The Law of Innocence

by Michael Connelly

  There was a clue to something coming. I had noticed that Kent Drucker left the courtroom after his testimony concluded. He was not replaced by his partner, Lopes, which meant that Berg was flying blind through the rest of the afternoon—no case detective on hand in case she needed documents or a refresher on aspects of the case. This rarely happened in a murder trial and it told me something was up. Drucker and Lopes were working on something. It had to be case-related, because they would have been taken out of the homicide rotation once the trial started. I was sure there was an October surprise coming.

  This was how the rules of fairness in trial procedure were subverted. By putting off the investigative work on a witness or piece of evidence until trial is underway, the prosecutor can claim that it was a newfound witness or piece of evidence and that is why there was no forewarning to opposing counsel. The defense did it as well—I’d had people poised to drop a subpoena on Louis Opparizio, who would be my own October surprise. But there was something inappropriate and unfair about it when the prosecution, which held all the power and all the cards, did it. It was like the New York Yankees always getting the best players because they had the most money. It was why my favorite team in baseball was whatever team was playing the Yankees.

  My thoughts were interrupted when the runner came to the holding cell to escort me down to the prisoner transport dock in the courthouse basement. Twenty minutes later I was in the back of a sheriff’s cruiser being driven solo back to Twin Towers, courtesy of the order from Judge Warfield. I noticed that the driver was a different deputy from the one who had driven me that morning and last week. This driver seemed familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. Between the jail and the courthouse I had seen so many different deputies in the past four months that there was no way I could remember them all.

  After we pulled out of the courthouse complex and onto Spring, I leaned forward to the metal grille that separated the driver from the rear compartment, where I was locked into a plastic form-fitting seat.

  “What happened to Bennet?” I asked.

  I had noted the name on the new guy’s uniform when he was putting me into the car. Pressley. It, too, was familiar but not enough for me to place it.

  “Assignment change,” Pressley said. “I’ll be driving you the rest of this week.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Have you worked in the keep-away module lately?”

  “No, I’m in transport.”

  “Thought I recognized you.”

  “That’s because I’ve sat behind you in court a few times.”

  “Really? This case?”

  “No, this goes back. Alvin Pressley is my nephew. You had him as a client for a while.”

  Alvin Pressley. The name, followed by a face, came back to me. A twenty-one-year-old kid from the projects caught slinging dope with enough quantity in his pockets to qualify for a big-time prison sentence. I was able to score him a better deal: a year in the county stockade.

  “Oh, yeah. Alvin,” I said. “You stood for him at the sentencing, right? I remember his uncle was a deputy.”

  “I did.”

  Here was the hard question.

  “So, how’s Alvin doing these days?”

  “He’s doing good. That was a wake-up call for him. Got his shit together, moved out to Riverside to get away from all the crap. He lives with my brother out there. They got a restaurant.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “Anyway, you did right by me with Alvin, so I’m going to do right by you. There’s people in the jail not happy with you.”

  “Tell me about it. I know.”

  “I’m serious now. You gotta watch your back in there, man.”

  “Believe me, I do know. You’re driving me because I got choked out by a guy on the bus. You know about that?”

  “Everybody knows about that.”

  “What about before? Did people know that was going to go down?”

  “I don’t know, man. Not me.”

  “The story they put in the paper today was bullshit.”

  “Yeah, well, shit happens like that when you’re making waves. Remember that.”

  “I’ve known that my entire life, Pressley. Is there something you want to tell me that I don’t know?”

  I waited. He said nothing, so I tried prompting him.

  “Sounds like you took a risk asking to drive me,” I said. “Might as well tell it.”

  We turned off Bauchet Street and into the inmate-reception garage at Twin Towers. Two deputies came to the car to get me and move me back up to the keep-away module.

  “Just watch yourself,” Pressley said.

  I had long assumed I was a target for any number of the forty-five hundred inmates held inside the jail’s octagonal walls. Anything could spur violence—the cut of your hair, the color of your skin, the look in your eyes. Getting warned about the deputies charged with keeping me safe was another matter.

  “Always,” I said.

  The door opened and a deputy reached in to unlock my cuffs from the seat and then pull me out.

  “Home, sweet home, asshole,” he said.

  45

  Tuesday, February 25

  The morning session in court had not gone well for the defense. Through crime scene analysis, DNA, and ballistics, prosecution witnesses had convincingly offered proof that Sam Scales had been shot to death in the trunk of my Lincoln while it was parked in my garage. While the case was missing the murder weapon, and none of the evidence could put me in the garage pulling the trigger, it was what defense attorneys call commonsense evidence. The victim was killed in the defendant’s car in the defendant’s garage. Common sense dictates that the defendant was responsible. There was, of course, room in that chain of circumstances for reasonable doubt, but sometimes common sense was an overriding factor in a juror’s decision. And whenever I had checked the faces of the jurors during the morning session, I never saw any skepticism. They were paying rapt attention to the parade of witnesses that wanted to bury me in guilt.

  Two of the witnesses I did not even bother to question on cross. There had been nothing in their testimony I could attack, no loose thread I could use to unravel their claims. With the ballistics expert, I thought I scored a point when I asked if any of the bullet slugs recovered in the case showed markings from a silencer being used on the weapon. His answer, as I knew it would be, was that sound-suppression devices do not come into contact with the discharged bullet, so it is impossible to tell if such an attachment was on the murder weapon.

  But then Dana Berg took the point away and scored her own when she used my question on redirect to bring out from her expert the fact that sound suppressors do not reduce the report of a gunshot to anything even approaching silence.

  I likened going into courtside holding during the lunch break to going into the locker room at halftime. My team was down and I felt the weight of dread as Deputy Chan led me into the holding cell. After securing me, he would bring Maggie McPherson in with lunch, and I was sure we would dissect the morning session to see if there was any way to repair the damage when we moved into the defense phase of the trial.

  But those thoughts disappeared like smoke after I went through the steel door from the courtroom and was directed by Chan down the hallway to the attorney-client room. I immediately heard a voice echoing off the steel and concrete walls. A female voice. As we passed the holding cells on either side, I looked through the bars on the right and saw Dana Berg sitting on a bench in the cell. I remembered now that she had gotten up from the prosecution table the moment the judge had left the bench. Now she was in the holding cell, but it wasn’t her voice I’d heard. It was coming from another woman but I could not see her because the cell extended to the right along a concrete wall beyond the barred door.

  I knew the voice. I just couldn’t place it.

  Chan delivered me to the attorney-client room.

  “Hey, who’s that Berg is with?” I asked casually.

  “Your old girlfrie
nd,” Chan said offhandedly.

  “What girlfriend?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Come on, Chan. If I’m going to find out, you might as well tell me.”

  “I actually don’t know. It’s all on the down-low. All I heard was that she was brought down from Chowchilla.”

  He slid the solid steel door closed behind me and I was left alone with the single clue as to who was in the cell with Berg. Chowchilla was up in California’s Central Valley and the location of one of the biggest women’s prisons in the state. While my client list ran 80 percent or more male, I had a few female clients in the prison system. I usually didn’t track my clients once they were adjudicated and sent off to prison, but I knew of one former client who, last I heard, was serving a fifteen-year stretch for manslaughter in Chowchilla. It was her voice, distorted by echoes off steel and concrete, that I now recognized.

  Lisa Trammel. She was the October surprise.

  The door slid back open to allow Maggie to come in with the bag containing our lunch. But I had just lost my appetite. After the door banged closed again, I told her why.

  “They’ve got a witness they’re bringing in and we need to fight it,” I began.

  “Who?” Maggie asked.

  “You hear the voices in the other cell? That’s her. Lisa Trammel.”

  “Lisa Trammel. Why do I know that name?”

  “She was a client. She was charged with murder and I got her off.”

  I saw the prosecutor in Maggie react.

  “Jesus, now I remember,” she said.

  “They just brought her down from Chowchilla to testify,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. But I know the voice and I know she’s in there with Dana Berg. Her case was the one I hung on Opparizio in court. He was the straw man. I got him to take the Fifth.”

  “Okay, let’s think about this.”

  Maggie started opening the bag and taking out wrapped sandwiches Lorna had ordered from Nickel Diner. Lorna knew I liked their BLT and that was what I got.

  Maggie held her sandwich up to take a bite but first said, “Come on, Mickey. They don’t bring somebody down from Chowchilla on a whim. There’s something. Think.”

  “Look, you have to understand that she’s a liar,” I said. “A good liar. She had me convinced nine years ago when we went to trial. I mean, totally convinced.”

  “Okay, so what can she lie about that will help the prosecution here?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  “It could be anything,” I said. “She was a longtime client. I handled her foreclosure defense, then the murder. She was a lot like Sam Scales, a skilled liar who eventually played me and never—”

  I snapped my fingers as I got it.

  “Money. Like Sam, she didn’t pay me. Berg is going to use her to support motive. She’s going to lie about the money, say I threatened her or something.”

  “Okay, I should handle this out there. First the objection, then the cross if she’s allowed to testify. It will look bad you going after her.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So tell me everything I need to know.”

  Thirty minutes later lunch was over and I was returned to the courtroom. Cisco, back from Arizona, was standing at the railing. It looked like he had something urgent to say. I spoke to Chan as he was removing my handcuffs.

  “All right if I talk to my investigator here?”

  “Make it fast. The judge is ready to come out.”

  I stepped over to the rail so we could speak confidentially.

  “Two things,” Cisco said. “First, we lost Opparizio in Scottsdale.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I thought your guys were going to stay with him.”

  “They were. They set up on his room and were ready to go whenever he made a move but he never did. I just got a call. Housekeeping cleared his room this morning. He’s gone. His car is still there but he’s gone.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Sorry, Mick.”

  “Something’s going on. Tell them to keep looking for him. He might come back for his car.”

  “They’re on the car. They’re also trying to figure out how he got out of the room. They had cameras set up in the hallway.”

  “Okay, what’s the other thing?”

  “Well, you remember Herb Dahl, that sleazeball movie producer who got hooked up with Lisa Trammel back in the day?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s sitting out in the hallway by the courtroom door. I think he might be here as a witness.”

  I nodded. The picture was becoming clearer.

  “They also brought Lisa down from Chowchilla,” I said. “She’s in holding and ready to go too.”

  “They weren’t on the wit list,” Cisco said.

  “Yeah, it’s an October surprise. Listen, I just thought of something. Step out and call Lorna, tell her to pull the Lisa Trammel file and bring in the letters she’s sent me over the years. Get them to Maggie ASAP. That means you might have to wait out on Spring Street for her.”

  “You got it.”

  “And let me know as soon as you hear something on Opparizio.”

  “Will do.”

  Cisco headed out of the courtroom. I got to my seat just as Deputy Chan announced that court was in session and the judge emerged from chambers. Maggie stood up as I sat down, a signal to the judge that there was business to attend to before bringing in the jury. I didn’t get a chance to tell her about Herb Dahl or the hate letters Lisa Trammel had sent me from prison. I looked over at the prosecution table and saw Berg follow Maggie in rising to her feet.

  “Back on the record,” Warfield said. “Ms. McPherson, I saw you standing first. Do you wish to address the court?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Maggie said. “It has come to the defense’s attention that the state is going to introduce a witness that is not on any list the defense was given. This witness is a convicted killer who has lied under oath in the past and will do so again today if she is allowed to testify.”

  “Well, this is all news to me,” Warfield said. “Ms. Berg, I see you standing as well. Do you wish to address this issue?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Berg said.

  While Berg identified Lisa Trammel as the witness and gave her argument for putting her on the stand, I tugged on Maggie’s sleeve and she bent down to hear me whisper.

  “She’s got a backup witness out in the hallway,” I said. “A movie producer named Herb Dahl. Lisa and Dahl were in cahoots against me during the trial.”

  Maggie just nodded, then straightened back up and refocused on Berg’s statement to the judge.

  “It is pattern evidence, Your Honor,” Berg said. “Evidence of prior bad acts in terms of how the defendant treated his clients, demanding money from them and then making threats and carrying out those threats when no money was exchanged. Additionally, I have a second witness named Herbert Dahl, who has firsthand knowledge of these activities and was threatened over money by Mr. Haller as well.”

  “You still have not addressed why these witnesses are suddenly appearing in my courtroom today without notice to the defense or the court,” Warfield said. “I know Ms. McPherson’s next argument—that the defense has been sandbagged by this. I think it is a very valid argument.”

  Berg disagreed, saying there was no sandbagging because Trammel and Dahl were not even known to her until Saturday, when she opened a letter Trammel had sent from prison after seeing a television report about the Sam Scales case. The prosecutor offered the letter, including the postmarked envelope, to the judge for examination. She handed a copy to Maggie for us to share.

  “Judge, that letter arrived on my desk last Wednesday,” Berg said. “You will see it is postmarked the day before. As you know, we were in trial last week. I had no time to go through the mail. I did that on Saturday and found the letter. I immediately contacted Detective Drucker and we drove up to Chowchil
la to talk to Ms. Trammel and gauge her potential as a witness. We heard her story and believed it was something the jury should hear—if we could find a way to back it up. She had given us the name Herbert Dahl. While Ms. Trammel was being transported down here yesterday, Detective Drucker finished his testimony and then went to interview Mr. Dahl. There is no subterfuge here, no sandbagging. We brought these witnesses to the attention of the court as soon as they were determined to be truthful and important for the jury to hear.”

  While Maggie pushed back, I studied the letter. It laid out a one-sided story of how badly I supposedly had treated Lisa Trammel. She blamed me for putting her in prison and leaving her penniless. She claimed that I operated on greed and the constant need for media adoration—the two qualities that I believed best described Lisa herself.

  In the end, Maggie could not swing the judge. Warfield ruled that Trammel and Dahl could testify and it would be up to the jury to decide whether they were truthful and if their stories had any merit.

  “However,” Warfield said, “I will grant the defense ample time to prepare for these witnesses if necessary. Ms. McPherson, how long would you need?”

  “May I confer with counsel?” Maggie asked.

  “Of course,” the judge said.

  Maggie sat down and huddled with me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have been able to stop this.”

  “No worries,” I said. “You did your best. But don’t worry. The prosecution just made a big mistake.”

  “Really? It seems to me that she just got her way.”

  “Yes, but we can use Trammel to open the door to Opparizio. Then we destroy her on the stand.”

  “So, how much time to prepare?”

  “None. Let’s go right at her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I just told Cisco to get Lorna to pull the file on Lisa Trammel. I think we may be able to counter their October surprise with our own little surprise.”

  “Good. Tell me more.”

  46

  I had heard Lisa Trammel’s voice but had not seen her in courtside holding. She was now walked into the courtroom by Deputy Chan. I saw a woman who was almost unrecognizable to me. Her hair had turned gray and was cropped short in a man’s cut. Her paper-white skin seemed to be stretched over her bones, as she looked to be half the weight of the woman I had known and defended a decade before. She wore a baggy orange jumpsuit and had a blurry blue prison tattoo—a line of stars—arching over her left eyebrow. All eyes from the jury were on this curiosity as she stood to be sworn in.