The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (17 page)

“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.”

B
efore 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.