Death Rattle

by Alex Gilly

  Mona affected a consoling tone. “Edward, I can only imagine how you feel. I really want to help you. But to do that, I need to know what you want, and I need to know what you know. You understand?”

  “I want to start my life over.”

  “I understand. Listen, I just had an idea. Ask me to be your lawyer.”

  “What?”

  “If I’m your lawyer, whatever you tell me is privileged. And if I think it’s strong enough, then I’ll go to the prosecutor and, swear to God, I will get you a deal. And you can go to Arizona and stop the madness. If it’s not, then as your lawyer, I can’t tell anyone else. Either way, you’re protected.”

  There was a pause while the logic worked its way through Maws’s alcohol-soaked brain.

  “You’re really smart, aren’t you?” he slurred.

  “I’m going to press Record on my phone, and then you’ll ask me to be your lawyer, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mona pressed Record. “All right, go ahead.”

  “Ms. Jimenez, will you be my lawyer?”

  “Yes, Mr. Edward Maws, I agree to act as your legal representative.”

  More sobbing. She rolled her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” said Maws.

  “Take your time,” said Mona, wishing he wouldn’t. She heard more gurgling; he was emptying the bottle.

  “Feeling better? Okay, now, why don’t you start by telling me what you want.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail. I want a new name, a new life. They’ll kill me if they knew I talked to you. You understand?”

  “I understand. But who, Edward? Who will kill you?”

  She heard the faint sound of a doorbell ringing.

  “That’s Honey,” said Maws, his voice brightening. “She’s early, for once.”

  “No. Stop. Edward, don’t answer the door.”

  It was too late. She heard unsteady steps—Maws’s, she assumed, stumbling down a hallway. She heard him say, “Honey, is that you?”

  She heard a woman’s muffled voice, as though from behind a door, answer, “Yeah, baby.”

  She heard the sound of a lock opening. She heard Maws yell, “Wait, no!”

  She heard two loud bangs.

  She heard Maws say something. It sounded like “lawyer is lost.” Then another bang.

  She heard a clattering sound.

  A moment later, she heard different steps—stiletto heels on boards. She heard the sound of someone handling the phone. Then she heard a man’s voice say in Spanish, “Turn it off.”

  The line went dead.

  TWENTY

  MONA dialed 911.

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?” said the dispatcher.

  “I just heard someone get shot,” she said.

  “Are you in immediate danger?”

  “No. You need to send the police.”

  “What’s your name, madam?”

  “Mona Jimenez. You need to send the police right now.”

  “Where are you located, Ms. Jimenez?”

  “I’m in Redondo Beach. But it didn’t happen here. I heard it over the phone.”

  “Where was the person located?”

  “He said he was at home. His name is Edward Maws. I don’t know where he lives. Somewhere in LA.” Mona thought quickly. “I have his ex-wife’s number. She might know. Hang on.”

  Mona scrolled through her phone for Katrina Wakefield’s number. She gave it to the dispatcher.

  “The police will want to speak with you, Ms. Jimenez. What is your location, please?”

  Mona gave the dispatcher her address. Then she hung up and ran into the bedroom. She switched on the light and shook Finn by the shoulder. Finn looked at her groggily.

  “I heard Maws get shot,” she said.

  Finn sat up straight. “What happened?”

  Mona held up her phone. “Listen. I recorded it.”

  Mona played the recording she’d made. When it finished, she took a deep breath.

  Finn got out of bed and started throwing on clothes.

  The doorbell rang. Finn and Mona went together to the front door. Two uniformed police officers were standing there. They asked if they could come in.

  “Please leave the door open,” said one of the officers. The cops had left the lights on their car roof flashing. The red and blue beams now swirled through the open front door.

  In the living room, Mona played them the recording on her phone. When they reached the end, one of the officers stepped out to respond to a call on his radio, while the other asked Mona questions: What time did the call take place? How long had she known Mr. Maws? What was he referring to when he said he didn’t want to go to jail?

  The other officer stepped back inside. “Anaheim PD are responding to a shooting at an apartment on Katella Avenue,” he said. “The caller identified the occupant as Edward Maws.”

  The officer turned to Mona and Finn. “You want to ride with us?” he said.

  Finn and Mona jumped in the back of the police car. The officer behind the wheel drove fast, using his lights and siren to clear the way. In just under half an hour, they pulled up at a six-story block of units on Katella Avenue in Anaheim. Several black-and-whites were clustered out front, along with two ambulances and a fire truck. All the vehicles had their lights flashing. Finn and Mona followed the two officers first into a lobby, up an elevator to the fifth floor, then along a long, carpeted corridor until they got to a door with a police officer standing guard. They weren’t allowed to enter the apartment, but over the police officer’s shoulder, Mona saw people in white protective suits moving carefully around Maws, who was lying on his back in a pool of blood, legs splayed, his head tilted to the right. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. His T-shirt was soaked red. Blood was still trickling out the side of his mouth.

  The sight triggered a wave of guilt in Mona. She had treated Maws like dirt. He had been no more than a means to an end. She had pretended to care about him in order to get what she wanted. She had been careless. She was the last person he had spoken to, apart from whoever had killed him. Life suddenly seemed a nasty, empty thing. She started to cry.

  The Redondo PD officers were consulting with their Anaheim peers. Now one of them peeled away and approached Mona.

  “We’re gonna need your phone,” he said.

  * * *

  The next afternoon, Finn drove Mona back out to Anaheim again to the police headquarters on Harbor Boulevard to get her phone back. She asked the lead investigator what he heard on the recording. “I hear ‘lawyer is lost,’ too,” he said. He told her that the mobile-device forensics team were running tests on the audio they had copied from her phone. He would let her know what they found.

  Mona and Finn sat in his truck outside the station and listened to the recording again.

  “There—right there. You hear that? What’s that sound like to you?”

  “‘Lawyer’?” said Finn. “I hear ‘lawyer is lost.’”

  “I hear that, too. ‘Lawyer is lost.’ Why does that mean?”

  Finn shook his head. “Maybe he wants to say more, but they finished him off.”

  “Who’s he saying it to? His killer? Or me?”

  Finn sighed. “We need to find Honey.”

  Mona snorted. “A sex worker in LA called Honey. Shouldn’t take long.” After a moment, she said, “Sorry. I don’t mean to be sarcastic. I just … ‘Lawyer is lost.’ I don’t get it. His last words…”

  Finn started his truck. “I don’t get it either.”

  While Finn drove, Mona kept playing the recording over and over. The stiletto steps. Then:

  “Turn it off.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  ON Thursday morning, two days after Maws was shot dead, Mona met with Marius Littlemore, her friend from college who was now a district attorney. In the wake of Maws’s murder, her resolution to investigate AmeriCo on her own had dissolved. She was in Littlemore’s office to tell him all she knew.

  At USC
Law, Mona had found Littlemore arrogant and insufferably clever. She had also dated him. That’s why he’d agreed to meet her now at such short notice. Littlemore had been a lesson for Mona: a man could throw up more red flags than a Chinese Communist Party Congress and still be attractive. Now, sitting in his office in the government building on West Temple Street downtown, looking at Littlemore behind his big desk and framed by a fine view of the city all the way out to the sea, Mona felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “You’re doing well, it looks like,” she said.

  “Don’t be deceived. It’s a shit show here.”

  Mona raised an interrogative eyebrow. Marius said, “Word is, Perez’s days are numbered. Everyone’s jockeying for position.”

  Over the weekend, a number of the country’s top legal minds had participated in a televised town hall, organized by a news network, on the legality of the president’s attacks on sanctuary cities. Esther Perez, the attorney general for the district of Los Angeles, had been particularly scathing.

  “She reminded me of Edward Smith,” said Littlemore.

  “Who?”

  “Edward John Smith? Captain of the Titanic? Went down with the ship. Everyone calls him a hero. I call him drowned.”

  “Is the ship going down, Marius?”

  Littlemore smiled.

  “Who’s the smart money backing to replace Perez?” said Mona.

  Littlemore’s eyes darted to the ceiling. “Oh, there are various hats in the ring,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Me? C’mon. I’m too young,” said Littlemore unconvincingly. Then, like a true politician, he pivoted. “It could’ve been you, Mona Jimenez. Top of the class, summa cum laude. You were always the smart one. How’s the not-for-profit sector?”

  “Rewarding.”

  Littlemore flashed that confident smile that Mona remembered so well. His teeth seemed brighter than they had been ten years previously.

  “I assume you mean rewarding for the soul. You always did like carrying the cross, Mona. I remember in college you sneaking off to volunteer at that legal-aid center.”

  Mona remembered it, too. At college, she’d made a standing commitment to volunteer four hours of free legal advice in a migrant resource center downtown. Unfortunately, her four-hour shift was on Saturday mornings, when, more often than she’d intended, she would wake up in Littlemore’s bed with a hangover and last night’s clothes strewn across the floor.

  “I do it full-time now. And I object to ‘sneaking off,’” she said. She had walked into the migrant-resource center proudly, with her head held high. But first, it was true, she had had to sneak out of Littlemore’s room.

  “Objection sustained. How can I help you, Mona? I assume you’re not here for nostalgia’s sake.”

  “One of my clients died in the detention center out in Paradise. I’m suing the operator for negligence leading to wrongful death.”

  Littlemore dropped his smile. He listened closely. “I heard about that. The one who was bitten by a rattlesnake?”

  Mona nodded.

  “Right. And now you’re suing the BSCA.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Okay. So what can I do for you?”

  Mona shifted forward to the edge of her seat. “I may have found evidence of a crime.”

  Mona explained to Littlemore how she had discovered how the BSCA was making inflated payments to its catering company, AmeriCo. She pulled the printout of the balance sheet from her briefcase and placed it on Littlemore’s desk. She’d highlighted the budget allocation for catering services.

  “It says, ‘$5,837,700,’” read Littlemore.

  “To feed 450 detainees for a year.”

  “And you’re saying the market rate is…?”

  “About a quarter that.”

  Littlemore nodded. “What else have you got?”

  Mona pulled out a picture of Edward Maws. “This guy? His name is Edward Maws. He was CEO of the catering company, AmeriCo. AmeriCo didn’t exist before the BSCA built the detention center out at Paradise. It’s like it was set up just to win the catering contract. Before the BSCA built Paradise, Maws was running a restaurant in Santa Monica. Then Marvin comes to him with a proposal, and Maws goes from running a small restaurant to a huge institutional catering operation. And here’s the kicker: Maws and Marvin went to school together. A private Catholic school in Yorba Linda called Saint Ignatius. Doesn’t that ring alarm bells, Marius?”

  The expression on his face didn’t change. “You say he was CEO of the catering company?”

  “Maws was shot dead on Tuesday night.”

  Littlemore leaned back. “Wow. Okay.”

  “I was on the phone with him when he got shot. He was about to tell me what the money is for. I think that’s why he got killed.”

  “Where was he murdered?”

  “Anaheim.”

  Littlemore intercommed his secretary and told her he needed to speak with the homicide detectives at Anaheim PD—whoever was investigating the murder of Edward Maws. When he was done, he turned back to Mona and said, “How long have you been sitting on this information?”

  She told him.

  “How come?” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “You should’ve come to me earlier,” said Littlemore.

  She looked at the view behind him and thought of Edward Maws, lying in his underwear in a pool of his own blood.

  “I know,” she said.

  * * *

  Mona drove from the DA’s office to her own feeling chastened. She had let things get out of hand, it was true, and now a man was dead. She had become distracted by a grandiose vision of bringing down a powerful institution. She had put her own ambition ahead of all else. She had forgotten who she was—a migrants’ right advocate employed by a small not-for-profit with a tiny budget. She worked civil cases. She was not a criminal investigator with the resources of the federal government to draw on. It was up to the DA and the police to investigate corruption schemes, not her. She was glad she had gone to Littlemore, and she scolded herself for not going sooner.

  She thought about her case against the BSCA. The truth was, she was more likely to lose it than win it. Joaquin was right; the resources that the BSCA had at their disposal were virtually limitless. Juntos was three people. Two on the days Natalie was at law school. Mona had told herself that justice would prevail, but now she admitted to herself that she had been willfully naïve. Carmen was dead. Nothing would bring her back. Mona could do more good by helping living migrants currently in the system. She parked the car next to the Porsche Macan and looked into her own eyes in the rearview mirror. She was going to go upstairs and tell Joaquin that he had been right. She would withdraw her complaint. In life, you have to pick your battles. She got out of the car and marched into the elevator.

  The elevator went up. She stepped out.

  “Thank God you’re here,” said Natalie, panic in her voice. Mona could hear Joaquin speaking loudly into the phone in his office.

  “What’s going on?” said Mona.

  “Wolfeson, White have let loose,” said Natalie. “They’ve filed a motion to move the case to Washington. They’ve demanded a truckload of documents as part of discovery: Carmen’s birth certificate, school records, health records. They even want a copy of her employment record at the auto-parts manufacturer she said she worked at in Tijuana. It’s in her statement, so they’re proceeding as if it’s real. Basically, they’ve asked for everything they could think of. Oh, and a process server is looking for you. Michael Marvin is suing you. You personally, I mean, not Juntos. I told him you weren’t coming in today. But keep an eye out.”

  “Suing me? What for?”

  “For defamation of character. Marvin claims that when you served him at that school fund-raiser, you compromised his reputation. He says you staged it to maximize the reputational damage you could do to him. He’s very distressed, apparently.”

  Joaquin came out of his office at a near
run. “There you are. They’re coming at us, Mona. It’s a full-court press,” he said, speaking quickly.

  “Listen, there’s something I need to tell you,” said Mona.

  “Me, too. Lots,” said Joaquin.

  “I’m dropping the case,” said Mona.

  Joaquin stopped in his tracks. He and Natalie stared at Mona.

  “You were right. We’re too small. They’re too powerful.”

  Joaquin shook his head vigorously. “Remember that little talk you gave me about the motorcycle? About looking where you want to go, not at what’s in the way?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, guess what? You were right. I mean, we’re not a motorcycle, we’re a…” He ran out of words.

  “Car?” suggested Natalie.

  “No.”

  “Bus?”

  “No.”

  “Boat?”

  “We’re a family. That’s what our name means, really, right? That we’re in this together?”

  Mona felt her eyes tear up. But it wouldn’t do. “They’ve outlawyered us already. We don’t have the resources,” she said.

  “That’s what I was coming out here to tell you. I just got off the phone with Joe,” said Joaquin. “He’s going to transfer $100,000 into our account today.”

  He meant Joe Rodriguez, the principal funder of Juntos, a millionaire who had made his fortune in recruitment. His parents were migrants.

  “Bless him. But it won’t be enough,” said Mona.

  “Wrong again. He owns his own recruitment company, remember? He’s going to get his people to find us some lawyers. We’ll have them tomorrow, he said. In the meantime, Natalie and I are putting everything else on hold. Wolfeson, White may end up winning in court, but not before we’ve pissed all over their territory. Juntos!”

  Mona noticed Natalie looking at Joaquin with glowing eyes, and for a second, she thought Natalie was going to break into applause.

  “So let’s go,” said Joaquin. “You’re the lead on this, Mona. You decide what’s most pressing. Game on!”

  Joaquin’s resolve and energy galvanized Mona. She felt a wave of gratitude. “Okay. I need someone to deal with the motion to move the case to Washington. We need to nip that in the bud.”