The Lincoln Lawyer

her for a long moment.
    “I can’t win with you, can I?”
    “Not when you’re underhanded, when you act like a criminal defense attorney.”
    She was always the better of the two of us when it came to verbal knife throwing. The truth was, I was thankful we had a built-in conflict of interest and I would never have to face her in trial. Over the years some people-mostly defense pros who suffered at her hands-had gone so far as to say that was the reason I had married her. To avoid her professionally.
    “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour. If you want a ride to the car that you were too drunk to drive last night, be ready and have her ready.”
    “It’s okay. We’ll take a cab.”
    “I will drive you.”
    “No, we’ll take a cab. And keep your voice down.”
    I looked over at my daughter, still asleep despite her parents’ verbal sparring.
    “What about her? Do you want me to take her tomorrow or Sunday?”
    “I don’t know. Call me tomorrow.”
    “Fine. Good-bye.”
    I left her there in the bedroom. Outside the apartment building I walked a block and a half down Dickens before finding the Lincoln parked awkwardly against the curb. There was a ticket on the windshield citing me for parking next to a fire hydrant. I got in the car and threw it into the backseat. I’d deal with it the next time I was riding back there. I wouldn’t be like Louis Roulet, letting my tickets go to warrant. There was a county full of cops out there who would love to book me on a warrant.
    Fighting always made me hungry and I realized I was starved. I worked my way back to Ventura and headed toward Studio City. It was early, especially for the morning after St. Patrick’s Day, and I got to the DuPar’s by Laurel Canyon Boulevard before it was crowded. I got a booth in the back and ordered a short stack of pancakes and coffee. I tried to forget about Maggie McFierce by opening up my briefcase and pulling out a legal pad and the Roulet files.
    Before diving into the files I made a call to Raul Levin, waking him up at his home in Glendale.
    “I’ve got something for you to do,” I said.
    “Can’t this wait till Monday? I just got home a couple hours ago. I was going to start the weekend today.”
    “No, it can’t wait and you owe me one after yesterday. Besides, you’re not even Irish. I need you to background somebody.”
    “All right, wait a minute.”
    I heard him put down the phone while he probably grabbed pen and paper to take notes.
    “Okay, go ahead.”
    “There’s a guy named Corliss who was arraigned right after Roulet back on the seventh. He was in the first group out and they were in the holding pen at the same time. He’s now trying to snitch Roulet off and I want to know everything there is to know about the guy so I can put his dick in the dirt.”
    “Got a first name?”
    “Nope.”
    “Do you know what he’s in there for?”
    “No, and I don’t even know if he is still in there.”
    “Thanks for the help. What’s he saying Roulet told him?”
    “That he beat up some bitch who had it coming. Words to that effect.”
    “Okay, what else you got?”
    “That’s it other than I got a tip that he’s a repeat snitch. Find out who he’s crapped on in the past and there might be something there I can use. Go back as far as you can go with this guy. The DA’s people usually don’t. They’re afraid of what they might find. They’d rather be ignorant.”
    “Okay, I’ll get on it.”
    “Let me know when you know.”
    I closed the phone just as my pancakes arrived. I doused them liberally with maple syrup and started eating while looking through the file containing the state’s discovery.
    The weapon report remained the only surprise. Everything else in the file, except the color photos, I had already seen in Levin’s file.
    I moved on to that. As expected with a contract investigator, Levin had larded the file with everything found in the net he had cast. He even had copies of the parking tickets and speeding citations Roulet had accumulated and failed to pay in recent years. It annoyed me at first because there was so much to weed through to get to what was going to be germane to Roulet’s defense.
    I was nearly through it all when the waitress swung by my booth with a coffee pot, looking to refill my mug. She recoiled when she saw the battered face of Reggie Campo in one of the color photos I had put to the side of the files.
    “Sorry about that,” I said.
    I