The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,60

ask for references. But it still comes down to what they give us and these kind of people don’t like to wait. When they want to see a piece of property, they want to see it. There are a lot of realtors out there. If we don’t act quickly, there will be somebody else who will.”

I nodded. The glimmer was getting brighter. There might be something here I could work with.

“There have been murders, you know,” Roulet said. “Over the years. Every realtor knows the danger exists when you go to some of these places alone. For a while there was somebody out there called the Real Estate Rapist. He attacked and robbed women in empty houses. My mother . . .”

He didn’t finish. I waited. Nothing.

“What about your mother?”

Roulet hesitated before answering.

“She was showing a place in Bel-Air once. She was alone and she thought it was safe because it was Bel-Air. The man raped her. He left her tied up. When she didn’t come back to the office, I went to the house. I found her.”

Roulet’s eyes were staring at the memory.

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

“About four years. She stopped selling after it happened. Just stayed in her office and never showed another property again. I did the selling. And that’s when and why I got the knife. I’ve had it for four years and carry it everywhere but on planes. It was in my pocket when I went to that apartment. I didn’t think anything about it.”

I dropped into the chair across the table from the couch. My mind was working. I was seeing how it could work. It was still a defense that relied on coincidence. Roulet was set up by Campo and the setup was aided coincidentally when she found the knife on him after knocking him out. It could work.

“Did your mother file a police report?” Levin asked. “Was there an investigation?”

Roulet shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“No, she was too embarrassed. She was afraid it would get into the paper.”

“Who else knows about it?” I asked.

“Uh, me . . . and Cecil I’m sure knows. Probably nobody else. You can’t use this. She would —”

“I won’t use it without her permission,” I said. “But it could be important. I’ll have to talk to her about it.”

“No, I don’t want you —”

“Your life and livelihood are on the line here, Louis. You get sent to prison and you’re not going to make it. Don’t worry about your mother. A mother will do what she has to do to protect her young.”

Roulet looked down and shook his head.

“I don’t know . . . ,” he said.

I exhaled, trying to lose all my tension with the breath. Disaster may have been averted.

“I know one thing,” I said. “I’m going to go back to the DA and say pass on the deal. We’ll go to trial and take our chances.”

SIXTEEN

The hits kept coming. The other shoe didn’t drop on the prosecution’s case until after I’d dropped Earl off at the commuter lot where he parked his own car every morning and I drove the Lincoln back to Van Nuys and Four Green Fields. It was a shotgun pub on Victory Boulevard—maybe that was why lawyers liked the place—with the bar running down the left side and a row of scarred wooden booths down the right. It was crowded as only an Irish bar can be the night of St. Patrick’s Day. My guess was that the crowd was swollen even bigger than in previous years because of the fact that the drinker’s holiday fell on a Thursday and many revelers were kicking off a long weekend. I had made sure my own calendar was clear on Friday. I always clear the day after St. Pat’s.

As I started to fight my way through the mass in search of Maggie McPherson, the required “Danny Boy” started blaring from a jukebox somewhere in the back. But it was a punk rock version from the early eighties and its driving beat obliterated any chance I had of hearing anything when I saw familiar faces and said hello or asked if they had seen my ex-wife. The small snippets of conversation I overheard as I pushed through seemed to all be about Robert Blake and the stunning verdict handed down the day before.

I ran into Robert Gillen in the crowd. The cameraman reached into his pocket and pulled out four crisp hundred-dollar bills and