The Lincoln Lawyer

where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.
    As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey. I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson. I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal. Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints. His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.
    “Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.
    “What, Earl?”
    “That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”
    I shook my head.
    “There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”
    Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.
    “I see,” he said, nodding again.
    And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said. That was my job. That was how it worked. After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.
    There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.
    Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.
    But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez.

FOUR
    L ouis Ross Roulet was in a holding tank with seven other men who had made the half-block bus ride from the Van Nuys jail to the Van Nuys courthouse. There were only two white men in the cell and they sat next to each other on a bench while the six black men took the other side of the cell. It was a form of Darwinian segregation. They were all strangers but there was strength in numbers.
    Since Roulet supposedly came from Beverly Hills money, I looked at the two white men and it was easy to choose between them. One was rail thin with the desperate wet eyes of a hype who was long past fix time. The other looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I chose him.
    “Mr. Roulet?” I said, pronouncing the name the way Valenzuela had told me to.
    The deer nodded. I signaled him over to the bars so I could talk quietly.
    “My name is Michael Haller. People call me Mickey. I will be representing you during your first appearance today.”
    We were in the holding area behind the arraignment court, where attorneys are routinely allowed access to confer with clients before court begins. There is a blue line painted on the floor outside the cells. The three-foot line. I had to keep that distance from my client.
    Roulet grasped the bars in front of me. Like the others in the cage, he had on ankle, wrist and belly chains. They wouldn’t come off until he was taken into the courtroom. He was in his early thirties and, though at least six feet tall and 180 pounds, he seemed slight. Jail will do that to you. His eyes were pale blue and it was rare for me to see the kind of panic that was so clearly set in them. Most of the time my clients have been in lockup before and they have the stone-cold look of the predator. It’s how they get