Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

consider. It had been directed at the jury.
    “Your Honor, I withdraw the question,” I announced. “And I have nothing further for this witness.”
    I moved away from the lectern and sat down. I stared pointedly at the jurors, my eyes sweeping across one row of them and then the other. Finally, I held them on Furlong in the three spot. He held my stare and didn’t look away. I took that as a very good sign.

Thirty-six
    Herb Dahl came alone. Cisco met him at the door of the office suite and escorted him into my office, where I was waiting. Bullocks sat to my left and we had an empty seat for Dahl right in front of my desk. Cisco stayed standing, which was by design. I wanted Cisco pacing and pensive. I wanted Dahl to feel unease, that the wrong word spoken could unleash the big man in the tight black T-shirt.
    I didn’t offer Dahl coffee, soda or water. I didn’t start with any platitudes or efforts to mend our strained relationship. I simply got down to business.
    “What we’re going to do here, Herb, is find out exactly what you’ve done, what your involvement with Louis Opparizio has been and what we’re going to do about it. As far as I know, I’m not needed anywhere until nine o’clock tomorrow morning, so we’ve got all night if that’s what it takes.”
    “Before we start I want to know that we have a deal if I cooperate,” Dahl said.
    “I told you at lunch the deal is you stay out of prison. In exchange, you tell me what you know. Beyond that, no promises.”
    “I won’t testify to anything. This is informational only. Besides, I have something better for you than my testifying.”
    “We’ll see about that. But right now why don’t we start at the beginning? You said today that you were told to go on Lisa Trammel’s picket line. Start there.”
    Dahl nodded but then disagreed.
    “I think I have to start before that. This goes back to the beginning of last year.”
    I raised two open hands.
    “Have at it. We’ve got all night.”
    Dahl then proceeded to tell a long story about a movie he produced a year earlier called Blood Racer. It was a warm family movie about a girl who is given a horse named Chester. She finds a tattooed number inside the animal’s lower lip that indicates he was once a thoroughbred racehorse thought to have been killed in a barn fire years before.
    “So she and her pop do some more investigating and—”
    “Look,” I interrupted. “It sounds like a nice story but can we talk about Louis Opparizio? I may have all night but let’s stay on point anyway.”
    “That is the point. This movie. It was supposed to be low budget all the way but I love horses. Ever since I was a little kid. And I really thought I could get out of the racks with this one.”
    “The racks?”
    “The straight-to-DVD dreck you see out there. I was thinking this story was a diamond in the rough and if we did it right we could get a major theatrical release. But to get that you need production value and to get that you need money.”
    It always comes down to money.
    “You borrowed the money?”
    “I borrowed the money and put it into the flick. Stupid, I know. And this was on top of the investor money I took at the start. But the director was this perfectionist freak from Spain. Guy barely spoke English but we hired him. He did take after take on every setup—thirty takes at a frickin’ snack bar scene! Bottom line is we ran out of money and I needed a quarter mill minimum just to finish the film. I had already been all over town and everybody was tapped. But I loved this flick. To me it was like the little movie that could, you know?”
    “You got the money on the street,” Cisco said from a position behind Dahl’s chair.
    Dahl twisted around to look up at him and nodded.
    “Yeah, from a guy I know. A bent-nose guy.”
    “What’s his name?” I asked.
    “We don’t need his name in this,” Dahl said.
    “Yes, we do. What is his name?”
    “Danny Greene.”
    “I thought you said—”
    “Yeah, I know. He’s with them but his name’s Greene—what can I say? It’s ‘Green’ with an ‘e’ at the end.”
    I gave Cisco a look. He would need to check this out.
    “Okay, so you took a quarter million from Danny Greene and what happened?”
    Dahl raised his palms in a gesture indicating frustration.
    “That’s just it, nothing happened. I finished the flick but I couldn’t sell it. I took it to every frickin’ festival in North America and nobody wanted it. I took