“Did your mother file a police report?” Levin asked. “Was there an investigation?”

Roulet shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“No, she was too embarrassed. She was afraid it would get into the paper.”

“Who else knows about it?” I asked.

“Uh, me… and Cecil I’m sure knows. Probably nobody else. You can’t use this. She would -”

“I won’t use it without her permission,” I said. “But it could be important. I’ll have to talk to her about it.”

“No, I don’t want you -”

“Your life and livelihood are on the line here, Louis. You get sent to prison and you’re not going to make it. Don’t worry about your mother. A mother will do what she has to do to protect her young.”

Roulet looked down and shook his head.

“I don’t know…,” he said.

I exhaled, trying to lose all my tension with the breath. Disaster may have been averted.

“I know one thing,” I said. “I’m going to go back to the DA and say pass on the deal. We’ll go to trial and take our chances.”

The hits kept coming. The other shoe didn’t drop on the prosecution’s case until after I’d dropped Earl off at the commuter lot where he parked his own car every morning and I drove the Lincoln back to Van Nuys and Four Green Fields. It was a shotgun pub on Victory Boulevard-maybe that was why lawyers liked the place-with the bar running down the left side and a row of scarred wooden booths down the right. It was crowded as only an Irish bar can be the night of St. Patrick’s Day. My guess was that the crowd was swollen even bigger than in previous years because of the fact that the drinker’s holiday fell on a Thursday and many revelers were kicking off a long weekend. I had made sure my own calendar was clear on Friday. I always clear the day after St. Pat’s.

As I started to fight my way through the mass in search of Maggie McPherson, the required “Danny Boy” started blaring from a jukebox somewhere in the back. But it was a punk rock version from the early eighties and its driving beat obliterated any chance I had of hearing anything when I saw familiar faces and said hello or asked if they had seen my ex-wife. The small snippets of conversation I overheard as I pushed through seemed to all be about Robert Blake and the stunning verdict handed down the day before.

I ran into Robert Gillen in the crowd. The cameraman reached into his pocket and pulled out four crisp hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. The bills were probably four of the original ten I had paid him two weeks earlier in the Van Nuys courthouse as I tried to impress Cecil Dobbs with my media manipulation skills. I had already expensed the thousand to Roulet. The four hundred was profit.

“I thought I’d run into you here,” he yelled in my ear.

“Thanks, Sticks,” I replied. “It’ll go toward my bar tab.”

He laughed. I looked past him into the crowd for my ex-wife.

“Anytime, my man,” he said.

He slapped me on the shoulder as I squeezed by him and pushed on. I finally found Maggie in the last booth in the back. It was full of six women, all prosecutors or secretaries from the Van Nuys office. Most I knew at least in passing but the scene was awkward because I had to stand and yell over the music and the crowd. Plus the fact that they were prosecutors and viewed me as being in league with the devil. They had two pitchers of Guinness on the table and one was full. But my chances of getting through the crowd to the bar to get a glass were negligible. Maggie noticed my plight and offered to share her glass with me.

“It’s all right,” she yelled. “We’ve swapped spit before.”

I smiled and knew the two pitchers on the table had not been the first two. I took a long drink and it tasted good. Guinness always gave me a solid center.

Maggie was in the middle on the left side of the booth and between two young prosecutors whom I knew she had taken under her wing. In the Van Nuys office, many of the younger females gravitated toward my ex-wife because the man in charge, Smithson, surrounded himself with attorneys like Minton.

Still standing at the side of the booth, I raised the glass in toast to her but she couldn’t respond because I had her glass. She reached over and raised the pitcher.

“Cheers!”

She didn’t go so far as to drink from the pitcher. She put it down and whispered to the woman on the outside of the booth. She got up to let Maggie out. My ex-wife stood up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “It’s always easier for a lady to get a glass in these sorts of situations.”

“Especially beautiful ladies,” I said.

She gave me one of her looks and turned toward the crowd that was five deep between us and the bar. She whistled shrilly and it caught the attention of one of the pure-bred Irish guys who worked the tap handles and could etch a harp or an angel or a naked lady in the foam at the top of the glass.

“I need a pint glass,” she yelled.

The bartender had to read her lips. And like a teenager being passed over the heads of the crowd at a Pearl Jam concert, a clean glass made its way back to us hand to hand. She filled it from the freshest pitcher on the booth’s table and then we clicked glasses.

“So,” she said. “Are you feeling a little better than when I saw you today?”

I nodded.

“A little.”

“Did Minton sandbag you?”

I nodded again.

“Him and the cops did, yeah.”

“With that guy Corliss? I told them he was full of shit. They all are.”

I didn’t respond and tried to act like what she had just said was not news to me and that Corliss was a name I already knew. I took a long and slow drink from my glass.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “But my opinion doesn’t matter. If Minton is dumb enough to use him, then you’ll take the guy’s head off, I’m sure.”

I guessed that she was talking about a witness. But I had seen nothing in my review of the discovery file that mentioned a witness named Corliss. The fact that it was a witness she didn’t trust led me further to believe that Corliss was a snitch. Most likely a jailhouse snitch.

“How come you know about him?” I finally asked. “Minton talked to you about him?”

“No, I’m the one who sent him to Minton. Doesn’t matter what I think of what he said, it was my duty to send him to the right prosecutor and it was up to Minton to evaluate him.”

“I mean, why did he come to you?”

She frowned at me because the answer was so obvious.

“Because I handled the first appearance. He was there in the pen. He thought the case was still mine.”

Now I understood. Corliss was a C. Roulet was taken out of alphabetical order and called first. Corliss must have been in the group of inmates taken into the courtroom with him. He had seen Maggie and me argue over Roulet’s bail. He therefore thought Maggie still had the case. He must have made a snitch call to her.

“When did he call you?” I asked.

“I am telling you too much, Haller. I’m not -”

“Just tell me when he called you. That hearing was on a Monday, so was it later that day?”

The case did not make any notice in the newspapers or on TV. So I was curious as to where Corliss would have gotten the information he was trying to trade to prosecutors. I had to assume it didn’t come from Roulet. I was pretty sure I had scared him silent. Without a media information point, Corliss would have been left with the information gleaned in court when the charges were read and Maggie and I argued bail.

It was enough, I realized. Maggie had been specific in detailing Regina Campo’s injuries as she was trying to impress the judge to hold Roulet without bail. If Corliss had been in court, he’d have been privy to all the details he would need to make up a jailhouse confession from my client. Add that to his proximity to Roulet and a jailhouse snitch is born.