The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
“About five minutes before ten,” Talbot answered.
“Did she tell you she was expecting another date at the apartment?”
“No, she didn’t say anything about that. In fact, she was sort of acting like she was done for the night.”
I stood up and objected.
“I don’t think Mr. Talbot is qualified here to interpret what Ms. Campo was thinking or planning by her actions.”
“Sustained,” the judge said before Minton could offer an argument.
The prosecutor moved right along.
“Mr. Talbot, could you please describe the physical state Ms. Campo was in when you left her shortly before ten o’clock on the night of March sixth?”
“Completely satisfied.”
There was a loud blast of laughter in the courtroom and Talbot beamed proudly. I checked the Bible man and it looked like his jaw was tightly clenched.
“Mr. Talbot,” Minton said. “I mean her physical state. Was she hurt or bleeding when you left her?”
“No, she was fine. She was okay. When I left her she was fit as a fiddle and I know because I had just played her.”
He smiled, proud of his use of language. This time there was no laughter and the judge had finally had enough of his use of the double entendre. She admonished him to keep his more off-color remarks to himself.
“Sorry, Judge,” he said.
“Mr. Talbot,” Minton said. “Ms. Campo was not injured in any way when you left her?”
“Nope. No way.”
“She wasn’t bleeding?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t strike her or physically abuse her in any way?”
“No again. What we did was consensual and pleasurable. No pain.”
“Thank you, Mr. Talbot.”
I looked at my notes for a few moments before standing up. I wanted a break of time to clearly mark the line between direct and cross-examination.
“Mr. Haller?” the judge prompted. “Do you wish to cross-examine the witness?”
I stood up and moved to the lectern.
“Yes, Your Honor, I do.”
I put my pad down and looked directly at Talbot. He was smiling pleasantly at me but I knew he wouldn’t like me for very long.
“Mr. Talbot, are you right- or left-handed?”
“I’m left-handed.”
“Left-handed,” I echoed. “And isn’t it true that on the night of the sixth, before leaving Regina Campo’s apartment, she asked you to strike her with your fist repeatedly in the face?”
Minton stood up.
“Your Honor, there is no basis for this sort of questioning. Mr. Haller is simply trying to muddy the waters by taking outrageous statements and turning them into questions.”
The judge looked at me and waited for a response.
“Judge, it is part of the defense theory as outlined in my opening statement.”
“I am going to allow it. Just be quick about it, Mr. Haller.”
The question was read to Talbot and he smirked and shook his head.
“That is not true. I’ve never hurt a woman in my life.”
“You struck her with your fist three times, didn’t you, Mr. Talbot?”
“No, I did not. That is a lie.”
“You said you have never hurt a woman in your life.”
“That’s right. Never.”
“Do you know a prostitute named Shaquilla Barton?”
Talbot had to think before answering.
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“On the website where she advertises her services she uses the name Shaquilla Shackles. Does that ring a bell now, Mr. Talbot?”
“Okay, yeah, I think so.”
“Have you ever engaged in acts of prostitution with her?”
“One time, yes.”
“When was that?”
“Would’ve been at least a year ago. Maybe longer.”
“And did you hurt her on that occasion?”
“No.”
“And if she were to come to this courtroom and say that you did hurt her by punching her with your left hand, would she be lying?”
“She damn sure would be. I tried her out and didn’t like that rough stuff. I’m strictly a missionary man. I didn’t touch her.”
“You didn’t touch her?”
“I mean I didn’t punch her or hurt her in any way.”
“Thank you, Mr. Talbot.”
I sat down. Minton did not bother with a redirect. Talbot was excused and Minton told the judge that he had only two witnesses remaining to present in the case but that their testimony would be lengthy. Judge Fullbright checked the time and recessed court for the day.
Two witnesses left. I knew that had to be Detective Booker and Reggie Campo. It looked like Minton was going to go without the testimony of the jailhouse snitch he had stashed in the PTI program at County-USC. Dwayne Corliss’s name had never appeared on any witness list or any other discovery document associated with the prosecution of the case. I thought maybe Minton had found out what Raul Levin had found out about Corliss before Raul was murdered. Either way, it seemed apparent that Corliss had been dropped by the prosecution. And that was what I needed to change.
As I gathered my papers and documents in my briefcase, I also gathered the resolve to talk to Roulet. I glanced over at him. He was sitting there waiting to be dismissed by me.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“I think you did very well. More than a few moments of reasonable doubt.”
I snapped the latches on the briefcase closed.
“Today I was just planting seeds. Tomorrow they’ll sprout and on Wednesday they’ll bloom. You haven’t seen anything yet.”
I stood up and lifted the briefcase off the table. It was heavy with all the case documents and my computer.
“See you tomorrow.”
I walked out through the gate. Cecil Dobbs and Mary Windsor were waiting for Roulet in the hallway near the courtroom door. As I came out they turned to speak to me but I walked on by.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Dobbs called to my back.
I turned around.
“We’re stuck out here,” he said as he and Windsor walked to me. “How is it going in there?”
I shrugged.
“Right now it’s the prosecution’s case,” I answered. “All I’m doing is bobbing and weaving, trying to protect. I think tomorrow will be our round. And Wednesday we go for the knockout. I’ve got to go prepare.”
As I headed to the elevator, I saw that a number of the jurors from the case had beaten me to it and were waiting to go down. The scorekeeper was among them. I went into the restroom next to the bank of elevators so I didn’t have to ride down with them. I put my briefcase on the counter between the sinks and washed my face and hands. As I stared at myself in the mirror I looked for signs of stress from the case and everything associated with it. I looked reasonably sane and calm for a defense pro who was playing both his client and the prosecution at the same time.
The cold water felt good and I felt refreshed as I came out of the restroom, hoping the jurors had cleared out.
The jurors were gone. But standing in the hallway by the elevator were Lankford and Sobel. Lankford was holding a folded sheaf of documents in one hand.
“There you are,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.”
THIRTY
T he document Lankford handed me was a search warrant granting the police the authority to search my home, office and car for a .22 caliber Colt Woodsman Sport Model pistol with the serial number 656300081-52. The authorization said the pistol was believed to have been the murder weapon in the April 12 homicide of Raul A. Levin. Lankford had handed the warrant to me with a proud smirk on his face. I did my best to act like it was business as usual, the kind of thing I handled every other day and twice on Fridays. But the truth was, my knees almost buckled.
“How’d you ge
It was a nonsensical response to a nonsensical moment.
“Signed, sealed and delivered,” Lankford said. “So where do you want to start? You have your car here, right? That Lincoln you’re chauffeured around in like a high-class hooker.”
I checked the judge’s signature on the last page and saw it was a Glendale muni-court judge I had never heard of. They had gone to a local who probably knew he’d need the police endorsement come election time. I started to recover from the shock. Maybe the search was a front.
“This is bullshit,” I said. “You don’t have the PC for this. I could have this thing quashed in ten minutes.”
“It looked pretty good to Judge Fullbright,” Lankford said.
“Fullbright? What does she have to do with this?”
“Well, we knew you were in trial, so we figured we ought to ask her if it was okay to drop the warrant on you. Don’t want to get a lady like that mad, you know. She said after court was over was fine by her—and she didn’t say shit about the PC or anything else.”
They must have gone to Fullbright on the lunch break, right after I had seen them in the courtroom. My guess was, it had been Sobel’s idea to check with the judge first. A guy like Lankford would have enjoyed pulling me right out of court and disrupting the trial.
I had to think quickly. I looked at Sobel, the more sympathetic of the two.
“I’m in the middle of a three-day trial,” I said. “Any way we can put this on hold until Thursday?”
“No fucking way,” Lankford answered before his partner could. “We’re not letting you out of our sight until we execute the search. We’re not going to give you the time to dump the gun. Now where’s your car, Lincoln lawyer?”
I checked the authorization of the warrant. It had to be very specific and I was in luck. It called for the search of a Lincoln with the California license plate NT GLTY. I realized that someone must have written the plate down on the day I was called to Raul Levin’s house from the Dodgers game. Because that was the old Lincoln—the one I was driving that day.
“It’s at home. Since I’m in trial I don’t use the driver. I got a ride in with my client this morning and I was just going to ride back with him. He’s probably waiting down there.”
I lied. The Lincoln I had been driving was in the courthouse parking garage. But I couldn’t let the cops search it because there was a gun in a compartment in the backseat armrest. It wasn’t the gun they were looking for but it was a replacement. After Raul Levin was murdered and I’d found my pistol box empty, I asked Earl Briggs to get me a gun for protection. I knew that with Earl there would be no ten-day waiting period. But I didn’t know the gun’s history or registration and I didn’t want to find out through the Glendale Police Department.
But I was in luck because the Lincoln with the gun inside wasn’t the one described in the warrant. That one was in my garage at home, waiting on the buyer from the limo service to come by and take a look at. And that would be the Lincoln that would be searched.
Lankford grabbed the warrant out of my hand and shoved it into an inside coat pocket.
“Don’t worry about your ride,” Lankford said. “We’re your ride. Let’s go.”
On the way down and out of the courthouse, we didn’t run into Roulet or his entourage. And soon I was riding in the back of a Grand Marquis, thinking that I had made the right choice when I had gone with the Lincoln. There was more room in the Lincoln and the ride was smoother.
Lankford did the driving and I sat behind him. The windows were up and I could hear him chewing gum.
“Let me see the warrant again,” I said.
Lankford made no move.
“I’m not letting you inside my house until I’ve had a chance to completely study the warrant. I could do it on the way and save you some time. Or . . .”
Lankford reached inside his jacket and pulled out the warrant. He handed it over his shoulder to me. I knew why he was hesitant. Cops usually had to lay out their whole investigation in the warrant application in order to convince a judge of probable cause. They didn’t like the target reading it, because it gave away the store.
I glanced out the window as we were passing the car lots on Van Nuys Boulevard. I saw a new model Town Car on a pedestal in front of the Lincoln dealership. I looked back down at the warrant, opened it to the summary section and read.
Lankford and Sobel had started out doing some good work. I had to give them that. One of them had taken a shot—I was guessing Sobel—and put my name into the state’s Automated Firearm System and hit the lotto. The AFS computer said I was the registered owner of a pistol of the same make and model as the murder weapon.
It was a smooth move but it still wasn’t enough to make probable cause. Colt made the Woodsman for more than sixty years. That meant there were probably a million of them out there and a million suspects who owned them.
They had the smoke. They then rubbed other sticks together to make the required fire. The application summary stated that I had hidden from the investigators the fact that I owned the gun in question. It said I had also fabricated an alibi when initially interviewed about Levin’s death, then attempted to throw detectives off the track by giving them a phony lead on the drug dealer Hector Arrande Moya.
Though motivation was not necessarily a subject needed to obtain a search warrant, the PC summary alluded to it anyway, stating that the victim—Raul Levin—had been extorting investigative assignments from me and that I had refused to pay him upon completion of those assignments.
The outrage of such an assertion aside, the alibi fabrication was the key point of probable cause. The statement said that I had told the detectives I was home at the time of the murder, but a message on my home phone was left just before the suspected time of death and this indicated that I was not home, thereby collapsing my alibi and proving me a liar at the same time.
I slowly read the PC statement twice more but my anger did not subside. I tossed the warrant onto the seat next to me.
“In some ways it’s really too bad I am not the killer,” I said.
“Yeah, why is that?” Lankford said.
“Because this warrant is a piece of shit and you both know it. It won’t stand up to challenge. I told you that message came in when I was already on the phone and that can be checked and proven, only you were too lazy or you didn’t want to check it because it would have made it a little difficult to get your warrant. Even with your pocket judge in Glendale. You lied by omission and commission. It’s a bad-faith warrant.”
Because I was sitting behind Lankford I had a better angle on Sobel. I watched her for signs of doubt as I spoke.
“And the suggestion that Raul was extorting business from me and that I wouldn’t pay is a complete joke. Extorted me with what? And what didn’t I pay him for? I paid him every time I got a bill. Man, I tell you, if this is how you work all your cases, I gotta open up an office in Glendale. I’m going to shove this warrant right up your police chief’s ass.”
“You lied about the gun,” Lankford said. “And you owed Levin money. It’s right there in his accounts book. Four grand.”
“I didn’t lie about anything. You never asked if I owned a gun.”
“Lied by omission. Right back at ya.”
“Bullshit.”
“Four grand.”
“Oh yeah, the four grand—I killed him because I didn’t want to pay him four grand,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster. “You got me there, Detective. Motivation. But I guess it never occurred to you to see if he had even billed me for the four grand yet, or to see if I hadn’t just paid an invoice from him for six thousand dollars a week before he was murdered.”
Lankford was undaunted. But I saw the doubt start to creep into Sobel’s face.
“Doesn’t matter how much or when you paid him,” Lankford said. “A blackmailer is never satisfied. You never stop paying until you reach the point of no return. That’s what this is about.
I shook my head.
“And what exactly was it that he had on me that made me give him jobs and pay him until I reached the point of no return?”
Lankford and Sobel exchanged a look and Lankford nodded. Sobel reached down to a briefcase on the floor and took out a file. She handed it over the seat to me.
“Take a look,” Lankford said. “You missed it when you were ransacking his place. He’d hidden it in a dresser drawer.”
I opened the file and saw that it contained several 8 ¥ 10 color photos. They were taken from afar and I was in each one of them. The photographer had trailed my Lincoln over several days and several miles. Each image a frozen moment in time, the photos showed me with various individuals whom I easily recognized as clients. They were prostitutes, street dealers and Road Saints. The photos could be interpreted as suspicious because they showed one split second of time. A male prostitute in mini-shorts alighting from the backseat of the Lincoln. Teddy Vogel handing me a thick roll of cash through the back window. I closed the file and tossed it back over the seat.
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re saying Raul came to me with that? He extorted me with that? Those are my clients. Is this a joke or am I just missing something?”
“The California bar might not think it’s a joke,” Lankford said. “We hear you’re on thin ice with the bar. Levin knew it. He worked it.”
I shook my head.
“Incredible,” I said.
I knew I had to stop talking. I was doing everything wrong with these people. I knew I should just shut up and ride it out. But I felt an almost overpowering need to convince them. I began to understand why so many cases were made in the interview rooms of police stations. People just can’t shut up.
I tried to place the photographs that were in the file. Vogel giving me the roll of cash was in the parking lot outside the Saints’ strip club on Sepulveda. That happened after Harold Casey’s trial and Vogel was paying me for filing the appeal. The prostitute was named Terry Jones and I handled a soliciting charge for him the first week of April. I’d had to find him on the Santa Monica Boulevard stroll the night before a hearing to make sure he was going to show up.