The Lincoln Lawyer

“Let’s do the bedroom next,” Lankford said, ignoring my protest.

I backed up into the hallway to give them space to come out of one room and go into the next. They walked down the sides of the bed to where twin night tables waited. Lankford opened the top drawer of his table and lifted out a CD.

“Wreckrium for Lil’ Demon,” he read. “You have to be fucking kidding me.”

I didn’t respond. Sobel quickly opened the two drawers of her table and found them empty except for a strip of condoms. I looked the other way.

“I’ll take the closet,” Lankford said after he had finished with his night table-leaving the drawers open in typical police search fashion. He walked into the closet and soon spoke from inside it.

“Here we go.”

He stepped back out of the closet holding the wooden gun box.

“Bingo,” I said. “You found an empty gun box. You must be a detective.”

Lankford shook the box in his hands before putting it down on the bed. Either he was trying to play with me or the box had a solid heft to it. I felt a little charge go down the back of my neck as I realized that Roulet could have just as easily snuck back into my house to return the gun. It would have been the perfect hiding place for it. The last place I might think to check again once I had determined that the gun was gone. I remembered the odd smile on Roulet’s face when I had told him I wanted my gun back. Was he smiling because I already had the gun back?

Lankford flipped the box’s latch and lifted the top. He pulled back the oilcloth covering. The cork cutout which once held Mickey Cohen’s gun was still empty. I breathed out so heavily it almost came out as a sigh.

“What did I tell you?” I said quickly, trying to cover up.

“Yeah, what did you tell us,” Lankford said. “Heidi, you got a bag? We’re going to take the box.”

I looked at Sobel. She didn’t look like a Heidi to me. I wondered if it was some sort of a squad room nickname. Or maybe it was the reason she didn’t put her first name on her business card. It didn’t sound homicide tough.

“In the car,” she said.

“Go get it,” Lankford said.

“You are going to take an empty gun box?” I asked. “What good does it do you?”

“All part of the chain of evidence, Counselor. You should know that. Besides, it will come in handy, since I have a feeling we’ll never find the gun.”

I shook my head.

“Maybe handy in your dreams. The box is evidence of nothing.”

“It’s evidence that you had Mickey Cohen’s gun. Says it right on this little brass plaque your daddy or somebody had made.”

“So fucking what?”

“Well, I just made a call while I was out on your front porch, Haller. See, we had somebody checking on Mickey Cohen’s self-defense case. Turns out that over there in LAPD’s evidence archive they still have all the ballistic evidence from that case. That’s a lucky break for us, the case being, what, fifty years old?”

I understood immediately. They would take the bullet slugs and casings from the Cohen case and compare them with the same evidence recovered in the Levin case. They would match the Levin murder to Mickey Cohen’s gun which they would then tie to me with the gun box and the state’s AFS computer. I doubted Roulet could have realized how the police would be able to make a case without even having the gun when he thought out his scheme to control me.

I stood there silently. Sobel left the room without a glance at me and Lankford looked up from the box at me with a killer smile.

“What’s the matter, Counselor?” he asked. “Evidence got your tongue?”

I finally was able to speak.

“How long will ballistics take?” I managed to ask.

“Hey, for you, we’re going to put a rush on it. So get out there and enjoy yourself while you can. But don’t leave town.”

He laughed, almost giddy with himself.

“Man, I thought they only said that in movies. But there, I just said it! I wish my partner had been here.”

Sobel came back in with a large brown bag and a roll of red evidence tape. I watched her put the gun box into the bag and then seal it with the tape. I wondered how much time I had and if the wheels had just come off of everything I had put into motion. I started to feel as empty as the wooden box Sobel had just sealed inside the brown paper bag.

THIRTY-TWO

Fernando Valenzuela lived out in Valencia. From my home it was easily an hour’s drive north in the last remnants of rush-hour traffic. Valenzuela had moved out of Van Nuys a few years earlier because his three daughters were nearing high school age and he feared for their safety and education. He moved into a neighborhood filled with people who had also fled from the city and his commute went from five minutes to forty- five. But he was happy. His house was nicer and his children safer. He lived in a Spanish-style house with a red tile roof in a planned community full of Spanish-style houses with red tile roofs. It was more than a bail bondsman could ever dream of having, but it came with a stiff monthly price tag.

It was almost nine by the time I got there. I pulled up to the garage, which had been left open. One space was taken by a minivan and the other by a pickup. On the floor between the pickup and a fully equipped tool bench was a large cardboard box that said SONY on it. It was long and thin. I looked closer and saw it was a box for a fifty-inch plasma TV. I got out and went to the front door and knocked. Valenzuela answered after a long wait.

“Mick, what are you doing up here?”

“Do you know your garage door is open?”

“Holy shit! I just had a plasma delivered.”

He pushed by me and ran across the yard to look into the garage. I closed his front door and followed him to the garage. When I got there he was standing next to his TV, smiling.

“Oh, man, you know that would’ve never happened in Van Nuys,” he said. “That sucker woulda been long gone. Come on, we’ll go in through here.”

He headed toward a door that would take us from the garage into the house. He hit a switch that made the garage door start to roll down.

“Hey, Val, wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s just talk out here. It’s more private.”

“But Maria probably wants to say hello.”

“Maybe next time.”

He came back over to me, concern in his eyes.

“What’s up, Boss?”

“What’s up is I spent some time today with the cops working on Raul’s murder. They said they cleared Roulet on it because of the ankle bracelet.”

Valenzuela nodded vigorously.

“Yeah, yeah, they came to see me a few days after it happened. I showed them the system and how it works and I pulled up Roulet’s track for that day. They saw he was at work. And I also showed them the other bracelet I got and explained how it couldn’t be tampered with. It’s got a mass detector. Bottom line is you can’t take it off. It would know and then I would know.”

I leaned back against the pickup and folded my arms.

“So did those two cops ask where you were on that Saturday?”

It hit Valenzuela like a punch.

“What did you say, Mick?”