The Lincoln Lawyer

said. “Keep your plugs in.”
    Earl did as instructed.
    “What else?” I said to Levin.
    “There’s Reggie Campo,” he said. “She’s not Snow White.”
    “What did you find out?”
    “It’s not necessarily what I found out. It’s what I think. You saw how she was on the tape. One guy leaves and she’s dropping love notes on another guy alone at the bar. Plus, I did some checking. She’s an actress but she’s not currently working as an actress. Except for private auditions, you could say.”
    He handed me a professional photo collage that showed Reggie Campo in different poses and characters. It was the kind of photo sheet sent to casting directors all over the city. The largest photo on the sheet was a head shot. It was the first time I had seen her face up close without the ugly bruises and swelling. Reggie Campo was a very attractive woman and something about her face was familiar to me but I could not readily place it. I wondered if I had seen her in a television show or a commercial. I flipped the head shot over and read her credits. They were for shows I never watched and commercials I didn’t remember.
    “In the police reports she lists her current employer as Topsail Telemarketing. They’re over in the Marina. They take the calls for a lot of the crap they sell on late-night TV. Workout machines and stuff like that. Anyway, it’s day work. You work when you want. The only thing is, Reggie hasn’t worked a day there for five months.”
    “So what are you telling me, she’s been tricking?”
    “I’ve been watching her the last three nights and -”
    “You what?”
    I turned and looked at him. If a private eye working for a criminal defendant was caught tailing the victim of a violent crime, there could be hell to pay and I would be the one to pay it. All the prosecution would have to do is go see a judge and claim harassment and intimidation and I’d be held in contempt faster than the Santa Ana wind through the Sepulveda Pass. As a crime victim Reggie Campo was sacrosanct until she was on the stand. Only then was she mine.
    “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Levin said. “It was a very loose tail. Very loose. And I’m glad I did it. The bruises and the swelling and all of that have either gone away or she’s using a lot of makeup, because this lady has been getting a lot of visitors. All men, all alone, all different times of the night. It looks like she tries to fit at least two into her dance card each night.”
    “Is she picking them up in the bars?”
    “No, she’s been staying in. These guys must be regulars or something because they know their way to her door. I got some plate numbers. If necessary I can visit them and try to get some answers. I also shot some infrared video but I haven’t transferred it to disc yet.”
    “No, let’s hold off on visiting any of these guys for now. Word could get back to her. We have to be very careful around her. I don’t care if she’s tricking or not.”
    I drank some more coffee and tried to decide how to move with this.
    “You ran a check on her, right? No criminal record?”
    “Right, she’s clean. My guess is that she’s new to the game. You know, these women who want to be actresses, it’s a tough gig. It wears you down. She probably started by taking a little help from these guys here and there, then it became a business. She went from amateur to pro.”
    “And none of this is in the reports you got before?”
    “Nope. Like I told you, there hasn’t been a lot of follow-up by the cops. At least so far.”
    “If she graduated from amateur to pro, she could’ve graduated to setting a guy like Roulet up. He drives a nice car, wears nice clothes… have you seen his watch?”
    “Yeah, a Rolex. If it’s real, then he’s wearing ten grand right there on his wrist. She could have seen that from across the bar. Maybe that’s why she picked him out of all the rest.”
    We were back by the courthouse. I had to start heading toward downtown. I asked Levin where he was parked and he directed Earl to the lot.
    “This is all good,” I said. “But it means Louis lied about more than UCLA.”
    “Yeah,” Levin agreed. “He knew he was going into a pay-for-play deal with her. He should have told you about it.”
    “Yeah, and now I’m going to talk to
him
about it.”
    We pulled up next to the curb outside a pay lot on Acacia. Levin took a file out of his briefcase. It had a rubber band around it that held a piece of