"The Brass Verdict" - читать интересную книгу автора (Connelly Michael)

Eleven

Cisco and Lorna were still at work in Jerry Vincent’s office when I got back. I handed the court order for the bank over to Lorna and told her about the two early appointments I had set for the next day.

“I thought you put Patrick Henson into the dog pile,” Lorna said.

“I did. But now I moved him back.”

She put her eyebrows together the way she did whenever I confounded her – which was a lot. I didn’t want to explain things. Moving on, I asked if anything new had developed while I had gone to court.

“A couple things,” Lorna said. “First of all, the check from Walter Elliot cleared. If he heard about Jerry it’s too late to stop payment.”

“Good.”

“It gets better. I found the contracts file and took a look at Jerry’s deal with Elliot. That hundred thousand deposited Friday for trial was only a partial payment.”

She was right. It was getting better.

“How much?” I asked.

“According to the deal,” she said, “Vincent took two fifty up front. That was five months ago and it looks like that is all gone. But he was going to get another two fifty for the trial. Nonrefundable. The hundred was only the first part of that. The rest is due on the first day of testimony.”

I nodded with satisfaction. Vincent had made a great deal. I had never had a case with that kind of money involved. But I wondered how he had blown through the first $250,000 so quickly. Lorna would have to study the ins and outs of the accounts to get that answer.

“Okay, all of that’s real good – if we get Elliot. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. What else do we have?”

Lorna looked disappointed that I didn’t want to linger over the money and celebrate her discovery. She had lost sight of the fact that I still had to nail Elliot down. Technically, he was a free agent. I would get the first shot at him but I still had to secure him as a client before I could consider what it would be like to get a $250,000 trial fee.

Lorna answered my question in a monotone.

“We had a series of visitors while you were in court.”

“Who?”

“First, one of the investigators Jerry used came by after hearing the news. He took one look at Cisco and almost got into it with him. Then he got smart and backed down.”

“Who was it?”

“Bruce Carlin. Jerry hired him to work the Elliot case.”

I nodded. Bruce Carlin was a former LAPD bull who had crossed to the dark side and did defense work now. A lot of attorneys used him because of his insider’s knowledge of how things worked in the cop shop. I had used him on a case once and thought he was living off an undeserved reputation. I never hired him again.

“Call him back,” I said. “Set up a time for him to come back in.”

“Why, Mick? You’ve got Cisco.”

“I know I’ve got Cisco but Carlin was doing work on Elliot and I doubt it’s all in the files. You know how it is. If you keep it out of the file, you keep it out of discovery. So bring him in. Cisco can sit down with him and find out what he’s got. Pay him for his time – whatever his hourly rate is – and then cut him loose when he’s no longer useful. What else? Who else came in?”

“A real loser’s parade. Carney Andrews waltzed in, thinking she was going to just pick the Elliot case up off the pile and waltz back out with it. I sent her away empty-handed. I then looked through the P and Os in the operating account and saw she was hired five months ago as associate counsel on Elliot. A month later she was dropped.”

I nodded and understood. Vincent had been judge shopping for Elliot. Carney Andrews was an untalented attorney and weasel, but she was married to a superior court judge named Bryce Andrews. He had spent twenty-five years as a prosecutor before being appointed to the bench. In the view of most criminal defense attorneys who worked in the CCB, he had never left the DA’s office. He was believed to be one of the toughest judges in the building, one who at times acted in concert with, if not as a direct arm of, the prosecutor’s office. This created a cottage industry in which his wife made a very comfortable living by being hired as co-counsel on cases in her husband’s court, thereby creating a conflict of interest that would require the reassignment of the cases to other, hopefully more lenient, judges.

It worked like a charm and the best part was that Carney Andrews never really had to practice law. She just had to sign on to a case, make an appearance as co-counsel in court and then wait until it was reassigned from her husband’s calendar. She could then collect a substantial fee and move on to the next case.

I didn’t have to even look into the Elliot file to see what had happened. I knew. Case assignments were generated by random selection in the chief judge’s office. The Elliot case had obviously been initially assigned to Bryce Andrews’s court and Vincent didn’t like his chances there. For starters, Andrews would never allow bail on a double-murder case, let alone the hard line he would take against the defendant when it got to trial. So Vincent hired the judge’s wife as co-counsel and the problem went away. The case was then randomly reassigned to Judge James P. Stanton, whose reputation was completely the opposite of Andrews’s. The bottom line was that whatever Vincent had paid Carney, it had been worth it.

“Did you check?” I asked Lorna. “How much did he pay her?”

“She took ten percent of the initial advance.”

I whistled. Twenty-five thousand dollars for nothing. That at least explained where some of the first quarter million went.

“Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

“But then you’d have to sleep at night with Bryce Andrews,” Lorna said. “I’m not sure that would be worth it.”

Cisco laughed. I didn’t but Lorna did have a point. Bryce Andrews had at least twenty years and almost two hundred pounds on his wife. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

“That it on the visitors?” I asked.

“No,” Lorna said. “We also had a couple of clients drop by to ask for their files after they heard on the radio about Jerry’s death.”

“And?”

“We stalled them. I told them that only you could turn over a file and that you would get back to them within twenty-four hours. It looked like they wanted to argue about it but with Cisco here they decided it would be better to wait.”

She smiled at Cisco and the big man bowed as if to say “at your service.”

Lorna handed me a slip of paper.

“Those are the names. There’s contact info, too.”

I looked at the names. One was in the dog pile, so I would be happily turning the file over. The other was a public indecency case that I thought I could do something with. The woman was charged when a sheriff’s deputy ordered her out of the water on a Malibu beach. She was swimming nude but this was not apparent until the deputy ordered her out of the water. Because the charge was a misdemeanor, the deputy had to witness the crime to make an arrest. But by ordering her out of the water, he created the crime he arrested her for. That wouldn’t fly in court. It was a case I knew I could get dismissed.

“I’ll go see these two tonight,” I said. “In fact, I want to hit the road with all of the cases soon. Starting with a stop at Archway Pictures. I’m going to take Cisco with me, and Lorna, I want you to gather up whatever you need from here and head on home. I don’t want you being here by yourself.”

She nodded but then said, “Are you sure Cisco should go with you?”

I was surprised she had asked the question in front of him. She was referring to his size and appearance – the tattoos, the earring, the boots, leather vest and so on – the overall menace his appearance projected. Her concern was that he might scare away more clients than he would help lock down.

“Yeah,” I said. “He should go. When I want to be subtle he can just wait in the car. Besides I want him driving so I can look at the files.”

I looked at Cisco. He nodded and seemed fine with the arrangement. He might look foolish in his bike vest behind the wheel of a Lincoln but he wasn’t complaining yet.

“Speaking of the files,” I said. “We have nothing in federal court, right?”

Lorna shook her head.

“Not that I know of.”

I nodded. It confirmed what I had indicated to Bosch and made me more curious about why he had asked about federal cases. I was beginning to get an idea about it and planned to bring it up when I saw him the next morning.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s time for me to be a Lincoln lawyer again. Let’s hit the road.”