“Just like that?”

“Well, formally he may want to go into court and ask a judge to dismiss the case.”

Roulet opened his mouth in shock.

“Mr. Haller, I can’t begin to tell you how -”

“You can call me Mickey. Sorry about that before.”

“No problem. Thank you. What questions do you want to ask?”

I thought for a moment. I really didn’t need anything else to go into the meeting with Minton. I was locked and loaded. I had walking proof.

“What did the note say?” I asked.

“What note?”

“The one she gave you at the bar in Morgan’s.”

“Oh, it said her address and then underneath she wrote ‘four hundred dollars’ and then under that she wrote ‘Come after ten.’”

“Too bad we don’t have that. But I think we have enough.”

I nodded and looked at my watch. I still had fifteen minutes until the meeting but I was finished with Roulet.

“You can go now, Louis. I’ll call you when it’s all over.”

“You sure? I could wait out here if you want.”

“I don’t know how long it will take. I’m going to have to lay it all out for him. He’ll probably have to take it to his boss. It could be a while.”

“All right, well, I guess I’ll go then. But you’ll call me, right?”

“Yes, I will. We’ll probably go in to see the judge Monday or Tuesday, then it will all be over.”

He put his hand out and I shook it.

“Thanks, Mick. You’re the best. I knew I had the best lawyer when I got you.”

I watched him walk back across the plaza and go between the two courthouses toward the public parking garage.

“Yeah, I’m the best,” I said to myself.

I felt the presence of someone and turned to see a man sit down on the bench next to me. He turned and looked at me and we recognized each other at the same time. It was Howard Kurlen, a homicide detective from the Van Nuys Division. We had bumped up against each other on a few cases over the years.

“Well, well, well,” Kurlen said. “The pride of the California bar. You’re not talking to yourself, are you?”

“Maybe.”

“That could be bad for a lawyer if that got around.”

“I’m not worried. How are you doing, Detective?”

Kurlen was unwrapping a sandwich he had taken out of a brown bag.

“Busy day. Late lunch.”

He produced a peanut butter sandwich from the wrap. There was a layer of something else besides peanut butter in it but it wasn’t jelly. I couldn’t identify it. I looked at my watch. I still had a few minutes before I needed to get in line for the metal detectors at the courthouse entrance but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend them with Kurlen and his horrible-looking sandwich. I thought about bringing up the Blake verdict, sticking it to the LAPD a little bit, but Kurlen stuck one in me first.

“How’s my man Jesus doin’?” the detective asked.

Kurlen had been lead detective on the Jesus Menendez case. He had wrapped him up so tightly that Menendez had no choice but to plead and hope for the best. He still got life.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t talk to Jesus anymore.”

“Yeah, I guess once they plead out and go upstate they’re not much use to you. No appeal work, no nothing.”

I nodded. Every cop had a jaundiced eye when it came to defense lawyers. It was as if they believed their own actions and investigations were beyond questioning or reproach. They didn’t believe in a justice system based on checks and balances.

“Just like you, I guess,” I said. “On to the next one. I hope your busy day means you’re working on getting me a new client.”

“I don’t look at it that way. But I was wondering, do you sleep well at night?”

“You know what I was wondering? What the hell is in that sandwich?”

He held what was left of the sandwich up on display.

“Peanut butter and sardines. Lots of good protein to get me through another day of chasing scumbags. Talking to them, too. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I sleep fine, Detective. You know why? Because I play an important part in the system. A needed part-just like your part. When somebody is accused of a crime, they have the opportunity to test the system. If they want to do that, they come to me. That’s all any of this is about. When you understand that, you have no trouble sleeping.”

“Good story. When you close your eyes I hope you believe it.”

“How about you, Detective? You ever put your head on the pillow and wonder whether you’ve put innocent people away?”

“Nope,” he said quickly, his mouth full of sandwich. “Never happened, never will.”

“Must be nice to be so sure.”

“A guy told me once that when you get to the end of your road, you have to look at the community woodpile and decide if you added to it while you were here or whether you just took from it. Well, I add to the woodpile, Haller. I sleep good at night. But I wonder about you and your kind. You lawyers are all takers from the woodpile.”

“Thanks for the sermon. I’ll keep it in mind next time I’m chopping wood.”

“You don’t like that, then I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference between a catfish and a defense attorney?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know, Detective.”

“One’s a bottom-feeding scum sucker and one’s a fish.”

He laughed uproariously. I stood up. It was time to go.

“I hope you brush your teeth after you eat something like that,” I said. “I’d hate to be your partner if you don’t.”

I walked away, thinking about what he had said about the woodpile and what Sam Scales had said about my being a street-legal con. I was getting it from all sides today.

“Thanks for the tip,” Kurlen called after me.

Ted Minton had arranged for us to discuss the Roulet case in private by scheduling our conference at a time he knew the deputy district attorney he shared space with had a hearing in court. Minton met me in the waiting area and walked me back. He did not look to me to be older than thirty but he had a self-assured presence. I probably had ten years and a hundred trials on him, yet he showed no sign of deference or respect. He acted as though the meeting was a nuisance he had to put up with. That was fine. That was the usual. And it put more fuel in my tank.

When we got to his small, windowless office, he offered me his office partner’s seat and closed the door. We sat down and looked at each other. I let him go first.

“Okay,” he said. “First off, I wanted to meet you. I’m sort of new up here in the Valley and haven’t met a lot of the members of the defense bar. I know you’re one of those guys that covers the whole county but we haven’t run across each other before.”

“Maybe that’s because you haven’t worked many felony trials before.”

He smiled and nodded like I had scored a point of some kind.

“That might be true,” he said. “Anyway, I gotta tell you, when I was in law school at SC I read a book about your father and his cases. I think it was called Haller for the Defense. Something like that. Interesting guy and interesting times.”

I nodded back.

“He was gone before I really knew him, but there were a few books about him and I read them all more than a few times. It’s probably why I ended up doing this.”

“That must have been hard, getting to know your father through books.”

I shrugged. I didn’t think that Minton and I needed to know each other that well, particularly in light of what I was about to do to him.

“I guess it happens,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He clapped his hands together once, a let’s-get-down-to-business gesture.

“Okay, so we’re here to talk about Louis Roulet, aren’t we?”

“It’s pronounced Roo-lay.”

“Roooo-lay.Got it. So, let’s see, I have some things for you here.”

He swiveled his seat to turn back to his desk. He picked up a thin file and turned back to hand it to me.