The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (6 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“More,” Lorna said. “It’s a kilo.”

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

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

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

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

“Who brought that?” I asked.

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

“So what’s a kilo of gold worth?”

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

“Bullocks, these are yours.”

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

She slid her notebook in front of her.

“Okay.”

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

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

“Why are we chasing this drug dealer down?”

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

“Right. Straw man defense.”

“Just see what you can find.”

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

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

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

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

A somber moment passed.

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

I turned my attention to Cisco.

“Cisco, what have you got for us?”

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

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

Cisco shrugged.

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

“Giselle Dallinger.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about a sprinkler system?”

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

“Two?” I asked.

This was sounding like something I could use.

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

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

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

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

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

I touched the front of my neck in illustration.

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

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

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

He referred to his notebook again to get a name.

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

“She told you this?”

“She did.”

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

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

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

“How old is Mrs. Stephens?”

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

Jennifer chimed in.

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

Cisco shrugged again.

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

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

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

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

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