“Remember: consequences,” he said to my back. “Make it right, or I’m gonna make it right.”
I waved without looking back.
13
Bosch took the reins of the Navigator and we pulled out of Mott Street. He said something about being prepared to take evasive action should any other White Fence gangsters want an audience with the Lincoln Lawyer. I told him to take Cesar Chavez Avenue over to Eastern, where we made an unscheduled stop at Home of Peace Memorial Park. I directed him to the main chapel and told him to pull off to the side of the access road.
“I won’t be long.”
I got out and walked into the chapel and down one of the hallways lined with the names of the dead. I had not been here in almost a year and it took me a few minutes to locate the etched brass plaque I had paid for. But there it was, between someone named Neufeld and someone named Katz.
It was as he had wanted it, as he had written it out in his last requests. I just stood there for a quiet moment, the light coming through the colored glass on the wall behind me.
I missed him a lot. In and out of the courtroom, I had learned more from Legal Siegel than from any parent, professor, judge, or attorney I’d ever known. He was the one who’d taken me under his wing and showed me how to be a lawyer and a man. I wished he’d been with me to see Jorge Ochoa walk out of prison a free man, no legal strings attached. There were not-guilty verdicts to cherish, cross-examinations to savor, and the adrenaline-charged moments when you just know the jury’s eating out of the palm of your hand. I’d had all of those over the years. In spades. But nothing could ever beat the resurrection walk — when the manacles come off and the last metal doors slide open like the gates of heaven, and a man or woman declared innocent walks into the waiting arms of family, resurrected in life and the law. There is no better feeling in the world than being with that family and knowing you were the one who made it so.
Frank Silver was wrong about what he thought I was doing. Sure, there was long-shot money at the end of the rainbow. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. With Jorge Ochoa, I had felt the adrenaline charge of the resurrection walk and I was now addicted to it. It might happen only once or twice in a lawyer’s career, but I didn’t care. I wanted that moment again and I’d do anything to get it. I wanted to stand outside the prison gates and welcome my client back to the land of the living. I didn’t know if Lucinda Sanz would be that client. But the Lincoln Lawyer had a full tank and was ready to drive down Resurrection Road again.
I heard the chapel door open and soon Bosch was standing next to me. He followed my sightline to the plaque on the wall.
“Legal Siegel,” he said. “What’s he doing out here in Boyle Heights?”
“He was born here,” I said.
“I had him as a Westside guy.”
“Back in the thirties and forties, there were more Jews than Latinos in Boyle Heights. Did you know that? Instead of East Los it was called the Lower East Side. And Cesar Chavez Avenue? That was Brooklyn Avenue.”
“You know your history.”
“Legal Siegel knew it. He passed it on to me. A hundred fifty years ago, this cemetery was in Chavez Ravine. Then they dug everybody up and moved them over here.”
“And now Chavez Ravine isn’t even Chavez Ravine. It’s a baseball field.”
“Nothing in this city stays the same for very long.”
“You got that right.”
We stood in respectful silence for a few moments. Then Bosch spoke.
“How was he at the end?” he asked. “You know, with the dementia.”
“Full on,” I said. “He’d moved from knowing he had it and being scared shitless to being completely gone.”
“Did he know you?”
“He thought I was my father. Same name but I could tell he thought I was him, his law partner for thirty years. He’d tell stories that at first I’d think were true but then I’d remember they were scenes from a movie. Like payoffs stuffed in shirt boxes from the laundry.”
“Not true?”
“Goodfellas — you ever see it?”
“Missed it.”
“Good movie.”
We went silent again. I wished Bosch would go back to the car so I could have a private moment. I thought about the last time I had seen Legal Siegel. I had snuck a corned-beef sandwich from Canter’s into his room at the hospice. But he didn’t remember the place or the sandwich and didn’t have the strength to eat it anyway. Two weeks later he was gone.
“You know, Canter’s was over here too,” I said. “The deli. Like a hundred years ago. Then they eventually moved out to Fairfax. Shelley versus Kraemer changed a lot of things.”
“‘Shelley versus Kraemer’?” Bosch asked.
“A case decided by the Supreme Court seventy-five years ago. It knocked down racial and ethnic covenants and restrictions on the sale of property. Jews, Blacks, Chinese — after that ruling, they could buy anywhere, live anywhere they liked. Of course, it still took a lot of courage. That same year Nat King Cole bought a house in Hancock Park and the bigots burned a cross on his lawn.”
Bosch just nodded. I stayed up on the soapbox.
“Anyway, back then the Court was moving us forward. Toward the Great Society and all that. Now it seems to want to move us back.”
After another moment of silence, Bosch pointed to the plaque.
“That saying about good things coming to an end,” he said. “That was on the locked door at Chinese Friends the last time I tried to eat there.”
I stepped up and put my hand on the wall, covering Legal’s name, and held it there for a moment. I bowed my head.
“They got that right,” I said.
We didn’t talk about the threat from Carlos Lopez until we were back in the Navigator.
“So what do you think he meant about making it right if you don’t make it right?” Bosch asked.
“No earthly idea,” I said. “Guy’s a gangster caught up in the macho-gangster ethos. Even he probably doesn’t know what he meant by that.”
“You don’t take it as a threat?”
“Not a serious one. It’s not the first time somebody thought they could make me work the law better by trying to scare me. Won’t be the last. Let’s get out of here, Harry. Take me back to my place.”
“You got it.”
Part Three
Side Effects
14
Bosch could feel the isotope moving in him, coursing coldly through his veins, over the shoulder and across his chest like a broken-dam flood. He tried to concentrate on the open file in front of him. Edward Coldwell, fifty-seven, convicted of killing a business partner four years before, fresh out of appeals and asking the Lincoln Lawyer to work a miracle in his name.
Bosch was only halfway through the file he’d put together with case documents from the court archives. Coldwell had gone to trial and the jury had believed the evidence against him over his denials. Now it was up to Bosch to determine if the case was worthy of the Lincoln Lawyer’s time and efforts.
Bosch had decided to do the deep dive into Coldwell’s case solely on the basis of the letter the convicted murderer had sent to Haller. The majority of requests for Haller’s legal expertise came with repeated claims of innocence and allegations of prosecutorial abuse and evidence missed or improperly dismissed. Coldwell’s letter had its fair share of that but it also contained what seemed to be a sincere plea to reveal the real killer and stop him from killing someone else. Bosch had not seen that in the other requests he’d reviewed and it struck a chord. In his forty-plus-year career of working murder cases, he had been motivated in part by the same sentiment — that if he could catch the killer, he would save another victim and another family from destruction down the line.