Page 24 of Resurrection Walk

“Been there many times,” Bosch responded. “If you get hungry, I got po’ boys from Little Jewel in that bag back there.”

“Almost sat on them. Oyster or shrimp?”

“Shrimp. You want me to go back for oysters?”

“No, I don’t like oysters. Just wanted to make sure.”

“I don’t like them either.”

The women’s prison in Chino was about an hour out from downtown. While Bosch worked his way toward the 10 freeway to go east, I took the band off the pocket file and opened it up to see what I had gotten from Silver. Immediately I realized I’d been sandbagged. The first three pockets contained documents, but the four pockets behind them contained completely unused legal pads. Silver had put them in the pocket folder to give it some heft when he handed it to me. An abundance of documents was an indicator of time and effort spent on a case. It seemed obvious that Silver was attempting during the handoff to disguise how little he’d done for Lucinda Sanz. Before I left the office, he’d made me sign a receipt acknowledging that he had given me Sanz’s entire file. Score one for Silver. I should have seen that coming and gone through the file before signing.

“Fucking weasel.”

Bosch looked at me in the rearview again.

“Who?”

“Second-Place Silver.”

“What do you mean?”

“He stuffed the case file with blank legal pads so I’d think he was giving me a lot of work product.”

“Why? Did you make some kind of deal with him?”

“I had to give him twenty-five points after costs in trade for the file. Tell you what, though, I’m going to take every dime I can think of off the top. Including what I pay you.”

From my angle on Bosch, I thought I saw him smile.

“You think it’s funny?”

“I think it’s ironic. One defense lawyer calling another a weasel. Welcome to my world for forty years.”

“Yeah, well, don’t forget who’s signing your paychecks and who put you on the health plan.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

“Speaking of which, how’d it go at UCLA yesterday?”

“Got the infusion, they took some blood, and then I was out of there.”

“Glad you made it. The stuff in the infusion is what they’re testing?”

“Yeah, that’s the isotope. They hang a bag, plug a line into my arm, and pump it in. Twenty to thirty minutes and I’m done, depending on how much of a dose they’re giving. That changes week to week.”

“And they draw blood to see if it’s working?”

“Not really. They’re making sure my platelets aren’t too low — whatever that means. And checking for kidney and liver damage. In about thirty days, they’ll go into the bone for a biopsy. That’ll be the real test.”

“Keep me informed, please.”

“I will. Back to Sanz now. You gave Silver twenty-five points. That mean you think there’s money to be made on the case?”

“Not really. If her conviction is vacated, she ought to be able to recover statutory compensation for an erroneous conviction, but there’s not much a lawyer gets from that. And I don’t see much chance of success for a civil action for wrongful incarceration because she entered a plea accepting imprisonment. Second-Place Silver doesn’t have much experience keeping people out of prison and none whatsoever getting them out. He’s just hoping for an undeserved windfall that will never come.”

I turned my attention back to what in the pocket file was useful. The first of the three inside files was a client-information form — a standard document filled out with a new client that contained addresses, names of relatives, and credit card information. It was largely used so a lawyer could know where his client was at any time and as a means, hopefully, of ensuring payment for work done. In this case, Lucinda Sanz never made bail so her whereabouts were never in question. And since Silver had told me that he had made very little off the case, I assumed that the two credit cards listed on the form had low limits and were tapped out early on.

I wondered why Sanz hadn’t asked for a public defender instead of paying for a midlevel lawyer, but that was water under the bridge. I moved on to the next pocket and here I found a transcript of the interview Lucinda had given the sheriff’s investigators assigned to the Roberto Sanz case.

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