The Gods of Guilt mh-5

by Michael Connelly

  “You’re twisting what I say around.”

  “I don’t think so, but let me rephrase. Before testifying here today, did you or did you not know that a call from the victim’s personal cell phone had been placed to the DEA one week before her death? Yes or no, Detective?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. So then it is safe to say you missed it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But you can say whatever you want.”

  I turned and looked back at the clock. It was eleven forty-five. I wanted to take Whitten in another direction but I wanted to leave the jurors with Gloria’s phone call to mull over at lunch. I knew if I suggested to the judge that we take the lunch break now I would end up in lockup with my client for the next hour.

  I turned back to Whitten, needing to string things out at least another fifteen minutes. I looked down at my notes.

  “Mr. Haller,” the judge prompted. “Do you have any more questions for the witness?”

  “Uh, yes, Your Honor. Quite a few, in fact.”

  “Then I suggest you get on with them.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “Uh, Detective Whitten, you just testified that you did not know that Gloria Dayton had been subpoenaed in a case involving Hector Moya. Do you recall when you found out?”

  “It was earlier this year,” Whitten answered. “It came to light through the exchange of discovery materials.”

  “So, in other words, you learned of the subpoena she received because the defense told you, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do with the information once the defense furnished you with it?”

  “I checked it out as I check out all leads that come in.”

  “And what did you conclude after checking it out?”

  “That it had no bearing on the case. It was coincidental.”

  “Coincidental. Do you still feel that it was coincidental now that you know that Gloria Dayton’s personal cell phone was used to call the DEA in Los Angeles less than an hour after she was served with the subpoena in a case that accused her of planting a gun on a DEA target?”

  Forsythe objected to the question on multiple grounds, and Leggoe had her pick. She sustained the objection and told me to rephrase the question if I wanted to get it in. I simplified and asked again.

  “Detective, if you knew back then on the day of Gloria Dayton’s murder that a week earlier she had called the DEA, would you have been interested enough to find out why?”

  Forsythe was on his feet again before I finished the question and jumped in right away with his objection.

  “Calls for speculation,” he argued.

  “Sustained,” Judge Leggoe said without giving me the opportunity to argue.

  But that was okay. I no longer needed Whitten to answer. I liked how the question hung out there like a cloud over the jury box.

  Sensing it was the right time to pause, the judge called for the lunch break.

  I moved over to the defense table and stood next to my client as the jury filed out of the box. I felt as though I had recovered from the Trina Trixxx fiasco and was back on top. I glanced out to the gallery and saw only Moya’s men in the public seats. Cisco had apparently not come back from escorting Trina Rafferty home. And Lorna was nowhere to be seen.

  No one had been watching. No one who mattered to me.

  37

  Jury trials always made me hungry. Something about the energy expended in constant wariness of the prosecution’s moves while worrying about my own moves steadily built a hunger in me that started soon after the judge took the bench and grew through the morning session. By the lunch break I usually wasn’t thinking about salad and soup. I usually craved a heavy meal that would carry me through the afternoon session.

  I made calls, and Jennifer, Lorna, Cisco, and I agreed to meet at Traxx in Union Station so I could indulge my appetite. They made a great hamburger there. Cisco and I gorged on the basics — red meat, French fries, and ketchup — while the ladies fooled themselves into being satisfied with Niçoise salads and iced tea.

  There wasn’t much talk. A little discussion about Trina Rafferty. Cisco reported only that something or someone had scared her shitless and she wasn’t talking, even off the record. But for the most part I stayed in my own world. Like a boxer in his corner between rounds, I wasn’t thinking about the earlier rounds and the punches missed. I was only thinking about answering the next bell and landing the knockout blow.

  “Do they ever eat?” Jennifer said.

  This question somehow bumped through my thoughts, and I looked across the table at her, wondering what I had missed and what she was talking about.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She nodded toward the great hall of the train station.

  “Those guys.”

  I turned and looked through the doorway of the restaurant and into the massive waiting area. Moya’s men were out there, sitting in the first row of stuffed-leather chairs.

  “If they do, I’ve never seen it,” I said. “You want to send them a salad?”

  “They don’t look like salad eaters,” Lorna said.

  “Carnivores,” Cisco added.

  I waved our waitress down.

  “Mickey, don’t,” Jennifer said.

  “Relax,” I said.

  I told the waitress we were ready for the check. It was time to get back to court.

  The afternoon session started on time at one o’clock. Whitten returned to the witness stand and looked a little less crisp than he had in the morning. It made me wonder if he’d braced himself for the afternoon with a martini or two for lunch. Maybe the whole aloof thing was actually about covering an alcohol habit.

  The plan with Whitten now was to use him to set up my next witness. My case was a daisy chain of interlocking witnesses, where one was used to build the path to the next. It was Whitten’s turn now to pave the way for a man named Victor Hensley, who was a security supervisor at the Beverly Wilshire hotel.

  “Good afternoon, Detective Whitten,” I said cheerily, as if I was not the same attorney who had brutalized him in the morning’s session. “Let’s turn our attention here to the victim of this horrible crime, Gloria Dayton. Did you and your partner, as part of your investigation, trace her movements up until the time of the murder?”

  Whitten made a show of adjusting the microphone to buy some time as he thought about how to answer. I was pleased to see this. It meant that he was on alert and looking for the trapdoor in the simplest of questions from me.

  “Yes,” he finally said. “We composed a timeline for her. The closer it was to the time of the murder, the more details we were interested in.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, so you checked out the last escort job she went out on that night?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “You talked to the man who regularly drove her to her assignations, correct?”

  “Yes, John Baldwin. We talked to him.”

  “And her last job was at the Beverly Wilshire, correct?”

  Forsythe stood up and objected, saying I was going over a timeline that had already been established by Whitten during his direct examination in the prosecution phase. The judge agreed and asked me to break new ground or to move on.

  “Okay, Detective, as testified to earlier, there was a disagreement that night between the victim and the defendant, am I right?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “What would you call it, then?”

  “You are talking about before he killed her?”

  I looked at the judge and widened my hands in a feigned signal of astonishment.

  “Your Honor…”

  “Detective Whitten,” the judge said, “please curtail such prejudicial statements. It is the jury’s role to determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant.”

  “I apologize, Your Honor,” Whitten said.

  I asked the question again.

  “Yes. They had a disagreement.”

&
nbsp; “And this disagreement was over money, correct?”

  “Yes, La Cosse wanted his share from a client and Gloria Dayton said there had been no client, that nobody was in the room he sent her to.”

  I pointed at the ground as if pointing to the moment he just described.

  “Did you and your partner investigate that disagreement to determine who was right and who was wrong?”

  “If you mean, did we check out whether the victim was actually holding out on La Cosse, yes we looked into it. We determined that the room La Cosse sent her to was unoccupied and that the name La Cosse said he gave her belonged to the guest who was in that room previously but had already checked out. There was no one in that room when she went to the hotel. He killed her for holding out on money she didn’t have.”

  I asked the judge to strike Whitten’s last sentence as unresponsive and prejudicial. She agreed and instructed the jury to disregard it, for whatever that was worth. I moved on, hitting Whitten with a new set of questions.

  “Did you check to see if the Beverly Wilshire had surveillance cameras on site, Detective Whitten?”

  “Yes, and they do.”

  “Did you review any of video from the night in question?”

  “We went to the security office at the hotel and reviewed their video feeds, yes.”

  “And what did you glean from your review, Detective Whitten?”

  “They don’t have video on the guest floors. But from what we did see of the lobby and elevators videos, we concluded that there was no one in the room she was sent to. She even checked at the front desk and they told her no. You can see it on the video.”

  “Why didn’t the state present this video to the jury during the prosecution phase of this trial?”

  Forsythe objected, saying the question was argumentative and irrelevant. Judge Leggoe agreed and sustained the objection, but again the question was more important than the answer. I wanted the jurors to wish they had seen the video, whether it was germane to the murder or not.

  I moved on.

  “Detective, how do you account for the discrepancy between Andre La Cosse setting up the date at the Beverly Wilshire and Gloria Dayton going there and finding the room unoccupied?”

  “I don’t account for it.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “Sure it bothers me but not every loose end gets tied up.”

  “Well, tell us, what you think happened that could explain what seems to be some kind of mix-up on Andre La Cosse’s part?”

  Forsythe objected, saying the answer called for speculation. This time the judge overruled, saying she wanted to hear the detective’s answer.

  “I really don’t have an answer,” Whitten said.

  I checked my notes to see if I had forgotten anything and then glanced at the defense table to see if Jennifer had any reminders. It looked like I was clear. I thanked the witness and told the judge I had no further questions.

  Forsythe went to the lectern to see if he could bandage the wounds I had opened in the prosecution’s case during the morning session. He would have been better off passing, because it came off — at least to me — as though he was more worried about semantics than content. He brought out that Whitten had been an undercover narcotics officer in an earlier part of his career. As such he had several confidential sources that fed him tips. None of them, he testified, contacted him through the main number of the police station. That would have been highly unusual and dangerous. They all were given private numbers with which to make contact.

  That was all well and good, but it did not speak to Gloria Dayton’s circumstances and gave me an easy setup when it was my turn for redirect. I didn’t even go to the lectern with my legal pad.

  “Detective Whitten, how long ago did you work as an undercover narcotics officer?”

  “I did it for two years — two thousand and two thousand and one.”

  “Okay, and do you still have the same cell phone number from those days?”

  “No, I’m in homicide now.”

  “You have a new number.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so what if one of your informants from two thousand and one wanted to call you today because they had information you needed to have?”

  “Well, I would direct this person to current narcotics investigators.”

  “You’re missing the point of the question. How would that old source of yours reach out to you, since the old established method of contact is no longer in existence?”

  “There are a lot of different ways.”

  “Like calling the main number of the police station and asking for you?”

  “I don’t see an informant who wants to stay an informant doing that.”

  Whitten understood what I wanted and obstinately didn’t want to give me the point. It didn’t matter, though. I was sure the jury understood. Gloria Dayton had no way after so many years to contact Agent Marco but to call the DEA’s main number.

  I gave up and sat down. Whitten was dismissed and I called my next witness, Victor Hensley.

  Hensley was a Trojan horse witness. His was the sixteenth name on the original witness list that the defense turned in before the start of trial. In keeping with court protocol, each name on the witness list was followed by a brief description of who the person was and what his or her expected testimony would be. This was to help the opposing side decide how much focus and time to apply to vetting and preparing for the witness’s testimony. However, in placing Hensley’s name on the list, I didn’t want the prosecution to know my true purpose — which was to use him to enter the Beverly Wilshire’s security videos as defense exhibits. So I listed Hensley’s occupation and simply described him as a corroborating witness. My hope was that Forsythe and his investigator Lankford would view Hensley as a witness who would confirm that no one had rented the room that Gloria Dayton had gone to on the night of her death.

  As it turned out, Hensley reported to Cisco during a check-in phone call that during the run-up to the trial, he’d had only one brief visit at the hotel from Lankford and had never spoken to Forsythe at all. All of this boded well for me. I realized as Hensley took the stand, carrying with him a smart-looking leather folder with his notes inside, that I stood a good chance of not only maintaining the momentum begun that morning with Whitten but increasing it.

  Hensley was in his late fifties and looked like a cop. After he was sworn in, I quickly ran down his pedigree as a former detective with the Beverly Hills Police Department who retired and took the job in security at the Beverly Wilshire. I then asked him if the hotel security staff had conducted its own investigation of the part the premises had played in the hours before Gloria Dayton’s murder.

  “Yes, we did,” he answered. “Once we became aware that the hotel played a tangential part in the situation, we looked into it.”

  “And did you take part in that investigation yourself?”

  “Yes, I did. I was in charge of it.”

  I then led Hensley through a series of questions and answers that outlined how he had worked with LAPD detectives and confirmed that Gloria Dayton had entered the hotel that evening and knocked on a guest-room door. He also confirmed that the room where she had knocked was empty and that no guest was staying in it.

  My Trojan horse was now inside the gate and I got down to work.

  “Now, from the very start, the defendant has claimed to police that a prospective client had called from the Beverly Wilshire and said that he was in that room. Is that possible?”

  “No, it’s not possible that a guest was staying in that room.”

  “But could someone have gotten in that room somehow and made the call?”

  “Anything’s possible. It would have to be someone who had a key.”

  “Is it an electronic key?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you check to see if someone stayed in that room the night before?”

  “Yes, we checked, and someone did stay in that room the
night before. That would have been Saturday night. We’d had a wedding reception in the hotel, and the bride and groom stayed in that suite that night.”

  “When is checkout time?”

  “Noon. But they asked for late checkout because they had an evening flight to Hawaii. Since they were newlyweds, we gladly accommodated them. They left at four twenty-five that afternoon, according to our records, meaning they probably left the room at four fifteen or so. We covered this in our investigation.”

  “So the room was occupied until four fifteen or so and then not rebooked for Sunday night.”

  “That’s correct. Because of the late checkout, it was not put on the availability list because housekeeping wouldn’t have it ready until much later.”

  “And if someone somehow got access to that room — got in somehow — then he would have been able to use the phone to call out, is that right?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Would a call from outside the hotel be put through to that room if the caller requested it?”

  “The policy at our hotel is that no call is transferred to a room without the caller asking for the guest by name. You cannot just call up and ask for room twelve-ten, for example. You have to know the name, and it has to be a registered guest. So the answer is no. The call would not have been put through.”

  I nodded thoughtfully before continuing.

  “What were the names of the newlyweds who had the suite the night before?”

  “Daniel and…”

  He opened his yellow folder and checked his notes from the investigation.

  “… Laura Price. But they were checked out and on their way to Hawaii when all of these events were supposedly happening.”

  “Earlier in this trial, the prosecution introduced a video of the police interrogation of the defendant, Andre La Cosse. Are you familiar with it?”

  “No, I have not seen it.”

  I got permission from the judge to reshow a portion of the interrogation on the overhead screen. In the segment, Andre La Cosse told Detective Whitten that he received a blocked call from someone named Daniel Price at about four-thirty the afternoon before the murder. As a security measure, he then asked for a callback number and the caller provided the phone number and a room number at the Beverly Wilshire. La Cosse said he called the hotel back, asked for Daniel Price’s room, and was put through. They made arrangements for escort service at eight p.m., with Giselle Dallinger being the provider.