Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

went for only four or five grand a pop but this was a quantity-over-quality period in my professional life. I currently had more than ninety foreclosure clients on my docket. No doubt my kid could start planning on USC. Hell, she could start thinking about staying for a master’s degree.
    There were those who believed I was part of the problem, that I was merely helping the deadbeats game the system while delaying the economic recovery of the whole. That description fit some of my clients for sure. But I viewed most of them as repeat victims. Initially scammed with the American dream of home ownership when lured into mortgages they had no business even qualifying for. And then victimized again when the bubble burst and unscrupulous lenders ran roughshod over them in the subsequent foreclosure frenzy. Most of these once-proud home owners didn’t stand a chance under California’s streamlined foreclosure regulations. A bank didn’t even need a judge’s approval to take away someone’s house. The great financial minds thought this was the way to go. Just keep it moving. The sooner the crisis hit bottom, the sooner the recovery would begin. I say, Tell that to Mrs. Pena.
    There was a theory out there that this was all part of a conspiracy among the top banks in the country to undermine property laws, sabotage the judicial system and create a perpetually cycling foreclosure industry that had them profiting from both ends of the process. Me, I wasn’t exactly buying into that. But during my short time in this area of the law, I had seen enough predatory and unethical acts by so-called legitimate businessmen to make me miss good old-fashioned criminal law.
    Rojas was waiting outside the car for Mrs. Pena to return with the money. I checked my watch and noted we were running late on my next appointment—a commercial foreclosure over in Compton. I tried to bunch my new client consultations geographically to save time and gas and mileage on the car. Today I worked the south end. Tomorrow I would hit East L.A. Two days a week I was in the car, signing up new clients. The rest of the time I worked the cases.
    “Let’s go, Mrs. Pena,” I said. “We gotta roll.”
    I decided to use the waiting time to call Lorna. Three months earlier I had started blocking the ID on my phone. I never did that when I practiced criminal, but in my brave new world of foreclosure defense, I usually didn’t want people having my direct number. And that included the lender attorneys as well as my own clients.
    “Law offices of Michael Haller and Associates,” Lorna said when she picked up. “How can I—”
    “It’s me. What’s up?”
    “Mickey, you have to get over to Van Nuys Division right away.”
    There was a strong urgency in her voice. Van Nuys Division was the LAPD’s central command for operations in the sprawling San Fernando Valley, on the north side of the city.
    “I’m working the south end today. What’s going on?”
    “They have Lisa Trammel there. She called.”
    Lisa Trammel was a client. In fact, my very first foreclosure client. I had kept her in her home for going on eight months and was confident I could take it at least another year further before we dropped the bankruptcy bomb. But she was consumed by the frustrations and inequities of her life and could not be calmed or controlled. She’d taken to marching in front of the bank with a placard decrying its fraudulent practices and heartless actions. That is, until the bank got a temporary restraining order against her.
    “Did she violate the TRO? Are they holding her?”
    “Mickey, they’re holding her for murder.”
    That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear.
    “Murder? Who’s the victim?”
    “She said they’re charging her with killing Mitchell Bondurant.”
    That gave me another great big pause. I looked out the window and saw Mrs. Pena coming out through her front door. She held a wad of cash in her hand.
    “All right, get on the phone and reschedule the rest of today’s appointments. And tell Cisco to head up to Van Nuys. I’ll meet him there.”
    “You got it. Do you want Bullocks to take the afternoon appointments?”
    “Bullocks” was what we called Jennifer Aronson, the associate I had hired out of Southwestern, a law school housed in the old Bullocks department store building on Wilshire.
    “No, I don’t want her doing intake. Just reschedule them. And listen, I think I have the Trammel file with me, but you have the call list.