The Fifth Witness: A Novel Read online

  I looked around. Three front yards down, a couple of kids were playing in the dirt but they looked too young to be graffiti artists. The rest of the street was deserted. I was baffled. Not only had I not heard or noticed the assault on my car that had taken place while I was having a client conference inside it, but it was barely past one and I knew most gangbangers didn’t get up and embrace the day and all its possibilities until late afternoon. They were night creatures.

  I headed back to my open door with the file. I noticed Rojas was standing at the front stoop, chatting with Mrs. Pena. I whistled and signaled him back to the car. We had to get going.

  I got in. Message received, Rojas trotted back to the car and jumped in himself.

  “Compton?” he asked.

  “No, change of plans. We’ve got to get up to Van Nuys. Fast.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  He pulled away from the curb and started making his way back to the 110 Freeway. There was no direct freeway route to Van Nuys. We would have to take the 110 into downtown where we’d pick up the 101 north. We couldn’t have been starting off from a worse position in the city.

  “What was she saying at the front door?” I asked Rojas.

  “She was asking about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said you looked like you shouldn’t need a translator, you know?”

  I nodded. I got that a lot. My mother’s genes made me look more south of the border than north.

  “She also wanted to know if you were married, Boss. I told her you were. But if you want to circle back and tap that, it’ll be there. She’d probably want a discount on the fees, though.”

  “Thanks, Rojas,” I said dryly. “She already got a discount but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Before opening the file I scrolled through the contacts list on my phone. I was looking for the name of someone in the Van Nuys detective squad who might share some information with me. But there was nobody. I was going in blind on a murder case. Not a good starting point either.

  I closed the phone and put it into its charger, then opened the file. Lisa Trammel had become my client after responding to the generic letter I sent to the owners of all homes in foreclosure. I assumed I wasn’t the only lawyer in Los Angeles who did this. But for some reason Lisa answered my letter and not theirs.

  As an attorney in private practice you get to choose your own clients most of the time. Sometimes you choose wrong. Lisa was one of those times with me. I was eager to start the new line of work. I was looking for clients who were in jams or who had been taken advantage of. People who were too naive to know their rights or options. I was looking for underdogs and thought I had found one in Lisa. No doubt she fit the bill. She was losing her house because of a set of circumstances that had fallen like dominoes out of her control. And her lender had turned her case over to a foreclosure mill that had cut corners and even violated the rules. I signed Lisa up, put her on a payment plan and started to fight her fight. It was a good case and I was excited. It was only after this that Lisa became a nuisance client.

  Lisa Trammel was thirty-five years old. She was the married mother of a nine-year-old boy named Tyler and their house was on Melba in Woodland Hills. At the time she and her husband, Jeffrey, bought the house in 2005, Lisa taught social studies at Grant High while Jeffrey sold BMWs at the dealership in Calabasas.

  Their three-bedroom house carried a $750,000 mortgage against an appraised value of $900,000. The market was strong then and mortgages were plentiful and easy to get. They used an independent mortgage broker who shopped their file around and got them into a low-interest loan that carried a balloon payment at the five-year mark. The loan was then folded into an investment block of mortgages and reassigned twice before finding its permanent home at WestLand Financial, a subsidiary of WestLand National, the Los Angeles–based bank headquartered in Sherman Oaks.

  All was well and good for the family of three until Jeff Trammel decided he didn’t want to be a husband and father anymore. A few months before the $750,000 note on the house was due, Jeff took off, leaving his BMW M3 demo in the parking lot at Union Station and Lisa holding the balloon.

  Down to a single income and a child to care for, Lisa looked at the reality of her situation and made choices. By now the economy had stalled out like a plane lumbering into the sky without enough airspeed. Given her teacher’s income, no institution was going to refinance the balloon. She stopped making payments on the loan and ignored all communications from the bank. When the note came due, the property went into foreclosure and that was when I came onto the scene. I sent Jeff and Lisa a letter, not realizing Jeff was no longer in the picture.

  Lisa answered it.

  I define a nuisance client as one who does not understand the bounds of our relationship, even after I clearly and sometimes repeatedly delineate them. Lisa came to me with her first notice of foreclosure. I took the case and told her to sit back and wait while I went to work. But Lisa couldn’t sit back. She couldn’t wait. She called me every day. After I filed a lawsuit putting the foreclosure before a judge, she showed up at court for routine filings and continuances. She had to be there and she had to know every move I made, see every letter I sent and be summarized on every call I received. She often called me and yelled when she perceived that I was not giving her case my fullest attention. I began to understand why her husband had hightailed it. He had to get away from her.

  I began to wonder about Lisa’s mental health and suspected a bipolar affliction. The incessant calls and activities were cyclical. There were weeks when I heard nothing, alternating with weeks where she would call daily and repeatedly until she got me on the line.

  Three months into the case she told me she had lost her job with the L.A. County School District because of unexcused absences. It was then that she talked about seeking damages from the bank that was foreclosing on her home. A sense of entitlement moved into the discourse. The bank was responsible for everything: the abandonment by her husband, the loss of her job, the taking of her home.

  I made a mistake in revealing to her some of my case intelligence and strategy. I did it to appease her, to get her off the line. Our examination of the loan record had turned up inconsistencies and issues in the mortgage’s repeated reassignment to various holding companies. There were indications of fraud that I thought I could use to swing leverage to Lisa’s side when it came time to negotiate an out.

  But the information only galvanized Lisa’s belief in her victimization at the hands of the bank. Never did she acknowledge the fact that she had signed for a loan and was obliged to repay it. She saw the bank only as the source of her woes.

  The first thing she did was register a website. She used www.californiaforeclosurefighters.com to launch an organization called Foreclosure Litigants Against Greed. It worked better as an acronym—FLAG—and she effectively made use of the American flag on her protest signs. The message being that fighting foreclosure was as American as apple pie.

  She then took to marching in front of WestLand’s corporate headquarters on Ventura Boulevard. Sometimes by herself, sometimes with her young son, and sometimes with people she had attracted to the cause. She carried signs that decried the bank’s involvement in illegal foreclosures and in putting families out of their homes and onto the streets.

  Lisa was quick to alert local media outlets to her activities. She got on TV repeatedly and was always ready with a sound bite that gave voice to people in her situation, casting them as victims of the foreclosure epidemic, not garden-variety deadbeats. I had noticed that on Channel 5 she had even become part of the stock footage thrown up on the screen whenever there was an update on nationwide foreclosure issues or statistics. California was the third leading state in the country for foreclosures and Los Angeles was the hotbed. As these facts were reported, there would be Lisa and her group on the screen carrying their signs—DON’T TAKE MY HOME! STOP ILLEGAL FORECLOSURE NOW!

  Alleging that her protests w
ere illegal gatherings that impeded traffic and endangered pedestrians, WestLand sought and received a restraining order that kept Lisa one hundred yards from any bank facility and its employees. Undaunted, she took her signs and her fellow protestors to the county courthouse, where foreclosures were fought every day.

  Mitchell Bondurant was a senior vice president at WestLand. He headed up the mortgage loan division. His name was on the loan documents relating to Lisa Trammel’s house. As such his name was on all of my filings. I had also written him a letter, outlining what I described as indications of fraudulent practices by the foreclosure mill WestLand had contracted with to carry out the dirty work of taking the homes and other properties of their default customers.

  Lisa was entitled to see all documents arising from her case. She was copied on the letter and everything else. Despite being the human face of the effort to take her home away, Bondurant remained above the fray, hiding behind the bank’s legal team. He never responded to my letter and I never met him. I had no knowledge that Lisa Trammel had ever met or spoken with him either. But now he was dead and the police had Lisa in custody.

  We exited the 101 at Van Nuys Boulevard and headed north. The civic center was a plaza surrounded by two courthouses, a library, City Hall North and the Valley Bureau police complex, which included the Van Nuys Division. Various other government agencies and buildings were clustered around the main grouping. Parking was always a problem but it wasn’t my worry. I pulled my phone and called my investigator, Dennis Wojciechowski.

  “Cisco, it’s me. You close?”

  In his early years Wojciechowski was associated with the Road Saints motorcycle club but there was already a member named Dennis. Nobody could pronounce Wojciechowski so they called him the Cisco Kid because of his dark looks and mustache. The mustache was now gone but the name had stuck.

  “Already here. I’ll meet you on the bench by the front stairs to the PD.”

  “I’ll be there in five. Have you talked to anyone yet? I’ve got nothing.”

  “Yeah, your old pal Kurlen’s running lead on this. The victim, Mitchell Bondurant, was found in the parking garage at WestLand’s headquarters on Ventura about nine this morning. He was on the ground between two cars. Not clear how long he was down but he was dead on scene.”

  “Do we know the cause yet?”

  “There it gets a little hinky. At first they put out that he’d been shot because an employee who was on another level of the garage told responding police she had heard two popping sounds, like shots. But when they examined the body on the scene it looked like he had been beaten to death. Hit with something.”

  “Was Lisa Trammel arrested there?”

  “No, from what I understand, she was picked up at her home in Woodland Hills. I still have some calls out but that’s about the extent of what I’ve got so far. Sorry, Mick.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll know everything soon enough. Is Kurlen at the scene or with the suspect?”

  “I was told he and his partner picked up Trammel and took her in. The partner’s a female named Cynthia Longstreth. She’s a D-one. I’ve never heard of her.”

  I had never heard of her either but since she was a detective one, my guess was that she was new to the homicide beat and paired with the veteran Kurlen, a D-3, to get some seasoning. I looked out the window. We were passing a BMW dealership and it made me think of the missing husband who had sold Beemers before pulling the plug on the marriage and disappearing. I wondered if Jeff Trammel would show up now that his wife was arrested for murder. Would he take custody of the son he had abandoned?

  “You want me to get Valenzuela over here?” Cisco asked. “He’s only a block away.”

  Fernando Valenzuela was a bail bondsman I used on Valley cases. But I knew he wouldn’t be needed this time.

  “I’d wait on that. If they’ve tagged her with murder she isn’t going to make bail.”

  “Right, yeah.”

  “Do you know if a DA’s been assigned yet?”

  I was thinking about my ex-wife who worked for the district attorney’s office in Van Nuys. She might be a useful source of back-channel information—unless she had been put on the case. Then there would be a conflict of interest. It had happened before. Maggie McPherson wouldn’t like that.

  “I’ve got nothing on that.”

  I considered what little we knew and what might be the best way to proceed. My feeling was that once the police understood what they had in this case—a murder that could draw wide attention to one of the great financial catastrophes of the time—they would quickly go to lockdown, putting a lid on all sources of information. The time to make moves was now.

  “Cisco, I changed my mind. Don’t wait for me. Go over to the scene and see what you can find out. Talk to people before they get locked down.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ll handle the PD and I’ll call if I need anything.”

  “Got it. Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  I closed the phone and looked at the back of my driver’s head.

  “Rojas, turn right at Delano and take me up Sylmar.”

  “No problem.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I want you to drop me and then go back up Van Nuys Boulevard and find a body shop. See if they can get the paint off the back of the car.”

  Rojas looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “What paint?”

  Three

  The Van Nuys police building is a four-story structure serving many purposes. It houses the Van Nuys police division as well as the Valley Bureau command offices and the main jail facility serving the northern part of the city. I had been here before on cases and knew that as with most LAPD stations large or small, there would be multiple obstacles standing between my client and me.

  I have always had the suspicion that officers assigned to front desk duty were chosen by cunning supervisors because of their skills in obfuscation and disinformation. If you doubt this, walk into any police station in the city and tell the desk officer who greets you that you wish to make a complaint against a police officer. See how long it takes him to find the proper form. Desk cops are usually young and dumb and unintentionally ignorant, or old and obdurate and completely deliberate in their actions.

  At the front desk at Van Nuys station I was met by an officer with the name CRIMMINS printed on his crisp uniform. He was a silver-haired veteran and therefore highly accomplished when it came to the dead-eyed stare. He showed this to me when I identified myself as a defense attorney with a client waiting to see me in the detective squad. His response consisted of pursing his lips and pointing to a row of plastic chairs where I was supposed to meekly go to wait until he deemed it time to call upstairs.

  Guys like Crimmins are used to a cowering public: people who do exactly as he says because they are too intimidated to do anything else. I wasn’t part of that public.

  “No, that’s not how this works,” I said.

  Crimmins squinted. He hadn’t been challenged by anybody all day, let alone a criminal defense attorney—emphasis on criminal. His first move was to fire up the sarcasm responders.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. So pick up the phone and call upstairs to Detective Kurlen. Tell him Mickey Haller is on the way up and that if I don’t see my client in the next ten minutes I’ll just walk across the plaza to the courthouse and go see Judge Mills.”

  I paused to let the name register.

  “I’m sure you know of Judge Roger Mills. Lucky for me, he used to be a criminal defense attorney before he got elected to the bench. He didn’t like being jacked around by the police back then and doesn’t like it much when he hears about it now. He’ll drag both you and Kurlen into court and make you explain why you were playing this same old game of stopping a citizen from exercising her constitutional rights to consult an attorney. Last time it went down like that Judge Mills didn’t like the answers he got and fined th
e guy who was sitting where you are five hundred bucks.”

  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.”