37
Jury 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 Ni?oise 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?”
“They don’t have video on the guest floors. But from what we did see of the lobby and elevators videos, we concluded that there was no one in the room she was sent to. She even checked at the front desk and they told her no. You can see it on the video.”
“Why didn’t the state present this video to the jury during the prosecution phase of this trial?”
Forsythe objected, saying the question was argumentative and irrelevant. Judge Leggoe agreed and sustained the objection, but again the question was more important than the answer. I wanted the jurors to wish they had seen the video, whether it was germane to the murder or not.
I moved on.
“Detective, how do you account for the discrepancy between Andre La Cosse setting up the date at the Beverly Wilshire and Gloria Dayton going there and finding the room unoccupied?”
“I don’t account for it.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Sure it bothers me but not every loose end gets tied up.”
“Well, tell us, what you think happened that could explain what seems to be some kind of mix-up on Andre La Cosse’s part?”
Forsythe objected, saying the answer called for speculation. This time the judge overruled, saying she wanted to hear the detective’s answer.
“I really don’t have an answer,” Whitten said.
I checked my notes to see if I had forgotten anything and then glanced at the defense table to see if Jennifer had any reminders. It looked like I was clear. I thanked the witness and told the judge I had no further questions.
Forsythe went to the lectern to see if he could bandage the wounds I had opened in the prosecution’s case during the morning session. He would have been better off passing, because it came off—at least to me—as though he was more worried about semantics than content. He brought out that Whitten had been an undercover narcotics officer in an earlier part of his career. As such he had several confidential sources that fed him tips. None of them, he testified, contacted him through the main number of the police station. That would have been highly unusual and dangerous. They all were given private numbers with which to make contact.
That was all well and good, but it did not speak to Gloria Dayton’s circumstances and gave me an easy setup when it was my turn for redirect. I didn’t even go to the lectern with my legal pad.
“Detective Whitten, how long ago did you work as an undercover narcotics officer?”
“I did it for two years—two thousand and two thousand and one.”
“Okay, and do you still have the same cell phone number from those days?”
“No, I’m in homicide now.”
“You have a new number.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, so what if one of your informants from two thousand and one wanted to call you today because they had information you needed to have?”
“Well, I would direct this person to current narcotics investigators.”
“You’re missing the point of the question. How would that old source of yours reach out to you, since the old established method of contact is no longer in existence?”
“There are a lot of different ways.”
“Like calling the main number of the police station and asking for you?”
“I don’t see an informant who wants to stay an informant doing that.”