Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

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