The Lincoln Lawyer - Michael Connelly [52]
“The harm is in lying to me,” I said. “You can lie to your mother, to Dobbs, to your priest and to the police. But when I ask you something directly, do not lie to me. I need to operate from the standpoint of having facts from you. Incontrovertible facts. So when I ask you a question, tell me the truth. All the rest of the time you can say what you want and whatever makes you feel good.”
“Okay, okay.”
“If you weren’t in law school, where were you?”
Roulet shook his head.
“Nowhere. I just didn’t do anything for a year. Most of the time I stayed in my apartment near campus and read and thought about what I really wanted to do with my life. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. No offense intended.”
“None taken. So you sat there for a year and came up with selling real estate to rich people.”
“No, that came later.”
He laughed in a self-deprecating way.
“I actually decided to become a writer—I had majored in English lit—and I tried to write a novel. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I couldn’t do it. I eventually went to work for Mother. She wanted me to.”
I calmed down. Most of my anger had been a show, anyway. I was trying to soften him up for the more important questioning. I thought he was now ready for it.
“Well, now that you are coming clean and confessing everything, Louis, tell me about Reggie Campo.”
“What about her?”
“You were going to pay her for sex, weren’t you?”
“What makes you say—”
I shut him up when I stopped again and grabbed him by one of his expensive lapels. He was taller than me and bigger, but I had the power in this conversation. I was pushing him.
“Answer the fucking question.”
“All right, yes, I was going to pay. But how did you know that?”
“Because I’m a good goddamn lawyer. Why didn’t you tell me this on that first day? Don’t you see how that changes the case?”
“My mother. I didn’t want my mother to know I… you know.”
“Louis, let’s sit down.”
I walked him over to one of the long benches by the police station. There was a lot of space and no one could overhear us. I sat in the middle of the bench and he sat to my right.
“Your mother wasn’t even in the room when we were talking about the case. I don’t even think she was in there when we talked about law school.”
“But Cecil was and he tells her everything.”
I nodded and made a mental note to cut Cecil Dobbs completely out of the loop on case matters from now on.
“Okay, I think I understand. But how long were you going to let it go without telling me? Don’t you see how this changes everything?”
“I’m not a lawyer.”
“Louis, let me tell you a little bit about how this works. You know what I am? I’m a neutralizer. My job is to neutralize the state’s case. Take each piece of evidence or proof and find a way to eliminate it from contention. Think of it like one of those street entertainers you see on the Venice boardwalk. You ever gone down there and seen the guy spinning all those plates on those little sticks?”
“I think so. I haven’t been down there in a long time.”
“Doesn’t matter. The guy has these thin little sticks and he puts a plate on each one and starts spinning the plate so it will stay balanced and upright. He gets a lot of them going at once and he moves from plate to plate and stick to stick making sure everything is spinning and balanced and staying up. You with me?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Well, that’s the state’s case, Louis. A bunch of spinning plates. And every one of those plates is an individual piece of evidence against you. My job is to take each plate, stop it from spinning and knock it to the ground so hard that it shatters and can’t be used anymore. If the blue plate contains the victim’s blood on your hands, then I need to find a way to knock it down. If the yellow plate has a knife with your bloody fingerprints on it, then once again I need to knock that sucker down. Neutralize it. You follow?”
“Yes, I follow. I—”
“Now, in the middle of this field of plates