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.”
“All right. I’ll deal with that,” said Joaquin.
“I need someone to dig out the paperwork they’re asking for.”
“On it,” said Natalie.
“Okay. I’m going to make a list of people I want to get depositions from. I want to get to them before Wolfeson, White do.”
Mona could feel the blood pumping through her veins. Her remorse had evaporated.
“Joaquin?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. Really. I mean it.”
For the next seven days, Finn and Mona barely saw each other. She was putting in fourteen-hour days at Juntos, and Finn was back on night patrols, which meant he was out on the water by the time she came home, and she was gone by the time he returned to shore. They left each other notes on the kitchen counter and sent each other the kind of ordinary texts that sustain the marriages of busy people: Miss you. Don’t overdo it. Dinner’s in the oven.
The Juntos office in Boyle Heights became a hive of activity. Everyone on the team knew that Wolfeson, White were waging a war of attrition. The mega-firm was counting on their vast resources and their client’s deep pockets to bleed Juntos dry. You need armies of lawyers and vaults of money to fight legal battles against large corporations. “You, Ms. Jimenez, have neither,” Scott had said. Mona was working to prove him wrong.
Through his recruitment agency, Joe Rodriguez seconded them three lawyers, on his dime. The expanded team succeeded in quickly having Wolfeson, White’s motion to move the case to Washington dismissed. Natalie managed to find all the documents they had requested, except the employment record at the nonexistent auto-parts factory in Tijuana. Mona drafted dozens of documents, then sent them by messenger to Wolfeson, White’s office downtown, insisting that someone there sign a receipt for every piece of paper she sent. It was an expensive but necessary move to prevent their crucial documents from mysteriously going missing—a classic delaying tactic.
And indeed, Wolfeson, White tried everything. They would delay responding to requests for documents for as long as they could get away with and would then bombard Juntos with boxes of completely irrelevant paperwork. Couriers delivered document box after document box to the Juntos office, until the corridor was lined with them. The team had to review thousands of pages of cases that Wolfeson, White claimed were pertinent—only to discover that the claimed pertinence was either tenuous or nonexistent.
Tempers frayed. There were squabbles. Joaquin slammed his door more than once. One of Rodriguez’s seconded lawyers called in sick and never came back. Once, Mona went to the bathroom and found Natalie sobbing in a stall. She took her out for lunch. The days went by. Summer arrived. No one took a break.
Meanwhile, Michael Marvin’s nomination for secretary of Homeland Security gathered pace. When Mona learned that he was scheduled to appear before a congressional confirmation committee on the twelfth of June, she called everyone she knew with even the slightest influence in Washington and told them about Carmen’s death and conditions in Paradise Detention Center. She asked them to get a committee member to press Marvin on deaths in custody. She watched the hearing on C-SPAN, first with anticipation, then disappointment, before switching off the TV in disgust. The committee members threw Marvin questions so soft, they may as well have been pompoms. It wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that the committee members were reading questions drafted for them by Wolfeson, White. They were handing Marvin the nomination on a platter.
The next day, Mona called Marius Littlemore to find out what progress he had made with the $5.8 million that the BSCA had paid AmeriCo. He said they hadn’t yet figured out what the money was for.
“Without the quid pro quo, we don’t have any crime to prosecute,” he said. “Michael Marvin’s got a lot of powerful friends. There’s a lot of pressure on us to drop it.”
“What about from AmeriCo? Can’t you find anything on that side?”
“We’ve talked to their financial officer. Maws was the only one who was there when the deal was made. With him dead, no one knows anything.”
Mona had called the lead detective working on Maws’s murder every week since she’d witnessed it over the phone. She called him again after speaking with Littlemore.
“We’re not getting anywhere on the corruption angle,” said the detective. “So now we’re interviewing pimps and sex workers, see if anyone had any dealings with him. The theory is, Maws did something to a girl and a pimp decided to do something about it.”
“What makes you think that he did something to a girl that warrants getting killed?” said Mona.
“We went through his porn viewing history on his computer. He was into some pretty nasty stuff,” said the detective.
Mona remembered Maws’s clammy hand.
“What about the recording from my phone?” asked Mona. “Why did he say ‘lawyer is lost’ before he died?”
“I don’t know what that means. The forensics techs couldn’t come up with anything conclusive from the audio. There’s no database of voices that we can use to identify the voices.”
Mona hung up in frustration. Neither Littlemore nor the police had made any progress. She reminded herself to focus on her own job. She knew Littlemore was competent, and she had no reason to believe the cops weren’t. It was frustrating, but that’s how things stood.
Right then, Natalie came in. “I finally got you a meeting with your snake guy,” she said.