The Brass Verdict (22 page)

“Yes, but I assume you’ll want a continuance so you can get up to speed.”

“Well, let me go look at the file during lunch and I’ll let you know if that’s what the plan is.”

“Okay, Mickey. But just so you know. I won’t oppose a continuance, considering what happened with Jerry.”

“Thanks, CoJo.”

She smiled as I used the name her young basketball players called her by at the Y.

“You seen Maggie lately?” she asked.

“Saw her last night when I went to pick up Hayley. She seems to be doing okay. Have you seen her?”

“Just at basketball practice. But she usually sits there with her nose in a file. We used to go out after with the girls to Hamburger Hamlet but Maggie’s been too busy.”

I nodded. She and Maggie had been foxhole buddies since day one, coming up through the ranks of the prosecutor’s office. Competitors but not competitive with each other. But time goes by and distances work their way into any relationship.

“Well, I’ll take this and look it all over,” I said. “The hearing’s with Friedman at two, right?”

“Yeah, two. I’ll see you then.”

“Thanks for doing this, Joanne.”

“No problem.”

I left the DA’s Office and waited ten minutes to get on an elevator with the lunch crowd. The last one on, I rode down with my face two inches from the door. I hated the elevators more than anything else in the entire Criminal Courts Building.

“Hey, Haller.”

It was a voice from behind me. I didn’t recognize it but it was too crowded for me to turn around to see who it was.

“What?”

“Heard you scored all of Vincent’s cases.”

I wasn’t going to discuss my business in a crowded elevator. I didn’t respond. We finally hit bottom, and the doors spread open. I stepped out and looked back for the person who had spoken.

It was Dan Daly, another defense attorney who was part of a coterie of lawyers who took in Dodgers games occasionally and martinis routinely at Four Green Fields. I had missed the last season of booze and baseball.

“How ya doin’, Dan?”

We shook hands, an indication of how long it had been since we’d seen each other.

“So, who’d you grease?”

He said it with a smile but I could tell there was something behind it. Maybe a dose of jealousy over my scoring the Elliot case. Every lawyer in town knew it was a franchise case. It could pay top dollar for years — first the trial and then the appeals that would come after a conviction.

“Nobody,” I said. “Jerry put me in his will.”

We started walking toward the exit doors. Daly’s ponytail was longer and grayer. But what was most notable was that it was intricately braided. I hadn’t seen that before.

“Then, lucky you,” Daly said. “Let me know if you need a second chair on Elliot.”

“He wants only one lawyer at the table, Dan. He said no dream team.”

“Well, then keep me in mind as a writer in regard to the rest.”

This meant he was available to write appeals on any convictions my new set of clients might incur. Daly had forged a solid reputation as an expert appeals man with a good batting average.

“I’ll do that,” I said. “I’m still reviewing everything.”

“Good enough.”

We came through the doors and I could see the Lincoln at the curb, waiting. Daly was going the other way. I told him I’d keep in touch.

“We miss you at the bar, Mick,” he said over his shoulder.

“I’ll drop by,” I called back.

But I knew I wouldn’t drop by, that I had to stay away from places like that.

I got in the back of the Lincoln — I tell my drivers never to get out and open the door for me — and told Patrick to take me over to Chinese Friends on Broadway. I told him to drop me and go get lunch on his own. I needed to sit and read and didn’t want any conversation.

I got to the restaurant between the first and second waves of patrons and waited no more than five minutes for a table. Wanting to get to work immediately, I ordered a plate of the fried pork chops right away. I knew they would be perfect. They were paper-thin and delicious and I’d be able to eat them with my fingers without taking my eyes off the Wyms documents.

I opened the file Joanne Giorgetti had given me. It contained copies only of what the prosecutor had turned over to Jerry Vincent under the rules of discovery — primarily sheriff’s documents relating to the incident, arrest and follow-up investigation. Any notes, strategies or defense documents that Vincent had generated were lost with the original file.

The natural starting point was the arrest report, which included the initial and most basic summary of what had transpired. As is often the case, it started with 911 calls to the county communications-and-dispatch center. Multiple reports of gunfire came in from a neighborhood next to a park in Calabasas. The calls fell under Sheriff’s Department jurisdiction because Calabasas was in an unincorporated area north of Malibu and near the western limits of the county.

The first deputy to respond was listed on the report as Todd Stallworth. He worked the night shift out of the Malibu substation and had been dispatched at 10:21 p.m. to the neighborhood off Las Virgenes Road. From there he was directed into the nearby Malibu Creek State Park, where the shots were being fired. Now hearing shots himself, Stallworth called for backup and drove into the park to investigate.

There were no lights in the rugged mountain park, as it was posted
CLOSED AT SUNSET.
As Stallworth entered on the main road, the headlights of his patrol car picked up a reflection, and the deputy saw a vehicle parked in a clearing ahead. He put on his spotlight and illuminated a pickup truck with its tailgate down. There was a pyramid of beer cans on the tailgate and what looked like a gun bag with several rifle barrels protruding from it.

Stallworth stopped his car eighty yards from the pickup and decided to wait until backup arrived. He was on the radio to the Malibu station, describing the pickup truck and saying that he was not close enough to read its license plate, when suddenly there was a gunshot and the searchlight located above the side-view mirror exploded with the bullet’s impact. Stallworth killed the rest of the car’s lights and bailed out, crawling into the cover of some bushes that lined the clearing. He used his handheld radio to call for additional backup and the special weapons and tactics team.

A three-hour standoff ensued, with the gunman hidden in the wooded terrain near the clearing. He fired his weapon repeatedly but apparently his aim was at the sky. No deputies were struck by bullets. No other vehicles were damaged. Finally, a deputy in black SWAT gear worked his way close enough to the pickup truck to read the license plate by using high-powered binoculars equipped with night-vision lenses. The plate number led to the name Eli Wyms, which in turn led to a cell-phone number. The shooter answered on the first ring and a SWAT team negotiator began a conversation.

The shooter was indeed Eli Wyms, a forty-four-year-old housepainter from Inglewood. He was characterized in the arrest report as drunk, angry and suicidal. Earlier in the day, he had been kicked out of his home by his wife, who informed him that she was in love with another man. Wyms had driven to the ocean and then north to Malibu and then over the mountains to Calabasas. He saw the park and thought it looked like a good place to stop the truck and sleep, but he drove on by and bought a case of beer at a gas station near the 101 Freeway. He then turned around and went back to the park.

Wyms told the negotiator that he started shooting because he heard noises in the dark and was afraid. He believed he was shooting at rabid coyotes that wanted to eat him. He said he could see their red eyes glowing in the dark. He said he shot out the spotlight on the first patrol car that arrived because he was afraid the light would give his position away to the animals. When asked about the shot from eighty yards, he said he had qualified as an expert marksman during the first war in Iraq.

The report estimated that Wyms fired at least twenty-seven times while deputies were on the scene and dozens of times before that. Investigators eventually collected a total of ninety-four spent bullet casings.

Wyms did not surrender that night until he ran out of beer. Shortly after crushing the last empty in his hand, he told the cell-phone negotiator that he would trade one rifle for a six-pack of beer. He was turned down. He then announced that he was sorry and ready for the incident and everything else to be over, that he was going to kill himself and literally go out with a bang. The negotiator tried to talk him out of it and kept the conversation going while a two-man SWAT unit moved through the heavy terrain toward his position in a dense stand of eucalyptus trees. But soon the negotiator heard snoring on the cell line. Wyms had passed out.

The SWAT team moved in and Wyms was captured without a shot being fired by law enforcement. Order was restored. Since Deputy Stallworth had taken the initial call and was the one fired upon, he was given the collar. The gunman was placed in Stallworth’s squad car and transported to the Malibu substation and jailed.

Other documents in the file continued the Eli Wyms saga. At his arraignment the morning after his arrest, Wyms was declared indigent and assigned a public defender. The case moved slowly in the system, with Wyms being held in the Men’s Central Jail. But then Vincent stepped in and offered his services pro bono. His first order of business was to ask for and receive a competency evaluation of his client. This had the effect of slowing the case down even further as Wyms was carted off to the state hospital in Camarillo for a ninety-day psych evaluation.

That evaluation period was over and the reports were now in. All of the doctors who examined, tested and talked to Wyms in Camarillo had agreed that he was competent and ready to stand trial.

In the hearing scheduled before Judge Mark Friedman at two, a trial date would be set and the case clock would begin to tick again. To me it was all a formality. One read of the case documents and I knew there would be no trial. What the day’s hearing would do was set the time period I would have to negotiate a plea agreement for my client.

It was a cut-and-dried case. Wyms would enter a plea and probably face a year or two of incarceration and mental-health counseling. The only question I got from my survey of the file was why Vincent had taken the case in the first place. It didn’t fall into line with the kinds of cases he usually handled, with paying or higher-profile clients. There didn’t seem to be much of a challenge to the case either. It was routine and Wyms’s crime wasn’t even unusual. Was it simply a case Jerry took on to satisfy a need for pro bono work? It seemed to me if that was the case that Vincent could have found something more interesting, which would pay off in other ways, such as publicity. The Wyms case had initially drawn media attention because of the public spectacle in the park. But when it came to trial or disposition of the case, it would likely fly well below the media radar.

My next thought was to suspect that there was a connection to the Elliot case. Vincent had found some sort of link.

But on first read I couldn’t nail it down. There were two general connections in that the Wyms incident had happened less than twelve hours before the beach house murders and both crimes had occurred in the Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu district. But those connections didn’t hold up to further scrutiny. In terms of topography they weren’t remotely connected. The murders were on the beach and the Wyms shooting spree took place far inland, in the county park on the other side of the mountains. As far as I could recall, none of the names in the Wyms file were mentioned in the Elliot materials I had reviewed. The Wyms incident happened on the night shift; the Elliot murders on the day shift.

I couldn’t nail down any specific connection and in great frustration closed the file with the question unanswered. I checked my watch and saw I had to get back to the CCB if I wanted time to meet my client in lockup before the two o’clock hearing.

I called Patrick to come get me, paid for lunch and stepped out to the curb. I was on my cell, talking with Lorna, when the Lincoln pulled up and I jumped into the back.

“Has Cisco met with Carlin yet?” I asked her.

“No, that’s at two.”

“Have Cisco ask him about the Wyms case, too.”

“Okay, what about it?”

“Ask him why Vincent even took it.”

“You think they’re connected? Elliot and Wyms?”

“I think it but I don’t see it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him.”

“Anything else going on?”

“Not at the moment. You’re getting a lot of calls from the media. Who’s this guy Jack McEvoy?”

The name rang a bell but I couldn’t place it.

“I don’t know. Who is he?”

“He works at the
Times
. He called up all huffy about not hearing from you, saying you had an exclusive deal with him.”

Now I remembered. The two-way street.

“Don’t worry about him. I haven’t heard from him either. What else?”

“Court TV wants to sit down and talk about Elliot. They’re going to carry live coverage throughout the trial, making it their feature, and so they’re hoping to get daily commentary from you at the end of court each day.”

“What do you think, Lorna?”

“I think it’s like free national advertising. You better do it. They told me they’re giving the trial its own logo wrap at the bottom of the screen. ‘Murder in Malibu,’ they’re calling it.”

“Then, set it up. What else?”

“Well, while we’re on the subject, I got a notice a week ago that your bus bench contract expires at the end of the month. I was just going to let it go because there was no money, but now you’re back and you’ve got money. Should we renew?”

For the past six years I had advertised on bus benches strategically located in high-crime andtraffic locations around the city. Although I had dropped out for the past year, the benches still spawned a steady stream of calls, all of which Lorna deferred or referred.

“That’s a two-year contract, right?”

“Yes.”

I made a quick decision.

“Okay, renew it. Anything else?”