The Lincoln Lawyer

heart?”
    “Yes, I care. I’m obviously the only one here who does care. But I am also bound by the rules and ethics of law.”
    “Your client could be in danger.”
    “My client is safe. My client is in lockdown.”
    “It’s a woman, isn’t it?” Sobel said. “You keep saying ‘client’ instead of he or she.”
    “I’m not talking to you about my client. If you want the name of the dealer, it’s Hector Arrande Moya. He’s in federal custody. I believe the originating charge came out of a DEA case in San Diego. That’s all I can tell you.”
    Sobel wrote it all down. I believed I had now given them sufficient reason to look beyond Roulet and the gay angle.
    “Mr. Haller, have you ever been in Mr. Levin’s office before?” Sobel asked.
    “A few times. Not in a couple months, at least.”
    “Do you mind walking back with us anyway? Maybe you’ll see something out of place or notice something that’s missing.”
    “Is he still back there?”
    “The victim? Yes, he’s still as he was found.”
    I nodded. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Raul Levin’s body in the center of a murder scene. I then decided all at once that I must see him and I must not forget the vision. I would need it to fuel my resolve and my plan.
    “Okay, I’ll go back.”
    “Then put these on and don’t touch anything while you’re back there,” Lankford said. “We’re still processing the scene.”
    From his pocket he produced a folded pair of paper booties. I sat down on Raul’s couch and put them on. Then I followed them down the hallway to the death room.
    Raul Levin’s body was in situ-as they had found it. He was chest-down on the floor, his face turned to his right, his mouth and eyes open. His body was in an awkward posture, one hip higher than the other and his arms and hands beneath him. It seemed clear that he had fallen from the desk chair that was behind him.
    I immediately regretted my decision to come into the room. I suddenly knew that the final look on Raul’s face would crowd out all other visual memories I had of him. I would be forced to try to forget him, so I would not have to look at those eyes in my mind again.
    It was the same with my father. My only visual memory was of a man in a bed. He was a hundred pounds tops and was being ravaged from the inside out by cancer. All the other visuals I carried of him were false. They came from pictures in books I had read.
    There were a number of people working in the room. Crime scene investigators and people from the medical examiner’s office. My face must have shown the horror I was feeling.
    “You know why we can’t cover him up?” Lankford asked me. “Because of people like you. Because of O.J. It’s what they call
evidence transference
. Something you lawyers like to jump all over on. So no sheets over the body anymore. Not till we move it out of here.”
    I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. He was right.
    “Can you step over here to the desk and tell us if you see anything unusual?” Sobel asked, apparently having some sympathy for me.
    I was thankful to do it because I could keep my back to the body. I walked over to the desk, which was a conjoining of three worktables forming a turn in the corner of the room. It was furniture I recognized had come from the IKEA store in nearby Burbank. It was nothing fancy. It was simple and useful. The center table in the corner had a computer on top and a pull-out tray for a keyboard. The tables to either side looked like twin work spaces and possibly were used by Levin to keep separate investigations from mingling.
    My eyes lingered on the computer as I wondered what Levin may have put on electronic files about Roulet. Sobel noticed.
    “We don’t have a computer expert,” she said. “Too small a department. We’ve got a guy coming from the sheriff’s office but it looks to me like the whole drive was pulled out.”
    She pointed with her pen under the table to where the PC unit was sitting upright but with one side of its plastic cowling having been removed and placed to the rear.
    “Probably won’t be anything there for us,” she said. “What about the desks?”
    My eyes moved over the table to the left of the computer first. Papers and files were spread across it in a haphazard way. I looked at some of the tabs and recognized the names.
    “Some of these are my clients but they’re old cases. Not active.”
    “They probably came from the file cabinets in the closet,” Sobel said.