The Brass Verdict (28 page)

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Sure you do. The photo of the guy with the gun coming out of the building. It was a phony. You set it up — choreographed it — and used it to smoke out your leak, then you tried to scam me with it.”

Bosch shook his head and looked out of the booth as if he were looking for someone to help him interpret what I was saying. It was a bad act.

“You set up the phony picture and then you showed it to me because you knew it would come back around through my investigator to your leak. You’d know that whoever asked you about the photo was the leak.”

“I can’t discuss any aspect of the investigation with you.”

“And then you used it to try to play me. To see if I was hiding something and to scare it out of me.”

“I told you, I can’t—”

“Well, you don’t have to, Bosch. I know it’s what you did. You know what your mistakes were? First of all, not coming back like you said you would to show the photo to Vincent’s secretary. If the guy in the picture was legit, you would’ve shown it to her because she knows the clients better than me. Your second mistake was the gun in the waistband of your hit man. Vincent was shot with a twenty-five — too small for a waistband. I missed that when you showed me the photo, but I’ve got it now.”

Bosch looked toward the bar in the middle of the restaurant. The overhead TV was showing sports highlights. I leaned across the table closer to him.

“So who’s the guy in the photo? Your partner with a stick-on mustache? Some clown from vice? Don’t you have better things to do than to be running a game on me?”

Bosch leaned back and continued to look around the place, his eyes moving everywhere but to me. He was contemplating something and I gave him all the time he needed. Finally, he looked at me.

“Okay, you got me. It was a scam. I guess that makes you one smart lawyer, Haller. Just like the old man. I wonder why you’re wasting it defending scumbags. Shouldn’t you be out there suing doctors or defending big tobacco or something noble like that?”

I smiled.

“Is that how you like to play it? You get caught being underhanded, so you respond by accusing the other guy of being underhanded?”

Bosch laughed, his face colored red as he turned away from me. It was a gesture that struck me as familiar, and his mention of my father brought him to mind. I had a vague memory of my father laughing uneasily and looking away as he leaned back at the dinner table. My mother had accused him of something I was too young to understand.

Bosch put both arms on the table and leaned toward me.

“You’ve heard of the first forty-eight, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The first forty-eight. The chances of clearing a homicide diminish by almost half each day if you don’t solve it in the first forty-eight hours.”

He looked at his watch before continuing.

“I’m coming up on seventy-two hours and I’ve got nothing,” he said. “Not a suspect, not a viable lead, nothing. And I was hoping that tonight I might be able to scare something out of you. Something that would point me in the right direction.”

I sat there, staring at him, digesting what he had said. Finally, I found my voice.

“You actually thought I knew who killed Jerry and wasn’t telling?”

“It was a possibility I had to consider.”

“Fuck you, Bosch.”

Just then the waiter came with our steaks and spaghetti. As the plates were put down, Bosch looked at me with a knowing smile on his face. The waiter asked what else he could get for us and I waved him away without breaking eye contact.

“You’re an arrogant son of a bitch,” I said. “You can just sit there with a smile on your face after accusing me of hiding evidence or knowledge in a murder. A murder of a guy I knew.”

Bosch looked down at his steak, picked up his knife and fork and cut into it. I noticed he was left-handed. He put a chunk of meat into his mouth and stared at me while he ate it. He rested his fists on either side of his plate, fork and knife in his grips, as if guarding the food from poachers. A lot of my clients who had spent time in prison ate the same way.

“Why don’t you take it easy there, Counselor,” he said. “You have to understand something. I’m not used to being on the same side of the line as the defense lawyer, okay? It has been my experience that defense attorneys have tried to portray me as stupid, corrupt, bigoted, you name it. So with that in mind, yes, I tried to run a game on you in hopes that it would help me solve a murder. I apologize all to hell and back. If you want, I will have them wrap up my steak and I’ll take it to go.”

I shook my head. Bosch had a talent for trying to make me feel guilty for his transgressions.

“Maybe now you should be the one who takes it easy,” I said. “All I’m saying is that from the start, I have acted openly and honestly with you. I have stretched the ethical bounds of my profession. And I have told you what I could tell you, when I could tell you. I didn’t deserve to have the shit scared out of me tonight. And you’re damn lucky I didn’t put a bullet in your man’s chest when he was at the office door. He made a beautiful target.”

“You weren’t supposed to have a gun. I checked.”

Bosch started eating again, keeping his head down as he worked on the steak. He took several bites and then moved to the side plate of spaghetti. He wasn’t a twirler. He chopped at the pasta with his fork before putting a bite into his mouth. He spoke after he swallowed his food.

“So now that we have that out of the way, will you help me?”

I blew out my breath in a laugh.

“Are you kidding? Have you heard a single thing I’ve said here?”

“Yeah, I heard it all. And no, I’m not kidding. When all is said and done, I still have a dead lawyer — your colleague — on my hands and I could still use your help.”

I started cutting my first piece of steak. I decided he could wait for me to eat, like I had waited for him.

Dan Tana’s was considered by many to serve the best steak in the city. Count me as one of the many. I was not disappointed. I took my time, savoring the first bite, then put my fork down.

“What kind of help?”

“We draw out the killer.”

“Great. How dangerous will it be?”

“Depends on a lot of things. But I’m not going to lie to you. It could get dangerous. I need you to shake some things up, make whoever’s out there think there’s a loose end, that you might be dangerous to them. Then we see what happens.”

“But you’ll be there. I’ll be covered.”

“Every step of the way.”

“How do we shake things up?”

“I was thinking a newspaper story. I assume you’ve been getting calls from the reporters. We pick one and give them the story, an exclusive, and we plant something in there that gets the killer thinking.”

I thought about this and remembered what Lorna had warned about playing fair with the media.

“There’s a guy at the
Times,
” I said. “I kind of made a deal with him to get him off my back. I told him that when I was ready to talk, I would talk to him.”

“That’s a perfect setup. We’ll use him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“So, are you in?”

I picked up my fork and knife and remained silent while I cut into the steak again. Blood ran onto the plate. I thought about my daughter getting to the point of asking me the same questions her mother asked and that I could never answer.
It’s like you’re always working for the bad guys
. It wasn’t as simple as that but knowing this didn’t take away the sting or the look I remembered seeing in her eyes.

I put the knife and fork down without taking a bite. I suddenly was no longer hungry.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in.”

PART THREE

—To Speak the Truth

Thirty-four

E
verybody lies.

Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Clients lie. Even jurors lie.

There is a school of belief in criminal law that says every trial is won or lost in the choosing of the jury. I’ve never been ready to go all the way to that level but I do know that there is probably no phase in a murder trial more important than the selection of the twelve citizens who will decide your client’s fate. It is also the most complex and fleeting part of the trial, reliant on the whims of fate and luck and being able to ask the right question of the right person at the right time.

And yet we begin each trial with it.

Jury selection in the case of
California v. Elliot
began on schedule in Judge James P. Stanton’s courtroom at ten a.m. Thursday. The courtroom was packed, half filled with the venire — the eighty potential jurors called randomly from the jury pool on the fifth floor of the CCB — and half filled with media, courthouse professionals, well-wishers and just plain gawkers who had been able to squeeze in.

I sat at the defense table alone with my client — fulfilling his wish for a legal team of just one. Spread in front of me was an open but empty manila file, a Post-it pad and three different markers, red, blue and black. Back at the office, I had prepared the file by using a ruler to draw a grid across it. There were twelve blocks, each the size of a Post-it. Each block was for one of the twelve jurors who would be chosen to sit in judgment of Walter Elliot. Some lawyers use computers to track potential jurors. They even have software that can take information revealed during the selection process, filter it through a sociopolitical pattern–recognition program and spit out instant recommendations on whether to keep or reject a juror. I had been using the old-school grid system since I had been a baby lawyer in the Public Defender’s Office. It had always worked well for me and I wasn’t changing now. I didn’t want to use a computer’s instincts when it came to picking a jury. I wanted to use my own. A computer can’t hear how someone gives an answer. It can’t see someone’s eyes when they lie.

The way it works is that the judge has a computer-generated list from which he calls the first twelve citizens from the venire, and they take seats in the jury box. At that point each is a member of the jury. But they get to keep their seats only if they survive voir dire — the questioning of their background and views and understanding of the law. There is a process. The judge asks them a series of basic questions and then the lawyers get the chance to follow up with a more narrow focus.

Jurors can be removed from the box in one of two ways. They can be rejected for cause if they show through their answers or demeanor or even their life’s circumstances that they cannot be fair judges of credibility or hear the case with an open mind. There is no limit to the number of challenges for cause at the disposal of the attorneys. Oftentimes the judge will make a dismissal for cause before the prosecutor or defense attorney even raises an objection. I have always believed that the quickest way off a jury panel is to announce that you are convinced that all cops lie or all cops are always right. Either way, a closed mind is a challenge for cause.

The second method of removal is the preemptory challenge, of which each attorney is given a limited supply, depending on the type of case and charges. Because this trial involved charges of murder, both the prosecution and defense would have up to twenty preemptory challenges each. It is in the judicious and tactful use of these preemptories that strategy and instinct come into play. A skilled attorney can use his challenges to help sculpt the jury into a tool of the prosecution or defense. A preemptory challenge lets the attorney strike a juror for no reason other than his instinctual dislike of the individual. An exception to this would be the obvious use of preemptories to create a bias on the jury. A prosecutor who continually removed black jurors, or a defense attorney who did the same with white jurors, would quickly run afoul of the opposition as well as the judge.

The rules of voir dire are designed to remove bias and deception from the jury. The term itself comes from the French phrase “to speak the truth.” But this of course is contradictory to each side’s cause. The bottom line in any trial is that I want a biased jury. I want them biased against the state and the police. I want them predisposed to be on my side. The truth is that a fair-minded person is the last person I want on my jury. I want somebody who is already on my side or can easily be pushed there. I want twelve lemmings in the box. Jurors who will follow my lead and act as agents for the defense.

And, of course, the man sitting four feet from me in the courtroom wanted to achieve a diametrically opposite result out of jury selection. The prosecutor wanted his own lemmings and would use his challenges to sculpt the jury his way, and at my expense.

By ten fifteen the efficient Judge Stanton had looked at the printout from the computer that randomly selected the first twelve candidates and had welcomed them to the jury box by calling out code numbers issued to them in the jury-pool room on the fifth floor. There were six men and six women. We had three postal workers, two engineers, a housewife from Pomona, an out-of-work screenwriter, two high school teachers and three retirees.

We knew where they were from and what they did. But we didn’t know their names. It was an anonymous jury. During all pretrial conferences the judge had been adamant about protecting the jurors from public attention and scrutiny. He had ordered that the Court TV camera be mounted on the wall over the jury box so that the jurors would not be seen in its view of the courtroom. He had also ruled that the identities of all prospective jurors be withheld from even the lawyers and that each be referred to during voir dire by their seat number.

The process began with the judge asking each prospective juror questions about what they did for a living and the area of Los Angeles County they lived in. He then moved on to basic questions about whether they had been victims of crime, had relatives in prison or were related to any police officers or prosecutors. He asked what their knowledge of the law and court procedures was. He asked who had prior jury experience. The judge excused three for cause: a postal employee whose brother was a police officer; a retiree whose son had been the victim of a drug-related murder; and the screenwriter because although she had never worked for Archway Studios, the judge felt she might harbor ill will toward Elliot because of the contentious relationship between screenwriters and studio management in general.