today. I’ll drop out and he can go with a PD. I’ll turn everything I have over. But the PD probably won’t have the budget to fly in the photo expert.”
Vogel shifted his position on the window sill and the car shuddered under the weight.
“No, no, we want you. Hard Case is important to us, you know what I mean? I want him out and back to work.”
I watched him reach inside his vest with a hand that was so fleshy that the knuckles were indented. It came out with a thick envelope that he passed into the car to me.
“Is this cash?” I asked.
“That’s right. What’s wrong with cash?”
“Nothing. But I have to give you a receipt. It’s an IRS reporting requirement. This is the whole ten?”
“It’s all there.”
I took the top off of a cardboard file box I keep on the seat next to me. My receipt book was behind the current case files. I started writing out the receipt. Most lawyers who get disbarred go down because of financial violations. The mishandling or misappropriation of client fees. I kept meticulous records and receipts. I would never let the bar get to me that way.
“So you had it all along,” I said as I wrote. “What if I had backed down to five? What would you have done then?”
Vogel smiled. He was missing one of his front teeth on the bottom. Had to have been a fight at the club. He patted the other side of his vest.
“I got another envelope with five in it right here, Counselor,” he said. “I was ready for you.”
“Damn, now I feel bad, leaving you with money in your pocket.”
I tore out his copy of the receipt and handed it out the window.
“I receipted it to Casey. He’s the client.”
“Fine with me.”
He took the receipt and dropped his arm off the window sill as he stood up straight. The car returned to a normal level. I wanted to ask him where the money came from, which of the Saints’ criminal enterprises had earned it, whether a hundred girls had danced a hundred hours for him to pay me, but that was a question I was better off not knowing the answer to. I watched Vogel saunter back to his Harley and struggle to swing a trash can-thick leg over the seat. For the first time I noticed the double shocks on the back wheel. I told Earl to get back on the freeway and get going to Van Nuys, where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.
As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey. I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson. I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal. Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints. His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.
“Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.
“What, Earl?”
“That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”
I shook my head.
“There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”
Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.
“I see,” he said, nodding again.
And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said. That was my job. That was how it worked. After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.
There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.