Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer

“That’s right. What’s wrong with cash?”

“Nothing. But I have to give you a receipt. It’s an IRS reporting requirement. This is the whole ten?”

“It’s all there.”

I took the top off of a cardboard file box I keep on the seat next to me. My receipt book was behind the current case files. I started writing out the receipt. Most lawyers who get disbarred go down because of financial violations. The mishandling or misappropriation of client fees. I kept meticulous records and receipts. I would never let the bar get to me that way.

“So you had it all along,” I said as I wrote. “What if I had backed down to five? What would you have done then?”

Vogel smiled. He was missing one of his front teeth on the bottom. Had to have been a fight at the club. He patted the other side of his vest.

“I got another envelope with five in it right here, Counselor,” he said. “I was ready for you.”

“Damn, now I feel bad, leaving you with money in your pocket.”

I tore out his copy of the receipt and handed it out the window.

“I receipted it to Casey. He’s the client.”

“Fine with me.”

He took the receipt and dropped his arm off the window sill as he stood up straight. The car returned to a normal level. I wanted to ask him where the money came from, which of the Saints’ criminal enterprises had earned it, whether a hundred girls had danced a hundred hours for him to pay me, but that was a question I was better off not knowing the answer to. I watched Vogel saunter back to his Harley and struggle to swing a trash can-thick leg over the seat. For the first time I noticed the double shocks on the back wheel. I told Earl to get back on the freeway and get going to Van Nuys, where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.

As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey. I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson. I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal. Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints. His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.

“Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.

“What, Earl?”

“That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”

I shook my head.

“There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”

Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.

“I see,” he said, nodding again.

And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said. That was my job. That was how it worked. After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.

There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.

Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.

But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez.

Louis Ross Roulet was in a holding tank with seven other men who had made the half-block bus ride from the Van Nuys jail to the Van Nuys courthouse. There were only two white men in the cell and they sat next to each other on a bench while the six black men took the other side of the cell. It was a form of Darwinian segregation. They were all strangers but there was strength in numbers.

Since Roulet supposedly came from Beverly Hills money, I looked at the two white men and it was easy to choose between them. One was rail thin with the desperate wet eyes of a hype who was long past fix time. The other looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I chose him.

“Mr. Roulet?” I said, pronouncing the name the way Valenzuela had told me to.

The deer nodded. I signaled him over to the bars so I could talk quietly.

“My name is Michael Haller. People call me Mickey. I will be representing you during your first appearance today.”

We were in the holding area behind the arraignment court, where attorneys are routinely allowed access to confer with clients before court begins. There is a blue line painted on the floor outside the cells. The three-foot line. I had to keep that distance from my client.

Roulet grasped the bars in front of me. Like the others in the cage, he had on ankle, wrist and belly chains. They wouldn’t come off until he was taken into the courtroom. He was in his early thirties and, though at least six feet tall and 180 pounds, he seemed slight. Jail will do that to you. His eyes were pale blue and it was rare for me to see the kind of panic that was so clearly set in them. Most of the time my clients have been in lockup before and they have the stone-cold look of the predator. It’s how they get by in jail.

But Roulet was different. He looked like prey. He was scared and he didn’t care who saw it and knew it.

“This is a setup,” he said urgently and loudly. “You have to get me out of here. I made a mistake with that woman, that’s all. She’s trying to set me up and -”

I put my hands up to stop him.

“Be careful what you say in here,” I said in a low voice. “In fact, be careful what you say until we get you out of here and can talk in private.”

He looked around, seemingly not understanding.

“You never know who is listening,” I said. “And you never know who will say he heard you say something, even if you didn’t say anything. Best thing is to not talk about the case at all. You understand? Best thing is not to talk to anyone about anything, period.”

He nodded and I signaled him down to the bench next to the bars. There was a bench against the opposite wall and I sat down.

“I am really here just to meet you and tell you who I am,” I said. “We’ll talk about the case after we get you out. I already spoke to your family lawyer, Mr. Dobbs, out there and we will tell the judge that we are prepared to post bail. Do I have all of that right?”

I opened a leather Mont Blanc folder and prepared to take notes on a legal pad. Roulet nodded. He was learning.

“Good,” I said. “Tell me about yourself. How old you are, whether you’re married, what ties you have to the community.”

“Um, I’m thirty-two. I’ve lived here my whole life-even went to school here. UCLA. Not married. No kids. I work -”