“And they call it a justice system.”
“Yeah, they do.”
“So what do you think about Blake?”
It had to be brought up. It was all anybody else was talking about. Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn’t go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn’t get it. The question wasn’t whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.
“What do I think?” I said. “I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense-‘If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been?’ Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don’t hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it.”
“Spoken like a true defense attorney.”
“Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I’m jealous and I’m already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me.”
“I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I’ve got?”
I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn’t miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.
“I don’t have time to go anywhere,” I said. “We can go sit in my car and grab a coffee. You got your stuff with you?”
In answer Levin raised his briefcase and rapped his knuckles on its side.
“But what about your driver?”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“Then let’s do it.”
ELEVEN
After we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee. “Ain’ no Starbuck ’round here,” Earl responded.
I knew Earl was from the area but I didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted coffee.
“Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don’t go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after.”
“You got it.”
“And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?”
Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver’s seat.
“Okay, what do you have for me?” I said. “I’m going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday.”
“I think I’ve got a few aces here,” Levin replied.
He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s begin with your client and then we’ll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets-which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying-I couldn’t find squat on him. He’s pretty much your standard citizen.”
“What’s with the tickets?”
“Twice in the last four years he’s let parking tickets-a lot of them-and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over.”
“I’m glad C.C.’s good for something. By ‘paying them off,’ I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges.”
“Let’s hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet.”
“What?”
“At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he’d had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn near everything. And most of the time it’s easy to do because everything’s on computer.”
“Right, I get it. So what about the law school, was that a lie?”
“Looks like it. I checked the registrar’s office and he’s never been enrolled in the law school at UCLA.”
I thought about this. It was Dobbs who had brought up UCLA law and Roulet had just nodded. It was a strange lie for either one of them to have told because it didn’t really get them anything. It made me think about the psychology behind it. Was it something to do with me? Did they want me to think of Roulet as being on the same level as me?
“So if he lied about something like that…,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Right,” Levin said. “I wanted you to know about it. But I gotta say, that’s it on the negative side for Mr. Roulet so far. He might’ve lied about law school but it looks like he didn’t lie about his story-at least the parts I could check out.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, his track that night checks out. I got wits in here who put him at Nat’s North, Morgan’s and then the Lamplighter, bing, bing, bing. He did just what he told us he did. Right down to the number of martinis. Four total and at least one of them he left on the bar unfinished.”
“They remember him that well? They remember that he didn’t even finish his drink?”
I am always suspicious of perfect memory because there is no such thing. And it is my job and my skill to find the faults in the memory of witnesses. Whenever someone remembers too much, I get nervous-especially if the witness is for the defense.
“No, I’m not just relying on a bartender’s memory. I’ve got something here that you are going to love, Mick. And you better love me for it because it cost me a grand.”
From the bottom of his briefcase he pulled out a padded case that contained a small DVD player. I had seen people using them on planes before and had been thinking about getting one for the car. The driver could use it while waiting on me in court. And I could probably use it from time to time on cases like this one.
Levin started loading in a DVD. But before he could play it the car pulled to a stop and I looked up. We were in front of a place called The Central Bean.
“Let’s get some coffee and then see what you’ve got there,” I said.
I asked Earl if he wanted anything and he declined the offer. Levin and I got out and went in. There was a short line for coffee. Levin spent the waiting time telling me about the DVD we were about to watch in the car.
“I’m in Morgan’s and want to talk to this bartender named Janice but she says I have to clear it first with the manager. So I go back to see him in the office and he’s asking me what exactly I want to ask Janice about. There’s something off about this guy. I’m wondering why he wants to know so much, you know? Then it comes clear when he makes an offer. He tells me that last year they had a problem behind the bar. Pilferage from the cash register. They have as many as a dozen bartenders working back there in a given week and he couldn’t figure out who had sticky fingers.”