Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

at me in the mirror.
    “Well, Counselor, did the judge slap your hands a little bit?”
    “That’s none of your business. I’ll find another restroom.”
    I turned around to leave but Opparizio stopped me.
    “Don’t bother. I’m leaving.”
    He shook his wet hands off and moved toward the door, coming very close to me and then suddenly stopping.
    “You are despicable, Haller,” he said. “Your client is a murderer and you have the balls to try to cast the blame on me. How do you look at yourself in the mirror?”
    He turned and gestured toward the line of urinals.
    “This is where you belong,” he said. “In the toilet.”

Forty-nine
    It all came down to the next half hour—maybe an hour at the most. I sat at the defense table, composing my thoughts and waiting. Everyone was in place except for the judge, who remained in chambers, and Opparizio, who was smugly conferring with his two attorneys in the first row of the gallery where they had reserved seats. My client leaned toward me and whispered, so that not even Aronson could hear.
    “You have more, right?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You have more, don’t you, Mickey? More to go after him with?”
    Even she knew that what I had already trotted out was not enough. I whispered back.
    “We’ll know before lunch. We’ll either be drinking champagne or crying in our soup.”
    The door to the judge’s chambers opened and Perry emerged. He called for the jury and the witness to return to the stand before he was even seated on the bench. A few minutes later I was back at the lectern, staring down Opparizio. The restroom confrontation seemed to give him renewed confidence. He adopted a relaxed posture that announced to the world that he was home free. I decided that there was no sense in waiting. It was time to start swinging.
    “Now then, Mr. Opparizio, continuing our discussion from before, you have not been completely truthful in your testimony today, have you?”
    “I have been completely honest and I resent the question.”
    “You lied from the start, didn’t you, sir? Giving a false name when sworn in by the clerk.”
    “My name was legally changed thirty-one years ago. I did not lie and it has nothing to do with this.”
    “What is the name that is on your birth certificate?”
    Opparizio paused and I think I saw the first inkling or recognition of where I was going with this.
    “My birth name was Antonio Luigi Apparizio. Like now but spelled with an A. Growing up, people called me Lou or Louie because there were a lot of Anthonys and Antonios in the neighborhood. I decided to go with Louis. I legally changed my name to Anthony Louis Opparizio. I Americanized it. That’s it.”
    “But why did you change the spelling of your last name too?”
    “There was a professional baseball player at the time named Luis Aparicio. I thought the names were too close. Louis Apparizio and Luis Aparicio. I didn’t want to have a name so close to a famous person’s so I changed the spelling. Is that okay with you, Mr. Haller?”
    The judge admonished Opparizio to simply answer the questions and not ask them.
    “Do you know when Luis Aparicio retired from professional baseball?” I asked.
    I glanced at the judge after asking the question. If his patience was being stretched before, it was now probably as thin as the piece of paper a contempt citation would be printed on.
    “No, I don’t know when he retired.”
    “Does it surprise you to learn that it was eight years before you changed your name?”
    “No, it doesn’t surprise me.”
    “But you expect the jury to believe that you changed your name to avoid a match to a baseball player long out of the game?”
    Opparizio shrugged.
    “It’s what happened.”
    “Isn’t it true that you changed your name from Apparizio to Opparizio because you were an ambitious young man and wanted to at least outwardly distance yourself from your family?”
    “No, untrue. I did want to have a more American-sounding name, but I wasn’t distancing myself from anyone.”
    I saw Opparizio’s eyes make a quick dart in the direction of his attorneys.
    “You were originally named after your uncle, were you not?” I asked.
    “No, that’s not true,” Opparizio answered quickly. “I wasn’t named after anyone.”
    “You had an uncle named Antonio Luigi Apparizio, the same name as on your birth certificate, and you are saying it was just coincidence?”
    Realizing his mistake in lying, Opparizio tried to recover but