Hector Arrande Moya. I still remembered his name, the way it rolled off the tongue. The feds had wanted him bad and Gloria knew where to find him.
“I’m going to put Bullocks on that tomorrow,” I said, referring to Jennifer Aronson by her nickname. “If nothing else, we might be able use the guy as a straw man.”
“Can you still take the case with the victim being a former client? Isn’t that some sort of conflict of interest or something?”
“It can be worked out. It’s the legal system, Cisco. It’s malleable.”
“Understood.”
“One last thing. Sunday night she had a trick at the Beverly Wilshire that didn’t come through. Supposedly the guy wasn’t there. Go poke around over there and see what you can come up with.”
“Did you get a room number?”
“Yeah, eight thirty-seven. Guy’s name was Daniel Price. This all comes from La Cosse. He said Gloria claimed the room wasn’t even rented.”
“I’m on it.”
After I finished the call with Cisco, I put the phone away and just looked out the window until we reached my house on Fareholm. Earl gave me the keys and headed to his own car parked against the curb. I reminded him about the early start the next day and went up the stairs to the front door.
I put my stuff down on the dining room table and went into the kitchen for a bottle of beer. When I closed the refrigerator, I checked through all the photos and cards held on the door by magnets until I found a postcard showing Diamond Head Crater on Oahu. It was the last card I had received from Gloria Dayton. I took it off the magnetic clip and read the back of it.
Happy New Year Mickey Mantle!
Hope you are doing fine. All is well here in the sun. I hit the beach every day. You are the only thing about L.A. I miss. Come see me one day.
Gloria
My eyes drifted from the words to the postmark. The date was Dec. 15, 2011, almost a year ago. The postmark, which I’d had no reason to ever look at before, said Van Nuys, California.
I’d had a clue to Gloria’s subterfuge on my refrigerator for nearly a year but I didn’t know it. Now it confirmed the charade and my unwitting part in it. I couldn’t help but wonder why she’d bothered. I was just her lawyer. There was no need to lead me on. If I’d never heard from her, I would not have been suspicious or come looking for her. It seemed oddly unnecessary to me and even a bit cruel. Especially the last line about coming to see her. What if I had come over at Christmas to escape the disaster of my personal life? What would’ve happened when I landed and she wasn’t there?
I walked over to the trash can, stepped on the pedal to raise the lid, and dropped the card in. Gloria Dayton was dead. Glory Days was over.
I took a shower, holding my head under the hard spray for a long time. More than a few of my clients had come to a bad end over the years. It came with the territory, and in previous cases I always looked at the loss in terms of business. Repeat clients were my bread and butter, and knowing I had lost a customer never left me with a good feeling. But with Gloria Dayton it was different. It wasn’t business. It was personal. Her death conjured a raft of feelings, from disappointment and emptiness to upset and anger. I was mad at her not only for the lie she had perpetrated with me but for staying in the world that ultimately got her killed.
By the time the hot water ran out and I cut off the spray, I had come to realize my anger was misplaced. I understood that there had been a reason and purpose to Gloria’s actions. Perhaps she had not so much cut me out of her life as protected me from something. What that was I didn’t know, but it would now be my job to find out.
After getting dressed I walked through my empty house and paused at the door of my daughter’s bedroom. She had not stayed there in a year and the room was unchanged since the day she had left. Viewing it reminded me of parents who have lost children and leave their rooms frozen in time. Only I had not lost my child in such a tragedy. I had driven her away.
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.
5
Earl 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.”