The Lincoln Lawyer

Renteria home, as suggested by the news reports, but had been an invited guest to her apartment. He explained that earlier in the day he had won eleven hundred dollars on the California lotto and had been willing to trade some of it to Renteria for some of her attention. He said that at her apartment they had engaged in consensual sex- although he did not use those words-and that when he left she was alive and five hundred dollars in cash richer.

The holes Kurlen and Crafton punched in Menendez’s story were many. First of all, there had been no state lotto on the day of or day before the murder and the neighborhood mini-market where he said he had cashed his winning ticket had no record of paying out an eleven-hundred-dollar win to Menendez or anyone else. Additionally, no more than eighty dollars in cash was found in the victim’s apartment. And lastly, the autopsy report indicated that bruising and other damage to the interior of the victim’s vagina precluded what could be considered consensual sexual relations. The medical examiner concluded that she had been brutally raped.

No fingerprints other than the victim’s were found in the apartment. The place had been wiped clean. No semen was found in the victim’s body, indicating her rapist had used a condom or had not ejaculated during the assault. But in the bathroom off the bedroom where the attack and murder had taken place, a crime scene investigator using a black light found a small amount of semen on a pink towel hanging on a rack near the toilet. The theory that came into play was that after the rape and murder the killer had stepped into the bathroom, removed the condom and flushed it down the toilet. He had then wiped his penis with the nearby towel and then hung the towel back on the rack. When cleaning up after the crime and wiping surfaces he might have touched, he forgot about that towel.

The investigators kept the discovery of the DNA deposit and their attendant theory secret. It never made it into the media. It would become Kurlen and Crafton’s hole card.

Based on Menendez’s lies and the admission that he had been in the victim’s apartment, he was arrested on suspicion of murder and held without bail. Detectives got a search warrant, and oral swabs were collected from Menendez and sent to the lab for DNA typing and comparison to the DNA recovered from the bathroom towel.

That was about when I entered the case. As they say in my profession, by then the Titanic had already left the dock. The iceberg was out there waiting. Menendez had badly hurt himself by talking-and lying-to the detectives. Still, unaware of the DNA comparison that was under way, I saw a glimmer of light for Jesus Menendez. There was a case to be made for neutralizing his interview with detectives-which, by the way, became a full-blown confession by the time it got reported by the media. Menendez was Mexican born and had come to this country at age eight. His family spoke only Spanish at home and he had attended a school for Spanish speakers until dropping out at age fourteen. He spoke only rudimentary English, and his cognition level of the language seemed to me to be even lower than his speaking level. Kurlen and Crafton made no effort to bring in a translator and, according to the taped interview, not once asked if Menendez even wanted one.

This was the crack I would work my way into. The interview was the foundation of the case against Menendez. It was the spinning platter. If I could knock it down most of the other plates would come down with it. My plan was to attack the interview as a violation of Menendez’s rights because he could not have understood the Miranda warning he had been read by Kurlen or the document listing these rights in English that he had signed at the detective’s request.

This is where the case stood until two weeks after Menendez’s arrest when the lab results came back matching his DNA to that found on the towel in the victim’s bathroom. After that the prosecution didn’t need the interview or his admissions. The DNA put Menendez directly on the scene of a brutal rape and murder. I could try an O.J. defense-attack the credibility of the DNA match. But prosecutors and lab techs had learned so much from that debacle and in the years since that I knew I was unlikely of prevailing with a jury. The DNA was the iceberg and the momentum of the ship made it impossible to steer around it in time.

The district attorney himself revealed the DNA findings at a press conference and announced that his office would seek the death penalty for Menendez. He added that detectives had also located three eyewitnesses who had seen Menendez throw a knife into the Los Angeles River. The DA said the river was searched for the weapon but it was not recovered. Regardless, he characterized the witness accounts as solid-they were Menendez’s three roommates.

Based on the prosecution’s case coming together and the threat of the death penalty, I decided the O.J. defense would be too risky. Using Fernando Menendez as my translator, I went to the Van Nuys jail and told Jesus that his only hope was for a deal the DA had floated by me. If Menendez would plead guilty to murder I could get him a life sentence with the possibility of parole. I told him he’d be out in fifteen years. I told him it was the only way.

It was a tearful discussion. Both brothers cried and beseeched me to find another way. Jesus insisted that he did not kill Martha Renteria. He said he had lied to the detectives to protect Fernando, who had given him the money after a good month selling tar heroin. Jesus thought that revealing his brother’s generosity would lead to another investigation of Fernando and his possible arrest.

The brothers urged me to investigate the case. Jesus told me Renteria had had other suitors that night in The Cobra Room. The reason he had paid her so much money was because she had played him off another bidder for her services.

Lastly, Jesus told me it was true that he had thrown a knife into the river but it was because he was afraid. It wasn’t the murder weapon. It was just a knife he used on day jobs he picked up in Pacoima. It looked like the knife they were describing on the Spanish channel and he got rid of it before going to the police to straighten things out.

I listened and then told them that none of their explanations mattered. The only thing that mattered was the DNA. Jesus had a choice. He could take the fifteen years or go to trial and risk getting the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole. I reminded Jesus that he was a young man. He could be out by age forty. He could still have a life.

By the time I left the jailhouse meeting, I had Jesus Menendez’s consent to make the deal. I only saw him one more time after that. At his plea-and-sentencing hearing when I stood next to him in front of the judge and coached him through the guilty plea. He was shipped off to Pelican Bay initially and then down to San Quentin after that. I had heard through the courthouse grapevine that his brother had gotten himself popped again-this time for using heroin. But he didn’t call me. He went with a different lawyer and I didn’t have to wonder why.

On the warehouse floor I opened the report on the autopsy of Martha Renteria. I was looking for two specific things that had probably not been looked at very closely by anyone else before. The case was closed. It was a dead file. Nobody cared anymore.

The first was the part of the report that dealt with the fifty-three stab wounds Renteria suffered during the attack on her bed. Under the heading “Wound Profile” the unknown weapon was described as a blade no longer than five inches and no wider than an inch. Its thickness was placed at one-eighth of an inch. Also noted in the report was the occurrence of jagged skin tears at the top of the victim’s wounds, indicating that the top of the blade had an uneven line, to wit, it was designed as a weapon that would inflict damage going in as well as coming out. The shortness of the blade suggested that the weapon might be a folding knife.

There was a crude drawing in the report that depicted the outline of the blade without a handle. It looked familiar to me. I pulled my briefcase across the floor from where I had put it down and opened it up. From the state’s discovery file I pulled the photo of the open folding knife with Louis Roulet’s initials etched on the blade. I compared the blade to the outline drawn on the page in the autopsy report. It wasn’t an exact match but it was damn close.

I then pulled out the recovered weapon analysis report and read the same paragraph I had read during the meeting in Roulet’s office the day before. The knife was described as a custom-made Black Ninja folding knife with a blade measuring five inches long, one inch wide and one-eighth of an inch thick-the same measurements belonging to the unknown knife used to kill Martha Renteria. The knife Jesus Menendez supposedly threw into the L.A. River.

I knew that a five-inch blade wasn’t unique. Nothing was conclusive but my instincts told me I was moving toward something. I tried not to let the burn that was building in my chest and throat distract me. I tried to stay on point. I moved on. I needed to check for a specific wound but I didn’t want to look at the photos contained in the back of the report, the photos that coldly documented the horribly violated body of Martha Renteria. Instead I went to the page that had two side-by-side generic body profiles, one for the front and one for the back. On these the