Michael Connelly: The Fifth Witness

Crimmins looked like he’d had a hard time following my words. He was a short-sentence man, I guessed. He blinked twice and reached for the phone. I heard him confer directly with Kurlen. He then hung up.

“You know the way, smart guy?”

“I know the way. Thank you for your help, Officer Crimmins.”

“Catch you later.”

He pointed his finger at me like it was a gun, getting the last shot in so he could tell himself that he had handled that son-of-a-bitch lawyer. I left the desk and headed into the nearby alcove where I knew the elevator was located.

On the third floor Detective Howard Kurlen was waiting for me with a smile on his face. It wasn’t a friendly smile. He looked like the cat who just ate the canary.

“Have fun down there, Counselor?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, you’re too late up here.”

“How’s that? You booked her?”

He spread his hands in a phony Sorry about that gesture.

“It’s funny. My partner took her out of here just before I got the call from downstairs.”

“Wow, what a coincidence. I still want to talk to her.”

“You’ll have to go through the jail.”

This would probably take me an extra hour of waiting. And this was why Kurlen was smiling.

“You sure you can’t have your partner turn around and bring her down? I won’t be long with her.”

I said it even though I thought I was spitting into the wind. But Kurlen surprised me and pulled his phone off his belt. He hit a speed-dial button. It was either an elaborate hoax or he was actually doing what I asked. Kurlen and I had a history. We had squared off against each other on prior cases. I had attempted on more than one occasion to destroy his credibility on the witness stand. I was never very successful at it but the experience still made it hard to be cordial afterward. But now he was doing me a good turn and I wasn’t sure why.

“It’s me,” Kurlen said into the phone. “Bring her back here.”

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.”