The Gods of Guilt(20)

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.