The Gods of Guilt(90)

This was one reason that Jennifer Aronson was not in court this morning. I could not afford to take her off the work for the few other paying clients we had. She spent the morning at a bankruptcy hearing regarding the owner-landlord of the loft we used for our team meetings.

At least the credit card I used to pay for lunch went through. I could only imagine the humiliation that would have come from my card being confiscated and cut in half in front of an audience of cops.

The good news was then doubled when I got a text from Cisco on our way back to the courthouse.

He’s here. Good to go.

I shared the news with Lorna that Fulgoni was in the courthouse and was then able to relax the rest of the way back. That is, until Lorna brought up the thing we had steadfastly avoided bringing up for nearly two months.

“Mickey, do you want me to start looking around for a driver?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now. Besides, I don’t have a car. What do I want a driver for? Are you saying you no longer want to drive me?”

She had been picking me up each morning and taking me to court. Usually it was Cisco who drove me home, so he could check the house to make sure it was clear.

“No, it’s not that,” Lorna said. “I don’t mind driving you at all. But how long are you going to wait before you try to get back to normal?”

The trial had been a good salve on the internal wounds left by the crash. The attention it required kept my mind from wandering back to that day we had gone up into the Mojave.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Besides, we can’t afford normal. There’s no money for a driver and there’s no money for a car until I get the check from the insurance company.”

The insurance check was held up by the investigation. The California Highway Patrol had classified the crash as a homicide caused by the intentional hit-and-run by the tow truck. The truck was found a day after the accident, parked in a field in Hesperia and burned to a charred hulk. It had been stolen from a tow lot the morning of the crash. The CHP investigators, as far as I knew, had no line on who had been driving the truck when it had rammed into my Lincoln.

As Sylvester Fulgoni Jr. made the long walk from the rear entrance all the way to the witness stand at the front, he swiveled his head back and forth as if seeing the inside of a real courtroom for the first time. When he got to the stand, he started to sit down and the judge had to stop him so he could remain standing while taking the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

After the preliminary questions that established who Fulgoni was and what he did, I zeroed in on Hector Moya’s habeas case, asking Fulgoni to go through the steps that led him to subpoena Gloria Dayton to appear for a deposition.

“Well, it started when Mr. Moya told me that the gun that was found by police in his hotel room was not his and that it had been planted,” Fulgoni answered. “Through our investigation we concluded that there was a strong possibility that the gun was already hidden in the room when the police arrived to make the arrest.”

“And what did that tell you?”

“Well, that if the gun was planted as Mr. Moya insisted, then it was planted by somebody who had been in that room before the police arrived.”

“Where did that lead you?”

“We looked at who had been in that room during the four days Mr. Moya was staying there before the bust. And through a process of elimination we narrowed our focus to two women who had been to the room multiple times in those days. They were prostitutes and they used the names Glory Days and Trina Trixxx—that’s spelled with three x’s. Trina Trixxx was easy to find because she was still working under that name in Los Angeles and had a website and all of that. I contacted her and arranged to meet her.”

Fulgoni stopped there, waiting for further direction. I had told him when we discussed his testimony not to take big bites out of the story, to keep his answers short. I also told him not to volunteer anything about paying Trina Trixxx for her cooperation. I didn’t want to drop that piece of information into Bill Forsythe’s lap.

“Will you tell the jury what happened at that meeting?” I asked.

Fulgoni nodded eagerly.

“Well, first she revealed that her real name is Trina Rafferty. She also acknowledged knowing Mr. Moya and being in his room back at that time. She denied ever planting a gun in the room but admitted that her friend Glory Days had told her she did.”

I did my best to feign confusion, raising one hand in an I-don’t-get-it gesture.

“But why would she plant the gun?”

This set off an objection from Bill Forsythe and a five-minute exchange of arguments at sidebar. Eventually I was allowed to proceed with my question. This is one of the few places in a criminal trial where the defense has an advantage. Everything about a trial is stacked against the defense, but the one thing no judge wants is a reversal on appeal due to judge’s error. So the wide majority of jurists, and this included Judge Nancy Leggoe, bend over backwards to allow the defense to proceed as it wishes as long as it stays close to the lines of evidentiary procedure and decorum. Leggoe knew that every time she sustained an objection from Forsythe, she risked being second-guessed and reversed by a higher court. By contrast, rejection of prosecutorial objections rarely carried the same risk. In practice this meant that giving the defense wide latitude in mounting its case was the safest judicial route to take.