The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,52
on the Venice boardwalk. You ever gone down there and seen the guy spinning all those plates on those little sticks?”
“I think so. I haven’t been down there in a long time.”
“Doesn’t matter. The guy has these thin little sticks and he puts a plate on each one and starts spinning the plate so it will stay balanced and upright. He gets a lot of them going at once and he moves from plate to plate and stick to stick making sure everything is spinning and balanced and staying up. You with me?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Well, that’s the state’s case, Louis. A bunch of spinning plates. And every one of those plates is an individual piece of evidence against you. My job is to take each plate, stop it from spinning and knock it to the ground so hard that it shatters and can’t be used anymore. If the blue plate contains the victim’s blood on your hands, then I need to find a way to knock it down. If the yellow plate has a knife with your bloody fingerprints on it, then once again I need to knock that sucker down. Neutralize it. You follow?”
“Yes, I follow. I —”
“Now, in the middle of this field of plates is a big one. It’s a fucking platter, Louis, and if that baby falls over it’s going to take everything down with it. Every plate. The whole case goes down. Do you know what that platter is, Louis?”
He shook his head no.
“That big platter is the victim, the chief witness against you. If we can knock that platter over, then the whole act is over and the crowd moves on.”
I waited a moment to see if he would react. He said nothing.
“Louis, for almost two weeks you have concealed from me the method by which I could knock the big platter down. It asks the question why. Why would a guy with money at his disposal, a Rolex watch on his wrist, a Porsche out in the parking lot and a Holmby Hills address need to use a knife to get sex from a woman who sells it anyway? When you boil it all down to that question, the case starts to collapse, Louis, because the answer is simple. He wouldn’t. Common sense says he wouldn’t. And when you come to that conclusion, all the plates stop spinning. You see the setup, you see the trap, and now it’s the defendant who starts to look like the victim.”
I looked at him. He nodded.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You should be,” I said. “The case would have started coming apart almost two weeks ago and we probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now if you had been up-front with me from the start.”
In that moment I realized where my anger was truly coming from and it wasn’t because Roulet had been late or had lied or because of Sam Scales calling me a street-legal con. It was because I saw the franchise slipping away. There would be no trial in this case, no six-figure fee. I’d be lucky just to keep the retainer I’d gotten at the start. The case was going to end today when I walked into the DA’s office and told Ted Minton what I knew and what I had.
“I’m sorry,” Roulet said again in a whiny voice. “I didn’t mean to mess things up.”
I was looking down at the ground between my feet now. Without looking at him I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you before, Louis.”
“What do we do now?”
“I have a few more questions to ask you about that night, and then I’m going to go up into that building over there and meet the prosecutor and knock down all his plates. I think that by the time I come out of there this may all be over and you’ll be free to go back to showing your mansions to rich people.”
“Just like that?”
“Well, formally he may want to go into court and ask a judge to dismiss the case.”
Roulet opened his mouth in shock.
“Mr. Haller, I can’t begin to tell you how —”
“You can call me Mickey. Sorry about that before.”
“No problem. Thank you. What questions do you want to ask?”
I thought for a moment. I really didn’t need anything else to go into the meeting with Minton. I was locked and loaded. I had walking proof.