The Brass Verdict

They say the best actors in Hollywood are on the wrong side of the camera. At that moment I knew that was true. I knew that Elliot had killed his wife and her lover and was even proud of it. I found my voice and spoke.

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“Oh, I’d had it. Bought it under the table at a flea market back in the seventies. I was a big Dirty Harry fan and I wanted a forty-four mag. I kept it out at the beach house for protection. You know, a lot of drifters down on the beach.”

“What really happened in that house, Walter?”

He nodded like it was his plan all along to take this moment to tell me.

“What happened was I went out there to confront her and whoever she was fucking every Monday like clockwork. But when I got there, I realized it was Rilz. She’d passed him off in front of me as a faggot, had him to dinners and parties and premieres with us, and they probably laughed all about it later. Laughed about me, Mick.

“It got me mad. Enraged, actually. I got the gun out of the cabinet, put on rubber gloves from under the sink and I went upstairs. You should have seen the look on their faces when they saw that big gun.”

I stared at him for a long moment. I’d had clients confess to me before. But usually they were crying, wringing their hands, battling the demons their crimes had created inside. But not Walter Elliot. He was cold to the bone.

“How’d you get rid of the gun?”

“I hadn’t gone out there alone. I had somebody with me and they took the gun, the gloves and my first set of clothes, then walked down the beach, got back up to the PCH and caught a cab. Meantime, I washed up and changed, then I dialed nine-one-one.”

“Who was it that helped you?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

I nodded. Not because I agreed with him. I nodded because I already knew. I had a flash vision of Nina Albrecht easily unlocking the door to the deck when I couldn’t figure it out. It showed a familiarity with her boss’s bedroom that had struck me the moment I saw it.

I looked away from my client and down at the floor. It had been scuffed by a million people who had trod a million miles for justice.

“I never counted on the transference, Mick. When they said they wanted to do the test, I was all for it. I thought I was clean and they would see that and it would be the end of it. No gun, no residue, no case.”

He shook his head at such a close call.

“Thank God for lawyers like you.”

I jerked my eyes up to his.

“Did you kill Jerry Vincent?”

Elliot looked me in the eye and shook his head.

“No, I didn’t. But it was a lucky break because I ended up with a better lawyer.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I looked down the hall to the courtroom door. The deputy was there. He waved to me and signaled me into the courtroom. The break was over and the judge was ready to start. I nodded and held up one finger. Wait. I knew the judge wouldn’t take the bench until he was told the lawyers were in place.

“Go back in,” I said to Elliot. “I have to use the restroom.”

Elliot calmly walked toward the waiting deputy. I quickly stepped into the nearby restroom and went to one of the sinks. I splashed cold water on my face, spotting my best suit and shirt but not caring at all.

Fifty-one

That night I sent Patrick to the movies because I wanted the house to myself. I wanted no television or conversation. I wanted no interruption and no one watching me. I called Bosch and told him I was in for the night. It was not so that I could prepare for what likely would be the last day of the trial. I was more than ready for that. I had the French police captain primed and ready to deliver another dose of reasonable doubt to the jury.

And it was not because I now knew that my client was guilty. I could count the truly innocent clients I’d had over the years on one hand. Guilty people were my specialty. But I was feeling bruised because I had been used so well. And because I had forgotten the basic rule: Everybody lies.

And I was feeling bruised because I knew that I, too, was guilty. I could not stop thinking about Rilz’s father and brothers, about what they had told Golantz about their decision to go home. They were not waiting to see the verdict if it first meant seeing their dead loved one dragged through the sewers of the American justice system. I had spent the good part of twenty years defending guilty and sometimes evil men. I had always been able to accept that and deal with it. But I didn’t feel very good about myself or the work that I would perform the next day.

It was in these moments that I felt the strongest desire to return to old ways. To find that distance again. To take the pill for the physical pain that I knew would numb me to the internal pain. It was in these moments that I realized that I had my own jury to face and that the coming verdict was guilty, that there would be no more cases after this one.