The Brass Verdict

hearing the news. He took one look at Cisco and almost got into it with him. Then he got smart and backed down.”
    “Who was it?”
    “Bruce Carlin. Jerry hired him to work the Elliot case.”
    I nodded. Bruce Carlin was a former LAPD bull who had crossed to the dark side and did defense work now. A lot of attorneys used him because of his insider’s knowledge of how things worked in the cop shop. I had used him on a case once and thought he was living off an undeserved reputation. I never hired him again.
    “Call him back,” I said. “Set up a time for him to come back in.”
    “Why, Mick? You’ve got Cisco.”
    “I know I’ve got Cisco but Carlin was doing work on Elliot and I doubt it’s all in the files. You know how it is. If you keep it out of the file, you keep it out of discovery. So bring him in. Cisco can sit down with him and find out what he’s got. Pay him for his time – whatever his hourly rate is – and then cut him loose when he’s no longer useful. What else? Who else came in?”
    “A real loser’s parade. Carney Andrews waltzed in, thinking she was going to just pick the Elliot case up off the pile and waltz back out with it. I sent her away empty-handed. I then looked through the P and Os in the operating account and saw she was hired five months ago as associate counsel on Elliot. A month later she was dropped.”
    I nodded and understood. Vincent had been judge shopping for Elliot. Carney Andrews was an untalented attorney and weasel, but she was married to a superior court judge named Bryce Andrews. He had spent twenty-five years as a prosecutor before being appointed to the bench. In the view of most criminal defense attorneys who worked in the CCB, he had never left the DA’s office. He was believed to be one of the toughest judges in the building, one who at times acted in concert with, if not as a direct arm of, the prosecutor’s office. This created a cottage industry in which his wife made a very comfortable living by being hired as co-counsel on cases in her husband’s court, thereby creating a conflict of interest that would require the reassignment of the cases to other, hopefully more lenient, judges.
    It worked like a charm and the best part was that Carney Andrews never really had to practice law. She just had to sign on to a case, make an appearance as co-counsel in court and then wait until it was reassigned from her husband’s calendar. She could then collect a substantial fee and move on to the next case.
    I didn’t have to even look into the Elliot file to see what had happened. I knew. Case assignments were generated by random selection in the chief judge’s office. The Elliot case had obviously been initially assigned to Bryce Andrews’s court and Vincent didn’t like his chances there. For starters, Andrews would never allow bail on a double-murder case, let alone the hard line he would take against the defendant when it got to trial. So Vincent hired the judge’s wife as co-counsel and the problem went away. The case was then randomly reassigned to Judge James P. Stanton, whose reputation was completely the opposite of Andrews’s. The bottom line was that whatever Vincent had paid Carney, it had been worth it.
    “Did you check?” I asked Lorna. “How much did he pay her?”
    “She took ten percent of the initial advance.”
    I whistled. Twenty-five thousand dollars for nothing. That at least explained where some of the first quarter million went.
    “Nice work if you can get it,” I said.
    “But then you’d have to sleep at night with Bryce Andrews,” Lorna said. “I’m not sure that would be worth it.”
    Cisco laughed. I didn’t but Lorna did have a point. Bryce Andrews had at least twenty years and almost two hundred pounds on his wife. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
    “That it on the visitors?” I asked.
    “No,” Lorna said. “We also had a couple of clients drop by to ask for their files after they heard on the radio about Jerry’s death.”
    “And?”
    “We stalled them. I told them that only you could turn over a file and that you would get back to them within twenty-four hours. It looked like they wanted to argue about it but with Cisco here they decided it would be better to wait.”
    She smiled at Cisco and the big man bowed as if to say “at your service.”
    Lorna handed me a slip of paper.
    “Those are the names. There’s contact info, too.”
    I looked at the names. One was in the dog pile, so I would be happily