The Lincoln Lawyer

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SIX

Traffic heading downtown bottlenecked in the Cahuenga Pass. I spent the time in the car working the phone and trying not to think about the conversation I’d had with Maggie McPherson about my parenting skills. My ex-wife had been right about me, and that’s what hurt. For a long time I had put my law practice ahead of my parenting practice. It was something I promised myself to change. I just needed the time and the money to slow down. I thought that maybe Louis Roulet would provide both.

In the back of the Lincoln I first called Raul Levin, my investigator, to put him on alert about the potential meeting with Roulet. I asked him to do a preliminary run on the case to see what he could find out. Levin had retired early from the LAPD and still had contacts and friends who did him favors from time to time. He probably had his own Christmas list. I told him not to spend a lot of time on it until I was sure I had Roulet locked down as a paying client. It didn’t matter what C. C. Dobbs had said to me face-to-face in the courthouse hallway. I wouldn’t believe I had the case until I got the first payment.

Next I checked on the status of a few cases and then called Lorna Taylor again. I knew the mail was delivered at her place most days right before noon. But she told me nothing of importance had come in. No checks and no correspondence I had to pay immediate attention to from the courts.

“Did you check on Gloria Dayton’s arraignment?” I asked her.

“Yes. It looks like they might hold her over until tomorrow on a medical.”

I groaned. The state has forty-eight hours to charge an individual after arrest and bring them before a judge. Holding Gloria Dayton’s first appearance over until the next day because of medical reasons meant that she was probably drug sick. This would help explain why she had been holding cocaine when she was arrested. I had not seen or spoken to her in at least seven months. Her slide must have been quick and steep. The thin line between controlling the drugs and the drugs controlling her had been crossed.

“Did you find out who filed it?” I asked.

“Leslie Faire,” she said.

I groaned again.

“That’s just great. Okay, well, I’m going to go down and see what I can do. I’ve got nothing going until I hear about Roulet.”

Leslie Faire was a misnamed prosecutor whose idea of giving a defendant a break or the benefit of the doubt was to offer extended parole supervision on top of prison time.

“Mick, when are you going to learn with this woman?” Lorna said about Gloria Dayton.

“Learn what?” I asked, although I knew exactly what Lorna would say.

“She drags you down every time you have to deal with her. She’s never going to get out of the life, and now you can bet she’s never going to be anything less than a twofer every time she calls. That would be fine, except you never charge her.”

What she meant by twofer was that Gloria Dayton’s cases would from now on be more complicated and time-consuming because it was likely that drug charges would always accompany solicitation or prostitution charges. What bothered Lorna was that this meant more work for me but no more income in the process.

“Well, the bar requires that all lawyers practice some pro bono work, Lorna. You know -”

“You don’t listen to me, Mick,” she said dismissively. “That’s exactly why we couldn’t stay married.”

I closed my eyes. What a day. I had managed to get both my ex-wives angry with me.

“What does this woman have on you?” she asked. “Why don’t you charge even a basic fee with her?”

“Look, she doesn’t have anything on me, okay?” I said. “Can we sort of change the subject now?”

I didn’t tell her that years earlier when I had looked through the dusty old account books from my father’s law practice, I had found that he’d had a soft spot for the so-called women of the night. He defended many and charged few. Maybe I was just continuing a family tradition.

“Fine,” Lorna said. “How did it go with Roulet?”

“You mean, did I get the job? I think so. Val’s probably getting him out right now. We’ll set up a meeting after that. I already asked Raul to sniff around on it.”

“Did you get a check?”

“Not yet.”

“Get the check, Mick.”

“I’m working on it.”

“How’s the case look?”

“I’ve only seen the pictures but it looks bad. I’ll know more after I see what Raul comes up with.”

“And what about Roulet?”

I knew what she was asking. How was he as a client? Would a jury, if it came to a jury, like him or despise him? Cases could be won or lost based on jurors’ impressions of the defendant.

“He looks like a babe in the woods.”

“He’s a virgin?”

“Never been inside the iron house.”

“Well, did he do it?”

She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn’t matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant “did it” or not. What mattered was the evidence against him-the proof-and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

But the question of did he or didn’t he always seemed to matter to her.

“Who knows, Lorna? That’s not the question. The question is whether or not he’s a paying customer. The answer is, I think so.”

“Well, let me know if you need any-oh, there’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“Sticks called and said he owes you four hundred dollars next time he sees you.”

“Yeah, he does.”

“You’re doing pretty good today.”

“I’m not complaining.”

We said our good-byes on a friendly note, the dispute over Gloria Dayton seemingly forgotten for the moment. Probably the security that comes with knowing money is coming in and a high-paying client is on the hook made Lorna feel a bit better about my working some cases for free. I wondered, though, if she’d have minded so much if I was defending a drug dealer for free instead of a prostitute. Lorna and I had shared a short and sweet marriage, with both of us quickly finding out that we had moved too quickly while rebounding from divorces. We ended it, remained friends, and she continued to work with me, not for me. The only time I felt uncomfortable about the arrangement was when she acted like a wife again and second-guessed my choice of client and who and what I charged or didn’t charge.

Feeling confident in the way I had handled Lorna, I called the DA’s office in Van Nuys next. I asked for Margaret McPherson and caught her eating at her desk.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about this morning. I know you wanted the case.”

“Well, you probably need it more than me. He must be a paying customer if he’s got C. C. Dobbs carrying the roll behind him.”

By that she was referring to a roll of toilet paper. High-priced family lawyers were usually seen by prosecutors as nothing more than ass wipers for the rich and famous.

“Yeah, I could use one like him-the paying client, not the wiper. It’s been a while since I had a franchise.”