The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(55)

“Harry, you’re overreacting.”

“No, I’m not. And right now, the thing I think is wrong is you. Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, and I’m not going to be part of that.”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not your daughter.”

“I know you’re not, and that has nothing to do with this. But what I said holds. You use the guest room or you can get Olivas to monitor the tap for you.”

“Fine. I’ll sleep. But I want to take this garlic toast to go.”

“Not a problem.”

Bosch looked around for the waiter so he could get the check.





28


While Ballard slept, Bosch went back to the Montgomery case. He kept the music off so as not to disturb her. Not knowing when she might get up, he decided to dive into the shortest stack of documents relating to the three remaining cases he needed to review. These emanated from Judge Montgomery’s service in civil court during the last two years of his life.

The shortest stack was actually a hybrid case: it involved the judge in both criminal and civil courts. It started with a murder case in which a man named John Proctor was convicted in an intentional hit-and-run of a woman who had been struck while walking to her car after leaving a Burbank bar, where she had rejected several efforts by Proctor to buy her drinks and start a conversation.

Proctor was represented at trial by an attorney named Clayton Manley. Proctor fired him after the conviction and hired an attorney named George Grayson to handle his appeal. Prior to Proctor’s sentencing, Grayson filed a motion for a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. It is a routine gambit to request a new trial based on poor lawyering, though it is rarely successful. But in this case the argument had merit. The motion described several things Manley failed to do in prepping for trial, including exploring a third-party culpability defense based on the fact that the victim was in the midst of a bitter divorce at the time of her death and that her estranged husband had been arrested twice for domestic abuse.

The appeal also included several instances at trial when Manley did not ask pertinent questions of prosecution witnesses or had to be prompted by the judge to object to the prosecutor’s witness questioning. Twice during the trial while the jury was not in the courtroom Judge Montgomery hammered Manley for his poor performance, one time directly asking him if he was on any medication that could explain his lack of focus on the case.

Manley worked for the downtown law firm of Michaelson & Mitchell, which had taken on the case and then assigned it to Manley to handle. Though he had handled other criminal matters for the firm, it was his first murder case.

In a one-in-a-hundred decision, Montgomery ordered a new trial, revealing his decision at Proctor’s scheduled sentencing. In open court he agreed with Grayson’s contention that Manley had blown the case with his inattentiveness and inaction. In canceling the sentencing and ordering a new trial, Montgomery went on record with his view of Manley’s performance, castigating the lawyer for his many failures and banning him from handling any future cases in his court.

A reporter from the Los Angeles Times was in the courtroom, there to report on the sentencing in a case that had drawn significant media attention because of the nature of the crime. Instead, he left with a story about Manley, which when published the next day included many of Judge Montgomery’s harshest quotes. Manley quickly became a courthouse whipping boy, the butt of many lawyer jokes traded in courthouse hallways; he soon even garnered the nickname “UnManley.”

At the new trial, the jury found John Proctor not guilty. No one else was ever charged in the killing.

Montgomery then was shifted by the chief judge to civil court and soon enough became embroiled in one himself. Clayton Manley sued the judge for defamation, seeking damages for the “unjust and untrue” statements Montgomery had made in court that were then disseminated by the media. Manley claimed in the filing that Montgomery had turned him into a courthouse pariah and destroyed his career. Manley said he still worked for Michaelson & Mitchell but was no longer assigned criminal cases and had not appeared in court in any capacity since the Proctor case.

The lawsuit was quickly dismissed on the grounds that a judge’s rulings and statements in court were not only protected by the First Amendment right to free speech but sacrosanct for the unbiased and unfettered administration of justice in court. Manley appealed the ruling, but higher courts similarly rejected it twice before he dropped the matter.

That was the end of it, but when Montgomery was murdered a year later his clerk gave the name Clayton Manley to detectives asking who the judge’s enemies might be. Gustafson and Reyes thought enough of it to investigate, and started by reviewing all matters regarding the Proctor case. They saw enough there to proceed to the next level: Reyes interviewed Manley at his office with his own attorney, William Michaelson, present. Manley provided a solid alibi for the morning of the murder. He was in Hawaii on vacation with his wife at a resort on Lanai. Manley gave the detective copies of his boarding passes, hotel and restaurant receipts, and even photos from his iPhone of him on a fishing charter, taken the day Montgomery was murdered. He also provided copies of e-mails from friends and associates, including Michaelson, who reported the murder to him because they knew he was thousands of miles away in Hawaii.

The interview with Manley had occurred a week before the DNA testing came back with the match to Herstadt. It explained why the Manley stack was the shortest. The detectives apparently accepted Manley’s denial of involvement and his alibi.