and will get purchase approval before a client ever gets to me.
“Nobody we know?” I asked.
“Gloria Dayton called from Twin Towers.”
I groaned. The Twin Towers was the county’s main lockup in downtown. It housed women in one tower and men in the other. Gloria Dayton was a high-priced prostitute who needed my legal services from time to time. The first time I represented her was at least ten years earlier, when she was young and drug-free and still had life in her eyes. Now she was a pro bono client. I never charged her. I just tried to convince her to quit the life.
“When did she get popped?”
“Last night. Or rather, this morning. Her first appearance is after lunch.”
“I don’t know if I can make that with this Van Nuys thing.”
“There’s also a complication. Cocaine possession as well as the usual.”
I knew that Gloria worked exclusively through contacts made on the Internet, where she billed herself on a variety of websites as Glory Days. She was no streetwalker or barroom troller. When she got popped, it was usually after an undercover vice officer was able to penetrate her check system and set up a date. The fact that she had cocaine on her person when they met sounded like an unusual lapse on her part or a plant from the cop.
“All right, if she calls back tell her I will try to be there and if I’m not there I will have somebody take it. Will you call the court and firm up the hearing?”
“I’m on it. But, Mickey, when are you going to tell her this is the last time?”
“I don’t know. Maybe today. What else?”
“Isn’t that enough for one day?”
“It’ll do, I guess.”
We talked a little more about my schedule for the rest of the week and I opened my laptop on the fold-down table so I could check my calendar against hers. I had a couple hearings set for each morning and a one-day trial on Thursday. It was all South side drug stuff. My meat and potatoes. At the end of the conversation I told her that I would call her after the Van Nuys hearing to let her know if and how the Roulet case would impact things.
“One last thing,” I said. “You said the place Roulet works handles pretty exclusive real estate deals, right?”
“Yeah. Every deal his name was attached to in the archives was in seven figures. A couple got up into the eights. Holmby Hills, Bel-Air, places like that.”
I nodded, thinking that Roulet’s status might make him a person of interest to the media.
“Then why don’t you tip Sticks to it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, we might be able to work something there.”
“Will do.”
“Talk to you later.”
By the time I closed the phone, Earl had us back on the Antelope Valley Freeway heading south. We were making good time and getting to Van Nuys for Roulet’s first appearance wasn’t going to be a problem. I called Fernando Valenzuela to tell him.
“That’s real good,” the bondsman said. “I’ll be waiting.”
As he spoke I watched two motorcycles glide by my window. Each rider wore a black leather vest with the skull and halo patch sewn on the back.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah, one other thing I should probably tell you,” Valenzuela said. “I was double-checking with the court on when his first appearance was going to be and I found out the case was assigned to Maggie McFierce. I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem for you or not.”
Maggie McFierce as in Margaret McPherson, who happened to be one of the toughest and, yes, fiercest deputy district attorneys assigned to the Van Nuys courthouse. She also happened to be my first ex-wife.
“It won’t be a problem for me,” I said without hesitation. “She’s the one who’ll have the problem.”
The defendant has the right to his choice of counsel. If there is a conflict of interest between the defense lawyer and the prosecutor, then it is the prosecutor who must bow out. I knew Maggie would hold me personally responsible for her losing the reins on what might be a big case but I couldn’t help that. It had happened before. In my laptop I still had a motion to disqualify from the last case in which we had crossed paths. If necessary, I would just have to change the name of the defendant and print it out. I’d be good to go and she’d be as good as gone.