Pitchess was part of Los Angeles County’s vast jail system. Decades earlier it was a minimum-security drunk farm, where hapless miscreants dried out and served their sentences for drunk driving and public intoxication. Now it was the biggest facility in the county system and operated under heavy security. Almost eight thousand male inmates were housed there while awaiting trial or serving sentences of less than a year. In May 2012, Santangelo was in Pitchess in the middle of a ninety-day sentence for battery while Fabian was there for a thirty-day stint for a drug-possession rap and Abbott was finishing a six-month term for an illegal gaming conviction. As far as Ballard could determine, the three men had overlapped at Pitchess for three weeks.
Ballard knew Pitchess was a big place. She had been there numerous times to conduct interviews with inmates. But she knew there were ways of cutting down the population pool that would have included the three men from the booth. Gangs were segregated according to race and affiliation, and the dorms dedicated to gangs at Pitchess accounted for half of the facility’s capacity. Ballard had found no record of any of the three booth men having street gang affiliation.
The remaining half of the facility was further segregated into dorms for inmates awaiting trials and hearings, and for those already convicted and serving out sentences. Santangelo, Fabian, and Abbott were in this latter group — they were already sentenced. That put the pool that they were swimming in at approximately two thousand inmates. It was a small enough number that Ballard believed it was possible that the three men interacted. All three were involved in crimes of vice — gambling, loan-sharking, and drugs — and they may have engaged in their businesses even behind the steel fences of the jail. The bottom line was that Ballard had good reason to believe that Santangelo, Fabian, and Abbott had known each other for as long as five years before their fateful and final meeting at the Dancers.
There was nothing in the case reports Ballard had reviewed to indicate that the official investigation of the Dancers massacre had reached the same conclusion about the victims in the booth. Ballard now faced the dilemma of whether she should find a way to share her information with the investigation, even though it was headed by the man who had done his level best to drive her from the police department.
Additionally, her conclusions about the three men could reflect on the fourth unknown man in the booth — the shooter. Had he also been at Pitchess with the other three? Was he also a trafficker in vice operations? Or was he someone whose connection to the other men came from a completely different angle?
As she checked out at the end of shift and headed for breakfast, Ballard decided that she would continue her investigation and would find a conduit for feeding her findings to the official inquiry. She somehow felt she owed that to Chastain.
Fed and full, she now wanted to brace Towson before he could leave home for the day. Eight o’clock would have been her preferred time but she gave him an extra hour of sleep because it was a Sunday. She was counting on his cooperation, and that extra hour of sleep could pay off.
She also hoped to catch him before he’d had time to read the Times, because she knew there was a story in it about Chastain’s murder. If Towson was aware of the murder, he might refuse to talk to her out of fear that whoever had targeted Chastain might go after him next.
Ballard knew that all of Chastain’s moves over the last two days would be retraced by the detectives investigating his murder. The Times story, which she had read at Du-par’s, said that the murder was being folded into the Dancers investigation but that the team working the case would be bolstered by detectives from the Major Crimes Unit.
Ballard had pulled Towson’s home address off the DMV computer and proceeded to Sherman Oaks after breakfast, carrying with her two cups of coffee in a cardboard tray.
The defense lawyer lived in a town house on Dickens, just a block south of Ventura Boulevard. The place had underground parking and a security entrance on the street. Ballard waited on the sidewalk and went in when someone stepped through the gate to walk a dog.
“Forgot my keys,” she mumbled.
She located Towson’s door and knocked. She pulled her badge off her belt and had it up and ready. He answered the door in what she assumed were his sleep clothes: workout pants and a T-shirt with a Nike Swoosh on it. He was about fifty and short with a potbelly, glasses, and a gray beard.
“Mr. Towson, LAPD. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“How’d you get in the building?”
“The security door was ajar. I just came in.”
“It has a spring. It should have automatically closed. Anyway, I already talked to the LAPD and it’s a Sunday morning. Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I have no court. I’ll be in the office all day.”
“No, sir, it can’t wait. As you know, we have a critical investigation under way and we’re cross-matching our interviews.”
“What the hell is cross-matching?”
“Different detectives covering the same ground. Sometimes one picks up something the other missed. Witnesses remember new details.”
“I’m not a witness to anything.”
“But you have information that is important.”
“You know what cross-matching sounds like? It sounds like what you do when you don’t have jack shit.”
Ballard didn’t respond. She wanted him to think that. It would make him feel important and he would be more open. It seemed clear that he didn’t know that Chastain was dead. She proffered the cardboard tray.
“I brought you a coffee,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I brew my own.”
He stepped back so she could enter. She was in.
Towson offered Ballard a seat in the kitchen so they could talk while he brewed. Ballard drank her Du-par’s coffee. She had been running for almost twenty-four hours straight and needed it.
“Do you live alone here?” she asked.
“Yep,” he said. “I’m as single as they come. You?”
It was an odd question to throw back to her. She had been establishing the lay of the land: who was in the house and how she might conduct the interview. His question to her wasn’t an appropriate response but she saw in it the opportunity to foster cooperation and to get what she needed from him.
“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-the-line 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.”