The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [41]
“Headache over.”
“Exactly. Only it didn’t work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown walks into the clerk’s office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?”
“Not personally. I know of her.”
“So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she’s black, she’s a woman and she’s popular in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better.”
“Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?”
“That’s what I’m getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in—though it was kind of curious why she’d want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures with her practice.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk’s office and withdraws from the ballot.”
Levin nodded.
“So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat,” he said.
“You got it. Then unification comes in and they’ll never be able to get him out of there.”
Levin looked outraged.
“That’s bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that’s gotta be a violation of election laws.”
“Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie has always maintained that she wasn’t paid off or part of some plan Flynn cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn’t sustain her lifestyle on a judge’s pay. But I’ll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front of Flynn.”
“And they call it a justice system.”
“Yeah, they do.”
“So what do you think about Blake?”
It had to be brought up. It was all anybody else was talking about. Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn’t go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn’t get it. The question wasn’t whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.
“What do I think?” I said. “I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense—‘If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been?’ Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don’t hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it.”
“Spoken like a true defense attorney.”
“Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I’m jealous and I’m already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me.”
“I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I’ve got?”
I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn’t miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.
“I don’t have time to go anywhere,” I said. “We can go sit in my car and grab a coffee. You got your stuff with you?”
In answer Levin