The Lincoln Lawyer

“Or what?”

He still didn’t finish the thought.

“Take seconds on?”

He nodded.

“Okay, so who’d you talk to at the Lamplighter? Where is that, by the way?”

It was the only place so far I was unfamiliar with.

“It’s on Ventura near White Oak. I didn’t really talk to anybody. It was crowded but there really wasn’t anybody I was interested in there.”

“The bartenders know you there?”

“No, not really. I don’t go there all that much.”

“You usually get lucky before you hit the third option?”

“Nah, I usually just give up after two.”

I nodded just to buy a little time to think about what else to ask before we got to what happened at the victim’s house.

“How long were you at the Lamplighter?”

“About an hour, I’d say. Maybe a little less.”

“At the bar? How many drinks?”

“Yeah, two drinks at the bar.”

“How many drinks in all did you have last night before getting to Reggie Campo’s apartment?”

“Um, four at the most. Over two, two and a half, hours. I left one drink untouched at Morgan’s.”

“What were you drinking?”

“Martinis. Gray Goose.”

“Did you pay for any of these drinks in any of these places with a credit card?” Levin asked, offering his first question of the interview.

“No,” Roulet said. “When I go out, I pay cash.”

I looked at Levin and waited to see if he had anything else to ask. He knew more about the case than I did at this moment. I wanted to give him free rein to ask what he wanted. He looked at me and nodded. He was good to go.

“Okay,” I said. “What time was it when you got to Reggie’s place?”

“It was twelve minutes to ten. I looked at my watch. I wanted to make sure I didn’t knock on her door early.”

“So what did you do?”

“I waited in the parking lot. She said ten so I waited till ten.”

“Did you see the guy she left Morgan’s with come out?”

“Yeah, I saw him. He came out and left, then I went up.”

“What kind of car was he driving?” Levin asked.

“A yellow Corvette,” Roulet said. “It was a nineties version. I don’t know the exact year.”

Levin nodded. He was finished. I knew he was just trying to get a line on the man who had been in Campo’s apartment before Roulet. I took the questioning back.

“So he leaves and you go in. What happens?”

“I go in the building and her place is on the second floor. I go up and knock and she answers and I walk in.”

“Hold on a second. I don’t want the shorthand. You went up? How? Stairs, elevator, what? Give us the details.”

“Elevator.”

“Anybody else on it? Anybody see you?”

Roulet shook his head. I signaled him to continue.

“She opened the door a crack, saw it was me and told me to come in. There was a hallway by the front door so it was kind of a tight space. I walked by her so she could close the door. That’s how come she was behind me. And so I didn’t see it coming. She had something. She hit me with something and I went down. It got black real fast.”

I was silent while I thought about this, tried to picture it in my mind.

“So before a single thing happened, she just knocked you out? She didn’t say anything, yell anything, just sort of came up behind and bang.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, then what? What do you remember next?”

“It’s still pretty foggy. I remember waking up and these two guys are sitting on me. Holding me down. And then the police came. And the paramedics. I was sitting up against the wall and my hands were cuffed and the paramedic put that ammonia or something under my nose and that’s when I really came out of it.”

“You were still in the apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“Where was Reggie Campo?”

“She was sitting on the couch and another paramedic was working on her face and she was crying and telling the other cop that I had attacked her. All these lies. That I had surprised her at the door and punched her, that I said I was going to rape her and then kill her, all these things I didn’t do. And I moved my arms so I could look down at my hands behind my back. I saw they had my hand in like a plastic bag and I could see blood on my hand, and that’s when I knew the whole thing was a setup.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She put blood on my hand to make it look like I did it. But it was my left hand. I’m not left-handed. If I was going to punch somebody, I’d use my right hand.”

He made a punching gesture with his right hand to illustrate this for me in case I didn’t get it. I got up from my spot and paced over to the window. It now seemed like I was higher than the sun. I was looking down at the sunset. I felt uneasy about Roulet’s story. It seemed so far-fetched that it might actually be true. And that bothered me. I was always worried that I might not recognize innocence. The possibility of it in my job was so rare that I operated with the fear that I wouldn’t be ready for it when it came. That I would miss it.

“Okay, let’s talk about this for a second,” I said, still facing the sun. “You’re saying that she puts blood on your hand to set you up. And she puts it on your left. But if she was going to set you up, wouldn’t she put the blood on your right, since the vast majority of people out there are right-handed? Wouldn’t she go with the numbers?”

I turned back to the table and got blank stares from everyone.

“You said she opened the door a crack and then let you in,” I said. “Could you see her face?”

“Not all of it.”

“What could you see?”

“Her eye. Her left eye.”

“So did you ever see the right side of her face? Like when you walked in.”

“No, she was behind the door.”

“That’s it!” Levin said excitedly. “She already had the injuries when he got there. She hid it from him, then he steps in and she clocks him. All the injuries were to the right side of her face and that dictated that she put the blood on his left hand.”

I nodded as I thought about the logic of this. It seemed to make sense.

“Okay,” I said, turning back to the window and continuing to pace. “I think that’ll work. Now, Louis, you’ve told us you had seen this woman around the bar scene before but had never been with her. So, she was a stranger. Why would she do this, Louis? Why would she set you up like you say she did?”

“Money.”

But it wasn’t Roulet who answered. It had been Dobbs. I turned from the window and looked at him. He knew he had spoken out of turn but didn’t seem to care.

“It’s obvious,” Dobbs said. “She wants money from him, from the family. The civil suit is probably being filed as we speak. The criminal charges are just the prelude to the suit, the demand for money. That’s what she’s really after.”

I sat back down and looked at Levin, exchanging eye contact.