The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [38]
“Ain’t that the truth.”
I thought about the idea of having an innocent client and the dangers involved.
“You know what my father said about innocent clients?”
“I thought your father died when you were like six years old.”
“Five, actually. They didn’t even take me to the funeral.”
“And he was talking to you about innocent clients when you were five?”
“No, I read it in a book long after he was gone. He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it’ll scar you for life.”
“He said it like that?”
“Words to that effect. He said there is no in-between with an innocent client. No negotiation, no plea bargaining, no middle ground. There’s only one verdict. You have to put an NG up on the scoreboard. There’s no other verdict but not guilty.”
Levin nodded thoughtfully.
“The bottom line was my old man was a damn good lawyer and he didn’t like having innocent clients,” I said. “I’m not sure I do, either.”
Ten
Thursday, March 17
The first ad I ever put in the yellow pages said “Any Case, Anytime, Anywhere” but I changed it after a few years. Not because the bar objected to it, but because I objected to it. I got more particular. Los Angeles County is a wrinkled blanket that covers four thousand square miles from the desert to the Pacific. There are more than ten million people fighting for space on the blanket and a considerable number of them engage in criminal activity as a lifestyle choice. The latest crime stats show almost a hundred thousand violent crimes are reported each year in the county. Last year there were 140,000 felony arrests and then another 50,000 high-end misdemeanor arrests for drug and sex offenses. Add in the DUIs and every year you could fill the Rose Bowl twice over with potential clients. The thing to remember is that you don’t want clients from the cheap seats. You want the ones sitting on the fifty-yard line. The ones with money in their pockets.
When the criminals get caught they get funneled into a justice system that has more than forty courthouses spread across the county like Burger Kings ready to serve them—as in serve them up on a plate. These stone fortresses are the watering holes where the legal lions come to hunt and to feed. And the smart hunter learns quickly where the most bountiful locations are, where the paying clients graze. The hunt can be deceptive. The client base of each courthouse does not necessarily reflect the socioeconomic structure of the surrounding environs. Courthouses in Compton, Downey and East Los Angeles have produced a steady line of paying clients for me. These clients are usually accused of being drug dealers but their money is just as green as a Beverly Hills stock swindler’s.
On the morning of the seventeenth I was in the Compton courthouse representing Darius McGinley at his sentencing. Repeat offenders mean repeat customers and McGinley was both, as many of my clients tend to be. For the sixth time since I had known him, he had been arrested and charged with dealing crack cocaine. This time it was in Nickerson Gardens, a housing project known by most of its residents as Nixon Gardens. No one I ever asked knew whether this was an abbreviation of the true name of the place or a name bestowed in honor of the president who held office when the vast apartment complex and drug market was built. McGinley was arrested after making a direct hand-to-hand sale of a balloon containing a dozen rocks to an undercover narcotics officer. At the time, he had been out on bail after being arrested for the exact same offense two months earlier. He also had four prior convictions for drug sales on his record.
Things didn’t look good for McGinley, who was only twenty-three years old. After he’d taken so many previous swings at the system, the system had now run out of patience with him. The hammer was coming down. Though McGinley had been coddled previously with sentences of probation and county jail time, the