Free Howtown by Michael Nava

“I’ve never seen a search warrant issued on so little probable cause, and if you take away the money, all you’ve got are fingerprints. What kind of case is that?”
    “So are you here to make a deal, or what?”
    “No deals,” I said. “I want a straight dismissal or a trial.”
    His attempt at gravity made him look like a pouting infant. “We take our crime a little more serious here than in the big cities,” he replied.
    “Speaking of that,” I ventured, “I understand people were pretty upset when the charges were dropped against Paul in that child molest case a few years back.”
    “You could say that,” he replied. “I was the DA on the case.”
    “You nursing a grudge?”
    “I’m strictly a nine-to-five kind of guy, Henry.”
    “What happened on that case?”
    “The judge wouldn’t drop the charges. Made us put the girl on the stand and threatened to hold her in contempt if she wouldn’t testify.”
    “But she didn’t.”
    “Nope. Just sat there, crying. Judge still wouldn’t dump the case. The DA had to come into court and ask for dismissal.”
    “Who was the judge?”
    “Burton K. Phelan,” he said. “Tough son-of-a-bitch.”
    I pocketed the information. “Clayton told me the prelim’s in front of the same judge who issued the search warrant. Judge Lanyon.”
    “Yeah, luck of the draw. Not lucky for you, maybe, but you know the prelim’s just a dog-and-pony show anyway.” He picked up his coffee cup, sipped, made a face.
    “You know as well as I do that it’s unlawful for the same judge who issues a search warrant to hear the prelim.”
    “Tell him.”
    “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”
    Cradling the cup between his hands, he said, “Like I said, Henry, we take our crime serious around here.”
    “What about procedure? You take that seriously, too?”
    “You ought to talk to a couple of defense lawyers before you plan anything fancy,” he said. “They’ll tell you that kind of stuff doesn’t sit well here.”
    “Frontier justice, huh?”
    He put the cup down. “You want to watch your attitude, too.”
    I got up. “No offense intended, Dom. Thanks for the cooperation. Should I pick the stuff up from you?”
    “Nah. Just go down to central and ask for Morrow. He’ll have it. Pleasure meeting you, Henry. Let’s have some fun with this case.”
    “Pleasure meeting you, Dom,” I replied, and let myself out of his office.
    After a final stop at Clayton’s office to pick up the packet of Sentinel articles about the case, I drove to the airport at the edge of town. Within the hour I was looking down at the baked landscape, declining a cocktail and wondering what I’d let myself into.
    Morning found me at my office, a shabby suite of rooms in a nondescript office building on Sunset and La Brea I’d picked up cheap. Our only neighbors were a publicist named Ronnie Toy and an actors’ agent who called himself Marc-Alan. An OFFICE SPACE FOR LEASE sign was a permanent fixture on the door to the building; we were the commercial equivalent of the motels that lined that part of Sunset and rented by the hour to the prostitutes who negotiated their deals alfresco on the street below. My secretary, Emma Austen, a regal black woman, had once demanded a raise on the grounds that she was entitled to at least as much money per hour as the hookers made.
    I was sitting in the conference room going over the Sentinel articles that Clayton had given me when I heard the radio start up in the next room. A moment later, Emma breezed in, swathed in a sort of filmy white caftan, her braided hair bright with blue and gold beads, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand and a stack of pink telephone message slips in the other.
    “Are you trying to hide from me?” she asked, setting the messages at my elbow.
    I glanced at the pile. “Make them go away.”
    She placed the mug in front of me. “I can’t, honey, but I did bring you coffee to make them easier to