“Look, I’ve got a client on trial for what amounts to her life. She’s got a little boy and they’re trying to take everything away from her. I’m not going to—”
“Fuck off, man, she probably did it. We’re talking about two different things here. I can’t help her. I have no evidence. I’ve got nothing. Just leave me the hell alone, would you? What about my life? I want to have a life, too.”
I looked at him and sadly shook my head.
“I can’t leave you alone. I’m putting you on the stand tomorrow. You can refuse to answer questions. You can even take the Fifth if you’ve committed crimes. But you’ll be there and they’ll be there. They’ll know they’ve got a continuing problem with you. Your best bet is to spill it all, Donald. Put it out there and be protected. Five years, ten years, they’ll never be able to do a damn thing to you because there will be a record.”
Driscoll was staring at an ashtray full of coins on the coffee table, but he was seeing something else.
“Maybe I should get an attorney,” he said.
I gave Cisco a look. This was exactly what I didn’t want to have happen. A witness with his own attorney was never a good thing.
“Sure, fine, if you’ve got a lawyer, bring him. But a lawyer is not going to stop the forward progress of this trial. That subpoena is bulletproof, Donald. A lawyer will charge you a grand to try to knock it down but it won’t work. It will only make the judge mad at you for making him take time out of the trial.”
My phone started to buzz in my pocket. It was early enough on a Sunday to be unusual. I pulled it out to check the display. Maggie McPherson.
“Think about what I said, Donald. I have to take this but I’ll be quick.”
As I answered I walked into the kitchen.
“Maggie? Everything all right?”
“Sure, why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of early for a Sunday. Is Hayley still asleep?”
Sunday was always my daughter’s catch-up day. She could easily sleep past noon if not roused.
“Of course. I’m just calling because we didn’t hear from you yesterday so I guess that makes today movie day.”
“Uh…”
I vaguely remembered promising a movie outing when I had been in Maggie’s office Friday afternoon.
“You’re busy.”
The Tone had entered her voice. The judgmental you-are-full-of-shit Tone.
“I am at the moment. I’m down in Long Beach talking to a wit.”
“So, no movie? Is that what I should tell her?”
I could hear both Cisco’s and Driscoll’s voices from the living room but was too distracted to hear what was said.
“No, Maggie, don’t tell her that. I’m just not sure when I’m going to be out of here. Let me finish here and I’ll call you back. Before she even wakes up, okay?”
“Fine, we’ll wait on you.”
Before I could respond she disconnected. I put the phone away and then looked around. It appeared that the kitchen was the least used room in the apartment.
I went back to the living room. Driscoll was still on the couch and Cisco was still standing close enough to prevent another escape attempt.
“Donald was just telling me how he wanted to testify,” Cisco said.
“Is that right? How come you changed your mind, Donald?”
I moved past Cisco so that I stood right in front of Driscoll. He looked up at me and shrugged, then nodded in Cisco’s direction.
“He said you’ve never lost a witness and that if it comes down to it he knows people who can handle their people without breaking a sweat. I kind of believe him.”
I nodded and momentarily had a vision from the dark room at the Saints’ clubhouse. I quickly shut it out.
“Yeah, well, he’s right,” I said. “So you are saying you want to cooperate?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Good. Then why don’t we start right now?”
Forty-five
At the start of the trial Andrea Freeman had successfully kept my associate, Jennifer Aronson, off the defense table as my second chair by challenging her listing as a defense witness as well. On Monday morning, when it was time for Aronson to testify, the prosecutor sought to prevent her testimony, challenging it as irrelevant to the charges. I couldn’t prevent the first challenge from succeeding but felt I had the legal gods on my side for the second. I also had a judge who still owed me after toeing the prosecution’s line on two critical decisions earlier in the trial.
“Your Honor,” I said, “this can’t really be a sincere objection by counsel. The state has set before the jury a motive for the defendant’s supposedly having committed this crime. The victim was engaged in taking her house away. She was angry and frustrated, and she killed. That’s their case in its entirety. So now to object to a witness who will provide the details of that inciting action, the foreclosure, on grounds of relevance is specious at best and at worst pure hypocrisy.”
The judge wasted no time in his response and ruling.
“Objection to the witness is overruled. We will now bring in the jury.”
Once the jury was in place and Aronson was in the witness’s seat, I proceeded with my direct examination, starting with a clarification of why she was the defense expert on the foreclosure of Lisa Trammel’s home.
“Now Ms. Aronson, you were not counsel of record on the Trammel foreclosure, were you?”
“No, I was associate counsel to you.”
I nodded.
“As such, you really did all the work while my name was on the pleadings, correct?”
“Yes, correct. Most of the documents in the foreclosure file were prepared by me. I was intimately involved in the case.”
“Such is the life of a first-year associate, correct?”
“I guess so.”
We shared a smile. From there I walked her step by step through the foreclosure proceedings. I don’t ever say you have to talk down to a jury but you do have to talk in ways that are universally understandable. From stockbrokers to soccer moms, there are twelve minds on the jury and they’ve all been marinated in different life experiences. You have to tell them all the same story. And you only get one chance. That’s the trick. Twelve minds, one story. It’s got to be a story that speaks to each of them.
Once I established the financial and legal issues my client was facing, I moved on to how the game was played by WestLand and its representative, ALOFT.
“So when you were given the file on this matter, what was the first thing you did?”
“Well, you had told me to make a practice of checking all the dates and details. You said to make sure with every case that the petitioner actually has standing, meaning that we needed to make sure that the institution making the claim of foreclosure actually had standing to make such a claim.”
“But wouldn’t that have been obvious in this case since the Trammels had been making mortgage payments to WestLand for almost four years before their financial difficulties changed things?”
“Not necessarily, because what we were finding was that the mortgage business exploded in the middle of the decade. So many mortgages were made and then repackaged and resold that in many instances the conveyances were never completed. It didn’t really matter in this case who the Trammels made their mortgage payments to. What mattered was what entity legitimately held the mortgage.”
“Okay, so what did you find when you checked dates and details on the Trammel foreclosure?”
Freeman objected again on relevance and she was again overruled. I didn’t need to ask Aronson the question again.
“When I reviewed the dates and details I found discrepancies and indications of fraud.”
“Can you describe these indications?”
“Yes. There was irrefutable evidence that conveyance documents were forged, giving WestLand false standing to seek the foreclosure.”
“Do you have those documents, Ms. Aronson?”
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“Yes, I do and we are able to display them in our PowerPoint presentation.”
“Please do.”
Aronson opened a laptop on the shelf in front of her and started the program. The document in question appeared on the overhead screens and I sought further explanation from Aronson.
“What are we looking at here, Ms. Aronson?”
“If I could explain, six years ago Lisa and Jeff Trammel bought their house, obtaining a mortgage through a broker called CityPro Home Loans. CityPro then grouped their mortgage in a portfolio with fifty-nine other mortgages of similar value. The entire portfolio was bought by WestLand. It was up to WestLand at that point to make sure the mortgage for each of those properties was properly conveyed through legal documentation to the bank. But that never happened. The assignment of mortgage in the case of the Trammel home was not done.”
“How do you know that? Isn’t this the conveyance right here in front of us?”
I stepped out from behind the lectern and gestured toward the overhead screens.
Aronson continued. “This document purports to be the assignment of mortgage but if you go to the last page…”
She hit the down arrow button on her computer and flipped through the document to the final page. It was the signing page, with the signatures of an officer of the bank and a notary as well as the notary’s required state seal.
“Two things here,” Aronson said. “According to the notarization you see that the document was purportedly signed on March sixth, two thousand seven. This would have been shortly after WestLand bought the mortgage portfolio from CityPro. The signing officer listed here is Michelle Monet. We have so far been unable to find a Michelle Monet who is or was an employee of WestLand National in any capacity at any bank branch or location. The second issue is if you look at the notary seal the expiration date is clearly seen here as two thousand fourteen.”
She stopped there, just as we had rehearsed, as if the fraud involving the notary seal was obvious to all. I held a long moment as if waiting for more.
“Okay, what’s wrong with the expiration being two thousand fourteen?”
“In the state of California notary licenses are awarded for five years. This would mean that this notary’s seal was issued in two thousand nine, yet the date being notarized on this document is March sixth, two thousand seven. This notary seal had not been issued in two thousand seven. This means that this document was created to falsely convey the mortgage note on the Trammel property to WestLand National.”
I stepped back to the lectern to check my notes and let Aronson’s testimony float in front of the jury a little longer. I stole a quick glance at the box and noticed several of the jurors were still staring up at the screens. This was good.
“So what did this tell you when you discovered this fraud?”
“That we could challenge WestLand’s right to foreclose on the Trammel property. WestLand was not the legitimate holder of the mortgage. It still remained with CityPro.”
“Did you inform Lisa Trammel of this discovery?”
“On December seventeenth of last year we had a client meeting which was attended by Lisa, you and myself. She was informed then that we had clear and convincing evidence of fraud in the foreclosure filing. We also told her that we would use the evidence as leverage to negotiate a positive outcome to her situation.”
“How did she react to this?”
Freeman objected, saying I was asking a question requiring a hearsay answer. I argued that I was allowed to establish the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the murder. The judge agreed and Aronson was allowed to answer.
“She was very happy and positive. She said it was an early Christmas present, knowing that she wasn’t going to lose her house anytime soon.”
“Thank you. Now did there come a time when you wrote a letter to WestLand National for my signature?”
“Yes, I wrote a letter for your signature that outlined these findings of fraud. It was addressed to Mitchell Bondurant.”
“And what was the purpose of this letter?”
“This was part of the negotiation we told Lisa Trammel about. The idea was to inform Mr. Bondurant of what ALOFT was doing in the bank’s name. We believed that if Mr. Bondurant was concerned about the bank’s exposure on this, it would help facilitate a negotiation beneficial to our client.”
“When you wrote that letter for my signature, did you know or intend that Mr. Bondurant would forward it to Louis Opparizio at ALOFT?”
“No, I did not.”
“Thank you, Ms. Aronson. I have no further questions.”
The judge called for the morning break and Aronson took the defendant’s seat when Lisa and Herb Dahl left to stretch their legs in the hallway.
“Finally, I get to sit here,” she said.
“Don’t worry, after today, you’re there. You did great, Bullocks. Now comes the hard part.”
I glanced over at Freeman, who was staying at the prosecution table during the break, finishing her plan for the cross-examination.
“Just remember, you are entitled to take your time. When she asks the tough ones, you just take a breath, compose yourself and then answer if you know the answer.”
She looked at me as if questioning whether I really meant it: You mean tell the truth?
I nodded.
“You’ll do fine.”
After the break, Freeman went to the lectern and spread open a file containing notes and her written questions. It was just a show for the most part. She did what she could but it is always a challenge to cross-examine an attorney, even a new one. For nearly an hour she tried to shake Aronson on her direct testimony but to no avail.
Eventually, she went in a different direction, using sarcasm whenever possible. A sure sign that she was frustrated.
“So, after that wonderful, happy client conference you had before Christmas, when was the next time you saw your client?”
Aronson had to think for a long moment before answering.
“It would have been after she was arrested.”
“Well, what about phone calls? After the client conference, when was the next time you talked to her on the phone?”
“I am pretty sure she spoke to Mr. Haller a number of times but I did not speak to her again until after her arrest.”
“So during the time between the meeting and the murder, you would have no idea what sort of state of mind your client was in?”
As instructed, my young associate took her time before answering.
“If there had been a change in her view of the case and how it was going I think I would have been informed of it by her directly or through Mr. Haller. But nothing like that occurred.”
“I’m sorry but I didn’t ask what you think. I asked what you directly know. Are you telling this jury that based on your meeting in December, you know what your client’s state of mind was a whole month later?”
“No, I’m not.”
“So you can’t sit there and tell us what Lisa Trammel’s state of mind was on the morning of the murder, can you?”
“I can tell you only what I know from our meeting.”
“And can you tell us what she was thinking when she saw Mitchell Bondurant, the man who was trying to take away her home, that morning at the coffee shop?”
“No, I can’t.”
Freeman looked down at her notes and seemed to hesitate. I knew why. She had a tough decision to make. She knew she had just scored some solid points with the jury and now had to decide whether to try to scrape up a few more or let it end on the high note.
She finally decided she’d gotten enough and folded her file.
“I have nothing further, Your Honor.”
Cisco was scheduled to come up next but the judge broke for an early lunch. I took my team over to Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City. Lorna was waiting there in a booth near the door that led to the bowling alley behind the restaurant. I sat next to Jennifer and across from Lorna and Cisco.
br /> “So, how did it go this morning?” Lorna asked.
“Good, I think,” I answered. “Freeman scored some points on cross but I think overall we came out ahead. Jennifer did very well.”
I don’t know if anybody had noticed but I had decided I would no longer be calling her Bullocks. In my estimation she had outgrown the nickname with her performance on the witness stand. She was no longer the young lawyer from the department-store school. She had made her bones on this case with her work in and out of the courtroom.
“And now she gets to sit at the big table!” I added.
Lorna cheered and clapped.
“And now it’s Cisco’s turn,” Aronson said, clearly uncomfortable with the attention.
“Maybe not,” I said. “I think I need to go to Driscoll next.”
“How come?” Aronson said.
“Because this morning in chambers I informed the court and the prosecution of his existence and his addition to my wit list. Freeman objected but she was the one who brought up Facebook so the judge called Driscoll fair game. So now I’m thinking that the faster I get to him the less time Freeman will have to prepare. If I stick with the plan and put Cisco on, Freeman can work him all afternoon while her investigators are running down Driscoll.”
Only Lorna nodded at my reasoning. But that was good enough for me.
“Shit, and I got all dressed up,” Cisco exclaimed.
It was true. My investigator was wearing a long-sleeved collared shirt that looked like it would burst at the seams if he flexed his muscles. I had seen it before, though. It was his testifying shirt.
I ignored his complaint.
“Speaking of Driscoll, what’s his status, Cisco?”
“My guys picked him up this morning and brought him up. Last I heard, he was shooting pool at the club.”
I stared at my investigator.
“They’re not giving him alcohol, right?”
“Course not.”
“That’s all I need, a drunk witness on the stand.”
“Don’t worry. I told them no alcohol.”
“Well, call your guys. Have them deliver Driscoll to the courthouse by one. He’s next.”
It was too loud in the restaurant for a phone call. Cisco slipped out of the booth and headed toward the door while pulling his cell. We watched him go.