“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.”
He paused there and Ballard said nothing. She knew he was trying to give her something and still not tread all the way across the line of his dead client’s confidentiality. She waited and Towson took another drink of coffee before continuing.
“So let me preface this by saying again that I do not know why Fabian was in that club Thursday night and that I have no idea who he was meeting with or what it was about. But I explained to him that if he was going to give somebody up in exchange for a plea agreement, it had to be a bigger fish than himself. I mean, obviously that’s how it works. He had to give up somebody the US Attorney’s Office would want more than it wanted him.”
“Okay. And what did he say to that?”
“He said, ‘How about a cop?’”
Towson made a gesture with his coffee cup of sweeping his arm away from his body like he was saying, you can take the story from there.
Ballard composed herself and her thoughts. What Towson was saying matched the theory she had been considering through the night: that Fabian had worn a wire to the meeting at the Dancers and that the fourth man in the booth was a police officer. It was the only explanation for Chastain’s behavior — his continuing to work the case Friday night after being told to go home.
“Let’s back up a second,” she said. “When was your conversation about bigger fish with Fabian?”
“About a month ago,” Towson said. “It was the last time I spoke to him.”
“And what did you say when he said, ‘How about a cop’?”
“I said I knew from my J-SID days that the feds always liked to trade for cops. Sorry, but it’s a fact. More headlines, more political cachet. Single-key drug dealers are a dime a dozen. Prosecuting a cop gets a D.A. salivating.”
“So you told him all that. Did you tell him to wear a wire?”
“No, I never said that. I cautioned him. I said crooked cops are very dangerous because they have so much to lose.”
“Did you ask who the cop was?”
“No, I didn’t. You have to understand that this was a very general conversation. It was not a planning meeting. He didn’t say, ‘I know a bent cop.’ He said, ‘What if I could deliver a cop?’ And in very general terms I said, ‘Yeah, a cop would be good.’ And that was it. I didn’t tell him to wear a wire but I may have said something along the lines of making sure that he had something solid. That was it and that was the last time we spoke. I never saw him again.”
Ballard now believed she knew the motive for the massacre and the reason the shooter took out Fabian first — because he was the traitor. The shooter eliminated everyone in the booth, then reached into Fabian’s shirt and pulled the recorder.
The question was, how did the shooter know about the wire? To Ballard it seemed obvious. The recorder had started to burn Fabian’s chest and he revealed himself either by flinching or by attempting to pull the wire off his skin. There was some kind of tell that the cop in the booth picked up on. And he acted quickly and decisively when he realized the meeting was a setup.
Ballard looked at Towson and wondered how much she should reveal now.
“Did Detective Chastain ask you any questions along these lines Friday?”
“No. He didn’t. He never mentioned any of this.”
“Good.”
“Good? Why is that good?”
“Did you watch or read the news last night or this morning, Mr. Towson?”
“I just got up. I haven’t seen anything.”