The Lincoln Lawyer

without hurting the other. I needed an answer. I needed a plan. I needed proof. But for the moment on the train, I could only think of Jesus Menendez’s dead eyes, because I knew I was the one who had killed the light in them.

TWENTY
    A s soon as I got off the shuttle at Burbank I turned on my cell. I had not come up with a plan but I had come up with my next step and that started with a call to Raul Levin. The phone buzzed in my hand, which meant I had messages. I decided I would get them after I set Levin in motion.
    He answered my call and the first thing he asked was whether I had gotten his message.
    “I just got off a plane,” I said. “I missed it.”
    “A plane? Where were you?”
    “Up north. What was the message?”
    “Just an update on Corliss. If you weren’t calling about that, what were you calling about?”
    “What are you doing tonight?”
    “Just hanging out. I don’t like going out on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s amateur hour. Too many drunks on the road.”
    “Well, I want to meet. I’ve got to talk to somebody. Bad things are happening.”
    Levin apparently sensed something in my voice because he immediately changed his stay-at-home-on-Friday-night policy and we agreed to meet at the Smoke House over by the Warner Studios. It was not far from where I was and not far from his home.
    At the airport valet window I gave my ticket to a man in a red jacket and checked messages while waiting for the Lincoln.
    Three messages had come in, all during the hour flight down from San Francisco. The first was from Maggie McPherson.
    “Michael, I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry about how I was this morning. To tell you the truth, I was mad at myself for some of the things I said last night and the choices I made. I took it out on you and I should not have done that. Um, if you want to take Hayley out tomorrow or Sunday she would love it and, who knows, maybe I could come, too. Either way, just let me know.”
    She didn’t call me Michael too often, even when we were married. She was one of those women who could use your last name and turn it into an endearment. That is, if she wanted to. She had always called me Haller. From the day we met in line to go through a metal detector at the CCB. She was headed to orientation at the DA’s office and I was headed to misdemeanor arraignment court to handle a DUI.
    I saved the message to listen to again sometime and went on to the next. I was expecting it to be from Levin but the automated voice reported the call came from a number with a 310 area code. The next voice I heard was Louis Roulet’s.
    “It’s me, Louis. I was just checking in. I was just wondering after yesterday where things stood. I also have something I want to tell you.”
    I hit the erase button and moved on to the third and last message. This was Levin’s.
    “Hey, Bossman, give me a call. I have some stuff on Corliss. Anyway, the name is Dwayne Jeffery Corliss. That’s Dwayne with a
D-W.
He’s a hype and he’s done the snitch thing a couple other times here in L.A. What’s new, right? Anyway, he was actually arrested for stealing a bike he probably planned to trade for a little Mexican tar. He has parlayed snitching off Roulet into a ninety-day lockdown program at County-USC. So we won’t be able to get to him and talk to him unless you got a judge that will set it up. Pretty shrewd move by the prosecutor. Anyway, I’m still running him down. Something came up on the Internet in Phoenix that looks pretty good for us if it was the same guy. Something that blew up in his face. I should be able to confirm it by Monday. So that’s it for now. Give me a call over the weekend. I’m just hanging out.”
    I erased the message and closed the phone.
    “Say no more,” I said to myself.
    Once I heard that Corliss was a hype, I needed to know nothing else. I understood why Maggie had not trusted the guy. Hypes-needle addicts-were the most desperate and unreliable people you could come across in the machine. Given the opportunity, they would snitch off their own mothers to get the next injection, or into the next methadone program. Every one of them was a liar and every one of them could easily be shown as such in court.
    I was, however, puzzled by what the prosecutor was up to. The name Dwayne Corliss was not in the discovery material Minton had given me. Yet the prosecutor was making the moves he would make with a witness. He had stuck Corliss into a ninety-day program for