“But we’re going to try to keep him,” she said. “We have what the snitch said in court and the ticket. We’re working on witnesses and the forensics.”
My eyes came up to hers.
“What ticket?”
A look of suspicion entered her face.
“I thought you had it figured out. We put it together as soon as the snitch mentioned the snake dancer.”
“Yeah. Martha Renteria. I got that. But what ticket? What are you talking about?”
I had moved in too close to her and Sobel took a step back from me. It wasn’t my breath. It was my desperation.
“I don’t know if I should tell you, Haller. You’re a defense lawyer. You’rehislawyer.”
“Not anymore. I just quit.”
“Doesn’t matter. He—”
“Look, you just took that guy down because of me. I might get disbarred because of it. I might even go to jail for a murder I didn’t commit. What ticket are you talking about?”
She hesitated and I waited, but then she finally spoke.
“Raul Levin’s last words. He said he found Jesus’s ticket out.”
“Which means what?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Look, just tell me. Please.”
She relented.
“We traced Levin’s most recent movements. Before he was murdered he had made inquiries about Roulet’s parking tickets. He even pulled hard copies of them. We inventoried what he had in the office and eventually compared it with what’s on the computer. He was missing one ticket. One hard copy. We didn’t know if his killer took it that day or if he had just missed pulling it. So we went and pulled a copy ourselves. It was issued two years ago on the night of April eighth. It was a citation for parking in front of a hydrant in the sixty-seven-hundred block of Blythe Street in Panorama City.”
It all came together for me, like the last bit of sand dropping through the middle of an hourglass. Raul Levin really had found Jesus Menendez’s salvation.
“Martha Renteria was murdered two years ago on April eighth,” I said. “She lived on Blythe in Panorama City.”
“Yes, but we didn’t know that. We didn’t see the connection. You told us that Levin was working separate cases for you. Jesus Menendez and Louis Roulet were separate investigations. Levin had them filed that way, too.”
“It was a discovery issue. He kept the cases separate so I wouldn’t have to turn over anything on Roulet that he came up with on Menendez.”
“One of your lawyer angles. Well, it stopped us from putting it together until that snitch in there mentioned the snake dancer. That connected everything.”
I nodded.
“So whoever killed Raul Levin took the hard copy?”
“We think.”
“Did you check Raul’s phones for a tap? Somehow somebody knew he found the ticket.”
“We did. They were clear. Bugs could have been removed at the time of the murder. Or maybe it was someone else’s phone that was tapped.”
Meaning mine. Meaning it might explain how Roulet knew so many of my moves and was even conveniently waiting for me in my home the night I had come home from seeing Jesus Menendez.
“I will have them checked,” I said. “Does all of this mean I am clear on Raul’s murder?”
