Michael Connelly: The Lincoln Lawyer

“No!” Mary Windsor shrieked. “You can’t -”

“What is this?” Dobbs cried out.

Kurlen didn’t answer or wait for Roulet to comply. He stepped forward and roughly turned Roulet around. As he made the forced turn, Roulet’s eyes came to mine.

“What’s going on, Mick?” he said in a calm voice. “This shouldn’t be happening.”

Mary Windsor moved toward her son.

“Take your hands off of my son!”

She grabbed Kurlen from behind but Booker and Lankford quickly moved in and detached her, handling her gently but strongly.

“Ma’am, step back,” Booker commanded. “Or I will put you in jail.”

Kurlen started giving Roulet the Miranda warning. Windsor stayed back but was not silent.

“How dare you? You cannot do this!”

Her body moved in place and she looked as though unseen hands were keeping her from charging at Kurlen again.

“Mother,” Roulet said in a tone that carried more weight and control than any of the detectives.

Windsor ’s body relented. She gave up. But Dobbs didn’t.

“You’re arresting him for what?” he demanded.

“Suspicion of murder,” Kurlen said. “The murder of Martha Renteria.”

“That’s impossible!” Dobbs cried. “Everything that witness Corliss said in there was proven to be a lie. Are you crazy? The judge dismissed the case because of his lies.”

Kurlen broke from his recital of Roulet’s rights and looked at Dobbs.

“If it was all a lie, how’d you know he was talking about Martha Renteria?”

Dobbs realized his mistake and took a step back from the gathering. Kurlen smiled.

“Yeah, I thought so,” he said.

He grabbed Roulet by an elbow and turned him back around.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Mick?” Roulet said.

“Detective Kurlen,” I said. “Can I talk to my client for a moment?”

Kurlen looked at me, seemed to measure something in me and then nodded.

“One minute. Tell him to behave himself and it will all go a lot easier for him.”

He shoved Roulet toward me. I took him by one arm and walked him a few paces away from the others so we would have privacy if we kept our voices down. I stepped close to him and began in a whisper.

“This is it, Louis. This is good-bye. I got you off. Now you’re on your own. Get yourself a new lawyer.”

The shock showed in his eyes. Then his face clouded over with a tightly focused anger. It was pure rage and I realized it was the same rage Regina Campo and Martha Renteria must have seen.

“I won’t need a lawyer,” he said to me. “You think they can make a case off of what you somehow fed to that lying snitch in there? You better think again.”

“They won’t need the snitch, Louis. Believe me, they’ll find more. They probably already have more.”

“What about you, Mick? Aren’t you forgetting something? I have -”

“I know. But it doesn’t matter anymore. They don’t need my gun. They’ve already got all they need. But whatever happens to me, I’ll know that I put you down. At the end, after the trial and all the appeals, when they finally stick that needle in your arm, that will be me, Louis. Remember that.”

I smiled with no humor and moved in closer.

“This is for Raul Levin. You might not go down for him but make no mistake, you are going down.”

I let that register for a moment and then stepped back and nodded to Kurlen. He and Booker came up on either side of Roulet and took hold of his upper arms.

“You set me up,” Roulet said, somehow maintaining his calm. “You aren’t a lawyer. You work for them.”

“Let’s go,” Kurlen said.

They started moving him but he shook them off momentarily and put his raging eyes right back into mine.

“This isn’t the end, Mick,” he said. “I’ll be out by tomorrow morning. What will you do then? Think about it. What are you going to do then? You can’t protect everybody.”

They took a tighter hold of him and roughly turned him toward the elevators. This time Roulet went without a struggle. Halfway down the hall toward the elevator, his mother and Dobbs trailing behind, he turned his head to look back over his shoulder at me. He smiled and it sent something right through me.

You can’t protect everybody.

A cold shiver of fear pierced my chest.

Someone was waiting for the elevator and it opened just as the entourage got there. Lankford signaled the person back and took the elevator. Roulet was hustled in. Dobbs and Windsor were about to follow when they were halted by Lankford’s hand extended in a stop signal. The elevator door started to close and Dobbs angrily and impotently pushed on the button next to it.

My hope was that it would be the last I would ever see of Louis Roulet, but the fear stayed locked in my chest, fluttering like a moth caught inside a porch light. I turned away and almost walked right into Sobel. I hadn’t noticed that she had stayed behind the others.

“You have enough, don’t you?” I said. “Tell me you wouldn’t have moved so quickly if you didn’t have enough to keep him.”

She looked at me a long moment before answering.

“We won’t decide that. The DA will. Probably depends on what they get out of him in interrogation. But up till now he’s had a pretty smart lawyer. He probably knows not to say a word to us.”

“Then why didn’t you wait?”

“Wasn’t my call.”

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her that they had moved too fast. It wasn’t part of the plan. I wanted to plant the seed, that’s all. I wanted them to move slowly and get it right.

The moth fluttered inside and I looked down at the floor. I couldn’t shake the idea that all of my machinations had failed, leaving me and my family exposed in the hard-eyed focus of a killer. You can’t protect everybody .

It was as if Sobel read my fears.

“But we’re going to try to keep him,” she said. “We have what the snitch said in court and the ticket. We’re working on witnesses and the forensics.”

My eyes came up to hers.

“What ticket?”

A look of suspicion entered her face.

“I thought you had it figured out. We put it together as soon as the snitch mentioned the snake dancer.”

“Yeah. Martha Renteria. I got that. But what ticket? What are you talking about?”

I had moved in too close to her and Sobel took a step back from me. It wasn’t my breath. It was my desperation.

“I don’t know if I should tell you, Haller. You’re a defense lawyer. You’re his lawyer.”

“Not anymore. I just quit.”

“Doesn’t matter. He -”

“Look, you just took that guy down because of me. I might get disbarred because of it. I might even go to jail for a murder I didn’t commit. What ticket are you talking about?”

She hesitated and I waited, but then she finally spoke.

“Raul Levin’s last words. He said he found Jesus’s ticket out.”

“Which means what?”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“Look, just tell me. Please.”

She relented.

“We traced Levin’s most recent movements. Before he was murdered he had made inquiries about Roulet’s parking tickets. He even pulled hard copies of them. We inventoried what he had in the office and eventually compared it with what’s on the computer. He was missing one ticket. One hard copy. We didn’t know if his killer took it that day or if he had just missed pulling it. So we went and pulled a copy ourselves. It was issued two years ago on the night of April eighth. It was a citation for parking in front of a hydrant in the sixty-seven-hundred block of Blythe Street in Panorama City.”

It all came together for me, like the last bit of sand dropping through the middle of an hourglass. Raul Levin really had found Jesus Menendez’s salvation.