The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,88
in the fourth inning the wheels came off and the Giants chased Jeff Weaver with a three-run shot over the centerfield wall. I used the downtime during the pitching change to brag about how fast I had heard from the Second on the Casey case. The other lawyers were impressed, though one of them, Dan Daly, suggested that I had only received the quick appellate review because the three judges were on my Christmas list. I remarked to Daly that he had apparently missed the bar memo regarding juries’ distrust of lawyers with ponytails. His went halfway down his back.
It was also during this lull in the game that I heard my phone ringing. I grabbed it off my hip and flipped it open without looking at the screen.
“Raul?”
“No, sir, this is Detective Lankford with the Glendale Police Department. Is this Michael Haller?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you have a moment?”
“I have a moment but I am not sure how well I’ll be able to hear you. I’m at the Dodgers game. Can this wait until I can call you back?”
“No, sir, it can’t. Do you know a man named Raul Aaron Levin? He’s a —”
“Yes, I know him. What’s wrong?”
“I’m afraid Mr. Levin is dead, sir. He’s been the victim of a homicide in his home.”
My head dropped so low and so forward that I banged it into the back of the man seated in front of me. I then pulled back and held one hand to one ear and pressed the phone against the other. I blanked out everything around me.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know,” Lankford said. “That’s why we are here. It looks like he was working for you recently. Is there any chance you could come here to possibly answer some questions and assist us?”
I blew out my breath and tried to keep my voice calm and modulated.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
TWENTY-THREE
Raul Levin’s body was in the back room of his bungalow a few blocks off of Brand Boulevard. The room had likely been designed as a sunroom or maybe a TV room but Raul had turned it into his home office. Like me he’d had no need for a commercial space. His was not a walk-in business. He wasn’t even in the yellow pages. He worked for attorneys and got jobs by word of mouth. The five lawyers that were to join him at the baseball game were testimony to his skill and success.
The uniformed cops who had been told to expect me made me wait in the front living room until the detectives could come from the back and talk to me. A uniformed officer stood by in the hallway in case I decided to make a mad dash for the back room or the front door. He was in position to handle it either way. I sat there waiting and thinking about my friend.
I had decided on the drive from the stadium that I knew who had killed Raul Levin. I didn’t need to be led to the back room to see or hear the evidence to know who the killer was. Deep down I knew that Raul had gotten too close to Louis Roulet. And I was the one who had sent him. The only question left for me was what was I going to do about it.
After twenty minutes two detectives came from the back of the house and into the living room. I stood up and we talked while standing. The man identified himself as Lankford, the detective who had called me. He was older, the veteran. His partner was a woman named Sobel. She didn’t look like she had been investigating homicides for very long.
We didn’t shake hands. They were wearing rubber gloves. They also had paper booties over their shoes. Lankford was chewing gum.
“Okay, this is what we’ve got,” he said gruffly. “Levin was in his office, sitting in his desk chair. The chair was turned from the desk, so he was facing the intruder. He was shot one time in the chest. Something small, looks like a twenty-two to me but we’ll wait on the coroner for that.”
Lankford tapped his chest dead center. I could hear the hard sound of a bullet-proof vest beneath his shirt.
I corrected him. He had pronounced the name here and on the phone earlier as Levine. I said the name rhymed with heaven.
“Levin, then,” he said, getting it right. “Anyway, after the shot, he tried to get up or just fell forward to the