“What, were you leaving without me?”
I didn’t respond to his question and quickly dispensed with any guise of civility.
“You know, you’re fucking me up by talking to the media like that. You think you’re helping the cause but you’re not—unless Herbert Dahl is the cause.”
“Whoa, what’s with the language? We’re in a courthouse.”
“I don’t care where we are. Do not speak for my client. Do you understand? If you do it again I’m going to call a press conference and you’re not going to like what I have to say about you.”
“Fine. That was it. My last press conference. But now I got a question. What’s goin’ on with all these people I’ve been sending your way? Some of them called me back and said they were treated pretty rudely by your staff.”
“Yeah, you keep sending them and we’ll keep treating them that way.”
“Hey, I know the business and these are legitimate people.”
“The Grind Side.”
Dahl looked confused. He looked at Lisa and then back at me.
“What’s that mean?”
“The Grind Side. Come on, you mean you haven’t heard of The Grind Side?”
“You mean The Blind Side? The movie about the lady who adopts the football player?”
“No, I mean The Grind Side. The movie made by one of the producers you sent over to us. It’s about this lady who adopts a football player and then has sex with him three or four times a day. Then when that gets boring she invites the whole football team over. I don’t think it made as much money as The Blind Side.”
Lisa was turning pale. I got the feeling that what I was saying about Dahl’s Hollywood connections wasn’t matching up with what Dahl had been putting in her ears for weeks.
“Yeah, this is what he’s doing for you, Lisa. These are the kind of people he wants to put you with.”
“Look,” Dahl said, “do you have any idea how hard it is to get something going in this town? A project? There are those who can and those who can’t. I don’t care what the guy made before as long as he can get something going now. You understand? These are legitimate people and I have a lot of money on the line here, Haller.”
An elevator finally arrived. I directed Lisa onto it but then put my hand on Dahl’s chest and slowly pushed him away from the door.
“Just back off, Dahl. You’ll get your money and then some. But you just back off.”
I stepped into the elevator and turned to make sure Dahl didn’t attempt to jump on at the last moment. He didn’t try it, but he didn’t move either. I held his hateful stare until the doors closed on it.
Nine
We moved into our new offices on Saturday morning. It was a three-room suite in a building at Victory and Van Nuys Boulevards. The place was even called the Victory Building, which I liked. It was also fully furnished and only two blocks from the courthouse where Lisa Trammel would face trial.
All hands were on deck to help with the move. Including Rojas, who wore a T-shirt and baggies, showing off the tattoos that completely covered his arms and legs. I didn’t know which was more shocking, seeing the tattoos or seeing Rojas in anything other than the suit he always wore while driving me.
The setup in the new place was that I got my own office while Cisco and Aronson shared the other, larger office and Lorna anchored the reception area in between. Going from the backseat of a Lincoln to an office with ten-foot ceilings, a full desk and a nap couch was a big change. The first thing I did upon settling in was to use the open space and polished wood floor to spread out the eight-hundred-plus pages of discovery documents I had received from Andrea Freeman.
Most of it was from WestLand and a lot of it was filler. It was Freeman’s passive-aggressive response to being maneuvered by the defense. There were dozens of pages and packets on bank policy and procedures and other forms I didn’t need. These all went into one pile. There were also copies of all communications that went directly to Lisa Trammel, most of which I already had and was familiar with. These went into a second pile. And finally, there were copies of internal bank communications as well as communications between the victim, Mitchell Bondurant, and the outside company the bank used to carry out its foreclosures.
This company was called ALOFT and I was already quite familiar with it because it was my adversary on at least a third of my foreclosure cases. ALOFT was a mill, a company that filed and tracked all documents required in the lengthy foreclosure process. It was a go-between that allowed bankers and other lenders to keep their hands clean in the dirty business of taking people’s homes away from them. Companies like ALOFT got the job done without the bank’s so much as having to send a letter to the customer faced with foreclosure.
It was this stack of correspondence that I was most interested in, and it was here that I found the document that would change the course of the case.
I moved behind my desk, sat down and studied the phone. There were more buttons on it than I would ever have use for. I finally found the intercom button for the other office and pushed it.
“Hello?”
Nothing. I pushed it again.
“Cisco? Bullocks? Are you there?”
Nothing. I got up and started toward the door, intent on communicating with my staff the old-fashioned way, when a response finally came over the phone’s speaker.
“Mickey, is that you?”
It was Cisco’s voice. I hurried back to the desk and pushed the button.
“Yeah, it’s me. Can you come in here? And bring Bullocks.”
“Roger and out.”
A few minutes later my investigator and associate counsel entered.
“Hey, Boss?” Cisco asked, looking at the stacks of documents on the floor. “The point of the office is to put stuff in drawers and file cabinets and up on shelves.”
“I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Shut the door and have a seat.”
Once we were all in place, I looked at them across my big rented desk and laughed.
“This is weird,” I said.
“I could get used to it, having an office,” Cisco said. “But Bullocks doesn’t know from nothing.”
“Yes, I do,” Aronson protested. “Last summer I interned at Shandler, Massey and Ortiz and I had my own office.”
“Well, maybe next time you get your own with us,” I said. “So now, down to business. Cisco, did you get the laptop to your guy?”
“Yeah, dropped it off yesterday morning. I told him it was a rush job.”
We were talking about Lisa’s laptop, which had been returned by the DA’s office along with her cell phone and the four boxes of documents.
“And he’s going to be able to tell us what the DA was looking at?”
“He said he’ll be able to provide a list of the files they opened and how long they were opened. From that we should be able to get an idea of what they paid attention to. But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Why?”
“Because Freeman gave in on this way too easily. I don’t think she would’ve given us back the computer if it was that important to her.”
“Maybe.”
Neither he nor Aronson was aware of the deal I made with Freeman or the leverage I had used. I turned my attention to Aronson. After she completed the motions to suppress earlier in the week I had put her on backgrounding the victim. This came after Cisco had picked up some preliminary indications in his investigations that all was not well in Mitchell Bondurant’s personal world.
“Bullocks, what’ve you got on our victim?”
“Well, there’s still a lot I need to check out, but there’s no doubt that he was heading over the falls. Financially, that is.”
“How so?”
“Well, when the going was good and the financing came easy, he was a definite player in the real estate market. Between oh-two and oh-seven he bought and flipped twenty-one properties, mostly residential real estate. Made good money and plowed it back into bigger deals. Then the ec
onomy tanked and he was caught holding the bag.”
“He was upside-down?”
“Exactly. At the time of his death he owned five large properties that suddenly weren’t worth what he paid for them. It looks like he had been trying to sell them for more than a year. No takers. And three of them had balloons that were going to pop this year. It added up to over two million dollars he would owe.”
I stood up and came around the desk. I started pacing. Aronson’s report was exciting. I didn’t know exactly how it fit in but I was confident I could make it fit. We just had to talk it out.
“Okay, so Bondurant, the senior vice president in charge of the home loan side of WestLand, was falling victim to the same sort of situation as many of the people he was foreclosing on. When the money was flowing he took mortgages with five-year balloon notes, thinking like everybody else that he’d turn the properties over or remortgage long before the five years were up.”
“Except the economy goes into the toilet,” Aronson said. “He can’t sell them and he can’t remortgage them because they aren’t worth what he paid for them. No bank would touch his paper, not even his own.”
Aronson had a glum look on her face.
“This is all good work, Bullocks. What’s wrong?”
“Well, I’m just wondering what all this has to do with the murder?”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
I went back to the desk and sat down. I handed her the three-page document I had found in the volumes the prosecution had provided. She took it and held it so she and Cisco could both look at it.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I think it’s our smoking gun.”
“I forgot my glasses in the other office,” Cisco said.
“Read it, Bullocks.”
“It’s a copy of a certified letter from Bondurant to Louis Opparizio at A. Louis Opparizio Financial Technologies, or ALOFT, for short. It says, ‘Dear Louis, Attached you will find correspondence from an attorney named Michael Haller who is representing the home owner in one of the foreclosure cases you are handling for WestLand.’ It gives Lisa’s name, loan number and the address of the house. Then it goes, ‘In his letter Mr. Haller makes allegations that the file is replete with fraudulent actions perpetrated in the case. You will note that he gives specific instances, all of which were carried out by ALOFT. As you know and we have discussed, there have been other complaints. These new allegations against ALOFT, if true, have put WestLand in a vulnerable position, especially considering the government’s recent interest in this aspect of the mortgage business. Unless we come to some sort of arrangement and understanding in regard to this I will be recommending to the board that WestLand withdraw from its contract with your company for cause and any ongoing business be terminated. This action would also require the bank to file an SAR with appropriate authorities. Please contact me at your earliest convenience to further discuss these matters.’ That’s it. A copy of your original letter is attached and a copy of the return card from the post office. The letter was signed for by someone named Natalie and I can’t read the last name. Begins with an L.”
I leaned back in my leather executive chair and smiled at them while rolling a paper clip over my fingers like a magician. Aronson, eager to impress, jumped in first.
“So, Bondurant was covering his ass. He had to have known what ALOFT was doing. The banks have a wink-wink relationship with all these foreclosure mills. They don’t care how it’s done, they just want it done. But by sending this letter he was distancing himself from ALOFT and the underhanded practices.”
I shrugged as if to say maybe.
“ ‘Arrangement and understanding,’ ” I said.
They both looked at me blankly.
“That’s what he said in the letter. ‘Unless we come to some sort of arrangement and understanding…’ ”
“Okay, what’s it mean?” Aronson asked.
“Read between the lines. I don’t think he was distancing himself. I think the letter was a threat. I think it means he wanted a piece of ALOFT’s action. He wanted in and he was covering his ass, yes, by sending the letter, but I think there was another message. He wanted some of the action or he was going to take it away from Opparizio. He was even threatening to file an SAR.”
“What exactly is an SAR?” Aronson asked.
“Suspicious activity report,” Cisco said. “A routine form. The banks file them over anything.”
“With who?”
“Federal trade, FBI, Secret Service, whoever they want to, really.”
I could tell I had not sold them on anything yet.
“Do you have any idea what sort of money ALOFT is raking in?” I asked. “It’s easily involved in a third of our cases. I know it’s unscientific but if you take that out across the board and ALOFT’s got a third of the cases in L.A. County then you are talking about millions and millions in fees from this one county. They say that in California alone there will be three million foreclosures before this plays out over the next few years.
“Plus, there’s the acquisition.”
“What acquisition?” Aronson asked.
“You gotta read the papers. Opparizio is in the process of selling ALOFT to a big investment fund, a company called LeMure. It’s publicly traded and any sort of controversy regarding one of its satellite acquisitions could affect the deal as well as the stock price. So don’t kid yourself. If Bondurant was desperate enough, he could make some waves. He may have made more than he was counting on.”
Cisco nodded, the first to tumble to my theory.
“Okay, so we have Bondurant facing personal financial disaster,” he said. “Three balloons about to pop. So he turns around and tries to muscle in on Opparizio, the LeMure deal and the whole foreclosure gravy train. And it gets him killed?”
“That’s right.”
Cisco was sold. I now swiveled in my chair so that I was looking directly at Aronson.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a big jump. And it’s going to be hard to prove.”
“Who says we have to prove it? We just have to figure out how to get it before the jury.”
The reality was we didn’t need to prove a damn thing. We only had to suggest it and let a jury do the rest. I just had to plant the seeds of reasonable doubt. To build the hypothesis of innocence. I leaned forward across my big wooden desk and looked at my team.
“This is our defense theory. Opparizio is our straw man. He’s the guy we paint as guilty. The jury points the finger at him and our client walks.”
I looked at both their faces and got no reaction. I kept going.
“Cisco, I want you to focus on Louis Opparizio and his company. Get me everything that’s out there. History, known associates, everything. All the details of the merger. I want to know more about that deal and this guy than even he knows. By the end of next week I want to subpoena records from ALOFT. They’ll fight it but it ought to stir things up a bit.”
Aronson shook her head.
“But wait a minute,” she said. “Are you saying this is all bullshit? Just a defense gambit and this guy Opparizio didn’t really do it? What if we’re right about Opparizio and they’re wrong about Lisa Trammel? What if she’s innocent?”
She looked at me with eyes full of naive hope. I smiled and looked at Cisco.
“Tell her.”
My investigator turned to face my young associate.
“Kid, you’re new at this so you get a pass. But we never ask that question. It doesn’t matter if our clients are guilty or innocent. They all get the same bang for the buck.”
“Yes, but…”
“There are no buts,” I said. “We are talking about avenues of defense here. Ways to provide our client with the best defense possible. These are strategies we will follow regardless of guilt or innocence. You want to do criminal defense, this is what you have to understand. You never ask your client if he did it. Yes or no, the answer is only a distraction. So you don’t n
eed to know.”
She tightened her lips into a thin, straight line.
“How are you on Tennyson?” I asked. “ ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’?”
“What does—”
“ ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die.’ We’re the Light Brigade, Bullocks. We go up against an army that has more people, more weapons, more everything. Most of the time it amounts to little more than a suicide run. No chance of survival. No chance of winning. But sometimes you get a case where you have a shot. It might be a long shot, but it’s a shot nonetheless. So you take it. You charge… and you don’t ask questions like that.”
“Actually, I think it’s ‘do and die.’ That was the point of the poem. They didn’t have the choice to do or die. They had to do and die.”
“So you know your Tennyson. I like ‘do or die’ better. The point is, did Lisa Trammel kill Mitchell Bondurant? I really don’t know. She says she didn’t and that’s good enough for me. If it’s not good enough for you, then I’ll take you off this one and put you back on foreclosures full-time.”
“No,” Aronson said quickly. “I want to stay. I’m in.”
“That’s good. Not many lawyers get to sit second chair on a murder case ten months out of law school.”
She looked at me, eyes wide.
“Second chair?”
I nodded.
“You deserve it. You’ve done some really good work on this.”
But the light quickly faded.
“What?”
“I just don’t know why you can’t have it both ways. You know, give unbridled effort in your defense but be conscientious about your work. Try for the best outcome.”
“The best outcome for who? Your client? Society? Or for yourself? Your responsibility is to your client and the law, Bullocks. That’s it.”
I gave her a long stare before continuing.
“Don’t go growing a conscience on me,” I said. “I’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead you to anything good.”
Ten
After spending most of the day setting up the office I didn’t get home till almost eight. I found my ex-wife sitting on the steps leading up to the front deck. Our daughter wasn’t with her. In the past year there had been several encounters between us that did not include Hayley and I was thrilled by the prospect of another. I was dog-tired from the day’s mental and physical work but I could easily rally for Maggie McFierce.