I set my expression to “listen,” although I could actually make no sense of what Ian was saying. He was reading from a chart projected on a screen when the door swung open and Tandy came in, Ziegler right behind him.
I felt sudden, pure terror, as if thugs had just broken in firing automatic weapons. Fescoe had given me no time to call my lawyer, no time to even clear the room.
“Excuse me, Ian. Mitch, let’s take this outside,” I said to Tandy.
“That won’t be necessary,” Tandy said. “Please stand up, Mr. Morgan. Turn around and face the wall.”
There was no way out. Nowhere to go. I told Cody to find Caine and Justine, and I followed Tandy’s orders.
Cuffs locked around my wrists. Tandy stuffed an arrest warrant inside my breast pocket and read me my rights, his voice the only sound in the otherwise stark silence of the conference room.
Tandy wanted to make sure he was humiliating me as much as possible.
I had time to say to my colleagues, “I’ll be talking to each of you very soon,” before Ziegler gave me a little shove and I was marched out of the room in the custody of two homicide dicks from the LAPD.
CHAPTER 54
Tandy grabbed my left elbow, Ziegler hooked my right, and they walked me down the winding staircase that opened into the reception areas on every floor. Clients and would-be clients, staffers moving between floors, all of them saw that I was under arrest.
Their faces mirrored my shock.
“We’ve got a car waiting,” Ziegler said. “It’s not your usual ride, Jack. But it has an engine. And wheels.”
“You didn’t have to do it this way,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure you know that.”
Tandy laughed. The son of a bitch was having a very good day. When we reached the ground floor, Ziegler held the front door open and we exited out onto Figueroa.
Clearly, the media had been alerted by the cops. The morning sun cast a flat bright light on the eager faces of the press surging toward me. Bystanders crowded in from the fringes.
Tandy cracked, “Hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Jack. I read that in Variety.”
Cody was waiting for me at the curb. He was very close to tears.
“Justine and Mr. Caine are heading out to TTCF,” he said to me. “They’ll meet you there.”
The Twin Towers Correctional Facility was the supersized prison complex that had replaced the LA Hall of Justice after the quake of ’94. It was known as the busiest prison in the free world, consisting of an intake center and three jails on a ten-acre campus.
The horror stories of the brutality at TTCF were legendary. If you couldn’t make bail, you could lose your health, even your life while waiting months to see a judge. This was true whether or not you were guilty of anything.
“What should I say to people?” Cody was asking.
“Say that I’ve been falsely charged and that I’ll have a statement for the press as soon as I’m back in my office.”
“Don’t worry, Jack. Mr. Caine will get you out. He’s the best.”
Cody was trying to reassure me, and I wanted to reassure him, but I had nothing comforting to say.
I wished now that I hadn’t listened to Justine, that I had gotten to Tommy and beaten the crap out of him. He was a cagey bastard, but he couldn’t stand up to me. Not in a fair fight. He would have told me something.
Reporters called my name, shouted, “What’s your side of the story, Jack? What do you want people to know?”
Tandy pushed my head down and folded me into the backseat of the unmarked car. As I ducked under the doorframe, I turned my head and glanced up at our offices.
Mo-bot was on the second floor, leaning out an open window with a video camera.
She was filming everything.
She saw me look up at her and gave me a thumbs-up. I was filled with affection for Mo. I smiled at her for a second before Tandy slammed my door. He went around to the other side and got into the backseat next to me.
Up front, Ziegler started the engine.
He waited a good long minute or two for an opening in the traffic while reporters banged on the doors and windows. And then the car took off.
I didn’t see a crack of hope.
They had me, and if they could they would destroy me.
CHAPTER 55
Tandy and Ziegler broke a path through the thick clots of gangbangers between the street and the chain-link fence surrounding the prison building. A guard opened the gate, Tandy spoke, and we were led through a number of checkpoints until we reached an interrogation room on the ground floor.
This small gray room was a gateway to the grand cesspool of the men’s jail, a hellhole built to hold a quarter of the eighteen thousand inmates warehoused here at any given time.
I expected to see Eric Caine waiting for me, but I should have known better. Twin Towers was a daunting, 1.5-million-square-foot maze, and defense attorneys were not welcomed here.
Ziegler closed the interview room door, blew his nose into a tissue, and lobbed the wad across the room into a wastebasket.
Tandy said, “You need anything, Jack?”
This was his good-buddy act, which was somehow more threatening than when Tandy was showing me the sadistic SOB he really was.
I said, “I’ve got nothing to say until I see my lawyer.”
“Sit down,” Ziegler said.
He shoved me in the direction of a metal chair, and as I stumbled toward it, Ziegler stuck out his foot and I went down, chin first, on the linoleum floor.
Tandy helped me to my feet, saying, “I’m sorry, Jack. Len didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.”
Even cuffed, I could have gotten in a groin kick Ziegler would have remembered for a couple of months, but I knew what would happen to me after that.
“Sure, what else could it have been?”
Tandy said, “You’re not getting mouthy with us, are you, Jack? That wouldn’t be smart.”
Ziegler and Tandy hoisted me to my feet and angled me into the chair. I wondered who was behind the one-way glass and if Fescoe knew I was about to be worked over.
“I’ve got to admit it,” Tandy said. “We sent your lawyer on a little detour, kind of a runaround. It’ll take him a while to find you, but we did it for your benefit. We’ve got information you’re going to appreciate.”
“Ah. I get it, Mitch. You’re going to help me.”
Tandy walked behind me to a spot where I couldn’t see him. Ziegler sat two feet away from me. He cleaned his nails with his pearl-handled pocket knife. Len Ziegler was a vain man. He worked out. He dressed well. But there wasn’t much he could do about his weak chin and his little pig eyes.
“Listen, Jack,” Ziegler said. “This is as close to a slam dunk as the LAPD has ever seen.”
He listed the physical evidence they had against me, then said, “You made a phone call to your brother at around the time the victim bought it. We talked to Tommy. We leaned on him. Hard. He says all he got was a hang-up call. But here’s the thing, Jack. You established your presence at the scene.”
“Why’d you make that phone call?” Tandy asked. “That’s a mystery to me. Did you dial by mistake? Do you have a guilty subconscious?”
“I don’t understand that phone call either,” I said. “I didn’t call Tommy. As soon as I saw what happened, I called 911. Mitch, given your theory of the crime, why on earth would I have called Tommy?”
Tandy said, “Well, I asked Tommy about that. I spent a couple of hours with him. He has a good alibi and nothing good to say about you. Frankly, and I tell you this as a guy who’s been a cop for twenty years, you are so cooked, I don’t know when I’ve been happier. Len, have you ever seen me this happy?”
“I think when you hit the trifecta at Santa Anita you were over the moon, but it’s a close call.”
“One Fine Day. That was that filly’s name.” Tandy laughed at the memory, then said, “I’m just an intermediary at this point; you know that. It’s the chief who asked me to help you out.”