The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly

  He took a seat across the table from me. His wrists were cuffed to a waist chain. We didn’t shake hands.

  “Hello, Sly,” I said. “How was lunch?”

  “Lunch was the same as it is everyday here. Bologna on white bread, unfit for human consumption.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m not. I figure when I start liking it, then I’ve got a problem.”

  I nodded.

  “I get that.”

  “I don’t know about you, but back in the day I had clients who liked to hide out in prison. Places like this. It was easier than the streets because you got your three squares, a bed, clean laundry. Sex and drugs readily available if you want ’em. It was dangerous, but the streets were plenty dangerous, too.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had a few like that.”

  “Well, that’s not me. I consider this place to be a living hell on earth.”

  “But less than a year to go, right?”

  “Three-hundred and forty-one days. I used to be able to tell it down to the hour and minute but I’m a little more relaxed about that now.”

  I nodded again and decided that was enough as far as the pleasantries went. It was time to get down to business. I hadn’t driven all the way up to discuss the pros and cons of prison life or to figuratively pat Sylvester Fulgoni on the back.

  “Did you talk to Hector Moya about me this morning?”

  Fulgoni nodded.

  “That I did. And you’re all set. He’ll take the meeting and he’ll take you as co-counsel with young Sly.”

  “Good.”

  “I can’t say he’s too happy about it. He’s pretty convinced that you’re in part responsible for him being here.”

  Before I could say a word in my defense, there was a booming impact that shook the room and, I assumed, the entire prison. My hand went to my belt and the alarm as my first thought was that there was some kind of explosion and prison break occurring.

  Then I noticed that Fulgoni hadn’t even flinched and had a glib smile on his face.

  “That was a big one,” he said calmly. “They probably have the B-Two up today. The stealth.”

  Of course. I now remembered the nearby airbase. I tried to shake it off and get back to business. My legal pad was on the table in front of me. I had jotted down a few questions and reminders while I waited for Fulgoni. I wanted to start with the basics and lead up to the important questions once I had Fulgoni vested in the conversation.

  “Tell me about Moya. I want to know how and when this whole thing started.”

  “Well, as far as I know, I’m one of two defrocked lawyers in here. The other guy was part of a bank fraud in San Diego. Anyway, it kind of gets known what you did in the world and people come to you. First it’s general advice and recommendations. Then some come because they want help with a writ. I’m talking about guys in here long enough to be abandoned by their lawyers because they’ve exhausted their appeals. Guys who don’t want to give up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, Hector was one of those guys. He came to me, said the government hadn’t played fair, and wanted to know what he could still do about it. The thing is, nobody had ever believed him. His own attorneys didn’t believe his story and didn’t even put an investigator on it, as far as I could tell.”

  “You’re talking about the DEA planting the gun in his room to get the enhancement?”

  “Yeah, the enhancement that puts him in here for life. I’m not talking about the powder in the room. He totally cops to that. But he said the gun wasn’t his, and it turns out he’s been saying that since day one but nobody would listen. Well, I listened. I mean, what else am I going to do in here but listen to people?”

  “Okay.”

  “So that’s your start. My son filed the paper and here we are.”

  “But let’s go back to before young Sly filed the habeas petition. Let’s go back to last year. See, I’m trying to put all of this together. Moya tells you the gun was planted. Did he tell you Gloria Dayton planted it?”

  “No, he said the cops did it. He was arrested by the LAPD after you made the deal with the DA’s Office. Remember that? Only he didn’t know about any deal until years later—until I told him. All he knew at the time was that the LAPD came through his door with a felony fugitive warrant. They found the coke in the bureau and the firearm under the mattress and that was it. The fugitive beef was for a grand jury no-show. That was nothing compared to the case they had now. He had two ounces of blow in the room and the gun. And then the feds swooped in and scooped the whole thing up and he goes to trial in federal court, where they have the lifetime achievement award. Convenient, huh?”

  “Yeah, and I know all of that. I’m talking about the gun. I am trying to track how you went from his story to Gloria Dayton. Your habeas petition says Gloria planted the gun.”

  “It was simple. I asked the right questions, and then I took two steps back and looked at the big picture. I came at it from the angle of believing Hector Moya. Like I said, nobody had before. But he came to me and said, ‘Yes, the powder in that room was mine and I’ll do the time for it. But not the gun.’ I figured, why deny one and not the other unless you’re telling the truth?”

  I could think of reasons to do exactly that—lie about one thing and not the other—but I kept them to myself for now.

  “So . . . Gloria?”

  “Right, Gloria. Hector said the gun was a plant. Well, I had a case once with a firearm enhancement attached. Same thing, but this was a DEA case from the start. No locals. A straight DEA buy bust and the client swore to me he had no gun on him when the deal went down. I didn’t believe him at first—I mean, who goes to buy a kilo with twenty-five K in a briefcase and no gun for backup? But then I started looking into it.”

  “You proved the gun was planted to get the enhancement?”

  Fulgoni frowned and shook his head.

  “Actually, I was never able to prove it. And my guy went down for it. But the unit that made the bust was something called the Interagency Cartel Enforcement Team, which was run by the DEA and headed up by an agent named Jimmy Marco. He’s the same guy who did the swoop and scoop on Moya. So when that name came up in the file I thought there was something to it. You know, that was twice I’d seen this on a case with his name on it. I figured, where there’s smoke there might be fire.”

  I thought for a long moment, trying to put the pieces together and understand the moves Fulgoni had made.

  “You had the name Marco but he didn’t come into it until after the arrest went down and the locals had found the coke and the gun,” I said in summary. “So if Marco was behind this, then you had to figure out how he got the gun in there for the locals to find.”

  Fulgoni nodded.

  “Exactly. So I went to Hector and said, what if the gun wasn’t planted by the locals? What if it was already there under the mattress and planted earlier by somebody else? Who was in that room between the time you checked into that hotel and the bust went down? That was four days and I asked him for a list with the names of everybody who’d visited that room in that time frame.”

  “Gloria Dayton.”

  “Yes, we zeroed in on her. But she wasn’t the only one who had been in that room. There had been at least one other hooker, Hector’s brother, and a couple other associates, too. Luckily, we didn’t have to vet the housekeepers because Hector kept the do not disturb on his door the whole time. But we zeroed in on Gloria because I had a friend run all the names through the police computer and—bingo!—she happened to get popped one fricking day before they took Hector down.”

  I nodded. The logic made sense. I would have zeroed in on Gloria as well. I also knew what I would have done next.

  “How’d you track down Gloria? She’d changed her name. She moved away and then moved back.”

  “The Internet. These girls can change names, locations, doesn’t matter. The business is based on the visual. Young Sly got her booking photo from eight ye
ars ago, when she got arrested on a possession and prostitution beef, and then he went online, checking photos on escort sites. Eventually he found her. She’d changed her hair but that was about it. He printed out photos and brought them up here. Hector confirmed.”

  I was surprised. Sly Jr. had actually done something that created a significant break in the case.

  “And you then, of course, had Junior paper her.”

  I said it like the next move had been a matter of routine.

  “Yeah, we hit her with a subpoena. We wanted to bring her in to put her on the record.”

  “Who was the process server, Valenzuela?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody Sly Jr. hired.”

  I leaned across the table and started increasing the urgency and momentum, hitting him with the questions without pause.

  “Was she photographed to prove receipt?”

  Fulgoni shrugged like he didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “Was she?”

  “Look, I don’t know. I was up here, Haller. What’s so—”

  “If there’s a photo, I want it. Tell your son.”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  “When did you paper her?”

  “I don’t know the date. Last year sometime. Obviously before she got killed by her pimp.”

  I leaned further across the table.

  “How long before she got killed?”

  “About a week, I think.”

  I hammered my fist down on the table.

  “She wasn’t killed by her pimp.”

  I pointed across the table at him.

  “You got her killed. You and your son. They found out about the subpoena. They couldn’t trust that she wouldn’t talk.”

  Fulgoni was shaking his head before I was finished.

  “First of all, who is ‘they’?”

  “Marco, the ICE team. Do you think they would risk this coming out? Especially if planting firearms was common practice with that team. Think of all the reputations, careers, and cases that would be jeopardized. You don’t think that’s motive for murder? You don’t think they’d risk taking out a hooker if it meant securing their operation?”

  Fulgoni held up a hand to stop me.

  “Look, I’m not stupid, Haller. I knew the risks. The subpoena was filed under seal. Marco couldn’t have known about it.”

  “So she ended up dead a week later and you thought, what, that the pimp did it and it was all just coincidence?”

  “I thought what the police thought and what my son read to me out of the newspaper. That her pimp killed her and we missed our chance to have her help Moya.”

  I shook my head.

  “Bullshit. You knew. You must have known you set things in motion. How many days before the deposition was she killed?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t sched—”

  “That’s bullshit! You knew. How many days?”

  “Four, but it doesn’t matter. It was under seal. No one knew but her and us.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, only you and she knew, and what did you expect—that she wouldn’t tell someone who might tell somebody else? Or that she might not call up Jimmy Marco, who she used to snitch for, and say, what should I do about this?”

  Suddenly I realized something that gave an answer to one of the questions I had been carrying since handling the phony subpoena served on Kendall Roberts. I pointed at Fulgoni’s chest.

  “I know what it was. You thought Marco had somebody inside the clerk’s office. Somebody who told him about the sealed subpoena. That’s why your son dummied up the subpoena he had Valenzuela serve on Kendall Roberts. You two didn’t want to do it again—get somebody killed. You wanted her to come in so Junior could find out what she knew about Gloria and Marco, but you were afraid a real subpoena would get back to Marco, even if it was under seal.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Haller.”

  “No, I know exactly what I’m talking about. One way or another, your subpoena got Gloria killed. You both knew it and you decided to keep quiet about it and lie low while some poor schmuck went down for it.”

  “You’re way off base on this.”

  “Really? I don’t think so. Why the subpoenas this week? To me and Marco and the phony one to Kendall Roberts. Why now?”

  “Because the petition was filed almost six months ago. We had to move on it or it would be dismissed. It had nothing to do with Gloria Dayton or—”

  “That’s such bullshit. And you know something, Sly? You and your son are no better than Marco and Lankford in all of this.”

  Fulgoni stood up.

  “First of all, I don’t know who Lankford is. And second, we’re done here. And you can forget about Moya. He’s ours, not yours. You’re not seeing him.”

  He turned and started shuffling toward the door.

  “Sit down, Sly, we’re not finished,” I said to his back. “You walk out of here and the state bar is going to come down all over you and Junior. You’re not an attorney anymore, Sly. You are operating a writ mill in here and feeding cases to a kid who sits in an office in a Dodgers jersey and doesn’t know the first thing about being a lawyer. The bar will tear him up and throw him away. You want that for him? For you? Who will you feed cases to when Junior’s out of business?”

  Fulgoni turned around and kicked at the door with his heel to alert the guard.

  “What’s it going to be, Sly?” I asked.

  The guard opened the door. Fulgoni glanced back at him, hesitated, and then said he needed five more minutes. The door was closed and Fulgoni looked at me.

  “You threatened my son yesterday but I didn’t think you’d have the balls to threaten me.”

  “It’s not a threat, Sly. I’ll shut you both down.”

  “You’re an asshole, Haller.”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, I’m an asshole. When I’ve got an innocent man facing a murder count.”

  He had nothing to say to that.

  “Sit back down,” I instructed. “You’re going to tell me how to handle Hector Moya.”

  27

  The wait between interviews with Fulgoni and Moya was twenty-five minutes and two more teeth-rattling sonic booms. When the door finally opened, Moya stepped in calmly and slowly, his eyes steady on me. He walked with a grace and ease that belied his situation and even suggested that the two men behind him were personal valets, not prison guards. His orange jumpsuit was vibrant and had crisp creases. Fulgoni’s had been faded from a thousand washes and frayed at the edges of the sleeves.

  Moya was taller and more muscled than I had expected. Younger, too. I put him at thirty-five tops. He had wide shoulders at the top of a torso that tapered down like a V. The sleeves of his jumpsuit stretched tightly against his biceps. I realized that despite my interaction with his case eight years before, I had never seen him in person or in a newspaper photograph or television report. I had built a visual image based on fantasy. I had him as a small, round man who was venal and cruel and had gotten what he deserved. I wasn’t expecting the specimen standing before me now. And this was a concern because, unlike Fulgoni, Moya was not chained at the ankles and waist. He was as unencumbered as I was.

  He accurately picked up on my concern and addressed it before even sitting down.

  “I have been here much longer than Sylvestri,” he said. “I am trusted and not chained like an animal.”

  He spoke with a strong accent but was clearly understandable. I nodded cautiously, not knowing whether his explanation contained some sort of threat.

  “Why don’t you have a seat,” I said.

  Moya pulled back the chair and sat down. He crossed his legs and held his hands together in his lap. He immediately looked relaxed, as if meeting in a lawyer’s office instead of a prison.

  “You know,” he said, “six months ago my plan was to have you killed in a very painful manner. When Sylvestri spoke of the part you played in my case, I became very angry. I was upset and I wanted
you dead, Mr. Haller. Glory Days, too.”

  I nodded as though I was sympathetic to his situation.

  “Well, I’m glad that didn’t happen. Because I’m still here and I may be able to help you.”

  He shook his head.

  “The reason I tell you this is because only a fool would think I had no motive to have you and Gloria Dayton eliminated. But I did not do this. If I had, you and she would have simply disappeared. This is the way it is done. There would be no case and no trial of an innocent man.”

  I nodded.

  “I understand. And I know it means little to you, but I also have to tell you that eight years ago I was doing my job, which was to do my best in the defense of a client.”

  “It does not matter. Your laws. Your code. A snitch is a snitch, and in my business they disappear. Sometimes with their lawyers.”

  He stared coldly at me through the darkest eyes I think I had ever seen besides my own half brother’s. Then he broke away and his voice changed as he engaged in the business of the day, the tone moving from dead-on threat to collegial cooperation.

  “So, Mr. Haller, what must we discuss here today?”

  “I want to talk about the gun that was found in your hotel room when you were arrested.”

  “It was not my gun. I have said this from the very beginning. No one has believed me.”

  “I wasn’t there at the beginning—at least on your side. But I’m pretty sure I believe you now.”

  “And you’ll do something about it?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Do you understand the stakes that are involved?”

  “I understand that the people who did this to you will stop at nothing to keep their crimes secret—because I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one they did it to. They already killed Gloria Dayton. So we will have to be very cautious until we can get this into open court. Once we are there, it will be harder for them to hide behind their badges and the cover of night. They’ll have to come out and answer to us.”

  Moya nodded.

  “Gloria—she was important to you?”

  “For a time. But what is important to me now is that I have a client in the county jail accused of killing her and he didn’t do it. I have to get him out and I need you to help me. If you help me, I will certainly help you. That all right with you?”