Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

raised my hand as if welcoming Trammel to the trial.
    “Lisa, would you please stand for a moment?”
    Trammel stood up and turned slightly to the jury, her eyes slowly scanning the twelve faces. She looked resolute, unbroken. Just the way I told her to be.
    “And this is Lisa Trammel, the defendant. Ms. Freeman wants you to believe she committed this crime. She is five foot three in height, weighs a hundred nine pounds soaking wet and is a schoolteacher. Thank you, Lisa. You can sit down now.”
    Trammel took her seat and I turned back to the jury, keeping my eyes moving from face to face as I spoke.
    “We agree with Ms. Freeman that this crime was brutal and violent and cold-blooded. No one should have taken Mitchell Bondurant’s life and whoever did should be brought to justice. But there should never be a rush to judgment. And that’s what the evidence will prove happened here. The investigators on this case saw the little picture and the easy fit. They missed the big picture. They missed the real murderer.”
    From behind me I heard Freeman’s voice.
    “Your Honor, can we please approach for a sidebar?”
    Perry frowned but then signaled us up. I followed Freeman to the side of the bench, already formulating my response to what I knew she was going to object to. The judge flipped on a sound distortion fan so the jurors wouldn’t hear anything they shouldn’t and we huddled at the side of the bench.
    “Judge,” Freeman began, “I hate interrupting an opening statement but this doesn’t sound like an opening statement. Is defense counsel going to hit us with the facts his defense case will prove and the evidence he has, or is he just going to talk in generalities about some mysterious killer that everybody else missed?”
    The judge looked at me for a response. I looked at my watch.
    “Judge, I object to the objection. I am less than five minutes into a thirty-minute allotment and she’s already objecting because I haven’t put anything on the board? Come on, Judge, she’s trying to show me up in front of the jury and I request that you take a continuing objection from her and not allow her to interrupt again.”
    “I think he’s right, Ms. Freeman,” the judge said. “Way too early to object. I’ll carry it now as a running objection and will step in myself if I need to. You go back to the prosecution table and sit tight.”
    He flipped the fan off and rolled his chair back to the center of the bench. Freeman and I returned to our positions.
    “As I was saying before being interrupted, there is a big picture to this case and the defense is going to show it to you. The prosecution would like you to believe that this is a simple case of vengeance. But murder is never simple and if you look for shortcuts in an investigation or a prosecution then you are going to miss things. Including a killer. Lisa Trammel did not even know Mitchell Bondurant. Had never met him before. She had no motive to kill him because the motive the prosecution will tell you about was false. They’ll say she killed Mitchell Bondurant because he was going to take away her house. The truth was, he wasn’t going to get the house and we will prove that. A motive is like a rudder on a boat. You take it away and the boat moves at the whim of the wind. And that’s what the prosecution’s case is. A lot of wind.”
    I put my hands in my pockets and looked down at my feet. I counted to three in my head and when I looked up I was staring directly at Furlong.
    “What this case is really about is money. It’s about the epidemic of foreclosure that has swept across our country. This was not a simple act of vengeance. This was the cold and calculated murder of a man who was threatening to expose the corruption of our banks and their agents of foreclosure. This is about money and those who have it and will not part with it at any cost—even murder.”
    I paused again, shifting my stance and moving my eyes across the whole panel. They came to a female juror named Esther Marks and held. I knew she was a single mother who worked as an office manager in the garment district. She probably made less than the men doing the same job and I had her pegged as someone who would be sympathetic to my client.
    “Lisa Trammel was set up for a murder she did not commit. She was the patsy. The fall guy. She protested the bank’s harsh and fraudulent foreclosure practices. She fought against them and for that she was kept away with a restraining