“Bullshit.”
“No bullshit. You could’ve beaten this case easy. But you folded, and that woman’s been sitting in Chino for five years.”
“Are you nuts? None of that is true. I got her a great fucking deal. But even if it was a bad deal, I didn’t take it. She did. It was her call.”
“You talked her into it.”
“I didn’t have to. She knew they had her. And she knew it was a good deal. I just had to lay it out for her and she did the rest. You ask her, she’ll say the same.”
“I did ask her. She did say it was her call, but she didn’t know at the time that a few months earlier, you’d represented a client named Angel Acosta.”
Silver failed to keep the surprise out of his eyes.
“That’s right,” I said. “Angel Acosta, the guy your new client’s ex-husband shot during a firefight at a hamburger stand.”
“It’s not a conflict of interest,” Silver said. “It’s a coincidence. Definitely not ineffect—”
“Acosta told you that was no ambush. It was some kind of meeting between the gang and a corrupt cop. I don’t know the details yet, but you do. Whatever it was, it went bad fast and the shooting started. Sanz was no hero and you knew it. That was the ace up your sleeve with Acosta. Your leverage. That’s how you got him the sweet deal. You threatened to put it all out there, put the sheriff’s department on trial.”
“You really don’t know what you’re talking about, Haller.”
“I think I do. You then saw the opportunity to double dip with Lucinda. Get the case from the public defender, then use the same intel from Acosta to get a deal. But the reality was you had an innocent client. And you had everything you needed to go to trial and win. But, no, you’re Second-Place Silver. You took a dive.”
Silver shoved the food container to the side of his desk but he pushed too hard and it fell off and showered the floor and wall with fried rice.
“Goddamn it!” he said.
He started to bend down to clean it up but then sat back up straight and looked at me.
“It was a judgment call,” he said. “We make them every single day and no judge will grant you a habeas on a judgment call. You file this and you’ll be laughed out of federal court.”
The document I had prepared that morning was simply a prop. Silver was right about one thing: Going for a habeas in federal court with just ineffective assistance of counsel was a nonstarter. It would go nowhere and I wasn’t planning to file it. It was just a tool to help me get to Silver and get him talking.
“I might be laughed out of court,” I said. “Or the public might learn that you took a dive on an innocent client’s case.”
“As I said, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Silver said.
“Then here’s your chance to school me, Frank. Tell me what I don’t know.”
“I was fucking threatened, you dumbass. I had no choice.”
There. I had broken through. Now I pulled out the chair in front of his desk and sat down.
“Threatened by who?” I said.
“I can’t get into it,” he said. “The threat is still out there and it’s real. You need to be careful or it will be your ass in a sling next.”
“Wrong answer. You need to get into it right now or I’ll file that in the morning and put a press release out to every newsroom in the city.”
“You can’t do this to me.”
I pointed to the document on the desk in front of him.
“It’s already done. You want to stop it, tell me what went down with Sanz. Who threatened you and why?”
“Jesus Christ.”
Silver shook his head like a man who sees no way out of a trap.
“There’s only one choice here, Frank,” I said. “You’re working with me or you’re working against me. And I will burn the ground you walk on to get my client out of that prison.”
“All right, all right,” Silver said. “I’ll tell you what happened, okay? But you need to treat it as intel. You can’t reveal who you got it from.”
“I can’t make that promise. Not until I know what you know.”
“Fuck...”
He was stalling. I pushed my chair back.
“Okay, I’m out of here. Good luck tomorrow.”
“No, no, no, wait. Okay, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. You were right, Angel told me everything. Sanz was a collector for this sheriff’s gang who call themselves the Cucos. Acosta and his gang were paying for protection, and Sanz was the bagman. That day was supposed to be a regular cash pickup but then Sanz upped the ante. The Cucos wanted more. There was an argument and it turned into a shoot-out. After Angel told me that, a friend of Sanz’s called me and said that if I went into court with what I knew, it would be the last case I ever tried.”
“A friend? Who are we talking about?”
“I don’t know. One of the Cucos.”
“That doesn’t help me. I need a name.”
“I don’t have a name. I didn’t want a name.”
“I’ll protect you.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You can’t protect me from them. They’re cops!”
“How did you know they were cops?”
“I just did. It was obvious, wasn’t it? With what Acosta had told me.”
“I still need a name, Frank, or we’re done here. Who called you?”
“He didn’t say his name and I didn’t ask for it.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“He told me to tell Acosta that if he kept his mouth shut, he’d get a deal from the DA. I said fine. I knew getting him a deal would be a big victory. And so did Acosta. I didn’t have to sell it. He was happy to take it.”
“Who was the prosecutor who offered the deal?”
“Same one who handled all the heavy cases out there. Andrea Fontaine. But she’s downtown now.”
I considered everything just said and then moved on.
“Okay,” I said. “Lucinda Sanz. You went to the PD and took the case.”
“Because I was told to,” Silver said.
“By who? The same one who called you on Acosta?”
“No, this time it was a woman. She knew about the whole Acosta deal and she said there would be an offer from Fontaine. She told me to make Lucinda take the deal and plead her out. And that if I used what I knew about Roberto Sanz and the shoot-out from before, I was a dead man, plain and simple.”
I thought about this. Lucinda had said a woman had conducted the GSR test on her, a woman who said she worked with Roberto Sanz.
“The second caller, do you know who it was?” I asked.
“No, man, I told you,” Silver said. “No names were mentioned. They weren’t that stupid.”
“Did Lucinda know about any of this?”
Silver lowered his eyes.
“I never told her,” he said. “I just told her to take the deal. That it was the only way.”
I thought I could see shame and regret in Silver’s eyes. Maybe he had believed at the time that Lucinda was guilty as charged and that the callers were putting a cap on what could blow up into another scandal for the sheriff’s department. But either way, Silver knew deep inside that he’d never be more than a hack lawyer from the Ord Street commune.
“You did all this based on phone calls from nameless people who claimed they were cops,” I said. “But how did you know the threats were legit?”
“Because they knew things,” Silver said. “Things that had never gotten out, that had to have come from the inside.”
“Like what?”
“Like they knew what Acosta could spill if I put him on the stand. That Roberto Sanz was no fucking hero that day at the shoot-out.”
I changed direction with Silver, using Bosch’s tactic of keeping a witness off balance with unexpected questions.
“Tell me about Agent MacIsaac,” I said.