The Gods of Guilt

11

There is never just one case. There are always many. I liken the practice of law to the craft of some of the premier buskers seen working the crowds on the Venice boardwalk. There’s the man who spins plates on sticks, keeping a forest of china spinning with momentum and aloft at the same time. And there’s the man who juggles gas-powered chain saws, spinning them in the air in a precise manner so that he never shakes hands with the business end of the blades.

Aside from the La Cosse case, I kept several plates spinning as the calendar changed from one year to the next. Leonard Watts, the carjacker, got a deal he grudgingly agreed to in order to head off a retrial. Jennifer Aronson handled the negotiations, just as she did with Deirdre Ramsey, who took a plea deal and did not have to testify against her boyfriend in court.

I picked up a high-profile case in late December that was more of the chain saw variety. A former client and lifelong con artist named Sam Scales was popped by the LAPD on a scam that brought new meaning to the words heartless predator. Scales was accused of setting up a phony website and Facebook page in order to solicit donations to cover the burial costs of a child killed in a school massacre in Connecticut. People from far and wide gave liberally and Scales was said by the prosecution to have raked in close to fifty thousand that donors believed was going toward a murdered child’s funeral. The scam worked well until the parents of the dead child got wind of the effort and contacted authorities. Scales had used a variety of false digital fronts to safeguard his identity but eventually — as in all scams — he needed to move the money to a place where he could access it and put it in his pocket.

And that was the Bank of America branch on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. When he strolled in and asked for the money in cash, the bank teller saw the flag on the account and stalled while police were called. It was explained to Sam that the bank did not keep that much money in cash on hand because it was in a high-risk location, meaning the chances of a robbery were higher than at other locations. Scales was told that he could wait for the money to be special-ordered and put on the regular three p.m. armored truck delivery, or he could go to a downtown location where that kind of cash was more readily available. Scales, a con artist who didn’t know a con when it was directed at him, elected to special-order the money and return to pick it up. When he came back at three, he was met by two detectives with the LAPD Commercial Crimes Division. The same two detectives who arrested him for the last case I defended him on — a Japanese tsunami aid rip-off.

Everybody wanted a piece of Scales this time — the FBI, the Connecticut State Police, even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who jumped in on the case because several of the victims who had given money were from across the border. But the LAPD made the arrest, and that meant the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office had the first shot at him. Scales called me as he had in the past and I took on the cause of a man so vilified in the media for his alleged crime that he had to be placed in solitary at Men’s Central for fear he would be harmed by other prisoners.

What made matters worse for Scales was that the outrage was so great that the district attorney himself, Damon Kennedy, the man who had soundly defeated me in the prior year’s election, had announced that he would personally prosecute Scales to the full extent of the law. This of course came after I had signed on as defense counsel, and now the stage was set for Kennedy to once again trounce me on the public stage. I had made inquiries about a disposition — the DA had Scales dead to rights on this one — but Kennedy was having none of that. He knew he had a slam-dunk case and there was no need to deal. He would milk the trial for every last video, print, and digital drop of attention he could wring out of it. No doubt, Sam Scales was going to go down for the full count this time.

The Scales case did not help me personally either. L.A. Weekly ran a cover story on “The Most Hated Man in America,” and the report provided a trip down memory lane of the many cons Scales had been accused of over the past two decades. My name came up often in these vignettes as his longtime defense attorney, and the overall story cast me as an official apologist for my client. The issue landed a week before Christmas and it made for an icy reception from my daughter, who once again believed her father had publicly humiliated her. All parties had previously agreed that I would be allowed to visit on Christmas morning with gifts for both daughter and former wife. But it didn’t go so well. What I had hoped would be the start of a winter thaw in both relationships turned into an ice storm. I ate a TV dinner at home alone that night.

It was now the first week of April, and I was appearing on behalf of Andre La Cosse before the Honorable Nancy Leggoe in Department 120 of the downtown Criminal Courts Building. We were six weeks out from trial on the case and Leggoe was taking testimony in regard to the motion to suppress that I had filed shortly after the preliminary hearing in which La Cosse was held to answer.

La Cosse sat beside me at the defense table. He had been in jail going on five months now and the pallor of his skin was just one indication of the deterioration within. Some people can handle a stint behind bars. Andre wasn’t one of them. As he told me often when we communicated, he was losing his mind in captivity.

Through the exchange of discovery materials that began in December, I had received a copy of the video of Andre La Cosse’s interview with the lead investigator on the Gloria Dayton murder. My motion to suppress claimed that the interview was actually an interrogation and that the police had used trickery and coercion to elicit incriminating statements from my client. Additionally, the motion claimed that the detective who interrogated La Cosse in a small windowless room at West Bureau ran roughshod over his constitutional rights, not properly administering the Miranda warning regarding his right to an attorney until after La Cosse had made the incriminating statements and was placed under arrest.

During the interrogation La Cosse had denied killing Dayton, which was good for our side. But what was bad was that he had given police evidence of motive and opportunity. He admitted that he had been in the victim’s apartment on the night of the murder and that he and Gloria had argued about the money she was supposed to have been paid by the client at the Beverly Wilshire. He even acknowledged that he had grabbed Gloria by the throat.

Of course, this evidence La Cosse had provided against himself was pretty damning, and it served as the core of the DA’s case, as demonstrated in the preliminary hearing. But now I was asking the judge to eliminate the interview from the case and not allow a jury to see it. In addition to the intimidation practices employed by the detective in the room, La Cosse had not been read his rights until after he had mentioned that he had been in Dayton’s apartment in the hours before her death and that there had been an argument.

Motions to suppress are always the longest of long shots but this one was worth a try. If I got the video of the interrogation kicked, the entire case would change. It might even tilt in Andre La Cosse’s direction.

The prosecution, led by Deputy DA William Forsythe, began the hearing with Detective Mark Whitten’s testimony about the circumstances of the interview and then introduced the video recording of the session. The thirty-two-minute video was shown in its entirety on a screen mounted to the wall opposite the courtroom’s empty jury box. I had already watched it numerous times. I had my video time counts and questions ready when Forsythe finished his direct examination of Whitten and turned the witness and the remote control over to me. Whitten knew what was coming. I had laid into him pretty good when he had testified during the preliminary hearing. This time the assault would take place in front of Judge Leggoe, who was assigned to hear the case after the prelim. There was no jury to play to. No gods of guilt. I remained seated at the defense table, my client in his orange jumpsuit next to me.

“Detective Whitten, good morning,” I said as I pointed the remote at the screen. “I want to go back to the very beginning of the interrogation.”

“Good morning,” Whitten said. “And it was an interview, not an interrogation. As I said before, Mr. La Cosse voluntarily agreed to come to the station to talk with me.”

“Right, I heard that. But let’s take a look at this.”

I started playing the video, and on the screen the door to the interview room opened and La Cosse entered, followed by Whitten, who put his hand on my client’s shoulder to direct him to one of the two chairs on either side of a small table. I stopped the playback as soon as La Cosse was seated.

“So, Detective, what are you doing there with your hand on Mr. La Cosse’s upper arm?”

“I was just directing him to a seat. I wanted to sit down for the interview.”

“You were directing him to that particular chair, though, correct?”

“Not really.”

“You wanted him facing the camera because your plan was to draw a confession from him, correct?”

“No, not correct.”

“Are you telling Judge Leggoe that you did not want him in that particular seat so that he would be in view of the hidden camera that was in that room?”

Whitten took a few moments to compose an answer. Bullshitting a jury is one thing. But it grows increasingly risky to mislead a judge who has been around the block a few times.

“It’s standard policy and practice to place the interview subject in the seat facing the camera. I was following policy.”

“Is it standard policy and practice to videotape interviews with subjects who have come to the police department for a ‘conversation,’ as you put it in your direct testimony?”

“Yes, it is.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise but then reminded myself that it wasn’t serving my client well to bullshit the judge either. This would include feigning surprise at an answer I knew was coming. I moved on.

“And you insist that you had not classified Mr. La Cosse as a suspect when he came to the police station to talk to you?”

“Absolutely. I had a completely open mind about him.”

“So there was no need to give him the standard rights warning at the top of this so-called conversation?”

Forsythe objected, saying the question was already asked and answered during his direct examination. Forsythe was midthirties and lean. With a ruddy complexion and sandy hair, he looked like a surfer in a suit.

Judge Leggoe overruled the objection and let me go with it. Whitten answered the question.

“I didn’t believe it was necessary,” he said. “He was not a suspect at the time he voluntarily came into the station and then voluntarily entered that room for the interview. I was just going to take a statement from him, and he ended up saying he had been in the victim’s apartment. I was not expecting that.”

He delivered the answer just as I am sure he had rehearsed it with Forsythe. I moved ahead in the video to a point where Whitten excused himself from the room to go get my client a soda that the detective had offered. I froze the image of La Cosse left alone in the room.

“Detective, what would have happened if my client had decided while alone in there that he had to use the restroom and got up to leave?”

“I don’t understand. We would have allowed him to use the restroom. He never asked.”

“But what would have happened if he’d decided on his own to get up from the table at this point here and open that door? Yes or no, did you lock it when you left the room?”

“It’s not a yes or no answer.”

“I think it is.”

Forsythe objected and called my response badgering. The judge told the detective to answer the question the way he saw fit. Whitten composed himself again and fell back on the standard out: policy.

“It is the policy of the department not to allow any citizen unescorted access to work areas of police stations. That door leads directly to the detective bureau, and it would have been against policy for me to allow him to wander through the squad unattended. Yes, I locked the door.”

“Thank you, Detective. So let me see if I have this right so far. Mr. La Cosse was not a suspect in your case but he was locked in this windowless room and was under constant surveillance while in there, correct?”

“I don’t know if I would call it surveillance.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“We roll the camera whenever someone is in one of those rooms. It’s standard—”

“Policy, yes, I know. Let’s move on.”

I fast-forwarded through the video about twenty minutes, to a point where Whitten stood up from his seat and took off his jacket and draped it over the backrest. He then moved his chair in toward the table and stood behind it, leaning forward with his hands on the table.

“So you don’t know anything about her murder, is that what you’re saying?” he said to La Cosse on the screen.

I froze it right there.

“Detective Whitten, why did you take your jacket off at this point in the interrogation?”

“You mean the interview? I took my jacket off because it was getting stuffy in there.”

“But you testified on direct that the camera was hidden in the air-conditioning vent. Wasn’t the air on?”

“I don’t know if it was on or not. I hadn’t checked before we went in there.”

“Aren’t these so-called interview rooms nicknamed ‘hot boxes’ by detectives because they are used to sweat suspects and hopefully induce them to cooperate and confess?”

“I’ve never heard that, no.”

“You’ve never used that phrase yourself to describe this room?”

I pointed to the screen and asked the question with such surprise in my tone that I hoped Whitten would think I had something up my sleeve that he didn’t know about. But it was a bluff and the detective parried it by using a standard witness out.

“I don’t recall ever using the phrase, no.”

“Okay, so you took your jacket off and are now standing over Mr. La Cosse. Was that to intimidate him?”

“No, it was because I felt like standing. We had been sitting at that point for a long time.”

“Do you have hemorrhoids, Detective?”

Forsythe quickly objected again and accused me of trying to embarrass the detective. I told the judge I was simply trying to place on the record testimony that would help the court understand why the detective felt compelled to stand during the interview after only twenty minutes. The judge sustained the objection and told me to proceed without asking the witness questions of such a personal nature.

“Okay, Detective,” I said. “What about Mr. La Cosse? Could he stand up if he wanted to? Could he have stood over you while you were sitting?”

“I would not have objected,” Whitten answered.

I hoped the judge was aware that Whitten’s answers were largely bogus and part of the dance detectives engaged in every day in every police station. They walked a constitutional tightrope, trying to push things as far as they could before having to enlighten the hapless saps who sat across the table from them. I had to make a case that this was a custodial interrogation and that under these circumstances Andre La Cosse did not feel that he was free to leave. If the judge was convinced, then she would hold that La Cosse was indeed under arrest when he entered that interrogation room and should have been Mirandized. She could then throw the entire video recording out, crippling the DA’s case.

I pointed up to the screen again.

“Let’s talk about what you’re wearing there, Detective.”

I took Whitten through a full description for the record of the shoulder holster and Glock he was wearing, and then moved down to his belt, eliciting descriptions of the handcuffs, extra gun clip, badge, and pepper-spray canister that were attached to it.

“Your displaying of all of these weapons to Mr. La Cosse was for what purpose?”

Whitten shook his head like he was annoyed with me.

“No purpose. It was warm in there and I took off my jacket. I wasn’t displaying anything.”

“So you are telling the court that showing my client your gun and badge and the extra bullets and the pepper spray were not a means of intimidating Mr. La Cosse?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling the court.”

“How about at this point?”

I moved the video forward another minute to the point that Whitten pulled the chair out from the table and put one foot up on it so he could really loom over the small table and La Cosse, who was shorter and more slightly built.

“I was not intimidating him,” Whitten said. “I was having a conversation with him.”

I checked the notes on my legal pad and made sure I had covered everything I wanted to get on the record. I didn’t think Leggoe would rule my way on this one but I thought I had a shot on appeal. Meantime, I had gotten in another round with Whitten on the witness stand. It better prepared me for trial, when I would really need to go at him.

Before ending the cross-examination I leaned over and conferred with La Cosse as a general courtesy.

“Anything I missed?” I whispered.

“I don’t think so,” La Cosse whispered back. “I think the judge knows what he was doing.”

“Let’s hope so.”

I straightened up in my seat and looked at the judge.

“I have nothing further, Your Honor.”

By prior agreement, Forsythe and I were to submit written arguments on the motion following the witness testimony. Pretty much knowing from the prelim how Whitten would testify, my document was already finished. I submitted it to Leggoe and gave copies to the court clerk and Forsythe. The prosecutor said he would have his response by the following afternoon, and Leggoe said she planned to rule promptly and well before the start of the trial. Her mention of her ruling not interrupting the trial schedule was a strong indication that my motion was going to be a loser. With its rulings in recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court had made new law when it came to Miranda cases, giving the police wider leeway on when and where suspects must be informed of their constitutional rights. I suspected that Judge Leggoe would go along to get along.

The judge adjourned the hearing and the two court deputies came to the defense table to take La Cosse back to the lockup. I asked for the chance to confer with my client for a few minutes, but they told me I would have to do it in the courtroom’s holding cell. I nodded to Andre and told him I’d be back to see him shortly.

The deputies took him away and I stood up and started repacking my briefcase, gathering the files and notebooks I had spread out on the table before the hearing. Forsythe came over to sympathize. He seemed like a decent guy and up till now had not — as far as I knew — played games with discovery or anything else.

“Must be hard,” he said.

“What’s that?” I responded.

“Just banging away at these things, knowing the success rate is what, one in fifty?”

“Maybe one in a hundred. But when you hit that one? Man, that’s a sweet day.”

Forsythe nodded. I knew he wanted to do more than commiserate on the defense attorney’s lot in life.

“So,” he finally said. “Any chance we might end this before the trial?”

He was talking about a disposition. He had sent up a balloon back in January and then another in February. I didn’t respond to the first one — which was an offer to accept a second-degree conviction, meaning La Cosse would be out in fifteen years. My ignoring the offer brought an improvement when Forsythe came around again in February. This time the DA was willing to call it a heat-of-passion case and let La Cosse plead to manslaughter. But La Cosse would still do at least ten years in the pen. As was my duty, I took the deal to him, and he turned it down flat. Ten years might as well be a hundred if you are doing time for a crime you didn’t commit, he said. He had a passion in his voice when he said it. It tipped me toward his corner, toward thoughts that maybe he was indeed innocent.

I looked at Forsythe and shook my head.

“Andre’s not getting cold feet,” I said. “He still says he didn’t do it and still wants to see if you can prove he did.”

“So no deal, then.”

“No deal.”

“Then, I guess I’ll see you at jury selection, May sixth.”

That was the date Leggoe had set for the start of the trial. She was giving us four days max to pick a jury and a day for lastminute motions and opening statements. The real show would start the following week, when the prosecution began its case.

“Oh, you might see me before that. You never know.”

I snapped my briefcase closed and headed toward the steel door to the holding cell. The court deputy escorted me back and I found La Cosse waiting alone in the cell.

“We’ll be moving him back in fifteen,” the deputy said.

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

“Knock when you’re ready to come out.”

I waited until the deputy went back through the courtroom door before turning and looking at my client through the bars.

“Andre, I’m worried. It doesn’t look like you’re eating.”

“I’m not eating. How could anyone eat when they’re in here for something they didn’t do? Besides, the food is fucking horrible. I just want to go home.”

I nodded.

“I know, I know.”

“You are going to win this, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to give it my best shot. But just so you know, the DA is still floating a deal out there if you want me to pursue it.”

La Cosse emphatically shook his head.

“I don’t even want to hear what it is. No deal.”

“That’s what I thought. So we go to trial.”

“What if we win the motion to suppress?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t get your hopes up on that. I told you, it’s a long shot. You have to expect that we are going to go to trial.”

La Cosse lowered his head until his forehead was against one of the bars that separated us. He looked like he was going to cry.

“Look, I know I’m not a good guy,” he said. “I did a lot of bad things in my life. But I didn’t do this. I didn’t.”

“And I’m going to do my best to prove it, Andre. You can count on that.”

He drew his head up to look at me eye to eye and nodded.

“That’s what Giselle said. That she could count on you.”

“She said that? Count on me for what?”

“You know, like if anything happened to her, she knew she could count on you to not let it go by.”

I paused for a moment. In the past five months La Cosse and I had had limited communication. He was in jail and I was working a full caseload. We spoke when together for court hearings and during occasional phone calls from the pink module, where he was housed at Men’s Central. Even so, I thought I had gotten everything I needed from him in order to defend him at trial. But what he had just said was new information, and it gave me pause because it was about Gloria Dayton, who still remained an enigma to me.

“Why did she tell you that?”

La Cosse shook his head slightly, as though he didn’t understand the urgency I had put into my voice.

“I don’t know. We were just talking once and she mentioned you. You know, like if anything happens to me, then Mickey Mantle will go to bat for me.”

“When did she say that?”

“I don’t remember. She just said it. She said to make sure to let you know.”

With my one free hand I gripped one of the bars and moved closer to my client.

“You told me you came to me because she said I was a good lawyer. You didn’t tell me any of this other stuff.”

“I had just been arrested for murder and was scared shitless. I wanted you to take my case.”

I held myself back from reaching through the bars and grabbing him by the collar of his jumpsuit.

“Andre, listen to me. I want you to tell me exactly what she said. Use her words.”

“She just said that if something happened to her, I had to promise to tell you. And then something did happen and I got arrested. So I called you.”

“How close was this conversation to when she was murdered?”

“I can’t remember exactly.”

“Days? Weeks? Months? Come on, Andre. It could be important.”

“I don’t know. A week, maybe longer. I can’t remember because being in this place, all the noise and the lights on all the time and the animals, it wears you down and you start losing your mind. I can’t remember things, I don’t even remember what my mother looks like anymore.”

“Okay, calm down. You think about this on the bus ride and when you’re back in your own cell. I want you to remember exactly when this conversation took place. Okay?”

“I’ll try but I don’t know.”

“Okay, you try. I have to go now. I’ll be seeing you before the trial. There’s still a lot of prep work to be done.”

“Okay. And I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For getting you upset about Giselle. I can tell you are.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just make sure you eat the food they give you tonight. I want you to look strong for the trial. You promise me?”

La Cosse reluctantly nodded.

“I promise.”

I headed back to the steel door.

12

I walked back through the courtroom with my head down, oblivious of the hearing that Judge Leggoe had started following ours. I moved toward the rear exit, pondering the story La Cosse had just told me, that he had reached out to me following his arrest because Gloria Dayton had wanted me to know if something happened to her, not necessarily because she thought I should be his attorney. There was a significant difference in the stories and it helped ease the burden I’d carried for months in regard to Gloria. But did she want me to get this message so I would avenge her, or was it to warn me about some unseen danger? The questions put a new complexion on how I viewed things about Gloria and even myself. I now realized that Gloria might have known or at least feared that she was in danger.

The moment I stepped out of the courtroom and into the crowded hallway I was confronted by Fernando Valenzuela — the bondsman, not the former baseball pitcher. Val and I went way back and once shared a working relationship that was financially beneficial to both parties. But things turned sour years ago and we drifted apart. When I needed a bondsman these days, I usually went to Bill Deen or Bob Edmundson. Val was a distant third on that list.

Valenzuela handed me a folded document.

“Mick, this is for you.”

“What is it?”

I took the document and started to unfold it one handed, waving it to get it open.

“It’s a subpoena. You’ve been served.”

“What are you talking about? You’re running process now?”

“One of my many skills, Mick. Guy’s gotta make a living. Hold it up for me.”

“Fuck that.”

I knew the routine. He wanted to take a photo of me with the document to prove service. Service had been made but I wasn’t going to pose for pictures. I held the paper behind my back. Valenzuela took a photo with his phone anyway.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said.

“This is totally unnecessary, Val,” I said.

He put his phone away and I looked at the paper. I immediately saw the styling of the case; Hector Arrande Moya vs Arthur Rollins, warden, FCI Victorville. It was a 2241 filing. This was a permutation of a habeas petition that was known by lawyers as a “true habeas,” because rather than being a last-ditch effort grasping at legal straws like ineffective counsel, it was a declaration that startlingly new evidence was now available that proved innocence. Moya had something new up his sleeve and somehow it involved me, meaning it must involve my late client Gloria Dayton. She was the only link between Moya and me. The basic cause of action in a 2241 filing was the claim that the petitioner — in this case, Moya — was being unlawfully detained in prison, and thus the civil action directed against the warden. There would be something more in the full filing, the claim of new evidence designed to get a federal judge’s attention.

“Okay, Mick, so no hard feelings?”

I looked over the paper at Valenzuela. He had his phone out again and took my photo. I had forgotten he was even there. I could’ve gotten mad but I was too intrigued now.

“No, no hard feelings, Val. If I knew you were a process server, I would have been using you myself.”

Now Valenzuela was intrigued.

“Anytime, man. You’ve got my number. Money’s tight in the bond market right now, so I’m just picking up the slack. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, but you tell your employer on this that lawyer to lawyer, a subpoena is not the way to…”

I paused when I read the name of the lawyer issuing the subpoena.

“Sylvester Fulgoni?”

“That’s right, the firm that puts the F-U in litigation.”

Valenzuela laughed, proud of his clever response. But I was thinking of something else. Sylvester Fulgoni was indeed a onetime ball buster when it came to practicing law. But what was unusual about being subpoenaed by him to give a deposition was that I knew he had been disbarred and was serving time in federal prison for tax evasion. Fulgoni had built a successful practice primarily suing law enforcement agencies over color-of-law cases — cops using the protection of the badge to get away with assault, extortion, and other abuses, sometimes even murder. He had won millions in settlements and jury verdicts and taken his fair share in fees. Only he hadn’t bothered to pay taxes on most of it and eventually the governments he so often sued took notice.

Fulgoni claimed he was the target of a vindictive prosecution designed to stop his championing of victims of law enforcement and government abuse, but the fact was he hadn’t paid or even filed his taxes for four successive years. You get twelve taxpayers in the box and the verdict always comes out against you. Fulgoni appealed the guilty verdict for nearly six years but eventually time ran out and he went to prison. That was only a year ago and I now had a sneaking suspicion that the prison he’d ended up in was the Federal Correctional Institution at Victorville, which also happened to be home to Hector Arrande Moya.

“Is Sly already out?” I asked. “He couldn’t have gotten his bar ticket back already.”

“No, it’s his son, Sly Jr. He’s on the case.”

I had never heard of a Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. and I didn’t recall Sylvester Sr. being much older than me.

“He must be a baby lawyer, then.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never met the man. I deal with the office manager there and I gotta go, Mick. I’ve got more goodies to deliver.”

Valenzuela patted the satchel he had slung over his shoulder and turned to head down the courthouse hallway.

“Any more on this case?” I asked, holding up the subpoena.

Valenzuela frowned.

“Come on, Mick, you know I can’t be—”

“I send out a lot of subpoenas, you know, Val. I mean, whoever gets my business stands to make some pretty good coin month to month. But it’s gotta be somebody I trust, you know what I mean? Somebody who’s with me and not against me.”

Valenzuela knew exactly what I meant. He shook his head and then his eyes lit when he came up with a way out of the corner I had put him in. He signaled me over with his finger.

“Say, Mick, maybe you can help me out,” he said.

I stepped over to him.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you need?”

He opened his satchel and started looking through the papers in it.

“I gotta go over to the DEA to see this agent over there named James Marco. You have any idea where the DEA is in the Roybal Building?”

“The DEA? Well, it depends if he’s on one of the task forces or not. They have them spread around that building and other places in town.”

Valenzuela nodded.

“Yeah, he’s part of something called Interagency Cartel Enforcement Team. I think they call it ICE-T or something like that.”

I thought about that, the intrigue of the subpoena and everything else building inside of me.

“Sorry, I don’t know where they’re at in there. Anything else I can help you with?”

Valenzuela went back to looking through his bag.

“Yeah, one other. After the DEA, I gotta go see a lady named Kendall Roberts — that’s with a K and two l’s — and she lives on Vista Del Monte in Sherman Oaks. You know where that is by any chance?”

“Not offhand, no.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to fire up the old GPS then. I’ll see you, Mick.”

“Yeah, Val. I’ll call you with my next batch of paper.”

I watched him go off down the hall and then walked over to one of the benches that lined the hallway. Finding a small open space to sit down, I opened my bag so I could write down the names Valenzuela had just given me. I then pulled my cell and called Cisco. I gave him the names James Marco and Kendall Roberts and told him to find out whatever he could on them. I mentioned that Marco was supposedly law enforcement and possibly with the Drug Enforcement Agency. Cisco groaned. All people in law enforcement take measures to protect themselves by eliminating as many digital trails and as much public information as possible. But DEA agents take it to a whole new level.

“I might as well be running down a CIA agent,” Cisco complained.

“Just see what you come up with,” I said. “Start with the Interagency Cartel Enforcement Team — ICE-T. You never know, we might get lucky.”

I left the courthouse after that and spotted the Lincoln parked on Spring. I jumped in the back and was about to tell Earl to head to Starbucks when I realized it wasn’t Earl behind the wheel, because I was in the wrong Lincoln.

“Oh, sorry, wrong car,” I said.

I jumped out and called Earl on the cell. He said he was parked on Broadway because a parking cop had chased him off the curb on Spring. I waited five minutes for his arrival and used the time to call Lorna to check on things. She told me nothing worth mentioning was happening and I told her about the subpoena from Fulgoni and that it was scheduled for the following Tuesday morning at his office in Century City. She said she’d put it on the calendar and seemed to share my annoyance with Fulgoni’s using Val to drop paper on me. Traditionally, it is not necessary for one lawyer to subpoena another. Usually a phone call and professional courtesy accomplishes the same thing.

“What a jerk!” Lorna said. “But how is Val doing?”

“I guess all right. I told him I’d throw him some of our paper.”

“And did you mean it? You have Cisco.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. Cisco hates process serving, thinks it’s beneath him.”

“But he does it and it doesn’t cost you anything extra.”

“That’s true.”

I ended the call as Earl pulled up in the right Lincoln. We drove over to the Starbucks on Central so I could use the Wi-Fi.

Once I was set up online, I went to the PACER site and plugged in the case number I took off the subpoena. The filing by Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. was indeed a true habeas motion seeking to vacate the conviction of Hector Arrande Moya. It cited gross government misconduct in the actions of DEA Agent James Marco. The filing alleged that prior to Moya’s arrest by the LAPD, Marco used a confidential informant to enter the premises of Moya’s hotel room and plant a firearm under the mattress. Marco then used the informant to orchestrate the arrest of Moya by the LAPD and the finding of the weapon by the arresting officers. The firearm allowed prosecutors to add an enhancement charge against Moya, making him eligible upon conviction for a life sentence in federal prison. He was indeed sentenced to life following his conviction.

The government had not yet responded, at least as far as I could determine online. But it was early. The filing by Fulgoni was dated April 1.

“April Fool’s,” I said to myself.

“What’s that, Boss?” Earl asked.

“Nothing, Earl. Just talking to myself.”

“You want me to go in and get you somethin’?”

“No, I’m good. You need a coffee?”

“No, not me.”

The Lincoln was set up with a printer on an equipment shelf on the front passenger seat — I bet those guys in the other Lincolns never thought of that. I printed out a copy of the filing and then closed the computer. When Earl handed the printout back over the seat, I read the motion in its entirety one more time. Then I leaned against the door and tried to figure out what the play was and what my part was supposed to be.

I thought it was pretty obvious that the confidential informant repeatedly mentioned in the document was Gloria Dayton. The inference was clearly that her arrest and my negotiation of a disposition on her behalf were orchestrated by the DEA and Agent Marco. It sure made a good story but I — being one of the players in the story — had a hard time believing it. I tried to recall in as great a detail as possible the case that brought Gloria Dayton and Hector Arrande Moya together. I remembered meeting Gloria at the downtown women’s jail and her telling me the details of her arrest. Without any prompting from her I saw the possibility of trading information from Gloria in exchange for a pretrial diversion. It had been wholly my idea. Gloria was not the kind of client who understood or even knew the law. And as far as Marco went, I had never met or spoken to him in my life.

I had to consider, however, that Gloria had been coached to say just enough to get the wheels turning inside her attorney’s head. It seemed like a long shot but I had to admit to myself that if the last five months proved anything to me, it was that Gloria had dimensions I didn’t know about. Maybe this was the ultimate revelation about her: that she had used me as a pawn for the DEA.

Impatiently I called Cisco again and asked what progress he had made running down the names I had given him.

“You gave me the names less than a half hour ago,” Cisco protested. “I know you want this stuff quick but a half hour?”

“I need to know what is going on with this. Now.”

“Well, I’m going as fast as I can. I can tell you about the woman but I got nothing yet on the agent. That’s going to be a tough nut to crack.”

“Okay, then tell me about the woman.”

There were a few moments of silence while Cisco apparently collected his notes.

“Okay, Kendall Roberts,” he began. “She’s thirty-nine and lives on Vista Del Monte in Sherman Oaks. She’s got a record going back to the midnineties. A lot of prostitutions and conspiracy to commits. You know, the usual escort stuff. So she’s a hooker. Or I should say, she was. Her record’s been clean the past six years.”

That would have made her active when Gloria Dayton was working as an escort under the name Glory Days. I suspected that Roberts and Dayton knew each other back then, or had known of each other, and that was the reason for the subpoena from Fulgoni.

“Okay,” I said. “What else?”

“Nothing else,” Cisco said. “What I told you is what I’ve got. Why don’t you call me back in an hour.”

“No, I’ll just see you tomorrow. I want everybody in the boardroom at nine tomorrow morning. Can you tell the others?”

“Sure. This is including Bullocks?”

“Yes, Bullocks, too. I want everybody there and everybody brainstorming on this latest thing. It could be just what we need on La Cosse.”

“You mean the straw man defense — Moya killed Dayton?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, well, we’ll all be there in the boardroom at nine.”

“And in the meantime you gotta find out who this Marco guy is. We really need it.”

“I’m doing my best already. I’m on it.”

“Just find this guy.”

“Easy for you to say. Meantime, what are you going to be doing?”

It was a good question — good enough to prompt a hesitation on my part before I knew the answer.

“I’m going up to the Valley to talk to Kendall Roberts.”

Cisco’s rejection of that plan was swift.

“Wait, Mickey, I should be there. You don’t know what you’re getting into up there with this woman. You don’t know who she’ll be with. You ask the wrong question and there will be trouble. Let me meet you there.”

“No, you stay on Marco. I have Earl and I’ll be fine. I won’t ask the wrong question.”

Cisco knew me well enough to know that one protest was enough, because I wouldn’t be changing my mind about going up to brace Roberts.

“Well,” he said, “then happy hunting. Call me if you need me.”

“Will do.”

I closed the phone.

“All right, Earl, let’s hit it. Sherman Oaks and step on it.”

Earl dropped the car into drive and pulled away from the curb.

I felt my adrenaline surge with the car’s velocity. New things were happening. Things that I didn’t understand yet. But that was okay. I promised myself that I would soon understand everything.

13

It seemed likely to me that Fernando Valenzuela would deliver his subpoenas in the order in which he had asked me about the names. The Edward R. Roybal Federal Building was just a few blocks from the Criminal Courts Building. He would probably go there first to try to serve the paperwork on James Marco and then head up to the Valley to serve Kendall Roberts. It would not be an easy thing for Val to get to Marco. Federal agents do their best to avoid accepting subpoenas. I knew this from experience. Usually service ended up having to be arranged through a supervisor who would reluctantly accept a subpoena on behalf of the agent in question. The target agent almost never received the subpoena personally.

I believed that the timing of all of this gave me an edge on Val. If Roberts happened to be home, I would be able to get to her long before he did. Of course, I had no idea what getting there first would accomplish, but my hope was that I would be able to talk to Roberts in an unguarded moment, before she knew she was being drawn into some sort of federal case involving an imprisoned cartel kingpin.

I still needed to know more about Roberts than her name. It sounded like Roberts and Gloria Dayton were in similar circles in the 1990s and at least into the beginning of the new century. Cisco’s information was a starting point but it wasn’t enough. The best way to go into a conversation with a player in a case is to go in with more knowledge than the player has.

I Googled Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. on my cell and then called the number listed. A woman with a deep, smoky voice that seemed more appropriate for taking calls for reservations at Boa than at a law office put me on hold. We were on the 101 Freeway now and in heavy traffic. I figured we were still a half hour from Sherman Oaks, so I wasn’t bothered by the wait or the Mexican cantina music playing in my ear.

I was leaning against the window and about to shut my eyes when the voice of a young man announced itself in my ear.

“This is Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. What can I do for you, Mr. Haller?”

I sat up straight and pulled a legal pad from my briefcase up onto my thigh.

“Well, I guess you could start by telling me why you hit me with a subpoena today at the courthouse. I’m thinking you must be a young lawyer, Mr. Fulgoni, because that whole thing was unnecessary. All you needed to do was call me. It’s called professional courtesy. Lawyers don’t drop paper on other lawyers — especially not in front of their peers in the courthouse.”

There was a pause and then an apology.

“I am truly sorry about that and embarrassed, Mr. Haller. You’re right, I’m a young lawyer just trying to make my way, and if I handled it wrong, then I certainly apologize.”

“Apology accepted and you can call me Michael. Why don’t you tell me what this is about? Hector Arrande Moya? I haven’t heard that name in seven or eight years.”

“Yes, Mr. Moya has been away a long time and we are trying to improve his situation. Have you had a chance to look at the case the subpoena refers to?”

“Mr. Fulgoni, I barely have time to look at my own cases. In fact, I need to move some things around in order to clear the time you put on this subpoena. You should’ve left the time of the depo open-ended or at a time convenient to both parties.”

“I am sure we can accommodate you if Tuesday morning doesn’t work. And please call me Sly.”

“That’s fine, Sly. I think I can make it. But tell me why I am being deposed for Hector Moya. He was never my client and I had nothing to do with him.”

“But you did… Michael. In a way you are the one who put him in prison, and therefore you might also have the key to getting him out.”

This time I paused. The first part of Fulgoni’s statement was debatable, but whether true or not, it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted a high-ranking cartel man thinking about me, even if he was safely held in a federal prison.

“I want to stop you right there,” I finally said. “Saying that I was the one who put your client in prison is not going to engender any help or cooperation from me. On what basis are you making such an outrageous and careless statement?”

“Oh, come on, Michael. It’s been eight years. We know the details. You made a deal that got your client Gloria Dayton into diversion and gave the feds Hector Moya tied up in a nice pink bow. Your client is now dead and that leaves you to tell us what happened.”

I drummed my fingers on the armrest as I tried to think of the best way to handle this.

“Tell me,” I finally said, “how do you know the things you think you know about Gloria Dayton and her case?”

“I’m not going to go there with you, Michael. That is internal and confidential. Privileged, as a matter of fact. But we do need to take your deposition as we prepare our case. I look forward to meeting you Tuesday.”

“That’s not going to work, Junior.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, you’re not excused. And maybe you’ll see me Tuesday and maybe you won’t. I can walk into any court in the CCB and get the judge to quash this in five minutes. You understand? So if you want me there on Tuesday, you’d better start talking. I don’t care if it’s internal, eyes only, confidential, or privileged, I’m not walking into any depo anywhere with just my hat in my hand. If you want me there, then you need to start telling me exactly why you want me there.”

That got his attention and he stammered in his reply.

“Uh, uh, I’ll tell you what. Let me get back to you on this, Michael. I promise to call you in a bit.”

“Yeah, you do that.”

I disconnected the call. I knew what Sly Jr. was going to do. He was going to get Sly Sr. on the phone up at Victorville and ask him how to handle me. It was pretty clear from the call that Junior was doing Senior’s bidding. This whole thing was probably cooked up in the rec yard up in Victorville: Sly Sr. going to Moya and suggesting he had a shot at a true habeas motion. From there, Sly Sr. probably handwrote the motion or the instructions to his son in the prison law library. The only question I had about it was how did they know Gloria Dayton had been the confidential informant on Moya?

I looked out the window after the call and saw that we were now making good progress and almost to the Cahuenga Pass. Earl was finding the holes and moving like a scatback through the blockers. That’s what he was good at. We were going to get to Roberts sooner than I had thought.

Roberts lived a few blocks from Ventura Boulevard. If you were looking for some sort of status attributed to address, then south of the boulevard was what was preferred in the Valley. After my divorce my ex-wife bought a condo one block south of the boulevard on Dickens, and the distinction had been important to her — and pricey. I, of course, was partially paying for the place, since it also housed our daughter.

Roberts was living a few blocks north of the designation line, in the stretch between Ventura Boulevard and the Ventura Freeway. It was sort of a second-place neighborhood with a mix of apartment buildings and single-family homes.

When we were a block away I saw that we were on a stretch of Vista Del Monte that was lined with homes instead of apartments. I had Earl stop the car so I could get into the front seat. I first had to unplug the printer and move the platform into the car’s trunk.

“Just in case she sees us arrive,” I said, once I was in and had closed the door.

“Okay,” Earl said. “What’s the plan, then?”

“Hopefully we park in front and look official in this car. You go with me to the door and I do the talking.”

“Who are we seeing?”

“A woman. I need her to tell me what she knows.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

That was the problem. Kendall Roberts was being subpoenaed in the Moya appeal just as I was. I barely knew what I was bringing to the case, let alone what Roberts had.

We were in luck. There was a red curb and a fire hydrant directly in front of the 1950s ranch house at the address Cisco had given me.

“Park here so she sees the car.”

“We might get popped on the hydrant.”

I opened the glove box and took out a printed sign that said CLERGY and put it on the dashboard. It worked more often than it didn’t and was always worth a try.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Before getting out of the car, I pulled my wallet out and took my laminated bar card from one of the back slots and slid it into the plastic display window in front of my driver’s license. I worked out a quick plan of action with Earl and we then got out. Cisco had said Kendall Roberts’s arrest record ended in 2007. My hunch was she was out of the life now and probably clinging to the straight and narrow. I hoped to use that to my advantage — if the woman was even home in the middle of a weekday.

I put on my sunglasses as we approached. My face had been on TV and billboards scattered around town last year in the lead-up to the election. I didn’t want to be recognized here. I firmly knocked on the door and then stepped back next to Earl. He had on his Ray-Ban Wayfarers and his standard black suit and tie. I was in my charcoal Corneliani with the pinstripes. Still, standing shoulder to shoulder, both of us wearing shades, I was reminded of the black guy/white guy combo in a popular series of movies I had enjoyed with my daughter during better times. I whispered to Earl.

“What were those movies about the two guys who hunt aliens for a secret govern—”

The door was pulled open. A woman who looked a bit younger than the thirty-nine Cisco reported for Roberts stood in the doorway. She was tall, lithe, and had reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders. As far as I could tell, she wore no makeup and didn’t need to. She was wearing gray sweatpants and a pink T-shirt that said GOT FLEX? on it.

“Kendall Roberts?”

“Yes?”

I started to pull my wallet out of my inside coat pocket.

“My name is Haller. I’m with the California Bar and this is Earl Briggs. I wonder if we could ask you a few questions about a situation we’re investigating.”

I flipped my wallet open and briefly held it up so she could see my bar card. It had the Bar’s scales of justice logo on it and looked fairly official. I didn’t allow her too long a look before flipping the wallet closed and returning it to my inside pocket.

“We won’t take too long.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I have nothing… legal going on. There must be some mis—”

“It’s not regarding you, ma’am. It involves others, and you are on the periphery of it. Can we come in, or would you like to accompany us to our office in Van Nuys for the conversation?”

It was a gamble offering her another location that didn’t actually exist, but I was betting she wouldn’t want to leave her home.

“What others?” she asked.

I was hoping she wouldn’t ask that until we got inside. But that was the rub. I was bluffing, trying to act like I knew something about something I knew nothing about.

“Gloria Dayton, for one. You might know of her as Glory Days.”

“What about her? I have nothing to do with her.”

“She’s dead.”

I can’t say she looked surprised by the news. It might not have been that she knew Gloria was dead, but that she had a knowledge that Gloria’s life could lead to a bad end.

“In November,” I said. “She was murdered and we are taking a look at how her case was handled. There are ethical questions regarding the conduct of her attorney. Could we come in? I promise we won’t take much of your time.”

She hesitated but then stepped back. We were in. It was probably against her instincts to let two strangers into her home but she also probably didn’t want to keep us — our business — out on the front porch for the neighbors to see and wonder about. I went through the doorway and Earl followed. Kendall directed us to a living-room couch and she took a chair opposite.

“Look, I am very sorry to hear about Glory. But let me just say that I haven’t had anything to do with that world in a very long time and I don’t want to be dragged back into it. I don’t know anything about what Glory was doing or how her case was handled or what happened to her. I had not talked to her in years.”

I nodded.

“We understand that and we’re not here to drag you back into it,” I said. “In fact, we actually want to help you avoid that.”

“I seriously doubt that. Not if you come to my house like this.”

“I’m sorry but these questions have to be asked. I’ll try to be as quick as possible. Let’s just start with me asking what your relationship was with Gloria Dayton. You can be open and honest. We know about your record and we know you’ve been clean a long time. This is not about you. It’s about Gloria.”

Roberts was silent for a moment while she came to a decision. Then she started talking.

“We covered for each other. We used the same answering service, and if one of us was busy and the other was not, then the service knew to call us. There were three of us, Glory, me, and Trina. We all looked alike and the clients never seemed to notice unless they were repeat customers.”

“What was Trina’s last name?”

“Why don’t you have it?”

“It just hasn’t come up.”

She looked at me suspiciously but then moved on, probably for the sake of getting the interview over with as quickly as possible. “Trina Rafferty. She went by the name Trina Trixxx — with a triple x—on her website.”

“Where is Trina Rafferty now?”

Wrong question.

“I have no idea!” she yelled. “Didn’t you hear anything I just said? I am not in the life anymore! I have a job and a business and a life and I have nothing to do with this!”

I held up a hand in a halting gesture.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just thought you might know. Like maybe you had stayed in touch, that’s all.”

“I don’t stay in touch with any of it, okay? Do you get it now?”

“Yes, I get it and I realize this is digging up old memories.”

“It is and I don’t like it.”

“I apologize and I will try to be quick. So you said there were the three of you and the calls came in to an answering service. If the caller asked for you and you were otherwise engaged, then the call would go to Glory or Trina and vice versa, correct?”

“That’s correct. You sound just like a lawyer.”

“I guess because I am. Okay, next question.”

I hesitated because this was the question that would either get us thrown out or take us to the promised land of knowledge.

“Back then, what was your association with Hector Arrande Moya?”

Roberts stared blankly at me for a moment. At first I thought it was because I had hit her with a name that she had never heard before. Then I saw the recognition in her eyes and the fear.

“I want you to leave now,” she said calmly.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I just—”

“Get out!” she yelled. “You people are going to get me killed! I have nothing to do with this anymore. Get out and leave me alone!”

She stood up and pointed toward the door. I started to rise, realizing I had blown it with my approach on Moya.

“Sit down!”

It was Earl. And he was talking to Roberts. She looked back at him, stunned by the force of his deep voice.

“I said sit down,” he said. “We’re not leaving until we know about Moya. And we’re not trying to get you killed. We’re actually trying to save your ass. So, sit down and tell us what you know.”

Roberts slowly sat back down. I did, too, and I think I was as stunned as Roberts. I had used Earl before with the fake investigators move. But this was the first time he had ever spoken a word.

“Okay,” he said after everyone was seated again. “Tell us about Moya.”

14

For the next twenty minutes Kendall Roberts told us a story about drugs and prostitution in Los Angeles. She said that the two vices were a popular combination in the upscale escort market, with the escort providing the client with both. It more than doubled the profitability of each liaison. And that was where Hector Moya came in. Though normally a middleman who took kilo quantities of cocaine across the border for distribution to lower-level dealers in the network, he had a taste for American prostitutes and always kept a quantity of powder on hand for himself. He paid for these liaisons with cocaine and quickly became a supply source for many of the upscale escorts working in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

It became obvious to me in the telling that what I thought I knew about Gloria Dayton was vastly incomplete. It also confirmed my earlier suspicions, that in the last deal I made for her, I had been merely a puppet carefully manipulated by Gloria and others. I tried to keep up the outward pretense of already knowing everything Roberts told us, but inside I felt used and humiliated — even eight years after the fact.

“So, how long did you and Glory and Trina know Hector before he was arrested and went away?” I asked at the end of her story.

“Oh, it must’ve been a few years. He was around a while.”

“And how did you learn of his arrest?”

“Trina told me. I remember she called up and said she heard he got busted by the DEA.”

“Anything else you remember?”

“Just that she said we were going to have to find another source if he was in jail. And I said I wasn’t interested because I wanted to get out of the life. And pretty soon after that I did.”

I nodded and tried to think about what I had learned from her and how it might fit with whatever the Fulgoni play was.

“Ms. Roberts, do you know an attorney named Sylvester Fulgoni?” I asked.

She creased her eyes and said no.

“You’ve never heard of him?”

“No.”

My sense was that Fulgoni needed Roberts as a corroborating witness. Her testimony about Moya would confirm information Fulgoni already had. That pointed toward Trina Trixxx as the likely origin of that information and possibly the source that gave up the name Gloria Dayton. Valenzuela had said nothing about having to serve paper on Trina Rafferty. This might be because Fulgoni already had her on board.

I looked back at Kendall.

“Did you ever talk to Glory about Moya and the bust?”

She shook her head.

“No, in fact, I thought she left the business at the same time. She called me once and said she was in rehab and that she was going to leave town as soon as she got out. I didn’t leave town but I quit the business.”

I nodded.

“Does the name James Marco mean anything to you?”

I studied her face for a reaction or any sort of tell. In doing so I realized she was really quite beautiful, in an understated way. She shook her head and her hair swung under her chin.

“No, should it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was he a client? Most of these guys didn’t use real names. If you had a photo I could look at it.”

“He wasn’t a client as far as I know. He’s a federal agent. DEA, we assume.”

She shook her head again.

“Then I don’t know him. I didn’t know any DEA agents back then, thank God. I knew some girls the feds worked. The feds were the worst. They never let them up, you know what I mean?”

“You mean as informants?”

“If they had their hooks in you, then you couldn’t even think about quitting the life. They wouldn’t let you. They were worse than pimps. They wanted you to bring them cases.”

“Was Glory caught like that with Marco?”

“Not that she ever told me.”

“But she could’ve been?”

“Anything’s possible. If you were diming for the feds, you wouldn’t exactly announce it.”

I had to agree with her there. I tried to think of the next question I should ask but I was drawing a blank.

“What are you doing now?” I finally asked. “For a living, I mean.”

“I teach yoga. I have a studio on the boulevard. What are you doing now?”

I looked at her and I knew that the ruse was up.

“I know who you are,” she said. “I recognize you now. You were Glory’s lawyer. You’re also the lawyer that got that guy off who then killed those two people in the car.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I’m that lawyer. And I’m sorry for the charade. I’m just trying to find out what happened to Glory and—”

“Is it hard?”

“Is what hard?”

“Living with your past.”

There was an unsympathetic tone in her voice as she spoke. Before I could answer, there was a sharp knock on the door that startled everyone in the room. Roberts leaned forward to get up but I raised my hands and lowered my voice.

“You may not want to answer that.”

She froze, half off of her chair, and whispered back.

“Why not?”

“Because I think it’s a man with a subpoena for you. He’s working for Moya’s attorney — Fulgoni. He wants to talk to you and put you on record regarding some of the things we’re talking about here.”

Roberts dropped back into her chair, her face showing her fear of Hector Arrande Moya. I nodded to Earl and he got up and went quietly into the entry area to check it out.

“What do I do?” Roberts whispered.

“For now, don’t answer,” I said. “He—”

A louder knock echoed through the house.

“He has to serve you personally. So as long as you avoid him, you don’t have to respond to the subpoena. Is there a way out the back? He might sit on the street waiting for you.”

“Oh my god! Why is this happening?”

Earl came back into the room. He had looked through the door’s peephole.

“Valenzuela?” I whispered.

He nodded. I looked back at Roberts.

“Or, if you want, I could accept service on your behalf and then go see a judge to quash it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Trash it. Make sure you’re not involved, that there’s no deposition.”

“And how much will that cost me?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing. I’ll just do it. You’ve helped me here, I’ll help you. I’ll keep you out of this.”

It was an offer I wasn’t sure I could make good on. But something about her fear made me say it. Something about her coming to the dreadful realization that she had not outrun the past touched me. I understood that.

There was another knock, followed by Valenzuela calling Roberts out by name. Earl went back to the peephole.

“I have a business,” Roberts whispered. “Clients. They don’t know about what I used to do. If it gets out, I’ll…”

She was on the verge of tears.

“Don’t worry. It won’t.”

I didn’t know why I was making these promises. I felt confident I could get the subpoena quashed. But Fulgoni could just restart the process. And there was no way I could control the media. Right now this whole thing was flying below the radar but Moya’s appeal contained charges of government misconduct, and if there was a full airing of the allegations, it was bound to draw attention. Whether that interest would extend to a peripheral player like Kendall Roberts was unknown but not something I could prevent.

And then there was the La Cosse case. I wasn’t yet sure how I could use Moya and his appeal in my client’s defense, but at minimum I knew I could introduce it as a diversion to muddy the waters of the prosecution’s case and make the jurors think of other possibilities.

Earl stepped back into the living room.

“He’s gone,” he said.

I looked at Roberts.

“But he’ll be back,” I said. “Or he’ll sit out there and wait for you. Do you want me to handle it for you?”

She thought for a moment and then nodded.

“Yes, thank you.”

“You got it.”

I asked for her phone number and the address of her yoga studio and wrote them down. I told her I would let her know when I had disposed of the subpoena. I then thanked her, and Earl and I left. I was pulling out my phone so I could call Valenzuela and tell him to come back so I could accept service, when I saw I didn’t need to. Valenzuela was waiting for me, sitting on the front hood of my Lincoln, leaning back on his hands and holding his face up to the sun. He spoke without turning his face or changing his position.

“Really, Mick? Clergy? I mean, how low will you go?”

I spread my arms wide like a minister in front of his flock.

“My pulpit is the well of the courtroom. I preach to the twelve apostles, the gods of guilt.”

Valenzuela casually looked at me.

“Yeah, well, whatever. It’s still pretty low and you should be ashamed of your ass. Almost as low as you racing out here ahead of me and hiding in there, telling her not to answer the door.”

I nodded. He had it all figured out. I signaled him off the hood of the car.

“Well, Val, Ms. Roberts is now my client and I am authorized to accept the subpoena from Fulgoni on her behalf.”

He slid off the car, dragging the wallet chain looped from his belt to his back pocket along the paint.

“Oh, geez, my fucking bad. I hope I didn’t scratch it, Reverend.”

“Just give me the paper.”

He pulled the rolled-up document out of his back pocket and slapped it into my palm.

“Good,” he said. “Saves me havin’ to sit on this place all day.”

He then waved over my shoulder at the house behind me. I turned and saw Kendall looking out the living-room window. I waved as if to say everything was okay and she closed the curtain.

I turned back to Valenzuela. He had his phone out and snapped a photo of me holding the subpoena.

“That’s really not necessary,” I said.

“With a guy like you I’m beginning to think it is,” he said.

“So, tell me, how did it go dropping paper on James Marco, or is he playing hard to get?”

“I’m not telling you shit anymore, Mick. And what you said before about hiring me to run your paper, that was all bullshit, wasn’t it?”

I shrugged. Valenzuela had already been useful to me and I knew I shouldn’t burn the bridge. But something about his dragging his chain across the hood of my car bothered me.

“Probably,” I said. “I’ve already got a full-time investigator. He usually handles that stuff.”

“No, then that’s good, because I don’t want your business, Mick. I’ll see you around.”

He headed down the sidewalk and I watched him go.

“Yeah, I’ll see you around, Val.”

I got in the backseat and told Earl to get over to Ventura Boulevard and head toward Studio City. I wanted to drive by Kendall Roberts’s business. There was no reason to do it other than that I was curious about her. I wanted to see what she had built for herself and what she was protecting.

“You did good in there, Earl,” I said. “You saved the day.”

He looked at me in the mirror and nodded.

“I got skills,” he said.

“That you do.”

I pulled my phone and called Lorna to check in. Nothing new had happened since the last call. I told her about the staff meeting I wanted for the next morning and she said Cisco had already informed her. I asked her to make sure she brought enough coffee and doughnuts for five.

“Who’s the fifth?” she asked.

“Earl’s going to join us,” I said.

I looked at him in the mirror. I could see only his eyes but I could tell he was smiling.

After I finished with Lorna I called Cisco. He said he was at a Ferrari dealership on Wilshire Boulevard, about twenty blocks from the Beverly Wilshire. He said the place had multiple security cameras for watching over its expensive fleet at night.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “The man in the hat?”

“That’s right.”

In his spare time Cisco had been pursuing the man in the hat for five months now. It deeply bothered him that he had been unable to find a camera anywhere in the Beverly Wilshire or its immediate surroundings that showed either the man’s face or him getting into a car to follow Gloria Dayton.

But Gloria’s chauffeur that night had been interviewed and he gave Cisco the exact route he had taken while driving her home from the hotel. Cisco spent all of his spare time on those streets checking businesses and residences with security cameras on the off chance that they picked up the car trailing Gloria home. He had even checked with the transportation departments for Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Los Angeles to view traffic cameras along the route. It had become a matter of professional pride to the big man.

I, on the other hand, had long since given up any hope of identifying the man in the hat. To me the trail was dead cold. Most security systems don’t keep video for more than a month. Most of the places where Cisco made inquiries told him they had no video from the night Gloria Dayton was murdered. That he was too late.

“Well, you can drop that,” I said. “I’ve got a name I want you to put at the top of your to-do list. I want to find her as soon as possible.”

I gave him the name Trina Rafferty and filled him in on my conversation with Roberts about her.

“If she’s still a working prostitute she could be anywhere from here to Miami and this might not even be her real name,” he said.

“I think she’s close,” I said. “I think Fulgoni may even have her stashed somewhere. You need to find her.”

“Okay, I’m on it. But why the big hurry? Won’t she say the same thing Roberts just told you?”

“Somebody knew Glory Days was the CI who set up the Moya arrest. That wasn’t Kendall Roberts — at least she says it wasn’t her. I think that leaves Trina Trixxx. I think Fulgoni already got to her and I want to know what she told him.”

“Got it.”

“Good. Let me know.”

I disconnected. Earl told me we were coming up on the address for Flex, the yoga studio owned by Roberts. He slowed the car to a crawl as we passed by the storefront studio. I checked the hours printed on the door and saw the place was open eight to eight every day. I could see people inside, all women and all in downward dog positions on rubber mats on the floor. I knew the position because my ex-wife was a longtime yoga enthusiast.

I wondered if Roberts’s clients minded being on display to the street and passersby on the sidewalk. Many of the positions in yoga have a subtle or overt sexuality to them and it seemed odd to have a studio where one wall was floor-to-ceiling glass. As I pondered the question, a woman inside the studio walked up to the window and held her hands up to her eyes, pantomiming that she was looking at me through binoculars. The point was clear.

“We can go now, Earl,” I said.

He picked up speed.

“Where to?”

“Let’s go down the road a bit to Art’s Deli. We’ll pick up sandwiches and then I’ll go see Legal Siegel for lunch.”

15

At eight-thirty that night I knocked on the door at Kendall Roberts’s home. I had been sitting out in the Lincoln on her street and waiting for her to return.

“Mr. Haller. Is something wrong?”

She was wearing the same outfit from earlier and I assumed she had come from work at the yoga studio.

“No, nothing is wrong. I just came back to tell you that you can forget about that subpoena.”

“What do you mean? Did you take it to a judge like you said?”

“Didn’t need to. I noticed after I left here that there wasn’t a seal on it from the clerk of the U.S. District Court. Moya’s case is in federal court. Gotta have that seal or it’s not legit. I think the lawyer, Fulgoni, was trying to see if he could get you to come in on the sly, so he doctored up what looked like a subpoena and had his man take it out to you.”

“Why would he do that — I mean, want me to come in on the sly?”

I had already been puzzling over this, especially since the subpoena Fulgoni had dropped on me had been legit. Why go through the correct motions on mine and not Kendall’s? So far I hadn’t been able to figure out why.

“Good question,” I said. “If he wanted to keep it quiet, he could have filed the subpoena request under seal. But he didn’t. Instead he tried to bluff you into coming in for an interview. I’m probably going to go see him tomorrow and that’s exactly what I’ll ask.”

“Well, it’s all confusing… but thank you.”

“Confusion aside, we aim to please at Michael Haller and Associates.”

I smiled and then felt dumb about what I had just said.

“You know, you could’ve called me. I gave you my number. You didn’t have to come all the way back out here.”

I frowned and shook my head like her concern was warrantless.

“It was no problem. My daughter lives nearby with my ex and I swung by there for a bit.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. I had indeed driven by my ex-wife’s condo building and stared at the lighted windows of her unit. I imagined my daughter in there in her bedroom, doing her homework or on the computer tweeting or Facebooking with friends. I had then driven over to see Kendall Roberts.

“So that means that next Tuesday I don’t have to go to that lawyer’s office?” she asked.

“No, you’re clear,” I said. “You can forget about it.”

“And I won’t have to go to court or testify about anything?”

That was the big question and I knew I had to stop making promises I was not sure I could keep.

“What I’m going to do is see Fulgoni tomorrow and make it clear to him that you’re out of it. That you have no knowledge that will be useful to him in this matter and he should forget about you. I think that should take care of it.”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

I didn’t make a move to leave and she glanced over my shoulder toward the street where my car was parked again in the red zone.

“So, where’s your partner? The mean one.”

I started to laugh.

“Oh, Earl? He’s off now. He’s actually my driver. Sorry again about that today. I didn’t know what I was getting into when we came here.”

“You’re forgiven.”

I nodded. There was nothing else to say at that point, but I still didn’t move from my position on the front doorstep. The silence became awkward and she finally broke it.

“Is there…”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I’m just standing here like a goof or something.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, I, uh… you know, the real reason I came back is I wanted to talk about that question you asked. I mean, from earlier today.”

“What question?”

She leaned against the door frame.

“You asked me about the past, you know? About how I lived with the past. My past.”

She nodded. She remembered now.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was being sarcastic and that was out of line. I had no business—”

“No, it’s fine. Sarcasm or not, the question was valid. But then that guy knocked on the door with the phony subpoena and I, you know, never answered the question.”

“So you came back to answer it.”

I smiled uneasily.

“Well, sort of. I thought… that the past for both of us was something…”

I started laughing with embarrassment and shook my head.

“Actually, I don’t know what I’m saying here.”

“Would you like to come in, Mr. Haller?”

“I would love to but you have to stop calling me that. Call me Michael or Mickey or Mick. You know, Gloria used to call me Mickey Mantle.”

She held the door wide and I stepped into the entry area.

“I’ve also been called Mickey Mouth on occasion. You know, because lawyers are sometimes called mouthpieces.”

“Yes, I get it. I was about to have a glass of red wine. Would you like one?”

I almost asked if she had something stronger but thought better of it.

“That would be perfect.”

She closed the door and we went into the kitchen to get glasses and pour the wine. She handed me a glass and then took up her own. She leaned against the counter and looked at me.

“Cheers,” I said.

“Cheers,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Your coming here, this isn’t some sort of thing you have, is it?”

“What do you mean? What thing?”

“You know with women… like me.”

“I don’t—”

“I’m retired. I don’t do it anymore, and if you went through this whole damsel in distress thing with the subpoena because you thought—”

“No, not at all. Look, I’m sorry. This is embarrassing and I should probably just go.”

I put my glass on the counter.

“You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve just called.”

I was halfway to the hallway when she stopped me.

“Wait, Mickey.”

I looked back at her.

“I didn’t say you should’ve just called. I said you could’ve just called. There’s a difference.”

She took my glass off the counter and brought it to me.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I needed to get that out of the way. You’d be surprised how my former life still affects my current one.”

I nodded.

“I get it.”

“Let’s go sit down.”

We went into the living room and took the same seats we sat in earlier in the day — across from each other, a coffee table between us. The conversation was stilted at first. We exchanged banal pleasantries and I complimented the wine like the expert oenophile I was not.

I finally asked her how she ended up with a yoga studio and she matter-of-factly explained that a former client from her escort days had loaned her the initial investment. It reminded me of my attempt to help Gloria Dayton but obviously with different results.

“I think for some of the girls, they really don’t want to get out,” Kendall said. “They get what they need from it — on a lot of levels. So they may talk about wanting out but they never do it. I got lucky. I wanted out, and there was someone there to help me. How’d you end up being a lawyer?”

She had expertly if not abruptly thrown the lead back to me and I responded with the basic explanation about following a family tradition. When I told her my father had been Mickey Cohen’s attorney, her eyes showed no recognition.

“Way before your time,” I said. “He was a gangster out here in the forties and fifties. Pretty famous — there’s been movies about him. He was part of what they called the Jewish Mafia. With Bugsy Siegel.”

Another name that did not register with her.

“Your father must have had you late in life if he was running around with those guys in the forties.”

I nodded.

“I was the kid from the second marriage. I think I was a surprise.”

“Young wife?”

I nodded again and wished the conversation were going in a different direction. I had sorted all of this out for myself before. I had checked the county records. My father divorced his first wife and married his second less than two months later. I came five months after that. It didn’t take a law degree to connect the dots. I was told as a child that my mother had come from Mexico, where she was a famous actress, but I never saw a movie poster, a newspaper clipping, or a publicity still anywhere in the house.

“I have a half brother who’s an LAPD cop,” I said. “He’s older. He works homicide.”

I didn’t know why I said it. I guess to change directions.

“Same father?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you guys get along?”

“Yeah, to a point. We never knew about each other until a few years ago. So consequently I guess we’re not that close.”

“Isn’t it funny that you didn’t know about each other and you became a defense lawyer and he became a cop?”

“Yeah, I guess. Funny.”

I was desperate to get off the path we were on but couldn’t think of a topic that would do it. Kendall rescued me with a question that broke new ground but was equally painful to answer.

“You mentioned your ex. So you’re not married?”

“No. I was. Twice, actually, but the second one I don’t really count. It was quick and painless. We both knew it was a mistake and we’re still friends. In fact, she works for me.”

“But the first one?”

“We have the daughter.”

She nodded, seemingly understanding the lifelong complications and connections a broken marriage with a child produces.

“And your daughter’s mother, are you on good terms?”

I sadly shook my head.

“No, not anymore. Actually, I’m not on good terms with either of them at the moment.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

I took another drink of wine and studied her.

“What about you?” I asked.

“People like me don’t have long relationships. I got married when I was twenty. It lasted a year. No kids, thank god.”

“Do you know where he is? Your ex? I mean, do you keep track of each other? My ex and me, we’re in the same business. The law, so I see her in the courthouse every now and then. If she sees me coming in the hall, she usually goes the other way.”

She nodded but I didn’t detect any sympathy.

“Last time I heard from my ex he wrote me a letter from a prison in Pennsylvania,” she said. “He wanted me to sell my car so I could send him money each month. I didn’t reply and that was about ten years ago. He’s still there for all I know.”

“Wow, and here I was all ‘woe is me’ because my ex-wife turns away from me in the courthouse. I think you win.”

I hoisted my glass to toast her and she nodded in acceptance of the win.

“So, why are you really here?” she asked. “Are you hoping that I can tell you more about Glory?”

I looked down at my glass, which was now almost empty. This was either going to be the end of things or the start.

“You’d tell me, right, if there was something I needed to know about her?”

She frowned.

“I told you all I know.”

“Then I believe you.”

I finished my wine and put the glass on the table.

“Thanks for the wine, Kendall. I should probably go now.”

She walked me to the front door and held it open for me. I touched her arm as I passed by. I tried to think of something to say that would leave us with the possibility of another meeting. She beat me to it.

“Maybe next time you come back, you’ll be more interested in me than the dead girl.”

I looked back at her as she closed the door. I nodded but she was gone.

16

I was trying to talk a final shot of Patrón out of Randy after last call at Four Green Fields, when my phone screen lit up on the bar top. It was Cisco and he was working late.

“Cisco?”

“Sorry if I woke you, Mick, but I thought you’d want me to.”

“No worries. What’s up?”

Randy hit the bright lights and started blasting “Closing Time” on the sound system, hoping to chase the lingering drinkers out.

I hit the mute button late and slid off the stool to head to the door.

“What the hell was that?” Cisco asked. “Mick, you there?”

Once I was out the door I took the phone off mute.

“Sorry, iPhone malfunction. Where are you and what’s going on?”

“I’m outside the Standard downtown. Trina Trixxx is inside doing what she does. But that’s not why I called. That could’ve waited.”

I wanted to ask how he had found Trina but noted the urgency in his voice.

“Okay, so then what couldn’t wait?”

I muted the phone again and got in my car, pulling the door closed behind me. It had been a stupid move chasing the wine I had shared with Kendall with tequila. But I had felt bad after leaving her place, as though I had fumbled the ball somehow, and I wanted to burn away the thoughts with Patrón.

“I just got a call from a guy who does me favors every now and then,” Cisco said. “You know the Ferrari dealership I told you about before?”

“Yeah, the one on Wilshire.”

“Right, well, I hit the gold mine there. A lot of video. They keep digital film for a year on the cloud. So we got double lucky.”

“Did you see the man in the hat’s face?”

“No, not that lucky. Still no face. But we went through the video on the night in question and I picked up Gloria and her driver going by. Then four cars back comes a Mustang and it looks like our guy. He’s still wearing the hat, so I’m ninety percent sure he’s our guy.”

“Okay.”

“One of their perimeter cameras shoots east along the front of the lot. I switch to that video and check out the Mustang.”

“You got a plate.”

“Damn right, I got a plate. So I gave it to this friend of mine and he just called me back after going into work tonight.”

By “friend” I knew he meant that he had a source in the cop shop who ran plates for him. A source who obviously worked the midnight shift. This practice of sharing information from the computer with an outsider was against the law in California. So I didn’t ask Cisco for any clarification on who provided the information that he was about to share. I just waited for him to tell me the name.

“All right, so the ’stang comes back to a guy named Lee Lankford. And get this, Mick, he’s law enforcement. My friend can tell because his address is not on the computer. They protect cops that way. They can put a law enforcement block on the registration of a personal vehicle. But he’s LE, and now we have to find out who he works for and why he was tailing Gloria. I already know this, he’s not LAPD. My friend checked. Bottom line, Mick, is I’m beginning to think there might be something to our client’s claiming he was set up.”

I didn’t hear most of what Cisco had said after he mentioned the Mustang owner’s name. I was off to the races, running with the name Lankford. Cisco hadn’t recognized it because he wasn’t working for me eight years before when I made the deal whereby Gloria Dayton gave up Hector Moya to the DA’s Office, which turned around and gave him up to the feds. Of course, back then Lankford had nothing to do with that deal, but he was skirting around that case like a vulture.

“Lankford is Glendale PD retired,” I said. “He’s currently working for the DA as an investigator.”

“You know him?”

“Sort of. He worked the murder of Raul Levin. In fact, he’s the guy who tried at first to pin it on me. And I saw him on this case at La Cosse’s first appearance. He’s the DA investigator assigned to the case.”

I heard Cisco whistle as I started the car.

“So let’s talk this out,” he said. “We have Lankford following Gloria Dayton on the night she was murdered. He presumably follows her home and about an hour later she is murdered in her apartment.”

“And then a couple days later at first appearance, he’s there,” I said. “He’s assigned to the Dayton murder case.”

“That’s not a coincidence, Mick. There are no coincidences like that.”

I nodded, even though I was alone in the car.

“It’s a setup,” I said. “Andre’s been telling the truth.”

I needed to get to my Gloria Dayton files but Jennifer Aronson still had them. It would have to wait until the morning staff meeting. In the meantime, I was trying to remember those days eight years ago when I first met Detective Lankford and became his prime suspect in the murder of my own investigator.

I suddenly remembered what Cisco had said at the top of the conversation.

“You’re tailing Trina Trixxx right now?”

“Yeah, she wasn’t hard to find. I drove by her place to get a feel for it and out she came. I followed her here. Same setup that Gloria had. The driver, the whole bit. She’s been inside the hotel for about forty minutes now.”

“Okay, I’m heading your way. I want to talk to her. Tonight.”

“I’ll make that happen. You okay to drive? You sound like you had a few.”

“I’m fine. I’ll grab coffee on the way. You just hold her until I get there.”

17

Before I got to the Standard downtown I got a text from Cisco redirecting me to an address and apartment number on Spring Street. Then I got another text, this one advising me to hit an ATM on the way — Trina wanted to be paid to talk. When I finally got to the address, it turned out it was one of the rehabbed lofts right behind the Police Administration Building. The lobby door was locked, and when I buzzed apartment 12C, it was my own investigator who answered and buzzed me up.

On the twelfth floor I stepped out of the elevator to find Cisco waiting in the open doorway of 12C.

“I followed her home from the Standard and waited until she was dropped off,” he explained. “Figured it’d be easier if we took her driver out of the equation.”

I nodded and looked through the open door but didn’t enter.

“Is she going to talk to us?”

“Depends on how much cash you brought. She’s a businesswoman through and through.”

“I got enough.”

I walked past him and into a loft with views over the PAB and the civic center, the city hall tower lit up and on center display. The apartment was a nice place, though sparely furnished. Trina Rafferty had either recently moved in or was in the process of moving out. She was sitting on a white leather couch with chrome feet. She wore a short black cocktail dress, had her legs crossed in a stab at modesty, and was smoking a cigarette.

“Are you going to pay me?” she asked.

I walked fully into the room and looked down at her. She was pushing forty and she looked tired. Her hair was slightly disheveled, her lipstick was smeared, and her eyeliner was caking at the corners. One more long night in another year of long nights. She had just come from having sex with someone she didn’t know before and would probably never see again.

“It depends on what you tell me.”

“Well, I’m not telling you anything unless you pay up front.”

I had hit an ATM in the Bonaventure Hotel lobby and made two maximum withdrawals of four hundred dollars each. The money had come in hundreds, fifties, and twenties and I split it between two pockets. I took out the first four hundred and dropped it on her coffee table next to the crowded ashtray.

“There’s four hundred. Is that good enough to start?”

She picked up the money, folded it twice, and worked it into one of her high-heeled shoes. I remembered in that moment that Gloria had once told me that she always put her cash payments into her shoes because the shoes were usually the last thing to come off — if at all. Many clients liked her to keep her heels on while they had sex.

“We’ll see,” Trina said. “Ask away.”

The whole drive downtown I had considered what I should ask and how I should ask it. I had a feeling this might be my only shot with Trina Trixxx. Once team Fulgoni found out I had gotten to her, they would attempt to shut down my access.

“Tell me about James Marco and Hector Moya.”

Her body rocked backward with surprise and then straightened up. She stuck out her lower lip for a few seconds before responding.

“I didn’t realize that this is about them. You need to pay me more if you want me to talk about them.”

Without hesitation I took the other fold of money out of my pocket and dropped it on the table. It disappeared into her other shoe. I sat down on an ottoman directly across the table from her.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Marco’s a DEA agent and he had a hard-on for Hector,” she said. “He really wanted to get him and he did.”

“How did you know Marco?”

“He busted me.”

“When?”

“It was a sting. He posed as a john and he wanted sex and coke and I brought both. Then I got busted.”

“When was this?”

“About ten years ago. I don’t remember the dates.”

“You made a deal with him?”

“Yeah, he let me go, but I had to tell him stuff. He’d call me.”

“What stuff?”

“Just stuff I would hear or know about — you know, from clients. He agreed to let me go if I fed him. And he was always hungry.”

“Hungry for Hector.”

“Well, no. He didn’t know about Hector, at least not from me. I wasn’t that stupid or that desperate. I’d take the bust before I’d give up Hector. The guy was cartel, you know what I mean? So I gave Marco the little stuff. The kind of stuff guys would brag about while fucking. All their big scores and plans and whatever. Guys try to compensate with talk all the time, you know?”

I nodded, though I didn’t know if I was revealing something about myself by agreeing. I tried to stay on track with what she was saying and how it fit with the latest permutation of Gloria’s case.

“Okay,” I said. “So you didn’t give Hector up to Marco. Who did?”

I knew that indirectly, at least, Gloria Dayton had given Moya up, but I didn’t know what Trina knew.

“All I can tell you is that it wasn’t me,” Trina said.

I shook my head.

“That’s not good enough, Trina. Not for eight hundred bucks.”

“What, you want me to throw in a blow job, too? That’s not a problem.”

“No, I want you to tell me everything. I want you to tell me what you told Sly Fulgoni.”

She went through the same body shiver as when I had first mentioned Hector Moya. As though for a second she had been shocked by the name and then was able to reconstitute herself.

“How do you know about Sly?”

“Because I do. And if you want to keep the money, I need to know what you told him.”

“But isn’t that like attorney-client stuff? Like it’s privileged or whatever they call it?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve got it wrong, Trina. You’re a witness, not a client. Fulgoni’s client is Hector Moya. What did you tell him?”

I leaned forward on the ottoman as I said it and then I waited.

“Well, I told him about another girl who Marco busted and was putting to work. Like me, only he really had her under his thumb. I don’t know why. I think when he caught her she had a lot more on her than I had.”

“You mean a lot more cocaine?”

“Right. And her record wasn’t as clean as mine. She was going to go down hard if she didn’t come up with something bigger than herself, you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

It was how most drug cases were built. Small fish giving up bigger fish. I nodded as though I had full knowledge about how things worked, but once again I was privately humiliated because I had not even known the details of my own client’s dealings with the DEA. Trina was obviously talking about Gloria Dayton, and she was telling a story I didn’t know.

“So your friend gave up Hector,” I said, hoping to keep the story moving so I didn’t have to dwell on my own failings in the case.

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’? She did or she didn’t.”

“She sort of did. She told me that Marco made her hide a gun in Moya’s hotel room so that when they busted him, they could add charges and send him away for life. See, Hector was smart. He never kept enough in his room for them to make a big case on. Just a few ounces. Sometimes less. But the gun would change everything, and Glory was the one who brought it in. She said when Hector fell asleep after she did him, she took it out of her purse and hid it under the mattress.”

To say I was stunned was an understatement. In the course of the past several months I had already accepted the fact that I’d been used by Gloria in some way. But if Trina Rafferty’s story was true, the level of deception and manipulation was as masterful as it was perfect, and I had played my part to a T, thinking I was carrying out good lawyering by pulling all the right strings for my client, when all along it was my client and her DEA handler who held the strings — my strings.

I still had many questions about the scenario Trina was outlining — mainly the question of why I was even needed in the scheme. But for the moment I was thinking of other things. The only way this knowledge could be more humiliating would be for it to become public, and everything the prostitute sitting in front of me was saying indicated that this was exactly the direction it was going.

I tried not to show any of the internal meltdown I was feeling. I kept my voice steady and asked the next question.

“When you say Glory, I take it you mean Gloria Dayton, also known at that time as Glory Days?”

Before she could answer, the iPhone on the coffee table started vibrating. Trina eagerly snatched it up, probably hoping she could get in one last booking before crashing for the night. She checked the ID but it was blocked. She answered anyway.

“Hello, this is Trina Trixxx…”

While she listened to the caller I glanced at Cisco to see what I could read in his face. I wondered if he understood from what had been said that I had been an unwitting participant in a rogue DEA agent’s scheme.

“And another man,” Trina told her caller. “He said you’re not my lawyer.”

I looked at Trina. She wasn’t talking to a potential customer.

“Is that Fulgoni?” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

She hesitated but then told the caller to hold on and handed me the phone.

“Fulgoni,” I said. “I thought you were going to call me back.”

There was a pause and then a voice I didn’t recognize as Sly Fulgoni Jr. spoke.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

And then I realized I was talking to Sly Sr., person to person from FCI Victorville. He was probably on a cell phone smuggled into the lockup by a visitor or a guard. Many of my incarcerated clients were able to communicate with me on burners — throwaway phones with limited minutes and life spans.

“Your son was supposed to get back to me. How are things up there, Sly?”

“Not too bad. I’m out of here in another eleven months.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. I was checking on Trina.”

I didn’t believe that for a moment. It sounded like he had specifically asked Trina about me before she passed the phone over. I decided not to push it — yet.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Haller?”

“Well… I’m sitting here talking to Trina and I’m wondering what I’m going to be doing for you. I got the subpoena and I’m just beginning to put together the angle you’re playing for Moya. And I gotta tell you, I have a problem being made to look like a fool — especially in open court.”

“That is understandable. But sometimes when one has indeed played the fool, it is difficult to skirt the issue. You have to be prepared for the truth to come out. A man’s freedom is at stake.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

I disconnected and handed the phone back across the table to Trina.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“Nothing much at all. How much have they promised you?”

“What?”

“Come on, Trina. You’re a businesswoman. You charged me just to answer a few questions here. You must be charging something to tell that story in a depo for a judge. How much? Did they already take your statement?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been paid anything.”

“What about this place? They get you this to keep you close?”

“No! This is my place and I want you to leave. Both of you, get out. Now!”

I glanced at Cisco. I could push it, but it was pretty clear that my eight hundred bucks were spent and she was finished talking. Whatever Fulgoni had said before the phone was handed to me had frozen her. It was time to go.

I stood up and nodded Cisco toward the door.

“Thanks for your time,” I said to Trina. “I’m sure we’ll be talking again.”

“Don’t count on it.”

We left the apartment and had to wait for the elevator. I stepped back to Trina’s door and bent forward to listen. I thought she’d make a call to someone, maybe Sly Jr. But I heard nothing.

The elevator came and we rode down. Cisco was quiet.

“What’s up, Big Man?” I asked.

“Nothing, just thinking. How did he know to call her then?”

I nodded. It was a good question. I hadn’t thought it through yet.

We left the building and walked out onto Spring Street, which was deserted except for a couple of empty patrol cars parked along the side of the PAB. It was after two a.m. and there was no sign of another human being anywhere.

“You think I was followed?” I asked.

Cisco thought about it for a moment before nodding.

“Somehow he knew we’d found her. That we were with her.”

“That’s not good.”

“I’ll get your car checked tomorrow and then put a couple Indians on you. If you have a physical tail we’ll know it soon enough.”

The associates Cisco used in countersurveillance were so adept at disappearing into the crevices that he called them Indians after the old westerns in which the Indians used to trail the wagon trains without the white settlers even knowing they were there.

“That will be good,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Where’d you park?” Cisco asked.

“Up in front of the PAB. Figured it was safe. You?”

“I’m around back here. You okay or you want an escort?”

“I’m good. See you at the staff meeting.”

“I’ll be there.”

We headed off in different directions. I looked over my shoulder three times before I made it to my car, parked in the safest spot in downtown. From there I kept an eye on the rearview mirror all the way home.

18

I was the last to arrive at the loft for the staff meeting. And I was dragging. I’d hit the private stash of Patrón Silver when I’d finally gotten home just a few hours before. Between the alcohol consumption, the trip downtown to interview Trina Rafferty, and the disquiet that comes with the knowledge that you are probably being watched, I’d gotten only a couple hours of restless sleep before the alarm sounded.

I grunted a hello to the assemblage in the boardroom and went immediately to the coffee set up on the side counter. I poured half a cup, shot two Advils into my mouth, and took the scalding hot liquid down in one gulp. I then refilled and this time added milk and sugar to make it a little more palatable. That first blast had burned my throat but it helped me find my voice.

“How’s everybody today? Better than me, I hope.”

Everyone chimed in positively. I turned to find a seat and immediately noticed that Earl was at the table. For a moment I forgot why and then remembered that I had indeed invited him to join the inner circle the day before.

“Oh, everybody, I invited Earl to join us. He’s going to take a more active role in some of the work, from the standpoint of investigations and interviews. He’ll still be driving the Lincoln, but he’s got other skills and I intend to exploit them to the benefit of our clients.”

I nodded to Earl and as I did so realized I had not mentioned his elevation to Cisco. Still, Cisco showed no surprise, and I realized I had obviously been helped out there by Lorna, who had kept her husband informed, where I had failed.

I pulled out a chair at the end of the table and sat down, noticing the small black electronic device with three green blinking lights at the center of the table.

“Mickey, you don’t want a doughnut?” Lorna asked. “It looks like you should put something in your stomach.”

“No, not right now,” I said. “What is that?”

I pointed at the device. It was a rectangular black box about the size of an iPhone, only an inch thick. And it had three separate stub antennas sticking out of one end.

Cisco answered.

“I was just telling everyone, that’s a Paquin seven thousand blocker. Stops all transmissions by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and radio wave. No one will hear what we say in this room outside of these walls.”

“Did you find a bug?”

“With one of these things you don’t even have to look. That’s the beauty of it.”

“What about the Lincoln?”

“I have some guys looking at it out back right now. They were waiting for you to arrive. I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

I reached into my pocket for the keys.

“They don’t need your keys,” Cisco said.

Of course not, I realized. They’re pros. I took the keys out anyway, put them on the table and slid them down to Earl. He’d be driving the rest of the day.

“Okay, well, let’s get started. I’m sorry I’m late. Long night. I know that’s not an excuse but…”

I braced myself with another slug of coffee and this time it went down easier and I began to feel it take hold of my bloodstream. I looked at the faces around the table and got down to it.

Pointing to the Paquin 7000, I said, “Sorry for all the secret-agent stuff but I think precautions are necessary. We had some significant developments yesterday and last night and I wanted everybody to be here and to be made aware of what’s happening.”

As if to underline the seriousness of my opening statement, a power chord from an electric guitar echoed through the ceiling and stopped me cold. All of us looked up at the ceiling. It had sounded like the opening chord tab of A Hard Day’s Night—the coincidence was not lost on me.

“I thought the Beatles were broken up,” I said.

“They are,” Lorna said. “And we were promised no band practice in the mornings.”

Another chord was strummed and then followed by some improvisational noodling. Somebody pumped a hi-hat on a drum kit and the clash of cymbals almost loosened my fillings.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Shouldn’t those guys be hungover or asleep? I know I wish I was still in bed.”

“I’ll go up,” Lorna said. “This makes me really angry.”

“No. Cisco, you go up. You already know the update. I want Lorna to hear it and you might get better results up there.”

“On it.”

Cisco left the room and headed upstairs. It was one of the few times I was pleased that he had worn a T-shirt to work, exposing his impressive biceps and intimidating tattoos. The T-shirt celebrated the one hundred tenth anniversary of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I thought that might help get the message across as well.

To the rhythm of a bass drum from above, I began updating the others, starting with the subpoena Valenzuela laid on me the morning before and then moving through the happenings of the rest of the day. About halfway through, a terrific crash was heard from above as Cisco put an end to band practice. I finished my story by recounting the late-night meeting with Trina Trixxx and the conclusion prompted by Fulgoni’s call from prison that I was under surveillance.

Nobody asked any questions along the way, though Jennifer took some notes. I didn’t know if the silence was a testament to the early hour, the implied threat that surveillance meant to all of us, or my fully engaging skill as a storyteller. There was also the possibility that I had simply lost everyone on one of the turns of the convoluted tale I was spinning.

Cisco reentered the room, looking none the worse for wear. He took his seat and nodded to me. Problem solved.

I looked at the others.

“Questions?”

Jennifer raised her pen as though she were still in school.

“I actually have a few,” she said. “First of all, you said that Sylvester Fulgoni Sr. called you from the prison in Victorville at two in the morning. How is that possible? I don’t think they give inmates access to—”

“They don’t,” I said. “The number was blocked but I’m sure it was a cell phone. Smuggled in to him or given to him by a guard.”

“Couldn’t that be traced?”

“Not really. Not if it was a burner.”

“A burner?”

“A throwaway phone — bought with no names attached. Look, we’re getting off the subject here. Suffice it to say it was Fulgoni and he called me from prison, where someone had obviously reached out to him to inform him that I was speaking at that moment to his star witness Trina Trixxx. That’s the salient point. Not that Sly Fulgoni has a phone up there, but that he knows the moves we’re making. What’s your next question?”

She checked her notes before asking it.

“Well, before yesterday we had two separate things going. We had the La Cosse case and then we had this other thing with Moya that we thought was separate but might be useful to bring in as part of a possible straw man defense for La Cosse. But now, if I’m following you correctly, we’re talking about these two things being one case.”

I nodded.

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. This is all one case now. What links it for us is obviously Gloria Dayton. But the key thing here is Lankford. He was following Gloria the night of the murder.”

“So La Cosse, he was set up all along,” Earl said.

I nodded again.

“Right.”

“And this isn’t just an angle we’re playing or a strategy,” Jennifer said. “We’re saying this is now our case.”

“Right again.”

I looked around. Three walls of the boardroom were glass. But there was one wall of old Chicago brick.

“Lorna, we need a whiteboard for that wall. I wish we could diagram this. It would make it easier.”

“I’ll get one,” Lorna said.

“And get the locks changed on this place. Also I want two cameras. One on the door, one on this room. When we go to trial, this is going to be ground zero, and I want it safe and secure.”

“I can put a guy on the place — twenty-four-seven,” Cisco said. “Might be worth it.”

“And what money do we use to pay for all of this?” Lorna asked.

“Hold off on the guy, Cisco,” I said. “Maybe when we get to trial. For now we’ll go with just locks and cameras.”

I then leaned forward, elbows on the table.

“It’s all one case now,” I said again. “And so we need to take it apart and look at all of the pieces. Eight years ago I was manipulated. I handled a case and made moves I believed were of my own design. But they weren’t, and I’m not going to let that happen again here.”

I sat back and waited for comment but I got only silent stares. I saw Cisco look over my shoulder and through the glass door behind me. He started to get up. I turned around. Across the loft there was a man standing by the front door. He was actually bigger than Cisco.

“One of my guys,” Cisco said as he left the boardroom.

I turned and looked back at the others.

“If this was a movie, that guy’s name would be Tiny.”

The others laughed. I got up to refill my coffee and by the time I returned, Cisco was coming back to the boardroom. I stayed standing and awaited the verdict. Cisco poked his head through the door but didn’t come in.

“The Lincoln’s been jacked,” he said. “Do you want them to take it out? We could find a place for it. Maybe a FedEx truck would be good — keep them running around.”

By “jacked” he meant LoJacked, a reference to an anti-theft tracking system. But in this case he was telling me somebody had crawled underneath my car and attached a GPS tracker.

“What does that mean?” Aronson asked.

While Cisco explained what I already knew, I thought about the question of whether to remove the device or leave it in place and possibly find a way of making it work to my advantage against whoever was monitoring my movements. A FedEx truck would keep them running in circles but it would also tip our hand and let them know we were onto them.

“Leave it in place,” I said when Cisco finished his explanation to the others. “For now, at least. It might come in handy.”

“Keep in mind it could be just a backup,” Cisco cautioned. “You still could have a live tail. I’ll keep the Indians up on the cliffs a couple days, just to see.”

“Sounds good.”

He turned in the doorway and signaled to his man with a flat hand, as if running it along the surface of a table. Status quo, leave the tracker in place. The man pointed at Cisco — message understood — and walked through the door. Cisco returned to the table, pointing to the Paquin 7000 as he went.

“Sorry. He couldn’t get a call in to me because of the blocker.”

I nodded.

“What’s that guy’s name?” I asked.

“Who, Little Guy? I actually don’t know his real name. I just know him as Little Guy.”

I snapped my fingers. I’d been close. The others muffled their laughter and Cisco looked at all of us like he knew there was some kind of joke and it was on him.

“Are there any bikers out there who don’t have nicknames?” Jennifer asked.

“Oh, you mean a nickname like Bullocks? No, I don’t think there are, to tell you the truth.”

There was more laughter, and then I turned it serious again.

“Okay, let’s look at this thing. We now know what’s on the surface. Let’s go below. First off, there’s the question why. Why the manipulation eight years ago? If we believe what we have been told, then Marco goes to Gloria and tells her to plant a gun in Moya’s hotel room so that when he gets busted he gets the firearms enhancement, making him eligible for a life sentence. Okay, we get that. But then comes the hard part.”

“Why didn’t Marco just bust him once the gun was in place?” Cisco asked.

I pointed at him.

“Exactly. Instead of the easy and direct route, he sets forth a strategy in which Gloria allows herself to get busted by the locals and then comes to me. She drops enough information on me for my eyes to light up and think there is a deal to be made. I go see the DA and make that deal. Moya gets busted, the gun is found, and the rest is history. It still begs the question why go to all that trouble?”

There was a pause while my team considered the complicated setup. Jennifer was the first to dive in.

“Marco couldn’t be seen as attached to it,” she said. “For some reason he had to be removed from this and wait until it was brought to him. The DA makes the deal with you, the LAPD gets the bust, but then Marco jumps in with the outstanding federal warrant that trumps everything. It looks like it just fell into his lap but he orchestrated the whole thing.”

“Which only brings us back to why,” Cisco said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Do you think Marco knew Moya and didn’t want him to know he’d set it up?” Jennifer asked. “So he sort of hid behind Gloria and you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But he still eventually got the case.”

“What if it was because of Moya?” Cisco said. “He’s a cartel guy, and they’re the most violent people on the planet. They’ll wipe out a whole village just to make sure they get one informant. Maybe Marco didn’t want to draw the target on himself for bringing Moya down. This way he just sat back and the case came to him all signed, sealed, and delivered. If Moya started looking for somebody to come down on, it would stop with Gloria.”

“That’s possible, I guess,” I said. “But then if Moya was looking for revenge, why did he wait seven years to hit Gloria?”

Cisco shook his head, unconvinced by either argument. That was the trouble with spitballing ideas. More often than not you found yourself talked into a logic corner.

“Maybe we’re talking about two separate things,” Jennifer said. “Two things separated by seven years. You have the bust and the unknown reason for how Marco set it up, and then you have Gloria’s murder, which may have happened for an entirely different reason.”

“You’re back to thinking our client did it?” I said.

“No, not at all. In fact, I’m pretty convinced he’s a patsy in this. I’m just saying seven years is a long time. Things change. You yourself just asked why Moya would wait seven years to exact vengeance. I don’t think he did. Gloria’s death is a big loss to him. His habeas suit claims the gun was planted in his hotel room. So he needed Gloria to make his case. Who’s he got now? Trina Trixxx and her secondhand account? Good luck putting her before the U.S. District Court of Appeals.”

I stared at Jennifer for a long moment and slowly started to nod.

“Out of the mouth of babes,” I said. “And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. I’m saying you’re the rookie here and I think you just nailed something. Moya needed her alive for the habeas. To tell the court what she did.”

“Well, maybe she wouldn’t tell the truth and so he had her whacked,” Cisco said, nodding afterward to help convince himself.

I shook my head. I didn’t like it. Something was missing.

“If we start with Moya needing her alive,” Jennifer said, “the question becomes who needed her dead.”

I nodded now, liking this logic. I waited a moment, spreading my hands to the others for the obvious answer. None came.

“Marco,” I said.

I leaned back in my chair and looked from Cisco to Jennifer. They stared back blankly.

“What, am I the only one seeing this?” I asked.

“So you’re choosing a federal agent over a cartel thug as our straw man?” Jennifer asked. “That doesn’t sound like a good strategy.”

“It’s no longer a straw man defense if it is a true defense,” I said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s a tough sell if it’s what really happened.”

There was a silence as my words were considered, and then Jennifer broke it.

“But why? Why would Marco want her dead?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“That’s what we have to find out,” I said.

“Lot of money in drugs,” Earl said. “It bends a lotta people.”

I pointed at him like he was a genius.

“Right there,” I said. “If we believe the story that Marco made Gloria plant the gun, then we’re dealing with a rogue agent already. We don’t know if he breaks the rules to get bad guys or if it’s to protect something else. Either way, is it that far a leap to think he might kill to protect himself and whatever his rogue operation is? If Gloria became a danger to him, then I think she was definitely in the crosshairs.”

I leaned forward.

“So this is what we need to do. We need to find out more about Marco. And this group he’s in — the ICE team. Find out what other cases they’ve made before and since Moya. See what kind of reputation they have. We look at other cases to see if anything at all looks bent.”

“I’ll search his name through court records,” Jennifer said. “State and federal. Pull out everything I can find and start from there.”

“I’ll ask around,” Cisco added. “I know some people who know some people.”

“And I’ll take the Fulgoni boys,” I said. “And Mr. Moya. They might now actually be assets to our case.”

I could feel the stirring of adrenaline in my veins. Nothing like having a sense of direction to get the blood moving.

“Do you think this means it was the DEA who jacked your car?” Jennifer asked. “And not Moya or Fulgoni?”

The thought of a rogue DEA agent monitoring my moves froze the adrenaline into tiny icicles in my veins.

“If that’s the case, then Fulgoni calling Trina last night when I was there was just coincidence,” I said. “Not sure I believe that.”

It was one of the conundrums of the case that would need to be cleared up before we had full understanding.

Jennifer gathered up her notepad and files and started to push back her chair.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re not finished.”

She resettled and looked at me.

“Lankford,” I said. “He was tailing Gloria the night she was murdered. If we’re looking at Marco, then we have to look for a connection between him and Lankford. We find that and we’ll be close to having everything we need.”

I turned my attention to Cisco.

“Everything you can find on him,” I said. “If he knows Marco, I want to know from where. I want to know how.”

“On it,” Cisco said.

I looked back at Jennifer.

“Just because we’re looking at Marco doesn’t mean we take our eyes off Moya. We have to know everything there is to know about his case. It will help us understand Marco. I still want you on that.”

“Got it.”

Now I turned to Lorna and Earl.

“Lorna, you keep the boat floating. And Earl, you’re with me. I think that’s it, everybody. For now, at least. Be careful out there. Remember who we’re dealing with.”

Everybody started to get up. They were all silent as they moved. It hadn’t been the kind of meeting that drew any kind of lasting jocularity or camaraderie out of the troops. We were going off in separate directions to conduct a sub rosa investigation of a possibly dangerous federal agent. There weren’t too many things more sobering to consider than that.

19

On the way downtown I had to tell Earl to cool it with the single-handed effort to determine if we had a tail. He was weaving in and out of traffic, accelerating and then braking, moving into exit lanes and then jerking the wheel to pull out at the last moment and get back on the freeway.

“Let Cisco handle that,” I said. “You just get me down to the courthouse in one piece.”

“Sorry, boss, I got carried away. But I gotta say I like all this stuff, you know? Bein’ in the meeting and knowin’ what’s going on.”

“Well, like I said, when things happen and I need your help — like yesterday, for example — I’ll bring you into it.”

“That’s cool.”

He settled down after that and we made it downtown without incident. I had Earl drop me at the Criminal Courts Building. I told him I didn’t know how long I would be. I had no business in court, but the District Attorney’s Office was up on the sixteenth floor and I was headed there. After getting out, I looked over the roof of the car and casually scanned the intersection of Temple and Spring. I didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary. I did catch myself checking the rooflines for Indians, however. I didn’t see anything up there either.

After I made it through the metal detector, I took one of the crowded elevators up to sixteen. I had no appointment and knew I might be in for a nice long wait on a hard plastic chair but I thought I needed to take a shot at getting in to see Leslie Faire. She had been a key player in the occurrences of eight years before, yet she had barely come up for discussion lately. She had been the deputy DA who made the deal that resulted in Hector Arrande Moya’s arrest and Gloria Dayton’s freedom.

Leslie had done well for herself in the years since that deal was struck. She won a few big trials and chose correctly in throwing her support to my opponent Damon Kennedy in the election. That paid off with a major promotion. She was now a head deputy DA and was in charge of the Major Trials Unit. This made her more of a manager of trial attorneys and court schedules, so it was rare to see her standing for the people anymore. This of course was fine by me. She was a tough prosecutor and I was glad I didn’t need to worry about crossing paths with her again in court. I counted the Gloria Dayton case as the only victory I ever scored against her. Of course, it was a hollow victory in my eyes now.

I may have disliked facing Leslie Faire on cases but I respected her. And now I thought she should know what had happened to Gloria Dayton. Maybe the news would make her inclined to help me fill in some of the details from eight years before. I wanted to know if she had ever crossed paths with Agent Marco and, if so, when.

I told the receptionist that I had no appointment but was willing to wait. She said to take a seat while she notified Ms. Faire’s secretary of my request for a ten-minute meeting. The fact that Faire had a secretary underscored her lofty position in the Kennedy regime. Most prosecutors I knew had no real administrative help and were lucky if they got to share a pool secretary.

I pulled out my phone and sat down on one of the plastic chairs that had populated the waiting room since before I was a licensed lawyer. I had e-mail to check and texts to write but the first thing I did was call Cisco to see if his Indians had picked up anything on the drive downtown.

“I was just talking to my guy,” Cisco reported. “They didn’t see anything.”

“Okay.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re not there. This was just one drive. We might need to send you out to get a little separation and then we’ll know for sure.”

“Really? I don’t have time to be running all over town, Cisco. I thought you said these guys were good.”

“Yeah, well, the Indians that were up in the cliffs didn’t have to watch the 101 Freeway. I’ll tell them to stick with it. What’s your schedule anyway?”

“I’m at the DA’s Office now and I don’t know how long I’ll be here. After this I’m going out to Fulgoni’s office to meet Junior.”

“Where’s he located?”

“Century City.”

“Well, Century City might work. Nice wide boulevards out there. I’ll tell my guys.”

I disconnected and opened up the e-mail on my phone. There were an assortment of messages from clients who were currently incarcerated. The worst thing to happen to defense attorneys in recent years was the approval from most prisons of e-mail access for inmates. With nothing else to do but worry about their cases, they inundated me and every other lawyer with endless e-mails containing questions, worries, and the occasional threat.

I started weeding through it all, and twenty minutes went by before I looked up to change focus. I decided I’d give it a whole hour before giving up on Leslie Faire. I went back to plowing through my e-mail and was able to clear out a good chunk of the backlog, even answering a few of them in the process. I was forty-five minutes into it, with my head down, when I saw a shadow reflect on my phone screen. I looked up and there was Lankford looking down at me. I almost flinched but think I managed to look unsurprised to see him.

“Investigator Lankford.”

“Haller, what are you doing here?”

He said it like I was some kind of squatter or other nuisance who had previously been warned to move on and not come back.

“I’m waiting to see someone. What are you doing here?”

“I work here, remember? Is this about La Cosse?”

“No, it’s not about La Cosse, but what it is about is none of your business.”

He signaled me to stand up. I stayed seated.

“I told you I’m waiting for somebody.”

“No, you’re not. Leslie Faire sent me out to see what you want. You don’t want to talk to me, then you’re not talking to anybody. Let’s go. Up. You can’t use our waiting room to operate your business. You’ve got a car for that.”

That answer froze me. He’d been sent out to me by Faire. Did that mean Faire had knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes on the Gloria Dayton murder case? I’d come to inform her but she might already know more of what was going on than me.

“I said let’s go,” Lankford said forcefully. “Get up or I’ll get you up.”

A woman who had been sitting two chairs away from me stood to get away from what she determined was about to become a physical extraction. She sat back down on the other side of the room.

“Hold your horses, Lankford,” I said. “I’m going, I’m going.”

I slipped my phone into an inside pocket of my jacket and grabbed my briefcase off the floor as I got up. Lankford didn’t move, choosing to stay close and invade my personal space. I made a move to go around him but he sidestepped and we were face-to-face again.

“Having fun?” I said.

“Ms. Faire doesn’t want you coming back here either,” he said. “She’s not in court anymore and doesn’t need to have anything to do with douche bags like you. Understand?”

His breath was rancid with coffee and cigarettes.

“Sure,” I said. “I get it.”

I moved around him and out to the elevator alcove. He followed me and watched silently as I pushed the down button and waited. I looked over my shoulder at him.

“This may take a while, Lankford.”

“I’ve got all day.”

I nodded.

“I’m sure you do.”

I turned back to look at the elevator doors for a moment and then glanced back over my shoulder at him. I couldn’t resist.

“You look different, Lankford.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“From last time I saw you. Something’s different. You get hair plugs or something?”

“Very funny. But, thankfully, I haven’t seen your ass since La Cosse’s first appearance last year.”

“No, somethin’ more recent. I don’t know.”

That’s all I said. I turned back to concentrate on the elevator doors. Finally the light went on overhead and the doors opened, revealing a car with only four people on it. I knew it would be packed wall to wall and well over the safety code weight limit by the time it got down to the lobby.

I stepped on the elevator and turned back to look at Lankford. I doffed an imaginary hat in saying good-bye.

“It’s your hat,” I said. “You’re not wearing your hat today.”

The elevator doors closed on his dead-eyed stare.

20

The confrontation with Lankford left me agitated. On the ride down I shifted my weight from foot to foot like a boxer in his corner waiting to answer the bell. By the time I reached the ground floor I knew exactly where I had to go. Sly Fulgoni Jr. could wait. I needed to see Legal Siegel.

Forty minutes later I stepped off another elevator onto the fourth floor at Menorah Manor. As I passed the reception desk, the nurse stopped me and told me I had to open my briefcase before she would allow me to go down the hall to Legal’s room.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m his lawyer. You can’t tell me to open my briefcase.”

She responded sternly and without any give.

“Someone has been bringing food from the outside to Mr. Siegel. Not only is it a violation of the health and religious policies of this facility, it is a risk to the patient because it interferes with a carefully considered and scheduled nutrition plan.”

I knew where this was headed and I refused to back down myself.

“You’re calling what you feed him and what he pays for here a nutrition plan?”

“Whether patients enjoy all aspects of the food here is beside the point. If you want to visit Mr. Siegel, you will be required to open your briefcase.”

“If you want to see what’s in my briefcase, you show me a warrant.”

“This is not a public institution, Mr. Haller, and it’s not a courtroom. It is a privately owned and operated medical facility. As head nurse on this ward I have the authority to inspect anyone and anything coming through those elevator doors. We have sick people here and we must safeguard them. Either open your briefcase or I’ll call security and have you removed from the premises.”

To underline the threat, she put her hand on the phone that was on the counter.

I shook my head in annoyance and brought my briefcase up onto the counter. I snapped open the twin locks and flipped up the top of the case. I watched her eyes scan its contents for a long moment.

“Satisfied? There might be a stray Tic Tac in there somewhere. I hope that won’t be a problem.”

She ignored the crack.

“You may close it and you may now visit Mr. Siegel. Thank you.”

“No, thank you.”

I closed the briefcase and walked down the hallway, pleased with myself but knowing I would now need a plan for the next time I actually did want to get food in to Legal. I had a briefcase in a closet at the house that I had taken in barter from a client once. It had a secret compartment that could hold a kilo of cocaine. I could easily hide a sandwich in there, maybe two.

Legal Siegel was propped up on his bed watching an Oprah rerun with the sound on too loud. His eyes were open but seemed unseeing. I closed the door and came over to the bed. I waved my hand up and down in front of his face, fearful for a moment that he was dead.

“Legal?”

He came out of the reverie, focused on me, and smiled.

“Mickey Mouse! Hey, what’d you bring me? Let me guess, tuna-avocado from Gus’s in Westlake.”

I shook my head.

“Sorry, Legal, I don’t have anything today. It’s too early for lunch anyway.”

“What? Come on, give. Pork dip from Coles, right?”

“No, I mean it. I didn’t bring anything. Besides, if I did, Nurse Ratched out there would have confiscated it. She’s onto us and made me open my briefcase.”

“Oh, that bag of wind — denying a man the simple pleasures in life!”

I put my hand on his arm in a calming gesture.

“Take it easy, Legal. She doesn’t scare me. I got a plan and I’ll hit Gus’s on the way in next time. Okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I pulled a chair away from the wall and sat down next to the bed. I found the remote in the folds of the bedding and muted the television.

“Thank God,” Legal said. “That was driving me nuts.”

“Then why didn’t you turn it off?”

“Because I couldn’t find the damn remote. Anyway, why did you come see me without bringing me any sustenance? You were just here yesterday, right? Pastrami from Art’s in the Valley.”

“You’re right, Legal, and I’m glad you remember it.”

“Then why’d you come back so soon?”

“Because today I need sustenance. Legal sustenance.”

“How do you mean?”

“The La Cosse case. Things are happening and it’s getting hard to see the forest for the trees.”

I ticked off the cast of characters on my fingers.

“I’ve got a shady DEA agent out there, a crooked DA investigator, a cartel thug, and a disbarred lawyer. Then I’ve got my own client in the clink, and the victim in all of this is the only one I really like — or liked — in the first place. To top it all off, I’m being watched — but I’m not exactly sure by who.”

“Tell me all about it.”

I spent the next thirty minutes summarizing the story and answering his questions. I backed up beyond the last update I had given him and then brought the story forward, going into much finer detail than I had previously given. He asked many questions as I told the story but never offered anything back. He was simply gathering data and holding his response. I took him right up to the confrontation I’d just had with Lankford in the DA’s Office waiting room, and the uneasy feeling I had that I was missing something — something right in front of me.

When I was finished, I waited for a response but he said nothing. He made a gesture with his frail hands, as if to throw the whole thing up into the air and let the wind take it. I noticed that both of his arms were purple from all the needles and the prodding and poking they did to him in this place. Getting old was not for the weak.

“That’s it?” I said. “Just throw it to the wind like a bunch of flower petals? You’ve got nothing to say?”

“Oh, I got plenty to say and you’re not going to like hearing it.”

I motioned with my hand inviting him to hit me with it all.

“You’re missing the big picture, Mouse.”

“Really?” I said sarcastically. “What is the big picture?”

“Now you see, that’s the wrong question,” he lectured. “Your first question should not be what but why. Why am I missing the big picture?”

I nodded, going along only grudgingly.

“Then why am I missing the big picture?”

“Let’s start with the report you just gave on the state of your case. You said it took that rookie shortstop you hired out of the five-and-dime to make you see things the right way at the staff meeting this morning.”

He was talking about Jennifer Aronson. It was true that I’d hired her out of Southwestern, which was housed in the old Bullocks Department Store building on Wilshire. It engendered her nickname, but referring to the law school as a five-and-dime was a new low.

“I was only trying to give credit where credit was due,” I said. “Jennifer may still be a rookie but she’s sharper than any three lawyers I could’ve hired out of SC.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s all well and good. She’s a good lawyer, I grant you that. The thing is, you always expect yourself to be the better lawyer and deep down you hold yourself to that. So when all of a sudden this morning it’s the team rookie who sees things with clarity, then that gets under your skin. You’re supposed to be the smartest guy in the room.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Legal pressed on.

“I’m not your shrink. I’m a lawyer. But I think you gotta stop hitting the booze at night and you gotta get your house in order.”

I stood up and started pacing in front of the bed.

“Legal, what are you talking about? My house is—”

“Your judgment and your ability to cut through the obstacles in front of you are, at best, clouded by an outside agenda.”

“You’re talking about my kid? My having to live with knowing my kid wants nothing to do with me? I wouldn’t call that an agenda.”

“I’m not talking about that per se. I am talking about the root of that. I’m talking about the guilt you carry over all of it. It is impacting you as a lawyer. Your performance as a lawyer, as a defender of the accused. And in this case, most likely, the wrongly accused.”

He was talking about Sandy and Katie Patterson and the accident that took their lives. I leaned down and grabbed the iron railing at the foot of his bed with both hands. Legal Siegel was my mentor. He could tell me anything. He could dress me down lower than even my ex-wife and I would accept it.

“Listen to me,” he said. “There is no more noble a cause on this planet than to stand for the wrongly accused. You can’t fuck this up, kid.”

I nodded and kept my head bowed.

“Guilt,” he said. “You have to get by it. Let the ghosts go or they’ll take you under and you’ll never be the lawyer you are supposed to be. You will never see the big picture.”

I threw up my hands.

“Please, enough with the big picture crap! What are you talking about, Legal? What am I missing?”

“To see what you’re missing, you have to step back and widen the angle. Then you see the bigger picture.”

I looked at him, trying to understand.

“When was the habeas filed?” he asked quietly.

“November.”

“When was Gloria Dayton murdered?”

“November.”

I said it impatiently. We both knew the answers to these questions.

“And when were you papered by the lawyer?”

“Just now — yesterday.”

“And this federal agent you talked about, when was he served?”

“I don’t know if he was served. But Valenzuela had the paper yesterday.”

“And then there’s the phony subpoena Fulgoni cooked up for the other girl from back then.”

“Kendall Roberts, right.”

“Any idea why he would dummy up paper for her and not you?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know. I guess he knew I’d know if it was legit or not. She’s not a lawyer, so she wouldn’t. He’d save the costs of filing with the court. I’ve heard of lawyers who roll that way.”

“Seems thin to me.”

“Well, that’s all I got off the top of—”

“So six months after the habeas was filed with the court they put out their first subpoenas? I tell you, if I ran a shop like that I’d a been out of business and on the street. It’s not the timely exercise of the law, that’s for sure.”

“This kid Fulgoni doesn’t know his ass from—”

I stopped in midsentence. I had suddenly caught a glimpse of the elusive big picture. I looked at Legal.

“Maybe these weren’t the first subpoenas.”

He nodded.

“Now I think you’re getting it,” Legal said.

21

I told Earl to drop down to Olympic and take me out to Century City and Sly Fulgoni Jr.’s office. I then settled in with a fresh legal pad and started charting timelines on the Gloria Dayton murder case and the Hector Moya habeas petition. Pretty soon I saw how the cases were entwined like a double helix. I saw the big picture.

“You sure you got the right address, boss?”

I looked up from my chart and out the window. Earl had slowed the Lincoln in front of a row of French provincial — style town house offices. We were still on Olympic but on the eastern edge of Century City. I was sure the address carried the correct zip code and all the cachet that came with it, but it was a far cry from the gleaming towers on the Avenue of the Stars that people think of when they imagine a Century City legal firm. I had to think there would be buyer’s remorse for any client who arrived here for the first time and found these digs. Then again, who was I to talk? Many was the time I dealt with buyer’s remorse when my clients learned I worked out of the backseat of my car.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”

I jumped out and headed toward the door. I entered a small reception room with a well-worn carpet leading from the front of the reception desk in twin paths to doors to the right and left. The door on the left had a name on it I didn’t recognize. The door on the right had the name Sylvester Fulgoni. I got the feeling that Sly Jr. was splitting the space with another attorney. Probably the secretary, too, but at the moment there was no secretary to share. The reception desk was empty.

“Hello?” I said.

Nobody replied. I looked down at the paperwork and mail piled on the desk and saw that on top was a photocopy of Sly Jr.’s court calendar. Only I saw very few court dates recorded on it for the month. Sly didn’t have much work — at least work that took him inside a courthouse. I did see that he had me down for a deposition scheduled for the following Tuesday, but there were no notations about James Marco or Kendall Roberts.

“Hello?” I called out again.

This time I was louder but still got no response. I stepped over to the Fulgoni door and leaned my ear to the jamb. I heard nothing. I knocked and tried the knob. It was unlocked and I pushed the door open, revealing a young man seated behind a large ornate desk that bespoke better times than the rest of the office presented.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” the man said, seemingly annoyed by the intrusion.

He closed a laptop computer that was on the desk in front of him, but didn’t get up. I stepped two feet into the office. I saw no one else in the room.

“I’m looking for Sly Jr.,” I said. “Is that you?”

“I’m sorry but my practice is by appointment only. You’ll have to set up an appointment and come back.”

“There’s no receptionist.”

“My secretary is at lunch and I’m very busy at the — wait, you’re Haller, aren’t you?”

He pointed a finger at me and put his other hand on the arm of his chair like he was bracing himself in case he had to cut and run. I raised my hands to show I was unarmed.

“I come in peace.”

He looked like he was no more than twenty-five. He was struggling to produce a reasonable goatee and was wearing a Dodgers game jersey. It was obvious he didn’t have court today, or maybe any day.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I took a few more steps toward the desk. It was gigantic and way too big for the space — obviously a leftover from his father’s practice in a better, bigger office. I pulled back one of the chairs positioned in front of the desk and sat down.

“Don’t sit. You can’t—”

I was seated.

“All right, go ahead.”

I nodded my thanks and smiled. I pointed at the desk.

“Nice,” I said. “A hand-me-down from the old man?”

“Look, what do you want?”

“I told you. I come in peace. What are you so jumpy about?”

He blew out his breath in exasperation.

“I don’t like people barging in on me. This is a law office. You wouldn’t want people just — oh, that’s right, you don’t even have an office. I saw the movie.”

“I didn’t just barge in. There was no secretary. I called out and then tried the door.”

“I told you, she’s at lunch. It’s the lunch hour. Look, can we get this over with? What do you want? State your business and then leave.”

He dramatically chopped the air with his hand.

“Look,” I said, “I’m here because we got off on the wrong foot and I apologize. It was my fault. I was treating you — and your father — like we were foes on this case. But I don’t think it’s got to be that way. So I’m here to make peace and to see if we might be able to help each other out. You know, I show you mine if you show me yours.”

He shook his head.

“No, we’re not doing this. I have a case and you have whatever the fuck you have, but we’re not working together.”

I leaned forward and tried to hold eye contact but the kid was all over the place.

“We have similar causes of action, Sly. Your client Hector Moya and my client Andre La Cosse stand to benefit by our working together and sharing information.”

He shook his head dismissively.

“I don’t think so.”

I looked around the room and noticed his diplomas framed on the wall. The print was too small for me to read from a distance but I didn’t think I was dealing with an Ivy Leaguer here. I decided to put some of what I was thinking and had charted in the car out there to see how it went over.

“My client is charged with the murder of Gloria Dayton, who figures importantly in your habeas petition. The thing is, I don’t think he did it.”

“Well, good for you. It’s not our concern.”

I was beginning to suspect that his use of “our” did not refer to him and Hector Moya. It was a reference to Team Fulgoni — Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Only Mr. Outside didn’t know habeas corpus from corpus delicti and I was talking to the wrong man.

I decided to go ahead and hit him with the big question. The question that had emerged when I stepped back and looked at the big picture.

“Answer one question and I’ll go. Last year, did you try to subpoena Gloria Dayton before she was murdered?”

Fulgoni emphatically shook his head.

“I’m not talking to you about our case.”

“Did you have Valenzuela do it?”

“I told you, I’m not talk—”

“I don’t understand. We can help each other.”

“Then you talk to my father and try to convince him, because I’m not at liberty to discuss anything with you. You have to go now.”

I made no move to get up. I just stared at him. He made a gesture with his hands as if pushing me away.

“Please go.”

“Did somebody get to you, Sly?”

“Get to me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why’d you dummy up the subpoena you had Valenzuela serve on Kendall Roberts?”

He brought a hand up and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to ward off a headache.

“I’m not saying another fucking word.”

“All right, then I’ll talk to your father. Call him right now, put him on speaker.”

“I can’t just call him. He’s in prison.”

“Why not? He talked to me last night on a phone.”

This raised Sly’s eyebrows.

“Yeah, when I was with Trina.”

His eyebrows arched again and then flatlined.

“There you go. He can only call out after midnight.”

“Come on, man. He’s got a cell phone up there. Half my clients do. Big fucking secret.”

“Yeah, but at Victorville they’ve got a jammer. And my dad’s got a guy who turns it off for him — but only after midnight. And if you’ve got guys with phones, then you know you never call in. They only call out. When it’s safe.”

I nodded. He was right. I knew from experience with other incarcerated clients that cell phones were common contraband in almost all jails and prisons. Rather than rely on finding them through constant body cavity and prison cell searches, many correctional institutions employed cellular blockers that eliminated the use of the phones. Sly Sr. obviously had a friendly guard — most likely a guard paid to be friendly — with his hand on the switch during the midnight shift. This was a confirmation that the call from Sly Sr. the night before was coincidence and did not come about because he was having me followed. It meant someone else was.

“How often does he call you?” I asked.

“I’m not telling you that,” Sly Jr. said. “We’re finished here.”

My guess was that Sly Sr. called every night with a to-do list for the following day. Junior did not appear to be much of a self-starter. I was dying to get a look at that diploma so I could see what law school gave him a skin but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I knew lawyers from top schools who couldn’t find their way out of a courtroom. And I knew night-school lawyers who I’d call in a heartbeat if it was ever my wrists in the cuffs. It was all about the lawyer, not the law school.

I stood up and pushed the chair back into place.

“Okay, Sylvester, this is what you do. When Daddy calls tonight, tell him I’m coming up to see him tomorrow. I’m going to register at the gate as his lawyer. Moya’s, too. You and I are co-counsel. You assure Daddy that I am seeking cooperation of our two camps, not an adversarial relationship. Tell him he better take the interview and hear me out. Tell him to tell Hector the same thing. Tell him not to turn down these interviews or things are going to get uncomfortable for him up there in the desert.”

“What the fuck you talking about? Co-counsel? Bullshit.”

I stepped back toward the desk and leaned down, two hands on the mahogany. Sly Jr. leaned back as far as he could in his chair.

“Let me tell you something, Junior. If I drive two hours up there and this doesn’t go down exactly as I just said it’s to go down, then two things are going to happen. One is that the jammer is going to start staying on all night, leaving you high and dry down here without a clue about what to do and what to file and what to say. And second, the California bar is going to take an intimate interest in this little arrangement you’ve got with Daddy. It’ll be called practicing law without a license for Daddy. For you it will be practicing law without knowing the first fucking thing about the law.”

I straightened up and made to leave but then turned right back to him.

“And when I talk to the bar, I’ll throw in that phony subpoena, too. They probably won’t like that much either.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that, Haller?”

I nodded and headed back to the door.

“When I need to be.”

I walked out, leaving the door wide open behind me.

22

The Lincoln was waiting where I had left it. I jumped into the backseat and was greeted by the sight of a man sitting across from me and directly behind Earl. I glanced at my driver’s eyes in the mirror and saw an almost apologetic look in them.

I drew my attention back to the stranger. He wore aviator sunglasses, worn blue jeans, and a black golf shirt. He had a dark complexion matched with dark hair and a mustache. My immediate thought was that he looked like a cartel hit man.

The man smiled when he recognized the look in my eyes.

“Relax, Haller,” he said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

“Then who the hell are you?” I asked.

“You know who I am.”

“Marco?”

He smiled again.

“Why don’t you tell your driver to take a walk?”

I hesitated a moment and then looked at Earl in the rearview.

“Go ahead, Earl. But stay close. Where I can see you.”

What I really wanted was for Earl to be able to see me. I wanted a witness because I didn’t know what Marco was about to pull.

“You sure?” Earl asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead.”

Earl got out of the car and closed the door. He walked a few feet forward and leaned against the front fender of the car with his arms folded. I looked across the seat at Marco.

“Okay, what do you want?” I said. “Are you following me?”

He seemed to ruminate on the questions before deciding to answer.

“No, I’m not following you,” he finally said. “I came to check out a lawyer who’s been trying to paper me and here I see you. You and him, working together.”

It was a good answer because it was plausible. It avoided confirmation that Marco had been the one who had jacked my car, and he seemed pleased with it, even though he had not convinced me. I put Marco in his midforties. He carried an aura about him, a sense of confidence and knowledge, like a guy who knows he’s two moves ahead of everybody else.

“What do you want?” I asked again.

“What I want is to help you avoid fucking up in a major way.”

“And what way is that?”

Marco proceeded as though he had not heard the question.

“Do you know the word sicario, Counselor?”

He said it with full Latin inflection. I glanced away from him and out the window, then I looked back.

“I’ve heard it said, I think.”

“There is no real English translation for the word, but it’s what they call the cartel assassins down in Mexico. Sicarios.”

“Thanks for the education.”

“Down there the laws are different than we’ve got up here. Do you know that they have no legal code or provision that allows a teenager to be charged as an adult? No matter what they do, no charges as an adult and no incarceration beyond the age of eighteen for the crimes they commit as children.”

“That’s good to know for the next time I’m down there, Marco, but I practice law right here in California.”

“Consequently, the cartels recruit and train teenagers as their sicarios. If they get caught and convicted, they do a year, maybe two, and then they’re out at eighteen and ready to go back to work. You see?”

“I see that it’s a real tragedy. No way those boys come out rehabilitated, that’s for sure.”

Marco showed no reaction to my sarcasm.

“At sixteen years of age Hector Arrande Moya admitted in a courtroom in Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa that he had tortured and murdered seven people by the time he was fifteen. Two of them were women. Three of them he hung in a basement and four he set on fire while they were still alive. He raped both the women and he cut all of the bodies up afterward and fed the remains to the coyotes in the hills.”

“And what’s that have to do with me?”

“He did all of this on orders from the cartel. You see, he was raised in the cartel. And when he got out of the penta at eighteen he went right back to the cartel. By then, of course, he had a nickname. They called him El Fuego—because he burned people.”

I checked my watch in a show of impatience.

“That’s a good story, but why tell it to me, Marco? What about you? What about the—”

“This is the man you conspire with Fulgoni to set free. El Fuego.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only person I am trying to set free is Andre La Cosse. He is sitting in a cell right now, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. But I’ll tell you this much about Hector Moya. You want to put the motherfucker away for life, then make the case fair and square in the first place. Don’t—”

I cut myself off and raised my hands, palms out. Enough.

“Just get out of my car now,” I said quietly. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll talk to you in court.”

“There’s a war, Haller, and you have to choose which side you’re on. There are sacrifices that—”

“Oh, now you’re going to talk to me about choices? What about Gloria Dayton, was she a choice? Was she a sacrifice? Fuck you, Marco. There are rules, rules of law. Now get out of my car.”

For five seconds we just stared at each other. But finally Marco blinked. He cracked his door and slowly backed out of the car. He then leaned down and looked back in at me.

“Jennifer Aronson.”

I spread my hands as if waiting for whatever it was he still had to say.

“Who?”

He smiled.

“Just tell her if she wants to know about me, she can come right to me. Anytime. No need to sneak around the courthouse, pulling files, whispering questions. I’m right here. All the time.”

He closed the door and walked off. I watched him as he went down the sidewalk and turned the corner. He didn’t go into Fulgoni’s office, even though he had claimed that was the reason he was in the vicinity and had spotted me.

Soon Earl got back in behind the wheel.

“You okay, boss?”

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

He started the car. My frustrations and feelings of vulnerability got the best of me and I snapped at Earl.

“How the hell did that guy get in the car?”

“He came up and knocked on the window. He showed me the badge and told me to unlock the back. I thought he was gonna put a slug in the back a my head.”

“Great, and you just let me jump in the back with him.”

“There was nothin’ I could do, boss. He told me not to move. What did he say?”

“A bunch of self-deluding bullshit. Let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Head toward the loft. For now.”

I immediately got on the phone and called Jennifer. I didn’t want to scare her but it was clear that Marco knew of her efforts to background him and check other cases he had been involved in.

The call went straight to message. As I listened to her recorded voice, I debated whether to leave a full message or just tell her to call me. I decided it would be best and perhaps safest to leave her the message so she got the information as soon as she turned on her phone.

“Jennifer, it’s me. I just had a little visit from Agent Marco, and he is aware of your efforts to document his history. He must have friends in the clerk’s office or wherever you’re pulling records. So I’m thinking you might want to keep what you got on that but switch back to Moya. I’m going up to see him tomorrow in Victorville and I’d like to know all there is to know by then anyway. Let me know that you got this. Bye.”

Cisco was next and this time my call went through. I told him of my encounter with Marco and asked why there had been no heads-up from the Indians who were supposedly watching me for a tail. I wasn’t too pleasant about it.

“No warning, Cisco. The guy was waiting for me in my fucking car.”

“I don’t know what happened but I’ll find out.”

He sounded as annoyed as I was.

“Yeah, do that and call me back.”

I disconnected the call. Earl and I rode in silence for a few minutes after that, with me replaying the Marco conversation in my head. I was trying to figure out the motives for the visit from the DEA agent. First and foremost, I decided, was the threat. He wanted to put a chill on my team’s efforts to research his activities. He also, it would seem, wanted to steer me away from the Moya case. He probably felt that Moya’s conviction and life sentence were relatively safe with the inexperienced Sly Fulgoni Jr. at the helm of the habeas petition. And he was probably right. But hitting me with the description of Moya as the worst thing this side of the devil was just a front. Marco’s motives weren’t altruistic. I didn’t buy that for a moment. All in all, I concluded that Marco was trying to spook me because I had spooked him. And that meant we were pointed in the right direction.

“Hey, boss?”

I looked at Earl in the rearview.

“I heard you telling Jennifer in that message that you’re goin’ up to Victorville tomorrow. That true? We’re goin’ up?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, we’re going. First thing in the morning.”

And in saying so out loud I also sent a silent fuck-you to Marco.

My phone buzzed and it was Cisco, already back with an explanation.

“Sorry, Mick, they fucked up. They saw the guy arrive and get in the car with Earl. They said he showed a badge but they didn’t know who he was. They thought it was a friendly.”

“A friendly? The guy has to badge Earl to get in the car and they think he’s a fucking friendly? They should’ve called you on the spot so you could call me and stop me from coming out with my goddamn zipper down.”

“Already told them all of that. You want me to pull them off now?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it seems pretty clear we know who jacked your car, right?”

I thought about Marco’s claim that he had just happened to see me while he was checking out Fulgoni because of the subpoena. I didn’t buy that for a moment. I agreed with Cisco; Marco had jacked my car.

“Might as well save the dough,” I told Cisco. “Pull ’em off. They weren’t much in the early-warning department anyway.”

“You want us to pull the GPS off the car, too?”

I thought about that for a moment and my plans for the next day. I decided I wanted to taunt Marco, show him I was unbowed by his little visit and unspoken threat.

“No, leave it. For now.”

“Okay, Mick. And for what it’s worth, the guys are really sorry.”

“Yeah, whatever. I gotta go.”

I disconnected. I had noticed out the windshield that Earl was cutting through Beverly Hills on Little Santa Monica Boulevard on the way to my house. I was starved and knew we were coming up on Papa Jake’s, a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter that made the best steak sandwich west of Philadelphia. I had not been there since the nearby Beverly Hills Superior Court was shuttered in the state budget crisis, and I had lost business that would bring me to the area. But in the meantime I had developed a Legal Siegel — type craving for a Jake steak with grilled onions and pizzaiola sauce.

“Earl,” I said. “We’re going to make a stop for lunch up here. And if that DEA agent is still following, he’s about to learn the best-kept secret in Beverly Hills.”

23

After the late lunch, I was through for the day. My calendar was clear and I had no further appointments. I considered heading back downtown and seeing if I could line up a visit with Andre La Cosse to go over some things related to the upcoming trial. But the occurrences of the past few hours — from Legal Siegel’s lecture to the meet with Sly Jr. and the surprise visit from Marco — led me toward home. I’d had enough for the time being.

I had Earl drive to the loft so he could get his care where he had left it after coming in for the staff meeting. I then drove home, stopping only long enough to change into clothes more appropriate to hiking through the wilds of Fryman Canyon. It had been a long while since I’d seen my daughter in the goal at practice. I knew from the school’s online newsletter that there were only a few weeks left in the season and the team was getting ready for the state tournament. I decided to go over the hill to watch and maybe escape from thoughts on the La Cosse case for a while.

But escape was delayed — at least on the ride up Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Jennifer called me back and told me she had received my message and my direction to step back from the search on Marco.

“I’d asked for some court files on other ICE cases because the stuff on PACER seemed incomplete,” she explained. “I bet one of those counter clerks called him and told him.”

“Anything’s possible. So just stick with Moya for now.”

“Got it.”

“Can you get me whatever you’ve got by the end of the day? I’ve got a long drive up to the prison tomorrow and I could use the reading material.”

“Will do…”

There was a hesitancy about the way she said it. As though there was something else she wanted to say.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I am still wondering if we are going the right way with this. Moya is a better target for us than the DEA.”

I knew what she meant. Casting suspicion on Moya in the upcoming trial would be a lot easier and possibly more fruitful than throwing the light on a federal agent. Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client’s favor. They weren’t always the same thing.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But sometimes you gotta go with your instincts, and mine tell me this is the way to go. If I’m right, the truth shall set Andre free.”

“I hope so.”

I could tell she was not convinced or something else was bothering her.

“You okay with this?” I asked. “If not, I can handle it and you just deal with the other clients.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just a little weird, you know? Things are upside down.”

“What things?”

“You know, the good guys might be the bad guys. And the bad guy up in prison might be our best hope.”

“Yeah, weird.”

I ended the call by reminding her to get the summaries of her research to me before I hit the road to Victorville the next morning. She promised she would and we said good-bye.

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the parking lot at the top of Fryman Canyon. I grabbed the binoculars out of the glove box, locked the car, and made my way down the trail. I then left the beaten path to get to my observation spot. Only when I got there, the rock I had positioned had been moved, and it looked like someone had been using the spot, possibly to sleep at night. The tall grass was matted down in a pattern that would fit a sleeping bag. I looked carefully around to make sure I was alone and moved the rock back to the way I’d had it.

Down below, soccer practice was just getting under way. I put the binoculars to my eyes and started checking out the north net. The goalkeeper had red hair in a ponytail. It wasn’t Hayley. I checked the other net, and there was another goalkeeper but she wasn’t my daughter either. I wondered if she had switched positions and started scanning the field. I checked each player but still didn’t see her. No number 7.

I let the binoculars hang from my neck and pulled my phone out. I called my ex-wife’s work number at the Van Nuys Division of the District Attorney’s Office. The pool secretary put me on hold and then came back and told me Maggie McPherson was unavailable because she was in court. I knew this was not correct, because Maggie was a filing deputy. She was never in court anymore — one of the many things I was held responsible for in the relationship, if it could still be called a relationship.

I tried her cell next, even though she had instructed me never to call the cell during work hours unless it was an emergency. She did take this call.

“Michael?”

“Where’s Hayley?”

“What do you mean, she’s at home. I just talked to her.”

“Why isn’t she at soccer practice?”

“What?”

“Soccer practice. She’s not there. Is she hurt or sick?”

There was a pause, and in it I knew I was about to learn something that as a father I should have already known.

“She’s fine. She quit soccer more than a month ago.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, she was getting more into riding and she couldn’t do both and keep up with her schoolwork. So she quit. I thought I told you. I sent you an e-mail.”

Thanks to the multitude of legal associations I belonged to and the many incarcerated clients who had my e-mail address, I had more than ten thousand messages sitting in my e-mail file. The messages I had cleared earlier in the day while in the DA’s waiting room represented only the tip of the iceberg. So many were unread that I knew there could have been an e-mail about this, but I usually didn’t miss messages from Maggie or my daughter. Still, I wasn’t on firm enough ground to argue the point, so I moved on.

“You mean horse riding?”

“Yes, hunter-jumper. She goes to the L.A. Equestrian Center near Burbank.”

Now I had to pause. I was embarrassed that I knew so little about what was going on in my daughter’s life. It didn’t matter that it had not been my choice to be shut out. I was the father and it was my fault regardless.

“Michael, listen, I was going to tell you this at a better time but I might as well tell you now so I know you got the message. I’ve taken another job, and we’re going to move to Ventura County this summer.”

The second impact on a one-two punch combination is supposed to land harder. And this one did.

“When did this happen? What job?”

“I told them here yesterday. I’m giving a month’s notice, then I’ll take a month off to look for a place and get everything ready. Hayley’s going to finish the school year here. Then we’ll move.”

Ventura was the next county up the coast. Depending on where they moved to, Maggie and my daughter would be anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half away. There were some distances even within Los Angeles County that could take longer to travel because of traffic. But still, they might as well have been moving to Germany.

“What job are you taking?”

“It’s with the Ventura DA’s Office. I’m starting a Digital Crime Unit. And I’ll be back in court again.”

And of course it all came back on me. My losing the election had dismantled her career at the L.A. County DA’s Office. For an agency charged with the fair and equal enforcement of the laws of the state, the place was one of the most political bureaucracies in the county. Maggie McPherson had backed me in the election. When I lost, she lost, too. As soon as Damon Kennedy took the reins, she was transferred out of a courtroom and into the divisional office, where she filed cases other deputies would take to trial. In a way she got lucky. She could’ve gotten worse. One deputy who introduced me at an election rally when I was the front-runner ended up with a transfer out to the courtroom in the Antelope Valley jail.

Like Maggie, he quit. And I understood why Maggie would quit. I also understood that she would not be able to cross the aisle to defense work or take a slot in a corporate law firm. She was a dyed-in-the-wool prosecutor and there was no choice about what she would do — it was only where she would do it. In that regard I knew that I should be happy that she was merely moving to a neighboring county and not up to San Francisco or Oakland or down to San Diego.

“So where are you going to look out there?”

“Well, the job is in the City of Ventura, so either there or not too far from it. I’d like to look at Ojai but it might be too expensive. I’m thinking Hayley would fit in real well with the riding.”

Ojai was a crunchy, New Agey village in a mountain valley in the northern county. Years back, before we had our daughter, Maggie and I used to go there on weekends. There was even a chance our daughter was conceived there.

“So… this riding is not a passing thing?”

“It could be. You never know. But she’s fully engaged for now. We leased a horse for six months. With an option to buy.”

I shook my head. This was painful. Never mind my ex-wife, but Hayley had told me none of this.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “I know this is tough on you. I want you to know that I don’t encourage it. No matter what is going on with us, I think she should have a relationship with her father. I really mean that and that’s what I tell her.”

“I appreciate that.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I stood up off the rock. I wanted to get out of there and go home.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked.

“What is it?”

I realized that I was improvising, running with a half-formed idea that had sprung from my grief and desire to somehow win my daughter back.

“There’s a trial coming up,” I said. “I want her to come.”

“You’re talking about this pimp you’re representing? Michael, no, I don’t want her to sit through that. Besides, she has school.”

“He’s innocent.”

“Really? Are you trying to play me like a jury now?”

“No, I mean it. Innocent. He didn’t do it, and I’m going to prove it. If Hay could be there, maybe—”

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it. There’s school, and I don’t want her taking time off. There’s also the move.”

“Come for the verdict. Both of you.”

“Look, I have to get going. The cops are stacking up around here.”

Cops waiting in the office to file their cases.

“Okay, but think about it.”

“All right, I will. I’ve got to go now.”

“Wait — one last thing. Can you e-mail me a picture of Hayley on the horse? I’d just like to see it.”

“Sure. I will.”

She disconnected after that and I stared down at the soccer field for a few moments, replaying the conversation and trying to compute all the news about my daughter. I thought about what Legal Siegel had told me about moving on past guilt. I realized that some things were easier said than done, and some things were impossible.

24

At seven p.m. that night I walked down the hill and over to the little market at the base of Laurel Canyon. I called for a cab and waited fifteen minutes, reading the community notices on the corkboard out front. The cab took me over the hill and down into the Valley. I had the driver drop me on Ventura Boulevard by Coldwater Canyon. From there I walked the last five blocks to Flex, arriving at the yoga studio shortly before eight.

Kendall Roberts was busy with closing duties at the front counter. Her hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head and there was a pencil stuck through it. The students from the last class were filing out, rolled rubber mats under their arms. I stepped in, got her attention, and asked if I could speak with her after she locked up. She hesitated. I had not told her I was coming by.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“I taught four classes back-to-back. I’m starved.”

“Have you ever been to Katsuya down the street here? It’s pretty good. It’s sushi, if you like that.”

“I love sushi, but I haven’t been there.”

“Why don’t I go down, get a table, and you come when you’re finished here?”

She hesitated again, as though she was still trying to figure out my motives.

“It won’t be a late night,” I promised.

She finally nodded.

“Okay, I’ll see you there. It might be fifteen minutes. I need to freshen up.”

“Take your time. You like sake?”

“Love it.”

“Hot or cold?”

“Uh, cold.”

“See you there.”

I walked down Ventura and stepped into Katsuya, only to find the place crowded with sushi enthusiasts. There were no tables available, but I secured two stools at the sushi bar. I ordered the sake and some cucumber salad and pulled out my phone as I began the wait for Kendall.

My ex-wife had come through with an e-mailed photo of my daughter and her horse. The shot showed Hayley with the horse’s face leaning over her shoulder from behind. The animal was black with a white lightning-bolt stripe running down its long nose. Both girl and horse were gorgeous. I was proud, but seeing the photo only added to my hurt at the news about the impending move to Ventura County.

I switched over to the message app and composed a text to my daughter. She read her e-mails only once or twice a week and I knew that if I wanted to get a message through without delay I needed to text.

I told her that her mother had sent me the photo of her and her horse and that I was proud of her for pursuing riding the way she was. I also said I had heard about the impending move and that I was sorry she’d be so far away but that I understood. I asked her if I could watch her take a lesson on the horse and left it at that. I sent it off into the air and foolishly thought I might get an answer soon after my phone reported the message delivered. But nothing came back.

I was about to compose another text, asking if she got the first, when Kendall suddenly appeared at the open stool next to me. I put the phone in my pocket as I stood up to greet her, successfully avoiding the embarrassment that second text would have brought me.

“Hi,” Kendall said cheerfully.

She had changed clothes at the studio and was wearing blue jeans and a peasant shirt. Her hair was down and she looked great.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

She kissed me on the cheek as she squeezed by me and onto the stool. It was unexpected but nice. I poured her a cup of sake and we toasted and tasted. I watched her face for a negative reaction to the sake but she accepted my selection.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m good. I had a good day. What about you? Kind of a surprise to see you come in the studio tonight.”

“Yeah, well, I need to talk to you about something, but let’s order first.”

We studied the sushi list together and Kendall checked off three different variations on spicy tuna, while I went with California and cucumber rolls. Before the election I had started taking my daughter to Katsuya as her palate grew sophisticated and Wednesday-night pancakes stopped being an attraction. Of course my food interests were stunted compared to hers, and I could never wrap my mind around the idea of uncooked fish. But there were always plenty of other things to eat for the nonadventurous.

Sake was another story. Hot or cold I liked it. I was into my third cup by the time one of the sushi chefs finally leaned over and took our order. I think the quick draw on the drink was in part due to my reason for being there and the conversation I felt obligated to have with Kendall.

“So what’s up?” she said after expertly using a pair of chopsticks to sample the cucumber salad I had previously ordered. “This is like last night — you didn’t have to come all the way out to see me.”

“No, I wanted to see you,” I said. “But I also need to talk to you more about this case with Moya and Marco, the DEA agent.”

She frowned.

“Please don’t tell me I have to go there and talk to that lawyer.”

“No, nothing like that. There’s no depo and I’ll make sure it stays that way. But something else came up today.”

I paused as I still had not formulated how I wanted to approach her with this.

“Well, what is it?” she prompted.

“The case is kind of dicey because of the people involved. You’ve got Moya up there in prison and then you have Marco, the DEA agent, down here, trying to protect himself and his cases. And in the middle of this, you have what happened to Gloria and then my client, who they charged with her killing but I don’t think did it. So a lot of moving parts in this and then this morning I found out that there’s a tracker on my car.”

“What do you mean? What’s a tracker?”

“Like a GPS thing. It means somebody’s tracking me. They know what moves I’m making — at least by car.”

I turned on my stool so I could look at her and directly see how she took this information. I could see the significance of it didn’t register to her.

“I don’t know how long the device has been on there,” I said. “But I went to your house twice yesterday. First with Earl and then last night by myself.”

Now it started to register. I saw the first inkling of fear move into her eyes.

“What does this mean? Somebody’s going to come to my house?”

“No, I don’t think it means that. There’s no reason to panic. But I thought you should know.”

“Who put it there?”

“We’re not a hundred percent sure but we think it was the DEA agent. Marco.”

At this inopportune moment the sushi chef lifted a large leaf-shaped plate over the counter and put it down in front of us. Five sliced rolls were displayed beautifully with pickled ginger and the hot wasabi paste that my daughter called green death. I nodded my thanks to the chef, and Kendall just stared at the food while considering what I just told her.

“I debated whether to even tell you,” I said. “But I thought you should know. Tonight I took precautions. I walked down the hill from my house and caught a cab. They won’t know I’m with you. My car’s sitting out in front of my house.”

“How do you know you’re not being followed, too?”

“I’ve had people working on that all day. It looks like it’s just the electronic tracker.”

If that brought any measure of comfort to her she didn’t show it.

“Can’t you just take it off and get rid of it?” she asked.

“That’s an option,” I said, nodding. “But there are other options. We might be able to use it against them. You know, feed them information that will be confusing or wrong. We’re still thinking about it, so for now it’s still on there. Why don’t you eat some of this?”

“I’m not sure I’m hungry anymore.”

“Come on, you worked hard all day. You said you were starving.”

Reluctantly she poured a dollop of soy sauce into one of the small dishes and mixed in a dab of wasabi paste. She then dipped a slice of one of the tuna rolls and ate it. She liked it and immediately sampled another. I was useless with chopsticks so I used my fingers to take a slice of California roll. I skipped the wasabi.

Two bites later and I was back to business.

“Kendall, I know I asked you this yesterday but I need to do it again. This DEA agent, James Marco, are you sure you never had dealings with him? He’s a dark-haired guy about forty now. Has a mustache, mean eyes. He—”

“If he’s DEA, you don’t have to describe him. I never had any dealings with the DEA.”

I nodded.

“Okay, and you can’t think of any reason you might be on his radar in regard to Gloria Dayton, right?”

“No, no reason.”

“You told me yesterday that one of the services you provided was to bring cocaine. Gloria and Trina got theirs from Moya. Where did you get yours?”

Kendall slowly finished the piece of California roll she was eating and then put her chopsticks down on the little stand next to her plate.

“I really don’t like talking about this,” she said. “I think you brought me here so I would feel cornered and have to answer.”

“No,” I said quickly. “That’s not true and I don’t want you to feel cornered. I’m sorry if I’m pushing this too far. I just want to be sure you’re in the clear, that’s all.”

She wiped her mouth with her napkin. I had a feeling the dinner was over.

“I need to go to the restroom,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up and pushed my stool back so she would have room for egress.

“Are you coming back?” I asked.

“Yes, I’ll be back,” she said curtly.

I sat back down and watched her as she made her way to the hallway in the back. I knew she could leave through a rear door and I wouldn’t know it for ten minutes. But I had faith.

I pulled out my phone to see if my daughter had answered my text but she hadn’t. I thought about texting her again, maybe sending her a photo of the California roll from Katsuya but decided not to push it.

Kendall returned in less than five minutes and slid silently back onto her stool. Before I could speak, she made a statement that she had apparently worked out in the restroom.

“I got the product that I brought to clients from Hector Moya but it was indirectly from him. I bought it from Gloria and Trina at their cost. I never once met their dealer or crossed paths with a DEA agent while I was in that life. It’s something I’ve left behind and I don’t want to have to talk about it with you or anybody else again.”

“That’s perfectly fine, Kendall. I under—”

“When you asked me to dinner I was very happy. I thought… I thought it was for a different reason and I was excited. So that’s why I reacted the way I did when you asked about the drugs.”

“I’m sorry I messed things up. But believe me, I was excited, too, when you said you would meet me. So why don’t we forget about all the work stuff and eat some sushi?”

I gestured toward the platter. Most of our order was still there. She smiled tentatively and nodded. I smiled back.

“Then we need more sake,” I said.

25

On the way back home I decided to let the cab take me all the way to my door. I was tired from the work and news of the day and the hike up the trail at Fryman Canyon. I figured even if someone was watching my house and car, he would only be able to puzzle over where I’d been for the last four hours. I paid the fare, got out, and climbed the stairs to the front door.

At the top I paused to look out across the iridescent landscape. It was a clear night and I could see all the way to the lighted towers in Century City. It reminded me that somewhere near those towers in the lowlands was where Sly Fulgoni Jr. made his pitiful stand in the land of law.

I turned and looked over my other shoulder toward downtown. Farther away, the lights seemed less vibrant, having to fight their way through the smog. I could, however, see the glow of lights from Chavez Ravine — a home game for the Dodgers, who had started the season abysmally.

I opened the door and went in. I was tempted to put on the radio and listen to the ageless Vin Scully call the game but I was too tired. I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water, pausing for a moment to look at the postcard from Hawaii on the fridge. I then went directly to my bedroom to crash.

Two hours later I was on a black horse galloping out of control across a dark landscape lit only by cracks of lightning when my phone woke me.

I was in bed, still fully clothed. I stared at the ceiling, trying to remember the dream when the phone rang again. I reached into my pocket for it and answered without looking at the display. For some reason I expected it to be my daughter, and a tone of desperation infected my hello.

“Haller?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Sly Fulgoni. Are you all right?”

The deeper timbre in the voice told me I was talking to Sly Sr., calling in from Victorville again.

“I’m fine. How’d you get this number?”

“Valenzuela gave it to me. He doesn’t like you too much, Haller. Something about unfulfilled promises.”

I sat up on the side of the bed and looked at the clock. It was two ten.

“Yeah, well, fuck him,” I said. “Why are you calling me, Sly? I’m coming up to see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, not so fast, smart guy. I don’t like you threatening me. Or my son, for that matter. So we need to get a few things straight before you make the long drive up here.”

“Hold on.”

I put the phone down on the bed and turned on the bed lamp. I opened the bottle of water I had retrieved before going to sleep and drank almost half of it down. It helped clear my head.

I then picked up the phone again.

“You there, Sly?”

“Where else am I gonna go?”

“Right. So what things do we need to straighten out?”

“First of all, this co-counsel bullshit you laid on young Sly. Not going to fly, Haller. Moya’s ours and we’re not sharing.”

“Have you really thought this out?”

“What’s to think out? We’ve got it covered.”

“Sly, you’re in prison. It’s going to reach a point where the paper on this is finished and somebody’s got to go to court. And do you really think young Sly is going to walk into federal court, go up against government lawyers and the DEA, and not have his head handed to him?”

There was no immediate answer, so I pressed it further.

“I’m a father, too, Sly. And we all love our kids, but young Sly is working off of the scripts you provide him right now. There is no script when you get into a courtroom. It’s do or die.”

Still no response.

“I didn’t have an appointment when I dropped by the office today. I don’t know exactly what he was doing but it wasn’t lawyer work. He’s got nothing on the calendar, Sly. He’s got no experience and he can’t even answer questions about this case. Those depos you want scheduled for next week? My guess is he’ll get the questions — every question — from you.”

“Not true. That’s not true.”

His first objection to anything I had been saying.

“All right, so he’ll write some of his own questions. It’s still your depo and you know it. Look, Sly, you’ve got a credible cause of action here. I think this could work but not unless you’ve got somebody going in there who knows his way around a habeas hearing.”

“How much you want?”

This time I paused. I knew that I had him and was about to close the deal.

“You’re talking about money? I don’t want any money. I want cooperation on my guy. We share information and we share Moya. I may need him on my case.”

He didn’t respond. He was thinking. I decided to jump in with my closing argument.

“Speaking of Moya, you really want him sitting next to young Sly if this thing goes the wrong way in court? You want him looking at your son when he wants someone to blame after a judge sends him back to Victorville for the rest of his life? I heard some stories today about Moya back in his Sinaloa days. He’s not the kind of guy you want near your son when things turn south.”

“Who told you those stories?”

“Agent Marco did. He visited me, just like I’m sure he visited Young Sly.”

Sly Sr. didn’t respond but this time I didn’t interrupt the silence. I’d said all I had to say. Now I waited.

But it didn’t take long.

“When will you get here?” Sly Sr. asked.

“Well, it’s the middle of the night. I’m going to go back to sleep now and sleep late. Maybe eight o’clock and then I’ll head up there. I’ll process in when I get there, maybe get in to see you before lunch.”

“Lunch around here is at ten-fucking-thirty. I used to have a one-o’clock table every day at Water Grill.”

I nodded. The little things are missed most.

“Okay, then I’ll see you after lunch. First you, then Moya. You remind him that this time I’m on his side. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“See you then.”

I disconnected the call and switched over to the message app. My daughter had still not responded to the message I had sent her almost six hours before.

I set the alarm on the phone for seven and put it on the nightstand. I stripped off my clothes and this time got under the covers. I lay on my back, thinking about things. My daughter, then Kendall. She had kissed me again when we’d separated outside the door of Katsuya. I felt as though things were changing in me. As though I was closing one door and opening another. It made me sad and hopeful at the same time.

Before drifting off I remembered the black horse racing across the field of lightning. I had been holding on to its neck because there were no reins. I remembered holding fast and hanging on for dear life.

26

I came down the front stairs at exactly eight and found Earl Briggs waiting, leaning against his car parked out front and taking in the view of West Hollywood past the shoulders of Laurel Canyon.

“Morning, Earl,” I said.

He took the two Starbucks cups off the hood of his car and crossed the street to the Lincoln. I exchanged the keys for one of the cups and thanked him for thinking of stopping for coffee before we headed off.

The Lincoln had gotten a clean sweep by Cisco the afternoon before. The GPS tracker was still in place but he and his men had found no bugs or cameras on the vehicle.

We headed south to pick up the 10 Freeway east, stopping only to top off the Lincoln’s big gas tank. Traffic was grim but I knew it would thin out once we got past downtown and turned north on the 15. From there it was a straight shot north through the Mojave.

Overnight Jennifer had sent me several e-mails with documents from her research attached. I passed the time by reading through these. The first thing to catch my eye was her analysis of Hector Moya’s habeas petition and what was riding on it. Moya had already been incarcerated for eight years since his arrest. The life term he received because of the gun enhancement under the federal career criminal statute was the only thing currently keeping him behind bars. He was sentenced to six years for the cocaine found in his possession. The life term was added on top of that.

This meant that Moya’s immediate freedom was riding on the outcome of his habeas petition. To me it was an added reason for him to cooperate with me on the La Cosse case and to put his future in more experienced hands than those of Sylvester Fulgoni Jr.

This knowledge also put Marco’s visit with me the day before in better perspective. The DEA agent had to have known as he sat across from me in the Lincoln that a violent man he had put away presumably for life could see freedom soon, depending upon the outcome of a couple of court cases he could not control.

I next reviewed the transcript from Hector Moya’s trial seven years before. I read two sections, one containing the testimony of an officer with the LAPD warrant enforcement team, and the other containing part of the testimony of DEA agent James Marco. The LAPD cop testified about Moya’s arrest and his finding the gun hidden under the mattress in the hotel room. The testimony from Marco contained replies to questioning about the analysis and trace work that was done on the recovered firearm. It was key testimony because it tied the gun to Moya through a purchase in Nogales, Arizona.

About the time we came through the mountains into the Mojave, I grew tired of the reading work and told Earl to wake me when we got there. I then racked out across the backseat and closed my eyes. I’d had a restless sleep after my middle-of-the-night conversation with Sly Fulgoni Sr. and needed to catch up. I knew from prior experience that going into a prison would be exhausting. It was an ordeal that fully taxed the senses. Prison sounds and smells, the drab gray steel set off by the garish orange uniforms of the incarcerated, the mixture of desperation and threat in the faces of the men I’d come to visit — it was not a place I ever wanted to spend an extra minute in. It always felt as if I were holding my breath the whole time I was inside.

Despite the cramped configuration of the backseat, I managed to doze off for almost a half hour. Earl woke me on our approach to the prison. I checked my phone and saw that we had made good time despite the early traffic. It was only ten o’clock and that was when attorney visiting hours began.

“You don’t mind, boss, I’m gonna wait outside on this one,” Earl said.

I smiled at him in the mirror.

“I don’t mind, Earl. I wish I could, too.”

I handed him my phone over the seat. There was no way I would be allowed to take it inside, which was ironic, since most prisoners had access to cell phones.

“If Cisco, Lorna, or Bullocks calls, answer it and tell them I’m inside. Everything else let go to message.”

“You got it.”

He dropped me at the main visitors’ entrance.

The process of getting in to see Fulgoni and Moya went smoothly. I had to show a driver’s license and my California bar card, then sign one document certifying that I was an attorney, and a second certifying that I was not smuggling drugs or other illegal contraband into the facility. After that I was walked through a magnetometer after removing my belt and shoes. I was placed in an attorney-client room and given an electronic alert to clip to my belt. If I was physically threatened by my client, I was instructed to yank the pager-size device off my belt, and an alarm would sound, drawing guards to the room. Of course, I would still need to be alive to pull it but that detail wasn’t mentioned. This had all come about because of one court ruling or another that had prohibited guards from watching over attorney-client meetings in the prison.

I was left alone in the ten-by-ten room to wait. There were a table and two chairs and an electronic call box on the wall next to the door. The waiting was a given. I don’t think I had ever made a prison visit where I walked into the interview room and my client was there waiting for me.

It was routine for attorneys to stack interviews with multiple clients at a prison — even when the cases were unrelated. It saved travel and clearance time to get it all done in one visit. But usually the prisoners were brought in on a timetable that suited the prison staff and was based on the schedules and availability of the prisoners. I had asked the visitor center captain to allow me to visit with Fulgoni first and then Moya. He frowned at the request but said he would see what he could do.

Maybe that was why the wait seemed extraordinarily long. Thirty minutes went by before Fulgoni was finally brought into the interview room. At first I almost told the guards escorting him that he had the wrong guy, but then I realized it was indeed Sylvester Fulgoni Sr. Though I’d finally recognized him, he still wasn’t the man I recalled from the courthouses and courtrooms we both worked at one time. The man shuffling into the room in leg chains was pale and haggard, hunched over, and for the first time, I realized he must have worn a toupee all those years I knew of him in L.A. No such vanity was allowed in prison. The crown of his head was bald and sharply reflected the overhead fluorescent lights.

He took a seat across the table from me. His wrists were cuffed to a waist chain. We didn’t shake hands.

“Hello, Sly,” I said. “How was lunch?”

“Lunch was the same as it is everyday here. Bologna on white bread, unfit for human consumption.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not. I figure when I start liking it, then I’ve got a problem.”

I nodded.

“I get that.”

“I don’t know about you, but back in the day I had clients who liked to hide out in prison. Places like this. It was easier than the streets because you got your three squares, a bed, clean laundry. Sex and drugs readily available if you want ’em. It was dangerous, but the streets were plenty dangerous, too.”

“Yeah, I’ve had a few like that.”

“Well, that’s not me. I consider this place to be a living hell on earth.”

“But less than a year to go, right?”

“Three-hundred and forty-one days. I used to be able to tell it down to the hour and minute but I’m a little more relaxed about that now.”

I nodded again and decided that was enough as far as the pleasantries went. It was time to get down to business. I hadn’t driven all the way up to discuss the pros and cons of prison life or to figuratively pat Sylvester Fulgoni on the back.

“Did you talk to Hector Moya about me this morning?”

Fulgoni nodded.

“That I did. And you’re all set. He’ll take the meeting and he’ll take you as co-counsel with young Sly.”

“Good.”

“I can’t say he’s too happy about it. He’s pretty convinced that you’re in part responsible for him being here.”

Before I could say a word in my defense, there was a booming impact that shook the room and, I assumed, the entire prison. My hand went to my belt and the alarm as my first thought was that there was some kind of explosion and prison break occurring.

Then I noticed that Fulgoni hadn’t even flinched and had a glib smile on his face.

“That was a big one,” he said calmly. “They probably have the B-Two up today. The stealth.”

Of course. I now remembered the nearby airbase. I tried to shake it off and get back to business. My legal pad was on the table in front of me. I had jotted down a few questions and reminders while I waited for Fulgoni. I wanted to start with the basics and lead up to the important questions once I had Fulgoni vested in the conversation.

“Tell me about Moya. I want to know how and when this whole thing started.”

“Well, as far as I know, I’m one of two defrocked lawyers in here. The other guy was part of a bank fraud in San Diego. Anyway, it kind of gets known what you did in the world and people come to you. First it’s general advice and recommendations. Then some come because they want help with a writ. I’m talking about guys in here long enough to be abandoned by their lawyers because they’ve exhausted their appeals. Guys who don’t want to give up.”

“Okay.”

“Well, Hector was one of those guys. He came to me, said the government hadn’t played fair, and wanted to know what he could still do about it. The thing is, nobody had ever believed him. His own attorneys didn’t believe his story and didn’t even put an investigator on it, as far as I could tell.”

“You’re talking about the DEA planting the gun in his room to get the enhancement?”

“Yeah, the enhancement that puts him in here for life. I’m not talking about the powder in the room. He totally cops to that. But he said the gun wasn’t his, and it turns out he’s been saying that since day one but nobody would listen. Well, I listened. I mean, what else am I going to do in here but listen to people?”

“Okay.”

“So that’s your start. My son filed the paper and here we are.”

“But let’s go back to before young Sly filed the habeas petition. Let’s go back to last year. See, I’m trying to put all of this together. Moya tells you the gun was planted. Did he tell you Gloria Dayton planted it?”

“No, he said the cops did it. He was arrested by the LAPD after you made the deal with the DA’s Office. Remember that? Only he didn’t know about any deal until years later — until I told him. All he knew at the time was that the LAPD came through his door with a felony fugitive warrant. They found the coke in the bureau and the firearm under the mattress and that was it. The fugitive beef was for a grand jury no-show. That was nothing compared to the case they had now. He had two ounces of blow in the room and the gun. And then the feds swooped in and scooped the whole thing up and he goes to trial in federal court, where they have the lifetime achievement award. Convenient, huh?”

“Yeah, and I know all of that. I’m talking about the gun. I am trying to track how you went from his story to Gloria Dayton. Your habeas petition says Gloria planted the gun.”

“It was simple. I asked the right questions, and then I took two steps back and looked at the big picture. I came at it from the angle of believing Hector Moya. Like I said, nobody had before. But he came to me and said, ‘Yes, the powder in that room was mine and I’ll do the time for it. But not the gun.’ I figured, why deny one and not the other unless you’re telling the truth?”

I could think of reasons to do exactly that — lie about one thing and not the other — but I kept them to myself for now.

“So… Gloria?”

“Right, Gloria. Hector said the gun was a plant. Well, I had a case once with a firearm enhancement attached. Same thing, but this was a DEA case from the start. No locals. A straight DEA buy bust and the client swore to me he had no gun on him when the deal went down. I didn’t believe him at first — I mean, who goes to buy a kilo with twenty-five K in a briefcase and no gun for backup? But then I started looking into it.”

“You proved the gun was planted to get the enhancement?”

Fulgoni frowned and shook his head.

“Actually, I was never able to prove it. And my guy went down for it. But the unit that made the bust was something called the Interagency Cartel Enforcement Team, which was run by the DEA and headed up by an agent named Jimmy Marco. He’s the same guy who did the swoop and scoop on Moya. So when that name came up in the file I thought there was something to it. You know, that was twice I’d seen this on a case with his name on it. I figured, where there’s smoke there might be fire.”

I thought for a long moment, trying to put the pieces together and understand the moves Fulgoni had made.

“You had the name Marco but he didn’t come into it until after the arrest went down and the locals had found the coke and the gun,” I said in summary. “So if Marco was behind this, then you had to figure out how he got the gun in there for the locals to find.”

Fulgoni nodded.

“Exactly. So I went to Hector and said, what if the gun wasn’t planted by the locals? What if it was already there under the mattress and planted earlier by somebody else? Who was in that room between the time you checked into that hotel and the bust went down? That was four days and I asked him for a list with the names of everybody who’d visited that room in that time frame.”

“Gloria Dayton.”

“Yes, we zeroed in on her. But she wasn’t the only one who had been in that room. There had been at least one other hooker, Hector’s brother, and a couple other associates, too. Luckily, we didn’t have to vet the housekeepers because Hector kept the do not disturb on his door the whole time. But we zeroed in on Gloria because I had a friend run all the names through the police computer and — bingo! — she happened to get popped one fricking day before they took Hector down.”

I nodded. The logic made sense. I would have zeroed in on Gloria as well. I also knew what I would have done next.

“How’d you track down Gloria? She’d changed her name. She moved away and then moved back.”

“The Internet. These girls can change names, locations, doesn’t matter. The business is based on the visual. Young Sly got her booking photo from eight years ago, when she got arrested on a possession and prostitution beef, and then he went online, checking photos on escort sites. Eventually he found her. She’d changed her hair but that was about it. He printed out photos and brought them up here. Hector confirmed.”

I was surprised. Sly Jr. had actually done something that created a significant break in the case.

“And you then, of course, had Junior paper her.”

I said it like the next move had been a matter of routine.

“Yeah, we hit her with a subpoena. We wanted to bring her in to put her on the record.”

“Who was the process server, Valenzuela?”

“I don’t know. Somebody Sly Jr. hired.”

I leaned across the table and started increasing the urgency and momentum, hitting him with the questions without pause.

“Was she photographed to prove receipt?”

Fulgoni shrugged like he didn’t know and didn’t care.

“Was she?”

“Look, I don’t know. I was up here, Haller. What’s so—”

“If there’s a photo, I want it. Tell your son.”

“Fine. Okay.”

“When did you paper her?”

“I don’t know the date. Last year sometime. Obviously before she got killed by her pimp.”

I leaned further across the table.

“How long before she got killed?”

“About a week, I think.”

I hammered my fist down on the table.

“She wasn’t killed by her pimp.”

I pointed across the table at him.

“You got her killed. You and your son. They found out about the subpoena. They couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t talk.”

Fulgoni was shaking his head before I was finished.

“First of all, who is ‘they’?”

“Marco, the ICE team. Do you think they would risk this coming out? Especially if planting firearms was common practice with that team. Think of all the reputations, careers, and cases that would be jeopardized. You don’t think that’s motive for murder? You don’t think they’d risk taking out a hooker if it meant securing their operation?”

Fulgoni held up a hand to stop me.

“Look, I’m not stupid, Haller. I knew the risks. The subpoena was filed under seal. Marco couldn’t have known about it.”

“So she ended up dead a week later and you thought, what, that the pimp did it and it was all just coincidence?”

“I thought what the police thought and what my son read to me out of the newspaper. That her pimp killed her and we missed our chance to have her help Moya.”

I shook my head.

“Bullshit. You knew. You must have known you set things in motion. How many days before the deposition was she killed?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t sched—”

“That’s bullshit! You knew. How many days?”

“Four, but it doesn’t matter. It was under seal. No one knew but her and us.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, only you and she knew, and what did you expect — that she wouldn’t tell someone who might tell somebody else? Or that she might not call up Jimmy Marco, who she used to snitch for, and say, what should I do about this?”

Suddenly I realized something that gave an answer to one of the questions I had been carrying since handling the phony subpoena served on Kendall Roberts. I pointed at Fulgoni’s chest.

“I know what it was. You thought Marco had somebody inside the clerk’s office. Somebody who told him about the sealed subpoena. That’s why your son dummied up the subpoena he had Valenzuela serve on Kendall Roberts. You two didn’t want to do it again — get somebody killed. You wanted her to come in so Junior could find out what she knew about Gloria and Marco, but you were afraid a real subpoena would get back to Marco, even if it was under seal.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Haller.”

“No, I know exactly what I’m talking about. One way or another, your subpoena got Gloria killed. You both knew it and you decided to keep quiet about it and lie low while some poor schmuck went down for it.”

“You’re way off base on this.”

“Really? I don’t think so. Why the subpoenas this week? To me and Marco and the phony one to Kendall Roberts. Why now?”

“Because the petition was filed almost six months ago. We had to move on it or it would be dismissed. It had nothing to do with Gloria Dayton or—”

“That’s such bullshit. And you know something, Sly? You and your son are no better than Marco and Lankford in all of this.”

Fulgoni stood up.

“First of all, I don’t know who Lankford is. And second, we’re done here. And you can forget about Moya. He’s ours, not yours. You’re not seeing him.”

He turned and started shuffling toward the door.

“Sit down, Sly, we’re not finished,” I said to his back. “You walk out of here and the state bar is going to come down all over you and Junior. You’re not an attorney anymore, Sly. You are operating a writ mill in here and feeding cases to a kid who sits in an office in a Dodgers jersey and doesn’t know the first thing about being a lawyer. The bar will tear him up and throw him away. You want that for him? For you? Who will you feed cases to when Junior’s out of business?”

Fulgoni turned around and kicked at the door with his heel to alert the guard.

“What’s it going to be, Sly?” I asked.

The guard opened the door. Fulgoni glanced back at him, hesitated, and then said he needed five more minutes. The door was closed and Fulgoni looked at me.

“You threatened my son yesterday but I didn’t think you’d have the balls to threaten me.”

“It’s not a threat, Sly. I’ll shut you both down.”

“You’re an asshole, Haller.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I’m an asshole. When I’ve got an innocent man facing a murder count.”

He had nothing to say to that.

“Sit back down,” I instructed. “You’re going to tell me how to handle Hector Moya.”

27

The wait between interviews with Fulgoni and Moya was twenty-five minutes and two more teeth-rattling sonic booms. When the door finally opened, Moya stepped in calmly and slowly, his eyes steady on me. He walked with a grace and ease that belied his situation and even suggested that the two men behind him were personal valets, not prison guards. His orange jumpsuit was vibrant and had crisp creases. Fulgoni’s had been faded from a thousand washes and frayed at the edges of the sleeves.

Moya was taller and more muscled than I had expected. Younger, too. I put him at thirty-five tops. He had wide shoulders at the top of a torso that tapered down like a V. The sleeves of his jumpsuit stretched tightly against his biceps. I realized that despite my interaction with his case eight years before, I had never seen him in person or in a newspaper photograph or television report. I had built a visual image based on fantasy. I had him as a small, round man who was venal and cruel and had gotten what he deserved. I wasn’t expecting the specimen standing before me now. And this was a concern because, unlike Fulgoni, Moya was not chained at the ankles and waist. He was as unencumbered as I was.

He accurately picked up on my concern and addressed it before even sitting down.

“I have been here much longer than Sylvestri,” he said. “I am trusted and not chained like an animal.”

He spoke with a strong accent but was clearly understandable. I nodded cautiously, not knowing whether his explanation contained some sort of threat.

“Why don’t you have a seat,” I said.

Moya pulled back the chair and sat down. He crossed his legs and held his hands together in his lap. He immediately looked relaxed, as if meeting in a lawyer’s office instead of a prison.

“You know,” he said, “six months ago my plan was to have you killed in a very painful manner. When Sylvestri spoke of the part you played in my case, I became very angry. I was upset and I wanted you dead, Mr. Haller. Glory Days, too.”

I nodded as though I was sympathetic to his situation.

“Well, I’m glad that didn’t happen. Because I’m still here and I may be able to help you.”

He shook his head.

“The reason I tell you this is because only a fool would think I had no motive to have you and Gloria Dayton eliminated. But I did not do this. If I had, you and she would have simply disappeared. This is the way it is done. There would be no case and no trial of an innocent man.”

I nodded.

“I understand. And I know it means little to you, but I also have to tell you that eight years ago I was doing my job, which was to do my best in the defense of a client.”

“It does not matter. Your laws. Your code. A snitch is a snitch, and in my business they disappear. Sometimes with their lawyers.”

He stared coldly at me through the darkest eyes I think I had ever seen besides my own half brother’s. Then he broke away and his voice changed as he engaged in the business of the day, the tone moving from dead-on threat to collegial cooperation.

“So, Mr. Haller, what must we discuss here today?”

“I want to talk about the gun that was found in your hotel room when you were arrested.”

“It was not my gun. I have said this from the very beginning. No one has believed me.”

“I wasn’t there at the beginning — at least on your side. But I’m pretty sure I believe you now.”

“And you’ll do something about it?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Do you understand the stakes that are involved?”

“I understand that the people who did this to you will stop at nothing to keep their crimes secret — because I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one they did it to. They already killed Gloria Dayton. So we will have to be very cautious until we can get this into open court. Once we are there, it will be harder for them to hide behind their badges and the cover of night. They’ll have to come out and answer to us.”

Moya nodded.

“Gloria — she was important to you?”

“For a time. But what is important to me now is that I have a client in the county jail accused of killing her and he didn’t do it. I have to get him out and I need you to help me. If you help me, I will certainly help you. That all right with you?”

“It is all right. I have people who can protect you.”

I nodded. I expected that he might make such an offer. But it wasn’t the kind of protection I was interested in.

“I think I’m all right,” I said. “I’ve got my own people. But I’ll tell you what. I’ve got a client in the pink module at Men’s Central down in L.A. You think you can get somebody in there to sort of watch over him? He’s in there alone, and I’m worried they’re going to see this thing moving toward a trial in which a lot of these secrets are going to come out. They’ll know that the best way to avoid that is to avoid having a trial.”

Moya nodded.

“If there is no client, there is no trial,” he said.

“You got that right,” I said.

“Then I will see to it that he is protected.”

“Thank you. And while you’re at it, I’d double up on whatever protective measures you have for yourself in here.”

“That will be done as well.”

“Good. Now let’s talk about the gun.”

I flipped a few pages back on my legal pad to get to the notes I had written off the trial transcript. I refreshed myself on the facts and then looked at Moya.

“Okay, at your trial the arresting officer from the LAPD described coming into the room and arresting you, and then finding the gun. Were you still in the room when they found it or had you already been pulled out of there?”

He nodded as if to say he could answer this one.

“It was a two-room suite. They handcuff me and make me sit on the couch in the living room. A man with a gun stood over me while the others began to search through the room. They found the cocaine in a drawer in the bedroom. Then they said they find the gun. He come out of the bedroom and show me the gun in a plastic bag and I said it was not my gun. He said, ‘It is now.’”

I wrote a few notes down and spoke without looking up from the pad.

“And he was the LAPD officer who testified at the trial? An officer named Robert Ramos?”

“That was him.”

“You’re sure he said, ‘It is now,’ when you said it wasn’t your gun?”

“This is what he said.”

It was a good note to have. It was hearsay and therefore might not even be allowed as testimony in a trial, but if Moya was telling the truth — and I believed he was — then it meant Ramos might have had some knowledge of the gun having been planted in the room. Maybe he had been coached to look under the mattress.

“There was no video of the search introduced at your trial. Do you recall seeing anybody with a video camera?”

“Yes, they take a video of me. And the whole room. They humiliate me. They make me take off my clothes for the search. And the video man was there.”

This made me curious. They had video but didn’t use it at trial. Why? What was on the video that made it a risk to show to a jury? The humiliation of Hector Moya? Possibly. But possibly something else.

I made another note on my pad and then moved on to the next thing I wanted to cover.

“Have you ever been in Nogales, Arizona?”

“No, never.”

“You’re sure? Never in your life.”

“Never.”

According to Marco’s testimony at trial, he received an ATF report tracing the gun. According to this report, the weapon was a .25 caliber Guardian manufactured by North American Arms. It was originally purchased in Colorado by a man named Budwin Dell, who then sold it at a gun show in Nogales five weeks before it was allegedly found in Moya’s hotel room. Dell was not a federally licensed firearms dealer, so he was allowed to sell the gun without a background check or a waiting period. An ID check would be the only thing required in a cash deal. An ATF agent assigned to the ICE team was dispatched to Littleton, Colorado, to interview Dell and show him a photo lineup. Dell chose the photo of Hector Moya as the customer he believed had bought the weapon in Nogales. His receipt book credited the sale to a customer named Reynaldo Sante, which happened to be one of the names contained in the numerous false identification packages found in the room where Moya was arrested.

Dell proved to be a key witness at the trial, locking Moya to the gun and the phony ID found in his possession. Though Moya claimed the gun and ID were planted by the police, it must’ve sounded preposterous to the jury.

But now with the knowledge that Glory Days and Trina Trixxx were informants to the DEA agent heading the ICE team, I didn’t think this was preposterous at all.

“Hector, I need you to tell me the truth about something. Don’t lie, because I think the truth will actually help you.”

“Ask me.”

“The false ID in the name of Reynaldo Sante. In trial you said the gun and the ID were planted in the room by the cops. But that wasn’t true, was it?”

Moya thought a little bit before answering. He first nodded his head.

“The ID was mine. Not the gun.”

I nodded. I thought so.

“And you used that ID on previous trips to Los Angeles, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Those trips, when you were checking into hotels under the name Reynaldo Sante, did you also meet Glory Days and Trina Trixxx in your rooms?”

“Yes.”

I wrote a few notes down. My adrenaline was kicking in my bloodstream. I was clearly seeing a path in which to take the La Cosse case as well as Moya’s. I was on the road to finding something out.

“Okay,” I said. “Hector, this is all good so far. I think we can do something with this.”

“What else do you want to know?”

“For the moment, nothing. But I’ll be back to see you. The main thing I wanted today was your cooperation and to know we could work together. I’m going to need you to testify at my other client’s trial. We will build a record in that trial that will support your habeas petition. One case will help the other. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“And testifying is not a problem? Your people will understand what you are doing?”

“I will make them understand.”

“Then we’re good here. The last thing I want to mention is a word of advice on Sylvester Fulgoni.”

“Sylvestri, yes.”

“Sylvestri, then. He was a very good lawyer but he is not a lawyer anymore. So you have to remember that anything you tell him is not protected like it is with anything you tell me. Be circumspect with what you say to him. Understand? Be careful.”

He nodded.

“Okay, and speaking of which, to make things all legal between you and me, you need to sign an authorization that allows me to represent you.”

I had the document ready to go, folded lengthwise in my inside pocket. I slipped it and a pen across the table to him and he signed it.

“Okay, then, I think we’re finished here,” I said. “Stay safe, Hector.”

“And you too, Miguel.”

28

Once in the Lincoln again I told Earl he could take us back to the city.

“How’d it go in there, boss?”

“You know, Earl, I’ve visited a lot of different people in a lot of different prisons and I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a better visit.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, real good.”

I opened the contacts file on my phone and scrolled down to the Vs. I might not have had Fernando Valenzuela on speed dial anymore but I knew I still had his cell on my contacts list. I made the call and wondered if he’d answer when my name came up on the screen. I was about to hang up before it went to message when he finally picked up.

“Yo, Mick, don’t tell me you’re calling me with all of this work you promised me.”

“As a matter of fact, Val, I thought you should know that I’ve partnered up with Fulgoni, so it looks like we’ll be working together again after all.”

“Ain’t that a shame. I’ll believe it when I hear it from Fulgoni, not you.”

“That’s fine. You call him. But there’s something I need from you right now.”

“Of course there is. But I’m not falling for this shit, Haller. I’ll call Fulgoni and if he clears it, then I’ll see what you need.”

“You can do whatever you want, Val. But I need you to text me the photo you took of Giselle Dallinger when you papered her back in November. You got that? Giselle Dallinger. If I don’t get it in the next ten minutes, you’re fired.”

“We’ll see what Sly says about that.”

“Sly and his old man are working for me. I don’t work for them. You’ve got nine minutes now, Val.”

I disconnected the call. Something about Valenzuela always got under my skin. He always acted like he knew something I didn’t, like he had something on me.

“That true?” Earl asked from the front seat. “You and Fulgoni partnering up?”

“Just on one case, Earl. That’s about all I could take with those guys.”

Earl nodded.

I looked around and saw that he had us back on the 15 Freeway heading south. Traffic was sparse and it gave me hope that we might get into L.A. before the afternoon traffic crunch. That would allow me to keep rolling with the momentum the prison visit had brought.

I called Cisco to once again redirect his activities.

“I’m going to need you to go to Colorado.”

“What’s in Colorado?”

“A guy named Budwin Dell. He was a witness against Moya at his trial. He’s an unlicensed gun dealer from Littleton who testified that he sold the gun to Hector Moya at a gun show in Nogales. I think he lied. I think somebody from the ICE team maybe put him up to it. The ATF probably had something on him. I want you to go talk to him and see if he’s going to hold up when I get him on the stand.”

“I’m working five different things here, Mick. You want me to drop it all and catch a plane?”

Sometimes momentum can move you too far too quickly. Cisco had a good point.

“I want you to go when the time is right. But I think this guy’s going to be key.”

“Okay. I’ll get out there by the end of the week. But first I’ll make sure he’s in Colorado. If he’s still on the gun show circuit, he might be anywhere. They’re all the rage these days.”

“Good point. I’ll leave it in your hands, then. You know what to do.”

“Okay, what else you get up there?”

“Sly Fulgoni Jr. subpoenaed Gloria a week before she was murdered. I think that’s what triggered the whole thing. They killed her before she could talk.”

Cisco whistled. He did that whenever a piece of the puzzle fell into place.

“There was no subpoena found in her place. I studied the inventory.”

“Because they took it. That’s why she was killed in her home. They had to find the subpoena or the locals might ask questions.”

“How did they know?”

“Fulgoni filed it under seal, so I’m thinking Gloria told the wrong person about it.”

“Marco?”

“That’s who I’m guessing. But I don’t want to guess. I want to nail it down.”

“Phone records?”

“If there are any. La Cosse said he and Gloria used burners that they changed all the time.”

“I’ll see what I can find. You might have to ask a judge for Marco’s records and we’ll try to match her numbers from the burners.”

“That’ll be a fight to the finish.”

“What else did you get up there, Mick? Sounds like a good trip.”

“Yeah, well, I think I got our case. We just need to nail down this guy Budwin Dell and a few other things…”

Prompted by thinking about the fight that would ensue if I sought Marco’s phone records, I was suddenly struck by where the case’s true battle would most likely be.

“It’s going to be a subpoena case,” I said. “Getting these people into court. Dell, Marco, Lankford — none of them are going to willingly testify. Their agencies will fight it tooth and nail. The feds will even fight my putting Moya on the stand. They’ll cite public safety, the cost to taxpayers, anything to prevent him from being brought down to L.A. to testify.”

“They might have a point on the public safety angle,” Cisco said. “Moving a cartel guy? This could be Moya’s whole plan — to get moved out into the open so his people can make a run at grabbing him. A lot of space between L.A. and Victorville.”

I thought about Moya and the conversation we’d just had.

“Could be,” I said. “But something tells me that’s not the case. He wants out fair and square. And if he wins his habeas, he’ll probably walk on time served. He’s already been in eight years on two ounces. The only thing holding him is the gun enhancement.”

“Well, either way,” Cisco said, “you’re going to need a strong judge. One who will stand up.”

“Yeah, not many of those left.”

It was true. Many judges were already fronts for the state. But even those who weren’t would be hard-pressed to allow me to present the defense I was envisioning. The true battleground of the case would be in the hearings before a single juror was seated. Unless I came up with another strategy to get my witnesses in.

I decided not to think about it for now.

“So how are you making out?” I asked.

“I’m getting close to connecting Lankford and Marco,” Cisco said.

That was good news.

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s a little tentative now, so give me a day on it. It involves a double murder in Glendale. A drug rip-off going back ten years. I’m waiting on records — it’s a cold case, so not a problem getting the docs.”

“Let me know when you know. You heard from Bullocks today?”

“Not today.”

“She—”

“Hey, boss!” Earl said from the front seat.

I looked at his eyes in the mirror. They weren’t on me. They were on something behind us. Something that was scaring him.

“What is—”

The impact was loud and hard as something with what felt like the power of a train plowed into us from behind. I was belted in, but even so, my body was hurled forward into the fold-down tabletop affixed to the back of the seat in front of me, and then thrown against the door as the Lincoln went into a sideways slide to the right. Fighting the centrifugal force of the slide I managed to raise my head up enough to look over the right side doorsill. I saw the freeway guardrail a microsecond before we hit it flush and our momentum took us over it.

The car started tumbling down a concrete embankment, the crunching of steel and shattering of glass sharp in my ears as it flipped once, then twice, then three times. I was whipped around like a rag doll until the car finally came to a metal-grinding stop upside down and at the forty-five-degree angle of the embankment.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes I realized I was hanging upside down by the seat belt. An old man on his hands and knees was staring at me through the broken window on the high side of the car.

“Mister, you all right?” the man said. “That was a bad one.”

I didn’t answer. I reached to the seat belt and pushed the release button without thinking. I crashed down to the ceiling of the car, embedding broken glass in my cheek and aggravating a dozen sore spots on my body.

I groaned and slowly tried to raise myself, looking to the front seat to check on Earl.

“Earl?”

He wasn’t there.

“Mister, I better get you out of there. I smell gas. I think the tank ruptured.”

I turned back to my would-be rescuer.

“Where’s Earl?”

He shook his head.

“Is Earl your chauffeur?”

“Yeah. Where is he?”

I reached up to pull a piece of glass out of my cheek. I could feel the blood on my fingers.

“He got thrown out,” the rescuer said. “He’s lying over there. He looks bad. I don’t think — well, the paramedics will be able to tell. I called them. I called nine-one-one and they’re coming.”

He looked at me and nodded.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Here, let me help you out. This thing could catch on fire.”

It wasn’t until I crawled out and struggled to my feet, hand on my rescuer’s shoulder, that I saw Earl lying facedown on the embankment above the Lincoln. Blood was running down the concrete in a thick stream from his neck and face area.

“You got lucky,” the man said.

“Yeah, I’m Mr. Lucky,” I said.

I took my hand off his shoulder and leaned forward until my hands reached the concrete. I crawled up the embankment to Earl. I knew right away that he was dead. He must’ve been thrown clear and then the car rolled over him. His skull was crushed and his face was misshapen and ghastly to look at.

I sat down on the concrete next to him and looked away. I saw the rescuer looking up at me, an expression of horror on his face. I knew my nose was broken and blood was dripping down both sides of my mouth. I guess I was ghastly to look at as well.

“Did you see what happened?” I asked.

“Yeah, I saw it. It was a red tow truck. The thing hit you like you weren’t even there and then it kept going.”

I nodded and looked down. I saw Earl’s outstretched hand, palm down on the bloody concrete. I put my hand on top of it.

“I’m sorry, Earl,” I said.