The Gods of Guilt

1

I approached the witness stand with a warm and welcoming smile. This, of course, belied my true intent, which was to destroy the woman who sat there with her eyes fixed on me. Claire Welton had just identified my client as the man who had forced her out of her Mercedes E60 at gunpoint on Christmas Eve last year. She said he was the one who then shoved her to the ground before taking off with the car, her purse, and all the shopping bags she had loaded into the backseat at the mall. As she had just told the prosecutor who questioned her, he had also made off with her sense of security and self-confidence, even though for these more personal thefts he had not been charged.

“Good morning, Mrs. Welton.”

“Good morning.”

She said the words like they were synonyms for please don’t hurt me. But everyone in the courtroom knew it was my job to hurt her today and thereby hurt the state’s case against my client, Leonard Watts. Welton was in her sixties and matronly. She didn’t look fragile but I had to hope she was.

Welton was a Beverly Hills housewife and one of three victims who were roughed up and robbed in a pre-Christmas crime spree resulting in the nine charges against Watts. The police had labeled him the “Bumper Car Bandit,” a strong-arm thief who followed targeted women from the malls, bumped into their cars at stop signs in residential neighborhoods, and then took their vehicles and belongings at gunpoint when they stepped out of their cars to check for damage. He then pawned or resold all the goods, kept any cash, and dropped the cars off at chop shops in the Valley.

But all of that was alleged and hinged on someone identifying Leonard Watts as the culprit in front of the jury. That was what made Claire Welton so special and the key witness of the trial. She was the only one of the three victims who pointed Watts out to the jury and unequivocally claimed that he was the one, that he did it. She was the seventh witness presented by the prosecution in two days but as far as I was concerned she was the only witness. She was the number one pin. And if I knocked her down at just the right angle, all the other pins would go down with her.

I needed to roll a strike here or the jurors who were watching would send Leonard Watts away for a very long time.

I carried a single sheet of paper with me to the witness stand. I identified it as the original crime report created by a patrol officer who was first to respond to the 911 call placed by Claire Welton from a borrowed cell phone after the carjacking occurred. It was already part of the state’s exhibits. After asking for and receiving approval from the judge, I put the document down on the ledge at the front of the witness stand. Welton leaned away from me as I did this. I was sure most members of the jury saw this as well.

I started asking my first question as I walked back to the lectern between the prosecution and defense tables.

“Mrs. Welton, you have there the original crime report taken on the day of the unfortunate incident in which you were victimized. Do you remember talking with the officer who arrived to help you?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“You told him what happened, correct?”

“Yes. I was still shaken up at the—”

“But you did tell him what happened so he could put a report out about the man who robbed you and took your car, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“That was Officer Corbin, correct?”

“I guess. I don’t remember his name but it says it on the report.”

“But you do remember telling the officer what happened, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And he wrote down a summary of what you said, correct?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And he even asked you to read the summary and initial it, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but I was very nervous.”

“Are those your initials at the bottom of the summary paragraph on the report?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Welton, will you now read out loud to the jury what Officer Corbin wrote down after talking with you?”

Welton hesitated as she studied the summary before reading it.

Kristina Medina, the prosecutor, used the moment to stand and object.

“Your Honor, whether the witness initialed the officer’s summary or not, counsel is still trying to impeach her testimony with writing that is not hers. The people object.”

Judge Michael Siebecker narrowed his eyes and turned to me.

“Judge, by initialing the officer’s report, the witness adopted the statement. It is present recollection recorded and the jury should hear it.”

Siebecker overruled the objection and instructed Mrs. Welton to read the initialed statement from the report. She finally complied.

“‘Victim stated that she stopped at the intersection of Camden and Elevado and soon after was struck from behind by a car that pulled up. When she opened her door to get out and check for damage, she was met by a black male thirty to thirty-five YOA—’ I don’t know what that means.”

“Years of age,” I said. “Keep reading, please.”

“‘He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her the rest of the way out of the car and to the ground in the middle of the street. He pointed a black, short-barrel revolver at her face and told her he would shoot her if she moved or made any sound. The suspect then jumped into her car and drove off in a northerly direction, followed by the car that had rear-ended her vehicle. Victim could offer no…”

I waited but she didn’t finish.

“Your Honor, can you instruct the witness to read the entire statement as written on the day of the incident?”

“Mrs. Welton,” Judge Siebecker intoned. “Please continue to read the statement in its entirety.”

“But, Judge, this isn’t everything I said.”

“Mrs. Welton,” the judge said forcefully. “Read the entire statement as the defense counselor asked you to do.”

Welton relented and read the last sentence of the summary.

“‘Victim could offer no further description of the suspect at this time.’”

“Thank you, Mrs. Welton,” I said. “Now, while there wasn’t much in the way of a description of the suspect, you were from the start able to describe in detail the gun he used, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know about how much detail. He pointed it at my face so I got a good look at it and was able to describe what I saw. The officer helped me by describing the difference between a revolver and the other kind of gun. I think an automatic, it’s called.”

“And you were able to describe the kind of gun it was, the color, and even the length of the barrel.”

“Aren’t all guns black?”

“How about if I ask the questions right now, Mrs. Welton?”

“Well, the officer asked a lot of questions about the gun.”

“But you weren’t able to describe the man who pointed the gun at you, and yet two hours later you pick his face out of a bunch of mug shots. Do I have that right, Mrs. Welton?”

“You have to understand something. I saw the man who robbed me and pointed the gun. Being able to describe him and recognize him are two different things. When I saw that picture, I knew it was him, just as sure as I know it’s him sitting at that table.”

I turned to the judge.

“Your Honor, I would like to strike that as nonresponsive.”

Medina stood up.

“Judge, counsel is making broad statements in his so-called questions. He made a statement and the witness merely responded. The motion to strike has no foundation.”

“Motion to strike is denied,” the judge said quickly. “Ask your next question, Mr. Haller, and I do mean a question.”

I did and I tried. For the next twenty minutes I hammered away at Claire Welton and her identification of my client. I questioned how many black people she knew in her life as a Beverly Hills housewife and opened the door on interracial identification issues. All to no avail. At no point was I able to shake her resolve or belief that Leonard Watts was the man who robbed her. Along the way she seemed to recover one of things she said she had lost in the robbery. Her self-confidence. The more I worked her, the more she seemed to bear up under the verbal assault and send it right back at me. By the end she was a rock. Her identification of my client was still standing. And I had bowled a gutter ball.

I told the judge I had no further questions and returned to the defense table. Medina told the judge she had a short redirect and I knew she would ask Welton a series of questions that would only reinforce her identification of Watts. As I slid into my seat next to Watts, his eyes searched my face for any indication of hope.

“Well,” I whispered to him. “That’s it. We are done.”

He leaned back from me as if repelled by my breath or words or both.

“We?” he said.

He said it loud enough to interrupt Medina, who turned and looked at the defense table. I put my hands out palms down in a calming gesture and mouthed the words Cool it to him.

“Cool it?” he said aloud. “I’m not going to cool it. You told me you had this, that she was no problem.”

“Mr. Haller!” the judge barked. “Control your client, please, or I’ll have—”

Watts didn’t wait for whatever it was the judge was about to threaten to do. He launched his body into me, hitting me like a cornerback breaking up a pass play. My chair tipped over with me in it and we spilled onto the floor at Medina’s feet. She jumped sideways to avoid getting hurt herself as Watts drew his right arm back. I was on my left side on the floor, my right arm pinned under Watts’s body. I manage to raise my left hand and caught his fist as it came down at me. It merely softened the blow. His fist took my own hand into my jaw.

I was peripherally aware of screams and motion around me. Watts pulled his fist back as he prepared for punch number two. But the courtroom deputies were on him before he could throw it. They gang-tackled him, their momentum taking him off me and onto the floor in the well in front of the counsel tables.

It all seemed to move in slow motion. The judge was barking commands no one was listening to. Medina and the court reporter were moving away from the melee. The court clerk had stood up behind her corral and was watching in horror. Watts was chest down on the floor, a deputy’s hand on the side of his head, pressing it to the tile, an odd smile on his face as his hands were cuffed behind his back.

And in a moment it was over.

“Deputies, remove him from the courtroom!” Siebecker commanded.

Watts was dragged through the steel door at the side of the courtroom and into the holding cell used to house incarcerated defendants. I was left sitting on the floor, surveying the damage. I had blood on my mouth and teeth and down the crisp white shirt I was wearing. My tie was on the floor under the defense table. It was the clip-on I wear on days I visit clients in holding cells and don’t want to get pulled through the bars.

I rubbed my jaw with my hand and ran my tongue along the rows of my teeth. Everything seemed intact and in working order. I pulled a white handkerchief out of an inside jacket pocket and started wiping off my face as I used my free hand to grab the defense table and help myself up.

“Jeannie,” the judge said to his clerk. “Call paramedics for Mr. Haller.”

“No, Judge,” I said quickly. “I’m okay. Just need to clean up a little bit.”

I picked my tie up and then made a pathetic attempt at decorum, reattaching it to my collar despite the deep red stain that had ruined the front of my shirt. As I worked the clip into my buttoned collar, several deputies reacting to the courtroom panic button undoubtedly pushed by the judge stormed in through the main doors at the back. Siebecker quickly told them to stand down and that the incident had passed. The deputies fanned out across the back wall of the courtroom, a show of force in case there was anyone else in the courtroom thinking about acting out.

I took one last swipe at my face with the handkerchief and then spoke up.

“Your Honor,” I said. “I am deeply sorry for my client’s—”

“Not now, Mr. Haller. Take your seat and you do the same, Ms. Medina. Everybody calm down and sit down.”

I did as instructed, holding the folded handkerchief to my mouth and watching as the judge turned his seat fully toward the jury box. First he told Claire Welton that she was excused from the witness stand. She got up tentatively and walked toward the gate behind the counsel tables. She looked more shaken than anyone else in the courtroom. No doubt for good reason. She probably figured that Watts could have just as easily gone after her as me. And if he had been quick enough he would’ve gotten to her.

Welton sat down in the first row of the gallery, which was reserved for witnesses and staff, and the judge proceeded with the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry that you had to see that display. The courtroom is never a place for violence. It is the place where civilized society takes its stand against the violence that is out on our streets. It truly pains me when something like this occurs.”

There was a metal snapping sound as the door to the holding cell opened and the two courtroom deputies returned. I wondered how badly they had roughed up Watts while securing him in the cell.

The judge paused and then returned his attention to the jury.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Watts’s decision to attack his attorney has prejudiced our ability to go forward. I believe—”

“Your Honor?” Medina interrupted. “If the state could be heard.”

Medina knew exactly where the judge was headed and needed to do something.

“Not now, Ms. Medina, and do not interrupt the court.”

But Medina was persistent.

“Your Honor, could counsel approach at sidebar?”

The judge looked annoyed with her but relented. I let her lead the way and we walked up to the bench. The judge hit the switch on a noise-canceling fan so the jury would not overhear our whispers. Before Medina could state her case, the judge asked me once more if I wanted medical attention.

“I’m fine, Judge, but I appreciate the offer. I think the only thing the worse for wear is my shirt, actually.”

The judge nodded and turned to Medina.

“I know your objection, Ms. Medina, but there is nothing I can do. The jury is prejudiced by what they just saw. I have no choice.”

“Your Honor, this case is about a very violent defendant who committed very violent acts. The jury knows this. They won’t be unduly prejudiced by what they saw. The jury is entitled to view and judge for themselves the demeanor of the defendant. Because he voluntarily engaged in violent acts, the prejudice to the defendant is neither undue nor unfair.”

“If I could be heard, Your Honor, I beg to differ with—”

“Besides that,” Medina continued, running me over, “I fear the court is being manipulated by this defendant. He knew full well that he could get a new trial this way. He—”

“Whoa, wait a minute here,” I protested. “Counsel’s objection is replete with unfounded innuendo and—”

“Ms. Medina, the objection is overruled,” the judge said, cutting off all debate. “Even if the prejudice is neither undue nor unfair, Mr. Watts has effectively just fired his attorney. I can’t require Mr. Haller to go forward in these circumstances and I am not inclined to allow Mr. Watts back into this courtroom. Step back. Both of you.”

“Judge, I want the people’s objection on the record.”

“You shall have it. Now step back.”

We went back to our tables and the judge turned off the fan and then addressed the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as I was saying, the event you just witnessed has created a situation prejudicial to the defendant. I believe that it will be too difficult for you to divorce yourself from what you just saw as you deliberate on his guilt or innocence of the charges. Therefore, I must declare a mistrial at this time and discharge you with the thanks of this court and the people of California. Deputy Carlyle will escort you back to the assembly room where you may gather your things and go home.”

The jurors seemed unsure of what to do or whether everything was over. Finally, one brave man in the box stood up and soon the others followed. They filed out through a door at the back of the courtroom.

I looked over at Kristina Medina. She sat at the prosecution table with her chin down, defeated. The judge abruptly adjourned court for the day and left the bench. I folded my ruined handkerchief and put it away.

2

My full day had been scheduled for trial. Suddenly released from it, I had no clients to see, no prosecutors to work, and no place to be. I left the courthouse and walked down Temple to First. At the corner there was a trash can. I took out my handkerchief, held it to my lips and spit all the debris from my mouth into it. I then tossed it away.

I took a right on First and saw the Town Cars parked along the sidewalk. There were six of them in line like a funeral procession, their drivers gathered together on the sidewalk, shooting the shit and waiting. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but ever since the movie, a whole contingent of Lincoln lawyers had cropped up and routinely crowded the curbs outside the courthouses of L.A. I was both proud and annoyed. I had heard more than a few times that there were other lawyers out there saying they were the inspiration for the film. On top of that, I had jumped into the wrong Lincoln at least three times in the past month.

This time there would be no mistake. As I headed down the hill I pulled my cell phone and called Earl Briggs, my driver. I could see him up ahead. He answered right away and I told him to pop the trunk. Then I hung up.

I saw the trunk of the third Lincoln in line rise and I had my destination. When I got there I put my briefcase down and then took off my jacket, tie, and shirt. I had a T-shirt on underneath, so I wasn’t stopping traffic. I chose a pale blue oxford from the stack of backup shirts I keep in the trunk, unfolded it, and started pulling it on. Earl came over from the klatch with the other drivers. He had been my driver on and off for nearly a decade. Whenever he ran into trouble he came to me and then worked off my fee by driving. This time it wasn’t his own trouble he was paying for. I handled his mother’s foreclosure defense and got her straightened out without her having to go homeless. That got me about six months’ worth of driving from Earl.

I had draped my ruined shirt over the fender. He picked it up and examined it.

“What, somebody spill a whole thing of Hawaiian Punch on you or something?”

“Something like that. Come on, let’s go.”

“I thought you had court all day.”

“I did too. But things change.”

“Where to, then?”

“Let’s go by Philippe’s first.”

“You got it.”

He got in the front and I jumped in the back. After a quick stop at the sandwich shop on Alameda I had Earl point the car west. The next stop was a place called Menorah Manor, near Park La Brea in the Fairfax District. I said I’d be about an hour and got out with my briefcase. I had tucked my fresh shirt in but didn’t bother clipping my tie back on. I wouldn’t need it.

Menorah Manor was a four-story nursing home on Willoughby east of Fairfax. I signed in at the front desk and took the elevator up to the third floor, where I informed the woman at the nurses’ desk that I had a legal consultation with my client David Siegel and was not to be disturbed in his room. She was a pleasant woman who was used to my frequent visits. She nodded her approval and I went down the hallway to room 334.

I entered and closed the door after putting the do not disturb sign on the outside handle. David “Legal” Siegel was lying in bed, his eyes on the screen of a muted television bolted to the upper wall across from the bed. His thin white hands were on top of a blanket. There was a low hiss from the tube that brought oxygen to his nose. He smiled when he saw me.

“Mickey.”

“Legal, how are you doing today?”

“Same as yesterday. Did you bring anything?”

I pulled the visitor’s chair away from the wall and positioned it so I could sit in his line of vision. At eighty-one years old, he didn’t have a lot of mobility. I opened my briefcase on the bed and turned it so he could reach into it.

“French dip from Philippe the Original. How’s that?”

“Oh, boy,” he said.

Menorah Manor was a kosher joint and I used the legal consultation bit as a way around it. Legal Siegel missed the places he’d eaten at during a near-fifty-year run as a lawyer in downtown. I was happy to bring him the culinary joy. He had been my father’s law partner. He was the strategist, while my father had been the front man, the performer who enacted the strategies in court. After my father died when I was five, Legal stuck around. He took me to my first Dodgers game when I was a kid, sent me to law school when I was older.

A year ago I had come to him after losing the election for district attorney amid scandal and self-destruction. I was looking for life strategy, and Legal Siegel was there for me. In that way, these meetings were legitimate consultations between lawyer and client, only the people at the desk didn’t understand that I was the client.

I helped him unwrap the sandwich and opened the plastic container holding the jus that made the sandwiches from Philippe’s so good. There was also a sliced pickle wrapped in foil.

Legal smiled after his first bite and pumped his skinny arm like he had just won a great victory. I smiled. I was glad to bring him something. He had two sons and a bunch of grandchildren but they never came around except on the holidays. As Legal told me, “They need you until they don’t need you.”

When I was with Legal we talked mostly about cases and he would suggest strategies. He was absolute aces when it came to predicting prosecution plans and case roll outs. It didn’t matter that he had not been in a courtroom in this century or that penal codes had changed since his day. He had baseline experience and always had a play. He called them moves, actually — the double-blind move, the judge’s robes move, and so on. I had come to him during the dark time that followed the election. I wanted to learn about my father and how he had dealt with the adversities of his life. But I ended up learning more about the law and how it was like soft lead. How it could be bent and molded.

“The law is malleable,” Legal Siegel always told me. “It’s pliable.”

I considered him to be part of my team, and that allowed me to discuss my cases with him. He’d throw out his ideas and moves. Sometimes I used them and they worked, sometimes not.

He ate slowly. I had learned that if I gave him a sandwich, he could take an hour to eat it, steadily chewing small bites. Nothing went to waste. He ate everything I brought him.

“The girl in three-thirty died last night,” he said between bites. “A shame.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. How old was she?”

“She was young. Early seventies. Just died in her sleep and they carted her out this morning.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. Legal took another bite and reached into my briefcase for a napkin.

“You’re not using the jus, Legal. That’s the good stuff.”

“I think I like it dry. Hey, you used the bloody flag move, didn’t you? How’d it go?”

When he’d grabbed the napkin, he had spotted the extra blood capsule I kept in a Ziploc bag. I had it just in case I swallowed the first one by mistake.

“Like a charm,” I said.

“You get the mistrial?”

“Yep. In fact, mind if I use your bathroom?”

I reached into the briefcase and grabbed another Ziploc, this one containing my toothbrush. I went into the room’s bathroom and brushed my teeth. The red dye turned the brush pink at first but soon it was all down the drain.

When I came back to the chair, I noticed that Legal had finished only half his sandwich. I knew the rest must be cold and there was no way I could take it out to the dayroom to heat it in the microwave. But Legal still seemed happy.

“Details,” he demanded.

“Well, I tried to break the witness but she held up. She was a rock. When I returned to the table, I gave him the signal and he did his thing. He hit me a little harder than I was expecting but I’m not complaining. The best part is I didn’t have to make the motion to declare a mistrial. The judge went right to it on his own.”

“Over prosecution’s objection?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Good. Fuck ’em.”

Legal Siegel was a defense attorney through and through. For him, any ethical question or gray area could be overcome by the knowledge that it is the sworn duty of the defense attorney to present the best defense of his client. If that meant tipping a mistrial when the chips were down, then so be it.

“Now the question is, will he deal now?”

“It’s actually a she, and I think she’ll deal. You should’ve seen the witness after the scuffle. She was scared and I don’t think she’ll be wanting to come back for another trial. I’ll wait a week and have Jennifer call the prosecutor. I think she’ll be ready to deal.”

Jennifer was my associate Jennifer Aronson. She would need to take over representation of Leonard Watts, because if I stayed on, it would look like the setup it was and that Kristina Medina had alluded to in the courtroom.

Medina had refused to negotiate a plea agreement before the trial because Leonard Watts declined to give up his partner, the guy who drove the car that bumped into each of the victims. Watts wouldn’t snitch, and so Medina wouldn’t deal. Things would be different in a week, I thought, for a variety of reasons: I had seen most of the prosecution’s case laid out in the first trial, Medina’s main witness was spooked by what had happened in front of her in court today, and mounting a second trial would be a costly use of taxpayers’ money. Added to that, I had given Medina a glimpse of what might come if the defense presented a case to a jury — namely my intention to explore through expert witnesses the pitfalls of interracial recognition and identification. That was something no prosecutor wanted to deal with in front of a jury.

“Hell,” I said, “she might call me before I even have to go to her.”

That part was wishful thinking but I wanted Legal to feel good about the move he had strategized for me.

While I was up I took the extra blood capsule out of the briefcase and dropped it into the room’s hazardous-waste container. There was no need for it anymore and I didn’t want to risk it breaking open and ruining my paperwork.

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket. It was my case manager, Lorna Taylor, calling but I decided to let it go to message. I’d call her back after my visit with Legal.

“What else you got going now?” Legal asked.

I spread my hands.

“Well, no trial now, so I guess I have the rest of the week off. I may go down to arraignment court tomorrow and see if I can pick up a client or two. I could use the work.”

Not only could I use the income but the work would keep me busy and not thinking about the things in my life that were wrong. In that sense the law had become more than a craft and a calling. It kept me sane.

By checking in at Department 130, the arraignment court in the downtown Criminal Courts Building, I had a shot at picking up clients the public defender was dropping because of conflict of interest. Every time the DA filed a multi-defendant case, the PD could take on only one defendant, putting all others in conflict. If those other defendants did not have private counsel, the judge would appoint counsel to them. If I happened to be there twiddling my thumbs, more often than not I’d pick up a case. It paid government scale but it was better than no work and no pay.

“And to think,” Legal said, “at one point last fall you were running five points up in the polls. And now here you are, scrounging around first-appearance court looking for handouts.”

As he had aged, Legal had lost most of the social filters normally employed in polite company.

“Thanks, Legal,” I said. “I can always count on you for a fair and accurate take on my lot in life. It’s refreshing.”

Legal Siegel raised his bony hands in what I guessed was an apologetic gesture.

“I’m just saying.”

“Sure.”

“So what about your daughter, then?”

This was how Legal’s mind worked. Sometimes he couldn’t remember what he’d had for breakfast, but he seemed to always remember that I had lost more than the election the year before. The scandal had cost me the love and companionship of my daughter and any shot I’d had at putting my broken family back together.

“Things are still the same there, but let’s not go down that road today,” I said.

I checked my phone again after feeling the vibration signaling I had received a text. It was from Lorna. She had surmised that I wasn’t taking calls or listening to voice-mail. A text was different.

Her mention of the California penal code number for murder got my attention. It was time to go.

“You know, Mickey, I only bring her up because you don’t.”

“I don’t want to bring her up. It’s too painful, Legal. I get drunk every Friday night so I can sleep through most of Saturday. You know why?”

“No, I don’t know why you would get drunk. You did nothing wrong. You did your job with that guy Galloway or whatever his name was.”

“I drink Friday nights so I am out of it Saturdays because Saturdays were when I used to see my daughter. His name was Gallagher, Sean Gallagher, and it doesn’t matter if I was doing my job. People died and it’s on me, Legal. You can’t hide behind just doing your job when two people get creamed at an intersection by the guy you set free. Anyway, I gotta go.”

I stood up and showed him the phone as if it were the reason I needed to go.

“What, I don’t see you for a month and now you already have to go? I’m not finished with my sandwich here.”

“I saw you last Tuesday, Legal. And I’ll see you sometime next week. If not then, then the week after. You hang in and hold fast.”

“Hold fast? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means hold on to what you got. My half brother, the cop, told me that one. Finish that sandwich before they come in here and take it from you.”

I moved toward the door.

“Hey, Mickey Mouse.”

I turned back to him. It was the name he bestowed on me when I was a baby, born at four and a half pounds. Normally I’d tell him not to call me that anymore. But I let him have it so I could go.

“What?”

“Your father always called the jurors the ‘gods of guilt.’ You remember that?”

“Yep. Because they decide guilty or not guilty. What’s your point, Legal?”

“The point is that there are plenty of people out there judging us every day of our lives and for every move we make. The gods of guilt are many. You don’t need to add to them.”

I nodded but couldn’t resist a reply.

“Sandy Patterson and her daughter Katie.”

Legal looked confused by my response. He didn’t recognize the names. I, of course, would never forget them.

“The mother and daughter Gallagher killed. They’re my gods of guilt.”

I closed the door behind me and left the do not disturb sign on the knob. Maybe he’d get the sandwich down before the nurses checked on him and discovered our crime.

3

Back in the Lincoln I called Lorna Taylor and by way of greeting she said the words that always put the two-edged sword right through me. Words that excited and repelled me at the same time.

“Mickey, you’ve got a murder case if you want it.”

The thought of a murder case could put the spark in your blood for many reasons. First and foremost, it was the worst crime on the books and with it came the highest stakes in the profession. To defend a murder suspect you had to be at the very top of your game. To get a murder case you had to have a certain reputation that put you at the top of the game. And in addition to all that, there was the money. A murder defense — whether the case goes to trial or not — is expensive because it is so time-consuming. You get a murder case with a paying customer and you likely make your whole nut for the year.

The downside is your client. While I have zero doubt that innocent people are charged with murder, for the most part the police and prosecutors get it right and you are left to negotiate or ameliorate the length and terms of punishment. All the while you sit at the table next to a person who has taken a life. It’s never a pleasant experience.

“What are the details?” I asked.

I was in the back of the Town Car with a legal pad ready on the fold-down worktable. Earl was heading toward downtown on Third Street, a straight shot in from the Fairfax District.

“The call came in collect from Men’s Central. I accepted and it was a guy named Andre La Cosse. He said he was arrested for murder last night and he wants to hire you. And get this, when I asked him where the referral came from, he said the woman he is accused of killing had recommended you. He said she told him you were the best.”

“Who is it?”

“That’s the crazy thing. Her name, according to him, is Giselle Dallinger. I ran her through our conflict app and her name doesn’t come up. You never represented her, so I am not sure how she got your name and made this recommendation even before she was supposedly killed by this guy.”

The conflict app was a computer program that digitized all our case files and allowed us to determine in seconds whether a prospective client had ever come up in a previous case as a witness, a victim, or even a client. At twenty-plus years into this career, I could not remember every client’s name, let alone the ancillary characters involved in cases. The conflict app saved us enormous amounts of time. Previously, I would often dig into a case only to find out I had a conflict of interest in representing the new client because of an old client, witness, or victim.

I looked down at my legal pad. So far I had written down only the names, nothing else.

“Okay, whose case is it?”

“LAPD West Bureau Homicide.”

“Do we know anything else about it? What else did this guy say?”

“He said he is supposed to have his first appearance tomorrow morning and he wanted you there. He said he was set up and didn’t kill her.”

“Was she a wife, girlfriend, business associate, or what?”

“He said she worked for him but that’s all. I know you don’t like your clients talking on jailhouse phones, so I didn’t ask him anything about the case.”

“That’s good, Lorna.”

“Where are you, anyway?”

“I went out to see Legal. I’m heading back downtown now. I’ll see if I can get in to see this guy and feel it out. Can you get a hold of Cisco and have him do some preliminaries?”

“He’s already on it. I can hear him on the phone with somebody now.”

Cisco Wojciechowski was my investigator. He was also Lorna’s husband, and they worked out of her condo in West Hollywood. Lorna also happened to be my ex-wife. She was wife number two, coming after the wife who bore me my only child — a child who was now sixteen years old and wanted nothing to do with me. Sometimes I thought I needed a flowchart on a whiteboard to keep track of everybody and their relationships, but at least there were no jealousies between me and Lorna and Cisco, just a solid working relationship.

“Okay, have him call me. Or I’ll call him after I get out of jail.”

“Okay, good luck.”

“One last thing. Is La Cosse a paying customer?”

“Oh, yeah. He said he didn’t have cash but he had gold and other ‘commodities’ he could trade.”

“Did you give him a number?”

“I told him you would need twenty-five just to get started, more later. He didn’t freak out or anything.”

The number of defendants in the system at any given time who could not only afford a $25,000 retainer but were willing to part with it were few and far between. I knew nothing about this case but it was sounding better to me all the time.

“Okay, I’ll check back when I know something.”

“Cheers.”

Some of the air came out of the balloon before I even laid eyes on my new client. I had filed an engagement letter with the jail office and was waiting for the detention deputies to find La Cosse and move him into an interview room, when Cisco called with the preliminary information he had been able to glean from human and digital sources in the hour or so since we had gotten the case.

“Okay, a couple things. The LAPD put out a press release on the murder yesterday but so far nothing on the arrest. Giselle Dallinger, thirty-six years old, was found early Monday morning in her apartment on Franklin west of La Brea. She was found by firefighters who were called because the apartment had been set on fire. The body was burned but it is suspected that the fire was set in an attempt to cover up the murder and make it look accidental. Autopsy is still pending but the release says there were indications she had been strangled. The press release labeled her a businesswoman but the Times ran a short on it on their website that quotes law enforcement sources as saying she was a hooker.”

“Great. Who is my guy then, a john?”

“Actually, the Times report says the coppers were questioning a business associate. Whether that was La Cosse it doesn’t say but you put two and two together—”

“And you get pimp.”

“Sounds like it to me.”

“Great. Seems like a swell guy.”

“Look at the bright side, Lorna says he’s a paying client.”

“I’ll believe it when the cash is in my pocket.”

I suddenly thought of my daughter, Hayley, and one of the last things she had said to me before she cut off contact. She called the people on my client list the dregs of society, people who are takers and users and even killers. Right now I couldn’t argue with her. My roster included the carjacker who targeted old ladies, an accused date rapist, an embezzler who took money from a student trip fund, and various other societal miscreants. Now I would presumably add an accused murderer to the list — make that an accused murderer in the business of selling sex.

I was beginning to feel that I deserved them as much as they deserved me. We were all hard-luck cases and losers, the kind of people the gods of guilt never smiled upon.

My daughter had known the two people my client Sean Gallagher killed. Katie Patterson was in her class. Her mom was their homeroom mother. Hayley had to switch schools to avoid the scorn directed at her when it was revealed by the media — and I mean all the media — that J. Michael Haller Jr., candidate for Los Angeles County District Attorney, had sprung Gallagher from his last DUI pop on a technicality.

The bottom line is that Gallagher was out drinking and driving because of my so-called skills as a defense lawyer, and no matter how Legal Siegel tried to soothe my conscience with the old “you-were-just-doing-your-job” refrain, I knew in the dark shadows of my soul that the verdict was guilty. Guilty in the eyes of my daughter, guilty in my own eyes as well.

“You still there, Mick?”

I came out of the dark reverie, realizing I was still on the phone with Cisco.

“Yeah. Do you know who’s working the case?”

“The press release names Detective Mark Whitten of West Bureau as the lead. His partner isn’t listed.”

I didn’t know Whitten and had never come up against him on a case, as far as I could remember.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“That’s all I have at the moment but I’m working it.”

Cisco’s info had dampened my excitement. But I wasn’t going to jettison the case just yet. Guilty conscience aside, a paycheck was a paycheck. I needed the dough to keep Michael Haller & Associates solvent.

“I’ll call you after I meet the man, which is right now.”

A detention deputy was directing me into one of the attorney-client booths. I got up and headed in.

Andre La Cosse was already in a chair on the other side of a table with a three-foot-high plexiglass divider cutting it in half. Most of the clients I visit in Men’s Central adopt a slouch and a laid-back, cavalier attitude about being in jail. It’s a protective measure. If you act unconcerned about being locked into a steel building with twelve hundred other violent criminals, then maybe they’ll leave you alone. On the other hand, if you show fear, then the predators will see it and exploit it. They’ll come for you.

But La Cosse was different. First of all, he was smaller than I had expected. He was slightly built and looked to me like he had never once picked up a set of barbells. He was in a baggy orange jail jumper but seemed to carry himself with a pride that belied his circumstances. He didn’t exactly show fear, but he wasn’t showing the exaggerated nonchalance I had seen so many times before in these places. He sat upright on the edge of his chair and his eyes tracked me like lasers as I came into the small space. There was something formal about the way he held himself. His hair was carefully feathered at the sides and it looked like he might have been wearing eyeliner.

“Andre?” I said as I sat down. “I’m Michael Haller. You called my office about handling your case.”

“Yes, I did. I shouldn’t be here. Somebody killed her after I was there but nobody will believe me.”

“Slow down a second and let me get set up here.”

I took a legal pad out of my briefcase and the pen from my shirt pocket.

“Before we talk about your case, let me ask a couple of things first.”

“Please.”

“And let me say from the beginning that you can never lie to me, Andre. You understand that? If you lie, I fly — that’s my rule. I can’t be working for you if we don’t have a relationship where I can believe that everything you tell me is the god’s honest truth.”

“Yes, that won’t be a problem. The truth is the only thing I’ve got on my side right now.”

I went down a list of the basics, gathering a quick bio for the files. La Cosse was thirty-two, unmarried, and living in a condo in West Hollywood. He had no local relatives, the nearest being his parents in Lincoln, Nebraska. He said he had no criminal record in California, Nebraska, or anywhere else and had never had so much as a speeding ticket. He gave me phone numbers for his parents and his cell phone and landline — these would be used to track him down in the event he were to get out of jail and not live up to our fee arrangement. Once I had the basics I looked up from my legal pad.

“What do you do for a living, Andre?”

“I work from home. I’m a programmer. I build and manage websites.”

“How did you know the victim in this case, Giselle Dallinger?”

“I ran all her social media. Her websites, Facebook, e-mail, all of it.”

“So you’re sort of a digital pimp?”

La Cosse’s neck immediately grew scarlet.

“Absolutely not! I am a businessman and she is — was — a businesswoman. And I did not kill her, but nobody around here will believe me.”

I made a calming gesture with my free hand.

“Let’s cool it down a little bit. I’m on your side, remember?”

“Doesn’t seem like it when you ask a question like that.”

“Are you gay, Andre?”

“What does that matter?”

“Maybe nothing but maybe it will mean a lot when the prosecutor starts talking about a motive. Are you?”

“Yes, if you have to know. I don’t hide it.”

“Well, in here maybe you should, for your own safety. I can also get you moved into a homosexual module once you’re arraigned tomorrow.”

“Please don’t bother. I don’t want to be classified in any way.”

“Suit yourself. What was Giselle’s website?”

“Giselle-for-you-dot-com. That was the main one.”

I wrote it down.

“There were others?”

“She had sites tailored to specific tastes that would come up if someone searched with certain words or things they were looking for. That’s what I offer — a multi-platform presence. That’s why she came to me.”

I nodded as though I were admiring his creativity and business acumen.

“And how long were you in business with her?”

“She came to me about two years ago. She wanted a multidimensional online presence.”

“She came to you? What does that mean? How did she come to you? Do you run ads online or something?”

He shook his head as though he was dealing with a child.

“No, no ads. I only work with people recommended to me by someone I already know and trust. She was recommended by another client.”

“Who was that?”

“There is a confidentiality issue there. I don’t want her dragged into this. She doesn’t know anything and has nothing to do with this.”

I shook my head as though I was dealing with a child.

“For now, Andre, I’ll let it pass. But if I take this case, I will at some point need to know who referred her. And you cannot be the one who decides whether someone or something has relevance to the case. I decide that. You understand?”

He nodded.

“I’ll get a message to her,” he said. “As soon as I have her okay, I will connect you. But I do not lie and I do not betray confidences. My business and my life are built on trust.”

“Good.”

“And what do you mean, ‘if I take the case’? I thought you took the case. I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?”

“I’m still deciding.”

I checked my watch. The sergeant I checked in with said I would get only a half hour with La Cosse. I still had three separate areas of discussion to cover — the victim, the crime, and my compensation.

“We don’t have a lot of time, so let’s move on. When was the last time you saw Giselle Dallinger in person?”

“Sunday night late — and when I left her she was alive.”

“Where?”

“At her apartment.”

“Why did you go there?”

“I went to get money from her but I didn’t get any.”

“What money and why didn’t you get it?”

“She went out on a job and my arrangement with her is I get paid a percentage of what she makes. I had set her up on a Pretty Woman Special and I wanted my share — these girls, if you don’t get the money right away, it has a tendency to disappear up their noses and other places.”

I wrote down a summary of what he had just said even though I wasn’t sure what most of it meant.

“Are you saying that Giselle was a drug user?”

“I would say so, yes. Not out of control, but it’s part of the job and part of the life.”

“Tell me about the Pretty Woman Special. What does that mean?”

“The client takes a suite at the Beverly Wilshire like in the movie Pretty Woman. Giz had the Julia Roberts thing going, you know? Especially after I had her photos airbrushed. I assume you can figure it out from there.”

I had never seen the movie but knew it was a story about a prostitute with a heart of gold meeting the man of her dreams on a paid date at the Beverly Wilshire.

“How much was the fee for that?”

“It was supposed to be twenty-five hundred.”

“And your take?”

“A thousand, but there was no take. She said it was a dead call.”

“What’s that?”

“She gets there and there’s nobody home, or whoever answers the door says he didn’t call for her. I check these things out as best as I can. I check IDs, everything.”

“So you didn’t believe her.”

“Let’s just say I was suspicious. I had talked to the man in that room. I called him through the hotel operator. But she claimed there was nobody there and the room wasn’t even rented.”

“So you argued about it?”

“A little bit.”

“And you hit her.”

“What? No! I have never hit a woman. I’ve never hit a man, either! I didn’t do this. Can’t you be—”

“Look, Andre, I’m just gathering information here. So you didn’t hit her or hurt her. Did you physically touch her anywhere?”

La Cosse hesitated and in that I knew there was a problem.

“Tell me, Andre.”

“Well, I grabbed her. She wouldn’t look at me and so that made me think she was lying. So I grabbed her up around her neck — with one hand only. She got mad and I got mad and that was it. I left.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, nothing. Well, out on the street, when I was going to my car, she threw an ashtray down at me from her balcony. It missed.”

“But how did you leave it when you were up in the apartment?”

“I said I was going to go back to the hotel and knock on the guy’s door myself and get our money. And I left.”

“What room was it and what was the guy’s name?”

“He was in eight thirty-seven. His name was Daniel Price.”

“Did you go to the hotel?”

“No, I just went home. I decided it wasn’t worth it.”

“It seemed worth it when you grabbed her by the throat.”

He nodded at the inconsistency but didn’t offer any further explanation. I moved off the subject — for now.

“Okay, then what happened? When did the police come?”

“They showed up at about five yesterday.”

“Morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon.”

“Did they say how they came up with you?”

“They knew about her website. That led to me. They said they had questions and I agreed to talk to them.”

Always a mistake, voluntarily talking to the cops.

“Do you remember their names?”

“There was Detective Whitten and he did most of the talking. His partner’s name was something like Weeder. Something like that.”

“Why did you agree to talk to them?”

“I don’t know, maybe because I did nothing wrong and wanted to help? I stupidly thought that they were trying to find out what happened to poor Giselle, not that they came with what they thought happened and just wanted to plug me into it.”

Welcome to my world, I thought.

“Did you know she was dead before they arrived?”

“No, I had been calling and texting her all day and leaving messages. I was sorry about the whole blowup the night before. But she didn’t call back and I thought she was still mad about the argument. Then they came and said she was dead.”

Obviously, when a prostitute is found dead, one of the first places the investigation goes is to the pimp, even if it is a digital pimp who doesn’t fit the stereotype of sadistic bruiser and who doesn’t keep the women in his stable in line through threat and physical abuse.

“Did they record the conversation with you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did they inform you of your constitutional right to have an attorney present?”

“Yes, but that was later at the station. I didn’t think I needed an attorney. I did nothing wrong. So I said fine, let’s talk.”

“Did you sign a waiver form of any kind?”

“Yes, I signed something — I didn’t really read it.”

I held my displeasure in check. Most people who enter the criminal justice system end up being their own worst enemies. They literally talk their way into the handcuffs.

“Tell me how this went. You talked to them at first in your home and then they took you to West Bureau?”

“Yes, first we were in my place for about fifteen minutes and then they took me to the station. They said they wanted me to look at some photos of suspects but that was just a lie. They never showed me any photos. They put me in a little interview room and kept asking questions. Then they told me I was under arrest.”

I knew that for them to make the arrest they had to have physical or eyewitness evidence linking La Cosse to the murder in some way. In addition, something he told them must not have squared with the facts. Once he lied, or they thought he lied, he was arrested.

“Okay, and you told them about going to the victim’s apartment on Sunday night?”

“Yes, and I told them she was alive when I left.”

“Did you tell them about grabbing her by the neck?”

“Yes.”

“Was that before or after they read you your rights and had you sign the waiver?”

“Uh, I can’t remember. I think before.”

“It’s okay. I’ll find out. Did they talk about any other evidence, confront you with anything else they had?”

“No.”

I checked my watch again. I was running out of time. I decided to end the case questions there. Most of the information I would get in discovery if I took on the case. Besides that, it’s a good idea to limit the information you get directly from a client. I would be stuck with whatever La Cosse told me and it might color the moves I made later in the case or at trial. For example, if La Cosse told me he had indeed killed Giselle, then I would not be able to put him on the stand to deny it. That would make me guilty of suborning perjury.

“Okay, enough on that for now. If I take this case, how are you going to pay me?”

“In gold.”

“I was told that, but I mean how? Where does this gold come from?”

“I have it in a safe place. All my money is in gold. If you take the case, I will have it delivered to you before the end of the day. Your manager said you needed twenty-five thousand dollars to start. We’ll use the New York Mercantile Exchange quote on valuation and it will simply be delivered. I haven’t really been able to check the market in here but I’m guessing a one-pound bar will cover it.”

“You realize that will only cover my start-up costs, right? If this case goes forward to preliminary hearing and trial, then you’re going to need more gold. You can get cheaper than me but you’re not going to get better.”

“Yes, I understand. I will have to pay to prove my innocence. I have the gold.”

“All right, then, have your delivery person bring the gold to my case manager. I’m going to need it in hand before your first appearance in court tomorrow. Then I’ll know you’re serious about this.”

I knew time was fleeting but I silently studied La Cosse for a long moment, trying to get a read on him. His story of innocence sounded plausible but I didn’t know what the police knew. I only had Andre’s tale and I suspected that as the evidence in the case was revealed, I would learn that he wasn’t as innocent as he claimed to be. It’s always that way.

“Okay, last thing, Andre. You told my case manager that I came recommended to you by Giselle herself, is that right?”

“Yes, she said you were the best lawyer in town.”

“How did she know that?”

La Cosse looked surprised, as if the whole conversation so far had been based on a given — that I knew Giselle Dallinger.

“She said she knew you, that you’d handled cases for her. She said you got her a really good deal once.”

“And you’re sure it was me she was talking about.”

“Yes, it was you. She said you hit a home run for her. She called you Mickey Mantle.”

That stopped my breath short. I’d had a client once — a prostitute, too — who would call me that. But I had not seen her in a long time. Not since I put her on a plane with enough money to start over and never come back.

“Giselle Dallinger was not her real name, was it?”

“I don’t know. It’s all I knew her by.”

There was a hard rap on the steel door behind me. My time was up. Some other lawyer needed the room to talk to some other client. I looked across the table at La Cosse. I was no longer second-guessing whether to take him on as my client.

Without a doubt, I was taking the case.

4

Earl drove me over to the Starbucks on Central Avenue and pulled to the curb out front. I stayed in the car while he went in to get us coffee. I opened my laptop on the worktable and used the coffee shop’s signal to get online. I tried three different variations before typing in www.Giselle4u.com and bringing up the website for the woman Andre La Cosse was accused of killing. The photos were airbrushed, the hair was different, and a plastic surgeon had gone to work since I had last seen her, but I had no doubt that Giselle Dallinger was my former client Gloria Dayton.

This changed things. Aside from the issue of legal conflict regarding my representing a client accused of killing another client, there were my feelings about Gloria Dayton and the sudden realization that I’d been used by her in a way that was not too different from the way she was used by men nearly all her life.

Gloria had been a project, a client I cared about beyond the usual boundaries of the attorney-client relationship. I cannot say why this came to be, only that she had a damaged smile, a sardonic wit, and a pessimistic self-knowledge that drew me in. I had handled at least six cases involving her over the years. All of them involved prostitution, drugs, solicitation of prostitution, and the like. She was deeply embedded in the life but always seemed to me to deserve a shot at rising above it and escaping. I was no hero but I did what I could for her. I got her into pretrial intervention programs, halfway houses, therapies, and even once enrolled her in Los Angeles City College after she had expressed an interest in writing. None of it worked for long. A year or so would go by and I’d get the call — she was in jail again and needed a lawyer. Lorna started telling me I needed to cut her loose or pass her off to another attorney, that she was a lost cause. But I couldn’t do that. The truth was I liked knowing Gloria Dayton, or Glory Days as she was known in the profession back then. She had a lopsided view of the world that matched her lopsided smile. She was a feral cat and she let no one but me pet her.

This is not to say there was anything romantic or sexual about our relationship. There was not. In fact, I’m not even sure we could have properly called us friends. We encountered each other too infrequently for that. But I cared about her and that’s why it hurt now to know she was dead. For the past seven years I thought she had gotten away and that I had helped. She had taken the money I gave her and flown off to Hawaii, where she claimed there was a longtime client who wanted to take her in and help her start over. I got postcards every now and then, a Christmas card or two. They all reported that she was doing well and had stayed clean. And they made me feel as though I had accomplished something rarely achieved in the courtrooms and corridors of law. I had changed the direction of a life.

When Earl got back with the coffee I closed the laptop and told him to take me home. I then called Lorna and told her to organize a complete staff meeting for eight the next morning. Andre La Cosse was due in arraignment court on second call, meaning he would make his first appearance sometime between ten a.m. and noon. I wanted to meet with my team and get things going before then. I told her to pull all our files on Gloria Dayton and bring them as well.

“Why do you want Gloria’s files?” she asked.

“Because she’s the victim,” I said.

“Oh my god, are you sure? That’s not the name Cisco gave me.”

“I’m sure. The cops don’t realize it yet, but it was her.”

“I’m sorry, Mickey. I know you… you liked her.”

“Yeah, I did. I was just thinking about her the other day and considering going to Hawaii when the courts are dark over Christmas. I was going to call her if I got there.”

Lorna didn’t respond. The Hawaii trip was an idea I had for getting through the holidays without seeing my kid. But I’d dismissed it out of hope that things would change. That maybe on Christmas Day I’d get a call and an invitation to come over for dinner. If I went to Hawaii, I’d miss the opportunity.

“Listen,” I said, breaking off the thought. “Is Cisco around?”

“No, I think he went over to where the victim — I mean, Gloria — lived, to see what he could find out.”

“Okay, I’ll call him. See you tomorrow.”

“Oh, Mickey, wait. Do you want Jennifer at the meeting, too? I think she has a couple of appearances in county court.”

“Yes, definitely. If she has a conflict, see if she can get one of the Jedi Knights to cover her.”

I had hired Jennifer a few years ago directly out of Southwestern Law School and she carried what was then our burgeoning foreclosure defense practice. That had slowed down in the past year, while criminal defense had picked back up, but Jennifer still carried a big caseload. There was a group of regular lawyers on the foreclosure circuit and they had taken to monthly lunches or dinners to swap stories and strategies. They called themselves the Jedi Knights, which was short for JEDTI, meaning Jurists Engaged in Defending Title Integrity, and the fellowship extended to covering each other’s court appearances when there were time conflicts.

I knew Jennifer wouldn’t mind being pulled away from the foreclosure work to visit the criminal side for a bit. When I hired her, she told me first thing that she wanted a career in criminal defense. And lately she had been suggesting repeatedly in e-mails and our weekly staff meetings that it was time to hire another associate to take over the foreclosure business while she immersed herself more fully in the criminal side. I had been resistant because hiring another associate pushed me closer toward needing the traditional setup with an office, a secretary, a copy machine, and all of that. I didn’t like the idea of the overhead or the brick-and-mortar anchor. I liked working out of the backseat and flying by the seat of my pants.

After ending the call with Lorna I put the window down and let the air blow into my face. It was a reminder of what I liked about the way I did things.

Soon enough I put the window back up so I would be able to hear Cisco on the cell phone. I called him and he reported that he was indeed working a door-to-door canvass of the building where Giselle Dallinger had lived and died.

“Getting anything good?”

“Bits and pieces. She kept to herself mostly. Not a lot of visitors. She must’ve handled her business outside the apartment.”

“How about getting into that place?”

“There’s a security door downstairs. She had to buzz you in.”

Which didn’t look good for La Cosse. The police probably assumed that Dallinger knew her killer and had let him in.

“Any record of activity on the door?” I asked.

“No, it’s not a recorded system,” Cisco said.

“Cameras?”

“Nope.”

That could cut either way for La Cosse.

“Okay, when you’re finished there, I’ve got some stuff for you.”

“I can come back to this. The building manager’s being cooperative.”

“Okay, then. We’re all going to meet tomorrow at eight. Before that, if you can, I want you to run down a name. Gloria Dayton. You can get a DOB from the files Lorna has. I want to know where she’s been for the past few years.”

“You got it. Who is she?”

“She’s our victim, only the police don’t know it.”

“La Cosse tell you this?”

“No, I figured it out on my own. She’s a former client.”

“You know, I could use this as currency. I checked with the morgue and they had not confirmed the ID because the body and the apartment were burned. No usable fingerprints from either. They were hoping her DNA would be in the system or that they could find a dentist.”

“Yeah, well, you can use it if it gets you something. I just looked at the pictures on the Giselle-for-you website. It’s Gloria Dayton, an old client I thought moved to Hawaii about seven years ago. Andre told me he’d been working with her here for the past two years. I want the full picture.”

“Got it. Seven years ago, why’d she go?”

I paused before answering, thinking about the last case I handled for Gloria Dayton.

“I had a case that paid me well and she played a part. I gave her twenty-five grand if she promised to quit the life and start over. There was also a guy. She snitched him off to get a deal. I was the broker. It was just time for her to get out of town.”

“Could that have anything to do with this?”

“I don’t know. It was a long time ago and that guy went away for life.”

Hector Arrande Moya. I still remembered his name, the way it rolled off the tongue. The feds had wanted him bad and Gloria knew where to find him.

“I’m going to put Bullocks on that tomorrow,” I said, referring to Jennifer Aronson by her nickname. “If nothing else, we might be able use the guy as a straw man.”

“Can you still take the case with the victim being a former client? Isn’t that some sort of conflict of interest or something?”

“It can be worked out. It’s the legal system, Cisco. It’s malleable.”

“Understood.”

“One last thing. Sunday night she had a trick at the Beverly Wilshire that didn’t come through. Supposedly the guy wasn’t there. Go poke around over there and see what you can come up with.”

“Did you get a room number?”

“Yeah, eight thirty-seven. Guy’s name was Daniel Price. This all comes from La Cosse. He said Gloria claimed the room wasn’t even rented.”

“I’m on it.”

After I finished the call with Cisco, I put the phone away and just looked out the window until we reached my house on Fareholm. Earl gave me the keys and headed to his own car parked against the curb. I reminded him about the early start the next day and went up the stairs to the front door.

I put my stuff down on the dining room table and went into the kitchen for a bottle of beer. When I closed the refrigerator, I checked through all the photos and cards held on the door by magnets until I found a postcard showing Diamond Head Crater on Oahu. It was the last card I had received from Gloria Dayton. I took it off the magnetic clip and read the back of it.

My eyes drifted from the words to the postmark. The date was Dec. 15, 2011, almost a year ago. The postmark, which I’d had no reason to ever look at before, said Van Nuys, California.

I’d had a clue to Gloria’s subterfuge on my refrigerator for nearly a year but I didn’t know it. Now it confirmed the charade and my unwitting part in it. I couldn’t help but wonder why she’d bothered. I was just her lawyer. There was no need to lead me on. If I’d never heard from her, I would not have been suspicious or come looking for her. It seemed oddly unnecessary to me and even a bit cruel. Especially the last line about coming to see her. What if I had come over at Christmas to escape the disaster of my personal life? What would’ve happened when I landed and she wasn’t there?

I walked over to the trash can, stepped on the pedal to raise the lid, and dropped the card in. Gloria Dayton was dead. Glory Days was over.

I took a shower, holding my head under the hard spray for a long time. More than a few of my clients had come to a bad end over the years. It came with the territory, and in previous cases I always looked at the loss in terms of business. Repeat clients were my bread and butter, and knowing I had lost a customer never left me with a good feeling. But with Gloria Dayton it was different. It wasn’t business. It was personal. Her death conjured a raft of feelings, from disappointment and emptiness to upset and anger. I was mad at her not only for the lie she had perpetrated with me but for staying in the world that ultimately got her killed.

By the time the hot water ran out and I cut off the spray, I had come to realize my anger was misplaced. I understood that there had been a reason and purpose to Gloria’s actions. Perhaps she had not so much cut me out of her life as protected me from something. What that was I didn’t know, but it would now be my job to find out.

After getting dressed I walked through my empty house and paused at the door of my daughter’s bedroom. She had not stayed there in a year and the room was unchanged since the day she had left. Viewing it reminded me of parents who have lost children and leave their rooms frozen in time. Only I had not lost my child in such a tragedy. I had driven her away.

I went to the kitchen for another beer and faced the nightly ritual of deciding whether to go out or stay in. With the early start coming in the morning, I went with the latter and pulled a couple to-go cartons out of the refrigerator. I had half a steak and some Green Goddess salad left over from my Sunday night visit to Craig’s, a Melrose Avenue restaurant where I often ate at the bar alone. I put the salad on a plate and the steak into a pan on the stove to warm it up.

When I opened the trash can to dump the cartons, I saw the postcard from Gloria. I thought better of what I had done earlier and rescued it from the debris. I studied both sides of the card once more, wondering again about her purpose in sending it. Did she want me to notice the postmark and come looking for her? Was the card some sort of a clue I had missed?

I didn’t have any answers yet but I intended to find them. Taking the card back to the fridge, I clipped it to a magnet and moved it to eye level on the door so I would be sure to see it every day.

5

Earl Briggs got to the house late Wednesday morning, so I was the last to arrive at the eight o’clock staff meeting. We were on the third floor of a loft building on Santa Monica Boulevard near the 101 Freeway ramp. It was a half-empty building we had access to whenever needed it, because Jennifer was handling the landlord’s foreclosure defense on a quid pro quo fee schedule. He had bought and renovated the place six years earlier when rents were high and there were seemingly more independent production companies in town than camera crews available to film their projects. But soon the bottom dropped out of the economy and investors in independent films grew as scarce as street parking outside the Ivy. Many companies folded and the landlord was lucky to be running at half capacity in the building. He eventually went upside down and that’s when he came to Michael Haller & Associates, responding to one of our direct-mail advertisements to properties that come up on the foreclosure rolls.

Like most of the mortgages issued before the crash, this one had been bundled with others and resold. That gave us an opening. Jennifer challenged the foreclosing bank’s standing and managed to stall the process for ten months while our client tried to turn things around. But there was not a lot of call for three-thousand-square-foot lofts in East Hollywood anymore. He couldn’t get out from under and was on a slippery slope, renting month to month to rock bands that needed rehearsal space. The foreclosure was definitely coming. It was just a matter of how many months Jennifer could hold it off.

The good news for Haller & Associates was that rock bands slept late. Every day the building was largely deserted and quiet until late afternoon at the earliest. We had taken to using the loft for our weekly staff meetings. The space was big and empty, with wood floors, fifteen-foot ceilings, exposed-brick walls, and iron support columns to go with a wall of windows offering a nice view of downtown. But what was best about it was that it had a boardroom built into the southeast corner, an enclosed room that still contained a long table and eight chairs. This is where we met to go over cases and where we would now strategize the defense of Andre La Cosse, digital pimp accused of murder.

The boardroom had a large plate-glass window looking out on the rest of the loft. As I walked across the big empty space, I could see the entire team standing around the table and looking down at something. I assumed it was the box of doughnuts from Bob’s that Lorna usually brought to our meetings.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said as I entered.

Cisco turned his wide body from the table and I saw that the team wasn’t looking at doughnuts. On the table was a gold brick shining like the sun breaking over the mountains in the morning.

“That doesn’t look like a pound,” I said.

“More,” Lorna said. “It’s a kilo.”

“I guess he thinks we’re going to trial,” Jennifer said.

I smiled and checked the credenza that ran along the left wall of the room. Lorna had set up the coffee and doughnuts there. I put my briefcase on the boardroom table and went to the coffee, needing a jolt of caffeine more than the gold to get myself going.

“So how is everybody?” I asked, my back to them.

I received a chorus of good reports as I brought my coffee and a glazed doughnut to the table and sat down. It was hard to look at anything other than the gold brick.

“Who brought that?” I asked.

“It came in an armored truck,” Lorna reported. “From a place called the Gold Standard Depository. La Cosse made the delivery order from jail. I had to sign for it in triplicate. The delivery man was an armed guard.”

“So what’s a kilo of gold worth?”

“About fifty-four K,” Cisco said. “We just looked it up.”

I nodded. La Cosse had more than doubled down on me. I liked that.

“Lorna, you know where St. Vincent’s Court is downtown?”

She shook her head.

“It’s in the jewelry district. Right off Seventh by Broadway. There’s a bunch of gold wholesalers in there. You and Cisco take this down there and cash it in — that is, if it’s real gold. As soon as it’s money and it’s in the trust account, text me and let me know. I’ll give La Cosse a receipt.”

Lorna looked at Cisco and nodded. “We’ll go right after the meeting.”

“Okay, good. What else? Did you bring the Gloria Dayton file?”

“Files,” she corrected as she reached to the floor and brought up a nine-inch stack of case files.

She pushed them across the table toward me but I deftly redirected them to Jennifer.

“Bullocks, these are yours.”

Jennifer frowned but dutifully reached out to accept the files. She was wearing her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, her all-business look. I knew her frown belied the fact that she’d willingly accept any part of a murder case. I also knew I could count on her very best work.

“What am I looking for in all of this?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet. I just want another set of eyes on those files. I want you to familiarize yourself with the cases and Gloria Dayton. I want you to know everything there is to know about her. Cisco’s working on her profile in the years since those cases.”

“Okay.”

“At the same time, I want you on something else.”

She slid her notebook in front of her.

“Okay.”

“Somewhere in the most recent file there, you’ll find some notes from my former investigator, Raul Levin. They regard a drug dealer and his location in a hotel. His name is Hector Arrande Moya. He was Sinaloa cartel and the feds wanted him. I want you to pull everything you can on him. My memory is that he went away for life. Find out where he is and what’s going on with him.”

Jennifer nodded but then said she wasn’t following the logic of the assignment.

“Why are we chasing this drug dealer down?”

“Gloria gave him up to get a deal. The guy went down hard and we might be looking at alternate theories at some point.”

“Right. Straw man defense.”

“Just see what you can find.”

“Is Raul Levin still around? Maybe I’ll start with him, see what he remembers about Hector.”

“Good idea, but he’s not around. He’s dead.”

I saw Jennifer glance at Lorna and Lorna’s eyes warn her off the subject.

“It’s a long story and we’ll talk about it someday,” I said.

A somber moment passed.

“Okay, then I’ll just see what I can find out on my own,” Jennifer said.

I turned my attention to Cisco.

“Cisco, what have you got for us?”

“I’ve got a few things so far. First of all, you asked me to run down Gloria since the last time you had a case with her. I did that and went through all the usual channels, digital and human, and she pretty much dropped off the grid after that last case. You said she moved to Hawaii, but if she did, she never got a driver’s license or paid utilities or set up cable TV or purchased a property on any of the islands.”

“She said she was going to live with a friend,” I said. “Somebody who was going to take care of her.”

Cisco shrugged.

“That could be but most people leave at least a shadow of a trail. I couldn’t find anything. I think what’s more likely is that’s the point where she started reinventing herself. You know, new name, ID, all of that.”

“Giselle Dallinger.”

“Maybe, or that could have been later. People who do this usually don’t stick with one ID. It’s a cycle. Whenever they think somebody might be getting close or it’s time to change, they go through the process again.”

“Yeah, but she wasn’t in Witness Protection. She just wanted a new start. This seems kind of extreme.”

Jennifer cut in on the back-and-forth then.

“I don’t know, if I had this record on my name and I wanted to start over somewhere, I’d lose the name. Nowadays everything’s digital and a lot of it is public information. Probably the last thing she wanted was somebody in Hawaii digging up all of this stuff.”

She patted the stack of files in front of her. She made a good point.

“Okay,” I said, “what about Giselle Dallinger? When did she show up?”

“Not so sure,” Cisco said. “Her current driver’s license was issued in Nevada two years ago. She never changed it when she moved over here. She rented the apartment on Franklin sixteen months ago, providing a four-year rental history in Las Vegas. I haven’t had time to go back into it over there but I’ll get to it soon.”

I pulled a pad out of my briefcase and wrote a few questions I needed to ask Andre La Cosse the next time we spoke.

“Okay, what else?” I asked. “Did you get to the Beverly Wilshire yesterday?”

“I did. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the apartment on Franklin.”

I nodded. It was his report. He could deliver it the way he wanted.

“Let’s start with the fire. It was first reported at twelve fifty-one Monday morning when smoke alarms in the hallway outside the apartment went off and residents entered the hallway and saw smoke coming from our victim’s door. The fire gutted the living room — where the body was located — and heavily damaged the kitchen and the two bedrooms. The smoke detectors inside the apartment evidently did not go off and the reason for that is under investigation.”

“What about a sprinkler system?”

“No sprinkler system. It’s an old building and it was grandfathered in without it. Now, from what I was able to pick up over at the fire station, there were two investigations of this death.”

“Two?” I asked.

This was sounding like something I could use.

“That’s right. Both police and fire investigators signed off on it at first as accidental, with the victim falling asleep on the couch while smoking. The accelerant was the blouse she was wearing, which was made of polyurethane. What changed their minds about that was the coroner’s initial survey. The remains were bagged and tagged at the scene and taken to the ME’s Office.”

Cisco looked at his own notes, which had been scratched on a pocket notebook that looked tiny in his big left hand.

“A deputy medical examiner named Celeste Frazier did a preliminary examination of the body and determined that the hyoid bone was fractured in two places. That changed things pretty quick.”

I looked at Lorna and knew she did not know what the hyoid bone was.

“It’s a small bone shaped like a horseshoe that protects the windpipe.”

I touched the front of my neck in illustration.

“If it’s broken, it means force trauma to the front of the neck. She was choked, strangled.”

She nodded her thanks and I told Cisco to keep going.

“So they went back out, with arson and homicide investigators, and now we have a full-on murder investigation. They knocked on doors and I talked to a lot of the people they talked to. Several of them heard an argument coming from her apartment about eleven Sunday night. Raised voices. A man and a woman going at it about money.”

He referred to his notebook again to get a name.

“A Mrs. Annabeth Stephens lives directly across the hall from the victim’s apartment and she was watching out her peephole when a man left following the argument. She said the time was between eleven thirty and midnight because the news was over and she went to bed at midnight. She later identified Andre La Cosse when the cops showed her a six-pack.”

“She told you this?”

“She did.”

“Did she know you were working for the guy she identified?”

“I told her I was investigating the death across the hall and she spoke willingly to me. I didn’t identify myself further than that because she never asked for anything further.”

I nodded to Cisco. Being able to finesse the story from a key prosecution witness so early in the game was good work on his part.

“How old is Mrs. Stephens?”

“She’s midsixties. I think she was stationed at that peephole a lot of the time. Every building has a busybody like that.”

Jennifer chimed in.

“If she says he left before midnight, how do the police account for the smoke detector in the hallway not sounding for fifty more minutes?”

Cisco shrugged again.

“Could be a couple of explanations. One, that it took the smoke some time to work its way under the door. The fire could’ve been burning in there the whole time. Or, two, he set the fire with some sort of delay or other rig to allow him time to get out and get clear. And then there’s three, a combination of one and two.”

Cisco reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and matches. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and then put it inside the folded matchbook.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said. “You light the cigarette and it slow burns down to the matches. The matches go up and ignite the accelerant. Gives a three- to ten-minute head start, depending on the cigarette you use.”

I nodded more to myself than to Cisco. I was getting a sense of the state’s case against my client and was already working out strategies and moves. Cisco continued.

“Did you know that by law in most states, any brand of cigarette sold in that state has to have a three-minute burn-down rate for unattended smoking? That’s why most arsonists use foreign cigarettes.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Can we get back to this case? What else did you get from the apartment building?”

“That’s about it at this time,” Cisco said. “I’ll be going back there, though. A lot of people weren’t at home when I knocked.”

“That’s because they looked through the peephole and got scared when they saw you.”

I meant it in jest but it wasn’t without a point. Cisco rode a Harley and he dressed the part. His usual outfit consisted of black jeans, boots, and a skin-tight black T-shirt with a leather vest over it. With his imposing size, dress, and the penetrating stare of his dark eyes through a peephole, it was no wonder to me that some people didn’t answer their doors. In fact, I was more surprised when he reported the cooperation of a witness. So much so that I took pains to make sure cooperation was fully voluntary. The last thing I ever wanted was a witness backfiring on me while on the stand. I personally vetted them all.

“I mean, maybe you should think about wearing a tie every now and then,” I added. “I have a whole collection of clip-ons, you know.”

“No, thanks,” Cisco responded flatly. “Can we move on to the hotel now or do you want to keep taking shots at me?”

“Easy, big guy, I’m just poking you a little bit. Tell us about the hotel. You had a busy night.”

“I worked it late. Anyway, the hotel is where this thing gets good.”

He opened his laptop and punched in a command as he spoke, his big fingers punishing the keyboard.

“I managed to obtain the cooperation of the security staff of the Beverly Wilshire without even wearing a tie. They—”

“All right, all right,” I said. “No more discussion of neckties.”

“Good.”

“Go on. What did they tell you over there?”

6

Cisco said it wasn’t what they told him at the hotel that was important. It was what they showed him.

“Most public spaces in the hotel are under camera surveillance twenty-four seven,” he said. “So they have almost all of our victim’s visit to the hotel Sunday night on digital. They provided me with copies for a nominal fee that I will be expensing.”

“No problem,” I said.

Cisco turned the computer around on the table so the rest of us could see the screen.

“I used the computer’s basic editing program and put the various angles together in one continuous take in real time. We can track her the whole time she was there.”

“Then play it, Scorsese.”

He hit the play button and we started watching. The playback was in black and white and had no sound. It was grainy but not to the point that faces were obscured or unidentifiable. It began with an overhead view of the hotel’s lobby. A time stamp at the top said it was 9:44 p.m. Though the lobby was busy with late check-ins and other people coming and going, Gloria/Giselle was easy enough to spot as she strolled through the lobby toward the elevator alcove. She was dressed in a knee-length black dress, nothing too risqué, and looked totally at ease and at home. She carried a shopping bag from Saks that helped her sell the image of someone who belonged.

“Is that her?” Jennifer asked, pointing to a woman sitting on a circular divan and showing a lot of leg.

“Too obvious,” I said. “Her.”

I pointed to the right of the screen and tracked Gloria. She smiled at a security man who stood at the entrance to the elevator alcove and passed him without hesitation.

Soon the angle changed and we looked down from the ceiling of the elevator alcove. Gloria checked her phone for e-mail while she waited. Soon enough an elevator arrived and she got on.

The next camera angle was from inside the elevator. Gloria got on and pushed the 8 button. As she rode up, she raised the bag and looked inside it. The view we had did not allow us to see the contents.

When she arrived at the eighth floor, she stepped off the elevator and the screen went black.

“Okay, this is where we go dark,” Cisco said. “No cameras on the guest floors.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They told me it was a privacy issue. Recording who goes into what room can be more trouble than it’s worth when it comes to divorce cases and subpoenas and all of that stuff.”

I nodded. The explanation seemed valid.

The screen came back to life again, showing Gloria riding the elevator down. I noted on the time stamp that five minutes had gone by, meaning that Gloria had apparently knocked on the door and waited in the hallway outside room 837 for a significant period of time.

“Is there a house phone up there on the eighth floor?” I asked. “Did she spend all that time knocking on the door or did she call down to the desk to ask about the room?”

“No phone,” Cisco said. “Just watch.”

Once back on the ground floor, Gloria stepped out of the elevator and went to a house phone that was on a table against the wall. She made a call and soon was speaking to someone.

“This is her asking to be connected to the room,” Cisco said. “She is told by the operator that there is no Daniel Price registered in the hotel and no one in eight thirty-seven.”

Gloria hung up the phone, and I could tell by her body language that she was annoyed, frustrated. Her trip had been wasted. She headed back through the lobby, moving at a faster clip than when she had arrived.

“Now watch this,” Cisco said.

Gloria was halfway across the lobby when a man entered the screen thirty feet behind her. He was wearing a fedora and had his head down, looking at the screen of his phone. He appeared to be heading toward the main doors as well, and there was nothing suspicious about him other than that his features were obscured by the hat and the downward pose of his face.

Gloria suddenly changed directions and headed toward the front desk. This caused the man behind her to awkwardly change his direction as well. He turned and went to the circular divan and sat down.

“He’s following her?” Lorna asked.

“Wait for it,” Cisco said.

On the screen, Gloria went to the desk, waited while a guest ahead of her was taken care of, then asked the deskman a question. He typed something on a keyboard, looked at a screen, and shook his head. He was obviously telling her that there was no Daniel Price registered as a guest in the hotel. All the while, the man in the hat sat with his head tilted down and the brim of his hat hiding his face. He was looking at his phone but not doing anything with it.

“That guy’s not even typing,” Jennifer said. “He’s just staring at his phone.”

“He’s looking at Gloria,” I said. “Not the phone.”

It was impossible to tell for sure because of the hat, but it seemed clear that Gloria had a follower. Finished at the front desk, she turned and once more headed toward the front doors of the lobby. She pulled a cell phone out of her handbag and hit a speed dial. Before she got to the doors, she said something quickly into the phone and then dropped it into her bag. She then exited the hotel.

Before she was gone, the man in the hat was up and crossing the lobby behind her. He picked up his step once she was through the doors, and this seemed to confirm that Gloria’s impromptu turn to the front desk had exposed a tail.

After the man in the hat left the lobby, the camera angle jumped to the outside curb, where a black Town Car like my own had pulled up in front of Gloria at the valet stand. She opened the back door, threw the Saks bag in, and then got in after it. The car pulled away and out of the frame. The man in the hat crossed the valet lanes and left the picture as well, never once raising his head enough for even his nose to be seen.

The playback ended and everyone was silent for a long moment while they reviewed it in their heads.

“So?” Cisco finally asked.

“So she was followed,” I said. “I take it you asked about the guy at the hotel?”

“I did and he doesn’t work there. They had nobody working undercover security that night. That guy — whoever he is — was an outsider.”

I nodded and thought some more about what I had seen.

“He didn’t follow her in,” I said. “Does that mean he was already there?”

“I’ve got a loop on him, too,” Cisco said.

He turned the computer back to him and punched in more commands, bringing up a second video. He turned the screen back to us and hit play. Cisco provided narration.

“All right, this is him sitting in the lobby at nine thirty. He was there before her. He stays like that until she gets there. I have a side-by-side of that.”

He spun the computer back and then set up the side-by-side videos before turning it to us again. The images from separate cameras were synced on the time stamps and we were able to watch Gloria cross the lobby and the man in the hat track her, his hat turning as she passed on the other side of the room. He then waited for her to come back down from the eighth floor and followed her out, after her sudden stop at the front desk.

Show over, Cisco closed his computer.

“Okay, so who is he?” I asked.

Cisco spread his hands, a wing span of nearly seven feet.

“All I can tell you is that he doesn’t work for the hotel,” he said.

I stood up and started pacing behind the table. I was feeling jazzed. The man in the hat was a mystery, and mysteries always played to the defense’s side. Mysteries were question marks, which led to reasonable doubt.

“Do you know if the police have been over to the hotel yet?” I asked.

“As of last night, no,” Cisco said. “They’ve already made their case to the DA. They probably don’t care what she was doing in the hours before the murder.”

I shook my head. It was foolish to underestimate the state.

“Don’t worry, they will.”

“Could he have been working for Gloria?” Jennifer asked. “You know, like her security or something?”

I nodded.

“Good question. I’ll ask the client when I see him before first appearance. I’ll also ask about the Town Car that picked her up. See if she had a regular driver. But there’s something about this… this video that is off. It doesn’t fit with this guy working for her. It’s like he knew there were cameras and he kept his hat on and his head down. He didn’t want to be seen on camera.”

“And him being there before she arrived,” Cisco added. “He was waiting for her.”

“He acted like he knew she’d be going up and coming right back down,” Lorna seconded. “He knew that there was nobody in that room up there.”

I stopped pacing and pointed at Cisco’s closed laptop.

“He’s gotta be the guy,” I said. “He’s Daniel Price. We have to find out who he is.”

“Um, can I butt in here for a moment?” Jennifer asked.

I nodded, giving her the floor.

“Before we get all hot and bothered about this mystery man in the hat, we have to remember that our client admitted to the police that he was in the victim’s apartment with her after this guy was or was not following her, and that he argued with her and put his hand around her throat. So rather than worrying about what was going on before he was in her apartment, shouldn’t we be worried about what La Cosse did or didn’t do when he was actually in the place?”

“It’s all important,” I answered quickly. “But it all needs to be vetted. We need to find this guy and see what he was doing. Cisco, can you widen the search a bit? That hotel sits right at the end of Rodeo Drive. There’s got to be more cameras out there. Maybe we can track this guy to a car and get a plate. His trail has not gone totally cold.”

Cisco nodded.

“I’m on it.”

I checked my watch. I needed to get moving toward downtown and arraignment court.

“Okay, what else?”

No one said anything, then Lorna timidly raised her hand.

“Lorna, what?”

“Just a reminder, today at two you have the pretrial conference in Department Thirty on Ramsey.”

I groaned. Another of my stellar clients, Deirdre Ramsey was charged with aiding and abetting and a variety of crimes in one of the more bizarre cases to come my or any lawyer’s way in years. She first gained public attention the year before as the unnamed victim of a horrible assault that occurred during a takeover robbery of a convenience store. The first reports were that the twenty-six-year-old had been one of four customers and two employees in the store when two heavily armed and masked men entered to rob the place. The customers and employees were herded into a storage room and locked in while the gunmen used a crowbar to open the store’s cash deposit slot.

But then the gunmen reentered the storage room and told all the captives to turn over their wallets and jewelry and take off all their clothes. While one of the men stood guard over the others, the second man raped Ramsey in front of the whole group. The men then fled the store, taking a total of $280 dollars and two boxes of candy besides the personal belongings of the victims. For months the crime remained unsolved. The city council offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of suspects, and Ramsey filed a negligence lawsuit against the corporation that owned the store, alleging that the business did not provide adequate protection of its customers. Knowing that the last thing they wanted to see was Ramsey testifying about her ordeal in front of a jury, the corporation’s board of directors in Dallas voted to settle the case, paying Ramsey $250,000 for her troubles.

Money is the great destroyer of relationships. Two weeks after Ramsey walked away with the money, investigators on the case took a call from a woman inquiring whether the city council award was still available. When informed that it was, she told a surprising story. She said that the $250K settlement was the true goal of the robbery and that the rapist-robber was actually Ramsey’s boyfriend, Tariq Underwood. The rape was part of an elaborate and consensual scam, according to the snitch, a get-rich scheme concocted by Ramsey herself.

As it turned out, the caller was Ramsey’s former best friend — that is, until she felt she was unfairly left out of the riches bestowed on Ramsey. Court-ordered wiretaps ensued, and soon enough Ramsey, her boyfriend, and his partner in the robbery were arrested. The Office of the Public Defender took on Underwood’s defense, which put it in conflict with Ramsey’s, and so her file was shuttled to me. It was a low-cost, low-probability case, but Ramsey refused to plead it out. She wanted to go to trial, and I had no choice but to take her there. It wasn’t going to end pretty.

Being reminded of the hearing shot holes in the engine block of my day’s momentum. My groan did not go unnoticed by Lorna.

“You want me to try to postpone it?” she offered.

I thought about it. I was tempted.

“You want me to take it?” Jennifer offered.

Of course she wanted it. She’d take any criminal case I’d give her.

“No, it’s a dog,” I said. “I can’t do that to you. Lorna, see what you can do. I want to run with La Cosse today if I can.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Everyone was either grabbing a final doughnut or heading to the door.

“Okay, then, everybody’s got their assignments and knows what they’re doing on this,” I said. “Stay in touch and let me know what you know.”

I made another cup of coffee and was the last one out. Earl was waiting with the car in the back parking lot. I told him to head downtown to the courthouse and to stay off the freeway. I wanted to get there in time to talk to Andre La Cosse before they hauled him before the judge.

7

I had fifteen minutes with my client before he would be herded into the courtroom with several other custodies for first appearances before a judge. He was in a crowded holding cell off the arraignment court and I had to lean close to the bars and whisper so the other men in the cell wouldn’t hear.

“Andre, we don’t have a lot of time here,” I said. “In a few minutes you’ll be taken into the courtroom to see the judge. It will be short and sweet, the charges will be read and they’ll set a date for your arraignment.”

“Don’t I plead not guilty?”

“No, not yet. This is just a formality. After you get arrested they have forty-eight hours to put you before a judge to get the ball rolling. This will be very brief.”

“What about bail?”

“You won’t make bail unless that gold brick you sent us is just one of many. You’re charged with murder. They will set bail, but on the low end it will probably be two million, maybe two and a half. That’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bond. You have that much gold? You don’t get it back, you know.”

He slumped and pressed his forehead against the bars that separated us.

“I can’t stand this place.”

“I know, but you’ve got no choice right now.”

“You said you could get me into another module?”

“Sure, I can do that. Give me the word and I’ll get you on keep-away status.”

“Do it. I don’t want to go back there.”

I leaned in closer and whispered lower.

“Did something happen to you last night in there?”

“No, but there are animals in there. I don’t want to be there.”

I didn’t tell him that no matter where he was placed in the jail complex, he wasn’t going to like it. The animals were everywhere.

“I’ll bring it up with the judge,” I said instead. “Now I want to ask you a couple things about the case before we go in there, okay?”

“Go ahead. You got the gold?”

“Yes, I got the gold. More than we asked for but it will all go toward your defense, and if it doesn’t get used, the remainder goes back to you. I have a receipt for you if you want it, but I don’t think you want to carry around a piece of paper in Men’s Central that shows you’ve got money.”

“No, you’re right. Keep it for now.”

“Okay. Now the questions. Did Giselle have any kind of security that you know about?”

He shook his head like he wasn’t sure but then answered.

“She had a burglar alarm but I don’t know if she ever used it and I—”

“No, I mean people. Did she have like a bodyguard or somebody that ran security for her when she went out on calls or dates or whatever you call them?”

“Oh, no, none that she ever told me about. She had a driver and she could call him if there was a problem but he usually just stayed in the car.”

“My next question was about the driver. Who was he and how do I reach him?”

“His name is Max and he was a friend of hers. He had a different job during the day and drove her at night. She basically just worked at nights.”

“Max what?”

“I don’t know his last name. I never even met him. She just mentioned him from time to time. She said he was her muscle.”

“But he didn’t go in with her.”

“Not that I know of.”

I noticed another prisoner was hovering behind my client’s left shoulder. He was trying to listen in on our conversation.

“Let’s move down,” I said.

We moved down the bars to the other side of the holding cell. The eavesdropper stayed behind.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about the phone call you made to the hotel to check out the Julia Roberts client. How did that whole thing go down?”

I checked my watch.

“Quickly,” I added.

“Well, he made contact through the website. I told him the prices and—”

“Was this by e-mail?”

“No, he called. From the hotel. I saw it on the caller ID.”

“Okay, go on. He called from the hotel, then what?”

“I told him her price and he said that was fine, and so we set it up for nine thirty that night. He gave me the room number and I told him I needed to call back to confirm. He said fine, so I did.”

“You called the hotel and asked for room eight thirty-seven?”

“That’s right. They connected me and it was the same guy. I told him she’d be there at nine thirty.”

“Okay, and you never dealt with this guy before?”

“No, never.”

“How did he pay?”

“He didn’t. That’s why I got in the fight with Giz. She said he didn’t pay because there was nobody in that room. She said they told her at the desk the guy checked out that day, and I knew that was bullshit because I talked to him in that room.”

“Right, right, but did you discuss payment with him? You know, cash or credit?”

“Yes, he said he was going to pay cash. And that’s why I went to Giz’s place, to collect my share. If the guy had just paid with a credit card, I would have handled the transaction and taken my share. It was paying with cash that made me want to go collect before she had a chance to spend it all or lose it.”

La Cosse’s business practices were becoming clearer to me now.

“And this is how you always did it?”

“Yes.”

“It was routine.”

“Yes, always the same.”

“And this guy’s voice, you didn’t recognize it as a previous customer?”

“No, I didn’t recognize it and he also said he was a new customer. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Maybe nothing but maybe everything. How often were you in contact with Giselle?”

La Cosse shrugged.

“Every day by text. We did a lot of it by text, but when I needed a quick answer I would call her on the cell. Maybe a couple times a week we’d talk.”

“And did you see her very often?”

“Maybe once or twice a week when we had a cash customer. I’d come by to collect after. Sometimes we’d meet for coffee or breakfast and I’d collect then.”

“And she never held back on you?”

“We’d had issues before.”

“How so?”

“I pretty much learned with Giz that money was for spending. The longer I left my money with her, the greater the chance it would get spent. I never waited long to collect.”

I saw the lineup of custodies who had just had first appearances being shuttled from the courtroom back into another holding cell. La Cosse was about to go out.

“Okay, hold on a second.”

I stooped down and opened my briefcase on the tile floor. I took out the document I needed signed and a pen and then stood back up.

“Andre, this is a conflict-of-interest waiver. I need you to sign it if you want me to represent you. It acknowledges that you understand that the victim you are charged with killing was a former client of mine. You are waiving any future claim that I had a conflict of interest while representing you. You are saying right now that you are okay with it. Hurry up and sign it before they see you with the pen.”

I passed the document and pen through and he signed it. He did a quick scan of the page as he passed it back.

“Who is Gloria Dayton?”

“That’s Giselle. That was her real name.”

I bent down to return the document to my briefcase.

“Couple more things,” I said as I stood back up. “You told me yesterday that you would make contact with the client who vouched for Giselle when she came to you. Did you do that yet? I need to talk to her.”

“Yes, she said fine. You can call her. Her name’s Stacey Campbell. Like the soup.”

He gave me the number and I wrote it down on my palm.

“You have her number memorized? Most people don’t remember numbers anymore because they’re on speed dial on their cell.”

“If I put everybody’s number in my phone, the police would have all of that right now. We change phones and numbers often, and I commit them all to memory. It’s the only safe way to do it.”

I nodded. I was impressed.

“Okay, we’re good, then. Let’s go out and see the judge.”

“You said a couple more things.”

“Oh, yeah.”

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a short stack of cards. I handed them to him through the bars.

“Put these on the bench over there,” I said.

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No, people are always looking for good representation. Especially when they get out there and meet the deputy PD who’s handling their case along with about three hundred others’. Spread them out a little bit on the bench and I’ll see you in the courtroom.”

“Whatever.”

“And remember, you can talk to whoever you want inside about your lawyer, but don’t talk to anybody about your case. No one, or it will come back to bite you on the ass. I promise you that.”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

Arraignment court is the place where the criminal justice system becomes a feeding frenzy, where those who are caught in the net are delivered to market. I stepped out from the holding facility and into a morass of defense lawyers, prosecutors, investigators, and all lines of support staff, all moving in an unchoreographed dance presided over by Judge Mary Elizabeth Mercer. It was her job to make good on the constitutional guarantee to swiftly bring those accused of a crime to court to be informed of the charges against them and assigned counsel if they have not made such arrangements themselves. In practice, this meant that each of the accused had but a few minutes before the judge prior to beginning the long and usually torturous journey through the system.

The attorney tables in first-appearance court were large boardroom-size tables designed so that several lawyers could be seated at once as they prepared for their cases and clients to be called. Still more defense lawyers stood and milled about in the corral to the left of the judge’s bench, where defendants were brought in from the holding cells in groups of six at a time. These lawyers would stand with their clients for the reading of the charges and then the scheduling of an arraignment hearing, where the accused would formally enter a plea. To an outsider — and this included those accused of crimes and their families packed into the wooden pews of the courtroom’s gallery — it was hard to keep track of or understand what was going on. They could only know that this was the justice system at work and that it would now take over their lives.

I went to the bailiff’s desk where the custody call list was on a clipboard. The bailiff had crossed out the first thirty names on the list. Judge Mercer was efficiently moving through the morning shift. I saw Andre La Cosse’s name next to the number thirty-eight. That meant one group of six was ahead of his group. And that gave me time to find a spot to sit down and check my messages.

All nine chairs at the defense table were taken. I scanned the line of chairs running along the railing that separated the gallery from the court’s work area and spotted one opening. As I made my way to it, I recognized one of the men I would be sitting next to. He wasn’t a lawyer. He was a cop, and we had a past history that coincidentally had been brought up that morning at the staff meeting. He recognized me, too, and grimaced as I sat down next to him.

We spoke in whispers so as not to draw the attention of the judge.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mickey Mouth, great courtroom orator and defender of douche bags.”

I ignored the shots. I was used to it from cops.

“Detective Lankford, long time no see.”

Lee Lankford was one of the Glendale PD homicide detectives who investigated the murder of my former investigator Raul Levin. The reasons for Lankford’s grimace and insults and the friction that still obviously existed between us were many. First, Lankford seemed to have a genetically bred hatred of all lawyers. Then there was the little rub that came when he wrongly accused me of Levin’s murder. Of course it didn’t help our relationship when I eventually proved him wrong by solving the case for him.

“You’re a long way from Glendale,” I offered as I was pulling out my phone. “Don’t you guys do your arraignments up there in Glendale Superior?”

“As usual, Haller, you’re behind the times. I don’t work for Glendale anymore. I retired.”

I nodded like I thought that was a good thing, then smiled.

“Don’t tell me you went to the dark side. You’re working for one of these defense guys?”

Lankford looked disgusted.

“No fucking chance I’d work for one of you creeps. I work for the DA now. And by the way, a seat just opened up at the big table. Why don’t you go over there and sit with your own people?”

I had to smile. Lankford hadn’t changed in the seven years or so since I had seen him. I kind of enjoyed tweaking him.

“No, I think I’m good here.”

“Wonderful.”

“What about Detective Sobel? Is she still with the department?”

Lankford’s partner back then was the one I communicated with. She didn’t carry around a bagful of biases like he did.

“She’s still there and she’s doing well. Tell me, which one of these fine upstanding citizens they’re traipsing out in bracelets is your client today?”

“Oh, mine will be in the next batch. He’s a real winner, though. A pimp accused of killing one of his own girls. It’s a heartwarming story, Lankford.”

Lankford pressed back into his chair slightly and I realized I had surprised him.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “La Cosse?”

I nodded.

“That’s right. It’s your case, too?”

A sneer cracked across his face.

“You bet. And now I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.”

DA investigators were used for ancillary duties on a case. The primary investigators remained the police detectives who worked the case from the crime scene on. But when the case was filed and shifted from the police department to the Prosecutor’s Office, DA investigators were used to help prep the case for trial. Their duties included locating witnesses, getting them to court, and reacting to defense maneuvers and witnesses and the like. It was a mixed bag of second-tier responsibilities. Their job was to be prepared to do what needed to be done in the run-up to trial.

The great majority of DA investigators were former cops, many of whom were retired like Lankford. They were double dippers, collecting a pension from one department and a paycheck from the DA. Nice work if you could get it. The thing that struck me as unusual was that Lankford had already been assigned to the La Cosse case. The defendant had not even made a first appearance yet and Lankford was on the case and in the courtroom.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “They just filed on him yesterday and you’re already assigned?”

“I’m in the homicide division. We get cases on a rotation. This one’s mine and I just wanted to get a look at the guy, see what I’ll be dealing with. And now that I know who his lawyer is, I know exactly who I’m dealing with.”

He stood up and turned to look down at me. I noticed the badge clipped to his belt and the black leather boots he wore below cuffed suit pants. It wasn’t a good look but probably no one wanted to incur his wrath by telling him.

“This will be fun,” he said and then he walked away.

“You’re not going to wait for him to come out?”

Lankford didn’t answer. He walked through the gate and down the center aisle toward the door at the back of the courtroom.

After watching him go, I sat still for a few moments, thinking about the veiled threat and the knowledge that I now had to factor in having an investigator with a hard-on for me working for the prosecutor on the case.

It was not a good start.

My phone buzzed in my hand and I checked the text. It was from Lorna and it was a little bit of good news to balance out the Lankford episode.

The gold brick was real! $52K+ deposited in escrow account.

We were in business. No matter what happened, at least I was going to get paid. I started to forget about Lankford. And then a shadow fell across me and I looked up to see one of the detention deputies standing over me.

“You’re Haller, right?”

“Yeah, that’s me. What’s—”

He showered a stack of business cards down on me. My own cards. The ones I had given La Cosse.

“You pull that stunt again and you’ll never be allowed back to see one of your scumbag clients. At least not on my watch.”

I felt my face growing red. Several attorneys were watching us. The only saving grace was that Lankford had missed the show.

“Got it?” the deputy asked.

“Yeah, got it,” I said.

“Good,” he said.

He walked away and I started gathering up the cards. Show over, the other lawyers turned and went back to business.

8

There was only one Lincoln at the curb when I got out of court this time. Everybody else had already split for lunch. I jumped in the back and told Earl to head toward Hollywood. I didn’t know where Stacey Campbell lived but I was guessing it wasn’t in downtown. I pulled my phone, looked at the number on my hand, and punched it in. She answered promptly with a practiced voice that was soft and sexy and everything I assumed was wanted in a prostitute’s voice.

“Hello, this is Starry-Eyed Stacey.”

“Uh, Stacey Campbell?”

The soft and sexy left her voice and was replaced by a harder-edged tone that had a tinge of cigarette to it as well.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Michael Haller. I’m Andre La Cosse’s attorney. He told me he spoke to you and you agreed to talk to me about Giselle Dallinger.”

“The thing is, I don’t want to be dragged into court.”

“That’s not my intention. I just want to talk to someone who knew Giselle and can tell me about her.”

There was a silence.

“Ms. Campbell, is there a chance I could come by to see you or meet you somewhere?”

“I’ll meet you. I don’t want anyone coming here.”

“That’s fine. Is now okay?”

“I need to get changed and put on my hair.”

“What time and where?”

Another silence went by. I was about to tell her she didn’t have to put on her hair for me when she spoke first.

“How about Toast?”

It was ten past noon, but I understood that a woman of her occupation might have just gotten up for the day.

“Uh, yeah, that’s fine, I guess. I’m trying to think of a place where we could get breakfast.”

“What? No, I mean Toast, the place. It’s a café on Third near Crescent Heights.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll meet you there. So about one, then?”

“I’ll be there.”

“I’ll get a table and be waiting.”

I ended the call, told Earl where we were going, and then called Lorna to see if she got my two o’clock status conference postponed.

“No soap,” she said. “Patricia said the judge wants this thing off his calendar. No more delays, Mickey. He wants you in chambers at two.”

Patricia was Judge Companioni’s clerk. She actually ran the courtroom and the calendar, and when she said the judge wanted to move the case on, it really meant Patricia wanted to move it on. She was tired of the constant delays I had asked for while I tried to convince my client to take the deal the DA had put on the table.

I thought for a moment. Even if Stacey Campbell showed up on time — which I knew I couldn’t count on — there was probably no way I could get what I needed from her and get back to the courthouse in downtown by two. I could cancel the meeting at Toast but I didn’t want to. The mysteries and motives surrounding Gloria Dayton had my full attention at the moment. I wanted to know the secrets behind her subterfuge, and diverting to handle another case was not going to happen.

“Okay, I’ll call Bullocks and see if she’s still up for covering for me on it.”

“Why, are you still in first-appearance court?”

“No, heading to West Hollywood on the Dayton case.”

“You mean the La Cosse case, don’t you?”

“Right.”

“And West Hollywood can’t wait?”

“No, it can’t, Lorna.”

“She still has a hold on you, doesn’t she? Even in death.”

“I just want to know what happened. So right now I need to call Bullocks. I’ll talk to you later.”

I clicked off before I got a sermon about getting emotionally involved with the work. Lorna had always had issues with my relationship with Gloria and could not understand that it had nothing to do with sex. That it wasn’t some kind of whore fixation. That it was about finding someone you somehow shared the same view of the world with. Or at least thought you did.

When I called Jennifer Aronson she told me she was working in the law library at Southwestern and going through the Gloria Dayton files I had given her that morning.

“I’m going case to case and just trying to familiarize myself with everything,” she said. “Unless there is something I should be specifically looking for.”

“Not really,” I said. “Did you find any notes on Hector Arrande Moya?”

“No notes. It’s amazing you remembered his name after seven years.”

“I remember names, some cases, but not birthdays or anniversaries. Always gets me in trouble. You need to check on Moya’s status and—”

“I did that first thing. I started with the L.A. Times online archives and found a couple stories about his case. It went federal. You said you made your deal with the DA’s Office, but the feds obviously took over the case.”

I nodded. The more I talked about a case, the more I remembered it.

“Right, there was a federal warrant existing. The DA must’ve gotten big-footed because Moya was papered and that gave the feds first dibs.”

“It also gave them a bigger hammer. There is a gun enhancement with federal drug-trafficking statutes that made Moya eligible for a life sentence, and that’s what he got.”

I remembered that part, too. That this guy was put away for life for having a couple ounces of coke in his hotel room.

“I’m assuming there was an appeal. Did you check PACER?”

PACER was the federal government’s Public Access to Court Electronic Records database. It provided quick access to all documents filed in regard to a case. It would be the starting point.

“Yes, I went on PACER and pulled up the docket. He was convicted in ’06. Then there was the plenary appeal — the usual global attack citing insufficient evidence, court error on motions, and unreasonable sentencing. None made it past Pasadena. PCA right down the line.”

She was referring to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It had a Southern California location on South Grand Avenue in Pasadena. Appeals from Los Angeles — based cases would be filed through the Pasadena courthouse and initially reviewed by a theee-member screening local panel of the appellate court. The local panel weeded out appeals it deemed unworthy and kicked the others for full consideration to a merits panel composed of three judges drawn from the circuit that held jurisdiction over the western region of the country. Aronson’s saying that Moya never made it past Pasadena meant that his conviction was “per curiam affirmed” by the screening panel of judges. Moya had struck out swinging.

His next move was to file a habeas corpus petition in U.S. District Court seeking postconviction relief, a long-shot move to vacate his sentence. This was like shooting a three at the buzzer. The motion would be his last shot at a new trial unless startling new evidence was brought forward.

“What about a twenty-two fifty-five?” I asked, using the U.S. Code designation for a habeas petition.

“Yep,” Aronson said. “He went with ineffective assistance of counsel — claiming his guy never negotiated a plea agreement — and got blown out on that as well.”

“Who was the trial attorney?”

“Somebody named Daniel Daly. You know him?”

“Yeah, I know him, but he’s a federal court guy and I try to stay clear of the fed. I haven’t seen him work but from what I’ve heard, he’s one of the go-to guys over there.”

I actually knew Daly from Four Green Fields, where we both stopped in on Fridays for end-of-the-week martinis.

“Well, there wasn’t much he or anybody could do with Moya,” Jennifer said. “He went down hard and stayed down. And now he’s seven years into a life sentence and not going anywhere.”

“Where is he?”

“Victorville.”

The Federal Correctional Institution at Victorville was eighty miles north and located at the edge of an air force base in the desert. It was not a good place to spend the rest of your life. It was said up there that if the desert winds didn’t dry you up and blow you away, then the constant earthshaking sonic booms of the air force jets overhead would drive you crazy. I was contemplating this when Aronson spoke again.

“I guess the feds really don’t fool around,” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“You know, a life sentence for two ounces of blow. Pretty harsh.”

“Yeah, they’re harsh all the way around on sentencing. Which is why I don’t do federal defense. Don’t like telling clients to abandon all hope. Don’t like working out a deal with the prosecution only to have the judge ignore it and drop the hammer on my guy.”

“That happens?”

“Too often. I had a guy once… uh, forget it, never mind. It’s history and I don’t want to dwell on it.”

What I did dwell on was Hector Arrande Moya and how a slick deal I made for a client ultimately landed him in Victorville with a life sentence. I hadn’t even really bothered to track the case after making the deal with a deputy DA named Leslie Faire. To me it was just another day in the salt mine. A quick courthouse deal; a hotel name and room number in exchange for a deferral of charges against my client. Gloria Dayton went into a drug rehab program instead of jail and Hector Arrande Moya went off to federal prison forever — and without knowing who or where the tip to the authorities had come from.

Or had he?

Seven years had gone by. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility to consider that Moya had reached out from federal prison to exact vengeance on Gloria Dayton. But no matter how farfetched the idea, it might be useful in the defense of Andre La Cosse. My job would be to make the jury second-guess the prosecution. To make at least one of the gods of guilt think for himself or herself and say, Hey, wait a minute, what about this guy up there in the desert, rotting in prison because of this woman? Maybe…

“Did you see any hearings in the docket on a motion to produce a witness or a motion to suppress based on lack of probable cause? Anything like that?”

“Yes, that was part of the first appeal on court error. The judge refused a motion to produce any confidential informants in the case.”

“He was fishing. There was only one CI and that was Gloria. What about anything on the docket that is under seal? Did you see anything like that?”

Judges usually sealed records pertaining to confidential informants but the documents themselves were often referenced by number or code on PACER so at least one knew that such records existed.

“No,” Jennifer said. “Just the PSR.”

The presentencing report on Moya. Those were always kept under seal as well. I thought about things for a moment.

“Okay, I don’t want to drop this. I want to see the transcript of that battle over confidential informants and probable cause. You are going to have to go to Pasadena and pull hard files. Who knows? Maybe we get lucky and there is something in there we can use. The DEA or FBI had to testify at some point about how they got to that hotel and to that room. I want to know what they said.”

“You think Gloria’s name could have been revealed?”

“That would be too easy and too careless. But if there is a reference to a specific CI we might have something to work with. Also, ask for the PSR. Maybe after seven years they might let you have a look at it.”

“That’s a long shot. Those are supposed to stay sealed forever.”

“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”

“Well, I can head to Pasadena right now. I’ll get back to these Gloria files later.”

“No, Pasadena can wait. I want you to go downtown instead. Are you still up for sitting in for me on the Deirdre Ramsey case?”

“Absolutely!”

She practically jumped through the phone.

“Don’t get too excited,” I quickly counseled. “Like I said this morning, the case is a dog. You just have to ask the judge for a little bit more time and patience. Tell him we know it’s an STD case and we are close to convincing Deirdre that it’s in her very best interest to take the state’s offer and get this behind her. And you have to persuade Shelly Albert, the prosecutor, to keep the offer on the table another couple of weeks. That’s it, just another couple weeks is all, okay?”

The offer was for Ramsey to plead to aiding and abetting and to testify against her boyfriend and his partner in the robbery. In exchange she’d get a three- to five-year sentence. With gain time and time already served she’d be out in a year.

“I can do that,” Jennifer said. “But I’ll probably skip the syph reference, if you don’t mind.”

“What?”

“Syphilis. You called it an STD case. Sexually transmitted disease?”

I smiled and looked out the window. We were cruising through Hancock Park. It was all big houses, big lawns, and tall hedges.

“Jennifer, I didn’t mean that. STD is shorthand from my days at the public defender’s. It means straight to disposition. When I was with the PD twenty years ago, that’s how we divided our caseloads. STDs and STTs — straight to dispo or straight to trial. Maybe now they call them STPs — straight to plea — to avoid confusion.”

“Oh, well, now I’m embarrassed.”

“Not as much as you’d be if you’d said to Judge Companioni that the case has syphilis.”

We both laughed at that. Jennifer had one of the brightest and hungriest legal minds I had ever encountered but she was still gaining practical experience and learning the routine and language of the criminal beat. I knew that if she stuck with it, she would eventually become the state’s worst nightmare when she walked into court.

“Couple more things,” I said, getting back to business. “Try to walk into chambers ahead of Shelly and grab the seat that will put you on the judge’s left.”

“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “Why?”

“It’s a left-brain right-brain thing. People are more agreeable toward people on their left.”

“Come on.”

“I mean it. Whenever I stand in front of a jury for closing argument, I move as far right as I can get. So for most of them I’m coming from their left.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Try it. You’ll see.”

“It’s impossible to prove.”

“I’m telling you. There have been scientific tests and studies. You can Google it.”

“I don’t have time. What was the other thing?”

“If you start feeling comfortable enough with the judge, tell him that what will really help us put this to bed is if Shelly drops cooperation from the plea agreement. If Deirdre doesn’t have to testify against her boyfriend, I think we can make this happen. We’re even willing to keep the same sentencing terms, just no cooperation. And tell the judge that Shelly doesn’t need it. She has all three of them on wiretaps talking about the whole thing. And she’s got the DNA from the rape kit matching to the boyfriend. It’s a slam dunk even without Deirdre’s testimony. She does not need Deirdre.”

“Okay, I’ll try. But I was sort of hoping this might be my first criminal trial.”

“You don’t want this to be your first trial. You want that one to be a winner. Besides, eighty percent of criminal law is figuring out how to stay out of trial. And the other half—”

“Is all mental. Yeah, I get that.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks, boss.”

“Don’t call me boss. We’re associates, remember?”

“Right.”

I put the phone away and started thinking about how I would handle the interview with Stacey Campbell. We were passing the Farmers Market now and were almost there.

After a while I noticed that Earl kept looking at me in the rearview. He did this when he had something to say.

“What’s up, Earl?” I finally asked.

“I was wondering about what you said on the phone. About with people on the left side and how that works.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, one time — you know, back when I was working the streets — I had this guy come up with a gun to rip off my stash.”

“Yeah?”

“And the thing was, back then somebody was going around popping guys for their cash and stash, you know? Just popping them in the head and grabbing it all up. And I was thinking that this was the guy and he was about to do me.”

“Scary. What happened?”

“Well, I talked him out of it. I just talked about my daughter just bein’ born and all. I gave him my stuff and he just ran away. Then later there was an arrest in those other murders and I saw his picture on the TV and it was the guy. The guy that ripped me off.”

“You got lucky there, Earl.”

He nodded and looked at me in the mirror again.

“And the thing is, he was on my right and I was on his left when he came up, and I talked him out of it. It’s kind of like what you were saying there. Like he agreed with me not to kill my ass.”

I nodded knowingly.

“You make sure you tell Bullocks that story next time you see her.”

“I will.”

“All right, Earl. I’m glad you talked him out of it.”

“Yeah, me, too. My moms and daughter, too.”

9

I got to Toast early, waited ten minutes for a table, and then kept it while nursing a coffee for forty-five minutes. There was a line of West Hollywood hipsters who weren’t happy about me monopolizing a coveted table and not even ordering a meal. I kept my head down and read e-mail until Starry-Eyed Stacey showed up at 1:30 and slid into the chair across from me, enveloped in a strong cloud of perfume.

The hair Stacey had put on was a white-blond spike wig with blue highlights at the tips. It went with her so-pale-it-was-almost-blue skin and the wide stripes of glitter paint on her eyelids. I figured that the hipsters who hated me for taking one of their tables were close to rabid about me now. Starry-Eyed Stacey didn’t exactly fit in. She looked like she had escaped from a 1970s glam rock album cover.

“So you’re the lawyer,” she said.

I smiled all business-like.

“That’s me.”

“Glenda told me about you. She said you were sweet. She didn’t say handsome, too.”

“Who’s Glenda?”

“Giselle. When we first met in Vegas she was Glenda ‘the Good Witch’ Daville.”

“Why’d she change her name when she came here?”

She shrugged.

“People change, I guess. She was still the same girl. That’s why I always called her Glenda.”

“So you had already come out from Vegas and she followed?”

“Something like that. We had stayed in touch, you know. She checked to see how tricks were out here and whatnot. I told her to come out if she wanted to and she did.”

“And you put her in touch with Andre.”

“Yeah, to set her up online and take her bookings.”

“How long had you known Andre?”

“Not so long. You think we can get any service around here?”

She was right, the waitress who had so attentively asked me every five minutes if I was going to order something was now nowhere to be seen. My guess was that Stacey had that effect on people, especially women. I got the attention of a busboy and told him to fetch our waitress.

“How did you find Andre?” I asked while we waited.

“That was easy. I went online and started looking at other girls’ sites. He was the site administrator on a lot of the good ones. So I e-mailed him and we hooked up.”

“How many sites does he manage?”

“I don’t know. You gotta ask him.”

“Did you ever know Andre to be physically abusive to any of the women he managed?”

She snickered.

“You mean like a real pimp?”

I nodded.

“No. When he wants to get rough, he knows people who can do the rough stuff for him.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know any names. I just know he’s not that physical. And there were a few times when some guy was trying to chip off his deal and he had to put a stop to it. At least that’s what he told me.”

“You mean guys trying to take over the online stuff?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“You know who they were?”

“No, I don’t know names or anything. Just what Andre told me.”

“What about the guys who do the rough stuff for him? You ever see those guys?”

“I saw them once when I needed them. Some guy wouldn’t pay and I called Andre when the john was in the shower. His guys showed up like that.”

She snapped her fingers.

“They made him pay, all right. The guy thought that because he was on some show on cable that nobody ever heard of he didn’t have to pay. Everybody pays.”

The waitress finally came back to the table. Stacey ordered a BLT on what else? — toast — and a Diet Coke. I went with chicken salad on a croissant and switched from coffee to iced tea.

“Who was Glenda hiding from?” I asked as soon as we were alone again.

Stacey handled the jump cut in direction pretty casually.

“Isn’t everybody hiding from somebody or something?”

“I don’t know. Was she?”

“She never talked about it, but she looked over her shoulder a lot, if you know what I mean. Especially when she came back here.”

This wasn’t getting anywhere.

“What did she tell you about me?”

“She said that when she lived out here before, you were her lawyer, but she could never call you again if she took a bust.”

The waitress put down our drinks and I waited until she was gone.

“Why couldn’t she call me?”

“I don’t know. Because it would all unravel, I guess.”

That wasn’t the answer I expected. I thought that she would say that Glenda could never call me because it would expose her betrayal.

“Unravel? Was that her word?”

“That’s what she said, yeah.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I don’t know, she just said things. She said it could unravel. I don’t know what it meant and she didn’t say any more about it.”

Stacey was starting to act put out by the questioning. I leaned back and thought about things. Besides offering a few tantalizing words with no further explanation, she wasn’t much help. I guess I had been foolish to think Gloria Dayton — if that was even her real name — had confided in another prostitute about her distant past.

All I knew now was that the whole thing depressed me. Gloria-Glenda-Giselle had been inextricably bound to the life. Unable to leave it, and it eventually took everything away from her. It was an old story and in a year’s time it would be forgotten or replaced by the next one.

Our food came but I had lost my appetite. I watched Starry-Eyed Stacey put globs of mayonnaise on her BLT and eat it like a little girl, licking her fingers after the first bite. And that didn’t lift my spirits either.

10

I sat in the backseat for a long time thinking about things. Earl kept looking at me in the rearview, wondering when I would give him directions. But I didn’t know where to go next. I thought about waiting for Stacey Campbell to come out of the restaurant after using the restroom and following her home so I knew where she lived, but I knew Cisco could run her down if I needed her again. I checked my watch and saw it was quarter to three. Bullocks was probably in the middle of things with the status conference in Judge Companioni’s chambers. I decided to wait a while before checking in with her.

“The Valley, Earl,” I finally said. “I want to go watch practice.”

Earl turned the ignition and we were off. He took Laurel Canyon up the mountain to Mulholland Drive. We turned west and after a few curves came to the parking lot entrance for Fryman Canyon Park. Earl pulled into a space, opened the glove box, and handed the binoculars over the seat to me. I took off my jacket and tie and left them on the backseat as I got out.

“I’ll probably be a half hour or so,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

I closed the door and walked off. Fryman Canyon descends the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way down into Studio City. I took the Betty Dearing Trail down until it split east and west. This is where I went off the trail and farther down through the brush until I reached a promontory with open views of the sprawling city below. My daughter had transferred this year to the Skyline School, and its campus backed up from Valleycrest Drive to the edge of the park. The campus was on two elevations; the lower level contained the academic buildings, and the upper side was where the sports complex was located. By the time I got to the viewing spot, soccer practice was already under way below. I scanned the field with the binoculars and found Hayley in the far goal. She was the team’s starting goalkeeper, which was an improvement over her previous school, where she was second string.

I sat on a large rock I had pulled up from the ground and positioned on a previous visit to the spot. After a while I let the binoculars hang around my neck and I just watched with my elbows on my knees, face in my hands. She was denying everything until one shot with a perfect shape to it got by her, hit the cross bar, and then was put in on the rebound. The bottom line was that she looked like she was having fun and the concentration of the position likely crowded out all other thoughts. I wished that I could do that. Just forget about Sandy and Katie Patterson and everything else for a while. Especially at night when I closed my eyes to sleep.

I could’ve gone to court to force the issue with my daughter, make a judge order visitation and compel her to stay with me every other weekend and every other Wednesday, like it used to be. But I knew that would only make things worse. You do that to a sixteen-year-old and you could lose her forever. So I let her go and began a waiting game. Waiting and watching from afar. I had to have faith that Hayley would eventually come to realize that the world was not black and white. That it was gray and the gray area was where her father dwelled.

It was easy for me to keep that faith because there was no other choice. But it was not so easy to face the larger question that floated above that faith like a storm cloud. The question of how you can hope and expect someone to forgive you when deep down you don’t forgive yourself.

My phone buzzed and I took a call from Bullocks, who had just left the courthouse downtown.

“How did it go?”

“I think good. Shelly Albert wasn’t happy about it, but the judge pressed her on the cooperation component of the disposition and she finally caved. So we have a deal if we can sell it to Deirdre.”

As it was a status conference in camera, Ramsey hadn’t been required to be there. We would have to visit the jail and present the new terms of the offer from the DA.

“Good. How long do we have?”

“Basically forty-eight hours. She’s giving us till close of shop Friday. And the judge wants to hear from us on Monday.”

“Okay, then we go see her tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to her and you sell her on it.”

“Sounds good. Where are you? I hear yelling.”

“I’m at soccer practice.”

“Really? You and Hayley have patched things up? That’s fan—”

“Not exactly. I’m just watching. So what’s your next move?”

“I guess I go back to the law library and hit those files. I think it’s probably too late to go out to Pasadena to pull transcripts”

“All right, well, I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks for taking Ramsey for me.”

“Happy to. I really liked it, Mickey. I want more criminal.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Oh, one other thing. You got another second?”

“Sure. What?”

“I sat to the judge’s left like you said, and you know, I think it worked. He patiently listened to me every time I spoke, and he kept cutting Shelly off every time she responded.”

I could have mentioned that the judge’s attentiveness might have had something to do with Jennifer Aronson’s being an attractive, energetic, and idealistic twenty-six-year-old and Shelly Albert’s being a lifer in the DA’s Office who seemed to carry the burden of proof in her slumped shoulders and permanent frown.

“See, I told you,” I said instead.

“Thanks for the tip,” she said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

After I put the phone away I used the binoculars again to watch my daughter. The coach called the practice at four and the girls were leaving the field. Because Hayley was a transfer, she was treated like a rookie, and she had to gather all the balls and put them in a net bag. During the practice she had been in a goal that faced my position. So I didn’t see her back until she started gathering up the balls. My heart lifted when I saw she still had the number 7 on the back of her green jersey. Her lucky number. My lucky number. Mickey Mantle’s number. She hadn’t changed it and that was at least one connection to me she hadn’t changed. I took that as a sign that not everything between us was lost and that I should continue to keep the faith.