He listened for a moment.
“Because I told you to. Now bring her back.”
He closed the phone without another word to his partner and looked at me.
“You owe me one, Haller. I could’ve hung you up for a couple hours. In the old days, I would’ve.”
“I know. I appreciate it.”
He headed back toward the squad room and signaled me to follow. He spoke casually as he walked.
“So, when she told us to call you she said you were handling her foreclosure.”
“That’s right.”
“My sister got divorced and now she’s in a mess like that.”
There it was. The quid pro quo.
“You want me to talk to her?”
“No, I just want to know if it’s best to fight these things or just get it over with.”
The squad room looked like it was in a time warp. It was vintage 1970s, with a linoleum floor, two-tone yellow walls and gray government-issue desks with rubber stripping around the edges. Kurlen remained standing while waiting for his partner to come back with my client.
I pulled a card out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“You’re talking to a fighter, so that’s my answer. I couldn’t handle her case because of conflict of interest between you and me. But have her call the office and we’ll get her hooked up with somebody good. Make sure she mentions your name.”
Kurlen nodded and picked a DVD case off his desk and handed it to me.
“Might as well give you this now.”
I looked at the disc.
“What’s this?”
“Our interview with your client. You will clearly see that we stopped talking to her as soon as she said the magic words: I want a lawyer.”
“I’ll be sure to check that out, Detective. You want to tell me why she’s your suspect?”
“Sure. She’s our suspect and we’re charging her because she did it and she made admissions about it before asking to call her lawyer. Sorry about that, Counselor, but we played by the rules.”
I held the disc up as if it were my client.
“You’re telling me she admitted killing Bondurant?”
“Not in so many words. But she made admissions and contradictions. I’ll leave it at that.”
“Did she by any chance say in so many words why she did it?”
“She didn’t have to. The victim was in the process of taking away her house. That’s plenty enough motive right there. We’re as good as gold on motive.”
I could’ve told him that he had that wrong, that I was in the process of stopping the foreclosure. But I kept my mouth shut about that. My job was to gather information here, not give it away.
“What else you got, Detective?”
“Nothing that I care to share with you at the moment. You’ll have to wait to get the rest through discovery.”
“I’ll do that. Has a DA been assigned yet?”
“Not that I heard.”
Kurlen nodded toward the back of the room and I turned to see Lisa Trammel being walked toward the door of an interrogation room. She had the classic deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Kurlen said. “And that’s only because I’m being nice. I figure there’s no need to start a war.”
Not yet, at least, I thought as I headed toward the interrogation room.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Kurlen called to my back. “I have to check the briefcase. Rules, you know.”
He was referring to the leather-over-aluminum attaché I was carrying. I could’ve made an argument about the search infringing on attorney-client privilege but I wanted to talk to my client. I stepped back toward him and swung the case up onto a counter, then popped it open. All it contained was the Lisa Trammel file, a fresh legal pad and the new contracts and power-of-attorney form I had printed out while driving up. I figured I needed Lisa to re-sign since my representation was crossing from civil to criminal.
Kurlen gave it a quick once-over and signaled me to close it.
“Hand-tooled Italian leather,” he said. “Looks like a fancy drug dealer’s case. You haven’t been associating with the wrong people, have you, Haller?”
He put on that canary smile again. Cop humor was truly unique in all the world.
“As a matter of fact, it did belong to a courier,” I said. “A client. But where he was going he wasn’t going to need it anymore so I took it in trade. You want to see the secret compartment? It’s kind of a pain to open.”
“I think I’ll pass. You’re good.”
I closed the case and headed back to the interrogation room.
“And it’s Colombian leather,” I said.
Kurlen’s partner was waiting at the room’s door. I didn’t know her but didn’t bother to introduce myself. We were never going to be friendly and I guessed she would be the type to stiff me on the handshake in order to impress Kurlen.
She held the door open and I stopped at the threshold.
“All listening and recording devices in this room are off, correct?”
“You got it.”
“If they’re not that would be a violation of my client’s—”
“We know the drill.”
“Yeah, but sometimes you conveniently forget it, don’t you?”
“You’ve got fourteen minutes now, sir. You want to talk to her or keep talking to me?”
“Right.”
I went in and the door was closed behind me. It was a nine-by-six room. I looked at Lisa and put a finger to my lips.
“What?” she asked.
“That means don’t say a word, Lisa, until I tell you to.”
Her response was to break down in a cascade of tears and a loud and long wail that tailed off into a sentence that was completely unintelligible. She was sitting at a square table with a chair opposite her. I quickly took the open chair and put my case up on the table. I knew she would be positioned to face the room’s hidden camera, so I didn’t bother to look around for it. I snapped open the case and pulled it close to my body, hoping that my back would act as a blind to the camera. I had to assume that Kurlen and his partner were listening and watching. One more reason for his being “nice.”
While one by one I took out the legal pad and documents with my right hand, I used the left to open the case’s secret compartment. I hit the engage button on the Paquin 2000 acoustic jammer. The device emitted a low-frequency RF signal that clogged any listening device within twenty-five feet with electronic disinformation. If Kurlen and his partner were illegally listening in, they were now hearing white noise.
The case and its hidden device were almost ten years old and as far as I knew, the original owner was still in federal prison. I’d taken it in trade at least seven years ago, back when drug cases were my bread and butter. I knew law enforcement was always trying to build a better mousetrap, and in ten years the electronic eavesdropping business must have undergone at least two revolutions. So I was not completely put at ease. I would still need to exercise caution in what I said and hoped my client would as well.
“Lisa, we’re not going to talk a whole lot here because we don’t know who may be listening. You understand?”
“I think so. But what is happening here? I don’t understand what’s happening!”
Her voice had risen progressively through the sentence until she was screaming the last word. This was an emotional speaking pattern she had used several times on the phone with me when I was handling only her foreclosure. Now the stakes were higher and I had to draw the line.
“None of that, Lisa,” I said firmly. “You do not scream at me. You understand? If I’m going to represent you on this you do not scream at me.”
“Okay, sorry, but they’re saying I did something I didn’t do.”
“I know and we’re going to fight it. But no screaming.”
Because they had pulled her back before the booking process had begun, Lisa was still in her own clothes. She was weari
ng a white T-shirt with a flower pattern on the front. I saw no blood on it or anywhere else. Her face was streaked with tears and her brown curly hair was unkempt. She was a small woman and seemed even more so in the harsh light of the room.
“I need to ask you some questions,” I said. “Where were you when the police found you?”
“I was home. Why are they doing this to me?”
“Lisa, listen to me. You have to calm down and let me ask the questions. This is very important.”
“But what’s going on? No one tells me anything. They said I was under arrest for murdering Mitchell Bondurant. When? How? I didn’t go near that man. I didn’t break the TRO.”
I realized that it would have been better if I had viewed Kurlen’s DVD before speaking with her. But it was par for the course to come into a case at a disadvantage.
“Lisa, you are indeed under arrest for the murder of Mitchell Bondurant. Detective Kurlen—he’s the older one—told me that you made admissions to them in re—”
She shrieked and brought her hands to her face. I saw that she was cuffed at the wrists. A new round of tears started.
“I didn’t admit anything! I didn’t do anything!”
“Calm down, Lisa. That’s why I’m here. To defend you. But we don’t have a lot of time right now. They’re giving me ten minutes and then they’re going to book you. I need to—”
“I’m going to jail?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“Well, what about bail?”
“It is very hard to get bail on a murder charge. And even if I could get something set, you don’t have the—”
Another piercing wail filled the tiny room. I lost my patience.
“Lisa! Stop doing that! Now listen, your life is at stake here, okay? You have to calm down and listen to me. I am your attorney and I will do my best to get you out of here but it’s going to take some time. Now listen to my questions and answer them without all the—”
“What about my son? What about Tyler?”
“Someone from my office is making contact with your sister and we will arrange for him to be with her until we can get you out.”
I was very careful not to introduce a hard time line for her release. Until we can get you out. As far as I was concerned, that might be days, weeks or even years. It might never happen. But I did not need to get specific.
Lisa nodded as if there was some relief in knowing her son would be with her sister.
“What about your husband? You have a contact number for him?”
“No, I don’t know where he is and I don’t want you contacting him anyway.”
“Not even for your son?”
“Especially not for my son. My sister will take care of him.”
I nodded and let it go. Now was not the time to ask about her failed marriage.
“Okay, calmly now, let’s talk about this morning. I have the disc from the detectives but I want to go over this myself. You said you were home when Detective Kurlen and his partner arrived. What were you doing?”
“I was… I was on the computer. I was sending e-mails.”
“Okay, to who?”
“To my friends. To people in FLAG. I was telling them that we were going to meet tomorrow at the courthouse at ten and to bring the placards.”
“Okay, and when the detectives showed up, what exactly did they say?”
“The man did all the talking. He—”
“Kurlen.”
“Yes. They came in and he asked me some things. Then he asked if I wouldn’t mind coming to the station to answer questions. I said about what and he said Mitch Bondurant. He didn’t say anything about him being dead or killed. So I said yes. I thought maybe they were finally investigating him. I didn’t know they were investigating me.”
“Well, did he tell you that you had certain rights not to speak to him and to contact a lawyer?”
“Yes, like on TV. He told me my rights.”
“When exactly?”
“When we were already here, when he said I was under arrest.”
“Did you ride with him here?”
“Yes.”
“And did you speak in the car?”
“No, he was on his cell phone almost the whole time. I heard him say things like ‘I have her with me’ and like that.”
“Were you handcuffed?”
“In the car? No.”
Smart Kurlen. He risked riding in the car with an uncuffed murder suspect in order to keep her suspicions down and to lull her into agreeing to speak with him. You can’t build a better mousetrap than that. It would also allow the prosecution to argue that Lisa was not under arrest yet and therefore her statements were voluntary.
“So you were brought here and you agreed to talk to him?”
“Yes. I had no idea they were going to arrest me. I thought I was helping them with a case.”
“But Kurlen didn’t say what the case was.”
“No, never. Not until he said I was under arrest and that I could make a call. And that’s when they handcuffed me, too.”
Kurlen had used some of the oldest tricks in the book but they were still in the book because they worked. I had to watch the DVD to know exactly what Lisa had admitted to, if anything. Asking her about it while she was upset was not the best use of my limited time. As if to underscore this, there was a sudden and sharp knock on the door followed by a muffled voice saying I had two minutes.
“Okay, I am going to go to work on this, Lisa. I need you to sign a couple of documents first, though. This first one is a new contract that covers criminal defense.”
I slid the one-page document over to her and put a pen on top of it. She started to scan it.
“All these fees,” she said. “A hundred fifty thousand dollars for a trial? I can’t pay you this. I don’t have it.”
“That’s a standard fee and that’s only if we go to trial. And as far as what you can pay, that’s what these other documents are for. This one gives me your power of attorney, allowing me to solicit book and movie deals, things like that, coming from the case. I have an agent I work with on this stuff. If there’s a deal out there he’ll get it. The last document puts a lien on any of those funds so that the defense gets paid first.”
I knew this case was going to draw attention. The foreclosure epidemic was the country’s biggest ongoing financial catastrophe. There could be a book in this, maybe even a film, and I could end up getting paid.
She picked up the pen and signed the documents without reading further. I took them back and put them away.
“Okay, Lisa, what I am about to tell you now is the most important piece of advice in the world. So I want you to listen and then tell me you understand.”
“Okay.”
“Do not talk about this case with anyone other than me. Do not talk to detectives, jailers, other jail inmates, don’t even talk to your sister or son about it. Whenever anyone asks—and believe me, they will—you simply tell them that you cannot talk about your case.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m innocent! It’s people who are guilty who don’t talk.”
I held my finger up to admonish her.
“No, you’re wrong, and it sounds to me like you are not taking what I say seriously, Lisa.”
“No, I am, I am.”
“Then do what I am telling you. Talk to no one. And that includes the phone in the jail. All calls are recorded, Lisa. Don’t talk on the phone about your case, even to me.”
“Okay, okay. I got it.”
“If it makes you feel any better, you can answer all questions by saying ‘I am innocent of the charges but on the advice of my attorney I am not going to talk about the case.’ Okay, how’s that?”
“Good, I guess.”
The door opened and Kurlen was standing there. He was giving me the squint of suspicion, which told me it was a good thing I had brought the Paquin jammer with me. I looked back at Lisa.
“Okay, Lisa, it gets bad before it gets g
ood. Hang in there and remember the golden rule. Talk to no one.”
I stood up.
“The next time you’ll see me will be at first appearance and we’ll be able to talk then. Now go with Detective Kurlen.”
Four
The following morning Lisa Trammel made her first appearance in Los Angeles Superior Court on charges of first-degree murder. A special circumstances count of lying in wait was added by the district attorney’s office, which made her eligible for a sentence of life without parole and even for the death penalty. It was a bargaining chip for the prosecution. I could see the DA wanting this case to go away with a plea agreement before public sympathy swung behind the defendant. What better way to get that result than to hold LWOP or the death penalty over the defendant’s head?
The courtroom was crowded to standing room only with members of the media as well as FLAG recruits and sympathizers. Overnight the story had grown exponentially as word spread about the police and prosecution’s theory that a home foreclosure may have spawned the murder of a banker. It put a blood-and-guts twist on the nationwide financial plague and that, in turn, packed the house.
Lisa had calmed considerably after almost twenty-four hours in jail. She stood zombie-like in the custody pen awaiting her two-minute hearing. I assured her first that her son was safe in the loving hands of her sister and second that Haller and Associates would do all that was possible to provide her with the best and most rigorous defense. Her immediate concern was in getting out of jail to take care of her son and to assist her legal team.
Though the first-appearance hearing was primarily just an official acknowledgment of the charges and the starting point of the judicial process, there would also be an opportunity to request and argue for bail. I was planning to do just that as my general philosophy was to leave no stone unturned and no issue un-argued. But I was pessimistic about the outcome. By law, bail would be set. But in reality, bail in murder cases was usually set in the millions, thereby making it unattainable for the common man. My client was an unemployed single mother with a house in foreclosure. A seven-figure bail meant Lisa wouldn’t be getting out of jail.
Judge Stephen Fluharty pushed the Trammel case to the top of the docket in an effort to accommodate the media. Andrea Freeman, the prosecutor assigned to the case, read the charges and the judge scheduled the arraignment for the following week. Trammel would not enter a plea until then. These routine procedures were dispensed with quickly. Fluharty was about to call a short recess so the media could pack up equipment and leave en masse when I interrupted and made a motion requesting him to set bail for my client. The second reason for doing this was to see how the prosecution responded. Every now and then I got lucky and the prosecutor revealed evidence or strategy while arguing for a high bail amount.
The Fifth Witness: A Novel Page 3