case that involved one of my clients snitching off a drug dealer. He made some calls, helped ID the guy. I heard afterward that the guy was a Colombian and he was pretty well connected. He could have had friends who…”
I left it for them to fill in the blanks.
“I don’t know,” Lankford said. “This was pretty clean. Doesn’t look like a revenge deal. They didn’t cut his throat or take his tongue. One shot, plus they ransacked the office. What would the dealer’s people be looking for?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe my client’s name. The deal I made kept it out of circulation.”
Lankford nodded thoughtfully.
“What is the client’s name?”
“I can’t tell you. Attorney-client privilege.”
“Okay, here we go with that bullshit. How are we going to investigate this if we don’t even know your client’s name? Don’t you care about your friend in there on the floor with a piece of lead in his 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
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. “The killer could have dumped them here to confuse us. To hide what he was really looking for or taking. What about over here?”
We stepped over to the table to the right of the computer. This one was not in as much disarray. There was a calendar blotter on which it was clear Levin kept a running account of his hours and which attorney he was working for at the time. I scanned the blocks and saw my name numerous times going back five weeks. It was as they had told me, he had practically been working full-time for me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to look for. I don’t see anything that could help.”
“Well, most attorneys aren’t that helpful,” Lankford said from behind me.
I didn’t bother to turn around to defend myself. He was by the body and I didn’t want to see what he was doing. I reached out to turn the Rolodex that was on the table just so I could look through the names on the cards.
“Don’t touch that!” Sobel said instantly.
I jerked my hand back.
“Sorry. I was just going to look through the names. I don’t…”
I didn’t finish. I was at sea here. I wanted to leave and get something to drink. I felt like the Dodger dog that had tasted so good back at the stadium was about to come up.
“Hey, check it out,” Lankford said.
I turned with Sobel and saw that the medical examiner’s people were slowly turning Levin’s body over. Blood had stained the front of the Dodgers shirt he was wearing. But Lankford was pointing to the dead man’s hands, which had not been visible beneath the body before. The two middle fingers of his left hand were folded down against the palm while the two outside fingers were fully extended.
“Was this guy a Texas Longhorns fan or what?” Lankford asked.
Nobody laughed.
“What do you think?” Sobel said to me.
I stared down at my friend’s last gesture and just shook my head.
“Oh, I got it,” Lankford said. “It’s like a signal. A code. He’s telling us that the devil did it.”
I thought of Raul calling Roulet the devil, of having the proof that he was evil. And I knew what my friend’s last message to me meant. As he died on the floor of his office, he tried to tell me. Tried to warn me.
