Try Darkness (9 page)
“I don’t know.”
“How old are you, Kylie?”
“Six.”
“Did you have a birthday party when you turned six?”
“My mommy gave me some cake with a candle in it.”
“Just your mommy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Were you living in the hotel when your mommy gave you that cake?”
Kylie nodded.
“What’s your last name, Kylie?”
She shrugged.
“What was your mommy’s whole name?”
“Just Mommy.”
“She didn’t have a last name?”
“She said we could just be Mommy and Kylie.”
Brosia frowned, wrote something down. “What about your daddy?”
Kylie whispered to me, “I’m tired.”
“That’s it for now,” I told Brosia. “She needs some sleep.”
“I’m not finished yet,” he said.
“Kylie is,” I said. “I’ll be in touch.”
He paused, then nodded. “See that you are. What about notifying Family Services?”
I shook my head. “I’m her counsel and guardian-in-fact. Last thing she needs is county services.”
“Can’t argue with you there,” Brosia said.
“You wouldn’t want to,” I said.
OUTSIDE THE STATION
, just before we got in the car, Kylie tapped my leg. She motioned with her finger for me to bend down.
“I didn’t tell him about the picture,” she said.
“What picture?”
“Of Mommy. I didn’t want him to take it away. Am I bad?”
“Show me the picture,” I said.
Kylie took her backpack and unzipped a pocket. Pulled out a photograph. It was a little wrinkled around the edges.
Showed a smiling, attractive woman.
“Your mommy?”
Kylie nodded. “Can I keep it?”
“Sure you can,” I said. I’d make a copy of it and send it to Brosia. It didn’t have any evidentiary value that I could see. “But can I keep it for you for a little while?”
“Okay,” Kylie said. “If you promise to give it back.”
“I promise.”
She started crying then, into my hip. In her little muffled voice she kept saying she wanted her mommy. I knelt down and let her cry it out for a while, then wiped her tears away with my thumb.
“You did real good today,” I told her. “You’re brave, did you know that?”
She sniffed and shook her head.
“Well you are,” I said. “You need to know that.”
I DROVE HER
back to St. Monica’s. She fell asleep on the way. I carried her onto the grounds and found Sister Mary in the office.
Sister Mary said she had a cot in her room. “It’s better if someone’s around when she wakes up,” she said.
I agreed and carried Kylie to Sister Mary’s small room and put her on the cot, then covered her with a blanket.
“What’s going to happen now?” Sister Mary said.
“I start making trouble for some very rich people.”
I GOT TO
the Starbucks in Westwood Village at ten the next morning.
They were playing “L.A. Woman,” by the Doors. I hadn’t grown up with the Doors and knew about Jim Morrison only by watching that movie Val Kilmer was in. Didn’t much care for the gastric squeal of “mojo risin’” over and over. I would have preferred shoving pencils in my ear.
Al came in about ten-fifteen. All smiles.
“This is more like it, bud,” he said. “Just like old times. Glad you called.”
“I figured I’d buy you a foamy frothy white chocolate froufrou,” I said. “That was your drink, wasn’t it?”
“Triple venti white chocolate mocha.”
“What’s that do to your heart?”
“Makes me know I’m alive. When I’m at home I’m not so sure.”
“And how is the lovely wife these days?”
“Same old.”
“Still not the Norman Rockwell type, are you?”
He shrugged. “Norman Rockwell was probably a serial killer. You never know.”
I got him his drink and refilled my regular and paid the ransom. At least by this time the Doors were gone and some good jazz was going.
“So I was sorry to hear about the death of that woman,” Al said.
“The murder, you mean.”
“Sorry to hear about it. Really.”
“Sure.”
“Sorry because she was your client, bud. And a human being.”
“She was a human being that had to live like a rat. In a hellhole your client owns. Only you don’t let the rats stay in the hole a full thirty days, and that makes it illegal.”
“There are several issues to that—”
“Don’t start getting all lawyerly on me, Al. I was always better at it than you anyway. There’s
issues
when you don’t want to do what’s right. When everything’s on your side, the law and the facts, suddenly the issues go away. That’s the way the game is played.”
Al bit down gently on his lower lip, like an amateur poker player hoping to fill a straight. It was the slightest tic but enough to give me a sense of well-being. Truth was, I didn’t mind playing a little hold-’em with Al, just to see him sweat.
“What did you call me down here for?” he finally said. “Lecture me about the law? Way I see it, anything we had to say to each other is now moot. You had a client and that client is, unfortunately, dead. Yes, she was a tenant at the Lindbrook, and you could have filed something, but now that’s gone.”
“Convenient, isn’t it?” I said. “If I were of an Oliver Stone bent, I might even say your client had an interest in making the problem go away.”
“Tyler, my friend, don’t do this. Don’t go getting yourself into a lunatic state of mind. This is the big city—stuff happens. It happens a lot to people like that woman, out there on the streets. We wish it wouldn’t but it does.”
“She has a little girl,” I said.
Al frowned. “Did I know that?”
“You should have.”
“How old’s the girl?”
“Six.”
“Where is she?”
“I’ve got her.”
“You? What are you going to do?”
“Protect her. And her rights.”
“She’s your client?”
“I’m guardian ad litem.” That’s a fancy Latin phrase for someone who stands in for an infant or child in a legal matter.
“Well that’s just great, Ty.” Al picked up his drink as if he were making a toast. “You are a good man, taking care of the little ones. Where’s she living? With you?”
“Her permanent residence is the Lindbrook.”
Al froze with his cup halfway to his face.
“Yeah,” I said. “Isn’t the law great? She can assert her right, by way of yours truly, to continue to occupy room 414 at the Lindbrook Hotel. The law is
wonderful.
” I toasted him with my cup.
“You are not serious.”
“Do I look like Adam Sandler to you?”
Al’s hand was actually shaking a little when he put his cup down. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You don’t need to do that. We can work out a settlement right now. You and me. You can get a nice chunk for the girl. Think about that. Better than—”
“Who’s behind all this, Al?”
“What?”
“You’re going to a lot of trouble to protect somebody. And you’re worried what’ll happen if I find out. You’re worried that this Lindbrook thing is going to blow up in somebody’s face, and maybe you’ll get singed yourself. Is that about it?”
He shook his head. “You were a lot easier to work with when you weren’t so sold on yourself.”
“Maybe I’m just not for sale,” I said. I wanted to believe that.
Al tapped his cup lid with his index finger. “What’s with all this nickel-and-diming now? There’s no future in that, not for you.”
“And you know what’s for me, is that it?”
“We’ve known each other a long time,” Al said. “We’ve worked together before.”
“Yeah. Remember the Morocco suit?”
“Sure,” Al beamed, as if he was proud of it.
The Morocco case was a lawsuit fueled by two monstrous egos with enough money to thump their chests like twin Kongs. Arn Bunting, the billionaire oil man from Texas who had made inroads as a Hollywood producer. And Duane Dollinger, the best-selling author on whose novel the movie
Morocco
was based.
The movie’s budget ballooned to a staggering $170 million. The critics massacred it. On opening weekend it took in a mere $18 million, finishing third behind the latest Pixar animation and a Will Ferrell comedy. The movie never got legs, even though it had two A-list stars for the leads.
Dollinger threw a fit and blamed Bunting for the loss, which hurt Dollinger’s hope for a franchise based on his series character. Bunting shot back that Dollinger had abused his right of approval over the script. Seven writers had worked on it at one time or another, and Dollinger had hated them all.
Our firm represented Dollinger, a sixty-five-year-old fireplug who told us he would keep on throwing money at us until he had cut off the two things that Bunting, as a man, would rather keep.
“What I remember about that,” I said, “was the week Dollinger testified. Here was a guy who was living large in Arizona, had a loyal following, who messed up his own movie and was now spending his time in a spite fight. He wouldn’t settle. He wanted to get to a jury, tell his story. His greatest story ever, starring himself. And he had the money to do it and we gladly took it, didn’t we?”
“And why not?”
“I thought, as I watched this guy, what would it be like if he was just some average doofus who really got ripped off? He’d never be able to be here, to get the representation we could give him. Even if he was in the right. It galled me then but I pushed that aside. I wasn’t supposed to think about it. Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Money shouldn’t be the only thing that talks.”
“You’re being naive now, Ty. In the law, costs and benefits are the only thing that matter. You can put a value on anything, and that’s the way it should be. It’s more efficient that way.”
“Well, as the great philosopher Steven Wright once asked, if one synchronized swimmer drowns, do all the rest have to drown too?”
Al just looked at me.
“I don’t like drowning, Al.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, now looking like he’d drawn that straight and was ready to go all in. “I see. You think there could be some connection between this chick’s murder and Orpheus. You really do, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
Al was happy to go on, tilting his head back as if telling a joke to a packed house. “Yeah! You got this idea you’re some kind of Bogart or something, and you’re gonna find a conspiracy. Yeah, Ty Buchanan, supercop.”
“I want Depp to play me in the movie,” I said.
“This is so funny except that it’s not.”
“Then let’s get a serious offer on the table. Here it is. You instruct whoever is calling the shots at the Lindbrook to accept rent on behalf of room 414, and every other renter who makes the request. You have until four-thirty today to give me your answer. If it’s not the answer I want to hear, then I’ll be at the courthouse tomorrow morning when it opens for business and present the clerk with a complaint that names Orpheus and Roddy. Have I made myself clear?”
Shaking his head, Al said, “Sad. Really sad.”
“Four-thirty,” I said.
“You have a tank of gas?” Al said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think you’ll be taking a drive.”
HE STEPPED OUTSIDE
with his cell on his ear. I listened to the Ray Charles track, happy. That was more like it. That was real music and artistry.
Law was like that, too. A lot of art and jazz to it, despite what they tried to tell me at Gunther, McDonough. You can have all the law on your side, but unless you know what to do with it you can come off like a rube holding live wires in his hands. You might be the one who gets electrocuted. Or more likely your client.
Which is why you need to get past the games played at a place like Gunther, and the lawyers like Al Bradshaw who practice there. They’ve become like the machines in
The Matrix,
running off the juice of humanity. And draining it in the process.
To be a great lawyer, it was occurring to me, you have to feel something. You can’t sleepwalk through a case or cause. You have to find the thing you’ll die for.
A criminal defense lawyer has the hardest job, because he usually reps the guilty and the damned. So what’s he supposed to feel? The Constitution, that’s what—the guarantee that the government can’t just shut you away because they don’t like the way you look or what you say, but they have to overcome a big burden of proof, and if we lose that, boys and girls, we lose the only thing that stands between us and the exercise of pure will and mob rule.
This was the one thing Gilbert Calderón had going for him. His lawyer actually believed that.
But Al was right about one thing. I did think I could smoke something out by keeping Kylie on as a tenant at the Lindbrook. I did think there was more going on. It was a long shot, but the Red Sox finally won a World Series, right?
And a little part of me, the selfish part, the part Father Bob and Sister Mary hadn’t been able to excise, just plain loved sticking it to Al Bradshaw.
Al came back in and sat down.
“You are being given one more shot.”
“Of espresso?”
“Listen to me. You are getting a privilege not many people get. All I can say to you is, don’t blow it.”
“I’m all atwitter.”
“You should be. You better be. You’ve got fifteen minutes to get to the top of Linda Flora Drive.”
IN LOS ANGELES
, the rich have always been able to carve out slices of exclusive heaven for their nests. They’ve always been able, with little effort, to hold back the hordes of merely well off and not-doing-too-well. The gates of their restricted habitations did not have to be made of iron bars. Time and land values do just as well.
Mostly land. L.A. was never a crowded hub of European immigrants in stuffy tenements working factory jobs. Early on, it was a sprawl of fashionable neighborhoods like Angeleno Heights and Bunker Hill and the Adams district. As these began to fray, wealthy developers expanded outward, to Beverly Hills and the new burg called Hollywood, with handy deed restrictions built in. No blacks. No Asians. No Mexicans.
By the time the courts stepped in and put the kibosh on such restrictions, the land had appreciated so much the “undesirable element” just plain couldn’t buy in. Thus, the rich had erected barriers of gold every bit as effective as the impenetrable gate that met me just off Linda Flora Drive, at the home of one Sam DeCosse.