The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel (50 page)

But Menendez will never go away. He is the one who gets to me at night when I sit on the deck and watch the million-dollar
view from my house with the million-one mortgage. He was pardoned by the governor and released from San Quentin two days after
Roulet was charged with Martha Renteria’s murder. But he only traded one life sentence for another. It was revealed that he
contracted HIV in prison and the governor doesn’t have a pardon for that. Nobody does. Whatever happens to Jesus Menendez
is on me. I know this. I live with it every day. My father was right. There is no client as scary as an innocent man. And
no client as scarring.

Menendez wants to spit on me and take my money as punishment for what I did and didn’t do. As far as I am concerned he is
entitled. But no matter what my failings of judgment and ethical lapses were, I know that by the end, I bent things in order
to do the right thing. I traded evil for innocence. Roulet is in because of me. Menendez is out because of me. Despite the
efforts of his new attorneys—it has now taken the partnership of Dan Daly and Roger Mills to replace me—Roulet will not see
freedom again. From what I have heard from Maggie McPherson, prosecutors have built an impenetrable case against him for the
Renteria murder. They have also followed Raul Levin’s steps and connected Roulet to another killing: the follow-home rape
and stabbing of a woman who tended bar in a Hollywood club. The forensic profile of his knife was matched to the fatal wounds
inflicted on this other woman. For Roulet, the science will be the iceberg spotted too late.
His ship will founder and go down. The battle for him now lies in just staying alive. His lawyers are engaged in plea negotiations
to keep him from a lethal injection. They are hinting at other murders and rapes that he would be willing to clear up in exchange
for his life. Whatever the outcome, alive or dead, he is surely gone from this world and I take my salvation in that. It is
what has mended me better than any surgeon.

Maggie McPherson and I are attempting to mend our wounds, too. She brings my daughter to visit me every weekend and often
stays for the day. We sit on the deck and talk. We both know our daughter will be what saves us. I can no longer hold anger
for being used as bait for a killer. I think Maggie no longer holds anger for the choices I have made.

The California bar looked at all of my actions and sent me on a vacation to Cuba. That’s what defense pros call being suspended
for conduct unbecoming an attorney. CUBA. I was shelved for ninety days. It was a bullshit finding. They could prove no specific
ethical violations in regard to Corliss, so they hit me for borrowing a gun from my client Earl Briggs. I got lucky there.
It was not a stolen or unregistered gun. It belonged to Earl’s father, so my ethical infraction was minor.

I didn’t bother contesting the bar reprimand or appealing the suspension. After taking a bullet in the gut, ninety days on
the shelf didn’t look so bad to me. I served the suspension during my recovery, mostly in a bathrobe while watching Court
TV.

Neither the bar nor the police found ethical or criminal violation on my part in the killing of Mary Alice Windsor. She entered
my home with a stolen weapon. She shot first and I shot last. From a block away Lankford and Sobel watched her take that first
shot at my front door. Self-defense, cut and dried. But what has not been so clear-cut are the feelings I have for what I
did. I wanted to avenge my friend Raul Levin, but I didn’t want to see it done in blood. I am a killer now. Being state sanctioned
only tempers slightly the feelings that come with that.

All investigations and official findings aside, I think now that
in the whole matter of Menendez and Roulet I was guilty of conduct unbecoming myself. And the penalty for that is harsher
than anything the state or the bar could ever throw at me. No matter. I will carry all of it with me as I go back to work.
My work. I know my place in this world and on the first day of court next year I will pull the Lincoln out of the garage,
get back on the road and go looking for the underdog. I don’t know where I will go or what cases will be mine. I just know
I will be healed and ready to stand once again in the world without truth.

This novel was inspired by a chance meeting and conversation with attorney David Ogden many years ago at a Los Angeles Dodgers
baseball game. For that, the author will always be grateful. Though the character and exploits of Mickey Haller are fictitious
and wholly of the author’s imagination, this story could not have been written without the tremendous help and guidance of
attorneys Daniel F. Daly and Roger O. Mills, both of whom allowed me to watch them work and strategize cases and were tireless
in their efforts to make sure the world of criminal defense law was depicted accurately in these pages. Any errors or exaggerations
in the law or the practice of it are purely the fault of the author.

Superior Court Judge Judith Champagne and her staff in Department 124 in the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles
allowed the author complete access to her courtroom, chambers and holding cells and answered any question posed. To the judge,
Joe, Marianne, and Michelle a great debt of thanks is owed.

Also of great help to the author and contribution to the story were Asya Muchnick, Michael Pietsch, Jane Wood, Terrill Lee
Lankford, Jerry Hooten, David Lambkin, Lucas Foster, Carolyn Chriss, and Pamela Marshall.

Last but not least, the author wishes to thank Shannon Byrne, Mary Elizabeth Capps, Jane Davis, Joel Gotler, Philip Spitzer,
Lukas Ortiz, and Linda Connelly for their help and support during the writing of this story.

Look for the next Lincoln Lawyer novel,
The Brass Verdict
.

Also look for the most recent Lincoln Lawyer novel,
The Gods of Guilt
.

Following is an excerpt from the opening pages of
The Brass Verdict
.

E
verybody lies.

Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.

A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They
come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.

The trick if you are sitting at the defense table is to be patient. To wait. Not for just any lie. But for the one you can
grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts
out on the floor.

That’s my job, to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience. To be the truth in a place where
everybody lies.

I
was in the fourth day of trial in Department 109 in the downtown Criminal Courts Building when I got the lie that became
the blade that ripped the case open. My client, Barnett Woodson, was riding two murder charges all the way to the steel-gray
room in San Quentin where they serve you Jesus juice direct through the arm.

Woodson, a twenty-seven-year-old drug dealer from Compton, was accused of robbing and killing two college students from Westwood.
They had wanted to buy cocaine from him. He decided instead to take their money and kill them both with a sawed-off shotgun.
Or so the prosecution said. It was a black-on-white crime and that made things bad enough for Woodson—especially coming just
four months after the riots that had torn the city apart. But what made his situation even worse was that the killer had attempted
to hide the crime by weighing down the two bodies and dropping them into the Hollywood Reservoir. They stayed down for four
days before popping to the surface like apples in a barrel. Rotten apples. The idea of dead bodies moldering in the reservoir
that was a primary source of the city’s drinking water caused a collective twist in the community’s guts. When Woodson was
linked by phone records to the dead men and arrested, the public outrage directed toward him was almost palpable. The District
Attorney’s Office promptly announced it would seek the death penalty.

The case against Woodson, however, wasn’t all that palpable.
It was constructed largely of circumstantial evidence—the phone
records—and the testimony of witnesses who were criminals themselves. And state’s witness Ronald Torrance sat front and center
in this group. He claimed that Woodson confessed the killings to him.

Torrance had been housed on the same floor of the Men’s Central Jail as Woodson. Both men were kept in a high-power module
that contained sixteen single-prisoner cells on two tiers that opened onto a dayroom. At the time, all sixteen prisoners in
the module were black, following the routine but questionable jail procedure of “segregating for safety,” which entailed dividing
prisoners according to race and gang affiliation to avoid confrontations and violence. Torrance was awaiting trial on robbery
and aggravated assault charges stemming from his involvement in looting during the riots. High-power detainees had six a.m.
to six p.m. access to the dayroom, where they ate and played cards at tables and otherwise interacted under the watchful eyes
of guards in an overhead glass booth. According to Torrance, it was at one of these tables that my client had confessed to
killing the two Westside boys.

The prosecution went out of its way to make Torrance presentable and believable to the jury, which had only three black members.
He was given a shave, his hair was taken out of cornrows and trimmed short and he was dressed in a pale blue suit with no
tie when he arrived in court on the fourth day of Woodson’s trial. In direct testimony elicited by Jerry Vincent, the prosecutor,
Torrance described the conversation he allegedly had with Woodson one morning at one of the picnic tables. Woodson not only
confessed to the killings, he said, but furnished Torrance with many of the telling details of the murders. The point made
clear to the jury was that these were details that only the true killer would know.

During the testimony, Vincent kept Torrance on a tight leash with long questions designed to elicit short answers. The questions
were overloaded to the point of being leading but I didn’t bother objecting, even when Judge Companioni looked at me with
raised eyebrows, practically begging me to jump in. But I didn’t object,
because I wanted the counterpoint. I wanted the jury
to see what the prosecution was doing. When it was my turn, I was going to let Torrance run with his answers while I hung
back and waited for the blade.

Vincent finished his direct at eleven a.m. and the judge asked me if I wanted to take an early lunch before I began my cross.
I told him no, I didn’t need or want a break. I said it like I was disgusted and couldn’t wait another hour to get at the
man on the stand. I stood up and took a big, thick file and a legal pad with me to the lectern.

“Mr. Torrance, my name is Michael Haller. I work for the Public Defender’s Office and represent Barnett Woodson. Have we met
before?”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so. But you and the defendant, Mr. Woodson, you two go back a long way, correct?”

Torrance gave an “aw, shucks” smile. But I had done the due diligence on him and I knew exactly who I was dealing with. He
was thirty-two years old and had spent a third of his life in jails and prisons. His schooling had ended in the fourth grade
when he stopped going to school and no parent seemed to notice or care. Under the state’s three-strike law, he was facing
the lifetime achievement award if convicted of charges he robbed and beat the female manager of a coin laundry.
The crime had been committed during three days of rioting and looting that ripped through the city after the not-guilty verdicts
were announced in the trial of four police officers accused of the excessive beating of Rodney King, a black motorist pulled
over for driving erratically. In short, Torrance had good reason to help the state take down Barnett Woodson.

“Well, we go back a few months is all,” Torrance said. “To high-power.”

“Did you say ‘higher power’?” I asked, playing dumb. “Are you talking about a church or some sort of religious connection?”