Michael Connelly - The Gods of Guilt

“It depends on what you tell me.”

“Well, I’m not telling you anything unless you pay up front.”

I had hit an ATM in the Bonaventure Hotel lobby and made two maximum withdrawals of four hundred dollars each. The money had come in hundreds, fifties, and twenties and I split it between two pockets. I took out the first four hundred and dropped it on her coffee table next to the crowded ashtray.

“There’s four hundred. Is that good enough to start?”

She picked up the money, folded it twice, and worked it into one of her high-heeled shoes. I remembered in that moment that Gloria had once told me that she always put her cash payments into her shoes because the shoes were usually the last thing to come off—if at all. Many clients liked her to keep her heels on while they had sex.

“We’ll see,” Trina said. “Ask away.”

The whole drive downtown I had considered what I should ask and how I should ask it. I had a feeling this might be my only shot with Trina Trixxx. Once team Fulgoni found out I had gotten to her, they would attempt to shut down my access.

“Tell me about James Marco and Hector Moya.”

Her body rocked backward with surprise and then straightened up. She stuck out her lower lip for a few seconds before responding.

“I didn’t realize that this is about them. You need to pay me more if you want me to talk about them.”

Without hesitation I took the other fold of money out of my pocket and dropped it on the table. It disappeared into her other shoe. I sat down on an ottoman directly across the table from her.

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“Marco’s a DEA agent and he had a hard-on for Hector,” she said. “He really wanted to get him and he did.”

“How did you know Marco?”

“He busted me.”

“When?”

“It was a sting. He posed as a john and he wanted sex and coke and I brought both. Then I got busted.”

“When was this?”

“About ten years ago. I don’t remember the dates.”

“You made a deal with him?”

“Yeah, he let me go, but I had to tell him stuff. He’d call me.”

“What stuff?”

“Just stuff I would hear or know about—you know, from clients. He agreed to let me go if I fed him. And he was always hungry.”

“Hungry for Hector.”

“Well, no. He didn’t know about Hector, at least not from me. I wasn’t that stupid or that desperate. I’d take the bust before I’d give up Hector. The guy was cartel, you know what I mean? So I gave Marco the little stuff. The kind of stuff guys would brag about while fucking. All their big scores and plans and whatever. Guys try to compensate with talk all the time, you know?”

I nodded, though I didn’t know if I was revealing something about myself by agreeing. I tried to stay on track with what she was saying and how it fit with the latest permutation of Gloria’s case.

“Okay,” I said. “So you didn’t give Hector up to Marco. Who did?”

I knew that indirectly, at least, Gloria Dayton had given Moya up, but I didn’t know what Trina knew.

“All I can tell you is that it wasn’t me,” Trina said.

I shook my head.

“That’s not good enough, Trina. Not for eight hundred bucks.”

“What, you want me to throw in a blow job, too? That’s not a problem.”

“No, I want you to tell me everything. I want you to tell me what you told Sly Fulgoni.”

She went through the same body shiver as when I had first mentioned Hector Moya. As though for a second she had been shocked by the name and then was able to reconstitute herself.

“How do you know about Sly?”

“Because I do. And if you want to keep the money, I need to know what you told him.”

“But isn’t that like attorney-client stuff? Like it’s privileged or whatever they call it?”

I shook my head.

“You’ve got it wrong, Trina. You’re a witness, not a client. Fulgoni’s client is Hector Moya. What did you tell him?”

I leaned forward on the ottoman as I said it and then I waited.

“Well, I told him about another girl who Marco busted and was putting to work. Like me, only he really had her under his thumb. I don’t know why. I think when he caught her she had a lot more on her than I had.”

“You mean a lot more cocaine?”

“Right. And her record wasn’t as clean as mine. She was going to go down hard if she didn’t come up with something bigger than herself, you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

It was how most drug cases were built. Small fish giving up bigger fish. I nodded as though I had full knowledge about how things worked, but once again I was privately humiliated because I had not even known the details of my own client’s dealings with the DEA. Trina was obviously talking about Gloria Dayton, and she was telling a story I didn’t know.

“So your friend gave up Hector,” I said, hoping to keep the story moving so I didn’t have to dwell on my own failings in the case.

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of ’? She did or she didn’t.”

“She sort of did. She told me that Marco made her hide a gun in Moya’s hotel room so that when they busted him, they could add charges and send him away for life. See, Hector was smart. He never kept enough in his room for them to make a big case on. Just a few ounces. Sometimes less. But the gun would change everything, and Glory was the one who brought it in. She said when Hector fell asleep after she did him, she took it out of her purse and hid it under the mattress.”

To say I was stunned was an understatement. In the course of the past several months I had already accepted the fact that I’d been used by Gloria in some way. But if Trina Rafferty’s story was true, the level of deception and manipulation was as masterful as it was perfect, and I had played my part to a T, thinking I was carrying out good lawyering by pulling all the right strings for my client, when all along it was my client and her DEA handler who held the strings—my strings.

I still had many questions about the scenario Trina was outlining—mainly the question of why I was even needed in the scheme. But for the moment I was thinking of other things. The only way this knowledge could be more humiliating would be for it to become public, and everything the prostitute sitting in front of me was saying indicated that this was exactly the direction it was going.

I tried not to show any of the internal meltdown I was feeling. I kept my voice steady and asked the next question.

“When you say Glory, I take it you mean Gloria Dayton, also known at that time as Glory Days?”

Before she could answer, the iPhone on the coffee table started vibrating. Trina eagerly snatched it up, probably hoping she could get in one last booking before crashing for the night. She checked the ID but it was blocked. She answered anyway.

“Hello, this is Trina Trixxx…”

While she listened to the caller I glanced at Cisco to see what I could read in his face. I wondered if he understood from what had been said that I had been an unwitting participant in a rogue DEA agent’s scheme.

“And another man,” Trina told her caller. “He said you’re not my lawyer.”

I looked at Trina. She wasn’t talking to a potential customer.

“Is that Fulgoni?” I said. “Let me talk to him.”

She hesitated but then told the caller to hold on and handed me the phone.

“Fulgoni,” I said. “I thought you were going to call me back.”

There was a pause and then a voice I didn’t recognize as Sly Fulgoni Jr. spoke.

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

And then I realized I was talking to Sly Sr., person to person from FCI Victorville. He was probably on a cell phone smuggled into the lockup by a visitor or a guard. Many of my incarcerated clients were able to communicate with me on burners—throwaway phones with limited minutes and life spans.