The Brass Verdict (20 page)

I smiled. Lorna was the best case manager in the business.

“Great. What else?”

“Then at eleven you have an in-chambers with Judge Stanton on Elliot.”

“Status conference?”

“Yes. He wants to know if you are going to be able to go next Thursday.”

“No, but Elliot won’t have it any other way.”

“Well, the judge will get to hear Elliot say that for himself. He’s requiring the defendant’s presence.”

That was unusual. Most status conferences were routine and quick. The fact that Stanton wanted Elliot there bumped this one up into a more important realm.

I thought of something and pulled out my cell phone.

“Did you let Elliot know? He might—”

“Put it away. He knows and he’ll be there. I talked to his assistant — Mrs. Albrecht — this morning and she knows he has to show and that the judge can revoke if he doesn’t.”

I nodded. It was a smart move. Threaten Elliot’s freedom as a means of making sure he shows up.

“Good,” I said. “That it?”

I wanted to get to Cisco to ask what else he had been able to find out about the Vincent investigation and whether his sources had mentioned anything about the man in the surveillance photo Bosch had shown me.

“Not by a long shot, my friend,” Lorna responded. “Now we get to the mystery case.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“We got a call yesterday afternoon from Judge Friedman’s clerk, who called Vincent’s office blind to see if there was anyone there taking over the cases. When the clerk was informed that you were taking over, she asked if you were aware of the hearing scheduled before Friedman today at two. I checked our new calendar and you didn’t have a two o’clock on there for today. So there is the mystery. You have a hearing at two for a case we not only don’t have on calendar but don’t have a file for either.”

“What’s the client’s name?”

“Eli Wyms.”

It meant nothing to me.

“Did Wren know the name?”

Lorna shook her head in a dismissive way.

“Did you check the dead cases? Maybe it was just misfiled.”

“No, we checked. There is no file anywhere in the office.”

“And what’s the hearing? Did you ask the clerk?”

Lorna nodded.

“Pretrial motions. Wyms is charged with attempted murder of a peace officer and several other weapons-related charges. He was arrested May second at a county park in Calabasas. He was arraigned, bound over and sent out to Camarillo for ninety days. He must’ve been found competent because the hearing today is to set a trial date and consider bail.”

I nodded. From the shorthand, I could read between the lines. Wyms had gotten into some sort of confrontation involving weapons with the Sheriff’s Department, which provided law enforcement services in the unincorporated area known as Calabasas. He was sent to the state’s mental evaluation center in Camarillo, where the shrinks took three months deciding whether he was a crazy man or competent to stand trial on the charges against him. The docs determined he was competent, meaning he knew right from wrong when he tried to kill a peace officer, most likely the sheriff’s deputy who confronted him.

It was a bare-bones sketch of the trouble Eli Wyms was in. There would be more detail in the file but we had no file.

“Is there any reference to Wyms in the trust account deposits?” I asked.

Lorna shook her head. I should’ve assumed she would be thorough and check the bank accounts in search of Eli Wyms.

“Okay, so it looks like maybe Jerry took him on pro bono.”

Attorneys occasionally provide legal services free of charge — pro bono — to indigent or special clients. Sometimes this is an altruistic endeavor and sometimes it’s because the client just won’t pay up. Either way, the lack of an advance from Wyms was understandable. The missing file was another story.

“You know what I was thinking?” Lorna said.

“What?”

“That Jerry had the file with him — in his briefcase — when he left Monday night.”

“And it got taken, along with his laptop and cell phone, by the killer.”

She nodded and I nodded back.

It made sense. He was spending the evening preparing for the week and he had a hearing Thursday on Wyms. Maybe he had run out of gas and thrown the file in his briefcase to look at later. Or maybe he kept the file with him because it was important in a way I couldn’t see yet. Maybe the killer wanted the Wyms file and not the laptop or the cell phone.

“Who’s the prosecutor on the case?”

“Joanne Giorgetti, and I’m way ahead of you. I called her yesterday and explained our situation and asked if she wouldn’t mind copying the discovery again for us. She said no problem. You can pick it up after your eleven with Judge Stanton and then have a couple hours to familiarize yourself with it before the hearing at two.”

Joanne Giorgetti was a top-flight prosecutor who worked in the crimes-against-law-officers section of the DA’s Office. She was also a longtime friend of my ex-wife’s and was my daughter’s basketball coach in the YMCA league. She had always been cordial and collegial with me, even after Maggie and I split up. It didn’t surprise me that she would run off a copy of the discovery materials for me.

“You think of everything, Lorna,” I said. “Why don’t you just take over Vincent’s practice and run with it? You don’t need me.”

She smiled at the compliment and I saw her eyes flick in the direction of Cisco. The read I got was that she wanted him to realize her value to the law firm of Michael Haller and Associates.

“I like working in the background,” she said. “I’ll leave center stage for you.”

Our plates were served and I spread a liberal dose of Tabasco sauce on both my steak and the eggs. Sometimes hot sauce was the only way I knew I was still alive.

I was finally able to hear what Cisco had come up with on the Vincent investigation but he dug into his meal and I knew better than to try to keep him from his food. I decided to wait and asked Lorna how things were working out with Wren Williams. She answered in a low voice, as if Wren were sitting nearby in the restaurant and listening.

“She’s not a lot of help, Mickey. She seems to have no idea of how the office worked or where Jerry put things. She’d be lucky to remember where she parked her car this morning. If you ask me, she was working there for some other reason.”

I could have told her the reason — as it had been told to me by Bosch — but decided to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to distract Lorna with gossip.

I looked over and saw Cisco mopping up the steak juice and hot sauce on his plate with a piece of toast. He was good to go.

“What do you have going today, Cisco?”

“I’m working on Rilz and his side of the equation.”

“How’s that going?”

“I think there’ll be a couple things you can use. You want to hear about it?”

“Not yet. I’ll ask when I need it.”

I didn’t want to be given any information about Rilz that I might have to turn over to the prosecution in discovery. At the moment, the less I knew, the better. Cisco understood this and nodded.

“I also have the Bruce Carlin debriefing this afternoon,” Cisco added.

“He wants two hundred an hour,” Lorna said. “Highway robbery, if you ask me.”

I waved off her protest.

“Just pay it. It’s a onetime expense and he probably has information we can use, and that might save Cisco some time.”

“Don’t worry, we’re paying him. I’m just not happy about it. He’s gouging us because he knows he can.”

“Technically, he’s gouging Elliot and I don’t think he’s going to care.”

I turned back to my investigator.

“You have anything new on the Vincent case?”

Cisco updated me with what he had. It consisted mostly of forensic details, suggesting that the source he had inside the investigation came from that side of the equation. He said Vincent had been shot twice, both times in the area of the left temple. The spread on the entry wounds was less than an inch, and powder burns on the skin and hair indicated the weapon was nine to twelve inches away when fired. Cisco said this indicated that the killer had fired two quick shots and was fairly skilled. It was unlikely that an amateur would fire twice quickly and be able to cluster the impacts.

Additionally, Cisco said, the slugs never left the body and were recovered during the autopsy conducted late the day before.

“They were twenty-fives,” he said.

I had handled countless cross-examinations of tool marks and ballistics experts. I knew my bullets and I knew a .25 caliber round came out of a small weapon but could do great damage, especially if fired into the cranial vault. The slugs would ricochet around inside. It would be like putting the victim’s brain in a blender.

“They know the exact weapon yet?”

I knew that by studying the markings — lands and grooves — on the slugs they would be able to tell what kind of gun fired the rounds. Just as with the Malibu murders, in which the investigators knew what gun had been used, even though they didn’t have it.

“Yeah. A twenty-five caliber Beretta Bobcat. Nice and small, you could almost hide it in your hand.”

A completely different weapon than the one used to kill Mitzi Elliot and Johan Rilz.

“So what’s all of this tell us?”

“It’s a hitter’s gun. You take it when you know it’s going to be a head shot.”

I nodded my agreement.

“So this was planned. The killer knew just what he was going to do. He waits in the garage, sees Jerry come out and comes right up to the car. The window goes down or it was already down, and the guy pops Jerry twice in the head, then reaches in for the briefcase that has the laptop, the cell phone, the portfolio and, we think, the Eli Wyms file.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, what about the suspect?”

“The guy they sweated the first night?”

“No, that was Carlin. They cut him loose.”

Cisco looked surprised.

“How’d you find out it was Carlin?”

“Bosch told me this morning.”

“Are you saying they have another suspect?”

I nodded.

“He showed me a photo of a guy coming out of the building at the time of the shooting. He had a gun and was wearing an obvious disguise.”

I saw Cisco’s eyes flare. It was a point of professional pride that he provide me with information like that. He didn’t like it happening the other way around.

“He didn’t have a name, just the photo,” I said. “He wanted to know if I had ever seen the guy before or if it was one of the clients.”

Cisco’s eyes darkened as he realized that his inside source was holding out on him. If I’d told him about the FBI calls, he probably would have picked the table up and thrown it through the window.

“I’ll see what I can find out,” he said quietly through a tight jaw.

I looked at Lorna.

“Bosch said he was coming back later to show the photo to Wren.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Make sure you look at it, too. I want everybody to be on alert for this guy.”

“Okay, Mickey.”

I nodded. We were finished. I put a credit card on the tab and pulled out my cell phone to call Patrick. Calling my driver reminded me of something.

“Cisco, there’s one other thing I want you to try to do today.”

Cisco looked at me, happy to move on from the idea that I had a better source on the investigation than he did.

“Go to Vincent’s liquidator and see if he’s sitting on one of Patrick’s surfboards. If he is, I want it back for Patrick.”

Cisco nodded.

“I can do that. No problem.”

Twenty-four

W
aylaid by the slow-moving elevators in the CCB, I was four minutes late when I walked into Judge Holder’s courtroom and hustled through the clerk’s corral toward the hallway leading to her chambers. I didn’t see anyone and the door was closed. I knocked lightly and I heard the judge call for me to enter.

She was behind her desk and wearing her black robe. This told me she probably had a hearing in open court scheduled soon and my being late was not a good thing.

“Mr. Haller, our meeting was set for ten o’clock. I believe you were given proper notice of this.”

“Yes, Your Honor, I know. I’m sorry. The elevators in this building are—”

“All lawyers take the same elevators and most seem to be on time for meetings with me.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Did you bring your checkbook?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Well, we can do this one of two ways,” the judge said. “I can hold you in contempt of court, fine you and let you explain yourself to the California bar, or we can go informal and you take out your checkbook and make a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It’s one of my favorite charities. They do good things for sick children.”

This was incredible. I was being fined for being four minutes late. The arrogance of some judges was amazing. I somehow was able to swallow my outrage and speak.

“I like the idea of helping out sick children, Your Honor,” I said. “How much do I make it out for?”

“As much as you want to contribute. And I will even send it in for you.”

She pointed to a stack of paperwork on the left side of her desk. I saw two other checks, most likely stroked out by two other poor bastards who had run afoul of the judge this week. I leaned down and rummaged through the front pocket of my backpack until I found my checkbook. I wrote a check for $250 to Make-A-Wish, tore it out and handed it across the desk. I watched the judge’s eyes as she looked at the amount I was donating. She nodded approvingly and I knew I was all right.

“Thank you, Mr. Haller. They’ll be sending you a receipt for your taxes in the mail. It will go to the address on the check.”

“Like you said, they do good work.”

“Yes, they do.”

The judge put the check on top of the two others and then turned her attention back to me.

“Now, before we go over the cases, let me ask you a question,” she said. “Do you know if the police are making any headway on the investigation of Mr. Vincent’s death?”

I hesitated a moment, wondering what I should be telling the chief judge of the superior court.