“All right,” the judge said. “Both of you, stop it. Mr. Haller, you’ve been given wide latitude with this witness. But I was beginning to agree with Ms. Freeman until she got on her soapbox. Objection sustained.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Freeman said as though she had just been rescued from abandonment in a desert.
I composed myself, looked at my witness and her mannequin, then checked my notes and finally nodded. I’d gotten what I could.
“I have no further questions,” I said.
Freeman did have questions but try as she might to shake Shami Arslanian from her direct testimony and conclusions, the veteran prosecutor never got the veteran witness to concede an inch. Freeman worked her on cross for nearly forty minutes but the closest she got to scoring a point for the prosecution was to get Arslanian to acknowledge that there was no way of knowing for sure what happened in the garage when Bondurant was murdered. The judge had announced earlier in the week that Friday would be a short day because of a districtwide judges’ meeting planned for late in the afternoon. So there was no afternoon break and we worked until almost four before Perry recessed the trial for the weekend. We moved into the two-day break with me feeling like I had the upper hand. We had weathered the state’s case by potshotting much of the evidence, then closed out the week with Lisa Trammel’s denial and claim to be the victim of a setup, and my forensic witness’s supposition that it was physically impossible for the defendant to commit the crime. Unless, of course, she happened to strike the fatal blow to the victim while he was looking straight up at the ceiling of the parking garage.
I believed these were powerful seeds of doubt. Things felt good to me and when I finished packing my briefcase, I lingered at the defense table, looking through a file for something that wasn’t really there. I was half expecting Freeman to come over and beg me to sell my client a plea bargain.
But it didn’t happen. When I looked up from my phony busywork she was gone.
I took the elevator down to two. The judges might all be getting off early for a meeting on the eroding rules of courtroom decorum, but I figured the DA’s office was still working until five. I asked at the counter for Maggie McPherson and was allowed back. She shared an office with another deputy DA but luckily he was on vacation. We were alone. I pulled the missing man’s chair away from his desk and sat down in front of Maggie.
“I came by court a couple times today,” she said. “Watched some of your direct with the lady from John Jay. She’s a good witness.”
“Yeah, she’s good. And I saw you there. I didn’t know who you were there for—me or Freeman.”
She smiled.
“Maybe I was there for myself. I still learn things from you, Haller.”
Now I smiled.
“Maggie McFierce learning from me? Really?”
“Well—”
“No, don’t answer that.”
We both laughed.
“Either way, I’m glad you came by,” I said. “What’s going on this weekend with you and Hay?”
“I don’t know. We’ll be around. You have to work, I guess.”
I nodded.
“We have to track somebody down, I think. And Monday and Tuesday are going to be the biggest days of the trial. But maybe we can do a movie or something.”
“Sure.”
We were silent for a few moments. I had just come off one of my best days in court ever, yet I felt pierced by a growing sense of loss and sadness. I looked at my ex-wife.
“We’re never going to get back together, are we, Maggie?”
“What?”
“It just kind of hit me. You want it the way it is now. There when one of us really needs it, but never what it was. You won’t ever give me that.”
“Why do you want to talk about this now, Michael? You’re in the middle of a trial. You have—”
“I’m in the middle of my life, Mags. I just wish there was a way to make you and Hayley proud of me.”
She leaned forward and reached out. She put her hand against my cheek for a moment and then pulled it back.
“I think Hayley is proud of you.”
“Yeah? What about you?”
She smiled but it was sort of in a sad way.
“I think you should go home and not think about this or the trial or anything else just for tonight. Let your mind clear of the clutter. Relax.”
I shook my head.
“Can’t. I have a meeting at five with a snitch.”
“On the Trammel case? What snitch?”
“Never mind, and you’re just trying to change the subject. You’ll never completely forgive and forget, will you? It’s not in you and maybe it’s what makes you such a good prosecutor.”
“Oh, I’m so good all right. That’s why I’m stuck out here in Van Nuys filing armed robberies.”
“That’s politics. Has nothing to do with skills and dedication.”
“It doesn’t matter and I can’t have this conversation now. I’m still on the clock and you need to go see your snitch. Why don’t you call me tomorrow if you want to take Hayley to a movie. I’ll probably let you take her while I run errands or something.”
I stood up. I knew a losing cause when I saw one.
“Okay, I’m leaving. I’ll call you tomorrow. But I hope you’ll come with us to the movie.”
“We’ll see.”
“Right.”
I took the stairs down for a quick exit. I crossed the plaza and headed north on Sylmar toward Victory. I soon came to a motorcycle parked at the curb. I recognized it as Cisco’s. A prized ’63 H-D panhead with a black pearl tank and matching fenders. I chuckled. Lorna, my second ex-wife, had actually done what I had told her to do. It was a first.
She had left the bike unlocked, probably figuring it was safe in front of the courthouse and adjoining police station. I steered it away from the curb and walked it down Sylmar. I must’ve been quite a sight, a man in his nicest Corneliani suit pushing a Harley down the street, briefcase propped on the handlebars.
When I finally got back to the office it was only four thirty, a half hour before Herb Dahl was scheduled to come in for a briefing. I called for a staff meeting and tried plugging back into the case as a means of pushing out thoughts about the conversation with Maggie. I told Cisco where I had parked his bike and I asked for an update on the list of our client’s Facebook friends.
“First of all, why the hell didn’t I know about her Facebook account?” I asked.
“It’s my fault,” Aronson said quickly. “Like I told you earlier, I knew about it and even accepted her friend request. I just didn’t realize the significance of it.”
“I missed it, too,” Cisco said. “She friended me, too. I looked and didn’t see anything. I should’ve looked harder.”
“Me, too,” Lorna added.
I looked at their faces. It was a unified front.
“Great,” I said. “I guess all four of us missed it and our client didn’t bother to tell us. So the bunch of us, I guess we’re all fired.”
I paused for effect.
“Now, what about this name you came up with? This Don Driscoll, where did that come from and do we know anything more? Freeman could’ve unwittingly dropped the key to the whole case in our laps this morning, people. What’ve we got?”
Bullocks looked at Cisco, deferring.
“As you know,” he said, “ALOFT was sold in February to the LeMure Fund with Opparizio still in place to run it. Because LeMure is a publicly traded company, everything about the deal was monitored by the Federal Trade Commission and made public to shareholders. Including a list of employees that would remain at ALOFT following the transition. I have the list, dated December fifteenth.”
“So we started cross-referencing the ALOFT employees to the list of Lisa’s Facebook friends,” Bullocks said. “Luckily Donald Driscoll was early in the alphabet. We came up with him pretty quickly.”
I nodded, impressed.
“So who is Dri
scoll?”
“In the FTC docs his name was in a group listed under information technology,” Cisco said. “So what the hell, I called IT at ALOFT and asked for him. I was told that Donald Driscoll used to work there but his employment contract expired on February first and it wasn’t extended. He’s gone.”
“You’ve started the trace?” I asked.
“We have. But it’s a common name and that’s slowing us down. As soon as we have something, you’ll be the first to know.”
Running names from the private sector always took time. It wasn’t as easy as being a cop and simply typing a name into one of the many law enforcement databases.
“Don’t let up,” I said. “This could be the whole game right here.”
“Don’t worry, Boss,” Cisco said. “Nobody’s letting up.”
Forty-four
Donald Driscoll, thirty-one, formerly employed by ALOFT, lived in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach. On Sunday morning I rode down with Cisco to tag Driscoll with a subpoena, the hope being that he would talk to me before I had to put him on the witness stand blind.
Rojas agreed to work on his day off to help make up for his misdeeds. He drove the Lincoln and we sat in the back, Cisco updating me on his conclusions regarding his latest investigations of the Bondurant murder. There was no doubt that the defense case was coming together and Driscoll just might be the witness who could cap it all off.
“You know,” I said, “we could actually win this thing if Driscoll cooperates and says what I think he’s going to say.”
“That’s a big if,” Cisco replied. “And look, we have to be prepared for anything with this guy. For all we know, he could be the guy. Do you know how tall he is? Six four. Has it on his driver’s license.”
I looked over at him.
“Which I wasn’t supposed to see but happened to get access to,” he said.
“Don’t tell me about any crimes, Cisco.”
“I’m just saying I saw the info on his license, that’s all.”
“Fine. Leave it at that. So what do you suggest we do when we get down there? I thought we were just going to knock on the door.”
“We are. But you still have to be careful.”
“I’ll be standing behind you.”
“Yeah, you’re a true friend.”
“I am. And by the way, if I put you on the stand tomorrow you’re going to have to come up with a shirt that has sleeves and a collar. Make yourself presentable, man. I don’t know how Lorna puts up with your shit.”
“So far she’s put up with it longer than she ever put up with yours.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
I turned and looked out the window. I had two ex-wives who were probably also my two best friends. But it didn’t go past that. I’d had them but couldn’t hold them. What did that say about me? I lived in a daydream that one day Maggie, my daughter and I would live together again as a family. The reality was, it was never going to happen.
“You all right, Boss?”
I turned back to Cisco.
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know. You’re looking a little shaky there. Why don’t you let me go knock on the door and if he’ll talk I’ll give you a bump on the cell and you come in.”
“No, we do it together.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Yeah, I’m the boss.”
But I felt like the loser. I decided right at that moment that I was going to change things and find a way to redeem myself. Right after the trial.
Belmont Shore had the feel of a rustic beach town even though it was part of Long Beach. Driscoll’s residence was a two-story, 1950s-style apartment building of aqua blue and white off Bayshore near the pier.
Driscoll’s place was on the second floor where an exterior walkway ran along the front of the building. Apartment 24 was halfway down. Cisco knocked and then took a position to the side of the door, leaving me standing there.
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
He just looked at me. He wasn’t.
I took a step to the side. We waited but nobody answered even though it was before ten on a Sunday morning. Cisco looked at me and raised his eyes as if to ask What do you want to do?
I didn’t answer. I turned to the railing and looked down at the parking lot in front. I saw some empty spaces and they were numbered. I pointed.
“Let’s find twenty-four and see if his car is here.”
“You go,” Cisco said. “I’ll check around up here.”
“What?”
I didn’t see anything to check around for. We were on a five-foot-wide walkway that ran in front of every second-floor apartment. No furniture, no bikes, just concrete.
“Just go check the parking lot.”
I headed back downstairs. After ducking to look under the front of three cars to get the number painted on the curb, I realized that the parking slot numbers did not correspond to the apartment numbers. It was a twelve-unit building, apartments 1 through 6 on the bottom and 21 through 26 up top. But the parking lot spaces were numbered 1 through 16. I took a guess that under that number scheme Driscoll had number 10 if each apartment got one space, which stood to reason since there were only sixteen spots and I saw that two were labeled as guest parking and two were marked for handicapped parking.
I was in the middle of turning these numbers in my head and looking at the ten-year-old BMW parked in slot 10 when Cisco called my name from the walkway above. I looked and he waved me up.
When I got back up there he was standing in the open door of apartment 24. He waved me in.
“He was asleep but he finally answered.”
I walked in and saw a disheveled man sitting on a couch in a sparsely furnished living room. His hair was sticking up in frozen curls and knots on the right side. He huddled with a blanket around his shoulders. Even so, I could tell he matched a photo Cisco had pulled off Donald Driscoll’s own Facebook account.
“That’s a lie,” he said. “I didn’t invite him in. He broke in.”
“No, you invited me,” Cisco said. “I have a witness.”
He pointed to me. The bleary-eyed man followed the finger and looked at me for the first time. I could see recognition in his eyes. I knew then that it was Driscoll and that we were on to something here.
“Hey, look, I don’t know what this—”
“Are you Donald Driscoll?” I asked.
“I’m not telling you shit, man. You can’t just break—”
“Hey!” Cisco yelled loudly.
The man jumped in his seat. Even I startled, not having expected Cisco’s new interviewing tactic.
“Just answer the question,” Cisco continued in a calmer voice. “Are you Donald Driscoll?”
“Who wants to know?”
“You know who wants to know,” I said. “You recognized me the moment you looked at me. And you know why we’re here, Donald, don’t you?”
I walked across the room, pulling the subpoena out of my windbreaker. Driscoll was tall but slightly built and vampire white, which was strange for a guy living a block from the beach. I dropped the folded document in his lap.
“What is this?” he said, slapping it onto the floor without even unfolding it.
“It’s a subpoena and you can throw it on the floor and choose not to read it but that doesn’t matter. You’ve been served, Donald. I have a witness and I am an officer of the court. You don’t show up tomorrow at nine to testify and you’ll be in jail on a charge of contempt by lunchtime.”
Driscoll reached down and grabbed the subpoena.
“Are you fucking kidding me? You’re going to get me killed.”
I glanced over at Cisco. We were definitely on to something.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about that I can’t testify! If I come anywhere near that courthouse they’ll kill me. They’re probably watching this place right fucking now!”
I looked again at Cisco and then ba
ck down at the man on the couch.
“Who is going to kill you, Donald?”
“I’m not saying. Who the fuck do you think?”
He threw the subpoena at me and it bounced off my chest and fluttered to the ground. He jumped from the couch and started to break for the open door. The blanket fell and I saw he was wearing only gym shorts and a T-shirt. Before he made it three strides Cisco hit him with his body like an outside linebacker. Driscoll caromed into the wall and fell to the floor. A framed poster of a girl on a surfboard slid down the wall and the frame broke on the floor next to him.
Cisco calmly bent down, pulled Driscoll up and walked him right back to the couch. I stepped over to the door and closed it, just in case the wall banging brought out a curious neighbor. I then came back to the living room.
“You can’t run from this, Donald,” I said. “You tell us what you know and what you did and we can help you.”
“Help me get killed, you assholes. And I think you fucking broke my shoulder.”
He started working his arm and shoulder like he was warming up to pitch nine innings. He grimaced.
“How’s it feel?” I said.
“I told you, it feels broken. I felt something give.”
“You wouldn’t be able to move it,” Cisco said.
Cisco’s voice had a threatening tone to it, as if there would be further consequences if the shoulder actually was broken. When I spoke, my voice was calm and welcoming.
“What do you know, Donald? What would make you a danger to Opparizio?”
“I don’t know anything and I didn’t say that name—you did.”
“You have to understand something. You have been served with a valid subpoena. You show up and you testify or you stay in jail until you do. But think about this, Donald. If you testify about what you know about ALOFT and what you did, then you’re protected. Nobody will make a move against you because it would be obvious where it came from. It’s your only move here.”
He shook his head.
“Yeah, obvious if they did it now. What about in ten years when nobody remembers your stupid-ass trial and they can still hide behind all the money in the world?”
I didn’t really have an answer to that one.