Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer

When I called Raul Levin next, he told me he was already on his way to the LAPD Van Nuys Division to pick up a copy of the arrest report.

“Just like that?” I asked.

“No, not just like that. In a way, you could say it took me twenty years to get this report.”

I understood. Levin’s connections, procured over time and experience, traded over trust and favors, had come through for him. No wonder he charged five hundred dollars a day when he could get it. I told him about the meeting at four and he said he would be there and would be ready to furnish us with the law enforcement view of the case.

The Lincoln pulled to a stop when I closed the phone. We were in front of the Twin Towers jail facility. It wasn’t even ten years old but the smog was beginning to permanently stain its sand-colored walls a dreary gray. It was a sad and forbidding place that I spent too much time in. I opened the car door and got out to go inside once again.

There was an attorney’s check-in window that allowed me to bypass the long line of visitors waiting to get in to see loved ones incarcerated in one of the towers. When I told the window deputy whom I wanted to see, he tapped the name into the computer and never said anything about Gloria Dayton being in medical and unavailable. He printed out a visitor’s pass which he slid into the plastic frame of a clip-on badge and told me to put it on and wear it at all times in the jail. He then told me to step away from the window and wait for an attorney escort.

“It will be a few minutes,” he said.

I knew from prior experience that my cell phone did not get a signal inside the jail and that if I stepped outside to use it, I might miss my escort and then have to go through the whole sign-in process again. So I stayed put and watched the faces of the people who came to visit those being held inside. Most were black and brown. Most had the look of routine on their faces. They all probably knew the ropes here much better than I.

After twenty minutes a large woman in a deputy’s uniform came into the waiting area and collected me. I knew that she had not gotten into the sheriff’s department with her current dimensions. She was at least a hundred pounds overweight and seemed to struggle just to carry it while walking. But I also knew that once somebody was in, it was hard to get them out. About the best this one could do if there was a jail break was lean up against a door to keep it closed.

“Sorry it took so long,” she told me as we waited between the double steel doors of a mantrap in the women’s tower. “I had to go find her, make sure we still had her.”

She signaled that everything was all right to a camera above the next door and its lock clacked open. She pushed through.

“She was up in medical getting fixed up,” she said.

“Fixed up?”

I wasn’t aware of the jail having a drug-treatment program that included “fixing up” addicts.

“Yeah, she got hurt,” the deputy said. “Got a little banged up in a scuffle. She can tell you.”

I let the questions go at that. In a way, I was relieved that the medical delay was not due-not directly, at least-to drug ingestion or addiction.

The deputy led me to the attorney room, which I had been in many times before with many different clients. The vast majority of my clients were men and I didn’t discriminate, but the truth was I hated representing women who were incarcerated. From prostitutes to murderers-and I had defended them all-there was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions or that some of them did not deserve the punishments they received. There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.

The visiting area was a row of booths in which an attorney could sit on one side and confer with a client who sat on the other side, separated by an eighteen-inch sheet of clear Plexiglas. A deputy sat in a glassed-in booth at the end of the room and observed but supposedly didn’t listen. If paperwork needed to be passed to the client, it was held up for the booth deputy to see and approve.

I was led to a booth and my escort left me. I then waited another ten minutes before the same deputy appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas with Gloria Dayton. Immediately, I saw that my client had a swelling around her left eye and a single butterfly stitch over a small laceration just below her widow’s peak. Gloria Dayton had jet-black hair and olive skin. She had once been beautiful. The first time I represented her, seven or eight years before, she was beautiful. The kind of beauty that leaves you stunned at the fact she was selling it, that she had decided that selling herself to strangers was her best or only option. Now she just looked hard to me. The lines of her face were taut. She had visited surgeons who were not the best, and anyway, there was nothing they could do about eyes that had seen too much.

“Mickey Mantle,” she said. “You’re going to bat for me again?”

She said it in her little girl’s voice that I suppose her regular clients enjoyed and responded to. It just sounded strange to me, coming from that tightly drawn mouth and face with eyes that were as hard and had as much life in them as marbles.

She always called me Mickey Mantle, even though she was born after the great slugger had long retired and probably knew little about him or the game he played. It was just a name to her. I guess the alternative would have been to call me Mickey Mouse, and I probably wouldn’t have liked it much.

“I’m going to try, Gloria,” I told her. “What happened to your face? How’d you get hurt?”

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“There was a little disagreement with some of the girls in my dorm.”

“About what?”

“Just girl stuff.”

“Are you getting high in there?”

She looked indignant and then she tried putting a pouting look on her face.

“No, I’m not.”

I studied her. She seemed straight. Maybe she wasn’t getting high and that was not what the fight had been about.

“I don’t want to stay in here, Mickey,” she said in her real voice.

“I don’t blame you. I don’t like being in here myself and I get to leave.”

I immediately regretted saying the last part and reminding her of her situation. She didn’t seem to notice.

“You think maybe you could get me into one of those pretrial whatchamacallits where I can get myself right?”

I thought it was interesting how addicts call both getting high and getting sober the same thing- getting right .

“The problem is, Gloria, we got into a pretrial intervention program last time, remember? And it obviously didn’t work. So this time I don’t know. They only have so many spaces in those things and the judges and prosecutors don’t like sending people back when they didn’t take advantage of it in the first place.”

“What do you mean?” she protested. “I took advantage. I went the whole damn time.”

“That’s right. That was good. But then after it was over, you went right back to doing what you do and here we are again. They wouldn’t call that a success, Gloria. I have to be honest with you. I don’t think I can get you into a program this time. I think you have to be ready for them to be tougher this time.”