The Late Show (Renée Ballard #1)(52)

“Nothing serious,” she said. “I work odd hours and it’s hard to keep anything going.”

There, she had shown him the possibility. It was now time to get down to business.

“You were handling Gordon Fabian’s defense in the federal drug case,” she said.

“That’s right,” Towson said. “And I know it sounds cynical but his getting killed saved my having to put a goose egg on my scorecard, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean you were going to lose the case?”

“That’s right. He was going to go down.”

“Did Fabian know it?”

“I told him. They caught him fair and square with a kilo in the glove compartment of a car he was driving, was alone in, and that was registered to him. There really was no way out of that box. Their probable cause to stop him was down-theline legit as well. I had nothing to work with. We were going to trial and it was going to be a very quick ride to a guilty verdict.”

“He wasn’t interested in a plea agreement?”

“None was offered. The kilo had cartel markings on it. The prosecutor would only talk about a plea if Fabian gave up his connection. And Fabian wasn’t going to do that, because he said he’d rather go to prison for five years—that’s the mandatory minimum—than have the Sinaloa Cartel put a hit on him for flipping.”

“He was out on bail. A hundred K. How’d he come up with money for that and money for you? You are one of the better, more expensive attorneys in town.”

“If there is a compliment in there, thank you. Fabian liquidated his mother’s home as well as some other valuables. It was enough to cover my fee and a ten percent bond.”

Ballard nodded and took a long drink of tepid coffee. She saw Towson surreptitiously check his reflection in the glass of an overhead cabinet door and smooth his hair. She had him saying more than he should about the case. Maybe it was because the client was dead and it didn’t matter. Maybe it was because he was interested in her and he knew the best way to a detective’s heart was through cooperation. She knew that she now had to get to the purpose of her visit.

“My colleague Detective Chastain called you Friday,” she said.

“That’s right,” Towson said. “And I told him pretty much what I’m telling you. I know nothing about what happened.”

“You don’t have any idea why Fabian was at the Dancers on Thursday night?”

“Not really. All I know is he was a desperate man. They do desperate things.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know.”

“Had he ever mentioned the name Cordell Abbott or Gino Santangelo to you before?”

“We are straying into areas of attorney-client privilege, which happens to stay solidly in place after death. But I’ll tell you this: the answer is no, he never mentioned them to me, though it is obvious that he knew them. He was, after all, murdered with them.”

Ballard decided to get to the point. Towson was either willing to cross the privilege line or he was not.

“Why was Fabian wearing a wire to that meeting at the Dancers?” she asked.

Towson stared at her for a moment before answering. Ballard could tell the question had struck a chord. It meant something.

“That’s interesting,” Towson said.

“Really?” Ballard said. “Why is it interesting?”

“Because as we have already established, he was fucked. And at some point in our relationship, I told him that if he wasn’t willing to give up the cartel, his only way out might be to give up somebody else.”

“And how did he respond to that?”

Towson breathed out heavily.

“You know what, I think I need to wave the attorney-client confidentiality flag here. We are getting too far into private communications between—”

“Please, six people are dead. If you know something, I need to know it.”

“I thought it was five.”

Ballard realized that she had slipped and included Chastain in the count.

“I mean five. What did Fabian say when you asked if he could give somebody else up?”

Towson finally began to pour himself a cup of coffee. Ballard watched him and waited.

“Do you know that I worked for the District Attorney’s Office as a baby lawyer?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t know that,” Ballard said.

Ballard silently rebuked herself for not backgrounding Towson when she was backgrounding his client.

Towson got a half gallon container of skim milk out of the refrigerator and topped off his cup.

“Yes, I was eight years there as a deputy D.A.,” he said. “The last four, I was in J-SID. You know what that is, right?”

He pronounced it Jay-Sid. Everybody called it that and everybody knew what it meant. The Justice System Integrity Division was the D.A.’s own watchdog unit.

“You investigated cops,” Ballard said.

Towson nodded, then leaned back against the counter and stayed standing as he sipped from the cup. Ballard thought it was some kind of a male thing. Stay standing and you have the higher ground in the conversation.

“That’s right,” he said. “And we ran a lot of wires, you know? Best way to bring a dirty cop to ground was to get them on tape. They always folded if they knew their own words were going to be played in open court. Their own guilty words.”