The Reversal
Tuesday, February 9, 1:43 P.M.
The last time I'd eaten at the Water Grill I sat across the table from a client who had coldly and calculatedly murdered his wife and her lover, shooting both of them in the face. He had engaged my services to not only defend him at trial but fully exonerate him and restore his good name in the public eye. This time I was sitting with someone with whom I needed to be even more careful. I was dining with Gabriel Williams, the district attorney of Los Angeles County.
It was a crisp afternoon in midwinter. I sat with Williams and his trusted chief of staff -- read political advisor -- Joe Ridell. The meal had been set for 1:30 P.M., when most courthouse lawyers would be safely back in the CCB, and the DA would not be advertising his dalliance with a member of the dark side. Meaning me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned.
The Water Grill was a nice place for a downtown lunch. Good food and atmosphere, good separation between tables for private conversation, and a wine list hard to top in all of downtown. It was the kind of place where you kept your suit jacket on and the waiter put a black napkin across your lap so you needn't be bothered with doing it yourself. The prosecution team ordered martinis at the county taxpayers' expense and I stuck with the free water the restaurant was pouring. It took Williams two gulps of gin and one olive before he got to the reason we were hiding in plain sight.
"Mickey, I have a proposition for you."
I nodded. Ridell had already said as much when he had called that morning to set up the lunch. I had agreed to the meet and then had gone to work on the phone myself, trying to gather any inside information I could on what the proposition would be. Not even my first ex-wife, who worked in the district attorney's employ, knew what was up.
"I'm all ears," I said. "It's not every day that the DA himself wants to give you a proposition. I know it can't be in regard to any of my clients -- they wouldn't merit much attention from the guy at the top. And at the moment I'm only carrying a few cases anyway. Times are slow."
"Well, you're right," Williams said. "This is not about any of your clients. I have a case I would like you to take on."
I nodded again. I understood now. They all hate the defense attorney until they need the defense attorney. I didn't know if Williams had any children but he would have known through due diligence that I didn't do juvy work. So I was guessing it had to be his wife. Probably a shoplifting grab or a DUI he was trying to keep under wraps.
"Who got popped?" I asked.
Williams looked at Ridell and they shared a smile.
"No, nothing like that," Williams said. "My proposition is this. I would like to hire you, Mickey. I want you to come work at the DA's office."
Of all the ideas that had been rattling around in my head since I had taken Ridell's call, being hired as a prosecutor wasn't one of them. I'd been a card-carrying member of the criminal defense bar for more than twenty years. During that time I'd grown a suspicion and distrust of prosecutors and police that might not have equaled that of the gangbangers down in Nickerson Gardens but was at least at a level that would seem to exclude me from ever joining their ranks. Plain and simple, they wouldn't want me and I wouldn't want them. Except for that ex-wife I mentioned and a half brother who was an LAPD detective, I wouldn't turn my back on any of them. Especially Williams. He was a politician first and a prosecutor second. That made him even more dangerous. Though briefly a prosecutor early in his legal career, he spent two decades as a civil rights attorney before running for the DA post as an outsider and riding into office on a tide of anti-police and -prosecutor sentiment. I was employing full caution at the fancy lunch from the moment the napkin went across my lap.
Monday, April 5, 4:45P.M.
Bosch knocked on the door of room 804 and looked directly at the peephole. The door was quickly opened by McPherson, who was checking her watch as she stood back to let him enter.
"Why aren't you in court with Mickey?" she asked.
Bosch entered. The room was a suite with a decent view of Grand Avenue and the back of the Biltmore. There was a couch and two chairs, one of them occupied by Sarah Ann Gleason. Bosch nodded his hello.
"Because he doesn't need me there. I'm needed here."
"What's going on?"
"Royce tipped his hand on the defense's case. I need to talk to Sarah about it."
He started toward the couch but McPherson put her hand on his arm and stopped him.
"Wait a minute. Before you talk to Sarah you talk to me. What's going on?"
Bosch nodded. She was right. He looked around but there was no place for private conversation in the suite.
"Let's take a walk."
McPherson went to the coffee table and grabbed a key card.
"We'll be right back, Sarah. Do you need anything?"
"No, I'm fine. I'll be here."
She held up a sketchpad. It would keep her company.
Bosch and McPherson left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby. There was a bar crowded with pre - happy hour drinkers but they found a private spot in a sitting area by the front door.
"Okay, how did Royce tip his hand?" McPherson asked.
"When he was cross-examining Eisenbach, he riffed off of Mickey's question about the killer using only his right hand to choke her."
"Right, while he was driving. He panicked when he heard the call on the police radio and killed her."
"Right, that's the prosecution theory. Well, Royce is already setting up a defense theory. On cross he asked whether it was possible that the killer was choking her with one hand while masturbating with the other."
She was silent as she computed this.
"This is the old prosecution theory," she said. "From the first trial. That it was murder in the commission of a sex act. Mickey and I sort of figured that once Royce got all the discovery material and learned that the DNA came from the stepfather, the defense would play it this way. They're setting up the stepfather as the straw man. They'll say he killed her and the DNA proves it."
McPherson folded her arms as she worked it out further.
"It's good but there are two things wrong with it. Sarah and the hair evidence. So we're missing something. Royce has got to have something or someone who discredits Sarah's ID."
"That's why I'm here. I brought Royce's witness list. These people have been playing hide-and-seek with me and I haven't run them all down. Sarah's got to look at this list and tell me which one I need to focus on."
"How the hell will she know?"
"She's got to. These are her people. Boyfriends, husbands, fellow tweakers. All of them have records. They're the people she hung out with before she got straight. Every address is a last-known and worthless. Royce has got to be hiding them."
McPherson nodded.
"That's why they call him Clever Clive. Okay, let's talk to her. Let me try first, okay?"
She stood up.
"Wait a minute," Bosch said.
She looked at him.
"What is it?"
"What if the defense theory is the right one?"
"Are you kidding me?"
He didn't answer and she didn't wait long. She headed back toward the elevator. He got up and followed.
They went back to the room. Bosch noticed that Gleason had sketched a tulip on her pad while they had been gone. He sat down on the couch across from her, and McPherson took the chair right next to her.
"Sarah," McPherson said. "We need to talk. We think that somebody you used to know during those lost years we were talking about is going to try to help the defense. We need to figure out who it is and what they are going to say."
Bosch nodded because there was nothing else to say. He shook the bag with the charm bracelet again and worked it with his fingers, removing more dirt from its surfaces. He then held it up to study closely and I could tell he saw something.
"What is it?"
His face changed. He was keying on one of the charms, rubbing dirt off it through the plastic bag. He then handed it to me.
"Take a look. What is that?"
The charm was still tarnished and dirty. It was a square piece of silver less than a half inch wide. On one side there was a tiny swivel at center and on the other what looked like a bowl or a cup.
"Looks like a teacup on a square plate," I suggested. "I don't know."
"No, turn it over. That's the bottom."
I did and I saw what he saw.
"It's one of those &hellip; a mortarboard. A graduation cap and this swivel on the top was for the tassel."
"Yeah. The tassel's missing, probably still in the dirt."
"Okay, so what's it mean?"
Bosch sat back down and quickly started looking through the files.
"You don't remember? The first girl I showed you and Maggie. Valerie Schlicter. She disappeared a month after graduating from Riverside High."
"Okay, so you think &hellip; "
Bosch found the file and opened it. It was thin. There were three photos of Valerie Schlicter, including one of her in her graduation cap and gown. He quickly scanned the few documents that were in the file.
"Nothing here about a charm bracelet," he said.
"Because it probably wasn't hers," I said. "This is a long shot, don't you think?"
He acted as though I had said nothing, his mind shutting out any opposing response.
"I'm going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who's still around and can look at this thing."
"Harry, you sure you -- "
"You think I have a choice?"
He stood back up, took the evidence bag back from me and gathered up the files. I could almost hear the adrenaline buzzing through his veins. A dog with a bone. It was time for Bosch to go. He had a long shot in his hand but it was better than no shot. It would keep him moving.
I got up, too, and followed him to the excavation. He told Kohl that he had to go check out the bracelet. He told her to call him if anything else was found in the hole.
We moved to the gravel parking lot, Bosch walking quickly and not looking back to see if I was still with him. We had driven separately to the dig.
"Hey," I called to him. "Wait up!"
He stopped in the middle of the lot.
"What?"
"Technically, I'm still the prosecutor assigned to Jessup. So before you go rushing off, tell me what the thinking is here. He buried the bracelet here but not her? Does that even make sense?"
"Nothing makes sense until I ID the bracelet. If somebody tells me it was hers, then we try to figure it out. Remember, when Jessup was up here, we couldn't get close to him. It was too risky. So we don't know exactly what he was doing. He could've been looking for this."
"Okay, I can maybe see that."
"I gotta go."
He continued on to his car. It was parked next to my Lincoln. I called after him.
"Let me know, okay?"
He looked back at me when he got to his car.