The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (7 page)

“That’s great,” I said. “Can we get back to this case? What else did you get from the apartment building?”

“That’s about it at this time,” Cisco said. “I’ll be going back there, though. A lot of people weren’t at home when I knocked.”

“That’s because they looked through the peephole and got scared when they saw you.”

I meant it in jest but it wasn’t without a point. Cisco rode a Harley and he dressed the part. His usual outfit consisted of black jeans, boots, and a skin-tight black T-shirt with a leather vest over it. With his imposing size, dress, and the penetrating stare of his dark eyes through a peephole, it was no wonder to me that some people didn’t answer their doors. In fact, I was more surprised when he reported the cooperation of a witness. So much so that I took pains to make sure cooperation was fully voluntary. The last thing I ever wanted was a witness backfiring on me while on the stand. I personally vetted them all.

“I mean, maybe you should think about wearing a tie every now and then,” I added. “I have a whole collection of clip-ons, you know.”

“No, thanks,” Cisco responded flatly. “Can we move on to the hotel now or do you want to keep taking shots at me?”

“Easy, big guy, I’m just poking you a little bit. Tell us about the hotel. You had a busy night.”

“I worked it late. Anyway, the hotel is where this thing gets good.”

He opened his laptop and punched in a command as he spoke, his big fingers punishing the keyboard.

“I managed to obtain the cooperation of the security staff of the Beverly Wilshire without even wearing a tie. They—”

“All right, all right,” I said. “No more discussion of neckties.”

“Good.”

“Go on. What did they tell you over there?”

C
isco said it wasn’t what they told him at the hotel that was important. It was what they showed him.

“Most public spaces in the hotel are under camera surveillance twenty-four seven,” he said. “So they have almost all of our victim’s visit to the hotel Sunday night on digital. They provided me with copies for a nominal fee that I will be expensing.”

“No problem,” I said.

Cisco turned the computer around on the table so the rest of us could see the screen.

“I used the computer’s basic editing program and put the various angles together in one continuous take in real time. We can track her the whole time she was there.”

“Then play it, Scorsese.”

He hit the play button and we started watching. The playback was in black and white and had no sound. It was grainy but not to the point that faces were obscured or unidentifiable. It began with an overhead view of the hotel’s lobby. A time stamp at the top said it was 9:44 p.m. Though the lobby was busy with late check-ins and other people coming and going, Gloria/Giselle was easy enough to spot as she strolled through the lobby toward the elevator alcove. She was dressed in a knee-length black dress, nothing too risqué, and looked totally at ease and at home. She carried a shopping bag from Saks that helped her sell the image of someone who belonged.

“Is that her?” Jennifer asked, pointing to a woman sitting on a circular divan and showing a lot of leg.

“Too obvious,” I said. “Her.”

I pointed to the right of the screen and tracked Gloria. She smiled at a security man who stood at the entrance to the elevator alcove and passed him without hesitation.

Soon the angle changed and we looked down from the ceiling of the elevator alcove. Gloria checked her phone for e-mail while she waited. Soon enough an elevator arrived and she got on.

The next camera angle was from inside the elevator. Gloria got on and pushed the 8 button. As she rode up, she raised the bag and looked inside it. The view we had did not allow us to see the contents.

When she arrived at the eighth floor, she stepped off the elevator and the screen went black.

“Okay, this is where we go dark,” Cisco said. “No cameras on the guest floors.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They told me it was a privacy issue. Recording who goes into what room can be more trouble than it’s worth when it comes to divorce cases and subpoenas and all of that stuff.”

I nodded. The explanation seemed valid.

The screen came back to life again, showing Gloria riding the elevator down. I noted on the time stamp that five minutes had gone by, meaning that Gloria had apparently knocked on the door and waited in the hallway outside room 837 for a significant period of time.

“Is there a house phone up there on the eighth floor?” I asked. “Did she spend all that time knocking on the door or did she call down to the desk to ask about the room?”

“No phone,” Cisco said. “Just watch.”

Once back on the ground floor, Gloria stepped out of the elevator and went to a house phone that was on a table against the wall. She made a call and soon was speaking to someone.

“This is her asking to be connected to the room,” Cisco said. “She is told by the operator that there is no Daniel Price registered in the hotel and no one in eight thirty-seven.”

Gloria hung up the phone, and I could tell by her body language that she was annoyed, frustrated. Her trip had been wasted. She headed back through the lobby, moving at a faster clip than when she had arrived.

“Now watch this,” Cisco said.

Gloria was halfway across the lobby when a man entered the screen thirty feet behind her. He was wearing a fedora and had his head down, looking at the screen of his phone. He appeared to be heading toward the main doors as well, and there was nothing suspicious about him other than that his features were obscured by the hat and the downward pose of his face.

Gloria suddenly changed directions and headed toward the front desk. This caused the man behind her to awkwardly change his direction as well. He turned and went to the circular divan and sat down.

“He’s following her?” Lorna asked.

“Wait for it,” Cisco said.

On the screen, Gloria went to the desk, waited while a guest ahead of her was taken care of, then asked the deskman a question. He typed something on a keyboard, looked at a screen, and shook his head. He was obviously telling her that there was no Daniel Price registered as a guest in the hotel. All the while, the man in the hat sat with his head tilted down and the brim of his hat hiding his face. He was looking at his phone but not doing anything with it.

“That guy’s not even typing,” Jennifer said. “He’s just staring at his phone.”

“He’s looking at Gloria,” I said. “Not the phone.”

It was impossible to tell for sure because of the hat, but it seemed clear that Gloria had a follower. Finished at the front desk, she turned and once more headed toward the front doors of the lobby. She pulled a cell phone out of her handbag and hit a speed dial. Before she got to the doors, she said something quickly into the phone and then dropped it into her bag. She then exited the hotel.

Before she was gone, the man in the hat was up and crossing the lobby behind her. He picked up his step once she was through the doors, and this seemed to confirm that Gloria’s impromptu turn to the front desk had exposed a tail.

After the man in the hat left the lobby, the camera angle jumped to the outside curb, where a black Town Car like my own had pulled up in front of Gloria at the valet stand. She opened the back door, threw the Saks bag in, and then got in after it. The car pulled away and out of the frame. The man in the hat crossed the valet lanes and left the picture as well, never once raising his head enough for even his nose to be seen.

The playback ended and everyone was silent for a long moment while they reviewed it in their heads.

“So?” Cisco finally asked.

“So she was followed,” I said. “I take it you asked about the guy at the hotel?”

“I did and he doesn’t work there. They had nobody working undercover security that night. That guy—whoever he is—was an outsider.”

I nodded and thought some more about what I had seen.

“He didn’t follow her in,” I said. “Does that mean he was already there?”

“I’ve got a loop on him, too,” Cisco said.

He turned the computer back to him and punched in more commands, bringing up a second video. He turned the screen back to us and hit play. Cisco provided narration.

“All right, this is him sitting in the lobby at nine thirty. He was there before her. He stays like that until she gets there. I have a side-by-side of that.”

He spun the computer back and then set up the side-by-side videos before turning it to us again. The images from separate cameras were synced on the time stamps and we were able to watch Gloria cross the lobby and the man in the hat track her, his hat turning as she passed on the other side of the room. He then waited for her to come back down from the eighth floor and followed her out, after her sudden stop at the front desk.

Show over, Cisco closed his computer.

“Okay, so who is he?” I asked.

Cisco spread his hands, a wing span of nearly seven feet.

“All I can tell you is that he doesn’t work for the hotel,” he said.

I stood up and started pacing behind the table. I was feeling jazzed. The man in the hat was a mystery, and mysteries always played to the defense’s side. Mysteries were question marks, which led to reasonable doubt.

“Do you know if the police have been over to the hotel yet?” I asked.

“As of last night, no,” Cisco said. “They’ve already made their case to the DA. They probably don’t care what she was doing in the hours before the murder.”

I shook my head. It was foolish to underestimate the state.

“Don’t worry, they will.”

“Could he have been working for Gloria?” Jennifer asked. “You know, like her security or something?”

I nodded.

“Good question. I’ll ask the client when I see him before first appearance. I’ll also ask about the Town Car that picked her up. See if she had a regular driver. But there’s something about this . . . this video that is off. It doesn’t fit with this guy working for her. It’s like he knew there were cameras and he kept his hat on and his head down. He didn’t want to be seen on camera.”

“And him being there before she arrived,” Cisco added. “He was waiting for her.”

“He acted like he knew she’d be going up and coming right back down,” Lorna seconded. “He knew that there was nobody in that room up there.”

I stopped pacing and pointed at Cisco’s closed laptop.

“He’s gotta be the guy,” I said. “He’s Daniel Price. We have to find out who he is.”

“Um, can I butt in here for a moment?” Jennifer asked.

I nodded, giving her the floor.

“Before we get all hot and bothered about this mystery man in the hat, we have to remember that our client admitted to the police that he was in the victim’s apartment with her
after
this guy was or was not following her,
and
that he argued with her and put his hand around her throat. So rather than worrying about what was going on before he was in her apartment, shouldn’t we be worried about what La Cosse did or didn’t do when he was actually in the place?”

“It’s all important,” I answered quickly. “But it all needs to be vetted. We need to find this guy and see what he was doing. Cisco, can you widen the search a bit? That hotel sits right at the end of Rodeo Drive. There’s got to be more cameras out there. Maybe we can track this guy to a car and get a plate. His trail has not gone totally cold.”

Cisco nodded.

“I’m on it.”

I checked my watch. I needed to get moving toward downtown and arraignment court.

“Okay, what else?”

No one said anything, then Lorna timidly raised her hand.

“Lorna, what?”

“Just a reminder, today at two you have the pretrial conference in Department Thirty on Ramsey.”

I groaned. Another of my stellar clients, Deirdre Ramsey was charged with aiding and abetting and a variety of crimes in one of the more bizarre cases to come my or any lawyer’s way in years. She first gained public attention the year before as the unnamed victim of a horrible assault that occurred during a takeover robbery of a convenience store. The first reports were that the twenty-six-year-old had been one of four customers and two employees in the store when two heavily armed and masked men entered to rob the place. The customers and employees were herded into a storage room and locked in while the gunmen used a crowbar to open the store’s cash deposit slot.

But then the gunmen reentered the storage room and told all the captives to turn over their wallets and jewelry and take off all their clothes. While one of the men stood guard over the others, the second man raped Ramsey in front of the whole group. The men then fled the store, taking a total of $280 dollars and two boxes of candy besides the personal belongings of the victims. For months the crime remained unsolved. The city council offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of suspects, and Ramsey filed a negligence lawsuit against the corporation that owned the store, alleging that the business did not provide adequate protection of its customers. Knowing that the last thing they wanted to see was Ramsey testifying about her ordeal in front of a jury, the corporation’s board of directors in Dallas voted to settle the case, paying Ramsey $250,000 for her troubles.

Money is the great destroyer of relationships. Two weeks after Ramsey walked away with the money, investigators on the case took a call from a woman inquiring whether the city council award was still available. When informed that it was, she told a surprising story. She said that the $250K settlement was the true goal of the robbery and that the rapist-robber was actually Ramsey’s boyfriend, Tariq Underwood. The rape was part of an elaborate and consensual scam, according to the snitch, a get-rich scheme concocted by Ramsey herself.

As it turned out, the caller was Ramsey’s former best friend—that is, until she felt she was unfairly left out of the riches bestowed on Ramsey. Court-ordered wiretaps ensued, and soon enough Ramsey, her boyfriend, and his partner in the robbery were arrested. The Office of the Public Defender took on Underwood’s defense, which put it in conflict with Ramsey’s, and so her file was shuttled to me. It was a low-cost, low-probability case, but Ramsey refused to plead it out. She wanted to go to trial, and I had no choice but to take her there. It wasn’t going to end pretty.