Chapter Three #2
The defendant has the right to his choice of counsel.
If there is a conflict of interest between the defense lawyer and the prosecutor, then it is the prosecutor who must bow out.
I knew Maggie would hold me personally responsible for her losing the reins on what might be a big case but I couldn’t help that.
It had happened before. In my laptop I still had a motion to disqualify from the last case in which we had crossed paths.
If necessary, I would just have to change the name of the defendant and print it out.
I’d be good to go and she’d be as good as gone.
The two motorcycles had now moved in front of us. I turned and looked out the back window. There were three more Harleys behind us.
“You know what that means, though,” I said.
“No, what?”
“She’ll go for no bail. She always does with crimes against women.”
“Shit, can she get it? I’m looking at a nice chunk of change on this, man.”
“I don’t know. You said the guy’s got family and C. C. Dobbs. I can make something out of that. We’ll see.”
“Shit.”
Valenzuela was seeing his major payday disappear.
“I’ll see you there, Val.”
I closed the phone and looked over the seat at Earl.
“How long have we had the escort?” I asked.
“Just came up on us,” Earl said. “You want me to do something?”
“Let’s see what they—”
I didn’t have to wait until the end of my sentence.
One of the riders from the rear came up alongside the Lincoln and signaled us toward the upcoming exit for the Vasquez Rocks County Park.
I recognized him as Teddy Vogel, a former client and the highest-ranked Road Saint not incarcerated.
He might have been the largest Saint as well.
He went at least 350 pounds and he gave the impression of a fat kid riding his little brother’s bike.
“Pull off, Earl,” I said. “Let’s see what he’s got.”
We pulled into the parking lot next to the jagged rock formation named after an outlaw who had hid in them a century before.
I saw two people sitting and having a picnic on the edge of one of the highest ledges.
I didn’t think I would feel comfortable eating a sandwich in such a dangerous spot and position.
I lowered my window as Teddy Vogel approached on foot. The other four Saints had killed their engines but remained on their bikes. Vogel leaned down to the window and put one of his giant forearms on the sill. I could feel the car tilt down a few inches.
“Counselor, how’s it hanging?” he said.
“Just fine, Ted,” I said, not wanting to call him by his obvious gang sobriquet of Teddy Bear. “What’s up with you?”
“What happened to the ponytail?”
“Some people objected to it, so I cut it off.”
“A jury, huh? Must’ve been a collection of stiffs from up this way.”
“What’s up, Ted?”
“I got a call from Hard Case over there in the Lancaster pen. He said I might catch you heading south. Said you were stalling his case till you got some green. That right, Counselor?”
It was said as routine conversation. No threat in his voice or words.
And I didn’t feel threatened. Two years ago I got an abduction and aggravated assault case against Vogel knocked down to a disturbing the peace.
He ran a Saints-owned strip club on Sepulveda in Van Nuys.
His arrest came after he learned that one of his most productive dancers had quit and crossed the street to work at a competing club.
Vogel had crossed the street after her, grabbed her off the stage and carried her back to his club.
She was naked. A passing motorist called the police.
Knocking the case down was one of my better plays and Vogel knew this. He had a soft spot for me.
“He’s pretty much got it right,” I said. “I work for a living. If he wants me to work for him he’s gotta pay me.”
“We gave you five grand in December,” Vogel said.
“That’s long gone, Ted. More than half went to the expert who is going to blow the case up. The rest went to me and I already worked off those hours. If I’m going to take it to trial, then I need to refill the tank.”
“You want another five?”
“No, I need ten and I told Hard Case that last week. It’s a three-day trial and I’ll need to bring my expert in from Kodak in New York.
I’ve got his fee to cover and he wants first class in the air and the Chateau Marmont on the ground.
Thinks he’s going to be drinking at the bar with movie stars or something.
That place is four hundred a night just for the cheap rooms.”
“You’re killing me, Counselor. Whatever happened to that slogan you had in the yellow pages? ‘Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.’ You call ten grand reasonable?”
“I liked that slogan. It brought in a lot of clients. But the California bar wasn’t so pleased with it, made me get rid of it.
Ten is the price and it is reasonable, Ted.
If you can’t or don’t want to pay it, I’ll file the paperwork today.
I’ll drop out and he can go with a PD. I’ll turn everything I have over.
But the PD probably won’t have the budget to fly in the photo expert. ”
Vogel shifted his position on the window sill and the car shuddered under the weight.
“No, no, we want you. Hard Case is important to us, you know what I mean? I want him out and back to work.”
I watched him reach inside his vest with a hand that was so fleshy that the knuckles were indented. It came out with a thick envelope that he passed into the car to me.
“Is this cash?” I asked.
“That’s right. What’s wrong with cash?”
“Nothing. But I have to give you a receipt. It’s an IRS reporting requirement. This is the whole ten?”
“It’s all there.”
I took the top off of a cardboard file box I keep on the seat next to me.
My receipt book was behind the current case files.
I started writing out the receipt. Most lawyers who get disbarred go down because of financial violations.
The mishandling or misappropriation of client fees.
I kept meticulous records and receipts. I would never let the bar get to me that way.
“So you had it all along,” I said as I wrote. “What if I had backed down to five? What would you have done then?”
Vogel smiled. He was missing one of his front teeth on the bottom. Had to have been a fight at the club. He patted the other side of his vest.
“I got another envelope with five in it right here, Counselor,” he said. “I was ready for you.”
“Damn, now I feel bad, leaving you with money in your pocket.”
I tore out his copy of the receipt and handed it out the window.
“I receipted it to Casey. He’s the client.”
“Fine with me.”
He took the receipt and dropped his arm off the window sill as he stood up straight.
The car returned to a normal level. I wanted to ask him where the money came from, which of the Saints’ criminal enterprises had earned it, whether a hundred girls had danced a hundred hours for him to pay me, but that was a question I was better off not knowing the answer to.
I watched Vogel saunter back to his Harley and struggle to swing a trash can–thick leg over the seat.
For the first time I noticed the double shocks on the back wheel.
I told Earl to get back on the freeway and get going to Van Nuys, where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.
As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills.
It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey.
I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson.
I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal.
Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints.
His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.
“Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.
“What, Earl?”
“That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”
I shook my head.
“There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”
Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.
“I see,” he said, nodding again.
And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said.
That was my job. That was how it worked.
After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money.
I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.
There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore.
The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations.
The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.
I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty.
Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers.
They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies.
My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks.
To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them.
To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.
Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.
But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez.