Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

You’re not staying long either?”
    “We’ll see about that.”
    She escorted me in through a gauntlet of handshakes, kisses and back pats. It was nice and totally unexpected. I was placed in the seat of honor and handed a lemonade.
    The party lasted another hour and I got time to visit with all my guests. I hadn’t seen Harry Bosch in a few months. I had heard he’d come by the hospital but I wasn’t awake for the visit. We had worked a case the year before, with me as a special prosecutor. It had been nice being on the same side and I had thought the experience would keep us close. But it hadn’t really worked out that way. Bosch remained as distant as ever and I remained as saddened about it as ever.
    When I saw the opportunity I moved toward him and we stood side by side in front of the window that gave the best view of the city.
    “From this angle it’s hard not to love it, isn’t it?” he asked.
    I turned from the view to him and then back. He was drinking a lemonade, too. He had told me he’d stopped drinking when his teenage daughter had come to live with him.
    “I know what you mean,” I said.
    He drained his glass and thanked me for the party. I told him he could leave Maddie with us if she wanted to visit Hayley longer. But he said that he already had plans to take her to a shooting range in the morning.
    “A shooting range? You’re taking your daughter to a shooting range?”
    “I’ve got guns in the house. She should know how to use them.”
    I shrugged. I guessed there was a logic in it.
    Bosch and his daughter were the first to leave and soon afterward the party ended. Everybody left except for Maggie and Hayley. They had decided to stay the night.
    Exhausted by the day and the week and the month, I took a long shower and then got into bed early. Soon Maggie came in, after talking Hayley to sleep in her room. She closed the door and that was when I knew my real birthday present was coming.
    She hadn’t brought any nightclothes with her. Lying on my back, I watched her get undressed and then slip under the covers with me.
    “You know, you’re a piece of work, Haller,” she whispered.
    “What did I do this time?”
    “You just trespassed all over the place.”
    She moved in close and then over on top of me. She bent down, tenting my face with her hair. She kissed me and started slowly moving her hips, then put her lips against my ear.
    “So,” she said. “Normal function and activity, that’s what the doctor told you, right?”
    “That’s what he said.”
    “We’ll see.”

PART THREE
    Boléro

Eighteen
    Louis Opparizio was a man who did not want to be served. As an attorney he knew that the only way he could be dragged into the Lisa Trammel trial was to be served with a subpoena to testify. Avoiding service meant avoiding testimony. Whether he had been tipped to the defense strategy or simply was smart enough to understand it on his own, he seemingly disappeared just at the time we began looking for him. His whereabouts became unknown and all the routine tricks of the trade to track him and draw him out had failed. We did not know if Opparizio was in the country, let alone in Los Angeles.
    Opparizio had one very big thing going for him in his effort to hide. Money. With enough money you can hide from anybody in this world and Opparizio knew it. He owned numerous homes in numerous states, multiple vehicles and even a private jet to help him connect quickly to all his dots. When he moved, whether it was from state to state or from Beverly Hills home to Beverly Hills office, he traveled behind a phalanx of security men.
    He also had one thing going against him. Money. The vast wealth he had accumulated by carrying out the bidding of banks and other lenders had also given him an Achilles’ heel. He had acquired the tastes and desires of the super rich.
    And that was how we eventually got him.
    In the course of his efforts to locate Opparizio, Cisco Wojciechowski amassed a tremendous amount of information about his quarry’s profile. From this data a trap was carefully planned and executed to perfection. A glossy presentation package announcing the closed-bid auction of an Aldo Tinto painting was sent to Opparizio’s office in Beverly Hills. The package said the painting would be on view for interested bidders for only two hours beginning at 7 P.M. two nights hence in Studio Z at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Bids would then be accepted until midnight.
    The