“In the car,” she said.

“Go get it,” Lankford said.

“You are going to take an empty gun box?” I asked. “What good does it do you?”

“All part of the chain of evidence, Counselor. You should know that. Besides, it will come in handy, since I have a feeling we’ll never find the gun.”

I shook my head.

“Maybe handy in your dreams. The box is evidence of nothing.”

“It’s evidence that you had Mickey Cohen’s gun. Says it right on this little brass plaque your daddy or somebody had made.”

“So fucking what?”

“Well, I just made a call while I was out on your front porch, Haller. See, we had somebody checking on Mickey Cohen’s self-defense case. Turns out that over there in LAPD’s evidence archive they still have all the ballistic evidence from that case. That’s a lucky break for us, the case being, what, fifty years old?”

I understood immediately. They would take the bullet slugs and casings from the Cohen case and compare them with the same evidence recovered in the Levin case. They would match the Levin murder to Mickey Cohen’s gun which they would then tie to me with the gun box and the state’s AFS computer. I doubted Roulet could have realized how the police would be able to make a case without even having the gun when he thought out his scheme to control me.

I stood there silently. Sobel left the room without a glance at me and Lankford looked up from the box at me with a killer smile.

“What’s the matter, Counselor?” he asked. “Evidence got your tongue?”

I finally was able to speak.

“How long will ballistics take?” I managed to ask.

“Hey, for you, we’re going to put a rush on it. So get out there and enjoy yourself while you can. But don’t leave town.”

He laughed, almost giddy with himself.

“Man, I thought they only said that in movies. But there, I just said it! I wish my partner had been here.”

Sobel came back in with a large brown bag and a roll of red evidence tape. I watched her put the gun box into the bag and then seal it with the tape. I wondered how much time I had and if the wheels had just come off of everything I had put into motion. I started to feel as empty as the wooden box Sobel had just sealed inside the brown paper bag.

THIRTY-TWO

Fernando Valenzuela lived out in Valencia. From my home it was easily an hour’s drive north in the last remnants of rush-hour traffic. Valenzuela had moved out of Van Nuys a few years earlier because his three daughters were nearing high school age and he feared for their safety and education. He moved into a neighborhood filled with people who had also fled from the city and his commute went from five minutes to forty-five. But he was happy. His house was nicer and his children safer. He lived in a Spanish-style house with a red tile roof in a planned community full of Spanish-style houses with red tile roofs. It was more than a bail bondsman could ever dream of having, but it came with a stiff monthly price tag.

It was almost nine by the time I got there. I pulled up to the garage, which had been left open. One space was taken by a minivan and the other by a pickup. On the floor between the pickup and a fully equipped tool bench was a large cardboard box that said SONY on it. It was long and thin. I looked closer and saw it was a box for a fifty-inch plasma TV. I got out and went to the front door and knocked. Valenzuela answered after a long wait.

“Mick, what are you doing up here?”

“Do you know your garage door is open?”

“Holy shit! I just had a plasma delivered.”

He pushed by me and ran across the yard to look into the garage. I closed his front door and followed him to the garage. When I got there he was standing next to his TV, smiling.

“Oh, man, you know that would’ve never happened in Van Nuys,” he said. “That sucker woulda been long gone. Come on, we’ll go in through here.”

He headed toward a door that would take us from the garage into the house. He hit a switch that made the garage door start to roll down.

“Hey, Val, wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s just talk out here. It’s more private.”

“But Maria probably wants to say hello.”

“Maybe next time.”

He came back over to me, concern in his eyes.

“What’s up, Boss?”

“What’s up is I spent some time today with the cops working on Raul’s murder. They said they cleared Roulet on it because of the ankle bracelet.”

Valenzuela nodded vigorously.

“Yeah, yeah, they came to see me a few days after it happened. I showed them the system and how it works and I pulled up Roulet’s track for that day. They saw he was at work. And I also showed them the other bracelet I got and explained how it couldn’t be tampered with. It’s got a mass detector. Bottom line is you can’t take it off. It would know and then I would know.”

I leaned back against the pickup and folded my arms.

“So did those two cops ask where you were on that Saturday?”

It hit Valenzuela like a punch.

“What did you say, Mick?”

My eyes lowered to the plasma TV box and then back up to his.

“Somehow, some way, he killed Raul, Val. Now my ass is on the line and I want to know how he did it.”

“Mick, listen to me, he’s clear. I’m telling you, that bracelet didn’t come off his ankle. The machine doesn’t lie.”

“Yeah, I know, the machine doesn’t lie…”

After a moment he got it.

“What are you saying, Mick?”

He stepped in front of me, his body posture stiffening aggressively. I stopped leaning on the truck and dropped my hands to my sides.

“I’m asking, Val. Where were you on that Tuesday morning?”

“You son of a bitch, how could you ask me that?”

He had moved into a fight stance. I was momentarily taken off guard as I thought about him calling me what I had called Roulet earlier in the day.

Valenzuela suddenly lunged at me and shoved me hard against his truck. I shoved him back harder and he went backwards into the TV box. It tipped over and hit the floor with a loud, heavy whump and then he came down on it in a seated position. There was a sharp snap sound from inside the box.

“Oh, fuck!” he cried. “Oh, fuck! You broke the screen!”

“You pushed me, Val. I pushed back.”

“Oh, fuck!”

He scrambled to the side of the box and tried to lift it back up but it was too heavy and unwieldy. I walked over to the other side and helped him right it. As the box came upright we heard small bits of material inside it slide down. It sounded like glass.

“Motherfuck!” Valenzuela yelled.

The door leading into the house opened and his wife, Maria, looked out.

“Hi, Mickey. Val, what is all the noise?”

“Just go inside,” her husband ordered.

“Well, what is -”

“Shut the fuck up and go inside!”

She paused for a moment, staring at us, then closed the door. I heard her lock it. It looked like Valenzuela was sleeping with the broken TV tonight. I looked back at him. His mouth was spread in shock.

“That was eight thousand dollars,” he whispered.

“They make TVs that cost eight thousand dollars?”

I was shocked. What was the world coming to?

“That was with a discount.”

“Val, where’d you get the money for an eight-thousand-dollar TV?”

He looked at me and the fire came back.

“Where the fuck do you think? Business, man. Thanks to Roulet I’m having a hell of a year. But goddamn, Mick, I didn’t cut him loose from the bracelet so he could go out and kill Raul. I knew Raul just as long as you did. I did not do that. I did not put the bracelet on and wear it while he went to kill Raul. And I did not go and kill Raul for him for a fucking TV. If you can’t believe that, then just get the hell out of here and out of my life!”

He said it all with the desperate intensity of a wounded animal. A flash thought of Jesus Menendez came to my mind. I had failed to see the innocence in his pleas. I didn’t want that to ever happen again.