Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

was?”
    “Well, we later found out that—”
    “No, no, no, I didn’t ask you what you later found out, Detective. I asked you about those first seventy-two minutes when you were at the crime scene. During that time, before you went to Lisa Trammel’s house in Woodland Hills, did you know whose coffee that was?”
    “No, we had not determined that yet.”
    “Okay, so you didn’t know who dropped that coffee at the crime scene, correct?”
    “Objection, asked and answered,” Freeman said.
    It was a useless objection but she had to do something to try to knock me out of rhythm.
    “I’ll allow it,” the judge said before I could respond. “You can answer the question, Detective. Did you know who dropped that cup of coffee at the crime scene?”
    “Not at that time.”
    I went back to the video and played the segment I had cued and ready to go. It was from the early part of the interview, when Trammel was recounting her routine activities during the morning of the murder.
    “You stopped for coffee?”
    “I guess I forgot.”
    “Where did you stop to get the coffee?”
    “A place called Joe’s Joe. It’s on Van Nuys Boulevard right by the intersection with Ventura.”
    “Do you remember, did you get a large or small cup?”
    “Large. I drink a lot of coffee.”
    I stopped the video.
    “Tell me something now, Detective. Why did you ask what size coffee she got at Joe’s Joe?”
    “You throw out a big net. You go for as many details as you can.”
    “Was it not because you believed the coffee cup found at the scene of the murder might have been Lisa Trammel’s?”
    “That was one possibility at that point.”
    “Did you count this as one of those admissions from Lisa Trammel?”
    “I thought it was significant at that point in the conversation. I wouldn’t call it an admission.”
    “But then, under further questioning, she told you she saw the victim at the coffee shop, correct?”
    “Correct.”
    “So didn’t that change your thinking on the coffee cup at the scene?”
    “It was just additional information to consider. It was very early in the investigation. We had no independent information that the victim had been in the coffee shop. We had this one person’s statement but it was inconsistent with the statement of a witness we had already spoken to. So we had Lisa Trammel saying she saw Mitchell Bondurant at the coffee shop but that didn’t make it a fact. We still needed to confirm that. And later we did.”
    “But do you see where what you considered an inconsistency early in the interview turned out to be totally consistent with the facts later?”
    “In this one instance.”
    Kurlen would give no quarter. He knew I was trying to back him up to the edge of a cliff. His job was to keep from going over.
    “In fact, Detective, wouldn’t you say that when all was said and done, the only thing inconsistent about the interview with Lisa Trammel was that she said she wasn’t near the bank and you had a witness who claimed she was?”
    “It’s always easy to look back with twenty-twenty vision. But that one inconsistency was and is pretty important. A reliable witness put her close to the scene of the crime at the time of the crime. That hasn’t changed since day one.”
    “A reliable witness. Based on one short interview with Margo Schafer she was deemed a reliable witness?”
    I put the proper mix of outrage and confusion in my voice. Freeman objected, saying that I was simply badgering the witness because I was not getting the answers I wanted. The judge overruled but it was a good message for her to get to the jury—the idea that I wasn’t getting what I wanted. Because, in fact, I was.
    “The first interview with Margo Schafer was short,” Kurlen said. “But she was reinterviewed several times by several investigators. Her observations on that day have not changed one iota. I believe she saw what she said she saw.”
    “Good for you, Detective,” I said. “Let’s go back to the coffee cup. Did there come a time that you came to a conclusion as to whose coffee was spilled and left at the crime scene?”
    “Yes. We found a Joe’s Joe receipt in the victim’s pocket for a large cup of coffee purchased that morning at eight twenty-one. Once we found that, we believed that the coffee cup at the crime scene was his. This was later confirmed by fingerprint analysis. He got out of the car with it and dropped it when he was attacked from behind.”
    I nodded, making