France

France is significant in the case chiefly as the setting of Johan Rilz’s earlier troubles with police and as the source of testimony about his informant past. Those connections become a point of conflict over how Rilz will be remembered in court and whether his history can affect the murder trial.

Rilz’s Past and the Planned Testimony

Jeffrey Golantz tells Mickey Haller that a French police captain is expected to testify the next day that Rilz had informed on seven dangerous, vindictive men whom the captain had investigated. Two of those men had been released from prison the previous year and had disappeared; Haller raises the possibility that they were in Malibu the preceding spring. The account links France not only to Rilz’s history but also to a possible line of inquiry about people who might have reached California.

France as a Point of Dispute

Golantz says he has warned Rilz’s family that the defense will use Rilz’s problems in France, from five years earlier, to challenge the prosecution’s case. He expects the defense to portray Rilz as someone who sought wealthy clients in Malibu and on Los Angeles’s west side. The family’s response, as Golantz recounts it, is to reject further involvement with American justice and return to Germany. France therefore appears through competing courtroom accounts: a history that may bear on the case, and a potential means of attacking the reputation of one of its victims.