The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,49
are going to get about as much sympathy from the judge and a jury—if it should come to that—as they would give a child raper. Maybe even less.”
“I know all of that but I am a useful asset to society. I could educate people. Put me in the schools. Put me in the country clubs. Put me on probation and I’ll tell people what to watch out for out there.”
“You are who they have to watch out for. You blew your chance with the last one and the prosecution said this is the final offer on this one. You don’t take it and they’re going to go to the wall on this. The one thing I can guarantee you is that there will be no mercy.”
So many of my clients are like Sam Scales. They hopelessly believe there is a light behind the door. And I’m the one who has to tell them the door is locked and that the bulb burned out long ago anyway.
“Then I guess I have to do it,” Scales said, looking at me with eyes that blamed me for not finding a way out for him.
“It’s your choice. You want a trial, we’ll go to trial. Your exposure will be ten years plus the one you’ve got left on the probation. You make ’em real mad and they can also ship you over to the FBI so the feds can take a swing at you on interstate wire fraud if they want.”
“Let me ask you something. If we go to trial, could we win?”
I almost laughed but I still had some sympathy left for him.
“No, Sam, we can’t win. Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you for two months? They got you. You can’t win. But I’m here to do what you want. Like I said, if you want a trial we’ll go to trial. But I gotta tell you that if we go, you’ll have to get your mother to pay me again. I’m only good through today.”
“How much did she pay you already?”
“Eight thousand.”
“Eight grand! That’s her fucking retirement account money!”
“I’m surprised she has anything left in the account with you for a son.”
He looked at me sharply.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I shouldn’t have said that. From what she told me, you’re a good son.”
“Jesus Christ, I should have gone to fucking law school. You’re a con no different from me. You know that, Haller? Only that paper they give you makes you street legal, that’s all.”
They always blame the lawyer for making a living. As if it’s a crime to want to be paid for doing a day’s work. What Scales had just said to me would have brought a near violent reaction back when I was maybe a year or two out of law school. But I’d heard the same insult too many times by now to do anything but roll with it.
“What can I say, Sam? We’ve already had this conversation.”
He nodded and didn’t say anything. I took it to mean he would take the DA’s offer. Four years in the state penal system and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, followed by five years’ parole. He’d be out in two and a half but the parole would be a killer for a natural-born con man to make it through unscathed. After a few minutes I got up and left the room. I knocked on the outer door and Deputy Frey let me back into the courtroom.
“He’s good to go,” I said.
I took my seat at the defense table and soon Frey brought Scales out and sat him next to me. He still had the cuffs on. He said nothing to me. In another few minutes Glenn Bernasconi, the prosecutor who worked 124, came down from his office on the fifteenth floor and I told him we were ready to accept the case disposition.
At 11 A.M. Judge Judith Champagne came out of chambers and onto the bench and Frey called the courtroom to order. The judge was a diminutive, attractive blonde and ex-prosecutor who had been on the bench at least as long as I’d had my ticket. She was old school all the way, fair but tough, running her courtroom as a fiefdom. Sometimes she even brought her dog, a German shepherd named Justice, to work with her. If the judge had had any kind of discretion in the sentence when Sam Scales faced her, he would have gone down hard. That was what I did for Sam Scales, whether