“He was fishing. There was only one CI and that was Gloria. What about anything on the docket that is under seal? Did you see anything like that?”
Judges usually sealed records pertaining to confidential informants but the documents themselves were often referenced by number or code on PACER so at least one knew that such records existed.
“No,” Jennifer said. “Just the PSR.”
The presentencing report on Moya. Those were always kept under seal as well. I thought about things for a moment.
“Okay, I don’t want to drop this. I want to see the transcript of that battle over confidential informants and probable cause. You are going to have to go to Pasadena and pull hard files. Who knows? Maybe we get lucky and there is something in there we can use. The DEA or FBI had to testify at some point about how they got to that hotel and to that room. I want to know what they said.”
“You think Gloria’s name could have been revealed?”
“That would be too easy and too careless. But if there is a reference to a specific CI we might have something to work with. Also, ask for the PSR. Maybe after seven years they might let you have a look at it.”
“That’s a long shot. Those are supposed to stay sealed forever.”
“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
“Well, I can head to Pasadena right now. I’ll get back to these Gloria files later.”
“No, Pasadena can wait. I want you to go downtown instead. Are you still up for sitting in for me on the Deirdre Ramsey case?”
“Absolutely!”
She practically jumped through the phone.
“Don’t get too excited,” I quickly counseled. “Like I said this morning, the case is a dog. You just have to ask the judge for a little bit more time and patience. Tell him we know it’s an STD case and we are close to convincing Deirdre that it’s in her very best interest to take the state’s offer and get this behind her. And you have to persuade Shelly Albert, the prosecutor, to keep the offer on the table another couple of weeks. That’s it, just another couple weeks is all, okay?”
The offer was for Ramsey to plead to aiding and abetting and to testify against her boyfriend and his partner in the robbery. In exchange she’d get a three- to five-year sentence. With gain time and time already served she’d be out in a year.
“I can do that,” Jennifer said. “But I’ll probably skip the syph reference, if you don’t mind.”
“What?”
“Syphilis. You called it an STD case. Sexually transmitted disease?”
I smiled and looked out the window. We were cruising through Hancock Park. It was all big houses, big lawns, and tall hedges.
“Jennifer, I didn’t mean that. STD is shorthand from my days at the public defender’s. It means straight to disposition. When I was with the PD twenty years ago, that’s how we divided our caseloads. STDs and STTs—straight to dispo or straight to trial. Maybe now they call them STPs—straight to plea—to avoid confusion.”
“Oh, well, now I’m embarrassed.”
“Not as much as you’d be if you’d said to Judge Companioni that the case has syphilis.”
We both laughed at that. Jennifer had one of the brightest and hungriest legal minds I had ever encountered but she was still gaining practical experience and learning the routine and language of the criminal beat. I knew that if she stuck with it, she would eventually become the state’s worst nightmare when she walked into court.
“Couple more things,” I said, getting back to business. “Try to walk into chambers ahead of Shelly and grab the seat that will put you on the judge’s left.”
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “Why?”
“It’s a left-brain right-brain thing. People are more agreeable toward people on their left.”
“Come on.”
“I mean it. Whenever I stand in front of a jury for closing argument, I move as far right as I can get. So for most of them I’m coming from their left.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Try it. You’ll see.”
“It’s impossible to prove.”
“I’m telling you. There have been scientific tests and studies. You can Google it.”
“I don’t have time. What was the other thing?”
“If you start feeling comfortable enough with the judge, tell him that what will really help us put this to bed is if Shelly drops cooperation from the plea agreement. If Deirdre doesn’t have to testify against her boyfriend, I think we can make this happen. We’re even willing to keep the same sentencing terms, just no cooperation. And tell the judge that Shelly doesn’t need it. She has all three of them on wiretaps talking about the whole thing. And she’s got the DNA from the rape kit matching to the boyfriend. It’s a slam dunk even without Deirdre’s testimony. She does not need Deirdre.”
“Okay, I’ll try. But I was sort of hoping this might be my first criminal trial.”
“You don’t want this to be your first trial. You want that one to be a winner. Besides, eighty percent of criminal law is figuring out how to stay out of trial. And the other half—”
“Is all mental. Yeah, I get that.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Don’t call me boss. We’re associates, remember?”
“Right.”
I put the phone away and started thinking about how I would handle the interview with Stacey Campbell. We were passing the Farmers Market now and were almost there.
After a while I noticed that Earl kept looking at me in the rearview. He did this when he had something to say.
“What’s up, Earl?” I finally asked.
“I was wondering about what you said on the phone. About with people on the left side and how that works.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, one time—you know, back when I was working the streets—I had this guy come up with a gun to rip off my stash.”
“Yeah?”
“And the thing was, back then somebody was going around popping guys for their cash and stash, you know? Just popping them in the head and grabbing it all up. And I was thinking that this was the guy and he was about to do me.”
“Scary. What happened?”
“Well, I talked him out of it. I just talked about my daughter just bein’ born and all. I gave him my stuff and he just ran away. Then later there was an arrest in those other murders and I saw his picture on the TV and it was the guy. The guy that ripped me off.”
“You got lucky there, Earl.”
He nodded and looked at me in the mirror again.
“And the thing is, he was on my right and I was on his left when he came up, and I talked him out of it. It’s kind of like what you were saying there. Like he agreed with me not to kill my ass.”
I nodded knowingly.
“You make sure you tell Bullocks that story next time you see her.”
“I will.”
“All right, Earl. I’m glad you talked him out of it.”
“Yeah, me, too. My moms and daughter, too.”
9
I got to Toast early, waited ten minutes for a table, and then kept it while nursing a coffee for forty-five minutes. There was a line of West Hollywood hipsters who weren’t happy about me monopolizing a coveted table and not even ordering a meal. I kept my head down and read e-mail until Starry-Eyed Stacey showed up at 1:30 and slid into the chair across from me, enveloped in a strong cloud of perfume.
The hair Stacey had put on was a white-blond spike wig with blue highlights at the tips. It went with her so-pale-it-was-almost-blue skin and the wide stripes of glitter paint on her eyelids. I figured that the hipsters who hated me for taking one of their tables were close to rabid about me now. Starry-Eyed Stacey didn’t exactly fit in. She looked like she had escaped from a 1970s glam rock album cover.
“So you’re the lawyer,” she said.
I smiled all business-like.
“That’s me.”
“Glenda told me about you. She said you were
sweet. She didn’t say handsome, too.”
“Who’s Glenda?”
“Giselle. When we first met in Vegas she was Glenda ‘the Good Witch’ Daville.”
“Why’d she change her name when she came here?”
She shrugged.
“People change, I guess. She was still the same girl. That’s why I always called her Glenda.”
“So you had already come out from Vegas and she followed?”
“Something like that. We had stayed in touch, you know. She checked to see how tricks were out here and whatnot. I told her to come out if she wanted to and she did.”
“And you put her in touch with Andre.”
“Yeah, to set her up online and take her bookings.”
“How long had you known Andre?”
“Not so long. You think we can get any service around here?”
She was right, the waitress who had so attentively asked me every five minutes if I was going to order something was now nowhere to be seen. My guess was that Stacey had that effect on people, especially women. I got the attention of a busboy and told him to fetch our waitress.
“How did you find Andre?” I asked while we waited.
“That was easy. I went online and started looking at other girls’ sites. He was the site administrator on a lot of the good ones. So I e-mailed him and we hooked up.”
“How many sites does he manage?”
“I don’t know. You gotta ask him.”
“Did you ever know Andre to be physically abusive to any of the women he managed?”
She snickered.
“You mean like a real pimp?”
I nodded.
“No. When he wants to get rough, he knows people who can do the rough stuff for him.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know any names. I just know he’s not that physical. And there were a few times when some guy was trying to chip off his deal and he had to put a stop to it. At least that’s what he told me.”
“You mean guys trying to take over the online stuff?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“You know who they were?”
“No, I don’t know names or anything. Just what Andre told me.”
“What about the guys who do the rough stuff for him? You ever see those guys?”
“I saw them once when I needed them. Some guy wouldn’t pay and I called Andre when the john was in the shower. His guys showed up like that.”
She snapped her fingers.
“They made him pay, all right. The guy thought that because he was on some show on cable that nobody ever heard of he didn’t have to pay. Everybody pays.”
The waitress finally came back to the table. Stacey ordered a BLT on what else?—toast—and a Diet Coke. I went with chicken salad on a croissant and switched from coffee to iced tea.
“Who was Glenda hiding from?” I asked as soon as we were alone again.
Stacey handled the jump cut in direction pretty casually.
“Isn’t everybody hiding from somebody or something?”
“I don’t know. Was she?”
“She never talked about it, but she looked over her shoulder a lot, if you know what I mean. Especially when she came back here.”
This wasn’t getting anywhere.
“What did she tell you about me?”
“She said that when she lived out here before, you were her lawyer, but she could never call you again if she took a bust.”
The waitress put down our drinks and I waited until she was gone.
“Why couldn’t she call me?”
“I don’t know. Because it would all unravel, I guess.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected. I thought that she would say that Glenda could never call me because it would expose her betrayal.
“Unravel? Was that her word?”
“That’s what she said, yeah.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“I don’t know, she just said things. She said it could unravel. I don’t know what it meant and she didn’t say any more about it.”
Stacey was starting to act put out by the questioning. I leaned back and thought about things. Besides offering a few tantalizing words with no further explanation, she wasn’t much help. I guess I had been foolish to think Gloria Dayton—if that was even her real name—had confided in another prostitute about her distant past.
All I knew now was that the whole thing depressed me. Gloria-Glenda-Giselle had been inextricably bound to the life. Unable to leave it, and it eventually took everything away from her. It was an old story and in a year’s time it would be forgotten or replaced by the next one.
Our food came but I had lost my appetite. I watched Starry-Eyed Stacey put globs of mayonnaise on her BLT and eat it like a little girl, licking her fingers after the first bite. And that didn’t lift my spirits either.
10
I sat in the backseat for a long time thinking about things. Earl kept looking at me in the rearview, wondering when I would give him directions. But I didn’t know where to go next. I thought about waiting for Stacey Campbell to come out of the restaurant after using the restroom and following her home so I knew where she lived, but I knew Cisco could run her down if I needed her again. I checked my watch and saw it was quarter to three. Bullocks was probably in the middle of things with the status conference in Judge Companioni’s chambers. I decided to wait a while before checking in with her.
“The Valley, Earl,” I finally said. “I want to go watch practice.”
Earl turned the ignition and we were off. He took Laurel Canyon up the mountain to Mulholland Drive. We turned west and after a few curves came to the parking lot entrance for Fryman Canyon Park. Earl pulled into a space, opened the glove box, and handed the binoculars over the seat to me. I took off my jacket and tie and left them on the backseat as I got out.
“I’ll probably be a half hour or so,” I said.
“I’ll be here,” he said.
I closed the door and walked off. Fryman Canyon descends the northern slope of the Santa Monica Mountains all the way down into Studio City. I took the Betty Dearing Trail down until it split east and west. This is where I went off the trail and farther down through the brush until I reached a promontory with open views of the sprawling city below. My daughter had transferred this year to the Skyline School, and its campus backed up from Valleycrest Drive to the edge of the park. The campus was on two elevations; the lower level contained the academic buildings, and the upper side was where the sports complex was located. By the time I got to the viewing spot, soccer practice was already under way below. I scanned the field with the binoculars and found Hayley in the far goal. She was the team’s starting goalkeeper, which was an improvement over her previous school, where she was second string.
I sat on a large rock I had pulled up from the ground and positioned on a previous visit to the spot. After a while I let the binoculars hang around my neck and I just watched with my elbows on my knees, face in my hands. She was denying everything until one shot with a perfect shape to it got by her, hit the cross bar, and then was put in on the rebound. The bottom line was that she looked like she was having fun and the concentration of the position likely crowded out all other thoughts. I wished that I could do that. Just forget about Sandy and Katie Patterson and everything else for a while. Especially at night when I closed my eyes to sleep.
I could’ve gone to court to force the issue with my daughter, make a judge order visitation and compel her to stay with me every other weekend and every other Wednesday, like it used to be. But I knew that would only make things worse. You do that to a sixteen-year-old and you could lose her forever. So I let her go and began a waiting game. Waiting and watching from afar. I had to have faith that Hayley would eventually come to realize that the world was not black and white. That it was gray and the gray area was where her father dwelled.
It was easy for me to keep that faith because there was no other choice. But it was not
so easy to face the larger question that floated above that faith like a storm cloud. The question of how you can hope and expect someone to forgive you when deep down you don’t forgive yourself.
My phone buzzed and I took a call from Bullocks, who had just left the courthouse downtown.
“How did it go?”
“I think good. Shelly Albert wasn’t happy about it, but the judge pressed her on the cooperation component of the disposition and she finally caved. So we have a deal if we can sell it to Deirdre.”
As it was a status conference in camera, Ramsey hadn’t been required to be there. We would have to visit the jail and present the new terms of the offer from the DA.
“Good. How long do we have?”
“Basically forty-eight hours. She’s giving us till close of shop Friday. And the judge wants to hear from us on Monday.”
“Okay, then we go see her tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to her and you sell her on it.”
“Sounds good. Where are you? I hear yelling.”
“I’m at soccer practice.”
“Really? You and Hayley have patched things up? That’s fan—”
“Not exactly. I’m just watching. So what’s your next move?”
“I guess I go back to the law library and hit those files. I think it’s probably too late to go out to Pasadena to pull transcripts”
“All right, well, I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks for taking Ramsey for me.”
“Happy to. I really liked it, Mickey. I want more criminal.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Oh, one other thing. You got another second?”
“Sure. What?”
“I sat to the judge’s left like you said, and you know, I think it worked. He patiently listened to me every time I spoke, and he kept cutting Shelly off every time she responded.”
I could have mentioned that the judge’s attentiveness might have had something to do with Jennifer Aronson’s being an attractive, energetic, and idealistic twenty-six-year-old and Shelly Albert’s being a lifer in the DA’s Office who seemed to carry the burden of proof in her slumped shoulders and permanent frown.