The Fifth Witness: A Novel

by Michael Connelly

  “No, we did not.”

  “Did you find the victim’s blood in the shower or bathtub drains?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “What about in the washing machine?”

  “No.”

  “What evidence has the state presented during this trial that was obtained from inside the defendant’s home? I am not talking about the garage. Just the home.”

  It took Longstreth a few long moments of silence as she conducted an internal inventory. Finally, she shook her head.

  “I can’t recall anything at the moment. But that still doesn’t mean the search was a bust. Sometimes not finding evidence is just as useful as finding it.”

  I paused. She was baiting me. She wanted me to ask her to explain. But if I did that I had no idea where she would go. I decided to pull back, not take the bait and move on.

  “Okay, but the real treasure—the evidence you did find—was found in the garage, right? The evidence that has been or will be brought to court in this trial.”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “We’re talking about the shoe with the blood on it and the tool set missing the hammer, correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Am I missing something else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, then let me show you something here on the overhead screens.”

  I grabbed the remote, which Freeman had conveniently left on the lectern. I reversed the search video, keeping my eyes on the rewinding images. I ran it right by the images I wanted and stopped it, then moved forward to the right spot and paused.

  “Okay, can you tell the jury what is happening at this point in the video?”

  I hit the play button and the image on the screen started to move. It showed Longstreth and one of the forensic techs leaving the main house and crossing the portico to the door that led to the garage.

  “Uh, this is when we go into the garage,” Longstreth said.

  Then her voice came from the recording.

  “We might need the key from Kurlen,” she said.

  But on the video she reached a gloved hand to the doorknob and it turned.

  “Never mind, it’s open.”

  I let the video run until Longstreth and the forensic tech had entered the garage and turned on the lights. I then paused it again.

  “Was this the first time you had entered the garage, Detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see you turned on the lights here. Had anybody else from the search team entered the garage before you?”

  “No, they had not.”

  I slowly backed up the video to the point where she had opened the door to enter. I started the playback again and asked my questions as it played.

  “I notice you don’t use a key to enter the garage, Detective. Why is that?”

  “I tried the door, as you can see here, and it was unlocked.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, it was just unlocked.”

  “Was anybody at the home when the search team arrived?”

  “No, the house was empty.”

  “And the door to the house itself was locked, correct?”

  “Yes, Ms. Trammel had locked it when she agreed to accompany us to Van Nuys.”

  “Did she want to lock it or did you have to tell her?”

  “No, she wanted to lock up.”

  “So at the time that she locked the house she left the outside door that led into the garage unlocked, correct?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “It’s safe to say that it was unlocked at the time you and the others arrived with the search warrant, correct?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Meaning anyone could have entered the garage while its owner, Lisa Trammel, was in police custody, correct?”

  “I guess it’s possible, yes.”

  “By the way, when you and Detective Kurlen left the house with Ms. Trammel that morning, did you leave a police officer on post at the house to sort of watch over it, make sure nothing was disturbed or taken from inside?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “Didn’t you think that would be prudent, considering that the house might contain evidence in a murder investigation?”

  “At the time she was not a suspect. She was just someone we wanted to talk to.”

  I almost smiled and Longstreth almost smiled. She had tiptoed past a trap I had set for her. She was good.

  “Ah,” I said. “Not a suspect, that’s right. So how long, would you say, was that side door left unlocked and the garage available for anyone to enter?”

  “That would be impossible for me to tell. I don’t know when it was left unlocked in the first place. It’s possible she never locked the garage.”

  I nodded and put a pause under her answer.

  “Did you or Detective Kurlen instruct the forensics team to see if there were any fingerprints on the door leading to the garage?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “Why not, Detective?”

  “We didn’t think it was necessary. We were searching the house, not holding it as a crime scene.”

  “Let me ask you hypothetically, Detective. Do you think that someone who has carefully planned and carried out a murder would then leave a pair of bloody shoes in their unlocked garage? Especially after taking the time to get rid of the murder weapon?”

  Freeman objected, citing the compound nature of the question and arguing that it assumed facts not in evidence. I didn’t care. The question hadn’t been for Longstreth to consider. It had been directed at the jury.

  “Your Honor, I withdraw the question,” I announced. “And I have nothing further for this witness.”

  I moved away from the lectern and sat down. I stared pointedly at the jurors, my eyes sweeping across one row of them and then the other. Finally, I held them on Furlong in the three spot. He held my stare and didn’t look away. I took that as a very good sign.

  Thirty-six

  Herb Dahl came alone. Cisco met him at the door of the office suite and escorted him into my office, where I was waiting. Bullocks sat to my left and we had an empty seat for Dahl right in front of my desk. Cisco stayed standing, which was by design. I wanted Cisco pacing and pensive. I wanted Dahl to feel unease, that the wrong word spoken could unleash the big man in the tight black T-shirt.

  I didn’t offer Dahl coffee, soda or water. I didn’t start with any platitudes or efforts to mend our strained relationship. I simply got down to business.

  “What we’re going to do here, Herb, is find out exactly what you’ve done, what your involvement with Louis Opparizio has been and what we’re going to do about it. As far as I know, I’m not needed anywhere until nine o’clock tomorrow morning, so we’ve got all night if that’s what it takes.”

  “Before we start I want to know that we have a deal if I cooperate,” Dahl said.

  “I told you at lunch the deal is you stay out of prison. In exchange, you tell me what you know. Beyond that, no promises.”

  “I won’t testify to anything. This is informational only. Besides, I have something better for you than my testifying.”

  “We’ll see about that. But right now why don’t we start at the beginning? You said today that you were told to go on Lisa Trammel’s picket line. Start there.”

  Dahl nodded but then disagreed.

  “I think I have to start before that. This goes back to the beginning of last year.”

  I raised two open hands.

  “Have at it. We’ve got all night.”

  Dahl then proceeded to tell a long story about a movie he produced a year earlier called Blood Racer. It was a warm family movie about a girl who is given a horse named Chester. She finds a tattooed number inside the animal’s lower lip that indicates he was once a thoroughbred racehorse thought to have been killed in a barn fire years before.

  “So she and her pop do some more investigating and—”

  “Look,” I
interrupted. “It sounds like a nice story but can we talk about Louis Opparizio? I may have all night but let’s stay on point anyway.”

  “That is the point. This movie. It was supposed to be low budget all the way but I love horses. Ever since I was a little kid. And I really thought I could get out of the racks with this one.”

  “The racks?”

  “The straight-to-DVD dreck you see out there. I was thinking this story was a diamond in the rough and if we did it right we could get a major theatrical release. But to get that you need production value and to get that you need money.”

  It always comes down to money.

  “You borrowed the money?”

  “I borrowed the money and put it into the flick. Stupid, I know. And this was on top of the investor money I took at the start. But the director was this perfectionist freak from Spain. Guy barely spoke English but we hired him. He did take after take on every setup—thirty takes at a frickin’ snack bar scene! Bottom line is we ran out of money and I needed a quarter mill minimum just to finish the film. I had already been all over town and everybody was tapped. But I loved this flick. To me it was like the little movie that could, you know?”

  “You got the money on the street,” Cisco said from a position behind Dahl’s chair.

  Dahl twisted around to look up at him and nodded.

  “Yeah, from a guy I know. A bent-nose guy.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “We don’t need his name in this,” Dahl said.

  “Yes, we do. What is his name?”

  “Danny Greene.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “Yeah, I know. He’s with them but his name’s Greene—what can I say? It’s ‘Green’ with an ‘e’ at the end.”

  I gave Cisco a look. He would need to check this out.

  “Okay, so you took a quarter million from Danny Greene and what happened?”

  Dahl raised his palms in a gesture indicating frustration.

  “That’s just it, nothing happened. I finished the flick but I couldn’t sell it. I took it to every frickin’ festival in North America and nobody wanted it. I took it to the American Film Market, rented a frickin’ suite at the Loews in Santa Monica and only sold it to Spain. Of course, the one country that was interested was where my asshole director was from.”

  “So Danny Greene wasn’t too happy, was he?”

  “Nope, he wasn’t. I mean, I had been keeping up with the payments but it was a six-month loan and he called it in. I couldn’t pay it all. I gave him the Spanish money but most of that was on the come. They gotta dub it and all that shit and I won’t see most of that cash till the end of this year when the movie comes out over there. So I was seriously fucked.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, one day Danny comes to me. I mean, he just shows up and I’m thinking he’s here to break my legs. But instead he says they need me to do something. It’s like a long-term job and if I do it they’ll restructure my loan and I can even lay off a good chunk of the remaining principal. So, man, I’m sitting there, I’ve got no choice. What’m I going to do, tell Danny Greene no? Uh-uh, doesn’t work that way.”

  “So you said yes.”

  “That’s right. I said yes.”

  “And what was the job?”

  “To get close to these people who were agitating and protesting about all the foreclosures. This organization called FLAG. He wanted me to get inside their camp if I could. So I did and that’s how I met Lisa. She was the top agitator.”

  This sounded crazy but I played along with it.

  “Were you told why?”

  “Not really. I was just told there was a guy out there who was sort of paranoid and he wanted to know what she was up to. He had some kind of deal going and didn’t want these people to mess it up. So if Lisa was planning a protest or something, then I was supposed to tell Danny where it would be and who the target was and like that.”

  The story was starting to have the ring of truth to it. I thought about the LeMure deal. Opparizio had been in the process of setting up the sale of ALOFT to the publicly traded company. It was prudent business practice to keep tabs on any potential threats to the deal before it was finished in February. That could even include Lisa Trammel. Bad publicity could hinder the sale. Stockholders always want squeaky-clean acquisitions.

  “Okay, what else?”

  “Not a whole lot else. Just intelligence gathering. I got close to Lisa but then like a month later she got popped for the murder. Danny came back then. I thought he was going to say deal’s off because she was in jail. But he said he wanted me to put up the money and get her out. He gave me the money in a bag—two hundred thou. Then when I got her out I was supposed to do the same thing again, only with you people. Get inside the defense camp, see what was going on and report back.”

  I looked over at Cisco. His pensive moves were no longer an act. We both knew that Dahl could be the tip of an iceberg that would tear the bottom out of the prosecution’s case and sink it. We also knew we might have a client in Lisa Trammel who was completely unlikable but innocent.

  And if she was innocent…

  “Where does Opparizio come into this?” I asked.

  “Well, he sort of doesn’t—at least, not directly. But when I call Danny to check in he always wants to know what you’ve got on Opparizio. That’s how he says it, ‘What do they have on Opparizio?’ He asks that every time. So I’m thinking, maybe he’s the guy I’m really doing this work for, you know?”

  I didn’t respond at first. I swiveled in my chair, thinking the story over.

  “You know what I don’t get and what isn’t in your story, Dahl?” Cisco said.

  “What?”

  “The part about you hiring those two guys to go after Mick. You left that part out, asshole.”

  “What about that?” I added.

  Dahl raised his hands in surrender to show his innocence.

  “Hey, they told me to do it. They sent me those two guys.”

  “Why beat me up? What did that do?”

  “It slowed you down, didn’t it? They want Lisa to go down for this and they started thinking you were too good. They wanted to slow you down.”

  Dahl avoided eye contact by brushing imaginary lint off his thigh as he spoke. It made me think he might be lying about the reason behind the attack on me. It was the first false note I had picked up during the confession. My guess was that Dahl had been freelancing on the attack, that maybe he was the one who wanted me hurt.

  I looked at Bullocks and then at Cisco. My quibble with Dahl’s last answer aside, we had an opportunity here. I knew what Dahl was going to offer next. Himself as a double agent. We’d reach the beach with him feeding Opparizio false intelligence.

  I had to think about this. I could easily give Dahl misleading information to take back to Danny Greene. But it would be a risky maneuver, not to mention the ethical considerations.

  I stood up and signaled Cisco toward the door.

  “Everybody sit tight for a minute. I want to talk to my investigator out here.”

  We stepped into the reception area and I closed the door behind me. I walked over to Lorna’s desk.

  “You know what this means?” I asked.

  “It means we’re going to win this fucking case.”

  I opened the middle drawer of Lorna’s desk and took out the stack of delivery menus for local restaurants and fast-food chains.

  “No, it means those two guys at the clubhouse? They might’ve been Bondurant’s killers and we fucked things up with that little play in the back room.”

  “I don’t know about that, Boss.”

  “Yeah, what did your two associates do with them?”

  “Exactly what I told them to do, drop them off. They told me later that both of them wanted to be left off at some bottle club in downtown. That was it. I mean it, Mick.”

  “It’s still fucked up.”

  With the menus in my hand, I heade
d toward the door to my office. Cisco spoke to my back.

  “Do you believe Dahl?”

  I looked back at him before opening the door.

  “To a point.”

  I went into the office and put the menus down in the middle of the desk. I took my seat again and looked at Dahl. He was a weasel always on the make. And I was about to go down the path with him.

  “We shouldn’t do it,” Bullocks said.

  I looked at her.

  “Do what?”

  “Use him to feed bad intel back to Opparizio. We should put him on the stand and make him tell the story to the jury.”

  Dahl immediately protested.

  “I’m not testifying! Who the fuck is she, saying how this—”

  I raised my hands in a calming gesture.

  “You’re not testifying,” I said. “Even if I wanted you to I couldn’t get you on the stand. You have nothing that directly connects Opparizio to this. Have you ever even met the man?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen him before?”

  “Yeah, in the court.”

  “Before that.”

  “No, and I had never even heard his name until Danny asked me about him.”

  I looked at Bullocks and shook my head.

  “They’re too smart to leave a direct link out there. The judge wouldn’t let him anywhere near the stand.”

  “Then what about Danny Greene? We put him on the stand.”

  “And what do we use to compel him to testify? He’d take the Fifth before we even got to his name. There is only one thing to do here.”

  I waited for further protest but Bullocks was finally and sullenly silent. I looked back at Dahl. I disliked the man intensely and trusted him about as much as I trusted that he had his own hair. But that didn’t stop me from taking the next step.

  “Dahl, how is contact initiated with Danny Greene?”

  “I usually call him about ten.”

  “Every night?”

  “Yeah, during the trial it’s been that way. He always wants to hear from me. Most nights he answers and if not he calls me back pretty quick.”

  “Okay, let’s dig in and order some takeout. Tonight you make the call from here.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “We’re going to work that out between now and ten when you make the call. But essentially I think you are going to tell Danny Greene that Louis Opparizio doesn’t have a thing to worry about when he takes the stand. You’re going to tell him that we’ve got nothing, that we’ve been bluffing and that the coast is clear.”