The Lincoln Lawyer

Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn’t go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn’t get it. The question wasn’t whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.
    “What do I think?” I said. “I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense-‘If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been?’ Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don’t hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it.”
    “Spoken like a true defense attorney.”
    “Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I’m jealous and I’m already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me.”
    “I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I’ve got?”
    I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn’t miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.
    “I don’t have time to go anywhere,” I said. “We can go sit in my car and grab a coffee. You got your stuff with you?”
    In answer Levin raised his briefcase and rapped his knuckles on its side.
    “But what about your driver?”
    “Don’t worry about him.”
    “Then let’s do it.”

ELEVEN
    A fter we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee. “Ain’ no Starbuck ’round here,” Earl responded.
    I knew Earl was from the area but I didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted coffee.
    “Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don’t go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after.”
    “You got it.”
    “And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?”
    Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver’s seat.
    “Okay, what do you have for me?” I said. “I’m going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday.”
    “I think I’ve got a few aces here,” Levin replied.
    He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.
    “Okay,” he said, “let’s begin with your client and then we’ll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets-which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying-I couldn’t find squat on him. He’s pretty much your standard citizen.”
    “What’s with the tickets?”
    “Twice in the last four years he’s let parking tickets-a lot of them-and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over.”
    “I’m glad C.C.’s good for something. By ‘paying them off,’ I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges.”
    “Let’s hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet.”
    “What?”
    “At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he’d had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn near everything. And most of the time it’s easy to do because everything’s on