Майкл Коннелли - The Law of Innocence

“I looked at this guy’s rap sheet,” Bosch interjected. “He was strictly white-collar cons. Internet mostly. And now he’s got grease under his nails.”

“So, what does it mean?” I pressed.

“Maybe he was working as a fucking dishwasher,” Cisco said.

“I think it means he was into something completely new,” Bosch said. “What that means to the case, I don’t know. But I think you should request a sample of the fingernail grease for your own testing.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can do that. Jennifer?”

“Got it,” she said.

She wrote it down. I was about to pass the baton to Lorna to see what she had come up with on the review of my past cases. But Arturo brought the steaks to the table at that moment and I kept my mouth closed until we were all served. I then started devouring my strip like a man who has eaten only apples and baloney sandwiches for a month and a half.

I soon became aware that I was being watched by the others. I spoke without looking up at them.

“What, you never seen a guy eat a steak before?” I asked.

“Just never seen one eat it so fast,” Lorna replied.

“Well, stand back, I might order another,” I said. “I need to get back to my fighting weight. Since you take so much time between bites, Lorna, why don’t you tell us where we stand on my enemies list.”

Before she could answer, I glanced over at Bosch to offer an explanation.

“Lorna has been going through the old case files and drawing up a list of enemies, people who might have wanted to do this to me,” I said. “Lorna?”

“Well, the list so far is short,” Lorna said. “You’ve had your problem clients and there have been some threats, but very few who we think have the skills, smarts, and general wherewithal to pull together a frame like this.”

“It’s a sophisticated frame,” Cisco added. “Your run-of-the-mill client could not do this.”

“So, who could?” I asked. “Who’s on your list?”

“I’ve been through everything twice and came up with only one name,” Lorna said.

“One name?” I said. “That’s it? Who?”

“Louis Opparizio,” she said.

“Wait, what?” I said. “Louis Opparizio...?”

The name rang a loud bell in my memory but I needed a moment to place it. I was sure I’d never had a client named Louis Opparizio. Then I remembered. Opparizio wasn’t a client. He was a witness. A man from a mob-connected family who straddled the line between criminal enterprise and legitimate business. I had used him. I had cornered him on the witness stand and made him look like the guilty party. It drew the jury’s attention away from my client and on to Opparizio. Compared to him, my client looked like an angel.

I remembered an encounter I’d had with Opparizio in a courthouse restroom. I remembered the anger, the hate. He was a bull of a man, built like a fireplug, and his arms hung away from his body like he was ready to use them to tear me apart. He’d backed me into a corner and had wanted to kill me right there.

“Who is Opparizio?” Bosch asked.

“He’s somebody I pinned a murder on once in court,” I said.

“He was mobbed up,” Cisco added. “From Vegas.”

“And did he do it?” Bosch asked.

“No, but I made it look like he did,” I said. “My client got the NG and walked.”

“And was your client really guilty?”

I hesitated but then answered truthfully.

“Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

Bosch nodded and I took it as a judgment, as though I had just confirmed why people hate lawyers.

“So,” he said then. “Would Opparizio wanting to return the favor and pin a murder on you be out of the question?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “What happened in court back then, it caused him a lot of problems and cost him a lot of money. He was a sleeper. He was trying to move mob money into legitimate fields and I sort of blew that up when I had him on the stand.”

Bosch thought about that for a few moments and nobody interrupted.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Let me take Opparizio. Find out what he’s up to. And Cisco, you stay with Sam Scales. Maybe we cross paths somewhere and then we know why this whole thing went down.”

It sounded like a plan to me but I was going to let Cisco decide. It seemed we were all looking at him, waiting, when he nodded his approval.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

I got home late and parked on the street. I didn’t want to park in the garage and wasn’t sure I ever would again. I entered to find the house completely dark. In that moment, I thought Kendall was gone. That she had realized, now that I was out, that she didn’t want to live here with me again. But then I saw movement in the darkened hallway and she appeared. She was wearing just a robe.

“You’re home,” she said.

“Yeah, it went late,” I said. “A lot to discuss. You’ve been waiting in the dark?”

“Actually, I’ve been asleep since earlier. We never turned on any lights when we got here. We just went straight to the bed.”

I nodded that I understood. My eyes started adjusting to the shadows and the dark.

“So you didn’t eat?” I said. “You must be hungry.”

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “ You must be tired.”

“Sort of. Yeah.”

“But still excited about being free?”

“Yeah.”

I had woken that day in a jail cell. I was now about to sleep in my own bed for the first time in six weeks. My back on a thick mattress and my head on a soft pillow. And if that wasn’t enough, my ex-girlfriend had come back and was standing in front of me with her robe open and nothing on underneath. I was still accused of murder but it was amazing how my fortunes had changed in a single day. As I stood there, I felt that nobody could ever touch me. I was golden. I was free.

“Well,” Kendall said, smiling. “I hope not too tired.”

“I think I can manage,” I said.

She turned and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway leading to the bedroom.

And I followed.

Thursday, January 9

I had no illusions about my innocence. I knew it was something only I could know for sure. And I knew that it wasn’t a perfect shield against injustice. It was no guarantee of anything. The clouds were not going to open for some sort of divine light of intervention.

I was on my own.

Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law. No one is ever exonerated by the verdict of a jury. The justice system can only deliver a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Nothing else, nothing more.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

That was my plan. To go further than a jury verdict. To expose the guilty and make my innocence clear. It was my only way out.

To that end, December proceeded with preparations for trial as well as prep for the anticipated move by the prosecution to recharge me and remand me back to a solo cell at Twin Towers. As the days until Christmas counted down, my paranoia rose incrementally. I expected the cruelest of moves by Death Row Dana as payback for the humiliation I had brought her in the last hearing — a Christmas Day arrest with courts closed for the holidays and me left unable to put our ready arguments before Judge Warfield until the calendar turned to the new year.