The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel (26 page)

“And tomorrow you have your daughter to entertain,” he said.

That froze me. He had listened to the call from Maggie. I didn’t say anything. He did.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter, Mick. That must be nice.”

He glanced back at me, smiling as he moved down the hall.

“She’s beautiful,” he said.

My inertia turned to momentum. I stepped into the hall and started following him, anger building with each step. I gripped
the knife tightly.

“How do you know what she looks like?” I demanded.

He stopped and I stopped. He looked down at the knife in my hand and then at my face. He spoke calmly.

“The picture of her on your desk.”

I had forgotten about the photo. A small framed shot of her in a teacup at Disneyland.

“Oh,” I said.

He smiled, knowing what I had been thinking.

“Good night, Mick. Enjoy your daughter tomorrow. You probably don’t get to see her enough.”

He turned and crossed the living room and opened the front door. He looked back at me before stepping out.

“What you need is a good lawyer,” he said. “One that will get you custody.”

“No. She’s better off with her mother.”

“Good night, Mick. Thanks for the conversation.”

“Good night, Louis.”

I stepped forward to close the door.

“Nice view,” he said from out on the front porch.

“Yeah,” I said as I closed and locked the door.

I stood there with my hand on the knob, waiting to hear his
steps going down the stairs to the street. But a few moments later he knocked on the door. I closed my eyes, held the knife
at the ready and opened it. Roulet raised his hand out. I took a step back.

“Your key,” he said. “I figured you should have it.”

I took the key off his outstretched palm.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I closed the door and locked it once again.

Tuesday, April 12

T
he day started better than any defense attorney could ask for. I had no courtroom to be in, no client to meet. I slept late,
spent the morning reading the newspaper cover to cover and had a box ticket to the home opener of the Los Angeles Dodgers
baseball season. It was a day game and a time-honored tradition among those on the defense side of the aisle to attend. My
ticket had come from Raul Levin, who was taking five of the defense pros he did work for to the game as a gesture of thanks
for their business. I was sure the others would grumble and complain at the game about how I was monopolizing Levin as I prepared
for the Roulet trial. But I wasn’t going to let it bother me.

We were in the outwardly slow time before trial, when the machine moves with a steady, quiet momentum. Louis Roulet’s trial
was set to begin in a month. As it was growing nearer I was taking on fewer and fewer clients. I needed the time to prepare
and strategize. Though the trial was weeks away it would likely be won or lost with the information gathered now. I needed
to keep my schedule clear for this. I took cases from repeat customers only—and only if the money was right and it came up
front.

A trial was a slingshot. The key was in the preparation. Pretrial is when the sling is loaded with the proper stone and slowly
the elastic is pulled back and stretched to its limit. Finally, at trial
you let it go and the projectile shoots forward, unerringly at the target. The target is acquittal. Not guilty. You only hit
that target if you have properly chosen the stone and pulled back carefully on the sling, stretching it as far as possible.

Levin was doing most of the stretching. He had continued to dig into the lives of the players in both the Roulet and Menendez
cases. We had hatched a strategy and plan we were calling a “double slingshot” because it had two intended targets. I had
no doubt that when the trial began in May, we would be stretched back to the limit and ready to let go.

The prosecution did its part to help us load the slingshot, as well. In the weeks since Roulet’s arraignment the state’s discovery
file grew thicker as scientific reports filtered in, further police investigations were carried out and new developments occurred.

Among the new developments of note was the identification of Mr. X, the left-handed man who had been with Reggie Campo at
Morgan’s the night of the attack. LAPD detectives, using the video I had alerted the prosecution to, were able to identify
him by showing a frame taken off the video to known prostitutes and escorts when they were arrested by the Administrative
Vice section. Mr. X was identified as Charles Talbot. He was known to many of the sex providers as a regular. Some said that
he owned or worked at a convenience store on Reseda Boulevard.

The investigative reports forwarded to me through discovery requests revealed that detectives interviewed Talbot and learned
that on the night of March 6 he left Reggie Campo’s apartment shortly before ten and went to the previously mentioned twenty-four-hour
convenience store. Talbot owned the business. He went to the store so that he could check on things and open a cigarette storage
cabinet that only he carried the key for. Tape from surveillance cameras in the store confirmed that he was there from 10:09
to 10:51
P.M.
restocking the cigarette bins beneath the front counter. The investigator’s summary dismissed Talbot as having no bearing
or part in the events that occurred after he left Campo’s apartment. He was just one of her customers.

Nowhere in the state’s discovery was there mention of Dwayne Jeffery Corliss, the jailhouse snitch who had contacted the prosecution
with a tale to tell about Louis Roulet. Minton had either decided not to use him as a witness or was keeping him under wraps
for emergency use only. I tended to think it was the latter. Minton had sequestered him in the lockdown program. He wouldn’t
have gone to the trouble unless he wanted to keep Corliss offstage but ready. This was fine with me. What Minton didn’t know
was that Corliss was the stone I was going to put into the slingshot.

And while the state’s discovery contained little information on the victim of the crime, Raul Levin was vigorously pursuing
Reggie Campo. He located a website called PinkMink.com on which she advertised her services. What was important about the discovery was not necessarily that it further established
that she was engaged in prostitution but that the ad copy stated that she was “very open-minded and liked to get wild” and
was “available for S&M role play—you spank me or I’ll spank you.” It was good ammunition to have. It was the kind of stuff
that could help color a victim or witness in a jury’s eyes. And she was both.

Levin also was digging deeper into the life and times of Louis Roulet and had learned that he had been a poor student who’d
attended five different private schools in and around Beverly Hills as a youth. He did go on to attend and graduate from UCLA
with a degree in English literature but Levin located fellow classmates who had said Roulet paid his way through by purchasing
from other students completed class assignments, test answers and even a ninety-page senior thesis on the life and work of
John Fante.

A far darker profile emerged of Roulet as an adult. Levin found numerous female acquaintances who said Roulet had mistreated
them, either physically or mentally, or both. Two women who had known Roulet while they were students at UCLA told Levin that
they suspected that Roulet had spiked their drinks at a fraternity party with a date-rape drug and then took sexual advantage
of them. Neither reported their suspicions to authorities but one woman had her blood tested the day after the party. She
said
traces of ketamine hydrochloride, a veterinary sedative, were found. Luckily for the defense, neither woman had so far been
located by investigators for the prosecution.

Levin took a look at the so-called Real Estate Rapist cases of five years before as well. Four women—all realtors—reported
being overpowered and raped by a man who was waiting inside when they entered homes they believed had been vacated by their
owners for a showing. The attacks went unsolved but stopped eleven months after the first one was reported. Levin spoke to
an LAPD sex crimes expert who worked the cases. He said that his gut instinct had always been that the rapist wasn’t an outsider.
The assailant seemed to know how to get into the houses and how to draw the female sales agents to them alone. The investigator
was convinced the rapist was in the real estate community, but with no arrest ever made, he never proved his theory.

Added to this branch of his investigation, Levin could find little to confirm that Mary Alice Windsor had been one of the
unreported victims of the rapist. She had granted us an interview and agreed to testify about her secret tragedy but only
if her testimony was vitally needed. The date of the attack she provided fell within the dates of the documented assaults
attributed to the Real Estate Rapist, and Windsor provided an appointment book and other documentation showing she was indeed
the realtor on record in regard to the sale of the Bel-Air home where she said she was attacked. But ultimately we only had
her word for it. There were no medical or hospital records indicative of treatment for a sexual assault. And no police record.

Still, when Mary Windsor recounted her story, it matched Roulet’s telling of it in almost all details. Afterward, it had struck
both Levin and me as odd that Louis had known so much about the attack. If his mother had decided to keep it secret and unreported,
then why would she share so many details of her harrowing ordeal with her son? That question led Levin to postulate a theory
that was as repulsive as it was intriguing.

“I think he knows all the details because he was there,” Levin had said after the interview and we were by ourselves.

“You mean he watched it without doing anything to stop it?”

“No, I mean I think he was the man in the ski mask and goggles.”

I was silent. I think on a subliminal level I may have been thinking the same thing but the idea was too creepy to have broken
through to the surface.

“Oh, man…,” I said.

Levin, thinking I was disagreeing, pressed his case forward.

“This is a very strong woman,” he said. “She built that company from nothing and real estate in this town is cutthroat. She’s
a tough lady and I can’t see her not reporting this, not wanting the guy who did it to be caught. I view people two ways.
They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people. She’s definitely an eye-for-an-eye person and I can’t
see her keeping it quiet unless she was protecting that guy. Unless that guy was our guy. I’m telling you, man, Roulet is
evil. I don’t know where it comes from or how he got it, but the more I look at him, the more I see the devil.”

All of this backgrounding was completely sub rosa. It obviously was not the kind of background that would in any way be brought
forward as a means of defense. It had to be hidden from discovery, so little of what Levin or I found was put down on paper.
But it was still information that I had to know as I made my decisions and set up the trial and the play within it.

At 11:05 my home phone rang as I was standing in front of a mirror and fitting a Dodgers cap onto my head. I checked the caller
ID before answering and saw that it was Lorna Taylor.

“Why is your cell phone off?” she asked.

“Because I’m off. I told you, no calls today. I’m going to the ballgame with Mish and I’m supposed to get going to meet him
early.”

“Who’s Mish?”

“I mean Raul. Why are you bothering me?”

I said it good-naturedly.

“Because I think you are going to want to be bothered with
this. The mail came in a little early today and with it you got a notice from the Second.”

The Second District Court of Appeal reviewed all cases emanating from L.A. County. They were the first appellate hurdle on
the way to the Supreme Court. But I didn’t think Lorna would be calling me to tell me I had lost an appeal.

“Which case?”

At any given time I usually have four or five cases on appeal to the Second.

“One of your Road Saints. Harold Casey. You won!”

I was shocked. Not at winning, but at the timing. I had tried to move quickly with the appeal. I had written the brief before
the verdict had come in and paid extra for expedited daily transcripts from the trial. I filed the notice of appeal the day
after the verdict and asked for an expedited review. Even still, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything on Casey for another
two months.

I asked Lorna to read the opinion and a smile widened on my face. The summary was literally a rewrite of my brief. The three-judge
panel had agreed with me right down the line on my contention that the low flyover of the sheriff’s surveillance helicopter
above Casey’s ranch constituted an invasion of privacy. The court overturned Casey’s conviction, saying that the search that
led to the discovery of the hydroponic pot farm was illegal.

The state would now have to decide whether to retry Casey and, realistically, a retrial was out of the question. The state
would have no evidence, since the appeals court ruled everything garnered during the search of the ranch was inadmissible.
The Second’s ruling was clearly a victory for the defense, and they don’t come that often.

“Man, what a day for the underdog!”

“Where is he, anyway?” Lorna asked.

“He may still be at the reception center but they were moving him to Corcoran. Here’s what you do. Make about ten copies of
the ruling and put them in an envelope and send it to Casey at Corcoran. You should have the address.”

“Well, won’t they be letting him go?”

“Not yet. His parole was violated after his arrest and the appeal doesn’t affect that. He won’t get out until he goes to the
parole board and argues fruit of the poisonous tree, that he got violated because of an illegal search. It will probably take
about six weeks for all that to work itself out.”

“Six weeks? That’s unbelievable.”