The Lincoln Lawyer

toward the elevators. This time Roulet went without a struggle. Halfway down the hall toward the elevator, his mother and Dobbs trailing behind, he turned his head to look back over his shoulder at me. He smiled and it sent something right through me.
    You can’t protect everybody.
    A cold shiver of fear pierced my chest.
    Someone was waiting for the elevator and it opened just as the entourage got there. Lankford signaled the person back and took the elevator. Roulet was hustled in. Dobbs and Windsor were about to follow when they were halted by Lankford’s hand extended in a stop signal. The elevator door started to close and Dobbs angrily and impotently pushed on the button next to it.
    My hope was that it would be the last I would ever see of Louis Roulet, but the fear stayed locked in my chest, fluttering like a moth caught inside a porch light. I turned away and almost walked right into Sobel. I hadn’t noticed that she had stayed behind the others.
    “You have enough, don’t you?” I said. “Tell me you wouldn’t have moved so quickly if you didn’t have enough to keep him.”
    She looked at me a long moment before answering.
    “We won’t decide that. The DA will. Probably depends on what they get out of him in interrogation. But up till now he’s had a pretty smart lawyer. He probably knows not to say a word to us.”
    “Then why didn’t you wait?”
    “Wasn’t my call.”
    I shook my head. I wanted to tell her that they had moved too fast. It wasn’t part of the plan. I wanted to plant the seed, that’s all. I wanted them to move slowly and get it right.
    The moth fluttered inside and I looked down at the floor. I couldn’t shake the idea that all of my machinations had failed, leaving me and my family exposed in the hard-eyed focus of a killer.
You can’t protect everybody
.
    It was as if Sobel read my fears.
    “But we’re going to try to keep him,” she said. “We have what the snitch said in court and the ticket. We’re working on witnesses and the forensics.”
    My eyes came up to hers.
    “What ticket?”
    A look of suspicion entered her face.
    “I thought you had it figured out. We put it together as soon as the snitch mentioned the snake dancer.”
    “Yeah. Martha Renteria. I got that. But what ticket? What are you talking about?”
    I had moved in too close to her and Sobel took a step back from me. It wasn’t my breath. It was my desperation.
    “I don’t know if I should tell you, Haller. You’re a defense lawyer. You’re
his
lawyer.”
    “Not anymore. I just quit.”
    “Doesn’t matter. He -”
    “Look, you just took that guy down because of me. I might get disbarred because of it. I might even go to jail for a murder I didn’t commit. What ticket are you talking about?”
    She hesitated and I waited, but then she finally spoke.
    “Raul Levin’s last words. He said he found Jesus’s ticket out.”
    “Which means what?”
    “You really don’t know, do you?”
    “Look, just tell me. Please.”
    She relented.
    “We traced Levin’s most recent movements. Before he was murdered he had made inquiries about Roulet’s parking tickets. He even pulled hard copies of them. We inventoried what he had in the office and eventually compared it with what’s on the computer. He was missing one ticket. One hard copy. We didn’t know if his killer took it that day or if he had just missed pulling it. So we went and pulled a copy ourselves. It was issued two years ago on the night of April eighth. It was a citation for parking in front of a hydrant in the sixty-seven-hundred block of Blythe Street in Panorama City.”
    It all came together for me, like the last bit of sand dropping through the middle of an hourglass. Raul Levin really had found Jesus Menendez’s salvation.
    “Martha Renteria was murdered two years ago on April eighth,” I said. “She lived on Blythe in Panorama City.”
    “Yes, but we didn’t know that. We didn’t see the connection. You told us that Levin was working separate cases for you. Jesus Menendez and Louis Roulet were separate investigations. Levin had them filed that way, too.”
    “It was a discovery issue. He kept the cases separate so I wouldn’t have to turn over anything on Roulet that he came up with on Menendez.”
    “One of your lawyer angles. Well, it stopped us from putting it together until that snitch in there mentioned the snake dancer. That connected everything.”
    I nodded.
    “So whoever killed Raul Levin took the