“That was really good,” Roulet said. “I think we’re already ahead of the game.”

I looked at him with dead eyes.

“It’s no game.”

“I know that. It’s just an expression. Listen, I am having lunch with Cecil and my mother. We would like you to join us.”

I shook my head.

“I have to defend you, Louis, but I don’t have to eat with you.”

I took my checkbook out of my briefcase and left him there. I walked around the table to the clerk’s station so that I could write out a check for five hundred dollars. The money didn’t hurt as much as I knew the bar review that follows any contempt citation would.

When I was finished I turned back to find Lorna waiting for me at the gate with a smile. We planned to go to lunch and then she would go back to manning the phone in her condo. In three days I would be back in business and needed clients. I was depending on her to start filling in my calendar.

“Looks like I better buy you lunch today,” she said.

I threw my checkbook into the briefcase and closed it. I joined her at the gate.

“That would be nice,” I said.

I pushed through the gate and checked the bench where I had seen Lankford and Sobel sitting a few moments before.

They were gone.

TWENTY-NINE

The prosecution began presenting its case to the jury in the afternoon session and very quickly Ted Minton’s strategy became clear to me. The first four witnesses were a 911 dispatch operator, the patrol officers who responded to Regina Campo’s call for help and the paramedic who treated her before she was transported to the hospital. In anticipation of the defense strategy, it was clear that Minton wanted to firmly establish that Campo had been brutally assaulted and was indeed the victim in this crime. It wasn’t a bad strategy. In most cases it would get the job done.

The dispatch operator was essentially used as the warm body needed to introduce a recording of Campo’s 911 call for help. Printed transcripts of the call were handed out to jurors so they could read along with a scratchy audio playback. I objected on the grounds that it was prejudicial to play the audio recording when the transcript would suffice but the judge quickly overruled me before Minton even had to counter. The recording was played and there was no doubt that Minton had started out of the gate strong as the jurors sat raptly listening to Campo scream and beg for help. She sounded genuinely distraught and scared. It was exactly what Minton wanted the jurors to hear and they certainly got it. I didn’t dare question the dispatcher on cross-examination because I knew it might give Minton the opportunity to play the recording again on redirect.

The two patrol officers who followed offered different testimony because they did separate things upon arriving at the Tarzana apartment complex in response to the 911 call. One primarily stayed with the victim while the other went up to the apartment and handcuffed the man Campo’s neighbors were sitting on-Louis Ross Roulet.

Officer Vivian Maxwell described Campo as disheveled, hurt and frightened. She said Campo kept asking if she was safe and if the intruder had been caught. Even after she was assured on both questions, Campo remained scared and upset, at one point telling the officer to unholster her weapon and have it ready in case the attacker broke free. When Minton was through with this witness, I stood up to conduct my first cross-examination of the trial.

“Officer Maxwell,” I asked, “did you at any time ask Ms. Campo what had happened to her?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What exactly did you ask her?”

“I asked what had happened and who did this to her. You know, who had hurt her.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She said a man had come to her door and knocked and when she opened it he punched her. She said he hit her several times and then took out a knife.”

“She said he took the knife out after he punched her?”

“That’s how she said it. She was upset and hurt at the time.”

“I understand. Did she tell you who the man was?”

“No, she said she didn’t know the man.”

“You specifically asked if she knew the man?”

“Yes. She said no.”

“So she just opened her door at ten o’clock at night to a stranger.”

“She didn’t say it that way.”

“But you said she told you she didn’t know him, right?”

“That is correct. That is how she said it. She said, ‘I don’t know who he is.’”

“And did you put this in your report?”

“Yes, I did.”

I introduced the patrol officer’s report as a defense exhibit and had Maxwell read parts of it to the jury. These parts involved Campo saying that the attack was unprovoked and at the hands of a stranger.

“‘The victim does not know the man who assaulted her and did not know why she was attacked,’” she read from her own report.

Maxwell’s partner, John Santos, testified next, telling jurors that Campo directed him to her apartment, where he found a man on the floor near the entrance. The man was semiconscious and was being held on the ground by two of Campo’s neighbors, Edward Turner and Ronald Atkins. One man was straddling the man’s chest and the other was sitting on his legs.

Santos identified the man being held on the floor as the defendant, Louis Ross Roulet. Santos described him as having blood on his clothes and his left hand. He said Roulet appeared to be suffering from a concussion or some sort of head injury and initially was not responsive to commands. Santos turned him over and handcuffed his hands behind his back. The officer then put a plastic evidence bag he carried in a compartment on his belt over Roulet’s bloody hand.

Santos testified that one of the men who had been holding Roulet handed over a folding knife that was open and had blood on its handle and blade. Santos told jurors he bagged this item as well and turned it over to Detective Martin Booker as soon as he arrived on the scene.

On cross-examination I asked Santos only two questions.

“Officer, was there blood on the defendant’s right hand?”

“No, there was no blood on his right hand or I would have bagged that one, too.”

“I see. So you have blood on the left hand only and a knife with blood on the handle. Would it then appear to you that if the defendant had held that knife, then he would have to have held it in his left hand?”

Minton objected, saying that Santos was a patrol officer and that the question was beyond the scope of his expertise. I argued that the question required only a commonsense answer, not an expert. The judge overruled the objection and the court clerk read the question back to the witness.

“It would seem that way to me,” Santos answered.

Arthur Metz was the paramedic who testified next. He told jurors about Campo’s demeanor and the extent of her injuries when he treated her less than thirty minutes after the attack. He said that it appeared to him that she had suffered at least three significant impacts to the face. He also described a small puncture wound to her neck. He described all the injuries as superficial but painful. A large blowup of the same photograph of Campo’s face I had seen on the first day I was on the case was displayed on an easel in front of the jury. I objected to this, arguing that the photo was prejudicial because it had been blown up to larger-than-life size, but I was overruled by Judge Fullbright.

Then, when it was my turn to cross-examine Metz, I used the photo I had just objected to.

“When you tell us that it appeared that she suffered at least three impacts to the face, what do you mean by ‘impact’?” I asked.

“She was struck with something. Either a fist or a blunt object.”

“So basically someone hit her three times. Could you please use this laser pointer and show the jury on the photograph where these impacts occurred.”