“I haven’t lied to you! I did not do this thing. I don’t know what that woman wants but I -”

“Let me ask you something, Louis. You and Dobbs said you took a year of law at UCLA, right? Did they teach you anything at all about the lawyer-client bond of trust?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I wasn’t there long enough.”

I took a step toward him, invading his space.

“You see? You are a fucking liar. You didn’t go to UCLA law school for a year. You didn’t even go for a goddamn day.”

He brought his hands down and slapped them against his sides.

“Is that what this is all about, Mickey?”

“Yeah, that’s right and from now on, don’t call me Mickey. My friends call me that. Not my lying clients.”

“What does whether or not I went to law school ten years ago have to do with this case? I don’t -”

“Because if you lied to me about that, then you’d lie to me about anything, and I can’t have that and be able to defend you.”

I said it too loud. I saw a couple of women on a nearby bench watching us. They had juror badges on their blouses.

“Come on. This way.”

I started walking back the other way, heading toward the police station.

“Look,” Roulet said in a weak voice. “I lied because of my mother, okay?”

“No, not okay. Explain it to me.”

“Look, my mother and Cecil think I went to law school for a year. I want them to continue to believe that. He brought it up with you and so I just sort of agreed. But it was ten years ago! What is the harm?”

“The harm is in lying to me,” I said. “You can lie to your mother, to Dobbs, to your priest and to the police. But when I ask you something directly, do not lie to me. I need to operate from the standpoint of having facts from you. Incontrovertible facts. So when I ask you a question, tell me the truth. All the rest of the time you can say what you want and whatever makes you feel good.”

“Okay, okay.”

“If you weren’t in law school, where were you?”

Roulet shook his head.

“Nowhere. I just didn’t do anything for a year. Most of the time I stayed in my apartment near campus and read and thought about what I really wanted to do with my life. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. No offense intended.”

“None taken. So you sat there for a year and came up with selling real estate to rich people.”

“No, that came later.”

He laughed in a self-deprecating way.

“I actually decided to become a writer-I had majored in English lit-and I tried to write a novel. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I couldn’t do it. I eventually went to work for Mother. She wanted me to.”

I calmed down. Most of my anger had been a show, anyway. I was trying to soften him up for the more important questioning. I thought he was now ready for it.

“Well, now that you are coming clean and confessing everything, Louis, tell me about Reggie Campo.”

“What about her?”

“You were going to pay her for sex, weren’t you?”

“What makes you say -”

I shut him up when I stopped again and grabbed him by one of his expensive lapels. He was taller than me and bigger, but I had the power in this conversation. I was pushing him.

“Answer the fucking question.”

“All right, yes, I was going to pay. But how did you know that?”

“Because I’m a good goddamn lawyer. Why didn’t you tell me this on that first day? Don’t you see how that changes the case?”

“My mother. I didn’t want my mother to know I… you know.”

“Louis, let’s sit down.”

I walked him over to one of the long benches by the police station. There was a lot of space and no one could overhear us. I sat in the middle of the bench and he sat to my right.

“Your mother wasn’t even in the room when we were talking about the case. I don’t even think she was in there when we talked about law school.”

“But Cecil was and he tells her everything.”

I nodded and made a mental note to cut Cecil Dobbs completely out of the loop on case matters from now on.

“Okay, I think I understand. But how long were you going to let it go without telling me? Don’t you see how this changes everything?”

“I’m not a lawyer.”

“Louis, let me tell you a little bit about how this works. You know what I am? I’m a neutralizer. My job is to neutralize the state’s case. Take each piece of evidence or proof and find a way to eliminate it from contention. Think of it like one of those street entertainers you see on the Venice boardwalk. You ever gone down there and seen the guy spinning all those plates on those little sticks?”

“I think so. I haven’t been down there in a long time.”

“Doesn’t matter. The guy has these thin little sticks and he puts a plate on each one and starts spinning the plate so it will stay balanced and upright. He gets a lot of them going at once and he moves from plate to plate and stick to stick making sure everything is spinning and balanced and staying up. You with me?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Well, that’s the state’s case, Louis. A bunch of spinning plates. And every one of those plates is an individual piece of evidence against you. My job is to take each plate, stop it from spinning and knock it to the ground so hard that it shatters and can’t be used anymore. If the blue plate contains the victim’s blood on your hands, then I need to find a way to knock it down. If the yellow plate has a knife with your bloody fingerprints on it, then once again I need to knock that sucker down. Neutralize it. You follow?”

“Yes, I follow. I -”

“Now, in the middle of this field of plates is a big one. It’s a fucking platter, Louis, and if that baby falls over it’s going to take everything down with it. Every plate. The whole case goes down. Do you know what that platter is, Louis?”

He shook his head no.

“That big platter is the victim, the chief witness against you. If we can knock that platter over, then the whole act is over and the crowd moves on.”

I waited a moment to see if he would react. He said nothing.

“Louis, for almost two weeks you have concealed from me the method by which I could knock the big platter down. It asks the question why. Why would a guy with money at his disposal, a Rolex watch on his wrist, a Porsche out in the parking lot and a Holmby Hills address need to use a knife to get sex from a woman who sells it anyway? When you boil it all down to that question, the case starts to collapse, Louis, because the answer is simple. He wouldn’t. Common sense says he wouldn’t. And when you come to that conclusion, all the plates stop spinning. You see the setup, you see the trap, and now it’s the defendant who starts to look like the victim.”

I looked at him. He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You should be,” I said. “The case would have started coming apart almost two weeks ago and we probably wouldn’t be sitting here right now if you had been up-front with me from the start.”

In that moment I realized where my anger was truly coming from and it wasn’t because Roulet had been late or had lied or because of Sam Scales calling me a street-legal con. It was because I saw the franchise slipping away. There would be no trial in this case, no six-figure fee. I’d be lucky just to keep the retainer I’d gotten at the start. The case was going to end today when I walked into the DA’s office and told Ted Minton what I knew and what I had.

“I’m sorry,” Roulet said again in a whiny voice. “I didn’t mean to mess things up.”

I was looking down at the ground between my feet now. Without looking at him I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you before, Louis.”

“What do we do now?”

“I have a few more questions to ask you about that night, and then I’m going to go up into that building over there and meet the prosecutor and knock down all his plates. I think that by the time I come out of there this may all be over and you’ll be free to go back to showing your mansions to rich people.”