Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

wrong.”
    She knitted her eyebrows. She was intrigued.
    “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “We’re all going to walk over to my office to wait. You two want to come?”
    “No, I think I need to get Hayley home. She’s got homework.”
    My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it and took a look. The screen said
    L.A. Superior Court
    I took the call. It was Judge Perry’s clerk. I listened and then hung up. I looked around to make sure Lisa Trammel was still nearby.
    “What is it?” Maggie asked.
    I looked back at her.
    “We already have a verdict. A five-minute verdict.”

PART FIVE
    The Hypocrisy of Innocence

Fifty-three
    They came in droves, pouring in from all over Southern California, all brought by the siren song of Facebook. Lisa Trammel had announced the party the morning after the verdict and now on Saturday afternoon they were ten deep at the cash bars. They waved the Stars and Stripes and wore red, white and blue. Fighting foreclosure with the nearly martyred leader of the cause was now more American than ever before. At every door to the house and spaced at intervals in the front and back yards were ten-gallon buckets for donations to defray Trammel’s expenses and keep the fight going. FLAG pins for a buck, cheap cotton T-shirts for ten. And posing with Lisa for a photo required a minimum twenty-dollar donation.
    But nobody complained. Fired in the kiln of false accusation, Lisa Trammel had emerged unscathed and appeared to be about to make the jump from activist to icon. And she wasn’t unhappy about it. The rumor was that Julia Roberts was in talks to play the part in the movie.
    My crew and I were stationed in the backyard at a picnic table with an umbrella. We had come early and gotten the spot. Cisco and Lorna were drinking canned beer and Aronson and I were on bottled water. There was a slight tension at the table and I picked up enough innuendo to understand that it had something to do with how late Cisco had stayed at Four Green Fields with Aronson back on Monday night after I’d left with Maggie McFierce.
    “Jeez, look at all of these people,” Lorna said. “Don’t they know that a not-guilty verdict doesn’t mean she’s innocent?”
    “That’s bad etiquette, Lorna,” I said. “You’re never supposed to say that, especially when it’s your own client you’re talking about.”
    “I know.”
    She frowned and shook her head.
    “You’re not a believer, Lorna?”
    “Well, don’t tell me you are.”
    I was glad I was wearing sunglasses. I didn’t want to reveal myself on this one. I shrugged like I didn’t know or it didn’t matter.
    But it did. You have to live with yourself. Knowing that there was a solid chance that Lisa Trammel actually deserved the verdict she got made things a whole lot better when I looked in the mirror.
    “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Lorna said. “Our phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the verdict came in. We’re back in business big time.”
    Cisco nodded approvingly. It was true. It seemed as though every accused criminal in the city wanted to hire me now. This would’ve been great if I had wanted things to continue the way they were going.
    “Did you check out the closing price on LeMure yesterday on NASDAQ?” Cisco asked.
    I gave him a look.
    “You following the Street now?”
    “Just wanted to see if anybody was paying attention and it looks like they were. LeMure dropped thirty percent of its value in two days. Didn’t help that the Wall Street Journal ran a story connecting Opparizio to Joey Giordano and questioning how much of that sixty-one mill he got went into the mob’s pocket.”
    “Probably all of it,” Lorna said.
    “So Mickey,” Aronson said. “How’d you know?”
    “Know what?”
    “That Opparizio would take the nickel.”
    I shrugged again.
    “I didn’t. I just figured that once it became apparent that his connections were going to come out in open court, he would do what he had to do to stop it. He had one choice. The Fifth.”
    Aronson didn’t look as though my answer appeased her. I turned away and looked across the crowded yard. My client’s son was at a nearby table with her sister. They both looked bored, as if forced to be there. A large group of children had gathered near the terraced herb garden. A woman in the middle of the circle was handing out candy from a bag. She was wearing a red, white and blue top hat like Uncle Sam’s.
    “How long do we need to stay, Boss?” Cisco