He was talking about Sandy and Katie Patterson and the accident that took their lives. I leaned down and grabbed the iron railing at the foot of his bed with both hands. Legal Siegel was my mentor. He could tell me anything. He could dress me down lower than even my ex-wife and I would accept it.
“Listen to me,” he said. “There is no more noble a cause on this planet than to stand for the wrongly accused. You can’t fuck this up, kid.”
I nodded and kept my head bowed.
“Guilt,” he said. “You have to get by it. Let the ghosts go or they’ll take you under and you’ll never be the lawyer you are supposed to be. You will never see the big picture.”
I threw up my hands.
“Please, enough with the big picture crap! What are you talking about, Legal? What am I missing?”
“To see what you’re missing, you have to step back and widen the angle. Then you see the bigger picture.”
I looked at him, trying to understand.
“When was the habeas filed?” he asked quietly.
“November.”
“When was Gloria Dayton murdered?”
“November.”
I said it impatiently. We both knew the answers to these questions.
“And when were you papered by the lawyer?”
“Just now—yesterday.”
“And this federal agent you talked about, when was he served?”
“I don’t know if he was served. But Valenzuela had the paper yesterday.”
“And then there’s the phony subpoena Fulgoni cooked up for the other girl from back then.”
“Kendall Roberts, right.”
“Any idea why he would dummy up paper for her and not you?”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know. I guess he knew I’d know if it was legit or not. She’s not a lawyer, so she wouldn’t. He’d save the costs of filing with the court. I’ve heard of lawyers who roll that way.”
“Seems thin to me.”
“Well, that’s all I got off the top of—”
“So six months after the habeas was filed with the court they put out their first subpoenas? I tell you, if I ran a shop like that I’d a been out of business and on the street. It’s not the timely exercise of the law, that’s for sure.”
“This kid Fulgoni doesn’t know his ass from—”
I stopped in midsentence. I had suddenly caught a glimpse of the elusive big picture. I looked at Legal.
“Maybe these weren’t the first subpoenas.”
He nodded.
“Now I think you’re getting it,” Legal said.
21
I told Earl to drop down to Olympic and take me out to Century City and Sly Fulgoni Jr.’s office. I then settled in with a fresh legal pad and started charting timelines on the Gloria Dayton murder case and the Hector Moya habeas petition. Pretty soon I saw how the cases were entwined like a double helix. I saw the big picture.
“You sure you got the right address, boss?”
I looked up from my chart and out the window. Earl had slowed the Lincoln in front of a row of French provincial–style town house offices. We were still on Olympic but on the eastern edge of Century City. I was sure the address carried the correct zip code and all the cachet that came with it, but it was a far cry from the gleaming towers on the Avenue of the Stars that people think of when they imagine a Century City legal firm. I had to think there would be buyer’s remorse for any client who arrived here for the first time and found these digs. Then again, who was I to talk? Many was the time I dealt with buyer’s remorse when my clients learned I worked out of the backseat of my car.
“Yeah,” I said. “This is it.”
I jumped out and headed toward the door. I entered a small reception room with a well-worn carpet leading from the front of the reception desk in twin paths to doors to the right and left. The door on the left had a name on it I didn’t recognize. The door on the right had the name Sylvester Fulgoni. I got the feeling that Sly Jr. was splitting the space with another attorney. Probably the secretary, too, but at the moment there was no secretary to share. The reception desk was empty.
“Hello?” I said.
Nobody replied. I looked down at the paperwork and mail piled on the desk and saw that on top was a photocopy of Sly Jr.’s court calendar. Only I saw very few court dates recorded on it for the month. Sly didn’t have much work—at least work that took him inside a courthouse. I did see that he had me down for a deposition scheduled for the following Tuesday, but there were no notations about James Marco or Kendall Roberts.
“Hello?” I called out again.
This time I was louder but still got no response. I stepped over to the Fulgoni door and leaned my ear to the jamb. I heard nothing. I knocked and tried the knob. It was unlocked and I pushed the door open, revealing a young man seated behind a large ornate desk that bespoke better times than the rest of the office presented.