ELEVEN

After we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee. “Ain’ no Starbuck ’round here,” Earl responded.

I knew Earl was from the area but I didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted coffee.

“Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don’t go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after.”

“You got it.”

“And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?”

Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver’s seat.

“Okay, what do you have for me?” I said. “I’m going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday.”

“I think I’ve got a few aces here,” Levin replied.

He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s begin with your client and then we’ll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets-which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying-I couldn’t find squat on him. He’s pretty much your standard citizen.”

“What’s with the tickets?”

“Twice in the last four years he’s let parking tickets-a lot of them-and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over.”

“I’m glad C.C.’s good for something. By ‘paying them off,’ I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges.”

“Let’s hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet.”

“What?”

“At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he’d had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn near everything. And most of the time it’s easy to do because everything’s on computer.”

“Right, I get it. So what about the law school, was that a lie?”

“Looks like it. I checked the registrar’s office and he’s never been enrolled in the law school at UCLA.”

I thought about this. It was Dobbs who had brought up UCLA law and Roulet had just nodded. It was a strange lie for either one of them to have told because it didn’t really get them anything. It made me think about the psychology behind it. Was it something to do with me? Did they want me to think of Roulet as being on the same level as me?

“So if he lied about something like that…,” I said, thinking out loud.

“Right,” Levin said. “I wanted you to know about it. But I gotta say, that’s it on the negative side for Mr. Roulet so far. He might’ve lied about law school but it looks like he didn’t lie about his story-at least the parts I could check out.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, his track that night checks out. I got wits in here who put him at Nat’s North, Morgan’s and then the Lamplighter, bing, bing, bing. He did just what he told us he did. Right down to the number of martinis. Four total and at least one of them he left on the bar unfinished.”

“They remember him that well? They remember that he didn’t even finish his drink?”

I am always suspicious of perfect memory because there is no such thing. And it is my job and my skill to find the faults in the memory of witnesses. Whenever someone remembers too much, I get nervous-especially if the witness is for the defense.

“No, I’m not just relying on a bartender’s memory. I’ve got something here that you are going to love, Mick. And you better love me for it because it cost me a grand.”

From the bottom of his briefcase he pulled out a padded case that contained a small DVD player. I had seen people using them on planes before and had been thinking about getting one for the car. The driver could use it while waiting on me in court. And I could probably use it from time to time on cases like this one.

Levin started loading in a DVD. But before he could play it the car pulled to a stop and I looked up. We were in front of a place called The Central Bean.

“Let’s get some coffee and then see what you’ve got there,” I said.

I asked Earl if he wanted anything and he declined the offer. Levin and I got out and went in. There was a short line for coffee. Levin spent the waiting time telling me about the DVD we were about to watch in the car.

“I’m in Morgan’s and want to talk to this bartender named Janice but she says I have to clear it first with the manager. So I go back to see him in the office and he’s asking me what exactly I want to ask Janice about. There’s something off about this guy. I’m wondering why he wants to know so much, you know? Then it comes clear when he makes an offer. He tells me that last year they had a problem behind the bar. Pilferage from the cash register. They have as many as a dozen bartenders working back there in a given week and he couldn’t figure out who had sticky fingers.”

“He put in a camera.”

“You got it. A hidden camera. He caught the thief and fired his ass. But it worked so good he kept the camera in place. The system records on high-density tape from eight till two every night. It’s on a timer. He gets four nights on a tape. If there is ever a problem or a shortage he can go back and check it. Because they do a weekly profit-and-loss check, he rotates two tapes so he always has a week’s worth of film to look at.”

“He had the night in question on tape?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And he wanted a thousand dollars for it.”

“Right again.”

“The cops don’t know about it?”

“They haven’t even come to the bar yet. They’re just going with Reggie’s story so far.”

I nodded. This wasn’t all that unusual. There were too many cases for the cops to investigate thoroughly and completely. They were already loaded for bear, anyway. They had an eyewitness victim, a suspect caught in her apartment, they had the victim’s blood on the suspect and even the weapon. To them, there was no reason to go further.

“But we’re interested in the bar, not the cash register,” I said.

“I know that. And the cash register is against the wall behind the bar. The camera is up above it in a smoke detector on the ceiling. And the back wall is a mirror. I looked at what he had and pretty quickly realized that you can see the whole bar in the mirror. It’s just reversed. I had the tape transferred to a disc because we can manipulate the image better. Blow it up and zero in, that sort of thing.”

It was our turn in line. I ordered a large coffee with cream and sugar and Levin ordered a bottle of water. We took our refreshments back to the car. I told Earl not to drive until after we’d viewed the DVD. I can read while riding in a car but I thought looking at the small screen of Levin’s player while bumping along south county streets might give me a dose of motion sickness.

Levin started the DVD and gave a running commentary to go with the visuals.

On the small screen was a downward view of the rectangular-shaped bar at Morgan’s. There were two bartenders on patrol, both women in black jeans and white shirts tied off to show flat stomachs, pierced navels and tattoos creeping up out of their rear belt lines. As Levin had explained, the camera was angled toward the back of the bar area and cash register but the mirror that covered the wall behind the register displayed the line of customers sitting at the bar. I saw Louis Roulet sit down by himself in the dead center of the frame. There was a frame counter in the bottom left corner and a time and date code in the right corner. It said that it was 8:11 P.M. on March 6.