The Gods of Guilt(111)

No one had been watching. No one who mattered to me.





37





Jury trials always made me hungry. Something about the energy expended in constant wariness of the prosecution’s moves while worrying about my own moves steadily built a hunger in me that started soon after the judge took the bench and grew through the morning session. By the lunch break I usually wasn’t thinking about salad and soup. I usually craved a heavy meal that would carry me through the afternoon session.

I made calls, and Jennifer, Lorna, Cisco, and I agreed to meet at Traxx in union   Station so I could indulge my appetite. They made a great hamburger there. Cisco and I gorged on the basics—red meat, French fries, and ketchup—while the ladies fooled themselves into being satisfied with Niçoise salads and iced tea.

There wasn’t much talk. A little discussion about Trina Rafferty. Cisco reported only that something or someone had scared her shitless and she wasn’t talking, even off the record. But for the most part I stayed in my own world. Like a boxer in his corner between rounds, I wasn’t thinking about the earlier rounds and the punches missed. I was only thinking about answering the next bell and landing the knockout blow.

“Do they ever eat?” Jennifer said.

This question somehow bumped through my thoughts, and I looked across the table at her, wondering what I had missed and what she was talking about.

“Who?” I asked.

She nodded toward the great hall of the train station.

“Those guys.”

I turned and looked through the doorway of the restaurant and into the massive waiting area. Moya’s men were out there, sitting in the first row of stuffed-leather chairs.

“If they do, I’ve never seen it,” I said. “You want to send them a salad?”

“They don’t look like salad eaters,” Lorna said.

“Carnivores,” Cisco added.

I waved our waitress down.

“Mickey, don’t,” Jennifer said.

“Relax,” I said.

I told the waitress we were ready for the check. It was time to get back to court.

The afternoon session started on time at one o’clock. Whitten returned to the witness stand and looked a little less crisp than he had in the morning. It made me wonder if he’d braced himself for the afternoon with a martini or two for lunch. Maybe the whole aloof thing was actually about covering an alcohol habit.

The plan with Whitten now was to use him to set up my next witness. My case was a daisy chain of interlocking witnesses, where one was used to build the path to the next. It was Whitten’s turn now to pave the way for a man named Victor Hensley, who was a security supervisor at the Beverly Wilshire hotel.

“Good afternoon, Detective Whitten,” I said cheerily, as if I was not the same attorney who had brutalized him in the morning’s session. “Let’s turn our attention here to the victim of this horrible crime, Gloria Dayton. Did you and your partner, as part of your investigation, trace her movements up until the time of the murder?”

Whitten made a show of adjusting the microphone to buy some time as he thought about how to answer. I was pleased to see this. It meant that he was on alert and looking for the trapdoor in the simplest of questions from me.

“Yes,” he finally said. “We composed a timeline for her. The closer it was to the time of the murder, the more details we were interested in.”

I nodded.

“Okay, so you checked out the last escort job she went out on that night?”

“Yes, we did.”

“You talked to the man who regularly drove her to her assignations, correct?”

“Yes, John Baldwin. We talked to him.”

“And her last job was at the Beverly Wilshire, correct?”

Forsythe stood up and objected, saying I was going over a timeline that had already been established by Whitten during his direct examination in the prosecution phase. The judge agreed and asked me to break new ground or to move on.

“Okay, Detective, as testified to earlier, there was a disagreement that night between the victim and the defendant, am I right?”

“If you want to call it that.”

“What would you call it, then?”

“You are talking about before he killed her?”

I looked at the judge and widened my hands in a feigned signal of astonishment.

“Your Honor . . .”

“Detective Whitten,” the judge said, “please curtail such prejudicial statements. It is the jury’s role to determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant.”

“I apologize, Your Honor,” Whitten said.

I asked the question again.

“Yes. They had a disagreement.”

“And this disagreement was over money, correct?”