The Enemy Inside

NINE

Herman called me. He found the place. The gentlemen’s club is in a building in a commercial area a few blocks in from the pier at Ocean Beach, what is left of the amusements from the old boardwalk era.

As I cruise slowly down the main drag, its denizens are T-shirt shops and souvenir stands. An antique cotton candy machine on wheels sits forlornly chained to the side of a building in front of a taffy shop. Late afternoon, middle of the week, most of the tourist haunts are closed.

The only place showing signs of life is a microbrewery doing a brisk business, people grabbing a cold one on the way home from work. All the storefront little businesses are neatly painted, mostly pastel colors, some of them with sparkling awnings out front. What you would think of as an upscale California beach community. I know the area. There are million-dollar homes just a few blocks away.

To the naked eye the gentlemen’s club is invisible. According to what Herman told me on the phone it lurks in a back alley under a sign posing as DARKSTONE’S BAR AND GRILL with an arrow pointing up a flight of stairs.

I pull into one of the diagonal parking spaces out on the street. I’m driving my old Jeep, a 1980s vintage Wrangler that I’ve stored for years. I use it for work from time to time just to keep the engine alive. I’ve had it since before Sarah was born. I retain it for sentiment as much as anything else. A time machine for going back to the past whenever I’m behind the wheel, if only for a brief illusion.

Home is not the same anymore. Joselyn and I have been living together for more than a year. She has been away on a project in Europe for two months now, her job with the Gideon Quest Foundation. During a recent excursion up north, she suffered a traumatic incident; I nearly lost her. She fell under the influence of a man who was suffering from mental war wounds and who very nearly took her life. She is recovering, but we are still working to restore our relationship. It was difficult for me to see her go, but it was necessary to give her some space as part of the process of recovery. I’m looking forward to her getting back. Joss, like me, is also a lawyer, but one who left her practice to do good works-in this case as director of a foundation dedicated to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. After my being alone for years, my wife deceased, the Fates brought Joss and me together while the tensions of a world gone crazy seem to keep us apart. I am missing her and wishing she were here. We keep in touch on Skype.

Sarah is gone, no longer living near me, now on her own up in Los Angeles. She has a new job, a career, and friends. I see her only occasionally on weekends. She is busy with her own life, getting on, and getting away. She’s had enough of my law practice and the problems that it caused in our lives. I can’t say that I blame her. Growing up without a mother-Nikki died of cancer when Sarah was young-was only part of it. Having to hide out from a psychotic named Liquida, a killer hired by the Mexican cartels who crossed my path like a black cat, the result of my practice, was enough to send Sarah packing.

She has no interest in being a lawyer or anywhere near a courtroom. I have at least cured her of that. I have often wondered why it is that children, when they come of age, often shy away from what their parents do for a living. The tailor’s son won’t make clothes and the banker’s boy wants to be a doctor.

A few of Sarah’s friends have come to me asking for letters of support to law schools. Of course, when they’ve asked me about a career in law, I do what every other lawyer does. I lie. What others perceive as lucrative and glamorous, your own kid sees up close for what it is, rancorous, dispute-ridden, and sometimes dangerous. They should ask Sarah. Criminal law is largely long hours, seedy clients, uncertain pay, and short-tempered judges, the stuff of which ulcers are made. How do you tell that to some bright-eyed grad with sufficient grades to get into Stanford? You don’t want to pop their balloon with the barbed stinger of cynicism. Listen, kid, the only reason the system tolerates you at all is that it grinds on and could not grind without you. Like the tango, human dispute is impossible without at least two to argue. The criminal defense lawyer’s sole claim to existence.

Suddenly, a shadow from the other side of the car. Herman taps on the window. I reach over and unlock the door. He slips into the passenger seat and closes the door behind him.

“The place is upstairs.” Herman points down the street toward a line of buildings on the other side. “It’s hopping,” he says. He’s already checked it out. “Place is like an old speakeasy. You don’t see or hear a thing ’til you get inside. Then they got a subwoofer give you a nosebleed,” he says.

“Late on a weekday in the afternoon I can’t imagine they’d be doing that much business.”

“Guess again,” says Herman. “Lotta pent-up libido in this town. Not what it used to be when the navy was young.” Herman is right. San Diego used to be a military town, mostly navy and marines. At one time, I am told, the shore patrol combed the bars and clubs downtown like they owned them. But that was decades past. Whoever is running Darkstone’s Bar and Grill is probably paying somebody to look the other way.

“Did you have any trouble getting in?” I ask.

Herman shook his head. “As long as you pay the cover, they open the door,” he says. “Top of the stairs they got a steel door thick as a safe, speaker system, and a camera. You talk nice, they let you in. Inside’s like an air lock. Once the door closes, they own you. They frisk you with a metal wand, check your ID, look you up and down and see if they smell a cop. If not, you pay and they let you in.”

“How much?”

“That’s the rub,” says Herman. “A hundred bills.”

I look at him in disbelief.

“They take a credit card,” he says. “I guess they figure, you can pay, you must be a gentleman. You get two drinks and you can talk to the girls. Anything more, the sky’s gonna be the limit,” he says. “I’m only guessin’, of course.” He smiles at me as he says it.

“You’re sure she works there?” I am talking about the girl we know as Ben, the one who invited Alex Ives to the party and the fiery crash afterward that he can’t remember.

“Yeah. I talked to one of the girls who works there, showed her the picture I got from the tattoo shop owner, and the gal ID’ed her. Says her name is Crystal. Stage name, of course. None of them use their real names at work. Said Crystal works the evening shift, four to whenever things go slack. They try to catch the guys going home from work. Noon until two or three in the afternoon, and then four thirty until closing.”

I look at my watch. It’s twenty past four. “She should be there,” I say.

“Give her a few more minutes,” says Herman. “If the shift starts at four thirty, she’s probably backstage getting ready. Don’t wanna appear too anxious. I already rented a room at the hotel down the street.” He points.

I see the blue neon sign.

“Room number seven.” He hands me the key. “We need a quiet place to get her to talk.”

I take his lead on this. Herman is streetwise. He certainly has more experience in this realm than I do. We sit in the car.

“We need to think this out. What we’re going to do,” I say. “Why don’t you approach her, figure out how to get her to the room. Once she’s inside we can both talk to her.”

“She’s more likely to go with you. Oversize black guy with a shiny shaved dome is more likely to put her on edge.”

“Statistics show that most serial killers are middle-aged white guys.”

“Be that as it may,” says Herman. “You keep the key. We approach her inside the club, start talking about Ives and the accident, she’s liable to wanna go to the ladies’ room, powder her nose,” says Herman, “and disappear. That’s if things go well.”

Herman gives me a briefing on what the place looks like inside, dark with a lot of mirrors, colored smoke, and laser lights. Cocktail tables and booths with a bar along the far wall. An elevated stage with a pole out front for dancing.

“I didn’t see any muscle. Nothing at the door. But you can be sure there’ll be some,” he says. “Chances are if there are problems they won’t be calling the cops.”

“You’re saying a frontal assault is not the height of prudence.”

“I don’t know about Prudence, whoever she is, but if the one we know as Ben makes a stink it could get damn ugly,” says Herman. “We’ll be up to our armpits in bulging bouncers, or worse, the business end of a sawed-off shotgun.”

Herman is thinking we need to get her on neutral turf before we start to talk about the business at hand, and then we pay her for the information, her time and trouble. He’s suggesting we go in separately so they don’t know we’re together. Sit at separate tables. That way we don’t overwhelm her.

“Makes sense. One thing bothers me, though,” I tell him. “We’re assuming that the minute we tell the cops that we have a witness who can put him at the party and that she was paid to do it, they’ll drop the charges on Ives.”

“It’s what we’re hoping,” says Herman. “Makes sense to me.”

“Yeah, but you’re not a prosecutor. If they find out we paid the girl for the information, and they will find out, they’re going to say we paid her to lie. To give Alex an out. If they force us to trial on a reckless charge, vehicular manslaughter, I put her on the stand, the first thing the D.A.’s gonna ask is whether we gave her anything in return for her testimony. They’ll impeach the hell out of her. That and the fact we found her working in a strip club and I offered to hire her for sex to get her to the hotel. They’ll impeach both of us. Her testimony won’t be worth a damn and I’ll be wearing a scarlet letter branded across my forehead during closing argument.”

“You’re the lawyer,” says Herman. “But what other alternative do we have?”

Herman has me there. The cops have no evidence of drugs in Ives’s system, yet he can’t remember anything and he was clearly unconscious at the scene and for some time after. If we put our own medical expert on the stand to tell the jury what we already know, there is only one set of drugs we know of that causes memory loss like this and disappears from the bloodstream that fast-the date rape drugs. How are these normally used in criminal cases? Dropped into one drink, what Ives said he had, without the drinker’s knowledge. The police have no way to explain an accident that killed a prominent lawyer. We hand them the answer. It wasn’t a DUI. Our client was drugged against his will. Used as cover for a murder. That bumps it all up. A much bigger case for them. “Her testimony works. I just don’t like the idea that we’re paying her.”

“You can ask her to testify out of the goodness of her heart,” he says, “but I doubt it’s gonna work.”

He’s right. I look at my watch. “Let’s do it.”