“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take you.”

Friday, March 18

SEVENTEEN

In the morning I awoke to find my eight-year-old daughter sleeping between me and my ex-wife. Light was leaking in from a cathedral window high up on the wall. When I had lived here that window had always bothered me because it let in too much light too early in the mornings. Looking up at the pattern it threw on the inclined ceiling, I reviewed what had happened the night before and remembered that I had ended up drinking all but one glass of the bottle of wine at the restaurant. I remembered taking Maggie home to the apartment and coming in to find our daughter had already fallen asleep for the night-in her own bed.

After the babysitter had been released, Maggie opened another bottle of wine. When we finished it she took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom we had shared for four years, but not in four years. What bothered me now was that my memory had absorbed all the wine and I could not remember whether it had been a triumphant return to the bedroom or a failure. I also could not remember what words had been spoken, what promises had possibly been made.

“This is not fair to her.”

I turned my head on the pillow. Maggie was awake. She was looking at our sleeping daughter’s angelic face.

“What isn’t fair?”

“Her waking up and finding you here. She might get her hopes up or just get the wrong idea.”

“How’d she get in here?”

“I carried her in. She had a nightmare.”

“How often does she have nightmares?”

“Usually, when she sleeps alone. In her room.”

“So she sleeps in here all the time?”

Something about my tone bothered her.

“Don’t start. You have no idea what it’s like to raise a child by yourself.”

“I know. I’m not saying anything. So what do you want me to do, leave before she wakes up? I could get dressed and act like I just came by to get you and drive you back to your car.”

“I don’t know. Get dressed for now. Try not to wake her up.”

I slipped out of the bed, grabbed my clothes and went down the hall to the guest bathroom. I was confused by how much Maggie’s demeanor toward me had changed overnight. Alcohol, I decided. Or maybe something I did or said after we’d gotten back to the apartment. I quickly got dressed and went back up the hallway to the bedroom and peeked in.

Hayley was still asleep. With her arms spread across two pillows she looked like an angel with wings. Maggie was pulling a long-sleeve T-shirt over an old pair of sweats she’d had since back when we were married. I walked in and stepped over to her.

“I’m going to go and come back,” I whispered.

“What?” she said with annoyance. “I thought we were going to get the car.”

“But I thought you didn’t want her to wake up and see me. So let me go and I’ll have some coffee or something and be back in an hour. We can all go together and get your car and then I’ll take Hayley to school. I’ll even pick her up later if you want. My calendar’s clear today.”

“Just like that? You’re going to start driving her to school?”

“She’s my daughter. Don’t you remember anything I told you last night?”

She shifted the line of her jaw and I knew from experience that this was when the heavy artillery came out. I was missing something. Maggie had shifted gears.

“Well, yes, but I thought you were just saying that,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I just thought you were trying to get into my head on your case or just plain get me into bed. I don’t know.”

I laughed and shook my head. Any fantasies about us that I’d had the night before were vanishing quickly.

“I wasn’t the one who led the other up the steps to the bedroom,” I said.

“Oh, so it was really about the case. You wanted what I knew about your case.”

I just stared at her for a long moment.

“I can’t win with you, can I?”

“Not when you’re underhanded, when you act like a criminal defense attorney.”

She was always the better of the two of us when it came to verbal knife throwing. The truth was, I was thankful we had a built-in conflict of interest and I would never have to face her in trial. Over the years some people-mostly defense pros who suffered at her hands-had gone so far as to say that was the reason I had married her. To avoid her professionally.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour. If you want a ride to the car that you were too drunk to drive last night, be ready and have her ready.”

“It’s okay. We’ll take a cab.”

“I will drive you.”

“No, we’ll take a cab. And keep your voice down.”

I looked over at my daughter, still asleep despite her parents’ verbal sparring.

“What about her? Do you want me to take her tomorrow or Sunday?”

“I don’t know. Call me tomorrow.”

“Fine. Good-bye.”

I left her there in the bedroom. Outside the apartment building I walked a block and a half down Dickens before finding the Lincoln parked awkwardly against the curb. There was a ticket on the windshield citing me for parking next to a fire hydrant. I got in the car and threw it into the backseat. I’d deal with it the next time I was riding back there. I wouldn’t be like Louis Roulet, letting my tickets go to warrant. There was a county full of cops out there who would love to book me on a warrant.

Fighting always made me hungry and I realized I was starved. I worked my way back to Ventura and headed toward Studio City. It was early, especially for the morning after St. Patrick’s Day, and I got to the DuPar’s by Laurel Canyon Boulevard before it was crowded. I got a booth in the back and ordered a short stack of pancakes and coffee. I tried to forget about Maggie McFierce by opening up my briefcase and pulling out a legal pad and the Roulet files.

Before diving into the files I made a call to Raul Levin, waking him up at his home in Glendale.

“I’ve got something for you to do,” I said.

“Can’t this wait till Monday? I just got home a couple hours ago. I was going to start the weekend today.”

“No, it can’t wait and you owe me one after yesterday. Besides, you’re not even Irish. I need you to background somebody.”

“All right, wait a minute.”

I heard him put down the phone while he probably grabbed pen and paper to take notes.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“There’s a guy named Corliss who was arraigned right after Roulet back on the seventh. He was in the first group out and they were in the holding pen at the same time. He’s now trying to snitch Roulet off and I want to know everything there is to know about the guy so I can put his dick in the dirt.”

“Got a first name?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know what he’s in there for?”

“No, and I don’t even know if he is still in there.”

“Thanks for the help. What’s he saying Roulet told him?”

“That he beat up some bitch who had it coming. Words to that effect.”

“Okay, what else you got?”

“That’s it other than I got a tip that he’s a repeat snitch. Find out who he’s crapped on in the past and there might be something there I can use. Go back as far as you can go with this guy. The DA’s people usually don’t. They’re afraid of what they might find. They’d rather be ignorant.”

“Okay, I’ll get on it.”

“Let me know when you know.”

I closed the phone just as my pancakes arrived. I doused them liberally with maple syrup and started eating while looking through the file containing the state’s discovery.

The weapon report remained the only surprise. Everything else in the file, except the color photos, I had already seen in Levin’s file.

I moved on to that. As expected with a contract investigator, Levin had larded the file with everything found in the net he had cast. He even had copies of the parking tickets and speeding citations Roulet had accumulated and failed to pay in recent years. It annoyed me at first because there was so much to weed through to get to what was going to be germane to Roulet’s defense.