Page 60 of The Lincoln Lawyer

The Guinness was catching up with Maggie. She smiled in a fractured sort of way that told me she was drunk. Beautifully drunk. She never got mean under a buzz. She always got sweeter. It was probably how we’d ended up having a child together.

“You should probably lay off the wine,” I told her. “Or you’ll have a headache tomorrow.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll lay what I want and lay off what I want.”

She smiled at me and I smiled back.

“So how you been, Haller? I mean really.”

“Fine. You? And I mean really.”

“Never better. Are you past Lorna now?”

“Yeah, we’re even friends.”

“And what are we?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes adversaries, I guess.”

She shook her head.

“We can’t be adversaries if we can’t stay on the same case together. Besides, I’m always looking out for you. Like with that dirtbag, Corliss.”

“Thanks for trying, but he still did the damage.”

“I just have no respect for a prosecutor who would use a jailhouse snitch. Doesn’t matter that your client is an even bigger dirtbag.”

“He wouldn’t tell me exactly what Corliss said my guy said.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He just said he had a snitch. He wouldn’t reveal what he said.”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s what I said. It’s a discovery issue but we don’t get a judge assigned until after the arraignment Monday. So there’s nobody I can really complain to yet. Minton knows that. It’s like you warned me. He doesn’t play fair.”

Her cheeks flushed. I had pushed the right buttons and she was angry. For Maggie, winning fair was the only way to win. That was why she was a good prosecutor.

We were sitting at the end of the banquette that ran along the back wall of the restaurant. We were on both sides of a corner. Maggie leaned toward me but went too far and we banged heads. She laughed but then tried again. She spoke in a low voice.

“He said that he asked your guy what he was in for and your guy said, ‘For giving a bitch exactly what she deserved.’ He said your client told him he punched her out as soon as she opened her door.”

She leaned back and I could tell she had moved too quickly, bringing on a swoon of vertigo.

“You okay?”

“Yes, but can we change the subject? I don’t want to talk about work anymore. There are too many assholes and it’s too frustrating.”

“Sure.”

Just then the waiter brought our wine and our dinners at the same time. The wine was good and the food was like home comfort. We started out eating quietly. Then Maggie hit me with a pitch right out of the blue.

“You didn’t know anything about Corliss, did you? Not till I opened my big mouth.”

“I knew Minton was hiding something. I thought it was a jailhouse—”

“Bullshit. You got me drunk so you could find out what I knew.”