12
I walked back through the courtroom with my head down, oblivious of the hearing that Judge Leggoe had started following ours. I moved toward the rear exit, pondering the story La Cosse had just told me, that he had reached out to me following his arrest because Gloria Dayton had wanted me to know if something happened to her, not necessarily because she thought I should be his attorney. There was a significant difference in the stories and it helped ease the burden I’d carried for months in regard to Gloria. But did she want me to get this message so I would avenge her, or was it to warn me about some unseen danger? The questions put a new complexion on how I viewed things about Gloria and even myself. I now realized that Gloria might have known or at least feared that she was in danger.
The moment I stepped out of the courtroom and into the crowded hallway I was confronted by Fernando Valenzuela—the bondsman, not the former baseball pitcher. Val and I went way back and once shared a working relationship that was financially beneficial to both parties. But things turned sour years ago and we drifted apart. When I needed a bondsman these days, I usually went to Bill Deen or Bob Edmundson. Val was a distant third on that list.
Valenzuela handed me a folded document.
“Mick, this is for you.”
“What is it?”
I took the document and started to unfold it one handed, waving it to get it open.
“It’s a subpoena. You’ve been served.”
“What are you talking about? You’re running process now?”
“One of my many skills, Mick. Guy’s gotta make a living. Hold it up for me.”
“Fuck that.”
I knew the routine. He wanted to take a photo of me with the document to prove service. Service had been made but I wasn’t going to pose for pictures. I held the paper behind my back. Valenzuela took a photo with his phone anyway.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“This is totally unnecessary, Val,” I said.
He put his phone away and I looked at the paper. I immediately saw the styling of the case; Hector Arrande Moya vs Arthur Rollins, warden, FCI Victorville. It was a 2241 filing. This was a permutation of a habeas petition that was known by lawyers as a “true habeas,” because rather than being a last-ditch effort grasping at legal straws like ineffective counsel, it was a declaration that startlingly new evidence was now available that proved innocence. Moya had something new up his sleeve and somehow it involved me, meaning it must involve my late client Gloria Dayton. She was the only link between Moya and me. The basic cause of action in a 2241 filing was the claim that the petitioner—in this case, Moya—was being unlawfully detained in prison, and thus the civil action directed against the warden. There would be something more in the full filing, the claim of new evidence designed to get a federal judge’s attention.
“Okay, Mick, so no hard feelings?”
I looked over the paper at Valenzuela. He had his phone out again and took my photo. I had forgotten he was even there. I could’ve gotten mad but I was too intrigued now.
“No, no hard feelings, Val. If I knew you were a process server, I would have been using you myself.”
Now Valenzuela was intrigued.
“Anytime, man. You’ve got my number. Money’s tight in the bond market right now, so I’m just picking up the slack. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah, but you tell your employer on this that lawyer to lawyer, a subpoena is not the way to . . .”
I paused when I read the name of the lawyer issuing the subpoena.
“Sylvester Fulgoni?”
“That’s right, the firm that puts the F-U in litigation.”
Valenzuela laughed, proud of his clever response. But I was thinking of something else. Sylvester Fulgoni was indeed a onetime ball buster when it came to practicing law. But what was unusual about being subpoenaed by him to give a deposition was that I knew he had been disbarred and was serving time in federal prison for tax evasion. Fulgoni had built a successful practice primarily suing law enforcement agencies over color-of-law cases—cops using the protection of the badge to get away with assault, extortion, and other abuses, sometimes even murder. He had won millions in settlements and jury verdicts and taken his fair share in fees. Only he hadn’t bothered to pay taxes on most of it and eventually the governments he so often sued took notice.
Fulgoni claimed he was the target of a vindictive prosecution designed to stop his championing of victims of law enforcement and government abuse, but the fact was he hadn’t paid or even filed his taxes for four successive years. You get twelve taxpayers in the box and the verdict always comes out against you. Fulgoni appealed the guilty verdict for nearly six years but eventually time ran out and he went to prison. That was only a year ago and I now had a sneaking suspicion that the prison he’d ended up in was the Federal Correctional Institution at Victorville, which also happened to be home to Hector Arrande Moya.
“Is Sly already out?” I asked. “He couldn’t have gotten his bar ticket back already.”
“No, it’s his son, Sly Jr. He’s on the case.”
I had never heard of a Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. and I didn’t recall Sylvester Sr. being much older than me.
“He must be a baby lawyer, then.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never met the man. I deal with the office manager there and I gotta go, Mick. I’ve got more goodies to deliver.”
Valenzuela patted the satchel he had slung over his shoulder and turned to head down the courthouse hallway.
“Any more on this case?” I asked, holding up the subpoena.
Valenzuela frowned.
“Come on, Mick, you know I can’t be—”
“I send out a lot of subpoenas, you know, Val. I mean, whoever gets my business stands to make some pretty good coin month to month. But it’s gotta be somebody I trust, you know what I mean? Somebody who’s with me and not against me.”
Valenzuela knew exactly what I meant. He shook his head and then his eyes lit when he came up with a way out of the corner I had put him in. He signaled me over with his finger.
“Say, Mick, maybe you can help me out,” he said.
I stepped over to him.
“Sure,” I said. “What do you need?”
He opened his satchel and started looking through the papers in it.
“I gotta go over to the DEA to see this agent over there named James Marco. You have any idea where the DEA is in the Roybal Building?”
“The DEA? Well, it depends if he’s on one of the task forces or not. They have them spread around that building and other places in town.”
Valenzuela nodded.
“Yeah, he’s part of something called Interagency Cartel Enforcement Team. I think they call it ICE-T or something like that.”
I thought about that, the intrigue of the subpoena and everything else building inside of me.
“Sorry, I don’t know where they’re at in there. Anything else I can help you with?”
Valenzuela went back to looking through his bag.