Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

Track down her sister. Lisa’s got a kid. He’s probably in school and somebody’s going to have to take him if Lisa can’t.”
    We made every client fill out an extensive contact list because sometimes it was hard to find them for court hearings—and to get them to pay for my work.
    “I’ll start on that,” Lorna said. “Good luck, Mickey.”
    “Same to you.”
    I closed the phone and thought about Lisa Trammel. Somehow I wasn’t surprised that she had been arrested for killing the man who was trying to take her home away from her. It’s not that I had thought it would come to this. Not even close. But deep down, I had known it was going to come to something.

Two
    I quickly took Mrs. Pena’s cash and gave her a receipt. We both signed the contract and she got a copy for her own records. I took a credit card number from her and she promised it would withstand a $250-a-month hit while I was working for her. I then thanked her, shook her hand and had Rojas walk her back to her front door.
    While he did that I popped the trunk with the remote I carried, and got out. The Lincoln’s trunk was spacious enough to hold three cardboard file boxes as well as all my office supplies. I found the Trammel file in the third box and pulled it. I also grabbed the fancy briefcase I used for police station visits. When I closed the trunk I saw the stylized 13 spray-painted in silver on the lid’s black paint.
    “Son of a bitch.”
    I looked around. Three front yards down, a couple of kids were playing in the dirt but they looked too young to be graffiti artists. The rest of the street was deserted. I was baffled. Not only had I not heard or noticed the assault on my car that had taken place while I was having a client conference inside it, but it was barely past one and I knew most gangbangers didn’t get up and embrace the day and all its possibilities until late afternoon. They were night creatures.
    I headed back to my open door with the file. I noticed Rojas was standing at the front stoop, chatting with Mrs. Pena. I whistled and signaled him back to the car. We had to get going.
    I got in. Message received, Rojas trotted back to the car and jumped in himself.
    “Compton?” he asked.
    “No, change of plans. We’ve got to get up to Van Nuys. Fast.”
    “Okay, Boss.”
    He pulled away from the curb and started making his way back to the 110 Freeway. There was no direct freeway route to Van Nuys. We would have to take the 110 into downtown where we’d pick up the 101 north. We couldn’t have been starting off from a worse position in the city.
    “What was she saying at the front door?” I asked Rojas.
    “She was asking about you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She said you looked like you shouldn’t need a translator, you know?”
    I nodded. I got that a lot. My mother’s genes made me look more south of the border than north.
    “She also wanted to know if you were married, Boss. I told her you were. But if you want to circle back and tap that, it’ll be there. She’d probably want a discount on the fees, though.”
    “Thanks, Rojas,” I said dryly. “She already got a discount but I’ll keep it in mind.”
    Before opening the file I scrolled through the contacts list on my phone. I was looking for the name of someone in the Van Nuys detective squad who might share some information with me. But there was nobody. I was going in blind on a murder case. Not a good starting point either.
    I closed the phone and put it into its charger, then opened the file. Lisa Trammel had become my client after responding to the generic letter I sent to the owners of all homes in foreclosure. I assumed I wasn’t the only lawyer in Los Angeles who did this. But for some reason Lisa answered my letter and not theirs.
    As an attorney in private practice you get to choose your own clients most of the time. Sometimes you choose wrong. Lisa was one of those times with me. I was eager to start the new line of work. I was looking for clients who were in jams or who had been taken advantage of. People who were too naive to know their rights or options. I was looking for underdogs and thought I had found one in Lisa. No doubt she fit the bill. She was losing her house because of a set of circumstances that had fallen like dominoes out of her control. And her lender had turned her case over to a foreclosure mill that had cut corners and even violated the rules. I signed Lisa up, put her on a payment plan and started to fight