Private L.A. (11 page)

But there was no reply.

“Let’s check the bedroom and get out of here,” Cruz said. “Place makes me want to take a shower. Make that several showers.”

Justine nodded, went to the hallway beyond the kitchen, turned on the light. The hallway had been turned into a pantry of sorts, with canned food, human and feline, stacked on shelves beside several full bottles of tequila.

The bedroom was a shambles—clothes commingled with books and paper and trash—and Justine found herself wondering about the bizarre reaches of the human mind, how it could drift into a realm where living in a garbage dump felt like the exact right thing to do.

The cat meowed even more loudly and then hissed as if it were facing off with a dog. The noises came from behind a closed door in the corner.

“Señora?”
Justine called, and knocked gently at the door.

When she got no answer, she looked at Cruz, who nodded. She twisted the knob and pushed the door open. The cat, an orange tabby with mangy fur, leaped off a counter and blew by Justine before she could fully digest what she was seeing inside the bathroom.

Leona Casa Madre was naked, bloated, sprawled between the toilet and the bath, a broken bottle of tequila beside her. Her head was turned toward the door as if she’d been listening for something or someone before she died.

Whether or not she’d seen Death come for her, or had talked to Death, was unclear. Her eyes were gone, eaten out of their sockets. Her lips were chewed off as well.

“Now do you think we should contact the cops?” Cruz asked.

But Justine was rushing from the room, wanting to throw up everything she’d eaten in the last five days.

“ALL RISE,” THE
bailiff cried at two that afternoon. “The Honorable Sharon Greer presiding.”

Judge Greer, a handsome woman in her late forties, strode up onto the bench inside the Bauchet Street Superior Courthouse east of L.A.’s Chinatown. She sat, donned reading glasses, and asked her clerk, “How many more?”

“Ten, Your Honor,” the clerk replied.

“Let’s move …” The judge stopped her order in midstream, spotting the district attorney as he entered. “Mr. Blaze,” she said, cocking her head. “A surprise to find you in my courtroom. I didn’t think you did arraignments anymore.”

“It’s an honor, Your Honor,” Billy Blaze replied, running a hand down the front of his suit jacket as if to make sure it was buttoned correctly, swiveling his head, taking in the surprisingly empty courtroom and me.

I’d feared a media horde for Tommy’s arraignment. Billy Blaze acted like he
longed
for a media horde. But I imagined that almost every journalist in L.A. was working some angle of the No Prisoners shootings by now.

In any case, the district attorney nodded stiffly at me, went through the swinging gates, set his briefcase on the state’s table. A harried, mousy woman clutching a stack of manila files hurried after him and I groaned. Alice Dunphy was defending Tommy? Dunphy was a public defender, and not the most organized person in the world.

Then again, maybe she’d just been asked to rep him for arraignment. I prayed that was the case. If Dunphy planned to defend Tommy through the criminal phase, he might as well call ahead to San Quentin to reserve a cell.

I noticed something else. Neither Tommy’s wife, Annie, nor his nine-year-old son, Ned, was in the room. I had no time to consider what their absence meant because a door behind the bailiff opened. A sheriff’s deputy led my brother in. He’d surrendered himself earlier in the day and now wore an orange jumpsuit, wrist and ankle shackles.

True to form, Tommy appeared not to care, as if he were wearing his latest suit from Hermès and had come to the room for a high-level meeting among equals. He spotted me, winked, then turned, sat, and began whispering to his attorney.

The wink. I kept seeing it. Was this it? Was he going to implicate me in a killing that I absolutely had not committed? Clay Harris might have killed my ex-girlfriend, but I still suspected that Tommy was behind it somehow. And that would explain why he had gotten rid of Clay—to tie up any loose ends. Now he was trying to pin Clay’s murder on me. Was my brother going to destroy me for spite?

“The State of California versus Thomas Morgan, Jr.,” the clerk announced.

Alice Dunphy nudged Tommy. My brother stood, looking at ease, in control, unshaken by the gravity of the proceedings.

“Charge?” the judge asked.

“Murder in the first degree,” Billy Blaze said, paused for dramatic effect. “Your Honor, the state plans to seek special circumstances in this case.”

Special circumstances. Blaze was seeking the death penalty for my brother. The charge and the potential penalty shook me. They seemed to mildly amuse Tommy, however, because he looked back over his shoulder at me and winked again, as if to say, “Care to join me in the gas chamber, brother?”

“Ms. Dunphy?” the judge said.

Before the public defender could speak, Tommy put his hand on her forearm. “I’d like to speak on my own behalf, Your Honor.”

“Only a fool acts as his own attorney, Mr. Morgan.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Tommy said, turning on the Irish charm. “I’ve been called a fool and worse many times before.”

Judge Greer sighed. “Your choice, Mr. Morgan. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” the judge replied, then looked at the district attorney. “Bail, Mr. Blaze?”

“The state seeks remand,” Billy Blaze said. “Mr. Morgan is a flight risk.”

“I’ll surrender my passport,” Tommy offered. “And, Judge, just so you know, we, I, am going to mount a vigorous defense. I know who the real killer is. I have compelling evidence, over-whelming evidence that the real killer is …”

His voice faded. The next moment was as long as any I have ever experienced, as long as the moment after a Taliban rocket hit the rotor of my helicopter in Afghanistan, my life once again hanging in the balance.

“YOU’RE ARRESTING
US?
”
Justine cried at Commandant Raoúl Gomez of the Jalisco State Police, and Arturo Fox, the chief of municipal police in Guadalajara.

Bizarrely, or at least it seemed so to Justine, the two high-level law enforcement officials had arrived at virtually the same time in the courtyard below Leona Casa Madre’s apartment, roughly a half hour after Emilio Cruz had called the body in and not ten minutes after the first uniformed officers had arrived. The two men had gone cold, hard, and sardonic when Justine and Cruz presented their Private badges and identifications.

“You are in this country conducting an investigation without declaring yourself to law enforcement, without working through proper channels?” Commandant Gomez asked. He was a small, imperious man who delivered nearly everything he said in a scornful tone.

“We told Immigration who we were,” Cruz said.

“It is customary to notify the police,” Commandant Gomez said.

“There’s a body upstairs,” Justine said. “We thought you’d like to know.”

“Yes, you did want us to know,” Chief Fox replied. He tapped his temple with a thick finger. “But I think the two of you are clever. I think you tell us this to cover your tracks.”

Fox was as big as Gomez was small, with a broad belly and cheek wattles that shook with indignation as he delivered the accusation. Gomez watched, flicking the nails of his index fingers against his thumb pads.

“Don’t be a couple of corrupt jackasses trying to show off your penises to each other,” Justine retorted. “The woman’s been dead at least a day or two. We only just arrived in Guadalajara. Check the facts. Look at the time stamp on our passports.”

Justine had moved to dig out her passport, but Chief Fox and Commandant Gomez seemed only to have heard her calling them corrupt jackasses trying to show off their penises, because that was when Justine and Cruz had been told to put their hands behind their backs and she’d demanded to know if they were under arrest.

“Of course you’re under arrest,” Gomez snarled. “You broke into an apartment. You may have murdered someone. And have you not heard? In México, we have Napoleonic law. Here you are guilty until proven innocent, and that has not a thing to do with jackasses or penises or corruption.”

“Look,” Cruz said, trying to remain calm. “I’m sorry. She’s sorry. We’re here looking for five missing persons. We believed Señora Casa Madre might have some knowledge of their whereabouts. We found her dead. End of story.”

“Yes?” Chief Fox said, not buying it. “Who is this missing people?”

Justine and Cruz exchanged glances. Then Cruz said, “Thom and Jennifer Harlow, the actors, and their three children.”

At that Gomez’s head jerked back as if he’d sniffed something fouler than the decomposing body of Leona Casa Madre. But then Chief Fox chortled disdainfully, “You really do think we are corrupt jackasses.”

“Take them away,” Commandant Gomez barked at one of the uniformed officers standing guard. “We’ll see if this story of much nonsense changes after a night in the cells.”

EVERYONE IN THAT
courtroom was staring at my brother, including me and District Attorney Blaze, who filled the silence before Tommy could finish his thought and implicate someone else, probably me, in a cold-blooded killing.

“Objection, Your Honor!” Billy Blaze shouted. “This man can’t just go around accusing people of murder, slandering them in a public venue without cause. If Mr. Morgan has such evidence, he should have brought it to my office, which he has not.”

“Sustained,” Judge Greer said, glanced at Tommy while my insides churned. Even from my angle, I could see that my brother was enraged that his little drama had been interrupted; and I half expected him to start shouting that I was to blame, that I had gotten him drunk, committed the murder myself, put Tommy in the victim’s car, fled the scene, or some diabolical nonsense like that.

“Mr. Morgan,” the judge went on. “The matter is bail, not your countertheory regarding the manner of Mr. Harris’s death.”

“I am not a flight risk, Judge,” Tommy insisted. “I have a business here, a wife, a son. And these charges are not true. I plan to fight. I plan to win.”

Greer hesitated, but only for a moment. “Mr. Morgan, you are to surrender your passport to my bailiff. And your bail is set at five million dollars.”

She rapped her gavel.

Five million? That number sank in, along with the general weakness I suddenly felt as the adrenaline that had seized my body began to ooze away. Tommy did not have five million. He was a recovering gambling addict. He didn’t even have the five hundred grand he’d have to come up with to get a bondsman to cover his bail.

But my brother looked unruffled at the figure, said, “I can live with that.”

Judge Greer rapped her gavel, looked at her clerk. “Next.”

A sheriff’s deputy came for Tommy, while a new inmate appeared from the door to the holding cells. Tommy looked at me, said, “Help me, brother.”

I watched him disappear as if he’d gone overboard in the darkness, leaving me the only one capable of throwing him a lifeline.

“Morgan,” Billy Blaze said in a harsh whisper, and pointed toward the door.

I startled, got up, and followed the DA into the outer hall, where in that same harsh whisper, Blaze demanded, “Who’s he gonna implicate?”

“I have no idea. Tommy and I aren’t close.”

He squinted. “And yet you come to your brother’s arraignment?”

“Blood’s thick,” I replied coolly. “Haven’t you heard?”

Billy Blaze studied me. “I think the chief and the mayor have grossly overestimated you, Morgan.”

“Think whatever you want, Billy,” I said.

The district attorney clucked his disapproval and said, “I’m watching you, Jack. Your brother’s a killer. It wouldn’t surprise me if you turn out to be one too.”

As Billy Blaze walked off toward the elevators, I wasn’t thinking about what he’d just said to me. I was wondering instead if the strange tattered bond that still existed between my brother and me was strong enough to warrant my posting his bail on a murder charge that he might try to implicate me in as part of his defense.

In all honesty, the thought of Tommy sitting in a jail, stewing, forced to ponder a life behind bars, or worse, a death by lethal injection, definitely had its appeal. But in the next moment I thought of my late mother, who’d told us often that as toddlers we’d spoken our own language, and that the blood of twins was thicker than any other bond, and that by our shared DNA we were committed to each other for life.

Enslaved to each other is more like it
, I thought, unsuccessfully fighting the idea that I could just walk away. Keep your enemies closer, wasn’t that the old saying? In any case, it was the argument I relied on as I took the elevator to the clerk’s office, where I planned to find out what I needed to do to post the bail and get my brother back where he belonged for the time being: at home with my sister-in-law and nephew, not sitting in a cell, resentful and plotting ways to destroy me. Or at least that was how my illogic was evolving when the elevator doors opened. I went to the clerk’s office, where a plump, cheerful woman at the front desk said, “How can I help you, handsome?”

I smiled, saw her name tag, said, “You made my day, Judy.”

Judy tittered, “Just doing my job, sir.”

I pulled out a checkbook. “I’m here to make bail for Thomas Morgan, Jr.”

Her face fell into confusion. “Well, someone’s just done that.”

Shocked, I said, “Who?”

“Me,” said an all-too-familiar voice.

I looked to my left and saw an overeducated, impeccably dressed, and utterly ruthless gangster named Carmine Noccia leaning against the counter, holding a BlackBerry.

RICK DEL RIO
was born into a family of hunters who lived in southern Arizona. His grandfather often took him out into the desert and taught him how to track deer, javelina, and quail. One of the most important things Del Rio learned from his grandfather was to move swiftly through country where there were no new tracks or old ones; and to slow to a crawl when he found fresh sign, as it usually indicated the animal was about to bed.