The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel (21 page)

“Okay, I’ll get on it.”

“Let me know when you know.”

I closed the phone just as my pancakes arrived. I doused them liberally with maple syrup and started eating while looking
through the file containing the state’s discovery.

The weapon report remained the only surprise. Everything else in the file, except the color photos, I had already seen in
Levin’s file.

I moved on to that. As expected with a contract investigator, Levin had larded the file with everything found in the net he
had cast. He even had copies of the parking tickets and speeding citations Roulet had accumulated and failed to pay in recent
years. It annoyed me at first because there was so much to weed through to get to what was going to be germane to Roulet’s
defense.

I was nearly through it all when the waitress swung by my booth with a coffee pot, looking to refill my mug. She recoiled
when she saw the battered face of Reggie Campo in one of the color photos I had put to the side of the files.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

I covered the photo with one of the files and signaled her back. The waitress came back hesitantly and poured the coffee.

“It’s work,” I said in feeble explanation. “I didn’t mean to do that to you.”

“All I can say is I hope you get the bastard that did that to her.”

I nodded. She thought I was a cop. Probably because I hadn’t shaved in twenty-four hours.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

She went away and I went back to the file. As I slid the photo
of Reggie Campo out from underneath it I saw the undamaged side of her face first. The left side. Something struck me and
I held the file in position so that I was only looking at the good half of her face. The wave of familiarity came over me
again. But again I could not place its origin. I knew this woman looked like another woman I knew or was at least familiar
with. But who?

I also knew it was going to bother me until I figured it out. I thought about it for a long time, sipping my coffee and drumming
my fingers on the table, and then decided to try something. I took the face shot of Campo and folded it lengthwise down the
middle so that one side of the crease showed the damaged right side of her face and the other showed the unblemished left
side. I then slipped the folded photo into the inside pocket of my jacket and got up from the booth.

There was no one in the restroom. I quickly went to the sink and took out the folded photo. I leaned over the sink and held
the crease of the photo against the mirror with the undamaged side of Reggie Campo’s face on display. The mirror reflected
the image, creating a full and undamaged face. I stared at it for a long time and then finally realized why the face was familiar.

“Martha Renteria,” I said.

The door to the restroom suddenly burst open and two teenagers stormed in, their hands already tugging on their zippers. I
quickly pulled the photo back from the mirror and shoved it inside my jacket. I turned and walked toward the door. I heard
them burst into laughter as I left. I couldn’t imagine what it was they thought I was doing.

Back at the booth I gathered my files and photos and put them all back into my briefcase. I left a more than adequate amount
of cash on the table for tab and tip and left the restaurant in a hurry. I felt like I was having a strange food reaction.
My face felt flushed and I was hot under the collar. I thought I could hear my heart pounding beneath my shirt.

Fifteen minutes later I was parked in front of my storage warehouse on Oxnard Avenue in North Hollywood. I have a fifteen-hundred-square-foot
space behind a double-wide garage door. The place is owned by a man whose son I defended on a possession case,
getting him out of jail and into pretrial intervention. In lieu of a fee, the father gave me the warehouse rent-free for a
year. But his son the drug addict kept getting into trouble and I kept getting free years of warehouse rent.

I keep the boxes of files from dead cases in the warehouse as well as two other Lincoln Town Cars. Last year when I was flush
I bought four Lincolns at once so I could get a fleet rate. The plan was to use each one until it hit sixty thousand on the
odometer and then dump it on a limousine service to be used to ferry travelers to and from the airport. The plan was working
out so far. I was on the second Lincoln and it would soon be time for the third.

Once I got one of the garage doors up I went to the archival area, where the file boxes were arranged by year on industrial
shelving. I found the section of shelves for boxes from two years earlier and ran my finger down the list of client names
written on the side of each box until I found the name Jesus Menendez.

I pulled the box off the shelf and squatted down and opened it on the floor. The Menendez case had been short-lived. He took
a plea early, before the DA pulled it back off the table. So there were only four files and these mostly contained copies
of the documents relating to the police investigation. I paged through the files looking for photographs and finally saw what
I was looking for in the third file.

Martha Renteria was the woman Jesus Menendez had pleaded guilty to murdering. She was a twenty-four-year-old dancer who had
a dark beauty and a smile of big white teeth. She had been found stabbed to death in her Panorama City apartment. She had
been beaten before she was stabbed and her facial injuries were to the left side of her face, the opposite of Reggie Campo.
I found the close-up shot of her face contained in the autopsy report. Once more I folded the photo lengthwise, one side of
her face damaged, one side untouched.

On the floor I took the two folded photographs, one of Reggie and one of Martha, and fitted them together along the fold lines.
Putting aside the fact that one woman was dead and one wasn’t, the half faces damn near formed a perfect match. The two women
looked so much alike they could have passed for sisters.

J
esus Menendez was serving a life sentence in San Quentin because he had wiped his penis on a bathroom towel. No matter how
you looked at it, that is what it really came down to. That towel had been his biggest mistake.

Sitting spread-legged on the concrete floor of my warehouse, the contents of Menendez files fanned out around me, I was reacquainting
myself with the facts of the case I had worked two years before. Menendez was convicted of killing Martha Renteria after following
her home to Panorama City from a strip club in East Hollywood called The Cobra Room. He raped her and then stabbed her more
than fifty times, causing so much blood to leave her body that it seeped through the bed and formed a puddle on the wood floor
below it. In another day it seeped through cracks in the floor and formed a drip from the ceiling in the apartment below.
That is when the police were called.

The case against Menendez was formidable but circumstantial. He had also hurt himself by admitting to police—before I was
on the case—that he had been in her apartment on the night of the murder. But it was the DNA on the fluffy pink towel in the
victim’s bathroom that ultimately did him in. It couldn’t be neutralized. It was a spinning plate that couldn’t be knocked
down. Defense pros call a piece of evidence like this the iceberg because it is the evidence that sinks the ship.

I had taken on the Menendez murder case as what I would
call a “loss leader.” Menendez had no money to pay for the kind of time and effort it would take to mount a thorough defense
but the case had garnered substantial publicity and I was willing to trade my time and work for the free advertising. Menendez
had come to me because just a few months before his arrest I had successfully defended his older brother Fernando in a heroin
case. At least in my opinion I had been successful. I had gotten a possession and sales charge knocked down to a simple possession.
He got probation instead of prison.

Those good efforts resulted in Fernando calling me on the night Jesus was arrested for the murder of Martha Renteria. Jesus
had gone to the Van Nuys Division to voluntarily talk to detectives. A drawing of his face had been shown on every television
channel in the city and was getting heavy rotation in particular on the Spanish channels. He had told his family that he would
go to the detectives to straighten things out and be back. But he never came back, so his brother called me. I told the brother
that the lesson to be learned was never to go to the detectives to straighten things out until after you’ve consulted an attorney.

I had already seen numerous television news reports on the murder of the exotic dancer, as Renteria had been labeled, when
Menendez’s brother called me. The reports had included the police artist’s drawing of the Latin male believed to have followed
her from the club. I knew that the pre-arrest media interest meant the case would likely be carried forward in the public
consciousness by the television news and I might be able to get a good ride out of it. I agreed to take the case on the come
line. For free. Pro bono. For the good of the system. Besides, murder cases are few and far between. I take them when I can
get them. Menendez was the twelfth accused murderer I had defended. The first eleven were still in prison but none of them
were on death row. I considered that a good record.

By the time I got to Menendez in a holding cell at Van Nuys Division, he had already given a statement that implicated him
to the police. He had told detectives Howard Kurlen and Don Crafton that he had not followed Renteria home, as suggested by
the news reports, but had been an invited guest to her apartment. He explained that earlier in the day he had won eleven hundred
dollars on the California lotto and had been willing to trade some of it to Renteria for some of her attention. He said that
at her apartment they had engaged in consensual sex—although he did not use those words—and that when he left she was alive
and five hundred dollars in cash richer.

The holes Kurlen and Crafton punched in Menendez’s story were many. First of all, there had been no state lotto on the day
of or day before the murder and the neighborhood mini-market where he said he had cashed his winning ticket had no record
of paying out an eleven-hundred-dollar win to Menendez or anyone else. Additionally, no more than eighty dollars in cash was
found in the victim’s apartment. And lastly, the autopsy report indicated that bruising and other damage to the interior of
the victim’s vagina precluded what could be considered consensual sexual relations. The medical examiner concluded that she
had been brutally raped.

No fingerprints other than the victim’s were found in the apartment. The place had been wiped clean. No semen was found in
the victim’s body, indicating her rapist had used a condom or had not ejaculated during the assault. But in the bathroom off
the bedroom where the attack and murder had taken place, a crime scene investigator using a black light found a small amount
of semen on a pink towel hanging on a rack near the toilet. The theory that came into play was that after the rape and murder
the killer had stepped into the bathroom, removed the condom and flushed it down the toilet. He had then wiped his penis with
the nearby towel and then hung the towel back on the rack. When cleaning up after the crime and wiping surfaces he might have
touched, he forgot about that towel.

The investigators kept the discovery of the DNA deposit and their attendant theory secret. It never made it into the media.
It would become Kurlen and Crafton’s hole card.

Based on Menendez’s lies and the admission that he had been in the victim’s apartment, he was arrested on suspicion of murder
and held without bail. Detectives got a search warrant, and oral swabs
were collected from Menendez and sent to the lab for DNA typing and comparison to the DNA recovered from the bathroom towel.

That was about when I entered the case. As they say in my profession, by then the
Titanic
had already left the dock. The iceberg was out there waiting. Menendez had badly hurt himself by talking—and lying—to the
detectives. Still, unaware of the DNA comparison that was under way, I saw a glimmer of light for Jesus Menendez. There was
a case to be made for neutralizing his interview with detectives—which, by the way, became a full-blown confession by the
time it got reported by the media. Menendez was Mexican born and had come to this country at age eight. His family spoke only
Spanish at home and he had attended a school for Spanish speakers until dropping out at age fourteen. He spoke only rudimentary
English, and his cognition level of the language seemed to me to be even lower than his speaking level. Kurlen and Crafton
made no effort to bring in a translator and, according to the taped interview, not once asked if Menendez even wanted one.

This was the crack I would work my way into. The interview was the foundation of the case against Menendez. It was the spinning
platter. If I could knock it down most of the other plates would come down with it. My plan was to attack the interview as
a violation of Menendez’s rights because he could not have understood the Miranda warning he had been read by Kurlen or the
document listing these rights in English that he had signed at the detective’s request.

This is where the case stood until two weeks after Menendez’s arrest when the lab results came back matching his DNA to that
found on the towel in the victim’s bathroom. After that the prosecution didn’t need the interview or his admissions. The DNA
put Menendez directly on the scene of a brutal rape and murder. I could try an O.J. defense—attack the credibility of the
DNA match. But prosecutors and lab techs had learned so much from that debacle and in the years since that I knew I was unlikely
of prevailing with a jury. The DNA was the iceberg and the momentum of the ship made it impossible to steer around it in time.

The district attorney himself revealed the DNA findings at a press conference and announced that his office would seek the
death penalty for Menendez. He added that detectives had also located three eyewitnesses who had seen Menendez throw a knife
into the Los Angeles River. The DA said the river was searched for the weapon but it was not recovered. Regardless, he characterized
the witness accounts as solid—they were Menendez’s three roommates.