She let that sink in for a moment. Dupree shook his head woefully.
“You people planted it,” he said.
“That’ll work about as well as I-never-seen-it-before,” Ballard said. “Be smart, Marcel. Listen to what I can do for you.”
“Fuck. Go ahead.”
“I can help you with this. I can even make it go away. But it’s a trade, Marcel. I need you to cooperate with me or we shut this down here and now and I file the gun charge and whatever else I can come up with. That’s the choice here.”
She waited. He said nothing. She started reciting the Miranda rights warning. He interrupted.
“Okay, okay, I’ll talk to you. But I want it in writing.”
“Let me finish and then you have to sign the waiver.”
She started the warning from the beginning. She didn’t want any lawyer down the line to complain of improper advisement. When she was finished, she asked if he was right- or left-handed.
“Right.”
“Okay, I’ll take the cuff off your right hand and you sign. You get froggy with me and there are four guys watching this on the other side of that door. You try to hurt me and they will definitely hurt you in a way you’ll never recover from. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I get it. Come on, let’s just do this. Let me sign the motherfuckin’ paper.”
Ballard set the waiver form and a pen down in front of Dupree. She then got up and moved behind him, uncuffed his right wrist, and snapped the open cuff closed around the middle bar of the chair’s backrest. She stayed behind him.
“Go ahead and sign, then bring your hand back here.”
Dupree signed the document and did as instructed. Ballard reversed the process and recuffed him, then went back to her seat. She returned her cell phone to her thigh.
“Now you sign a paper,” Dupree said. “Says you drop the gun charge for my help.”
Ballard shook her head.
“You haven’t given me any help,” she said. “You help me and I’ll get the D.A.’s Office to put it in writing. That’s the deal. Yes or no? I’m running out of patience with you.”
Dupree shook his head.
“I know I’m fucked,” he said. “Just ask your questions.”
“Okay, good,” Ballard said. “I’ll start by letting you know we had Elvin Kidd on a wiretap, Marcel — all his phone calls and texts. We got the text to you where he set up the meeting today at Dulan’s. We have you meeting with him there and we have this.”
She opened the evidence envelope and slid out the envelope full of cash.
“He hired you to hit somebody at Men’s Central and you agreed to arrange it. Now that is conspiracy to commit murder on top of the gun charge. So, you are in a bottomless hole here that you are never climbing out of unless you give us something we like better than you. You understand? That’s how this works.”
“What do you want?”
“Tell me the story. Tell me who Kidd wanted hit and why. I need a name to stop it from happening. Because if it’s too late, then it’s too late for you. No deals. You’re done.”
“A guy named D-squared.”
“That doesn’t help me. Who is D-squared?”
“I don’t even know his first name. His last name is Dorsey. Like the high school.”
“Your call in the car outside Dulan’s. You set this in motion, didn’t you?”
“Nah, I was just calling a friend.”
“Clinton Townes? Was that your friend?”
“What the fuck?”
“I told you. We had this wired from the start. We knew about Dorsey and we knew about Townes. But it’s still conspiracy to commit murder and that makes your gun charge look like a walk in the park. Conspiracy to commit jumps you up to life without, Marcel. You know that, right?”
“Motherfuckers, you played me.”
“That’s right — and now you’ve got one path to the light, Marcel. It’s called substantial assistance. That’s you giving me everything. Everything you know. And you can start by telling me why Elvin Kidd wanted D-squared hit.”
Dupree shook his head.
“I don’t know — he didn’t say,” he said. “He just said he wanted him taken care of.”
Ballard leaned across the table.
“Elvin Kidd is retired,” she said. “He’s out of the game. He’s running a fucking construction company in Rialto. You don’t run a hit on one of your own in Men’s Central for three thousand dollars without a damn good reason. So if you want to help yourself here, you’ll answer the question: What did he tell you?”
Dupree’s eyes were cast down at the table. The dread he was feeling was almost palpable. Ballard was looking at a man realizing that life as he had known it was gone. He was now a fifty-one-year-old snitch and would forever be an outcast in the world he knew. He was a violent criminal but Ballard felt empathy for him. He had been born into a dog-eat-dog world, and now he was the meal.
“He say this guy crossed him from way back and now he’s causing problems,” Dupree said. “That’s all. Look, I’d tell you if I knew. I’m cooperating but I don’t know. He wanted him hit, he paid the money, and with an OG like Kidd, I don’t ask no questions.”
“Then why was he mad at you at Dulan’s? He raised his voice.”
“He mad ’cause I gave out his number so D-squared could talk to him. I thought it was legit because D used to be his boy on the blocks, back in the day. I thought they maybe still have business together or something. I didn’t know. I fucked up and gave him the number. E-K was mad about that.”
“So what was the call in the car after Dulan’s?”
“I had to set it up, you know. Get the word to my boy Townes.”
Ballard knew that while there were pay phones that allowed inmates to call out from their modules at Men’s Central, no one could simply call in. But it was well documented that gangs used various methods of getting messages into the jail. Mothers, wives, girlfriends, and lawyers of incarcerated gangsters often carried gang business inside. But the call Dupree got from Townes seemed to have come too quickly for that method. Townes appeared to have gotten the message to call Dupree within thirty minutes of the meeting at Dulan’s. There had long been rumors of gangs using jail deputies to get messages inside — deputies motivated by threat or extortion or just plain greed.
“How’d you get the word inside?” Ballard asked.
“A guy I know. He take the message for me.”
“Come on, Marcel. What guy? Who did you call?”
“I thought this was about Dorsey.”
“It’s about everything. Who got the message to Townes?”
Ballard felt her phone buzz on her thigh and looked down to read the text from Bosch.
Don’t waste time on this. It’ll be on the phone. Move on.
Ballard was annoyed because she knew Bosch was right. A search warrant for the phone would produce the number or numbers Dupree had called after Dulan’s, and that would likely lead to the message carrier. She needed to move the story on to Elvin Kidd.
“Okay, never mind who you called,” she said. “Tell me about Townes. He’s the hitter inside?”
Dupree shrugged. He didn’t want to verbally acknowledge it.
“Yes or no, Marcel?” Ballard pressed.
“Yeah, he does a piece of work now and then,” Dupree said.
“Do you have to get approval from a higher-up to do something like this? You call somebody for approval to hit Dorsey?”
“I tell some people but it wasn’t like ‘approval.’ Just to let them know we had a piece of business and Kidd was paying. Look, you going to take care of me on this, right? Like you said.”