The Lincoln Lawyer

injury?”
    I pointed to the photo on the exhibit easel. Metz shrugged, realizing he had probably not been so helpful to the prosecution.
    “Anything is possible,” he said.
    “Anything is possible,” I repeated. “Well, is there any other possibility you can think of that would explain these injuries as coming from anything other than direct left-handed punches?”
    Metz shrugged again. He was not an impressive witness, especially following two cops and a dispatcher who had been very precise in their testimony.
    “What if Ms. Campo were to have hit her face with her own fist? Wouldn’t she have used her right -”
    Minton jumped up immediately and objected.
    “Your Honor, this is outrageous! To suggest that this victim did this to herself is not only an affront to this court but to all victims of violent crime everywhere. Mr. Haller has sunk to -”
    “The witness said anything is possible,” I argued, trying to knock Minton off the soapbox. “I am trying to explore what -”
    “Sustained,” Fullbright said, ending it. “Mr. Haller, don’t go there unless you are making more than an exploratory swing through the possibilities.”
    “Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “No further questions.”
    I sat down and glanced at the jurors and knew from their faces that I had made a mistake. I had turned a positive cross into a negative. The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim’s face were self-inflicted. The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.
    Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury’s feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.
    Roulet leaned toward me and whispered, “What the fuck was that?”
    Without responding I turned my back to him and took a scan around the courtroom. It was almost empty. Lankford and Sobel had not returned to the courtroom and the reporters were gone as well. That left only a few other onlookers. They appeared to be a disparate collection of retirees, law students and lawyers resting their feet until their own hearings began in other courtrooms. But I was counting on one of these onlookers being a plant from the DA’s office. Ted Minton might be flying solo but my guess was that his boss would have a means of keeping tabs on him and the case. I knew I was playing as much to the plant as I was to the jury. By the trial’s end I needed to send a note of panic down to the second floor that would then echo back to Minton. I needed to push the young prosecutor toward taking a desperate measure.
    The afternoon dragged on. Minton still had a lot to learn about pacing and jury management, knowledge that comes only with courtroom experience. I kept my eyes on the jury box-where the real judges sat-and saw the jurors were growing bored as witness after witness offered testimony that filled in small details in the prosecutor’s linear presentation of the events of March 6. I asked few questions on cross and tried to keep a look on my face that mirrored those I saw in the jury box.
    Minton obviously wanted to save his most powerful stuff for day two. He would have the lead investigator, Detective Martin Booker, to bring all the details together, and then the victim, Regina Campo, to bring it all home to the jury. It was a tried-and-true formula-ending with muscle and emotion-and it worked ninety percent of the time, but it was making the first day move like a glacier.
    Things finally started to pop with the last witness of the day. Minton brought in Charles Talbot, the man who had picked up Regina Campo at Morgan’s and gone with her to her apartment on the night of the sixth. What Talbot had to offer to the prosecution’s case was negligible. He was basically hauled in to testify that Campo had been in good health and uninjured when he left her. That was it. But what caused his arrival to rescue the trial from the pit of boredom was that Talbot was an honest-to-God alternate lifestyle man and jurors always loved visiting the other side of the tracks.
    Talbot was fifty-five years old with dyed blond hair that wasn’t fooling anyone. He had blurred Navy tattoos on both forearms. He was twenty years divorced and owned a twenty-four-hour convenience store called Kwik Kwik. The business gave him a comfortable living and lifestyle with an apartment in the Warner Center, a late-model Corvette and