I stopped the playback.
“Officer Milton, why did you laugh when you found the body?” I asked.
“I didn’t laugh,” Milton said.
“What was that, then? A guffaw?”
“I was surprised by what was in the trunk. It was an expression of surprise.”
I knew he had prepped for this with Berg.
“An expression of surprise?” I said. “Are you sure you weren’t gloating about the predicament you knew I would now be in?”
“No, that wasn’t the case at all,” Milton insisted. “I felt like a semi-boring night just got interesting. After twenty-two years, I was going to make my first arrest for homicide.”
“Move to strike as nonresponsive,” I said to the judge.
“You asked the question, he answered,” she responded. “Overruled. Continue, Mr. Haller.”
“Let’s listen again,” I said.
I replayed the moment on the video, turning the sound up louder. The gloating laugh was unmistakable, no matter how Milton tried to couch it.
“Officer Milton, are you telling the jury that you did not laugh when you opened the trunk and discovered the body?” I asked.
“I’m saying I might’ve been a little giddy, but not gloating,” Milton said. “It was a nervous laugh, that’s all.”
“Did you know who I was?”
“Yes, I had your ID. You told me you were a lawyer.”
“But did you know of me before you pulled me over?”
“No, I did not. I don’t pay much attention to lawyers and all of that.”
I felt that I had gotten all I could out of the moment. I had thrown at least some suspicion on the prosecution’s very first witness. I decided to leave it at that. No matter what came next, I felt we had opened the trial with a strong showing of contesting the state’s evidence.
“No further questions,” I said. “But I reserve the right to recall Officer Milton to the witness stand during the defense phase of the trial.”
I returned to the defense table. Berg took the lectern and tried to mitigate the damage on redirect, but there wasn’t much that could be done with the video evidence I had presented. She walked Milton through his story again, but he could not express a good and believable reason for his dropping the car into drive before he could have seen the rear bumper of my car. And the buzzing of the cell phone just prior to that had cemented in place the possibility that he had been told to pull me over.
I leaned into Maggie to whisper.
“Do we have the subpoena ready on his cell?” I asked.
“All set,” she said. “I’ll take it to the judge as soon as we adjourn.”
We were going to ask the judge to allow us to subpoena the call and text records from Milton’s personal cell phone. We had planned to follow his testimony and the playing of videos with the subpoena so as not to show our hand to Milton or Berg. My guess was that if we got the cell records, there would be no call or text that matched up with the buzzing sound heard on the video we had just played for the jury. This was because I was pretty sure that Milton would have used a throwaway phone for work like this. Either way it would be a win when I brought him back to testify during the defense phase. If there was no record of a text to his registered cell, he would have to explain to the jury where the buzzing sound came from. And when I asked if he had a burner with him that night, his denial would ring false to the jury, who had clearly heard that unexplained buzzing sound.
Overall, I felt the Milton cross-examination had been a score for the defense, and Berg apparently already needed to regroup. With a half hour still to go in the court day, she asked Warfield to adjourn early so she could review evidence with her next witness, Detective Kent Drucker. She had anticipated that the defense’s opening statement and cross-examination of Milton would both last longer than they had.
Warfield reluctantly agreed but warned both sides that they should expect full days of court and should plan accordingly with their witnesses.
Immediately after adjournment, Maggie went to the clerk with the subpoena for Milton’s cell records. I waved goodbye to the rest of my team and my loved ones and was taken into the courtside holding tank. I changed from my suit into blues in preparation for being driven back to Twin Towers in a sheriff’s patrol car. While I waited in the cell to be escorted down the security elevator to the prisoner loading garage, Dana Berg came into the holding area and looked at me through the bars.
“Way to go, Haller,” she said. “Score one for the defense.”
“The first of many,” I said.
“We’ll see about that.”
“What do you want, Dana? You come to tell me you see the light and are dropping the charges?”
“You wish. I just wanted to come back and say, well played. That’s all.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t a play. It might be a game to you but it’s life or death to me.”
“Then that’s why you should savor today’s win. There won’t be any more.”
Having delivered her message, she turned from the bars and disappeared, heading back to the courtroom.
“Hey, Dana!” I called.
I waited and a few seconds later she was back at the bars.
“What?”
“The Hollywood Bowl chef.”
“What about her?”
“I wanted her on the jury. I switched the tags on my chart during the break because I knew you’d send your bow-tie guy over to steal a look.”
I could see the surprise momentarily move across her face. Then it was gone. I nodded.
“That was a play,” I said. “But today? That was the real thing.”
41
Friday, February 21
Possibly it was in reaction to the Milton testimony the day before, but Dana Berg came to court Friday morning with a plan not just to even the score in the jury’s ledger but to tip the scales permanently to the state’s side. She had choreographed a day that would stack the blocks of evidence and motive against me so high that the jurors would be able to see nothing else and would go into the weekend with my guilt permeating their brains. It was a good strategy and I needed to do something about it.
Kent Drucker was the lead detective on the case. That made him lead storyteller as well. Berg used him to take the jury through the investigation at a leisurely pace. I could and did object on occasion but it all amounted to a buzzing of gnats. I could not disrupt the flow of one-sided, unchallenged information to the jury until I could cross-examine the witness. And it was Berg’s goal to prevent that from happening until after the weekend.
The morning session was largely just nuts and bolts. She walked Drucker through the initial phase of the investigation, from his callout at his home out in Diamond Bar to the full crime scene investigation. She did the smart thing and owned all the mistakes that had been made, revealing through Drucker that the victim’s wallet had somehow gone missing from either the crime scene or coroner’s office.
“And did you ever recover the wallet?” Berg asked.
“Not yet,” Drucker said. “It’s just... gone.”
“Was there an investigation into the theft?”
“There’s an ongoing investigation.”
“And did losing the wallet hamper the homicide investigation?”
“To some extent, yes.”
“How so?”
“Well, we were able to identify the victim pretty quickly from fingerprints, so that was not an issue. But the victim’s criminal history indicated that he changed IDs frequently and adopted a new name, address, bank account, et cetera with each new scam that he perpetrated. My thinking was that the wallet contained the documentation of whatever identity he was using at the time of the murder. That was gone and it would have been useful to have that from the start.”