The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [127]
I went out into the hallway to talk to Mary Alice Windsor and work my cell phone. It looked like I would be putting on witnesses in the afternoon session.
I was first approached by Roulet, who wanted to talk about my cross-examination of Booker.
“It looked to me like it went really well for us,” he said.
“Us?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You can’t tell whether it’s gone well until you get the verdict. Now leave me alone, Louis. I have to make some calls. And where is your mother? I am probably going to need her this afternoon. Is she going to be here?”
“She had an appointment this morning but she’ll be here. Just call Cecil and he’ll bring her in.”
After he walked away Detective Booker took his place, walking up to me and pointing a finger in my face.
“It’s not going to fly, Haller,” he said.
“What’s not going to fly?” I asked.
“Your whole bullshit defense. You’re going to crash and burn.”
“We’ll see.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. You know, you have some balls trying to trash Talbot with this. Some balls. You must need a wheelbarrow to carry them around in.”
“I’m just doing my job, Detective.”
“And some job it is. Lying for a living. Tricking people from looking at the truth. Living in a world without truth. Let me ask you something. You know the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?”
“No, what’s the difference?”
“One’s a bottom-feeding, shit-eating scum sucker. The other’s a fish.”
“That’s a good one, Detective.”
He left me then and I stood there smiling. Not because of the joke or the understanding that Lankford had probably been the one to elevate the insult from defense attorneys to all of lawyerdom when he had retold the joke to Booker. I smiled because the joke was confirmation that Lankford and Booker were in communication. They were talking and it meant that things were moving and in play. My plan was still holding together. I still had a chance.
Thirty-four
Every trial has a main event. A witness or a piece of evidence that becomes the fulcrum upon which everything swings one way or the other. In this case the main event was billed as Regina Campo, victim and accuser, and the case would seem to rest upon her performance and testimony. But a good defense attorney always has an understudy and I had mine, a witness secretly waiting in the wings upon whom I hoped to shift the weight of the trial.
Nevertheless, when Minton called Regina Campo to the stand after the break, it was safe to say all eyes were on her as she was led in and walked to the witness box. It was the first time anyone in the jury had seen her in person. It was also the first time I had ever seen her. I was surprised, but not in a good way. She was diminutive and her hesitant walk and slight posture belied the picture of the scheming mercenary I had been building in the jury’s collective consciousness.
Minton was definitely learning as he was going. With Campo he seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that less was more. He economically led her through the testimony. He first started with personal background before moving on to the events of March 6.
Regina Campo’s story was sadly unoriginal and that was what Minton was counting on. She told the story of a young, attractive woman coming to Hollywood from Indiana a decade before with hopes of celluloid glory. There were starts and stops to a career, an appearance on a television show here and there. She was a fresh face and there were always men willing to put her in small meaningless parts. But when she was no longer a fresh face, she found work in a series of straight-to-cable films which often required her to appear nude. She supplemented her income with nude