I’m walking through the lobby of the Gold Rush when I hear the familiar hacking cough. Jerry Edwards follows me out the door and lights a cigarette. “Your source didn’t turn out to be so terrific after all,” he rasps. “He didn’t give me a damn thing that I could use.”
“Are you expecting an apology?”
“Yes. I wasted an entire day because of you.”
“Forget it. I didn’t make any promises.”
“You told me I’d get a story out of it.”
“You’re the writer–go write a story.”
“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t just make this stuff up. I can’t put something in the paper based on unsubstantiated, alcohol-abetted rumors spewed by a homeless addict.”
You’ve done it dozens of times. “Did you talk to the cops who were hassling people?”
“Yeah. They’re both highly-decorated veterans who denied everything.”
“I know. I got a call from one of them. Seems they weren’t real excited about some of the questions you were asking.”
He strains to catch his breath and his wild eyes glow. “You sandbagged me,” he says. “You gave me the tip just to stir the pot and keep me off your back.”
I stop in my tracks and look into the bloodshot eyes of San Francisco’s most prominent hell-raiser. We’re getting hammered from every side and I’ve run out of patience and diplomacy. “Get off my back, Jerry,” I say. “I told you up front that Willie was a homeless person with drug and alcohol problems and a criminal record. If you couldn’t substantiate any of his allegations, then you’re out of luck.”
He tosses his cigarette onto the sidewalk and stomps it out violently. “If you keep fucking with me,” he says, “I’ll kick your ass in my column so hard that you won’t be able to show your face at the Hall of Justice again.”
I’ve spent the last three days in this shithole corner of town. I’ve had my life threatened. I’m working for free and I’m exhausted and pissed off. “Write whatever you want,” I say. “Make it up if you have to. I handed you a story about corruption in the police department on a silver platter. Now I have the DA’s office, the homicide division, the cops and you all over my ass. I’m just a small time defense lawyer who works down the street from the bus station. If you want to fill your column with crap about me, that’s fine, but nobody gives a damn. The next time you want information about this case, you can try to get it from Marcus Banks and Roosevelt Johnson.”
“They won’t talk to me.”
“That’s because they’re smarter than I am.”
He takes a step back. He’s used to dishing it out, but he doesn’t like being on the receiving end. He lowers his voice and says, “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“Are you going to slam us in the paper tomorrow?”
“Probably.”
“I’m out of here.”
He’s unhappy. While he’d love to take another mean-spirited poke at me, he’s practical and cognizant of the fact that he will get absolutely nothing out of Johnson and Banks. I’m his only option. “Look,” he says, “I’m not going to win a Pulitzer by taking another swipe at you in tomorrow’s paper. I’ll give you a pass if you can give me something I don’t already know.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“You’ll have to take my word for it.”
Notwithstanding the fact that I think Jerry Edwards is a self-promoting shit, it’s in Leon’s interest to keep him involved. I look him in the eye and say, “You didn’t hear this from me.”
“Understood.”
“Grayson made a call right before he died to a cell phone owned by that lovely theater across the street called Basic Needs. The phone was issued to an exotic dancer named Alicia Morales, who lived in this hotel and has mysteriously disappeared. One of Morales’s co-workers has already confided to us that Morales and Grayson were acquainted.”
His eyes light up. “In the biblical sense?”
“I don’t know for sure. If you use your imagination, I suspect you can come up with an answer. If you can find her, you will find out what happened to Tower Grayson.”
# # #
The mood is downbeat at eight-thirty Monday night. Rosie, Carolyn, Pete and I have huddled in my office. I just got back from the Gold Rush and Rosie just returned from the ICU at San Francisco General. Carolyn has been poring over police and autopsy reports and Pete has been watching Debbie Grayson.
I start by asking Rosie about Leon’s condition.
“His vitals are stable, but he hasn’t regained consciousness. The doctor said it was probably stress and dehydration. There’s a chance he might be a little better in a couple of days.”
Not good. I tell her about my visit to the Gold Rush and my discussions with Terrence Love, Paula Howard and Jerry Edwards.
Her reaction is less than enthusiastic. “I can’t believe you told Jerry Edwards about Alicia Morales,” she says.
“If the cops can’t find her, maybe he can.”
“It’s insane.”
“We don’t have anything better at the moment. Maybe I can persuade him to let me go on Mornings on Two to ask for help finding Morales.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
“We’ll see.”
She’s picks another bone. “I can’t believe you enlisted the Terminator for help.”
I try not to sound too defensive. “He lives in the same building as Alicia Morales.”
“He’s a convicted felon and he’s unreliable.”
“We aren’t going to use him as a character witness.”
She’s tired and utterly unconvinced. “It’s another act of desperation.”
“It’s all we have.” And, in fairness, it isanother act of desperation.
We talk about strategy for a few minutes when Carolyn cuts to the chase. “Realistically,” she says, “how long does Leon have?”
Rosie says, “The doctor said two to three weeks at best.”
I ask if there’s any chance that he’ll be able to attend his prelim.
Rosie answers honestly. “I don’t know.” The corner of her mouth turns down as she suggests, “I suppose we could ask for a continuance.”
We could, but our client is likely to die in the interim. “Leon wanted to move forward.”
“The circumstances have changed.”
“I don’t disagree, but he’s still the client and we have our marching orders.”
“What if he doesn’t regain consciousness?”
I don’t know. “We’ll reevaluate in a couple of days if his condition doesn’t improve.”
Rosie gives me a thoughtful look and says, “In some respects, he may be more comfortable if he has to stay in the hospital. It’s a more humane setting than a cell.”
Sadly, it’s true.
She shifts to another subject. “Did Roosevelt have any idea who trashed Morales’s room?”
“No, but the perp didn’t pick her name out of a hat.” We consider the possibilities: an angry boyfriend or disgruntled john; an unpaid pimp; a drug deal gone south. More remote possibilities include robbery, drug suppliers or even extortion and blackmail.
Rosie maintains her composure. “Just because her room was tossed doesn’t prove she was involved in Grayson’s death.”
I say, “Grayson called her right before he died. Life is full of coincidences, but there’s something else going on here.”
She acknowledges that my point has some merit, but she goes shopping for a second opinion. “What does Roosevelt think?”
“He isn’t making any judgments until he gets the lab reports from Morales’s room.”
“I’m inclined to take a similar approach.”
I turn to Carolyn and ask, “Did you find any holes in the latest police reports?”
Her mouth forms a tiny ball as she studies her notes. “Maybe,” she says. “She taps her pen and says, “The knife and money were found in the rightpocket of Leon’s jacket.”
I look at Rosie
first, and then at Pete, who gives me a pronounced scowl, as if to say, “Not bad.” I say to Carolyn, “Why would a lefty have put the knife in his right pocket?”
“I don’t know. You’d think he would have put it into his left pocket.”
“Unless somebody was trying to set him up who didn’t know he was left handed.”
Rosie plays devil’s advocate. “Or unless he used his stronger left arm to hold Grayson.”
Carolyn replies, “There’s no evidence he did.”
Rosie isn’t convinced. “The prosecution will downplay it,” she argues. “They’ll say it makes no difference. All that matters is that he had the murder weapon.”
I interject, “It’s still worth mentioning.”
“I don’t want to base our entire defense on it.”
Carolyn says, “There was also a relatively small amount of blood on the jacket and none on his pants.”
It may be an opening. I say, “He couldn’t have stabbed Grayson without spattering a substantial amount of blood.” In a normal case, such a detail might be enough to get to reasonable doubt. In this situation, it’s just another fact that we’ll try to exploit at the prelim. I ask Carolyn if the final fingerprint reports have come back.
“Not yet.”
“It would be interesting to see if they found prints from Leon’s left hand on the knife.”
Carolyn says she obtained a copy of the partnership agreement for Paradigm. She says there are six investors, including Tower Grayson and his son and Lawrence Chamberlain. “The others are the California State Employees’ Retirement Fund, the investment arm of the Government of Singapore and a private hedge fund called SST Partner Capital Fund.”
The first two names I can figure out, but the third is a mystery. “What’s SST?”
“The investment fund for the partners of Story, Short and Thompson.”
It’s Brad Lucas’s law firm. I ask, “Have you talked to Brad about it?”
“I thought you might like to do the honors.”
“I would.” I may want to do it in court. I ask Pete about Debbie Grayson.
“She spent the morning at home and the afternoon at the club. She had dinner in a private dining room with Susan Morrow, the woman from her dinner at Postrio. Mrs. Grayson had the rotisserie chicken and Mrs. Morrow had a Cobb salad. Both had iced teas.”
The Bjorns have been helpful, but they were unable to provide Pete with any details of the conversation at dinner.
He says he followed her home. “There was a summit conference at her house,” he says. “The usual suspects were there: her son, Chamberlain and Lucas.”
“Do you have any idea what they were talking about?”
“No.” He says he couldn’t get inside the gate and his high-tech eavesdropping paraphernalia didn’t work among the trees. “I’m going to talk to the guy who sold it to me.”
First there was Home Depot. Then there was Office Depot. Perhaps there is Spy Depot.
“Everybody left about an hour ago,” he says. “I followed Lucas back to his office. Chamberlain headed toward the city, too.” He says he has somebody watching Lucas and Chamberlain. “I put somebody on J.T. Grayson’s tail.” He hands me a copy of a computer printout and says, “I had a friend down at Verizon Wireless pull a copy of the records for Tower Grayson’s cell phone. I’ve highlighted about three dozen calls to Alicia Morales’s cell phone.”
I scan the document. The calls to Morales picked up precipitously about four weeks ago. I ask, “Can you find her?”
“I’ll try. What are you planning to do now?”
“Rosie and I are heading over to E’Angelo’s for dinner. Care to join us?”
“Sure. Are you celebrating Rosie’s birthday?”
“Yes. And we’re getting together with Kaela Joy Gullion.”
*****
Chapter 32
Kaela Joy
“My career as a PI started by accident. I got some disturbing information about my ex-husband’s behavior on a road trip and I decided to check it out.”
— Kaela Joy Gullion. Profile in San Francisco Chronicle.
The statuesque brunette leans across the red-checked tablecloth and says in a sultry voice, “Tower Grayson was not what he appeared to be.”
Kaela Joy Gullion is a dead ringer for Xena, the warrior princess, except that she’s wearing a tight-fitting gray blouse and faded jeans instead of a black leather thong. She’s in her mid-forties, but the six-foot-two inch former Ninerscheerleader and model still has the creamy complexion, high cheekbones and seamless features that appeared on fashion magazine covers two decades ago. She’s still capable of flashing the award-winning smile, but her toned muscles make it clear that she now plays in another league. Just ask her ex-husband, who swears he never saw the left hook that left him unconscious in the middle of the French Quarter.
Kaela Joy, Rosie, Pete and I are sitting in the back of E’Angelo’s, a hole-in-the wall on Chestnut Street that looks as if it was transported intact from Florence. The narrow room has about a dozen tables crammed against a paneled wall in a dark dining area that bears the aroma of an exquisite combination of tomato sauce, garlic and mozzarella. Although it isn’t as flashy as its North Beach contemporaries, they’ve been serving honest Northern Italian food here for decades, and it’s one of the last remnants of a time when this neighborhood was inhabited by more working class families than spandex-clad singles who hang out at the Starbucks down the block and the trendy retro-diner across the street. E’Angelo’stends to its regulars, who fill up on homemade pasta and minestrone. There’s a line out the door at ten o’clock on Monday night.
There is a level of professional courtesy among PI’s that often exceeds that of lawyers. Pete takes the lead and asks if Debbie Grayson knows that KaelaJoy is talking to us.
“Yes.”
“Was she okay about it?”
“I didn’t give her any choice. This is a murder investigation and I’ve talked to Johnson and Banks. I try to maintain good relations with the cops.”
Pete isn’t always quite as forthcoming with his former employers. Kaela Joy doesn’t have the same history. He asks, “Was Mrs. Grayson happy with your work?”
“Yes, but she wasn’t ecstatic about some of the information that I provided about her husband.” The striking PI’s tone fills with contempt when she says, “He was a cheating pig.” The seductress shakes her silky hair and adds, “It started three months ago when Mrs. Grayson suspected he was sleeping with the marketing director of a company in the Valley.”
“Was he?”
“Yes, but that was tame compared to his other activities. In the daytime, he was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. At night, he was doing drugs and women on Sixth Street.”
The picture is coming into focus. “He lived in Atherton,” I say. “He had enough money to get anything he wanted. Why would he have spent his free time down on skid row?”
“Looking for thrills.”
It’s hard to believe he risked everything for a little action. “What was he thinking?”
“Guys like Grayson let their penises do their thinking. My ex-husband was making a million bucks a year with the Niners, but he still had action on the side. It wasn’t for the sex. He did it to see if he could get away with it. Given the chance, most men will do the same thing.”
I sense hostility and decide this may not be an ideal time to defend my gender.
Kaela Joy hasn’t concluded her analysis. “The inability of males to keep their pants zipped accounts for ninety percent of the unhappiness in the world. Grayson didn’t do anything original. Something was defective in his wiring and the results were predictable.”
“Why not a model or a coed or even a high-class call girl?” I ask. “Surely, he could have found an attractive young woman who would have been willing to jump in the sack with him. He was putting himself at risk for everything from STDs to AIDS.”
She takes a bite of French bread and then downs the rest of he
r ravioli. “Put yourself in his shoes,” she says. “You’ve worked hard and played by the rules. Your kids are grown and your wife spends more time at the country club than she does with you. Then you get lucky and you make a few bucks. You raise twenty million dollars from people who think you know what you’re doing. Suddenly, you’re staying in five star hotels and traveling in limos. CEOs of start-ups kiss your ass because they want your money. You make the fundamental mistake of believing your own bullshit. You get seduced by the Valley mentality and you think you’re indestructible. You want it now and money is no object.”
MD04 - Final Verdict Page 26