Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer

“Divorced?”

“No, never married. I work for my family’s business. Windsor Residential Estates. It’s named after my mother’s second husband. It’s real estate. We sell real estate.”

I was writing notes. Without looking up at him, I quietly asked, “How much money did you make last year?”

When Roulet didn’t answer I looked up at him.

“Why do you need to know that?” he asked.

“Because I am going to get you out of here before the sun goes down today. To do that, I need to know everything about your standing in the community. That includes your financial standing.”

“I don’t know exactly what I made. A lot of it was shares in the company.”

“You didn’t file taxes?”

Roulet looked over his shoulder at the others in the cell and then whispered his answer.

“Yes, I did. On that my income was a quarter million.”

“But what you’re saying is that with the shares you earned in the company you really made more.”

“Right.”

One of Roulet’s cellmates came up to the bars next to him. The other white man. He had an agitated manner, his hands in constant motion, moving from hips to pockets to each other in desperate grasps.

“Hey, man, I need a lawyer, too. You got a card?”

“Not for you, pal. They’ll have a lawyer out there for you.”

I looked back at Roulet and waited a moment for the hype to move away. He didn’t. I looked back at him.

“Look, this is private. Could you leave us alone?”

The hype made some kind of motion with his hands and shuffled back to the corner he had come from. I looked back at Roulet.

“What about charitable organizations?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Roulet responded.

“Are you involved in any charities? Do you give to any charities?”

“Yeah, the company does. We give to Make a Wish and a runaway shelter in Hollywood. I think it’s called My Friend’s Place or something like that.”

“Okay, good.”

“Are you going to get me out?”

“I’m going to try. You’ve got some heavy charges on you-I checked before coming back here-and I have a feeling the DA is going to request no bail, but this is good stuff. I can work with it.”

I indicated my notes.

“No bail?” he said in a loud, panicked voice.

The others in the cell looked in his direction because what he had said was their collective nightmare. No bail.

“Calm down,” I said. “I said that is what she is going to go for. I didn’t say she would get it. When was the last time you were arrested?”

I always threw that in out of the blue so I could watch their eyes and see if there was going to be a surprise thrown at me in court.

“Never. I’ve never been arrested. This whole thing is -”

“I know, I know, but we don’t want to talk about that here, remember?”

He nodded. I looked at my watch. Court was about to start and I still needed to talk to Maggie McFierce.

“I’m going to go now,” I said. “I’ll see you out there in a few minutes and we’ll see about getting you out of here. When we are out there, don’t say anything until you check with me. If the judge asks you how you are doing, you check with me. Okay?”

“Well, don’t I say ‘not guilty’ to the charges?”

“No, they’re not going to even ask you that. Today all they do is read you the charges, talk about bail and set a date for an arraignment. That’s when we say ‘not guilty.’ So today you say nothing. No outbursts, nothing. Got that?”

He nodded and frowned.

“Are you going to be all right, Louis?”

He nodded glumly.

“Just so you know,” I said. “I charge twenty-five hundred dollars for a first appearance and bail hearing like this. Is that going to be a problem?”

He shook his head no. I liked that he wasn’t talking. Most of my clients talk way too much. Usually they talk themselves right into prison.

“Good. We can talk about the rest of it after you are out of here and we can get together in private.”

I closed my leather folder, hoping he had noticed it and was impressed, then stood up.

“One last thing,” I said. “Why’d you pick me? There’s a lot of lawyers out there, why me?”

It was a question that didn’t matter to our relationship but I wanted to test Valenzuela’s veracity.

Roulet shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I remembered your name from something I read in the paper.”

“What did you read about me?”

“It was a story about a case where the evidence got thrown out against some guy. I think it was drugs or something. You won the case because they had no evidence after that.”

“The Hendricks case?”

It was the only one I could think of that had made the papers in recent months. Hendricks was another Road Saint client and the sheriff’s department had put a GPS bug on his Harley to track his deliveries. Doing that on public roads was fine. But when he parked his bike in the kitchen of his home at night, that bug constituted unlawful entry by the cops. The case was tossed by a judge during the preliminary hearing. It made a decent splash in the Times .

“I can’t remember the name of the client,” Roulet said. “I just remembered your name. Your last name, actually. When I called the bail bondsman today I gave him the name Haller and asked him to get you and to call my own attorney. Why?”

“No reason. Just curious. I appreciate the call. I’ll see you in the courtroom.”

I put the differences between what Roulet had said about my hiring and what Valenzuela had told me into the bank for later consideration and made my way back into the arraignment court. I saw Maggie McFierce sitting at one end of the prosecution table. She was there along with five other prosecutors. The table was large and L-shaped so it could accommodate an endlessly revolving number of lawyers who could sit and still face the bench. A prosecutor assigned to the courtroom handled most of the routine appearances and arraignments that were paraded through each day. But special cases brought the big guns out of the district attorney’s office on the second floor of the courthouse next door. TV cameras did that, too.

As I stepped through the bar I saw a man setting up a video camera on a tripod next to the bailiff’s desk. There was no network symbol on the camera or the man’s clothes. The man was a freelancer who had gotten wind of the case and would shoot the hearing and then try to sell it to one of the local stations whose news director needed a thirty-second story. When I had checked with the bailiff earlier about Roulet’s place on the calendar, he told me the judge had already authorized the filming.

I walked up to my ex-wife from behind and bent down to whisper into her ear. She was looking at photographs in a file. She was wearing a navy suit with a thin gray stripe. Her raven-colored hair was tied back with a matching gray ribbon. I loved her hair when it was back like that.

“Are you the one who used to have the Roulet case?”

She looked up, not recognizing the whisper. Her face was involuntarily forming a smile but then it turned into a frown when she saw it was me. She knew exactly what I had meant by using the past tense and she slapped the file closed.

“Don’t tell me,” she said.

“Sorry. He liked what I did on Hendricks and gave me a call.”

“Son of a bitch. I wanted this case, Haller. This is the second time you’ve done this to me.”

“I guess this town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” I said in a poor Cagney imitation.

She groaned.

“All right,” she said in quick surrender. “I’ll go peacefully after this hearing. Unless you object to even that.”

“I might. You going for a no-bail hold?”