Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

player?”
    “No, I mean The Grind Side. The movie made by one of the producers you sent over to us. It’s about this lady who adopts a football player and then has sex with him three or four times a day. Then when that gets boring she invites the whole football team over. I don’t think it made as much money as The Blind Side.”
    Lisa was turning pale. I got the feeling that what I was saying about Dahl’s Hollywood connections wasn’t matching up with what Dahl had been putting in her ears for weeks.
    “Yeah, this is what he’s doing for you, Lisa. These are the kind of people he wants to put you with.”
    “Look,” Dahl said, “do you have any idea how hard it is to get something going in this town? A project? There are those who can and those who can’t. I don’t care what the guy made before as long as he can get something going now. You understand? These are legitimate people and I have a lot of money on the line here, Haller.”
    An elevator finally arrived. I directed Lisa onto it but then put my hand on Dahl’s chest and slowly pushed him away from the door.
    “Just back off, Dahl. You’ll get your money and then some. But you just back off.”
    I stepped into the elevator and turned to make sure Dahl didn’t attempt to jump on at the last moment. He didn’t try it, but he didn’t move either. I held his hateful stare until the doors closed on it.

Nine
    We moved into our new offices on Saturday morning. It was a three-room suite in a building at Victory and Van Nuys Boulevards. The place was even called the Victory Building, which I liked. It was also fully furnished and only two blocks from the courthouse where Lisa Trammel would face trial.
    All hands were on deck to help with the move. Including Rojas, who wore a T-shirt and baggies, showing off the tattoos that completely covered his arms and legs. I didn’t know which was more shocking, seeing the tattoos or seeing Rojas in anything other than the suit he always wore while driving me.
    The setup in the new place was that I got my own office while Cisco and Aronson shared the other, larger office and Lorna anchored the reception area in between. Going from the backseat of a Lincoln to an office with ten-foot ceilings, a full desk and a nap couch was a big change. The first thing I did upon settling in was to use the open space and polished wood floor to spread out the eight-hundred-plus pages of discovery documents I had received from Andrea Freeman.
    Most of it was from WestLand and a lot of it was filler. It was Freeman’s passive-aggressive response to being maneuvered by the defense. There were dozens of pages and packets on bank policy and procedures and other forms I didn’t need. These all went into one pile. There were also copies of all communications that went directly to Lisa Trammel, most of which I already had and was familiar with. These went into a second pile. And finally, there were copies of internal bank communications as well as communications between the victim, Mitchell Bondurant, and the outside company the bank used to carry out its foreclosures.
    This company was called ALOFT and I was already quite familiar with it because it was my adversary on at least a third of my foreclosure cases. ALOFT was a mill, a company that filed and tracked all documents required in the lengthy foreclosure process. It was a go-between that allowed bankers and other lenders to keep their hands clean in the dirty business of taking people’s homes away from them. Companies like ALOFT got the job done without the bank’s so much as having to send a letter to the customer faced with foreclosure.
    It was this stack of correspondence that I was most interested in, and it was here that I found the document that would change the course of the case.
    I moved behind my desk, sat down and studied the phone. There were more buttons on it than I would ever have use for. I finally found the intercom button for the other office and pushed it.
    “Hello?”
    Nothing. I pushed it again.
    “Cisco? Bullocks? Are you there?”
    Nothing. I got up and started toward the door, intent on communicating with my staff the old-fashioned way, when a response finally came over the phone’s speaker.
    “Mickey, is that you?”
    It was Cisco’s voice. I hurried back to the desk and pushed the button.
    “Yeah, it’s me. Can you come in here? And bring Bullocks.”
    “Roger and out.”
    A few minutes later my investigator and associate counsel