Everybody lies.
Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.
A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.
To paraphrase the character played by Robert DeNiro in the film Wag the Dog on the subject of law enforcement in America: it’s a pageant. The legal system—from law enforcement through the judiciary process—is a pageant. It’s a show, a dramatic performance, theater. Of course, most of us know this to be the truth deep down, but there is still something about the whole process that we so desperately want to believe in that when someone actually working inside the belly of the beast admits to it, well, it still has the power to shock. But then somebody who has risen briefly from the muck like Mickey Haller almost immediately starts with the shining knight talk. Which Haller begins to do in the lines immediately following these.
He was the chairman/owner of Archway Pictures and a very powerful man in Hollywood. He had been charged with murdering his wife and her lover in a fit of rage after discovering them together in a Malibu beach house.
The “he” here is Walter Eliot. Anytime a big Hollywood honcho is involved in murder—especially of his wife—it is the type of case that is hard to resist for any lawyer. Not that it happens that often, of course. Well, at least as far as we actually know. But as Mickey goes on to note, a case like this is a publicity machine and since the whole legal system is a pageant anyway, lawyers need publicity as much as anyone else these days. Why do you think Alan Dershowitz’s only clients are those everybody assumes is guilty?
Our plates were served and I spread a liberal dose of Tabasco sauce on both my steak and the eggs. Sometimes hot sauce was the only way I knew I was still alive.
The Eliot trial is not the only big story going on here. There is a tapestry of historical context involving Haller’s recovery from a gunshot wound inflicted by a would-be assassin and, of course, the by-now-requisite offshoot of that subplot dealing with his addiction to opioid painkillers and subsequent attempt work his way out of that spiral downward. And to top it off, the only reason he finds himself taking on the Eliot case—aside from publicity—is the murder of an old friend who would have been the attorney representing the Hollywood power player.
