The Crossing

  Haller walked back to his chair and sat down. His client gave no indication that he had listened and understood the argument.

  “Mr. Wright?” the judge said.

  The prosecutor stood and reluctantly approached the lectern. Bosch had no law degree but he did have a solid working knowledge of the law. It was clear to him that the case against Hennegan was in trouble.

  “Your Honor,” Wright began. “Every day of the week police officers have what we call citizen encounters, some of which lead to arrest. As the Supreme Court says in Terry, ‘Not all personal intercourse between police officers and citizens involves seizure of persons.’ This was a citizen encounter—the intention of which was to reward good behavior. What turned this in a new direction and provided the probable cause for the actions of the officers was the passenger fleeing the defendant’s vehicle. That was the game changer.”

  Wright checked the notes on the yellow pad he had brought with him to the lectern. He found the string and continued.

  “The defendant is a drug dealer. The good intentions of these officers should not preclude this case’s going forward. The court has wide discretion in this area and Officer Sanchez and his partner should not be penalized for carrying out their duty to the fullest.”

  Wright sat down. Bosch knew his argument had been tantamount to throwing himself on the mercy of the court. Haller stood up to respond.

  “Your Honor, if I could make one point. Mr. Wright is Mr. Wrong here. He quoted from Terry but left out that when an officer, by means of physical force or show of authority, restrains a citizen, then a seizure has occurred. He seems to have a slide rule with which he likes to move the point of seizure vis-à-vis probable cause. He says there was no seizure until the passenger jumped from Mr. Hennegan’s car and probable cause arose. But that logic does not work, Your Honor. Through the siren and lights on his car, Officer Sanchez forced Mr. Hennegan’s car to the side of the road. And for an arrest of any kind to transpire, there had to be probable cause for that stop. Citizens are free to travel and move about unimpeded in this country. Forcing a citizen to stop and chat is a seizure and a violation of the right to be left alone to lawful pursuits. The bottom line is, a turkey ticket is not probable cause. It is this case that is the turkey, Your Honor. Thank you.”

  Proud of his last turn of phrase, Haller returned to his seat. Wright did not get back up to throw out the last word. His argument, what there was of it, had been submitted.

  Judge Yerrid leaned forward once again and cleared his voice right into the bench’s microphone, creating a loud blast in the courtroom. Hennegan sat bolt upright, revealing that he had in fact been sleeping through the hearing that might decide his freedom.

  “Excuse me,” Yerrid said after the ringing sound receded. “Having heard the testimony and the arguments, the court grants the motion to suppress. The evidence found in the trunk of—”

  “Your Honor!” Wright shouted as he jumped up from his seat. “Clarification.”

  He held his hands out wide as if he were surprised by a ruling he certainly had to have known was coming.

  “Your Honor, the state has no case without the evidence from the trunk of that vehicle. You are saying the drugs and the money are tossed?”

  “That’s exactly what I am saying, Mr. Wright. There was no probable cause to make the stop. As Mr. Haller stated, fruit of the poisonous tree.”

  Wright now pointed directly at Hennegan.

  “Your Honor, the man is a drug dealer. He is part of the plague on our city and society. You are putting him back out on—”

  “Mr. Wright!” the judge barked into his microphone. “Do not blame the court for the failings of your case.”

  “The state will be filing a notice of appeal within twenty-four hours.”

  “It is the state’s right to do so. I will be most interested in seeing if you can make the Fourth Amendment disappear.”

  Wright dropped his chin to his chest. Haller took the moment to stand and pour salt on the prosecutor’s wounds.

  “Your Honor, I would like to make a motion to dismiss the charges against my client. There is no longer any evidence in support of the filing.”

  Yerrid nodded. He knew this was coming. He decided to grant Wright a small dose of mercy.

  “I am going to take that under advisement, Mr. Haller, and see if the state actually does file an appeal. Anything else from counsel?”

  “No, Your Honor,” Wright said.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Haller said. “My client is currently incarcerated in lieu of half a million dollars’ bail. I ask that he be released on recognizance pending appeal or dismissal.”

  “The state objects,” Wright said. “This man’s partner ran. There is no indication Hennegan won’t do the same. As I said, we will be appealing this ruling and returning to prosecute the case.”

  “So you say,” the judge said. “I am going to take consideration of bail under advisement as well. Let’s see what the state does after considering the case further. Mr. Haller, you can always request a rehearing on your motions if the District Attorney’s Office moves too slowly.”

  Yerrid was telling Wright not to sit on this or he would take action.

  “Now if there is nothing else, we’re adjourned here,” the judge said.

  Yerrid paused a moment to see if there was anything else from the lawyers, then stood up and left the bench. He disappeared through the door behind the clerk’s desk.

  Bosch watched Haller clap Hennegan on the shoulder and lean down to explain to his client the great victory he had just won. Bosch knew the rulings didn’t mean that Hennegan would immediately waltz out of the courtroom or the county jail. Not even close. Now the dealing would begin. The case was no doubt a wounded duck that couldn’t fly. But as long as Hennegan was being held in jail, the prosecutor still had some leverage in negotiating an end to the case. Wright could offer a lesser offense in exchange for a guilty plea. Hennegan would end up looking at months instead of years and the D.A. would still get a conviction.

  Bosch knew that was how it worked. The law could bend. If there were lawyers involved, then there was always a deal to be made. The judge knew this, too. He had been faced with an untenable situation. Everyone in the courtroom knew that Hennegan was a drug dealer. But the arrest was bad and therefore the evidence tainted. By keeping Hennegan in county lockup he was allowing a resolution to be worked out that might prevent a drug dealer from walking away. Wright quickly packed his briefcase and turned to leave. As he headed toward the gate, he glanced at Haller and said he would be in touch.

  Haller nodded back, and that was when he noticed Bosch for the first time. He quickly finished conferring with his client as the courtroom deputy came over to take Hennegan back to lockup.

  Soon afterward, Haller came through the gate to where Bosch sat waiting.

  “How much of that did you catch?” he asked.

  “Enough,” Bosch said. “I heard ‘Mr. Wright is Mr. Wrong.’”

  Haller’s smile went wide.

  “I’ve been waiting years to get that guy on a case and be able to say that.”

  “I guess I should say congratulations.”

  Haller nodded.

  “Tell you the truth, that doesn’t happen too often. I can probably count on my two hands how many times I’ve prevailed on a motion to suppress.”

  “You tell your client that?”

  “Somehow the subtleties of the law are lost on him. He just wants to know when he’s getting out.”

  3

  They ate at Traxx in Union Station. It was a nice place that was courthouse close and favored at lunchtime by judges and lawyers. The waitress knew Haller and she didn’t bother giving him a menu. He simply ordered the usual. Bosch took a quick look and ordered a hamburger and French fries, which seemed to disappoint Haller.

  On the walk over they had talked about family matters. Bosch and Haller were half brothers and had daughters the same age. In fact, the girls were plann
ing to room together in September at Chapman University down in Orange County. Both had applied to the school without knowing the other’s intention until they celebrated their acceptance letters on the same day on Facebook. From there their plan to be roommates quickly formed. The fathers were happy about this because they knew they would be able to pool their efforts to monitor the girls’ well-being and adjustment to college life.

  Now as they sat at the table with a window that looked out on the train station’s cavernous waiting room, it was time to get down to business. Bosch was expecting an update on the case Haller was handling for him. The previous year Bosch had been suspended from the LAPD on a trumped-up beef when he had picked the lock on a captain’s office door so he could look at old police records connected to a murder investigation he was actively working. It was a Sunday and Bosch didn’t want to have to wait for the captain to come in the next day. The infraction was minor but could have been the first step in the firing process.

  More important, to Bosch it was a suspension without pay that also halted payments to his Deferred Retirement Option Plan. That meant he had no salary and no access to his DROP funds while he fought the suspension and took it to a Board of Rights—a process that would take a minimum of six months, pushing him past his retirement date anyway. With no money coming in to cover living expenses and college around the corner for his daughter, Bosch retired so he could access his retirement and DROP funds. He then hired Haller to file a lawsuit against the city, charging that the police department had engaged in unlawful tactics to force him into pulling the pin.

  Because Haller had requested a meeting in person, Bosch expected that the news would not be good. Previously Haller had given him updates on the case by phone. Bosch knew something was up.

  He decided to put off discussing his case by going back to the hearing that had just ended.

  “So I guess you’re pretty proud of yourself, getting that drug dealer off,” he said.

  “You know as well as I do that he’s not going anywhere,” Haller responded. “The judge had no choice. Now the D.A. will deal it down and my guy will still do some time.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “But the cash in the trunk,” he said. “I bet that goes back to him. What’s your piece on that? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Fifty K, plus I get the car,” Haller said. “He won’t need it in jail. I got a guy handles that stuff. A liquidator. I’ll get another couple grand out of the car.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Not bad if I can get it. Need to pay the bills. Hennegan hired me because he knew my name from a bus bench right there at Florence and Normandie. He saw it from the backseat of the cruiser they put him in and he memorized the phone number. I’ve got sixty of those benches around town and that costs money. Gotta keep gas in the tank, Harry.”

  Bosch had insisted on paying Haller for his work on the lawsuit, but it wasn’t anything as stratospheric as the potential Hennegan payday. Haller had even been able to keep costs down on the lawsuit by having an associate handle most of the non-courtroom work. He called it his law enforcement discount.

  “Speaking of cash, you see how much Chapman is going to cost us?” Haller asked.

  Bosch nodded.

  “It’s steep,” he said. “I made less than that the first ten years I was a cop. But Maddie’s got a couple scholarships. How’d Hayley do on those?”

  “She did all right. It certainly helps.”

  Bosch nodded and it seemed as though they had covered everything but the thing the meeting was about.

  “So, I guess you can give me the bad news now,” he said. “Before the food gets here.”

  “What bad news?” Haller asked.

  “I don’t know. But this is the first time you called me in for an update on things. I figure it’s not looking good.”

  Haller shook his head.

  “Oh, I’m not going to even talk about the LAPD thing. That case is chugging along and we still have them in the corner. I wanted to talk about something else. I want to hire you, Harry.”

  “Hire me. What do you mean?”

  “You know I have the Lexi Parks case, right? I’m defending Da’Quan Foster?”

  Bosch was thrown by the unexpected turn in the conversation.

  “Uh, yeah, you’ve got Foster. What’s it have to do—”

  “Well, Harry, I’ve got the trial coming up in six weeks and I don’t have jack shit for a defense. He didn’t do it, man, and he is in the process of being totally fucked by our wonderful legal system. He’s going to go down for her murder if I don’t do something. I want to hire you to work it for me.”

  Haller leaned across the table with urgency. Bosch involuntarily leaned back from him. He still felt as though he were the only guy in the restaurant who didn’t know what was going on. Since his retirement he had pretty much dropped out of having day-to-day knowledge of things going on in the city. The names Lexi Parks and Da’Quan Foster were on the periphery of his awareness. He knew it was a case and he knew it was big. But for the past six months he had tried to stay away from newspaper stories and TV reports that might remind him of the mission he had carried for nearly thirty years—catching killers. He had gone so far as to start a long-planned-but-never-realized restoration project on an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle that had been gathering dust and rust in his carport shed for almost twenty years.

  “But you’ve already got an investigator,” he said. “That big guy with the big arms. The biker.”

  “Yeah, Cisco, except Cisco’s on the DL and he’s not up to handling a case like this,” Haller said. “I catch a murder case maybe once every other year. I only took this one because Foster’s a longtime client. I need you on this, Harry.”

  “The disabled list? What happened to him?”

  Haller shook his head like he was in pain.

  “The guy rides a Harley out there every day, lane-splitting whenever he wants, wearing one of those novelty helmets that is total bullshit when it comes to protecting your neck. I told him it was only a matter of time. I asked him for dibs on his liver. There is a reason they call them donorcycles. And it doesn’t matter how good a rider you are, it’s always the other guy.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He was cruising down Ventura one night a while back and some yahoo comes up, cuts him off, and pushes him into head-on traffic. He dodges one car and then has to lay the bike down—it’s an old one, no front brakes—and he skids through an entire intersection on his hip. Luckily he was wearing leathers, so the road rash wasn’t too hideous, but he fucked up his ACL. He’s down for the count right now and they’re talking about a total knee replacement. But it doesn’t matter. My point is, Cisco’s a great defense investigator and he already took a swing at this. What I need is an experienced homicide detective. Harry, I’m not going to be able to live with it if my guy goes down for this. Innocent clients leave scars, if you know what I mean.”

  Bosch stared at him blankly for a long moment.

  “I’ve already got a project,” he finally said.

  “What do you mean, a case?” Haller asked.

  “No, a motorcycle. A restoration.”

  “Ah, Jesus, you too?”

  “It’s a nineteen-fifty Harley like the one Lee Marvin rode in The Wild One. I inherited it from a guy I knew in the service way back. Twenty years ago he wrote it into his will that I get the bike and then he jumped off a cliff up in Oregon. I’ve had the bike in storage since I got it.”

  Haller waved a hand dismissively.

  “So it’s waited all that time. It can wait longer. I’m talking about an innocent man and I don’t know what I can do. I’m desperate. Nobody’s listening and—”

  “It’ll undo everything.”

  “What?”

  “I work a case for you—not just you, any defense lawyer—and it’ll undo everything I did with the badge.”

  Haller looked incredulous.

  “Come on. It’s a case. I
t’s not—”

  “Everything. You know what they call a guy who switches sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese. You get it? It’s crossing to the dark side.”

  Haller looked off through the window into the waiting room. It was crowded with people coming down from the Metrolink tracks on the roof.

  Before Haller said anything the waiter brought their food. He stared across the table at Bosch the whole time the woman was placing the plates down and refilling their glasses with iced tea. When she was gone, Bosch spoke first.

  “Look, it’s nothing personal—if I did it for anybody, it would probably be you.”

  It was true. They were the sons of a fabled L.A. defense attorney but had grown up miles and generations apart. They had only come to know each other in recent years. Despite the fact that Haller was across the aisle from Bosch, so to speak, Harry liked and respected him.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he continued. “That’s how it is. It’s not like I haven’t thought about this. But there’s a line I can’t bring myself to cross. And you’re not the first one to ask.”

  Haller nodded.

  “I get that. But what I am offering is something different. I got this guy I’m convinced was somehow set up for murder and there’s DNA I can’t shake and he’s going to go down for it unless I get someone like you to help me—”

  “Come on, Haller, don’t embarrass yourself. Every defense lawyer in every courthouse says the same thing every day of the week. Every client is innocent. Every client is getting railroaded, set up. I heard it for thirty years, every time I sat in a courtroom. But you know what? I don’t have a second thought about anybody I ever put in the penitentiary. And at some point or other every one of them said they didn’t do it.”

  Haller didn’t respond and Bosch took the time to take his first bite of food. It was good but the conversation had soured his appetite. Haller started moving his salad around with his fork but he didn’t eat anything.