“It’s too risky. You lose signal and you lose any calls that get made. I’ll be fine. It’s an in-and-out operation. I go in, light the fire, I get out. He—hopefully—starts making calls. Maybe texts.”
“We still need to figure out how you light the fire.”
“I think I just tell him I work cold cases, was assigned this one, and saw that he was never interviewed back in the day. I let it drop that back then there was a witness who described a shooter that looked a lot like him. He’ll deny, deny, I’ll leave, and my bet is he gets on the phone to try to find out who this witness is.”
Bosch thought about that and decided it could work.
“Okay,” he said. “Good.”
But he knew that if that was the plan, he needed to say something about Ballard’s readiness.
“Look, I know we made a deal and all that, but we’re talking about a high-risk move here and you need to be ready,” he said. “So, I have to say it: you look tired—and you can’t be tired when you do this. I think you should put it off until you’re ready.”
“I am ready,” Ballard protested. “And I can’t put it off. It’s a seventy-two-hour tap. That’s all the judge would give me. It starts as soon as the service providers begin sending the signal—which is supposed to be end of day today. So, we have three days to get this going. We can’t put it off.”
“Okay, okay. Then you take a sick day tonight so you can sleep.”
“I’m not doing that either. I’m needed on the late show and I’m not going to leave them high and dry.”
“Okay, then we go back to my house. I have a spare room you can use. You sleep on a bed, not sand, until it’s time to go to work tonight.”
“No. I have too much to do.”
“Then that’s too bad. You think this guy is safe because he’s supposedly not in the gang anymore. Well, he’s not safe—he’s dangerous. And I’m not going to monitor anything if I think there’s something wrong with the setup.”
“Harry, you’re overreacting.”
“No, I’m not. And right now, the thing I think is wrong is you. Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, and I’m not going to be part of that.”
“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not your daughter.”
“I know you’re not, and that has nothing to do with this. But what I said holds. You use the guest room or you can get Olivas to monitor the tap for you.”
“Fine. I’ll sleep. But I want to take this garlic toast to go.”
“Not a problem.”
Bosch looked around for the waiter so he could get the check.
28
While Ballard slept, Bosch went back to the Montgomery case. He kept the music off so as not to disturb her. Not knowing when she might get up, he decided to dive into the shortest stack of documents relating to the three remaining cases he needed to review. These emanated from Judge Montgomery’s service in civil court during the last two years of his life.
The shortest stack was actually a hybrid case: it involved the judge in both criminal and civil courts. It started with a murder case in which a man named John Proctor was convicted in an intentional hit-and-run of a woman who had been struck while walking to her car after leaving a Burbank bar, where she had rejected several efforts by Proctor to buy her drinks and start a conversation.
Proctor was represented at trial by an attorney named Clayton Manley. Proctor fired him after the conviction and hired an attorney named George Grayson to handle his appeal. Prior to Proctor’s sentencing, Grayson filed a motion for a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. It is a routine gambit to request a new trial based on poor lawyering, though it is rarely successful. But in this case the argument had merit. The motion described several things Manley failed to do in prepping for trial, including exploring a third-party culpability defense based on the fact that the victim was in the midst of a bitter divorce at the time of her death and that her estranged husband had been arrested twice for domestic abuse.
The appeal also included several instances at trial when Manley did not ask pertinent questions of prosecution witnesses or had to be prompted by the judge to object to the prosecutor’s witness questioning. Twice during the trial while the jury was not in the courtroom Judge Montgomery hammered Manley for his poor performance, one time directly asking him if he was on any medication that could explain his lack of focus on the case.
Manley worked for the downtown law firm of Michaelson & Mitchell, which had taken on the case and then assigned it to Manley to handle. Though he had handled other criminal matters for the firm, it was his first murder case.
In a one-in-a-hundred decision, Montgomery ordered a new trial, revealing his decision at Proctor’s scheduled sentencing. In open court he agreed with Grayson’s contention that Manley had blown the case with his inattentiveness and inaction. In canceling the sentencing and ordering a new trial, Montgomery went on record with his view of Manley’s performance, castigating the lawyer for his many failures and banning him from handling any future cases in his court.
A reporter from the Los Angeles Times was in the courtroom, there to report on the sentencing in a case that had drawn significant media attention because of the nature of the crime. Instead, he left with a story about Manley, which when published the next day included many of Judge Montgomery’s harshest quotes. Manley quickly became a courthouse whipping boy, the butt of many lawyer jokes traded in courthouse hallways; he soon even garnered the nickname “UnManley.”
At the new trial, the jury found John Proctor not guilty. No one else was ever charged in the killing.
Montgomery then was shifted by the chief judge to civil court and soon enough became embroiled in one himself. Clayton Manley sued the judge for defamation, seeking damages for the “unjust and untrue” statements Montgomery had made in court that were then disseminated by the media. Manley claimed in the filing that Montgomery had turned him into a courthouse pariah and destroyed his career. Manley said he still worked for Michaelson & Mitchell but was no longer assigned criminal cases and had not appeared in court in any capacity since the Proctor case.
The lawsuit was quickly dismissed on the grounds that a judge’s rulings and statements in court were not only protected by the First Amendment right to free speech but sacrosanct for the unbiased and unfettered administration of justice in court. Manley appealed the ruling, but higher courts similarly rejected it twice before he dropped the matter.
That was the end of it, but when Montgomery was murdered a year later his clerk gave the name Clayton Manley to detectives asking who the judge’s enemies might be. Gustafson and Reyes thought enough of it to investigate, and started by reviewing all matters regarding the Proctor case. They saw enough there to proceed to the next level: Reyes interviewed Manley at his office with his own attorney, William Michaelson, present. Manley provided a solid alibi for the morning of the murder. He was in Hawaii on vacation with his wife at a resort on Lanai. Manley gave the detective copies of his boarding passes, hotel and restaurant receipts, and even photos from his iPhone of him on a fishing charter, taken the day Montgomery was murdered. He also provided copies of e-mails from friends and associates, including Michaelson, who reported the murder to him because they knew he was thousands of miles away in Hawaii.
The interview with Manley had occurred a week before the DNA testing came back with the match to Herstadt. It explained why the Manley stack was the shortest. The detectives apparently accepted Manley’s denial of involvement and his alibi.
Still, something about the Manley angle bothered Bosch. There was no mention in the chronological record of the interview with Manley having been set up in advance. In fact, that would have been poor form. Investigators routinely approach subjects without warning. It is better to get extemporaneous answers to questions rather than prepared statements. It’s a basic rule of homicide work: don’t let them see you coming.
But with no indication in the documents th
at Reyes gave any prior warning that he was coming to talk to Manley, the attorney was apparently prepared for the interview: he had his own attorney present and alibi documentation ready to be turned over. Bosch wondered if that bothered Reyes or Gustafson. Because it bothered him.
True, Manley had had a protracted dispute with Montgomery, so he could probably assume the police would want to talk to him. That wasn’t suspicious to Bosch. Even having a lawyer present didn’t raise an eyebrow. It was a law firm, after all. But the detail of the alibi was what bothered Bosch the most. It appeared to be bulletproof, right down to his providing the digital time stamp with the Hawaii photo taken just a few minutes before Montgomery was bladed in L.A. It had been Bosch’s experience that an alibi—even a legitimate one—was seldom bulletproof. This one felt to Bosch like a setup. Like maybe Manley knew precisely when he would need an alibi.
Gustafson and Reyes apparently didn’t feel the same way. A week later they dropped Manley from consideration when the DNA report landed. Bosch didn’t think he would have done so, even with a direct DNA match to another suspect.
He wrote a note on his pad. It was just one word: Manley. Bosch was comfortable dropping the first two avenues of investigation he had reviewed, but he felt Manley warranted further follow-up.
Bosch got up from the table and worked the stiffness out of his knee. He grabbed the cane he had leaned into a corner next to the front door and went out for a short walk, up the hill for a block and then back down. The knee got loose and felt pretty strong. He looked forward to retiring the cane completely in a few more days.
When he got back inside the house he found Ballard sitting at the table where he had been working.
“Who’s Manley?” she said.
“Just a guy, maybe a suspect,” Bosch said. “I thought you were going to sleep longer than a couple hours.”
“Didn’t need to. I feel refreshed. Two hours on a bed is worth five on the sand.”
“When are you going to stop doing that?”
“I don’t know. I like being by the water. My father used to say that salt water cures everything.”
“There are other ways to accomplish that. You might be ‘refreshed’ now, but by tomorrow morning you’re going to be dragging ass when you go off to confront Kidd.”
“I’ll be fine. I do this all the time.”
“That’s not reassuring. We have to work out some kind of signal so I can get you backup if you need it. You going in by yourself is crazy.”
“I work every night by myself. This is nothing new.”
Bosch shook his head. He still wasn’t happy.
“Look,” Ballard said, “what I want to do now is show you the software on my laptop so you can monitor everything after I go out there and stir up his shit. I’m going to come by in the morning and leave my laptop with you before going out there.”
“You can’t just transfer it to my computer?” Bosch asked.
“Not possible. It’s proprietary. But it will only take a few minutes to bring you up to date on everything. I know you’re old school and never did it this way.”
“Just show me.”
Bosch cleared space on the table so she could sit next to him. She opened the monitoring program.
“Oh good, we’re up,” she said. “The tap is in place.”
“So the seventy-two-hour clock is already ticking,” Bosch said.
“Right. But of course nothing said today is going to be worth a shit, since he doesn’t even know he’s being investigated.”
Ballard showed him how to run the software. She set separate alarm tones for Elvin Kidd’s cell and landline, which would sound on the computer any time a call came in or went out. There was a third tone for text messages coming in or going out. She reiterated the rules of listening in. By law the police were forbidden from listening to personal calls. If a call was not specifically about the crime documented in the probable cause statement in the search warrant, the listener had to turn off the speaker but was allowed to check in briefly every thirty seconds to confirm the ongoing phone conversation was personal in nature.
The software recorded only what was live-monitored. Calls not listened to were not recorded. This was why a wiretap required around-the-clock monitoring. It had been at least ten years since Bosch had been involved in a wiretap case. The software was all new but the rules had not changed. He told Ballard that he understood all of that.
“What about the fact that I’m not a cop anymore?” he asked. “What if something good comes in after you shake his tree and I’m sitting here by myself?”
“You’re still a reserve with San Fernando PD, aren’t you?” Ballard asked.
After leaving the LAPD, Bosch had signed on as a reserve at the tiny city in the Valley’s police department to work cold cases. But his tenure there had ended almost a year before, when he was accused of cutting too many corners on cases.
“Well, sort of,” he said. “They haven’t gotten around to taking my badge because there’s still a couple cases I worked on that haven’t gotten to court. The prosecutors want me to have a badge and be a reserve when I have to testify. So, technically, yes, I’m a reserve officer but I’m not really doing—”
“Doesn’t matter. You have a badge, and a reserve is still a sworn officer. We’re good. You can do this.”
“Okay.”
“So, I’ll come by in the morning, leave this with you, and you just leave it on while you do your work. And when you hear any of the alarms just start listening and recording until you know what kind of call it is.”
“And you’ll call me as soon as you’re going in.”
“Yes.”
“And when you’re out. When you’re clear.”
“Roger that. You don’t have to worry.”
“Somebody does. What about using a couple Rialto PD uniforms for backup? To wait outside while you’re inside.”
“If you insist, I will do that.”
“I insist.”
“Okay, I’ll call on my way out there, see if they can spare a car.”
“Good.”
That made Bosch feel better about everything. He just had to make sure in the morning she did as she said she would.
Ballard was reaching for her laptop to close it, when one of the tones she had programmed sounded.
“Ooh, incoming call,” she said. “We get to see how this works.”
She moved her hand down to the touch screen and slid the cursor to the Record button. They heard a man’s voice answer.
“Hello?”
29
It was a collect call from the Men’s Central jail. A robot voice informed the recipient that the call was coming from “D-squared,” and that he needed to hit the number 1 button to accept the call and the number 2 button to decline it. The call had come in on Elvin Kidd’s cell. He accepted the call.
“Yo, E—that you, n____?”
“What you want, boy? I ain’t putting up no bail on you, man. I’m out. You know that.”
“No, no, no, my n____. I ain’t want nothin’—they got me on a parole hold anyway. I just givin’ you a heads-up, man.”
“About what?”
Ballard grabbed the pad Bosch had written the name Manley on, scribbled a note, and slid it in front of Bosch.
D-squared = Dennard Dorsey. Talked to him Tuesday
Bosch nodded. He understood now who was calling Kidd. Kidd and Dorsey couldn’t hear them if Ballard and Bosch talked, but they maintained silence because they wanted not to miss anything.
“It’s ’bout that thing in the alley way back when, man. Some cop come in here asking all about that thing that happened with that white boy.”
“Asking what?”
“Like was I there and what was going on.”
“What you tell ’em?”
“I didn’t say shit. I wudn’t even there. But I thought, you know, I should tell you they still interested, you know what I mean? Keep your head down, n_____.”
; “When was this?”
“She came up in here Tuesday. They put me in a room with her.”
“She?”
“A lady cop. Kind I’d like to see on my bone, too.”
“She got a name?”
“Something like Ballet or something. I didn’t properly catch it at the start ’cause I was like, What you want with me, motherfucker? But she knew some shit, man. She knew me and V-Dog worked that alley back in the day. You remember him? He died up in Folsom or some shit. It’s like one of them cold case things, you know?”
“Who told her about me?”
“I ’on’t know. She just got up in my shit and asked about you.”
“How’d you get this number?”
“I ain’t had no number. I had to call a couple OGs to get it. That’s why it took me a couple days to get to you.”
“Which OG?”
“Marcel. He had a number for—”
“Okay, dog, don’t call me no more. I’m outta the game.”
“I know that, but I still thought you’d—”
The call was disconnected by Kidd.
Ballard immediately got up from her seat and started pacing.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Dorsey just did what I was going to drive out there and do tomorrow.”
“But Kidd didn’t give anything up,” Bosch cautioned. “He was careful.”
“True, but he asked a lot of questions. We got the right guy. It’s him and we were fucking lucky the wire got set up already. But now what? Do I still go out there tomorrow?”
“No way. He’ll be ready for you and you don’t want that.”
Ballard nodded while she paced the living room.
“Can you play it again?” Bosch asked.
Ballard came back to the table and replayed the call. Bosch listened closely for anything that might sound like a code passed between the two old gangbangers. But he concluded that Kidd had taken the call out of the blue and there had been no secret message or code imparted. As Dorsey had said, he was simply passing on a warning about a potentially threatening situation.
“What do you think?” Ballard asked.
The Night Fire Page 17