“He put in a camera.”
“You got it. A hidden camera. He caught the thief and fired his ass. But it worked so good he kept the camera in place. The system records on high-density tape from eight till two every night. It’s on a timer. He gets four nights on a tape. If there is ever a problem or a shortage he can go back and check it. Because they do a weekly profit-and-loss check, he rotates two tapes so he always has a week’s worth of film to look at.”
“He had the night in question on tape?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And he wanted a thousand dollars for it.”
“Right again.”
“The cops don’t know about it?”
“They haven’t even come to the bar yet. They’re just going with Reggie’s story so far.”
I nodded. This wasn’t all that unusual. There were too many cases for the cops to investigate thoroughly and completely. They were already loaded for bear, anyway. They had an eyewitness victim, a suspect caught in her apartment, they had the victim’s blood on the suspect and even the weapon. To them, there was no reason to go further.
“But we’re interested in the bar, not the cash register,” I said.
“I know that. And the cash register is against the wall behind the bar. The camera is up above it in a smoke detector on the ceiling. And the back wall is a mirror. I looked at what he had and pretty quickly realized that you can see the whole bar in the mirror. It’s just reversed. I had the tape transferred to a disc because we can manipulate the image better. Blow it up and zero in, that sort of thing.”
It was our turn in line. I ordered a large coffee with cream and sugar and Levin ordered a bottle of water. We took our refreshments back to the car. I told Earl not to drive until after we’d viewed the DVD. I can read while riding in a car but I thought looking at the small screen of Levin’s player while bumping along south county streets might give me a dose of motion sickness.
Levin started the DVD and gave a running commentary to go with the visuals.
On the small screen was a downward view of the rectangular-shaped bar at Morgan’s. There were two bartenders on patrol, both women in black jeans and white shirts tied off to show flat stomachs, pierced navels and tattoos creeping up out of their rear belt lines. As Levin had explained, the camera was angled toward the back of the bar area and cash register but the mirror that covered the wall behind the register displayed the line of customers sitting at the bar. I saw Louis Roulet sit down by himself in the dead center of the frame. There was a frame counter in the bottom left corner and a time and date code in the right corner. It said that it was 8:11 P.M. on March 6.
“There’s Louis showing up,” Levin said. “And over here is Reggie Campo.”
He manipulated buttons on the player and froze the image. He then shifted it, bringing the right margin into the center. On the short side of the bar to the right a woman and a man sat next to each other. Levin zoomed in on them.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
I had only seen pictures of the woman with her face badly bruised and swollen.
“Yeah, it’s her. And that’s our Mr. X.”
“Okay.”
“Now watch.”
He started the film moving again and widened the picture back to full frame. He then started moving it in fast-forward mode.
“Louis drinks his martini, he talks with the bartenders and nothing much happens for almost an hour,” Levin said.
He checked a notebook page that had notes attributed to specific frame numbers. He slowed the image to normal speed at the right moment and shifted the frame again so that Reggie Campo and Mr. X were in the center of the screen. I noticed that we had advanced to 8:43 on the time code.
On the screen Mr. X took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter off the bar and slid off his stool. He then walked out of camera range to the right.
“He’s heading to the front door,” Levin said. “They have a smoking porch in the front.”
Reggie Campo appeared to watch Mr. X go and then she slid off her stool and started walking along the front of the bar, just behind the patrons on stools. As she passed by Roulet she appeared to drag the fingers of her left hand across his shoulders, almost in a tickling gesture. This made Roulet turn and watch her as she kept going.
“She just gave him a little flirt there,” Levin said. “She’s heading to the bathroom.”
“That’s not how Roulet said it went down,” I said. “He claimed she came on to him, gave him her -”
“Just hold your horses,” Levin said. “She’s got to come back from the can, you know.”
I waited and watched Roulet at the bar. I checked my watch. I was doing okay for the time being but I couldn’t miss the calendar call at the CCB. I had already pushed the judge’s patience to the max by not showing up the day before.
“Here she comes,” Levin said.
Leaning closer to the screen I watched as Reggie Campo came back along the bar line. This time when she got to Roulet she squeezed up to the bar between him and a man on the next stool to the right. She had to move into the space sideways and her breasts were clearly pushed against Roulet’s right arm. It was a come-on if I had ever seen one. She said something and Roulet bent over closer to her lips to hear. After a few moments he nodded and then I saw her put what looked like a crumpled cocktail napkin into his hand. They had one more verbal exchange and then Reggie Campo kissed Louis Roulet on the cheek and pulled backwards away from the bar. She headed back to her stool.
“You’re beautiful, Mish,” I said, using the name I gave him after he told me of his mishmash of Jewish and Mexican descent.
“And you say the cops don’t have this?” I added.
“They didn’t know about it last week when I got it and I still have the tape. So, no, they don’t have it and probably don’t know about it yet.”
Under the rules of discovery, I would need to turn it over to the prosecution after Roulet was formally arraigned. But there was still some play in that. I didn’t technically have to turn over anything until I was sure I planned to use it in trial. That gave me a lot of leeway and time.
I knew that what was on the DVD was important and no doubt would be used in trial. All by itself it could be cause for reasonable doubt. It seemed to show a familiarity between victim and alleged attacker that was not included in the state’s case. More important, it also caught the victim in a position in which her behavior could be interpreted as being at least partially responsible for drawing the action that followed. This was not to suggest that what followed was acceptable or not criminal, but juries are always interested in the causal relationships of crime and the individuals involved. What the video did was move a crime that might have been viewed through a black-and-white prism into the gray area. As a defense attorney I lived in the gray areas.
The flip side of that was that the DVD was so good it might be too good. It directly contradicted the victim’s statement to police about not knowing the man who attacked her. It impeached her, showed her in a lie. It only took one lie to knock a case down. The tape was what I called “walking proof.” It would end the case before it even got to trial. My client would simply walk away.
And with him would go the big franchise payday.
Levin was fast-forwarding the image again.
“Now watch this,” he said. “She and Mr. X split at nine. But watch when he gets up.”
Levin had shifted the frame to focus on Campo and the unknown man. When the time code hit 8:59 he put the playback in slow motion.
“Okay, they’re getting ready to leave,” he said. “Watch the guy’s hands.”
I watched. The man took a final draw on his drink, tilting his head far back and emptying the glass. He then slipped off his stool, helped Campo off hers and they walked out of the camera frame to the right.