Майкл Коннелли - Law of Innocence

I sat between my two ex-wives, Maggie McFierce to my left and our daughter next to her, Lorna on my right followed by Cisco. Harry Bosch was directly across the table from me. For the most part I was quiet, just taking it all in and occasionally holding my drink up to clink glasses with a friend leaning over Bosch’s shoulder to say well done.

“You okay?” Maggie whispered to me at one point.

“Yeah, I’m great,” I said. “Just getting used to it being over, you know?”

“You should go away. Go somewhere and clear your mind of all of this.”

“Yeah. I was thinking of going out to Catalina for a few days. They just reopened the Zane Grey and it’s really nice.”

“You’ve been there already?”

“Uh, online.”

“I wonder if they still have that room with the fireplace we used to get.”

I thought about that—the memory of when we were together and we’d go to Catalina for weekend getaways. There was a good chance that our daughter had been conceived there. Had I ruined the memory by taking Kendall there?

“You could come with me, you know,” I said.

Maggie smiled and I saw the shine I remembered so well in her dark eyes.

“Maybe,” she said.

That was good enough for me. I smiled as I looked out at the crowd. They were all there for the free booze. But also for me. I realized I had forgotten about Bishop. I should have invited him.

I then noticed that Cisco and Bosch had their heads together and were talking in serious tones.

“Hey,” I said. “What?”

“Just talking about Opparizio,” Cisco said.

“What about him?” I asked.

“You know, why they hit him,” Cisco said. “Harry says they had to.”

I looked at Bosch and tilted my head back. I wanted to hear his take. I had told no one about my conversation with Agent Ruth in the back of Deputy Pressley’s cruiser.

Bosch leaned as much as he could across the table. It was loud in the bar and not the proper setting for yelling murder theories out loud.

“He let personal business get in the way of the real business,” Bosch said. “He should have taken care of Scales cleanly. Whacked him, buried him, put him in an oil barrel and dropped it in the channel. Anything but what he did. He used the situation—whatever it was—to try to settle an old score with you. That was his mistake and it made him vulnerable. He had to go, and the thing is, he knew it. I don’t think he was out in Arizona hiding from you and a subpoena. He was hiding from a bullet.”

I nodded. The former homicide detective was very close.

“You think they found him through us?” I asked. “Followed us out there to him?”

“You mean followed me,” Cisco said.

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I sent you out there.”

“About Opparizio?” Cisco said. “I don’t feel a thing about that guy.”

“It could’ve been the way,” Bosch said. “He could have made a slip himself. Told his girlfriend or somebody. Made a call.”

I shook my head.

“That room-service trick,” I said. “That tells me the hitter knew we were there watching him. I think they used us to get to him.”

I thought of the video the Indians had taken and that I had turned over to Agent Ruth. The room-service hit man was white, maybe forty years old, with thinning red hair. He didn’t look menacing. He looked nondescript. He looked like he belonged in the red room-service jacket he had used to bluff his way into Opparizio’s room.

“Well, too bad,” Maggie said. “He tried to pin a murder rap on you, Mickey. Just like Cisco, I have a hard time coming up with any sympathy for Louis Opparizio.”

The conversation shifted to speculation about who the federal target was and most agreed it was probably a corporate mobster, someone from the Las Vegas casino world who had been backing the biofuel play. But all of that was above our pay grade. I could only hope that one day Agent Ruth would call me and say, “We got him.” Then I would know the identity of the man ultimately responsible for almost destroying my life.

Soon I was back to just enjoying the moment and watching the people in the bar. Eventually my eyes fell on a woman standing at the bar and I excused myself from the table to join her.

“Have you tried the Sticky Mickey?” I asked.

Jennifer Aronson turned and saw it was me. A broad smile broke across her face. She pulled me into a hug and held me.

“Congratulations!”

“Thank you! When did you get back?”

“Today. As soon as I heard, I knew I had to get back here for this.”

“Once again, I’m sorry about your father.”

“Thank you, Mickey.”

“How did everything go afterward?”

“It was all right. I ended up being nursemaid to my sister, who got sick.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I feel fine. But enough about me. Cisco told me that Maggie is a natural-born defense lawyer. That true?”

“Yeah, she was great. But it’s not going to stick. She’s going back to the D.A.”

“She’s a lifer, I guess.”

“And you know, you did all the groundwork, Bullocks. I wouldn’t be standing here free if you hadn’t been there for me.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

“It’s true. Come sit at the table with us. The team’s all there.”

“I will, I will. I just want to move around a little bit, say some hellos. So many people are here from the courts.”

I watched her push through the crowd and start giving friends hugs and high fives. I stepped back toward the bar so I could lean my back against it and take in the whole scene. I looked across the room and realized that few of those in front of me were truly celebrating that I was innocent and had defeated the forces against me. Most of them simply believed I had beaten the case, that I was not guilty by the legal standard, which didn’t at all mean I was innocent.

It was a moment that seared me. I knew then how I would always be looked at in the courtroom, in the courthouse, in the city.

I turned toward the bar and saw Moira.

“Can I get you something, Mick?” she asked.

I hesitated. I looked at all the bottles lined against the mirror at the back of the bar.

“No,” I finally said. “I think I’m fine.”

EPILOGUE

Monday, March 9

There were no paper towels or toilet paper. No bottled water, and not a single carton of eggs. I was giving a running commentary to Maggie over my cell, holding the handwritten list she had prepared with contributions from Hayley. So many items on the list were already gone. Long gone. I had started just grabbing what I could.

“What about pinto beans?” I asked. “I just got four cans.”

We were speaking via my Bluetooth earpiece, leaving both my hands free to grab things from the shelves.

“Haller, what are we going to do with pinto beans?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Nachos? There’s nothing here. I just need to get whatever’s left and then we’ll have to make do with it. And I still have a lot of stuff at the house. Have you checked the pantry against this list?”

I spotted a lone jar of Newman’s Own spaghetti sauce on the pasta shelf but another shopper swooped in and grabbed it first.

“Shit,” I said.

“What?” Maggie asked.

“Nothing. I missed out on some Newman’s Own.”

“Just go to produce, see what’s left. Get stuff for salads. Then come back. This is too crazy.”

Crazy was an understatement. Chaos had descended. But in the midst of it, there was at least a calm center for me. My family was together for the first time in too many years to count. We had decided that the three of us would shelter together until the threat of the virus passed. Even with my home office converted into a bedroom for my daughter, my house had the most space and the biggest buffer zone around it compared with Hayley’s apartment or Maggie’s condo. The nuclear family would ride out the plague together and now it was down to the prep work. It was my second supermarket stop, the first having been equally disappointing. Still, I had earthquake supplies at the house and a mostly stocked pantry. It was just the wish list my girls had put together that I was missing. Red wine, good cheeses, and a few of the ingredients for Maggie’s recipes.