“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.”