4
Earl drove me over to the Starbucks on Central Avenue and pulled to the curb out front. I stayed in the car while he went in to get us coffee. I opened my laptop on the worktable and used the coffee shop’s signal to get online. I tried three different variations before typing in www.Giselle4u.com and bringing up the website for the woman Andre La Cosse was accused of killing. The photos were airbrushed, the hair was different, and a plastic surgeon had gone to work since I had last seen her, but I had no doubt that Giselle Dallinger was my former client Gloria Dayton.
This changed things. Aside from the issue of legal conflict regarding my representing a client accused of killing another client, there were my feelings about Gloria Dayton and the sudden realization that I’d been used by her in a way that was not too different from the way she was used by men nearly all her life.
Gloria had been a project, a client I cared about beyond the usual boundaries of the attorney-client relationship. I cannot say why this came to be, only that she had a damaged smile, a sardonic wit, and a pessimistic self-knowledge that drew me in. I had handled at least six cases involving her over the years. All of them involved prostitution, drugs, solicitation of prostitution, and the like. She was deeply embedded in the life but always seemed to me to deserve a shot at rising above it and escaping. I was no hero but I did what I could for her. I got her into pretrial intervention programs, halfway houses, therapies, and even once enrolled her in Los Angeles City College after she had expressed an interest in writing. None of it worked for long. A year or so would go by and I’d get the call—she was in jail again and needed a lawyer. Lorna started telling me I needed to cut her loose or pass her off to another attorney, that she was a lost cause. But I couldn’t do that. The truth was I liked knowing Gloria Dayton, or Glory Days as she was known in the profession back then. She had a lopsided view of the world that matched her lopsided smile. She was a feral cat and she let no one but me pet her.
This is not to say there was anything romantic or sexual about our relationship. There was not. In fact, I’m not even sure we could have properly called us friends. We encountered each other too infrequently for that. But I cared about her and that’s why it hurt now to know she was dead. For the past seven years I thought she had gotten away and that I had helped. She had taken the money I gave her and flown off to Hawaii, where she claimed there was a longtime client who wanted to take her in and help her start over. I got postcards every now and then, a Christmas card or two. They all reported that she was doing well and had stayed clean. And they made me feel as though I had accomplished something rarely achieved in the courtrooms and corridors of law. I had changed the direction of a life.
When Earl got back with the coffee I closed the laptop and told him to take me home. I then called Lorna and told her to organize a complete staff meeting for eight the next morning. Andre La Cosse was due in arraignment court on second call, meaning he would make his first appearance sometime between ten a.m. and noon. I wanted to meet with my team and get things going before then. I told her to pull all our files on Gloria Dayton and bring them as well.
“Why do you want Gloria’s files?” she asked.
“Because she’s the victim,” I said.
“Oh my god, are you sure? That’s not the name Cisco gave me.”
“I’m sure. The cops don’t realize it yet, but it was her.”
“I’m sorry, Mickey. I know you . . . you liked her.”
“Yeah, I did. I was just thinking about her the other day and considering going to Hawaii when the courts are dark over Christmas. I was going to call her if I got there.”
Lorna didn’t respond. The Hawaii trip was an idea I had for getting through the holidays without seeing my kid. But I’d dismissed it out of hope that things would change. That maybe on Christmas Day I’d get a call and an invitation to come over for dinner. If I went to Hawaii, I’d miss the opportunity.
“Listen,” I said, breaking off the thought. “Is Cisco around?”
“No, I think he went over to where the victim—I mean, Gloria—lived, to see what he could find out.”
“Okay, I’ll call him. See you tomorrow.”
“Oh, Mickey, wait. Do you want Jennifer at the meeting, too? I think she has a couple of appearances in county court.”
“Yes, definitely. If she has a conflict, see if she can get one of the Jedi Knights to cover her.”
I had hired Jennifer a few years ago directly out of Southwestern Law School and she carried what was then our burgeoning foreclosure defense practice. That had slowed down in the past year, while criminal defense had picked back up, but Jennifer still carried a big caseload. There was a group of regular lawyers on the foreclosure circuit and they had taken to monthly lunches or dinners to swap stories and strategies. They called themselves the Jedi Knights, which was short for JEDTI, meaning Jurists Engaged in Defending Title Integrity, and the fellowship extended to covering each other’s court appearances when there were time conflicts.
I knew Jennifer wouldn’t mind being pulled away from the foreclosure work to visit the criminal side for a bit. When I hired her, she told me first thing that she wanted a career in criminal defense. And lately she had been suggesting repeatedly in e-mails and our weekly staff meetings that it was time to hire another associate to take over the foreclosure business while she immersed herself more fully in the criminal side. I had been resistant because hiring another associate pushed me closer toward needing the traditional setup with an office, a secretary, a copy machine, and all of that. I didn’t like the idea of the overhead or the brick-and-mortar anchor. I liked working out of the backseat and flying by the seat of my pants.
After ending the call with Lorna I put the window down and let the air blow into my face. It was a reminder of what I liked about the way I did things.
Soon enough I put the window back up so I would be able to hear Cisco on the cell phone. I called him and he reported that he was indeed working a door-to-door canvass of the building where Giselle Dallinger had lived and died.
“Getting anything good?”
“Bits and pieces. She kept to herself mostly. Not a lot of visitors. She must’ve handled her business outside the apartment.”
“How about getting into that place?”
“There’s a security door downstairs. She had to buzz you in.”
Which didn’t look good for La Cosse. The police probably assumed that Dallinger knew her killer and had let him in.
“Any record of activity on the door?” I asked.
“No, it’s not a recorded system,” Cisco said.
“Cameras?”
“Nope.”
That could cut either way for La Cosse.
“Okay, when you’re finished there, I’ve got some stuff for you.”
“I can come back to this. The building manager’s being cooperative.”
“Okay, then. We’re all going to meet tomorrow at eight. Before that, if you can, I want you to run down a name. Gloria Dayton. You can get a DOB from the files Lorna has. I want to know where she’s been for the past few years.”
“You got it. Who is she?”
“She’s our victim, only the police don’t know it.”
“La Cosse tell you this?”
“No, I figured it out on my own. She’s a former client.”
“You know, I could use this as currency. I checked with the morgue and they had not confirmed the ID because the body and the apartment were burned. No usable fingerprints from either. They were hoping her DNA would be in the system or that they could find a dentist.”
“Yeah, well, you can use it if it gets you something. I just looked at the pictures on the Giselle-for-you website. It’s Gloria Dayton, an old client I thought moved to Hawaii about seven years ago. Andre told me he’d been working with her here for the past two years. I want the full picture.”
“Got it. Seven years ago, why’d she go?”
I paused before answering, thinking about the last case I handled for Gloria Dayton.
“I had a case that paid me well and she played a part. I gave her twenty-five grand if she promised to quit the life and start over. There was also a guy. She snitched him off to get a deal. I was the broker. It was just time for her to get out of town.”
“Could that have anything to do with this?”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago and that guy went away for life.”