And I was feeling bruised because I knew that I, too, was guilty. I could not stop thinking about Rilz’s father and brothers, about what they had told Golantz about their decision to go home. They were not waiting to see the verdict if it first meant seeing their dead loved one dragged through the sewers of the American justice system. I had spent the good part of twenty years defending guilty and sometimes evil men. I had always been able to accept that and deal with it. But I didn’t feel very good about myself or the work that I would perform the next day.
It was in these moments that I felt the strongest desire to return to old ways. To find that distance again. To take the pill for the physical pain that I knew would numb me to the internal pain. It was in these moments that I realized that I had my own jury to face and that the coming verdict was guilty, that there would be no more cases after this one.
I went outside to the deck, hoping the city could pull me out of the abyss into which I had fallen. The night was cool and crisp and clear. Los Angeles spread out in front of me in a carpet of lights, each one a verdict on a dream somewhere. Some people lived the dream and some didn’t. Some people cashed in their dreams a dime on the dollar and some kept them close and as sacred as the night. I wasn’t sure if I even had a dream left. I felt like I only had sins to confess.
After a while a memory washed over me and somehow I smiled. It was one of my last clear memories of my father, the greatest lawyer of his time. An antique glass ball—an heirloom from Mexico passed down through my mother’s family—had been found broken beneath the Christmas tree. My mother brought me to the living room to view the damage and to give me the chance to confess my guilt. By then my father was sick and wasn’t going to get better. He had moved his work—what was left of it—home to the study next to the living room. I didn’t see him through the open door but from that room I heard his voice in a sing-song nursery rhyme.
In a pickle, take the nickel…
I knew what it meant. Even at five years old I was my father’s son in blood and the law. I refused to answer my mother’s questions. I refused to incriminate myself.
Now I laughed out loud as I looked at the city of dreams. I leaned down, elbows on the railing, and bowed my head.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I whispered to myself.
The song of the Lone Ranger suddenly burst from the open door behind me. I stepped back inside and looked at the cell phone left on the table with my keys. The screen said private number. I hesitated, knowing exactly how long the song would play before the call went to message.
At the last moment I took the call.
“Is this Michael Haller, the lawyer?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“This is Los Angeles police officer Randall Morris. Do you know an individual named Elaine Ross, sir?”
I felt a fist grip my guts.
“Lanie? Yes. What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Uh, sir, I have Miss Ross up here on Mulholland Drive and she shouldn’t be driving. In fact, she sort of passed out after she handed me your card.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. The call seemed to confirm my fears about Lanie Ross. She had fallen back. An arrest would put her back into the system and probably cost her another stay in jail and rehab.
“Which jail are you taking her to?” I asked.
“I gotta be honest, Mr. Haller. I’m code seven in twenty minutes. If I take her down to book her, I’m looking at two more hours and I’m tapped on my overtime allowance this month. I was going to say, if you can come get her or send somebody for her, I’m willing to give her the break. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do. Thank you, Officer Morris. I’ll come get her if you give me the address.”
“You know where the overlook is above Fryman Canyon?”
“Yes, I do.”
“We’re right here. Make it quick.”
“I’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes.”
Fryman Canyon was only a few blocks from the converted garage guesthouse where a friend allowed Lanie to live rent free. I could get her home, walk back to the park, and retrieve her car afterward. It would take me less than an hour and it would keep Lanie out of jail and her car out of the tow lot.
I left the house and drove Laurel Canyon up the hill to Mulholland. When I reached the top, I took a left and headed west. I lowered the windows and let the cool air in as I felt the first pulls of fatigue from the day grab me. I followed the serpentine road for half a mile, slowing once when my headlights washed across a scruffy coyote standing vigil on the side of the road.
My cell phone buzzed as I had been expecting it to.
“What took you so long to call, Bosch?” I said by way of a greeting.
“I’ve been calling but there’s no cell coverage in the canyon,” Bosch said. “Is this some kind of test? Where the hell are you going? You called and said you were done for the night.”
“I got a call. A… client of mine got busted on a deuce up here. The cop’s giving her a break if I drive her home.”
“From where?”
“The Fryman Canyon overlook. I’m almost there.”
“Who was the cop?”
“Randall Morris. He didn’t say whether he was Hollywood or North Hollywood.”
Mulholland was a boundary between the two police divisions. Morris could work out of either one.
“Okay, pull over until I can check it out.”
“Pull over? Where?”
Mulholland was a winding two-lane road with no pull-over spots except for the overlooks. If you pulled over anywhere else, you would get plowed into by the next car to come around the bend.
“Then, slow down.”
“I’m already here.”
The Fryman Canyon overlook was on the Valley side. I took a right to turn in and drove right by the sign that said that the parking area was closed after sunset.
I didn’t see Lanie’s car or a police cruiser. The parking area was empty. I checked my watch. It had been only twelve minutes since I had told Officer Morris that I would be there in less than fifteen.
“Damn!”
“What?” Bosch asked.
I hit the heel of my palm on the steering wheel. Morris hadn’t waited. He’d gone ahead and taken Lanie to jail.
“What?” Bosch repeated.
“She’s not here,” I said. “And neither is the cop. He took her to jail.”
I would now have to figure out which station Lanie had been transported to and probably spend the rest of the night arranging bail and getting her home. I’d be wrecked in court the next day.
I put the car in park and got out and looked around. The lights of the Valley spread out below the precipice for miles and miles.
“Bosch, I gotta go. I have to try to find—”
I saw movement in my peripheral vision to the left. I turned and saw a crouching figure coming out of the tall brush next to the parking clearing. At first I thought coyote but then I saw that it was a man. He was dressed in black and a ski mask was pulled down over his face. As he straightened from the crouch, I saw that he was raising a gun at me.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What is—”
“Drop the fucking phone!”
I dropped the phone and raised my hands.
“Okay, okay, what is this? Are you with Bosch?”
The man moved quickly toward me and shoved me backwards. I stumbled to the ground and then felt him grab the back of my jacket’s collar.
“Get up!”
“What is—?”
“Get up! Now!”
He started pulling me up.
“Okay, okay. I’m getting up.”
The moment I was on my feet I was shoved forward and crossed through the lights at the front of my car.
“Where are we going? What is—?”
I was shoved again.
“Who are you? Why are you—?”
“You ask too many questions, lawyer.”
He grabbed the b
ack of my collar and shoved me toward the precipice. I knew it was almost a sheer drop-off at the edge. I was going to end up in somebody’s backyard hot tub—after a three-hundred-foot high dive.
I tried to dig my heels in and slow my forward momentum but that resulted in an even harder shove. I had velocity now and the man in the mask was going to run me off the edge into the blackness of the abyss.
“You can’t—”
Suddenly there was a shot. Not from behind me. But from the right and from a distance. Almost simultaneously, there was a metal snapping sound from behind me and the man in the mask yelped and fell into the brush to the left.
Then came voices and shouting.
“Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon!”
“Get on the ground! Get down on the ground!”
I dove facedown to the dirt at the edge of the precipice and put my hands over my head for protection. I heard more yelling and the sound of running. I heard engines roaring and vehicles crunching across the gravel. When I opened my eyes, I saw blue lights flashing in repeated patterns off the dirt and brush. Blue lights meant cops. It meant I was safe.
“Counselor,” a voice said from above me. “You can get up now.”
I craned my neck to look up. It was Bosch, his shadowed face silhouetted by the stars above him.
“You cut that one pretty close,” he said.
Fifty-two
The man in the black mask groaned in pain as they cuffed his hands behind his back.
“My hand! Jesus, you assholes, my hand is broken!”
I climbed to my feet and saw several men in black windbreakers moving about like ants on a hill. Some of the plastic raid jackets said LAPD on them but most had FBI printed across the back. Soon a helicopter came overhead and lit the entire parking clearing with a spotlight.
Bosch stepped over to the FBI agents huddling over the man in the mask.
“Was he hit?” he asked.
“There is no wound,” an agent said. “The round must have hit the gun, but that still hurts like a son of a bitch.”
“Where is the gun?”
“We’re still looking,” the agent said.
“It may have gone over the side,” another agent said.
“If we don’t find it tonight, we find it in daylight,” said a third.
They pulled the man up into a standing position. Two of the FBI agents stood on either side of him, holding him at the elbows.
“Let’s see who we’ve got,” Bosch said.
The ski mask was unceremoniously yanked off and a flashlight was aimed point-blank at the man’s face. Bosch turned and looked back at me.
“Juror number seven,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Juror number seven from the trial. He didn’t show up today and the Sheriff’s Department was looking for him.”
Bosch turned back to the man I knew was named David McSweeney.
“Hold him right there.”
He then turned and signaled to me to follow him. He walked out of the circle of activity and into the parking clearing near my car. He stopped and turned back to me. But I got my question in first.
“What just happened?”
“What just happened was we just saved your life. He was going to push you over the side.”
“I know that, but what happened? Where did you and everybody else come from? You said you would let people go at night after I was tucked in. Where did all of these cops come from? And what’s the FBI doing here?”
“Things were different tonight. Things happened.”
“What things happened? What changed?”
“We can go over that later. Let’s talk about what we’ve got here first.”
“I don’t know what we’ve got here.”
“Tell me about juror number seven. Why didn’t he show up today?”
“Well, you should probably ask him that. All I can tell you is that this morning the judge called us into chambers and said he got an anonymous letter saying number seven was a phony and he lied about having a record. The judge planned to question him but he didn’t show up. The sheriffs were sent to his house and his job and they brought back a guy who wasn’t juror number seven.”
Bosch raised his hand like a traffic cop.
“Hold on, hold on. You’re not making sense. I know you just had a scare but—”
He stopped when one of the men in an LAPD jacket came over to address him.
“You want us to call paramedics? He says he thinks his hand is broken.”
“No, just hold him there. We’ll have him checked after we book him.”
“You sure?”
“Fuck him.”
The man nodded and went back to the spot where they were holding McSweeney.
“Yeah, fuck him,” I said.
“Why did he want to kill you?” Bosch asked.
I raised my empty hands.
“I don’t know. Maybe because of the story we planted. Wasn’t that the plan, to draw him out?”
“I think you’re holding out on me, Haller.”
“Look, I’ve told you what I could tell you all along. You’re the one holding out and playing games. What’s the FBI doing here?”
“They’ve been in it from the start.”
“Right, and you just forgot to tell me.”
“I told you what you needed to know.”
“Well, I need to know it all now or my cooperation with you ends now. That includes being any sort of witness against that man over there.”
I waited a moment and he said nothing. I turned to walk toward my car and Bosch put his hand on my arm. He smiled in frustration and shook his head.
“Come on, man, cool your jets. Don’t be throwing empty threats around.”
“You think it’s an empty threat? Why don’t we see how empty it is when I start stringing out the federal grand jury subpoena I know is going to come out of this. I can argue client confidentiality all the way to the Supreme Court—I bet that will only take about two years—and your new-found pals over in the bureau are going to wish you had just come clean with me when you had the chance.”
Bosch thought a moment and pulled me by the arm.
“All right, tough guy, come over here.”
We walked to a spot in the parking area even further from the law enforcement ant hill. Bosch started to talk.
“The bureau contacted me a few days after the Vincent murder and said that he had been a person of interest to them. That’s all. A person of interest. He was one of the lawyers whose names came up in their look at the state courts. Nothing specific, just based on rumors, things he had supposedly told clients he could get done, connections he claimed to have, that sort of thing. They’d drawn up a list of lawyers they heard might be bent and Vincent was on it. They invited him in as a cooperating witness and he declined. They were increasing the pressure on him when he got hit.”
“So they tell you all of this and you join forces. Isn’t that wonderful? Thanks for telling me.”
“Like I said, you didn’t need to know.”
A man in an FBI jacket crossed the parking area behind Bosch, and his face was momentarily lit from above. He looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. But then I imagined a mustache on him.
“Hey, there’s the asshole you sent after me the other night,” I said loud enough for the passing agent to hear. “He’s lucky I didn’t put a bullet in his face at the door.”
Bosch put his hands on my chest and pushed me back a few steps.
“Calm down, Counselor. If it weren’t for the bureau, I wouldn’t have had the manpower to keep the watch on you. And right now you could be lying down there at the bottom of the mountain.”
I pushed his hands off me but settled down. My anger dissipated as I accepted the reality of what Bosch had just said. And the reality that I had been used as a pawn from the beginning. By my client and now by Bosch and the FBI. Bosch took the moment to signal over another agent, who was stand
ing nearby watching.
“This is Agent Armstead. He’s been running the bureau’s side of things and he’s got some questions for you.”
“Why not?” I said. “Nobody answers mine. I might as well answer yours.”
Armstead was a young, clean-cut agent with a precision military haircut.
“Mr. Haller, we’ll get to your questions as soon as we can,” he said. “Right now we have a fluid situation here and your cooperation will be greatly appreciated. Is juror number seven the man Vincent paid the bribe to?”
I looked at Bosch with a “who is this guy?” expression.
“Man, how would I know that? I wasn’t part of this thing. You want an answer to that, go ask him.”
“Don’t worry. We will be asking him a lot of questions. What were you doing up here, Mr. Haller?”
“I told you people. I told Bosch. I got a call from somebody who said he was a cop. He said he had a woman I know personally up here and she was under the influence and that I could come up and drive her home and save her the trouble of getting booked on a deuce.”
“We checked that name you gave me on the phone,” Bosch said. “There is one Randall Morris in the department. He’s on gang detail in South Bureau.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, well, I think it’s pretty clear now that it was a fake call. But he knew my friend’s name and he had my cell. It seemed convincing at the time, all right?”
“How did he get the woman’s name?” Armstead asked.
“Good question. I had a relationship with her—a platonic relationship—but I haven’t talked to her in almost a month.”
“Then, how would he know about her?”
“Man, you’re asking me shit I don’t know. Go ask McSweeney.”
I immediately realized I had slipped up. I wouldn’t know that name unless I had been investigating juror number seven.
Bosch looked at me curiously. I didn’t know if he realized the jury was supposed to be anonymous, even to the lawyers on the case. Before he could come up with a question, I was saved by someone yelling from the brush where I had almost been pushed over the side.