The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [42]
“But what about your driver?”
“Don’t worry about him.”
“Then let’s do it.”
Eleven
After we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee.
“Ain’ no Starbuck ’round here,” Earl responded.
I knew Earl was from the area but I didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted coffee.
“Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don’t go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after.”
“You got it.”
“And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?”
Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver’s seat.
“Okay, what do you have for me?” I said. “I’m going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday.”
“I think I’ve got a few aces here,” Levin replied.
He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s begin with your client and then we’ll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets—which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying—I couldn’t find squat on him. He’s pretty much your standard citizen.”
“What’s with the tickets?”
“Twice in the last four years he’s let parking tickets—a lot of them—and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over.”
“I’m glad C.C.’s good for something. By ‘paying them off,’ I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges.”
“Let’s hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet.”
“What?”
“At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he’d had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn near everything. And most of the time it’s easy to do because everything’s on computer.”
“Right, I get it. So what about the law school, was that a lie?”
“Looks like it. I checked the registrar’s office and he’s never been enrolled in the law school at UCLA.”
I thought about this. It was Dobbs who had brought up UCLA law and Roulet had just nodded. It was a strange lie for either one of them to have told because it didn’t really get them anything. It made me think about the psychology behind it. Was it something to do with me? Did they want me to think of Roulet as being on the same level as me?
“So if he lied about something like that…,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Right,” Levin said. “I wanted you to know about it. But I gotta say, that’s it on the negative side for Mr. Roulet so far. He might’ve lied about law school but it looks like he didn’t lie about his story—at least the parts I could check out.”
“Tell me.”
“Well, his track that night checks out. I got wits in here who put him at Nat’s North, Morgan’s and then the Lamplighter, bing, bing, bing. He did just what he told us he did. Right down to the number of martinis. Four total and at least one of them he left on the bar unfinished.”
“They remember him that well? They remember that he didn’t even finish his drink?”
I am always suspicious of perfect memory because there is no such thing. And it is my job and my skill to find the faults in the memory of witnesses. Whenever someone remembers too much, I get nervous—especially if the witness is for the defense.
“No, I’m not just relying on a bartender’s memory. I’ve got something here that you are going to love, Mick. And you better