The Lincoln Lawyer

for.
    I called Lorna Taylor back first. Lorna is my case manager. The phone number that runs on my half-page ad in the yellow pages and on thirty-six bus benches scattered through high-crime areas in the south and east county goes directly to the office/second bedroom of her Kings Road condo in West Hollywood. The address the California bar and all the clerks of the courts have for me is the condo as well.
    Lorna is the first buffer. To get to me you start with her. My cell number is given out to only a few and Lorna is the gatekeeper. She is tough, smart, professional and beautiful. Lately, though, I only get to verify this last attribute once a month or so when I take her to lunch and sign checks-she’s my bookkeeper, too.
    “Law office,” she said when I called in.
    “Sorry, I was still in court,” I said, explaining why I didn’t get her call. “What’s up?”
    “You talked to Val, right?”
    “Yeah. I’m heading down to Van Nuys now. I got that at eleven.”
    “He called here to make sure. He sounds nervous.”
    “He thinks this guy is the golden goose, wants to make sure he’s along for the ride. I’ll call him back to reassure him.”
    “I did some preliminary checking on the name Louis Ross Roulet. Credit check is excellent. The name in the
Times
archive comes up with a few hits. All real estate transactions. Looks like he works for a real estate firm in Beverly Hills. It’s called Windsor Residential Estates. Looks like they handle all exclusive pocket listings-not the sort of properties where they put a sign out front.”
    “That’s good. Anything else?”
    “Not on that. And just the usual so far on the phone.”
    Which meant that she had fielded the usual number of calls drawn by the bus benches and the yellow pages, all from people who wanted a lawyer. Before the callers hit my radar they had to convince Lorna that they could pay for what they wanted. She was sort of like the nurse behind the desk in the emergency room. You have to convince her you have valid insurance before she sends you back to see the doc. Next to Lorna’s phone she keeps a rate schedule that starts with a $5,000 flat fee to handle a DUI and ranges to the hourly fees I charge for felony trials. She makes sure every potential client is a paying client and knows the costs of the crime they have been charged with. There’s that saying, Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Lorna likes to say that with me, it’s Don’t do the crime if you can’t pay for my time. She accepts MasterCard and Visa and will get purchase approval before a client ever gets to me.
    “Nobody we know?” I asked.
    “Gloria Dayton called from Twin Towers.”
    I groaned. The Twin Towers was the county’s main lockup in downtown. It housed women in one tower and men in the other. Gloria Dayton was a high-priced prostitute who needed my legal services from time to time. The first time I represented her was at least ten years earlier, when she was young and drug-free and still had life in her eyes. Now she was a pro bono client. I never charged her. I just tried to convince her to quit the life.
    “When did she get popped?”
    “Last night. Or rather, this morning. Her first appearance is after lunch.”
    “I don’t know if I can make that with this Van Nuys thing.”
    “There’s also a complication. Cocaine possession as well as the usual.”
    I knew that Gloria worked exclusively through contacts made on the Internet, where she billed herself on a variety of websites as Glory Days. She was no streetwalker or barroom troller. When she got popped, it was usually after an undercover vice officer was able to penetrate her check system and set up a date. The fact that she had cocaine on her person when they met sounded like an unusual lapse on her part or a plant from the cop.
    “All right, if she calls back tell her I will try to be there and if I’m not there I will have somebody take it. Will you call the court and firm up the hearing?”
    “I’m on it. But, Mickey, when are you going to tell her this is the last time?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe today. What else?”
    “Isn’t that enough for one day?”
    “It’ll do, I guess.”
    We talked a little more about my schedule for the rest of the week and I opened my laptop on the fold-down table so I could check my calendar against hers. I had a couple hearings set for each morning and a one-day trial on Thursday. It was all South side drug stuff. My meat and potatoes.