The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly

  “My secretary is at lunch and I’m very busy at the—wait, you’re Haller, aren’t you?”

  He pointed a finger at me and put his other hand on the arm of his chair like he was bracing himself in case he had to cut and run. I raised my hands to show I was unarmed.

  “I come in peace.”

  He looked like he was no more than twenty-five. He was struggling to produce a reasonable goatee and was wearing a Dodgers game jersey. It was obvious he didn’t have court today, or maybe any day.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I took a few more steps toward the desk. It was gigantic and way too big for the space—obviously a leftover from his father’s practice in a better, bigger office. I pulled back one of the chairs positioned in front of the desk and sat down.

  “Don’t sit. You can’t—”

  I was seated.

  “All right, go ahead.”

  I nodded my thanks and smiled. I pointed at the desk.

  “Nice,” I said. “A hand-me-down from the old man?”

  “Look, what do you want?”

  “I told you. I come in peace. What are you so jumpy about?”

  He blew out his breath in exasperation.

  “I don’t like people barging in on me. This is a law office. You wouldn’t want people just—oh, that’s right, you don’t even have an office. I saw the movie.”

  “I didn’t just barge in. There was no secretary. I called out and then tried the door.”

  “I told you, she’s at lunch. It’s the lunch hour. Look, can we get this over with? What do you want? State your business and then leave.”

  He dramatically chopped the air with his hand.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m here because we got off on the wrong foot and I apologize. It was my fault. I was treating you—and your father—like we were foes on this case. But I don’t think it’s got to be that way. So I’m here to make peace and to see if we might be able to help each other out. You know, I show you mine if you show me yours.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, we’re not doing this. I have a case and you have whatever the fuck you have, but we’re not working together.”

  I leaned forward and tried to hold eye contact but the kid was all over the place.

  “We have similar causes of action, Sly. Your client Hector Moya and my client Andre La Cosse stand to benefit by our working together and sharing information.”

  He shook his head dismissively.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I looked around the room and noticed his diplomas framed on the wall. The print was too small for me to read from a distance but I didn’t think I was dealing with an Ivy Leaguer here. I decided to put some of what I was thinking and had charted in the car out there to see how it went over.

  “My client is charged with the murder of Gloria Dayton, who figures importantly in your habeas petition. The thing is, I don’t think he did it.”

  “Well, good for you. It’s not our concern.”

  I was beginning to suspect that his use of “our” did not refer to him and Hector Moya. It was a reference to Team Fulgoni—Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Only Mr. Outside didn’t know habeas corpus from corpus delicti and I was talking to the wrong man.

  I decided to go ahead and hit him with the big question. The question that had emerged when I stepped back and looked at the big picture.

  “Answer one question and I’ll go. Last year, did you try to subpoena Gloria Dayton before she was murdered?”

  Fulgoni emphatically shook his head.

  “I’m not talking to you about our case.”

  “Did you have Valenzuela do it?”

  “I told you, I’m not talk—”

  “I don’t understand. We can help each other.”

  “Then you talk to my father and try to convince him, because I’m not at liberty to discuss anything with you. You have to go now.”

  I made no move to get up. I just stared at him. He made a gesture with his hands as if pushing me away.

  “Please go.”

  “Did somebody get to you, Sly?”

  “Get to me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why’d you dummy up the subpoena you had Valenzuela serve on Kendall Roberts?”

  He brought a hand up and pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to ward off a headache.

  “I’m not saying another fucking word.”

  “All right, then I’ll talk to your father. Call him right now, put him on speaker.”

  “I can’t just call him. He’s in prison.”

  “Why not? He talked to me last night on a phone.”

  This raised Sly’s eyebrows.

  “Yeah, when I was with Trina.”

  His eyebrows arched again and then flatlined.

  “There you go. He can only call out after midnight.”

  “Come on, man. He’s got a cell phone up there. Half my clients do. Big fucking secret.”

  “Yeah, but at Victorville they’ve got a jammer. And my dad’s got a guy who turns it off for him—but only after midnight. And if you’ve got guys with phones, then you know you never call in. They only call out. When it’s safe.”

  I nodded. He was right. I knew from experience with other incarcerated clients that cell phones were common contraband in almost all jails and prisons. Rather than rely on finding them through constant body cavity and prison cell searches, many correctional institutions employed cellular blockers that eliminated the use of the phones. Sly Sr. obviously had a friendly guard—most likely a guard paid to be friendly—with his hand on the switch during the midnight shift. This was a confirmation that the call from Sly Sr. the night before was coincidence and did not come about because he was having me followed. It meant someone else was.

  “How often does he call you?” I asked.

  “I’m not telling you that,” Sly Jr. said. “We’re finished here.”

  My guess was that Sly Sr. called every night with a to-do list for the following day. Junior did not appear to be much of a self-starter. I was dying to get a look at that diploma so I could see what law school gave him a skin but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I knew lawyers from top schools who couldn’t find their way out of a courtroom. And I knew night-school lawyers who I’d call in a heartbeat if it was ever my wrists in the cuffs. It was all about the lawyer, not the law school.

  I stood up and pushed the chair back into place.

  “Okay, Sylvester, this is what you do. When Daddy calls tonight, tell him I’m coming up to see him tomorrow. I’m going to register at the gate as his lawyer. Moya’s, too. You and I are co-counsel. You assure Daddy that I am seeking cooperation of our two camps, not an adversarial relationship. Tell him he better take the interview and hear me out. Tell him to tell Hector the same thing. Tell him not to turn down these interviews or things are going to get uncomfortable for him up there in the desert.”

  “What the fuck you talking about? Co-counsel? Bullshit.”

  I stepped back toward the desk and leaned down, two hands on the mahogany. Sly Jr. leaned back as far as he could in his chair.

  “Let me tell you something, Junior. If I drive two hours up there and this doesn’t go down exactly as I just said it’s to go down, then two things are going to happen. One is that the jammer is going to start staying on all night, leaving you high and dry down here without a clue about what to do and what to file and what to say. And second, the California bar is going to take an intimate interest in this little arrangement you’ve got with Daddy. It’ll be called practicing law without a license for Daddy. For you it will be practicing law without knowing the first fucking thing about the law.”

  I straightened up and made to leave but then turned right back to him.

  “And when I talk to the bar, I’ll throw in that phony subpoena, too. They probably won’t like that much either.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that, Haller?”

  I nodded and headed back to
the door.

  “When I need to be.”

  I walked out, leaving the door wide open behind me.

  22

  The Lincoln was waiting where I had left it. I jumped into the backseat and was greeted by the sight of a man sitting across from me and directly behind Earl. I glanced at my driver’s eyes in the mirror and saw an almost apologetic look in them.

  I drew my attention back to the stranger. He wore aviator sunglasses, worn blue jeans, and a black golf shirt. He had a dark complexion matched with dark hair and a mustache. My immediate thought was that he looked like a cartel hit man.

  The man smiled when he recognized the look in my eyes.

  “Relax, Haller,” he said. “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Then who the hell are you?” I asked.

  “You know who I am.”

  “Marco?”

  He smiled again.

  “Why don’t you tell your driver to take a walk?”

  I hesitated a moment and then looked at Earl in the rearview.

  “Go ahead, Earl. But stay close. Where I can see you.”

  What I really wanted was for Earl to be able to see me. I wanted a witness because I didn’t know what Marco was about to pull.

  “You sure?” Earl asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  Earl got out of the car and closed the door. He walked a few feet forward and leaned against the front fender of the car with his arms folded. I looked across the seat at Marco.

  “Okay, what do you want?” I said. “Are you following me?”

  He seemed to ruminate on the questions before deciding to answer.

  “No, I’m not following you,” he finally said. “I came to check out a lawyer who’s been trying to paper me and here I see you. You and him, working together.”

  It was a good answer because it was plausible. It avoided confirmation that Marco had been the one who had jacked my car, and he seemed pleased with it, even though he had not convinced me. I put Marco in his midforties. He carried an aura about him, a sense of confidence and knowledge, like a guy who knows he’s two moves ahead of everybody else.

  “What do you want?” I asked again.

  “What I want is to help you avoid fucking up in a major way.”

  “And what way is that?”

  Marco proceeded as though he had not heard the question.

  “Do you know the word sicario, Counselor?”

  He said it with full Latin inflection. I glanced away from him and out the window, then I looked back.

  “I’ve heard it said, I think.”

  “There is no real English translation for the word, but it’s what they call the cartel assassins down in Mexico. Sicarios.”

  “Thanks for the education.”

  “Down there the laws are different than we’ve got up here. Do you know that they have no legal code or provision that allows a teenager to be charged as an adult? No matter what they do, no charges as an adult and no incarceration beyond the age of eighteen for the crimes they commit as children.”

  “That’s good to know for the next time I’m down there, Marco, but I practice law right here in California.”

  “Consequently, the cartels recruit and train teenagers as their sicarios. If they get caught and convicted, they do a year, maybe two, and then they’re out at eighteen and ready to go back to work. You see?”

  “I see that it’s a real tragedy. No way those boys come out rehabilitated, that’s for sure.”

  Marco showed no reaction to my sarcasm.

  “At sixteen years of age Hector Arrande Moya admitted in a courtroom in Culiacán in the state of Sinaloa that he had tortured and murdered seven people by the time he was fifteen. Two of them were women. Three of them he hung in a basement and four he set on fire while they were still alive. He raped both the women and he cut all of the bodies up afterward and fed the remains to the coyotes in the hills.”

  “And what’s that have to do with me?”

  “He did all of this on orders from the cartel. You see, he was raised in the cartel. And when he got out of the penta at eighteen he went right back to the cartel. By then, of course, he had a nickname. They called him El Fuego—because he burned people.”

  I checked my watch in a show of impatience.

  “That’s a good story, but why tell it to me, Marco? What about you? What about the—”

  “This is the man you conspire with Fulgoni to set free. El Fuego.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The only person I am trying to set free is Andre La Cosse. He is sitting in a cell right now, charged with a murder he didn’t commit. But I’ll tell you this much about Hector Moya. You want to put the motherfucker away for life, then make the case fair and square in the first place. Don’t—”

  I cut myself off and raised my hands, palms out. Enough.

  “Just get out of my car now,” I said quietly. “If I need to talk to you, I’ll talk to you in court.”

  “There’s a war, Haller, and you have to choose which side you’re on. There are sacrifices that—”

  “Oh, now you’re going to talk to me about choices? What about Gloria Dayton, was she a choice? Was she a sacrifice? Fuck you, Marco. There are rules, rules of law. Now get out of my car.”

  For five seconds we just stared at each other. But finally Marco blinked. He cracked his door and slowly backed out of the car. He then leaned down and looked back in at me.

  “Jennifer Aronson.”

  I spread my hands as if waiting for whatever it was he still had to say.

  “Who?”

  He smiled.

  “Just tell her if she wants to know about me, she can come right to me. Anytime. No need to sneak around the courthouse, pulling files, whispering questions. I’m right here. All the time.”

  He closed the door and walked off. I watched him as he went down the sidewalk and turned the corner. He didn’t go into Fulgoni’s office, even though he had claimed that was the reason he was in the vicinity and had spotted me.

  Soon Earl got back in behind the wheel.

  “You okay, boss?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  He started the car. My frustrations and feelings of vulnerability got the best of me and I snapped at Earl.

  “How the hell did that guy get in the car?”

  “He came up and knocked on the window. He showed me the badge and told me to unlock the back. I thought he was gonna put a slug in the back a my head.”

  “Great, and you just let me jump in the back with him.”

  “There was nothin’ I could do, boss. He told me not to move. What did he say?”

  “A bunch of self-deluding bullshit. Let’s go.”

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Head toward the loft. For now.”

  I immediately got on the phone and called Jennifer. I didn’t want to scare her but it was clear that Marco knew of her efforts to background him and check other cases he had been involved in.

  The call went straight to message. As I listened to her recorded voice, I debated whether to leave a full message or just tell her to call me. I decided it would be best and perhaps safest to leave her the message so she got the information as soon as she turned on her phone.

  “Jennifer, it’s me. I just had a little visit from Agent Marco, and he is aware of your efforts to document his history. He must have friends in the clerk’s office or wherever you’re pulling records. So I’m thinking you might want to keep what you got on that but switch back to Moya. I’m going up to see him tomorrow in Victorville and I’d like to know all there is to know by then anyway. Let me know that you got this. Bye.”

  Cisco was next and this time my call went through. I told him of my encounter with Marco and asked why there had been no heads-up from the Indians who were supposedly watching me for a tail. I wasn’t too pleasant about it.

  “No warning, Cisco. The guy was waiting for me
in my fucking car.”

  “I don’t know what happened but I’ll find out.”

  He sounded as annoyed as I was.

  “Yeah, do that and call me back.”

  I disconnected the call. Earl and I rode in silence for a few minutes after that, with me replaying the Marco conversation in my head. I was trying to figure out the motives for the visit from the DEA agent. First and foremost, I decided, was the threat. He wanted to put a chill on my team’s efforts to research his activities. He also, it would seem, wanted to steer me away from the Moya case. He probably felt that Moya’s conviction and life sentence were relatively safe with the inexperienced Sly Fulgoni Jr. at the helm of the habeas petition. And he was probably right. But hitting me with the description of Moya as the worst thing this side of the devil was just a front. Marco’s motives weren’t altruistic. I didn’t buy that for a moment. All in all, I concluded that Marco was trying to spook me because I had spooked him. And that meant we were pointed in the right direction.

  “Hey, boss?”

  I looked at Earl in the rearview.

  “I heard you telling Jennifer in that message that you’re goin’ up to Victorville tomorrow. That true? We’re goin’ up?”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, we’re going. First thing in the morning.”

  And in saying so out loud I also sent a silent fuck-you to Marco.

  My phone buzzed and it was Cisco, already back with an explanation.

  “Sorry, Mick, they fucked up. They saw the guy arrive and get in the car with Earl. They said he showed a badge but they didn’t know who he was. They thought it was a friendly.”

  “A friendly? The guy has to badge Earl to get in the car and they think he’s a fucking friendly? They should’ve called you on the spot so you could call me and stop me from coming out with my goddamn zipper down.”

  “Already told them all of that. You want me to pull them off now?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, it seems pretty clear we know who jacked your car, right?”

  I thought about Marco’s claim that he had just happened to see me while he was checking out Fulgoni because of the subpoena. I didn’t buy that for a moment. I agreed with Cisco; Marco had jacked my car.

  “Might as well save the dough,” I told Cisco. “Pull ’em off. They weren’t much in the early-warning department anyway.”