They went to Pauline's office overlooking the lake. Pauline pulled a couple of beers out of the refrigerator and gave one to Jake.
"So," Jake said. "What the hell did he do? Do you know the whole story yet?"
She nodded. "Yeah," she said. "He fucked up pretty big this time."
"Let's hear it," Jake said with a resigned sigh.
"Okay," Pauline said. "This is the sequence of events as Matt himself has explained them to me. It seems that he and Kim were in Matt's Maserati, coming back from the LA Coliseum."
"What were they doing there?" Jake asked.
"Watching a football game," she replied. "USC was playing Fresno State."
"Since when does Matt give a shit about football?" Jake asked.
"Since he started dating Kim Kowalski," Pauline said. "She's an alumna of Fresno State."
"Kim graduated from Fresno State?" Jake asked, amazed.
"Ain't that some shit?" Pauline said. "She was in the class of '83. She graduated with a Bachelor's in Performing Arts."
"Wow," Jake said. "So she actually did some of her earlier movies..."
"While she was still in school," Pauline confirmed. "The things you learn when one of your clients gets arrested. Anyway, they'd apparently consumed more then their share of twenty-four ounce beers and were quite intoxicated when they left the game."
"Nothing unusual about that," Jake said.
"Yeah," Pauline agreed with disapproval. All five of her clients, despite her repeated warnings, were in the habit of driving while intoxicated — sometimes grossly intoxicated. "So they made it safely all the way to the junction of Highway 73 and Interstate 5 just outside San Juan Capistrano. There, as Matt was merging onto I-5, at a speed of around ninety miles an hour, he shot past an Orange County Sheriff's deputy on routine patrol in a marked car. The deputy attempted to pull Matt over for excessive speed and Matt decided to make a run for it."
"Jesus Christ," Jake said. "What the hell did he do that for?"
"It was a classic Matt decision based on his basic personality and fueled by a .16 blood alcohol level. He said he wanted to see if he could get away."
Jake shook his head and gave a little eye roll. Yes, that was a classic Matt move all right.
"Matt got off the freeway at the next off-ramp and put on the speed," Pauline continued. "He began tearing through the streets of Laguna Niguel, Laguna Beach, Laguna Hills, and eventually, Mission Viejo. Soon he accumulated a following of no less than thirty patrol cars from Orange County Sheriff's department and the California Highway Patrol trying to take him down. He ran multiple stop signs and red lights. He tore through several residential neighborhoods at speeds over one hundred miles per hour. And, somewhere in Lake Forest, he lost them — or they lost him, depending on how you want to look at it."
"He lost them?" Jake said.
"Well, only in a matter of speaking," Pauline said. "He got away from the pursuit, but, at some point, they were able to get his license number. A gaggle of Orange County deputies showed up at his house within fifteen minutes. He wasn't there, of course, but they pounded on the door until Charles, his elderly butler, opened it for them. They demanded to know if Matt was in the house and when Charles said he wasn't, they asked if they could come in to look around and make sure.
"Charles let them in so they could confirm Matt was not in residence. Once inside, one of the deputies lifted up the cover on a little silver bowl on his coffee table..."
"Oh shit," Jake said. He knew what was in that little silver bowl.
"Exactly," Pauline said. "Inside was two grams of uncut cocaine. They looked inside another little silver bowl on the other side of the room and found a half an ounce of high-grade marijuana. This was enough to get the narcotics detectives involved in the case and to get them working on a search warrant for Matt's entire house."
"Jesus," Jake said. "How much shit did they find?" He knew that the supply in Matt's little silver bowls was just for convenience — his "courtesy bowls" he called them. The real stash was inside of his bedroom safe.
"I'll get to that," Pauline said. "For now, let's return to the present. While the police are waiting for their warrant so they can begin tearing his house apart in earnest, Matt returns home. He sees all the patrol cars parked in front of his house but he pulls into the driveway anyway, intending to give himself up and take the consequences for his drunken driving and running from the cops. It sounds like he thought they'd just shake his hand, congratulate him for beating them during the chase, and then take him down to the station where he would be booked and then released."
"He's deluded," Jake said.
"Yeah," Pauline agreed. "He is dangerously naïve about certain things. I think it comes from growing up in the upper class. Anyway, the moment he steps out of the car, the cops are all pointing guns at him and ordering him to get down. He doesn't get down. He starts yelling at them, telling them that he kicked their fucking asses out there, that he was the best goddamn driver in the free motherfuckin' world. Kim gets in on the insults as well, saying that she'd tried to fuck a cop once but he couldn't get his dick hard so she had to use his nightstick."
"God," Jake said, rubbing his temples now.
"The cops moved in to handcuff both of them," Pauline said. "They elected to go the hard way. Matt broke one deputy's nose, blackened the eyes of two others, and gave another a concussion with a left cross to the temple. Kim kicked one cop in the balls and scratched another across the face bad enough that he needed stitches. Both of them were tackled down, kicked, punched, pepper sprayed, and struck numerous times with nightsticks before, during, and after handcuffing. Kim was taken directly to jail. Matt had to spend a little time in the Santa Ana Medical Center first. They also impounded his car.
"Shortly after the two of them were taken away, the cops' warrant came through. They went in and basically tore his house apart, looking in everything. They had a safecracker come in to blow torch his safe open. Inside, they found almost an ounce of cocaine and nearly a pound of marijuana. Now you and I know that this is just his stash. The sheer amount, however, is enough to qualify him for a possession for sale charge. That carries a significantly stiffer penalty than mere possession."
Jake sighed. "So what's he looking at?"
"He's looking at prison time for the drug charges," Pauline said. "Possession for sale of cocaine is pretty damn serious. Even on a first offense he could get five years for that, which translates into maybe two years before he's eligible for parole."
"Good God," Jake said. "Does he have a lawyer?"
She nodded. "I'm not qualified for criminal law and I told him that as soon as he called me. National set him up with Perceville Maywood, who is one of the most prominent defense attorneys in southern California."
"I've heard of him," Jake said. "Isn't he the one who defended Darlene Jacoby when she killed that chick?" Darlene Jacoby was a well-known television actress who had starred in numerous sitcoms and family oriented shows from the time she was eight years old until just two years before (she had, in fact, been the younger sister on The Slow Lane, the series Mindy Snow had starred in as a child and young adult). Shortly after her twenty-first birthday, Darlene was involved in a drunken driving accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in which her passenger, a member of her entourage, had been killed when she'd been ejected from the vehicle and slammed into a light pole. Darlene had ended up being convicted of simple drunk driving causing injury instead of the more serious charge of vehicular manslaughter because her lawyer had made a big deal of the fact that the fire department and the other emergency medical workers on the scene of the accident had not found the body of the young woman for nearly forty-five minutes after arrival because it was concealed by bushes. The argument had been that if the EMS workers had not been so incompetent at their jobs, they might've found her in time to save her life. The fact that Darlene Jacoby had not mentioned the fact that she'd had a passenger to said EMS workers, and that therefore they didn't even know to look for her, had been ruled irrelevant to the issue.