Page 93 of The Lincoln Lawyer

“You know what I used to be afraid of?” I asked.

“What?”

“That I wouldn’t recognize innocence. That it would be there right in front of me and I wouldn’t see it. I’m not talking about guilty or not guilty. I mean innocence. Just innocence.”

She didn’t say anything.

“But you know what I should have been afraid of?”

“What, Haller?”

“Evil. Pure evil.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, most of the people I defend aren’t evil, Mags. They’re guilty, yeah, but they aren’t evil. You know what I mean? There’s a difference. You listen to them and you listen to these songs and you know why they make the choices they make. People are just trying to get by, just to live with what they’re given, and some of them aren’t given a damn thing in the first place. But evil is something else. It’s different. It’s like… I don’t know. It’s out there and when it shows up… I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“You’re drunk, that’s why.”

“All I know is I should have been afraid of one thing but I was afraid of the complete opposite.”

She reached over and rubbed my shoulder. The last song was “to live & die in l.a.,” and it was my favorite on the homespun CD. I started to softly hum and then I sang along with the refrain when it came up on the track.

to live & die in l.a.

it’s the place to be

you got to be there to know it

ev’ybody wanna see

Pretty soon I stopped singing and pulled my hands down from my face. I fell asleep with my clothes on. I never heard the woman I had loved more than anyone else in my life leave the house. She would tell me later that the last thing I had mumbled before passing out was, “I can’t do this anymore.”

I wasn’t talking about my singing.

Twenty-six

Wednesday, April 13

Islept almost ten hours but I still woke up in darkness. It said 5:18 on the Bose. I tried to go back to the dream but the door was closed. By 5:30 I rolled out of bed, struggled for equilibrium, and hit the shower. I stayed under the spray until the hot-water tank ran cold. Then I got out and got dressed for another day of fighting the machine.

It was still too early to call Lorna to check on the day’s schedule but I keep a calendar on my desk that is usually up-to-date. I went into the home office to check it and the first thing I noticed was a dollar bill taped to the wall over the desk.

My adrenaline jogged up a couple notches as my mind raced and I thought an intruder had left the money on the wall as some sort of threat or message. Then I remembered.

“Maggie,” I said out loud.

I smiled and decided to leave the dollar bill taped to the wall.

I got the calendar out of the briefcase and checked my schedule. It looked like I had the morning free until an 11A.M.hearing in San Fernando Superior. The case was a repeat client charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. It was a bullshit charge, hardly worth the time and money, but Melissa Menkoff was already on probation for a variety of drug offenses. If she took a fall for something as minor as drug paraphernalia, her probated sentence wouldkick in and she would end up behind a steel door for six to nine months.

That was all I had on the calendar. After San Fernando my day was clear and I silently congratulated myself for the foresight I must have used in keeping the day after opening day clear. Of course, I didn’t know when I set up the schedule that the death of Raul Levin would send me into Four Green Fields so early, but it was good planning just the same.

The hearing on the Menkoff matter involved my motion to suppress the crack pipe found during a search of her vehicle after a reckless driving stop in Northridge. The pipe had been found in the closed center console of her car. She had told me that she had not given permission to the police to search the car but they did anyway. My argument was that there was no consent to search and no probable cause to search. If Menkoff had been pulled over by police for driving erratically, then there was no reason to search the closed compartments of her car.

It was a loser and I knew it, but Menkoff’s father paid me well to do the best I could for his troubled daughter. And that was exactly what I was going to do at eleven o’clock in San Fernando Court.

For breakfast I had two Tylenols and chased them with fried eggs, toast and coffee. I doused the eggs liberally with pepper and salsa. It all hit the right spots and gave me the fuel to carry on the battle. I turned the pages of theTimesas I ate, looking for a story on the murder of Raul Levin. Inexplicably, there was no story. I didn’t understand this at first. Why would Glendale keep the wraps on this? Then I remembered that theTimesput out several regional editions of the paper each morning. I lived on the Westside, and Glendale was considered part of the San Fernando Valley. News of a murder in the Valley may have been deemed byTimeseditors as unimportant to Westside readers, who had their own region’s murders to worry about. I got no story on Levin.