The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (37 page)

“Right away, Your Honor.”

I looked back at my notes, got my bearings again, and pressed on. Forsythe’s objection was nothing more than an attempt to break my rhythm. He knew it didn’t stand a chance on its merits.

“So Detective Whitten, this call went out at six forty-seven on the evening of November fifth, just seven days before Ms. Dayton’s murder, correct?”

“Yes.”

“How long did the call last?”

Whitten checked the document.

“It says two minutes, fifty-seven seconds.”

“Thank you. Did you check that number out when you got this list? Did you call it?”

“I don’t recall if I did or not.”

“Do you have a cell phone, Detective?”

“Yes, but I don’t have it on me.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled my own phone. I asked the judge to allow me to give it to Whitten.

Forsythe objected, calling what I was about to do a stunt and accusing me of grandstanding.

I argued that what Forsythe called a stunt was merely a demonstration, not unlike the demonstration a week earlier when he asked the deputy medical examiner to demonstrate on Lankford how the victim’s hyoid bone was crushed during her strangulation. I added that having the detective make the call to the number in question was the easiest and quickest way to ascertain who Gloria Dayton had called at 6:47 p.m. on November 5.

The judge allowed me to proceed. I walked up and handed my phone to Whitten after turning on its speaker. I asked him to call 213-621-6700. He did so and placed the phone down on the flat railing that ran in front of the witness stand.

The call was answered by a woman’s voice after one ring.

“DEA, Los Angeles Division, how can I help you?”

I nodded and stepped forward, picking up the phone.

“Sorry, wrong number,” I said before disconnecting.

I stepped back to the lectern, savoring the pure silence that had followed the voice of the woman who had said DEA. I stole a quick glance at Mallory Gladwell, my alpha juror, and saw an expression that soothed my soul. Her mouth was slightly opened in what I took to be an
Oh My God
moment.

I looked back at Whitten as I pulled a photograph I’d had ready from beneath my legal pad. I asked permission to approach the witness with the defense’s first exhibit.

The judge allowed it, and I gave Whitten the eight-by-ten shot that Fernando Valenzuela had taken of Gloria Dayton when he served her with the subpoena in the Moya case.

“Detective, you have in your hand a photo that has been marked as defense exhibit one. It is a photo of the victim in this case in the moment she was served with a subpoena in a civil matter styled as
Moya versus Rollins
. Can I draw your attention to the time and date stamp on the photograph, and will you read that out to the jury?”

“It says six oh-six p.m., November fifth, twenty twelve.”

“Thank you, Detective. And so, is it correct to conclude from that photo and the victim’s phone records that exactly forty-one minutes after Gloria Dayton was served with the subpoena in the Moya case, she called the DEA’s Los Angeles Division on her personal cell phone?”

Whitten hesitated as he looked for a way out of his predicament.

“It is impossible for me to know if she made the call,” he finally said. “She could have loaned her phone to someone else.”

I loved it when cops dissembled on the stand. When they tried not to give the obvious answer and made themselves look bad in the process.

“So then it would be your opinion that forty-one minutes after being served as a witness in a case involving an incarcerated drug dealer, someone other than Ms. Dayton used her phone to call the DEA?”

“No, I’m not saying that. I don’t have an opinion on it. I said that we don’t know who was in possession of her phone at that moment. Therefore, I can’t sit here and say with certainty that it was she who made the call.”

I shook my head in a feigned show of frustration. The truth was I was elated by Whitten’s response.

“Okay, Detective, then let’s move on. Did you ever investigate this call or Gloria Dayton’s connection to the DEA?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you ever inquire as to whether she had been an informant for the DEA?”

“No, I did not.”

I could tell Whitten was about to blow his cool. He wasn’t getting any protection from Forsythe, who, without valid objection in hand, was hunkering down in his seat, waiting for the damage to end.

“Why not, Detective? Doesn’t this strike you as one of those ‘valid avenues of investigation’ you spoke of earlier?”

“First of all, I knew nothing about the subpoena at that time. And second, informants don’t call the main number of the DEA. That would be like walking through the front door with a sign on your back. I had no reason to be suspicious about one quick call to the DEA.”

“I’m confused now, Detective. So are you now saying you were aware of the call and just not suspicious of it? Or, as I think you just said a few minutes ago, you didn’t even recall checking out that number or the call. Which is it?”

“You’re twisting what I say around.”

“I don’t think so, but let me rephrase. Before testifying here today, did you or did you not know that a call from the victim’s personal cell phone had been placed to the DEA one week before her death? Yes or no, Detective?”

“No.”

“Okay. So then it is safe to say you missed it?”

“I wouldn’t say that. But you can say whatever you want.”

I turned and looked back at the clock. It was eleven forty-five. I wanted to take Whitten in another direction but I wanted to leave the jurors with Gloria’s phone call to mull over at lunch. I knew if I suggested to the judge that we take the lunch break now I would end up in lockup with my client for the next hour.

I turned back to Whitten, needing to string things out at least another fifteen minutes. I looked down at my notes.

“Mr. Haller,” the judge prompted. “Do you have any more questions for the witness?”

“Uh, yes, Your Honor. Quite a few, in fact.”

“Then I suggest you get on with them.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “Uh, Detective Whitten, you just testified that you did not know that Gloria Dayton had been subpoenaed in a case involving Hector Moya. Do you recall when you found out?”

“It was earlier this year,” Whitten answered. “It came to light through the exchange of discovery materials.”

“So, in other words, you learned of the subpoena she received because the defense told you, correct?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with the information once the defense furnished you with it?”

“I checked it out as I check out all leads that come in.”

“And what did you conclude after checking it out?”

“That it had no bearing on the case. It was coincidental.”

“Coincidental. Do you still feel that it was coincidental now that you know that Gloria Dayton’s personal cell phone was used to call the DEA in Los Angeles less than an hour after she was served with the subpoena in a case that accused her of planting a gun on a DEA target?”

Forsythe objected to the question on multiple grounds, and Leggoe had her pick. She sustained the objection and told me to rephrase the question if I wanted to get it in. I simplified and asked again.

“Detective, if you knew back then on the day of Gloria Dayton’s murder that a week earlier she had called the DEA, would you have been interested enough to find out why?”

Forsythe was on his feet again before I finished the question and jumped in right away with his objection.

“Calls for speculation,” he argued.

“Sustained,” Judge Leggoe said without giving me the opportunity to argue.

But that was okay. I no longer needed Whitten to answer. I liked how the question hung out there like a cloud over the jury box.

Sensing it was the right time to pause, the judge called for the lunch break.

I moved over to the defense table and stood next to my client as the jury filed out of the box. I felt as though I had recovered from the Trina Trixxx fiasco and was back on top. I glanced out to the gallery and saw only Moya’s men in the public seats. Cisco had apparently not come back from escorting Trina Rafferty home. And Lorna was nowhere to be seen.

No one had been watching. No one who mattered to me.

J
ury trials always made me hungry. Something about the energy expended in constant wariness of the prosecution’s moves while worrying about my own moves steadily built a hunger in me that started soon after the judge took the bench and grew through the morning session. By the lunch break I usually wasn’t thinking about salad and soup. I usually craved a heavy meal that would carry me through the afternoon session.

I made calls, and Jennifer, Lorna, Cisco, and I agreed to meet at Traxx in Union Station so I could indulge my appetite. They made a great hamburger there. Cisco and I gorged on the basics—red meat, French fries, and ketchup—while the ladies fooled themselves into being satisfied with Niçoise salads and iced tea.

There wasn’t much talk. A little discussion about Trina Rafferty. Cisco reported only that something or someone had scared her shitless and she wasn’t talking, even off the record. But for the most part I stayed in my own world. Like a boxer in his corner between rounds, I wasn’t thinking about the earlier rounds and the punches missed. I was only thinking about answering the next bell and landing the knockout blow.

“Do they ever eat?” Jennifer said.

This question somehow bumped through my thoughts, and I looked across the table at her, wondering what I had missed and what she was talking about.

“Who?” I asked.

She nodded toward the great hall of the train station.

“Those guys.”

I turned and looked through the doorway of the restaurant and into the massive waiting area. Moya’s men were out there, sitting in the first row of stuffed-leather chairs.

“If they do, I’ve never seen it,” I said. “You want to send them a salad?”

“They don’t look like salad eaters,” Lorna said.

“Carnivores,” Cisco added.

I waved our waitress down.

“Mickey, don’t,” Jennifer said.

“Relax,” I said.

I told the waitress we were ready for the check. It was time to get back to court.

The afternoon session started on time at one o’clock. Whitten returned to the witness stand and looked a little less crisp than he had in the morning. It made me wonder if he’d braced himself for the afternoon with a martini or two for lunch. Maybe the whole aloof thing was actually about covering an alcohol habit.

The plan with Whitten now was to use him to set up my next witness. My case was a daisy chain of interlocking witnesses, where one was used to build the path to the next. It was Whitten’s turn now to pave the way for a man named Victor Hensley, who was a security supervisor at the Beverly Wilshire hotel.

“Good afternoon, Detective Whitten,” I said cheerily, as if I was not the same attorney who had brutalized him in the morning’s session. “Let’s turn our attention here to the victim of this horrible crime, Gloria Dayton. Did you and your partner, as part of your investigation, trace her movements up until the time of the murder?”

Whitten made a show of adjusting the microphone to buy some time as he thought about how to answer. I was pleased to see this. It meant that he was on alert and looking for the trapdoor in the simplest of questions from me.

“Yes,” he finally said. “We composed a timeline for her. The closer it was to the time of the murder, the more details we were interested in.”

I nodded.

“Okay, so you checked out the last escort job she went out on that night?”

“Yes, we did.”

“You talked to the man who regularly drove her to her assignations, correct?”

“Yes, John Baldwin. We talked to him.”

“And her last job was at the Beverly Wilshire, correct?”

Forsythe stood up and objected, saying I was going over a timeline that had already been established by Whitten during his direct examination in the prosecution phase. The judge agreed and asked me to break new ground or to move on.

“Okay, Detective, as testified to earlier, there was a disagreement that night between the victim and the defendant, am I right?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“What would you call it, then?”

“You are talking about before he killed her?”

I looked at the judge and widened my hands in a feigned signal of astonishment.

“Your Honor . . .”

“Detective Whitten,” the judge said, “please curtail such prejudicial statements. It is the jury’s role to determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant.”

“I apologize, Your Honor,” Whitten said.

I asked the question again.

“Yes. They had a disagreement.”

“And this disagreement was over money, correct?”

“Yes, La Cosse wanted his share from a client and Gloria Dayton said there had been no client, that nobody was in the room he sent her to.”

I pointed at the ground as if pointing to the moment he just described.

“Did you and your partner investigate that disagreement to determine who was right and who was wrong?”

“If you mean, did we check out whether the victim was actually holding out on La Cosse, yes we looked into it. We determined that the room La Cosse sent her to was unoccupied and that the name La Cosse said he gave her belonged to the guest who was in that room previously but had already checked out. There was no one in that room when she went to the hotel. He killed her for holding out on money she didn’t have.”

I asked the judge to strike Whitten’s last sentence as unresponsive and prejudicial. She agreed and instructed the jury to disregard it, for whatever that was worth. I moved on, hitting Whitten with a new set of questions.

“Did you check to see if the Beverly Wilshire had surveillance cameras on site, Detective Whitten?”

“Yes, and they do.”

“Did you review any of video from the night in question?”

“We went to the security office at the hotel and reviewed their video feeds, yes.”

“And what did you glean from your review, Detective Whitten?”