“No comment.”
“He must have ruffled a few feathers.”
“No comment.”
“It’s too early to rule out the possibility that somebody killed him because they were unhappy about a business or personal matter.”
“That’s something to discuss with your client.”
We will. “King was divorced twice. He had a reputation for treating people poorly—especially women.”
“All I know is what I’ve seen in the papers.”
“What makes you think our client was involved?”
“She injected King.”
“How do you know?”
His eyes narrowed. “We know.”
“Heroin?”
“No comment.”
“Are you suggesting our client supplied it and injected King with intent to kill?”
“No comment.”
“Had they met before last night?”
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Is she a hooker?”
“She’s definitely a looker.”
“You think King was paying her for sex?”
“We found five grand in unmarked bills in her purse.”
That would fall squarely into the category of bad optics. “Who found the body?”
“The victim’s security chief. He called 9-1-1. Your new client tried to flee, but he stopped her. She made no effort to help King.”
Not good. “We’ll need a list of everybody who was there last night.”
“It will be in my report.”
I tried again. “How can you be so sure that our client injected the decedent?”
“We have it on video.”
4
“SEXY LEXY”
The petite young woman with straight black hair, chiseled cheekbones, and delicate features stared at us through glassy brown eyes and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Are you my lawyers?”
Rosie answered her. “At the moment, yes. We’ll make a final determination after you complete our intake procedures.”
At four-thirty a.m., Alexa Low had just finished a brief intake interview, been showered with disinfectant, and completed a perfunctory medical exam. Her fair skin had a pale cast from a light bulb dangling from the ceiling of a windowless eight-by-ten-foot consultation room on the fourth floor of County Jail #2, the Costco-like structure jammed between the Hall of Justice and I-80 in the nineties. The cops had dubbed it the “Glamour Slammer.”
Our new client’s voice filled with desperation. “I need you to get me out of here.”
Rosie invoked the maternal tone that I had heard for the first time when I was a rookie public defender. “We’ll do everything that we can, Ms. Low.”
“Lexy.”
“Rosie Fernandez. I’m the Public Defender. This is Mike Daley. He’s the head of our Felony Division.”
“I didn’t expect to see the Public Defender at this hour.”
“It’s Christmas Eve. We gave our deputies the night off.”
“Will you be handling my case?”
“We’ll decide on staffing in due course.”
Lexy cut to the chase. “I didn’t kill Jeff.”
“We’ll talk about what happened in a few minutes.”
Rosie was being coy for strategic reasons. Neither of us wanted to ask Lexy flat-out if she’d killed King. If we knew that the answer was yes, we couldn’t let her lie about it in court. We defense lawyers find creative ways to dance around this rule, but it’s better to avoid the issue altogether.
Rosie started with the basics. “What is your full name?”
“Alexa Susan Low.” She said that she was twenty-five.
“Are you hurt or sick?”
“No.”
“Did they give you something to eat?”
She took a sip of water from a paper cup. “A tuna sandwich.” She declined Rosie’s offer of additional food.
“What have you told the police?”
“Just my name and date of birth.”
“Good. Have you talked to anybody else?”
“No.”
“Even better. Rule Number One: You don’t talk to anybody except Mike and me. Not the cops. Or Inspector Lee. Or the press. Or anybody in the hallway. And especially none of the other detainees. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a cell phone or laptop?”
“Both. The police took them.”
“Did you give them your passwords?”
“No.”
“Is there anything that might be problematic if they manage to crack your passwords?”
She thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think so.”
“Good.” Rosie’s voice softened. “Who can we call for you?”
“Nobody.”
“Somebody must be worried about you.”
“Nobody,” she repeated.
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No.”
“Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“No.” She confirmed that she had no roommates, either.
“Parents?”
“Gone.” Lexy explained that her mother had died in an auto accident two years earlier. She had never met her father. She had no siblings.
“Friends?”
“Not anymore.”
How sad.
Rosie asked if she had ever been arrested.
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Daly City.” She said that she had graduated from Cal four years earlier.
Rosie pointed at me. “Mike’s a Cal alum, too.”
Go Bears. I asked, “What did you study?”
“Computer science.” She said that her first job was as a programmer at Uber. Then she moved to a FinTech startup. “We competed with Bitcoin.”
“You must have been well compensated,” Rosie said.
“I was.” Lexy’s eyes turned down. “I lost my job about a year ago. I had a disagreement with my boss.”
“About work?”
“About his hands. He couldn’t keep them off me.”
“Did you report him to HR?”
“Yes. The first time, they did nothing. The second time, they gave him a warning. The third time, they fired me. I looked for another job, but they blackballed me.”
“That’s illegal,” I said.
“It was his word against mine. You know how it goes.”
Unfortunately, I do. “Where do you live?”
“When they have room, in a shelter in the Mission. Some nights, on the street.”
“Your driver’s license lists an address in an apartment near the ballpark.”
“I don’t live there anymore. I ran out of money about six months ago. I had to move out of my apartment, sell my car, and default on my student loans.”
She had covered a lot of territory in a short period.
Rosie kept her tone even. “What haven’t you told us?”
Lexy pulled up her sleeve and showed us needle marks. “Heroin.”
I wasn’t surprised.
Rosie and I sat in silence as Lexy filled in details. Raised by a single mother in Daly City. Graduated at the top of her class from Jefferson High School and worked her way through Cal. A programmer at Uber for two years. Recruited to a FinTech startup. At first, she was well-respected, well-liked, and well-compensated. Then her supervisor started hitting on her. When she rebuffed his advances, she was fired. Around the same time, her mother died in an auto accident, and she started taking anti-depressants. Then she injured her knee while jogging. She got hooked on pain killers and medical marijuana. That led to stronger drugs and, ultimately, heroin. Her habit got more expensive as her income disappeared.
Her tone was somber. “I lost my job. I lost my mother. I lost my savings. I lost my apartment. I lost everything.”
Rosie’s lips turned down. “Are you getting treatment?”
“Some
times.”
Rosie and I exchanged a glance. In the best of circumstances, dealing with addiction was extraordinarily difficult. It was even harder for somebody who was unemployed and living in a shelter. It would be almost impossible for somebody in custody.
I told her that we would ask for a medical evaluation. “I’ll need you to sign a HIPAA form and give us authorization to obtain your medical records. We’ll make sure that you get treatment.”
Her voice was flat. “Fine.”
“Were you high last night?”
“I took a little smack to take off the edge.”
“Drinking?”
“Just a glass of wine.”
That would seem to rule out a “diminished mental capacity” defense. “Do you have any money in the bank?” I hated asking this question, but it was my job.
“A couple hundred dollars.” She said that she owed ninety thousand on her student loans. “I thought about bankruptcy, but it wouldn’t have gotten rid of them.”
It wasn’t a good time to ask why she hadn’t paid off her loans while she was flush. “We’ll need you to complete a financial declaration and a request for appointed counsel. If your financial story checks out, it’s likely that you’ll qualify for our services.”
“Thank you.” There was a hint of light in her eyes. “When can you get me out of here?”
That’s always the top priority. “The earliest will be at an arraignment. Given the holiday, it’s unlikely to happen before Wednesday.”
“What can you do now?”
“First, you need to understand that you have to be completely honest with us. It’s our only absolute rule. We can’t be blindsided in court or when we talk to the D.A.”
“Understood.”
Here goes. “Tell us about your relationship with Jeff King.”
“I’ve known him for about six months.”
“You knew that he was married?”
“Yes. Unhappily.”
“You were dating?”
“We were having sex and doing drugs. Crystal meth. Speed. Heroin. Designer stuff.”
“Which you provided?”
“If you were a billionaire, would you accept drugs from somebody you met on the Internet?”
“Probably not.” Stranger things have happened. “He paid you for sex?”
“I’m not a hooker, Mr. Daley. We had a sophisticated relationship.”
At the risk of being judgmental, it doesn’t seem sophisticated to me. “You met online?”
“Yes.”
“Match? Tinder?”
“Mature Relations.”
“I’m not familiar with that site.” Or any other hookup site, for that matter.
“It’s like Sugar Daddy with a more exclusive clientele.”
“Sugar Daddy?”
“It’s a site for affluent people seeking mature romantic relationships.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m having trouble grasping how this arrangement could result in anything resembling romance.
Her voice remained even. “It’s like every dating site. You set up a profile and post photos. You also specify how much you’re willing to spend, and how much you expect your match to spend on you. You provide financial information. They plug it into the algorithm and send you a list of names.”
Very romantic. “How did you qualify?
“Do you think they really check your assets?”
Guess not.
“Jeff liked my photo. He wanted to sleep with me. That’s all that mattered.”
“Did you have any other patrons from Mature Relations?”
“No.”
“Is your listing still active?”
“Yes. My handle is ‘Sexy Lexy.’”
Of course. “We’ll need your login and password to take it down. It will not enhance your credibility with potential jurors if a screenshot appears on the front page of the Chronicle.”
“Fine.” Her tone turned pointed. “In a perfect world, I wouldn’t be hooking up with rich old guys, but I’m not the only person doing it. People in tech work crazy hours. Nobody has time to meet people in bars. Jeff had an unhappy marriage and wanted something that I was able to provide. I liked him well enough, and I needed the money. It was working pretty well.”
Until last night. “Did his wife know?”
“Probably. It isn’t public, but they were separated. They are getting divorced.”
According to Rosie, his marriage had been portrayed in a more idyllic light in the Chronicle. “You understand that once the press gets wind of this, it won’t look good.”
“Jeff and I didn’t invent this stuff. Mature Relations has more than ten million subscribers. Everybody does it.”
Well, not everybody. “Let’s go back to the beginning. I want you to tell us everything that happened last night from the minute you arrived until the cops showed up.”
5
“THERE WAS A ‘CUDDLE PUDDLE’”
Lexy was drinking her third cup of water. “It was just business,” she insisted.
“How many times had you seen King before last night?” I asked.
“About a dozen. Usually at the house here in San Francisco. A couple of times at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto. Once at a resort in Carmel Valley.”
“What about his house in Palo Alto?”
“Never. His wife and baby lived there.”
Kudos for discretion. “He invited you to his house knowing that others would be there?”
“Sometimes your urges trump your judgment.”
“When did he invite you to the party?”
“I got a text from him around eight o’clock last night. He had just landed at SFO. He’d been travelling all week, and he wanted a little action.”
“He didn’t want to see his daughter?”
“He wanted to see me.”
I was beginning to see why King and his wife had separated. Rosie and I got married after a brief romance while we were working at the P.D.’s Office. She had just spun out of a bad marriage. I had spent three unhappy years as a priest. We were young, stubborn, and incompatible. Nowadays, we’re older, still stubborn, and more compatible. We’ve also learned that we need our own spaces. That’s why we’ve maintained separate residences in Marin County, even though we spend many nights together. We weren’t good at being married, but we never cheated.
Lexy was warming up. “Jeff invited some people to his house to thank them for their work on the IPO. He asked me to come over later. He said that I shouldn’t talk to the guests. He told me to go upstairs and wait in his bedroom until everybody left.”
Because a good family man didn’t want his high-flying pals to meet the woman he had met on Mature Relations. “You were okay with it?”
“It was part of our deal. We were never seen together.”
“He provided the heroin?”
“Always. Every time we met at his house, he left it in a drawer in the master bath.”
“Some of the guests were still there when you arrived?”
“Yes. The party ran late.”
“Did you talk to anybody?”
“No. I went straight upstairs.”
Rosie reasserted herself. “Do you know the name of King’s supplier?”
“No.”
“How many people were at the party?”
“About a dozen.” She said that there were about an equal number of men and women. “I presume that the men worked for the company or were involved in the IPO. The women were there to entertain them.”
“Hookers?”
“That’s not how it works in the Valley. You need an invitation. A lot of successful women would give anything to be invited to a party at Jeff’s house. A few are gold diggers. Most are looking for business connections.”
Or other connections.
She read my expression and asked, “Have you ever been to a Silicon Valley party?”
Do I look like a guy who hangs out with people like King? “Afraid not.”
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“A bunch of horny guys with money hit on pretty women invited to show up and flirt. They’re expected to go home with the men. The sex is often supplemented by high-end pharmaceuticals. It’s demeaning, but it’s the way things work.”
Yup, it’s demeaning.
Rosie was a master at hiding her emotions, but I saw the disgust in her eyes. “What time did you get there?” she asked.
“Around eleven. The party was pretty tame. The houses on the hill are close together and everybody has security, so you need to keep it down or they’ll call the cops.”
“Did you see anything downstairs?”
“Not much. I looked into the living room as I headed upstairs. People were eating, drinking, vaping, smoking weed, and doing some harder stuff. There was a ‘cuddle puddle.’”
During my three years as a priest and two decades as a lawyer, I had never encountered this term. “A ‘cuddle puddle’?”
“People get high and make out in groups on the sofa and the floor.”
Sounds like a party after a St. Ignatius football game. “What time did it end?”
“Midnight. Jeff came upstairs for our after-party.”
“You had stayed upstairs the entire time?”
“Yes.”
“You found the heroin in the bathroom?”
“Right where Jeff always left it. We always did it the same way. I cooked it and injected him. Then we had sex. He was pretty good in bed, and he wasn’t into anything kinky.”
More information that I needed. “He let you inject him?”
“He didn’t like doing it himself. I prepared a second syringe for myself, but he started having convulsions. He threw up and collapsed.”
“Had anything like this ever happened before?”
“No.”
“What did you do with the second syringe?”
“I emptied it when Jeff collapsed.”
“Did you try to help him?”
“Of course. Then I ran downstairs and found his security guy, who was still there. He knows CPR. He called 9-1-1.”
“Inspector Lee told us that the security guard said that you tried to run. He also said that you made no effort to assist King.”
“That’s a lie.”
Here goes. “They seem to be suggesting that you may have killed King on purpose.”
“Not true. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he had a bad reaction to some high-powered smack that he provided. Or maybe it was tainted. Either way, I didn’t kill him. He was my source of support. I needed the money.”
Higher Law Boxset, Volume 3 Page 53