The Brass Verdict (18 page)

“A few, yes.”

It was the best I could honestly say.

“Mom’s made a lot of bad people go to jail.”

I nodded.

“Yes, she has. I used to think we were a great balancing act. What she did and what I did. Now…”

There was no need to finish the thought. I turned the radio on and hit the preset button that tuned in the Disney music channel.

The last thing I thought about on the drive home was that maybe grown-ups were just as easy to read as their children.

Twenty-one

A
fter dropping my daughter off at school Thursday morning I drove directly to Jerry Vincent’s law offices. It was still early and traffic was light. When I got into the garage adjoining the legal center, I found that I almost had my pick of the place — most lawyers don’t get into the office until closer to nine, when court starts. I had all of them beat by at least an hour. I drove up to the second level so I could park on the same floor as the office. Each level of the garage had its own entrance into the building.

I drove by the spot where Jerry Vincent had been parked when he was shot to death and parked farther up the ramp. As I walked toward the bridge that connected the garage to the Legal Center, I noticed a parked Subaru station wagon with surfboard racks on the roof. There was a sticker on the back window that showed the silhouette of a surfer riding the nose of a board. It said
ONE WORLD
on the sticker.

The back windows on the wagon were darkly tinted and I couldn’t see in. I moved up to the front and looked into the car through the driver’s side window. I could see that the backseat had been folded flat. Half the rear area was cluttered with open cardboard boxes full of clothes and personal belongings. The other half served as a bed for Patrick Henson. I knew this because he was lying there asleep, his face turned from the light into the folds of a sleeping bag. And it was only then that I remembered something he had said during our first phone conversation when I had asked if he was interested in a job as my driver. He had told me he was living out of his car and sleeping in a lifeguard stand.

I raised my fist to knock on the window but then decided to let Patrick sleep. I wouldn’t need him until later in the morning. There was no need to roust him. I crossed into the office complex, made a turn and headed down a hallway toward the door marked with Jerry Vincent’s name. Standing in front of that door was Detective Bosch. He was listening to his music and waiting for me. He had his hands in his pockets and looked pensive, maybe even a little put out. I was pretty sure we had no appointment, so I didn’t know what he was upset about. Maybe it was the music. He pulled out the earbuds as I approached and put them away.

“What, no coffee?” I said by way of a greeting.

“Not today. I could tell you didn’t want it yesterday.”

He stepped aside so I could use a key to open the door.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“If I said no, you’d ask anyway.”

“You’re probably right.”

I opened the door.

“So then, just ask the question.”

“All right. Well, you don’t seem like an iPod sort of guy to me. Who were you listening to there?”

“Somebody I am sure you never heard of.”

“I get it. It’s Tony Robbins, the self-help guru?”

Bosch shook his head, not rising to take the bait.

“Frank Morgan,” he said.

I nodded.

“The saxophone player? Yeah, I know Frank.”

Bosch looked surprised as we entered the reception area.

“You know him,” he said in a disbelieving tone.

“Yeah, I usually drop by and say hello when he plays at the Catalina or the Jazz Bakery. My father loved jazz and back in the fifties and sixties he was Frank’s lawyer. Frank got into a lot of trouble before he got straight. Ended up playing in San Quentin with Art Pepper — you’ve heard of him, right? By the time I met Frank, he didn’t need any help from a defense attorney. He was doing good.”

It took Bosch a moment to recover from my surprise knowledge of Frank Morgan, the obscure heir to Charlie Parker who for two decades squandered the inheritance on heroin. We crossed the reception area and went into the main office.

“So how’s the case going?” I asked.

“It’s going,” he said.

“I heard that before you came and saw me yesterday, you spent the night in Parker Center sweating a suspect. No arrest, though?”

I moved around behind Vincent’s desk and sat down. I started pulling the files out of my bag. Bosch stayed standing.

“Who told you that?” Bosch asked.

There wasn’t anything casual about the question. It was more of a demand. I acted nonchalant about it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I must’ve heard it somewhere. Maybe a reporter. Who was the suspect?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Then, what is my business with you, Detective? Why are you here?”

“I came to see if you had any more names for me.”

“What happened to the names I gave you yesterday?”

“They’ve checked out.”

“How could you check them all out already?”

He leaned down and put both hands on the desk.

“Because I’m not working this case alone, okay? I have help and we checked out every one of your names. Every one of them is in jail, dead or was not worried about Jerry Vincent anymore. We also checked out several of the people he put away as a prosecutor. It’s a dead end.”

I felt a real sense of disappointment and realized that maybe I had put too much hope in the possibility of one of those names from the past belonging to the killer, and his arrest being the end of any threat to me.

“What about Demarco, the gun dealer?”

“I took that one myself and it didn’t take long to scratch him off the list. He’s dead, Haller. Died two years ago in his cell up at Corcoran. Internal bleeding. When they opened him up they found a toothbrush shiv lodged in the anal cavity. It was never determined whether he’d put it up there for safekeeping himself or somebody else did it for him, but it was a good lesson for the rest of the inmates. They even put up a sign. Never put sharp objects up your ass.”

I leaned back in my seat, as much repelled by the story as by the loss of a potential suspect. I recovered and tried to continue in nonchalant form.

“Well, what can I tell you, Detective? Demarco was my best shot. Those names were all I had. I told you I can’t reveal anything about active cases, but here’s the deal: There’s nothing to reveal.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

“I mean it, Detective. I’ve been through all of the active cases. There is nothing in any of them that constitutes a threat or reason for Vincent to feel threatened. There is nothing in any of them that connects to the FBI. There is nothing in any of them that indicates Jerry Vincent stumbled onto something that put him in harm’s way. Besides, when you find out bad things about your clients, they’re protected. So there’s nothing there. I mean, he wasn’t representing mobsters. He wasn’t representing drug dealers. There wasn’t anything in—”

“He represents murderers.”

“Accused murderers. And at the time of his death he had only one murder case — Walter Elliot — and there isn’t anything there. Believe me, I’ve looked.”

I wasn’t so sure I believed it as I said it but Bosch didn’t seem to notice. He finally sat down on the edge of the chair in front of the desk, and his face seemed to change. There was an almost desperate look to it.

“Jerry was divorced,” I offered. “Did you check out the ex-wife?”

“They got divorced nine years ago. She’s happily remarried and about to have her second kid. I don’t think a woman seven months pregnant is going to come gunning for an ex-husband she hasn’t talked to in nine years.”

“Any other relatives?”

“A mother in Pittsburgh. The family angle is dry.”

“Girlfriend?”

“He was banging his secretary but there was nothing serious there. And her alibi checks out. She was also banging his investigator. And they were together that night.”

I felt my face turning red. That sordid scenario wasn’t too far from my own current situation. At least Lorna, Cisco and I had been entangled at different times. I rubbed my face as if I were tired and hoped it would account for my new coloration.

“That’s convenient,” I said. “That they alibi each other.”

Bosch shook his head.

“It checks out through witnesses. They were with friends at a screening at Archway. That big-shot client of yours got them the invitation.”

I nodded and took an educated guess at something, then threw a zinger at Bosch.

“The guy you sweated in a room that first night was the investigator, Bruce Carlin.”

“Who told you that?”

“You just did. You had a classic love triangle. It would’ve been the place to start.”

“Smart lawyer. But like I said, it didn’t pan out. We spent a night on it and in the morning we were still at square one. Tell me about the money.”

He’d thrown a zinger right back at me.

“What money?”

“The money in the business accounts. I suppose you’re going to tell me they are protected territory, too.”

“Actually, I’d probably need to talk to the judge for an opinion on that, but I don’t need to bother. My case manager is one of the best accounts people I’ve ever run across. She’s been working with the books and she tells me they’re clean. Every penny Jerry took in is accounted for.”

Bosch didn’t respond, so I continued.

“Let me tell you something, Detective. When lawyers get into trouble, most of the time it’s because of the money. The books. It’s the one place where there are no gray areas. It’s the one place where the California bar loves to stick its nose in. I keep the cleanest books in the business because I don’t ever want to give them a reason to come after me. So I would know and Lorna, my case manager, would know if there was something in these books that didn’t add up. But there isn’t. I think Jerry probably paid himself a little too quickly but there is nothing technically wrong with that.”

I saw Bosch’s eyes light on something I had said.

“What?”

“What’s that mean, he ‘paid himself too quickly’?”

“It means — let me just start at the start. The way it works is you take on a client and you receive an advance. That money goes into the client trust account. It’s their money but you are holding it because you want to make sure you can get it when you earn it. You follow?”

“Yeah, you can’t trust your clients because they’re criminals. So you get the money up front and put it in a trust account. Then you pay yourself from it as you do the work.”

“More or less. Anyway, it’s in the trust and as you do the work, make appearances, prepare the case and so forth, you take your fees from the trust account. You move it into the operating account. Then, from the operating account you pay your own bills and salaries. Rent, secretary, investigator, car costs and so on and so forth. You also pay yourself.”

“Okay, so how did Vincent pay himself too quickly?”

“Well, I am not exactly saying he did. It’s a matter of custom and practice. But it looks from the books that he liked to keep a low balance in operating. He happened to have had a franchise client who paid a large advance up front and that money went through the trust and operating accounts pretty quickly. After costs, the rest went to Jerry Vincent in salary.”

Bosch’s body language indicated I was hitting on something that jibed with something else and was important to him. He had leaned slightly toward me and seemed to have tightened his shoulders and neck.

“Walter Elliot,” he said. “Was he the franchise?”

“I can’t give out that information but I think it’s an easy guess to make.”

Bosch nodded and I could see that he was working on something inside. I waited and he said nothing.

“How does this help you, Detective?” I finally asked.

“I can’t give out that information but I think it’s an easy guess to make.”

I nodded. He’d nailed me back.

“Look, we both have rules we have to follow,” I said. “We’re flip sides of the same coin. I’m just doing my job. And if there is nothing else I can help you with, I’ll get back to it.”

Bosch stared at me and seemed to be deciding something.

“Who did Jerry Vincent bribe on the Elliot case?” he finally asked.

The question came out of left field. I wasn’t expecting it but in the moments after he asked it, I realized that it was the question he had come to ask. Everything else up until this point had been window dressing.

“What, is that from the FBI?”

“I haven’t talked to the FBI.”

“Then, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a payoff.”

“To who?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

I shook my head and smiled.

“Look, I told you. The books are clean. There’s—”

“If you were going to bribe someone with a hundred thousand dollars, would you put it in your books?”

I thought about Jerry Vincent and the time I turned down the subtle quid pro quo on the Barnett Woodson case. I turned him down and ended up hanging a not-guilty verdict on him. It changed Vincent’s life and he was still thanking me for it from the grave. But maybe it didn’t change his ways in the years that followed.

“I guess you’re right,” I said to Bosch. “I wouldn’t do it that way. So what aren’t you telling me?”

“This is in confidence, Counselor. But I need your help and I think you need to know this in order to help me.”

“Okay.”

“Then, say it.”

“Say what?”

“That you will treat this information in confidence.”

“I thought I did. I will. I’ll keep it confidential.”

“Not even your staff. Just you.”

“Fine. Just me. Tell me.”

“You have Vincent’s work accounts. I have his private accounts. You said he paid himself the money from Elliot quickly. He—”

“I didn’t say it was Elliot. You did.”

“Whatever. The point is, that five months ago he accumulated a hundred grand in a personal investment account and a week later called his broker and told him he was cashing out.”