Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

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