Майкл Коннелли - The Law of Innocence

“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.

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 girlfriend,” 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.