Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

part of a very circumstantial case. They lose her or she turns up shaky and they have a big problem. We already know it’s going to be tough to convince a jury that she saw what she claims she saw.”
    “But we still haven’t talked to her?”
    “She refused to be interviewed and is under no obligation to do so.”
    I opened the middle drawer of the desk and pulled out a pencil. I pushed its point into the top opening of the cast and down between two fingers, then maneuvered the pencil back and forth to scratch my palm.
    “What are you doing?” Cisco asked.
    “What’s it look like? Itching my palm. It was driving me crazy the whole meeting.”
    “You know what they say about itchy palms,” Aronson said.
    I looked at her, wondering if there was some sort of sexual innuendo to the answer.
    “No, what?”
    “If it’s your right hand you are going to come into money. If it’s your left then you are going to pay out money. If you scratch them, you stop it from happening.”
    “They teach you that in law school, Bullocks?”
    “No, my mother always said it. She was superstitious. She thought it was true.”
    “Well, if it is, I just saved us a bunch of money.”
    I pulled the pencil out and put it back in the drawer.
    “Cisco, take another run at Schafer. Try to catch her off guard. Show up somewhere she’d never expect it. See how she reacts. See if she talks.”
    “You got it.”
    “If she doesn’t talk, take another run at her background. Maybe there’s a connection we don’t know about.”
    “If there is I’ll find it.”
    “That’s what I’m counting on.”

Sixteen
    As I had expected, Lisa Trammel wanted no part in a plea agreement that would put her in prison for as long as seven years, even though she faced the possibility of four times that amount if convicted at trial. She chose to take her chances on an acquittal and I couldn’t blame her. While I remained at a loss to explain the state’s change of heart, the offer of a defense-friendly disposition made me think the prosecution was running scared and that we had a legitimate fighting chance. If my client was willing to roll the dice, then so was I. It wasn’t my freedom at stake.
    I was cruising home at the end of work the next day when I called Andrea Freeman to give her the news. She had left several messages early in the day and I had strategically not returned them, hoping to make her sweat. It turned out she was anything but feeling the heat. When I told her my client was passing on the offer she simply laughed.
    “Uh, Haller, you might want to start returning your messages a little sooner. I tried several times this morning to get to you. That offer was permanently taken off the table at ten o’clock. She should’ve accepted it last night and it probably would have saved her about twenty years in prison.”
    “Who pulled the offer, your boss?”
    “I did. I changed my mind and that’s that.”
    I couldn’t think of what could have caused such a dramatic change in less than twenty-four hours. The only activity on the case that morning that I knew of was Louis Opparizio’s attorney filing a motion to quash the subpoena we had served on him. But I didn’t see the connection to Freeman’s abrupt change in direction on the plea.
    When I didn’t respond, Freeman moved to end the call.
    “So, Counselor, I guess I’ll see you in court.”
    “Yeah, and just so you know, I’m going to find it, Andrea.”
    “Find what?”
    “Whatever it is you’re hiding. The thing that went wrong yesterday, that made you bring me that offer. Doesn’t matter if you think it’s all fixed now, I’m going to find it. And when we get to trial, I’ll have it in my back pocket.”
    She laughed into the phone in a way that immediately undercut the confidence I’d had in my statement.
    “Like I said, I’ll see you in court,” she said.
    “Yeah, I’ll be there,” I said.
    I put the phone down on the armrest and tried to intuit what was going on. Then it struck me. I might already be carrying Freeman’s secret in my back pocket.
    The letter from Bondurant to Opparizio had been hidden in the haystack of documents Freeman had turned over. Maybe she had found it only recently herself and realized what I could do with it, how I could build a defense case around it. It happens sometimes. A prosecutor gets a case with what seems like overwhelming evidence, and hubris sets in. You go with what you’ve got and other potential evidence