The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel (13 page)

McGinley turned slightly and looked at me. He was street smart but not life smart. He didn’t understand what was happening,
whether this was part of the sentencing or just some form of white man disrespect. I wanted to tell him that the judge was
being insensitive and probably racist. Instead I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Just be cool. He’s an asshole.”

“Do you know the origin of your name, Mr. McGinley?” the judge asked.

“No, sir.”

“Do you care?”

“Not really, sir. It’s a name from a slaveholder, I ’spect. Why would I care who that motherfucka be?”

“Excuse me, Your Honor,” I said quickly.

I leaned over to McGinley again.

“Darius, cool it,” I whispered. “And watch your language.”

“He’s dissing me,” he said back, a little louder than a whisper.

“And he hasn’t sentenced you yet. You want to blow the deal?”

McGinley stepped back from me and looked up at the judge.

“Sorry about my language, Y’Honor. I come from the street.”

“I can tell that,” Flynn said. “Well, it is a shame you feel that way about your history. But if you don’t care about your
name, then I don’t either. Let’s get on with the sentencing and get you off to prison, shall we?”

He said the last part cheerfully, as if he were taking great delight in sending McGinley off to Disneyland, the happiest place
on earth.

The sentencing went by quickly after that. There was nothing
in the presentencing investigation report besides what everybody already knew. Darius McGinley had had only one profession
since age eleven, drug dealer. He’d had only one true family, a gang. He’d never gotten a driver’s license, though he drove
a BMW. He’d never gotten married, though he’d fathered three babies. It was the same old story and same old cycle trotted
out a dozen times a day in courtrooms across the county. McGinley lived in a society that intersected mainstream America only
in the courtrooms. He was just fodder for the machine. The machine needed to eat and McGinley was on the plate. Flynn sentenced
him to the agreed-upon three to five years in prison and read all of the standard legal language that came with a plea agreement.
For laughs—though only his own courtroom staff complied—he read the boilerplate using his brogue again. And then it was over.

I know McGinley dealt death and destruction in the form of rock cocaine and probably committed untold violence and other offenses
he was never charged with, but I still felt bad for him. I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything
but thug life in the first place. He’d never known his father and had dropped out of school in the sixth grade to learn the
rock trade. He could accurately count money in a rock house but he had never had a checking account. He had never been to
a county beach, let alone outside of Los Angeles. And now his first trip out would be on a bus with bars over the windows.

Before he was led back into the holding cell for processing and transfer to prison I shook his hand, his movement restricted
by the waist chain, and wished him good luck. It is something I rarely do with my clients.

“No sweat,” he said to me. “I’ll be back.”

And I didn’t doubt it. In a way, Darius McGinley was just as much a franchise client as Louis Roulet. Roulet was most likely
a one-shot deal. But over the years, I had a feeling McGinley would be one of what I call my “annuity clients.” He would be
the gift that would keep on giving—as long as he defied the odds and kept on living.

I put the McGinley file in my briefcase and headed back
through the gate while the next case was called. Outside the courtroom Raul Levin was waiting for me in the crowded hallway.
We had a scheduled meeting to go over his findings in the Roulet case. He’d had to come to Compton because I had a busy schedule.

“Top o’ the morning,” Levin said in an exaggerated Irish accent.

“Yeah, you saw that?”

“I stuck my head in. The guy’s a bit of a racist, isn’t he?”

“And he can get away with it because ever since they unified the courts into one countywide district, his name goes on the
ballot everywhere. Even if the people of Compton rose up like a wave to vote him off, the Westsiders could still cancel them
out. It’s fucked up.”

“How’d he get on the bench in the first place?”

“Hey, you get a law degree and make the right contributions to the right people and you could be a judge, too. He was appointed
by the governor. The hard part is winning that first retention election. He did. You’ve never heard the ‘In like Flynn’ story?”

“Nope.”

“You’ll love it. About six years ago Flynn gets his appointment from the governor. This is before unification. Back then judges
were elected by the voters of the district where they presided. The supervising judge for L.A. County checks out his credentials
and pretty quickly realizes that he’s got a guy with lots of political connections but no talent or courthouse experience
to go with it. Flynn was basically an office lawyer. Probably couldn’t find a courthouse, let alone try a case, if you paid
him. So the presiding judge dumps him down here in Compton criminal because the rule is you have to run for retention the
year after being appointed to the bench. He figures Flynn will fuck up, anger the folks and get voted out. One year and out.”

“Headache over.”

“Exactly. Only it didn’t work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown
walks into the clerk’s office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?”

“Not personally. I know of her.”

“So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she’s black, she’s a woman and she’s popular
in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better.”

“Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?”

“That’s what I’m getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in—though it
was kind of curious why she’d want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures
with her practice.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk’s office
and withdraws from the ballot.”

Levin nodded.

“So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat,” he said.

“You got it. Then unification comes in and they’ll never be able to get him out of there.”

Levin looked outraged.

“That’s bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that’s gotta be a violation of election laws.”

“Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie has always maintained that she wasn’t paid off or part of some plan Flynn
cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn’t sustain
her lifestyle on a judge’s pay. But I’ll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front
of Flynn.”

“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.”

A
fter 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.