Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

entered.
    “Hey, Boss?” Cisco asked, looking at the stacks of documents on the floor. “The point of the office is to put stuff in drawers and file cabinets and up on shelves.”
    “I’ll get around to it,” I said. “Shut the door and have a seat.”
    Once we were all in place, I looked at them across my big rented desk and laughed.
    “This is weird,” I said.
    “I could get used to it, having an office,” Cisco said. “But Bullocks doesn’t know from nothing.”
    “Yes, I do,” Aronson protested. “Last summer I interned at Shandler, Massey and Ortiz and I had my own office.”
    “Well, maybe next time you get your own with us,” I said. “So now, down to business. Cisco, did you get the laptop to your guy?”
    “Yeah, dropped it off yesterday morning. I told him it was a rush job.”
    We were talking about Lisa’s laptop, which had been returned by the DA’s office along with her cell phone and the four boxes of documents.
    “And he’s going to be able to tell us what the DA was looking at?”
    “He said he’ll be able to provide a list of the files they opened and how long they were opened. From that we should be able to get an idea of what they paid attention to. But don’t get your hopes up.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Freeman gave in on this way too easily. I don’t think she would’ve given us back the computer if it was that important to her.”
    “Maybe.”
    Neither he nor Aronson was aware of the deal I made with Freeman or the leverage I had used. I turned my attention to Aronson. After she completed the motions to suppress earlier in the week I had put her on backgrounding the victim. This came after Cisco had picked up some preliminary indications in his investigations that all was not well in Mitchell Bondurant’s personal world.
    “Bullocks, what’ve you got on our victim?”
    “Well, there’s still a lot I need to check out, but there’s no doubt that he was heading over the falls. Financially, that is.”
    “How so?”
    “Well, when the going was good and the financing came easy, he was a definite player in the real estate market. Between oh-two and oh-seven he bought and flipped twenty-one properties, mostly residential real estate. Made good money and plowed it back into bigger deals. Then the economy tanked and he was caught holding the bag.”
    “He was upside-down?”
    “Exactly. At the time of his death he owned five large properties that suddenly weren’t worth what he paid for them. It looks like he had been trying to sell them for more than a year. No takers. And three of them had balloons that were going to pop this year. It added up to over two million dollars he would owe.”
    I stood up and came around the desk. I started pacing. Aronson’s report was exciting. I didn’t know exactly how it fit in but I was confident I could make it fit. We just had to talk it out.
    “Okay, so Bondurant, the senior vice president in charge of the home loan side of WestLand, was falling victim to the same sort of situation as many of the people he was foreclosing on. When the money was flowing he took mortgages with five-year balloon notes, thinking like everybody else that he’d turn the properties over or remortgage long before the five years were up.”
    “Except the economy goes into the toilet,” Aronson said. “He can’t sell them and he can’t remortgage them because they aren’t worth what he paid for them. No bank would touch his paper, not even his own.”
    Aronson had a glum look on her face.
    “This is all good work, Bullocks. What’s wrong?”
    “Well, I’m just wondering what all this has to do with the murder?”
    “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
    I went back to the desk and sat down. I handed her the three-page document I had found in the volumes the prosecution had provided. She took it and held it so she and Cisco could both look at it.
    “What’s this?” she asked.
    “I think it’s our smoking gun.”
    “I forgot my glasses in the other office,” Cisco said.
    “Read it, Bullocks.”
    “It’s a copy of a certified letter from Bondurant to Louis Opparizio at A. Louis Opparizio Financial Technologies, or ALOFT, for short. It says, ‘Dear Louis, Attached you will find correspondence from an attorney named Michael Haller who is representing the home owner in one of the foreclosure cases you are handling for WestLand.’ It gives Lisa’s name, loan number and the address of the house. Then it goes, ‘In his letter Mr.