“Okay, I’ll try. But I was sort of hoping this might be my first criminal trial.”
“You don’t want this to be your first trial. You want that one to be a winner. Besides, eighty percent of criminal law is figuring out how to stay out of trial. And the other half—”
“Is all mental. Yeah, I get that.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Don’t call me boss. We’re associates, remember?”
“Right.”
I put the phone away and started thinking about how I would handle the interview with Stacey Campbell. We were passing the Farmers Market now and were almost there.
After a while I noticed that Earl kept looking at me in the rearview. He did this when he had something to say.
“What’s up, Earl?” I finally asked.
“I was wondering about what you said on the phone. About with people on the left side and how that works.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, one time—you know, back when I was working the streets—I had this guy come up with a gun to rip off my stash.”
“Yeah?”
“And the thing was, back then somebody was going around popping guys for their cash and stash, you know? Just popping them in the head and grabbing it all up. And I was thinking that this was the guy and he was about to do me.”
“Scary. What happened?”
“Well, I talked him out of it. I just talked about my daughter just bein’ born and all. I gave him my stuff and he just ran away. Then later there was an arrest in those other murders and I saw his picture on the TV and it was the guy. The guy that ripped me off.”
“You got lucky there, Earl.”
He nodded and looked at me in the mirror again.
“And the thing is, he was on my right and I was on his left when he came up, and I talked him out of it. It’s kind of like what you were saying there. Like he agreed with me not to kill my ass.”
I nodded knowingly.
“You make sure you tell Bullocks that story next time you see her.”
“I will.”
“All right, Earl. I’m glad you talked him out of it.”
“Yeah, me, too. My moms and daughter, too.”
9
I got to Toast early, waited ten minutes for a table, and then kept it while nursing a coffee for forty-five minutes. There was a line of West Hollywood hipsters who weren’t happy about me monopolizing a coveted table and not even ordering a meal. I kept my head down and read e-mail until Starry-Eyed Stacey showed up at 1:30 and slid into the chair across from me, enveloped in a strong cloud of perfume.
The hair Stacey had put on was a white-blond spike wig with blue highlights at the tips. It went with her so-pale-it-was-almost-blue skin and the wide stripes of glitter paint on her eyelids. I figured that the hipsters who hated me for taking one of their tables were close to rabid about me now. Starry-Eyed Stacey didn’t exactly fit in. She looked like she had escaped from a 1970s glam rock album cover.
“So you’re the lawyer,” she said.
I smiled all business-like.
“That’s me.”
“Glenda told me about you. She said you were sweet. She didn’t say handsome, too.”
“Who’s Glenda?”
“Giselle. When we first met in Vegas she was Glenda ‘the Good Witch’ Daville.”
“Why’d she change her name when she came here?”
She shrugged.
“People change, I guess. She was still the same girl. That’s why I always called her Glenda.”
“So you had already come out from Vegas and she followed?”
“Something like that. We had stayed in touch, you know. She checked to see how tricks were out here and whatnot. I told her to come out if she wanted to and she did.”
“And you put her in touch with Andre.”
“Yeah, to set her up online and take her bookings.”
“How long had you known Andre?”
“Not so long. You think we can get any service around here?”
She was right, the waitress who had so attentively asked me every five minutes if I was going to order something was now nowhere to be seen. My guess was that Stacey had that effect on people, especially women. I got the attention of a busboy and told him to fetch our waitress.
“How did you find Andre?” I asked while we waited.
“That was easy. I went online and started looking at other girls’ sites. He was the site administrator on a lot of the good ones. So I e-mailed him and we hooked up.”
“How many sites does he manage?”
“I don’t know. You gotta ask him.”
“Did you ever know Andre to be physically abusive to any of the women he managed?”
She snickered.
“You mean like a real pimp?”