“Then, why would he ever work with you or throw you cases?”

“Because, Judge, by ending his career as a prosecutor, I started his career as a defense attorney.”

I left it at that but it wasn’t enough for her.

“And?”

“And a couple of years later he was making about five times what he had made with the DA. He called me up one day and thanked me for showing him the light.”

The judge nodded knowingly.

“It came down to money. He wanted the money.”

I shrugged like I was uncomfortable answering for a dead man and didn’t respond.

“What happened to your client?” the judge asked. “What became of the man who got away with murder?”

“He would’ve been better off taking a conviction. Woodson got killed in a drive-by about two months after the acquittal.”

The judge nodded again, this time as if to say end of story, justice served. I tried to put the focus back on Jerry Vincent.

“I can’t believe this about Jerry. Do you know what happened?”

“That’s not clear. He was apparently found late last night in his car in the garage at his office. He had been shot to death. I am told that the police are still there at the crime scene and there have been no arrests. All of this comes from a Times reporter who called my chambers to make an inquiry about what will happen now with Mr. Vincent’s clients – especially Walter Elliot.”

I nodded. For the last twelve months I had been in a vacuum but it wasn’t so airtight that I hadn’t heard about the movie mogul murder case. It was just one in a string of big-time cases Vincent had scored over the years. Despite the Woodson fiasco, his pedigree as a high profile prosecutor had set him up from the start as an upper-echelon criminal defense attorney.