Try Darkness (15 page)
“Not in this environment, buddy. People shooting the mom from a mom-and-pop business is not something people like, especially in the Valley. You’re a west side guy, right?”
“Used to be.”
“You’ll find out. It’s like tipping.”
“Tipping?”
Roberts leaned back and crossed his legs. “When I was going to law school, at night I worked as a waiter, first in Westwood, then in the Valley. We used to talk about Valley tippers. Cheap. It was an exciting night when you got ten percent out of ’em. They’re that way with defense lawyers. You’ll be lucky to get ’em to buy fifteen percent of your case. That’s not a way to win.”
“Were you a good waiter?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you give your customers a menu?”
“Of course.”
“And on that menu, I bet there was more than one choice.”
“Your point?”
“You’re not giving us much choice.”
“It just seems a shame. You want to start your criminal career with a guy going to death row?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll relay your offer to my client. I’ll let him make the call. And he’ll tell me to tell you where to put your offer. That’s just his way, you understand. And then I’ll make
you
a deal.”
“I’m listening.”
“If I can prove to you you’ve got the wrong guy, you’ll move to dismiss.”
“Knock yourself out,” Roberts said.
I SPENT THE
weekend working on my closing argument in Gilbert’s case.
One of the best lessons I learned from Pierce McDonough, a great trial lawyer in his day, was that you begin with the end in mind. You formulate your closing argument first and then work your evidence presentation around that.
Most big firms use focus groups now and test-market their theories before deciding what direction to take.
I didn’t have those resources available to me, so I did the next best thing. On Saturday at the Ultimate Sip I ran the evidence by Father Bob, Sister Mary, and Barton C. McNitt. Kylie was with us, sipping a hot chocolate and coloring.
It all came down to two things. The trouble with eyewitness testimony and a motive to lie on the part of one of the witnesses.
McNitt, wearing a big black shirt that looked like a whale skin with arm holes, said, “Eyewitness testimony is the thing most people rely on, but it’s got a whole lot of problems.”
“Which is why I’ll begin right at the top,” I said, “by telling the jury how unreliable eyewitness testimony is. I’ll take them to school—”
“No,” Father Bob said.
“No?”
“I wouldn’t do it that way.”
“You’re going to tell me how to try cases now?”
“You must prepare the soil of their hearts,” he said.
I shook my head. “What is that even supposed to mean?”
“Allow me?”
“Go for it,” I said.
“I would begin like this: Ladies and gentlemen, I am tempted at this time not even to make an argument. I have a sense that if you were going to go into to the jury room right now, just based on my cross-examination of the witnesses, you would vote not guilty.”
“Now that’s not bad,” I said. “Where’d you get that?”
“I read books, son,” Father Bob said. “Books on the law I especially like. Great closing arguments. Like Clarence Darrow in the Leopold and Loeb case. Or Louis Nizer in John Henry Faulk. You can learn, son, so listen.” He cleared his throat and stood. He faced us as if we were in the jury box.
“But I have the duty to marshal all of the evidence. And I don’t think there is any question that the eyewitnesses actually
think
that it is Mr. Calderón who robbed them, Mr. Calderón who pulled the trigger of that gun. But in our system of government it is not they who try the defendant. We have you twelve people and you are the jury. You’re here for a reason.”
“Can’t wait to hear this one,” McNitt said.
“Quiet down and you will,” Father Bob said. “You are here to stand between the government and the defendant. You listen to the evidence. You weigh it. You are the ones to judge it in terms of your own common sense and your own experience. That’s what makes this country different from most other countries. In our country it is not the prosecutor who gets to vote. He must prove his case to you, beyond a reasonable doubt. If he is not able to do that, you must find the defendant not guilty. The defendant doesn’t have to prove anything.”
“Solid,” I said.
“In most other countries that is not true. But in this country it is the foundation of our system of justice, and thank God for that, ladies and gentlemen.”
“Thank who?” McNitt said.
“Throughout the history of the criminal law there runs a sacred trust, a monument to the dignity of all mankind. This sacred trust is now placed in your hands, I am talking about the presumption of innocence.”
I applauded. So did Sister Mary.
Pick McNitt grumbled. “You’ve convinced me,” he said. “The eyewitnesses in the Bible were unreliable and there’s a presumption they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Sister Mary looked at me with a
here we go again
expression.
So McNitt and Father Bob went around and around awhile. I tuned them out and looked at what Kylie was drawing.
“It’s me and you and Sister Mary,” she said. “Standing by the ocean. And that’s a shark coming out of the water.”
“A shark, huh?” I said. She had drawn me bigger, between them and the shark, with my arms out in a gesture of protection.
The shark looked hungry.
MONDAY MORNING I
went to the Twin Towers downtown to see Gilbert Calderón and give him Roberts’s offer.
“You mean I say I did it?” he asked.
“And you get to keep your life. They could go for the DP here.”
“I ain’t afraid of no death penalty, man. I know where I’m going.”
“That would be San Quentin.”
“No. To be with the Lord.”
“Fine. But I don’t want to be your travel agent. I have an offer from the DA, I’m obligated to—”
“I can’t say I did it when I didn’t.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m gonna walk. I got real faith in you.”
“Hey, you know what? That and five grand’ll get you Dodger season tickets.”
Gilbert paused, then said, “Could you do something for me?”
“If I can.”
“Thanks.” He cleared his throat. “Would you tell the DA I’m sorry I said he was scum? That was just my old man asserting himself.”
“I’m sure Mr. Roberts has gotten over it.”
“No, man, this is important. Bad talk, coming out of my mouth. I got to make that right.”
“Okay, Gilbert. When I see him, I’ll pass that along.”
“Thanks, that’s a weight off my shoulders.”
Gilbert was troubled by telling a DA he was scum, but not by the death penalty. Jail did some crazy things to people. This was a new one on me.
OUTSIDE I BOUGHT
an
L.A. Times
and gave it a quick scan.
Another toddler was dead, shot in gang crossfire in South Los Angeles. The city’s chief of police made a PR statement about it. Local politicians were falling all over themselves to be next.
Nothing much better inside. A neighborhood with a bad homeless problem was getting “cleaned up,” which only meant the homeless were being hassled to other parts of the city. And
those
neighborhoods were really, really happy about that.
Foster care was suffering because payment rates lagged behind the cost of living and were, in fact, lower than the price to kennel a dog. People were dropping out of the duty, leaving more kids without a place to go.
Two people died when a big rig crashed into a tractor-trailer on the westbound 210 and caught fire. And the ACLU was suing a local college for denying a male student the right to attend classes in the nude.
Just another day in the naked city, as they used to say.
But the biggest news had to be the panda droppings. The Chinese were into recycling panda poop, fibrous from the bamboo diet, and making paper goods out of it.
Now that was enterprise. That was the mind of man at work for the betterment of all.
Which put me right in the mood for the big one-page ad for a huge success seminar at Staples Center.
The ad was dominated by a photo of Roland Funk, the New York speculator who had become a national celebrity after divorcing his first wife and taking up with an Olympic skier from Switzerland. Now he was pitching his “magic way to become a millionaire,” joined by a bunch of his “friends.”
There was Robbie Abston, a “life performance coach,” whatever that meant. His photo showed a mouthful of teeth as white and large as elephant tusks. In three hours, the ad promised, he would change your life forever.
Yes, and then came Pug Robinson, former heavyweight boxer, now a skin cream entrepreneur, on “How to Punch Up Your Business and Sex Life.”
Next was the latest power couple, coauthors of the hot new book
The Key,
who promised to teach you how to harness all the laws of success and attract love and money into your life after just one hour. In the photo they stood back to back, arms folded, flashing pearlies.
What a lineup! Here you would learn about businesses you could start on a shoestring budget and build into an empire. How to increase any sale 350 percent with a little-known trick. Of course, there was the standard promise of real estate profits with no money down.
Then, adding a bit of spirituality to the mix, was Oz Julian, the “people’s pastor” from Denver, who promised to place you at the pinnacle of life
right now.
His smile looked like a transplant from the land of cookware infomercials.
Finally, to top it all off like Cool Whip on a brownie, was a session with the “fastest-rising star in the world of real estate development,” Sam DeCosse Jr.
Junior.
Rising star. Sure. Riding daddy’s coattails maybe.
That’s when it hit me. I’d thought the Lindbrook was a little too small for Sam Senior. But maybe it was Junior’s deal, his starter kit.
Maybe it was Junior I needed to talk to about what happened in the Lindbrook.
Tickets were only forty-nine bucks, and what the heck? Maybe I could have a word with Junior. Maybe I could learn how to start a business. Maybe I could corner the U.S. market in panda poop.
I put the event on my calendar.
USUALLY, YOU DON’T
go to a nun to get connected to a call girl. But in this case Sister Mary had gotten some names off of L.A. Night Silk. She handed me a list of four based, she said, on their profiles. She did this at my trailer, as far from the office as she could get and still be on the grounds of St. Monica’s.
“What sort of profiles?” I asked.
“Please don’t ask,” she said. She looked upset. Or concerned.
“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”
“And I’m going to continue to be,” she said. “When do we go?”
“Go?”
“To talk to them.”
“You want to go with me?”
“You think I’m going to let you be alone with a prostitute?”
“I’m just going to be talking, paying for their time.”
“Sez you.”
“Sister Mary, you wound me.”
“I’ll see that Sister Judith looks after Kylie.”
“And after that you’ll look after me?”
“Sharp, Mr. Buchanan,” she said. “Very sharp.”
PROSTITUTION
.
They call it the world’s oldest profession but I think lawyers were there first. When a caveman made a move on somebody else’s woman, there was no payment involved. But there was the law. The law of the club. And lawyers have always been about clubs. At Gunther, McDonough, I loved to swing ’em hard.
Then the prostitutes came along and it was all a matter of exchange. Society tried to stop it, but the demand was too great.
Lawyers and prostitutes have been running some nice scams ever since.
Escort services is one of them. Technically, the service only rents out “companions.” A woman on the arm to take to dinner or a function or the crap tables in Vegas. That’s what is negotiated and paid for. Any sex, the services say, is purely a voluntary thing that may or may not happen. And if it does, well, that’s what adults do.
Right.
The salesman from Chicago, the field hockey jock from UCLA, the stockbroker from New York—these guys are not paying for a night of jocular conversation or Yahtzee.
And everyone knows it. The cops, the politicians, the clinicians who administer the HIV tests. There’s not a lot of call to shut these things down, of course. Because the local government gets to tax the business, and it’s a business that never runs out of customers.
SISTER MARY HAD
determined that three of the escorts had been working for Silk for over six years. That’s a long time in the trade. Without a retirement plan, too.
But with seniority comes cost, and this cost wasn’t cheap. Five hundred for four hours for the first one on the list, named Lana. I called, got a voice mail, and she returned my call an hour later. I told her I’d meet her in the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel and we’d go to dinner and see what happened after that.
She said fine and quoted me the price. Then I gave her my credit card number. It was easier than ordering from Amazon.com.
THE BONAVENTURE HOTEL
is on Figueroa in L.A.’s financial district. Seemed fitting, as I was about to make a financial transaction myself. Of sorts.
Lana told me she would be wearing red and holding a
Wall Street Journal
. Honest. Just like the movies. Or maybe she was into investing. Whatever it was, I made her immediately. She was sitting in one of the big chairs by the fountain.
She was tall and slender and packed into her red dress. Her hair was light strawberry and shoulder length. Her face, while perfectly made up, seemed to carry an added weight, as if time had attached lead pellets to her cheeks. When she smiled at me, it looked like it took effort.
“Mr. Buchanan?” She had a gentle voice with a practiced, come-hither nuance.
“How are you?” I said, and then felt completely flustered. What do you do when you meet your escort for the first time? Shaking hands seemed completely unacceptable, and lip lock a bit over the top.