“Oh, they’re relevant all right, Ms. Berg,” the judge said. “She just sat there and accused the defendant of threatening her over money. The exhibits are admitted. Ms. McPherson, you may proceed.”
We returned to our positions and Maggie approached the witness stand. She put another letter down in front of Trammel.
“Ms. Trammel, did you write this and send it to Mr. Haller from Chowchilla?” she asked.
Trammel looked at the letter and took a long time to read it.
“The thing is,” she said, “I was diagnosed as bipolar at the inmate-reception center nine years ago, so sometimes I kind of slip into a fugue and do things I don’t always remember doing.”
“Is that your inmate number on the envelope?”
“Yes. But I don’t know who put it on there.”
“Is that your name on the letter?”
“Well, yes, but anybody could have written that.”
“Could you read the letter to the jury, please?”
Trammel looked at Berg and then at the judge, hoping someone would say she didn’t have to read what she had sent to me.
“Go ahead, Ms. Trammel,” Warfield said. “Read the letter.”
Trammel looked at the letter for a long moment before finally beginning to read.
“Dear Asshole-at-law,
Just wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten about you. Never. You ruined everything and you will one day answer for it. I have not seen my son in six years. Because of you! You are a piece of shit to the end. You call yourself a lawyer but you are nothing. I hope you have found God because you will need him.”
I watched the jury as she read it. I could see that Trammel’s credibility disintegrated with each word she read. And some of that probably rubbed off on Berg. The prosecutor sat at her table, realizing that she had been blinded by greed. Greed for one more piece of evidence against me. She had heard Trammel’s story through Drucker and thought it was the thing that would slam the prison door shut on me.
But her October surprise turned into a December dud. She didn’t even bother to call Herb Dahl into the courtroom to testify. He was told to go home.
It was unclear whether the misstep with Lisa Trammel would have much impact on the jury, especially after the morning’s delivery of conclusive evidence about Sam Scales being killed in my garage while I was apparently on the premises. Either way, by the day’s end, Berg felt good enough about her case to bring it to an end. Whatever potential witnesses she still had in the wings, she decided to hold them for rebuttal and a big finish.
“Your Honor,” she said, “the state rests.”
47
Wednesday, February 26
I spent a restless night in my cell, listening to the random echoes of desperate men calling out in the dark. I heard steel doors bang and incongruous laughter from the deputies on the midnight shift. At times my body shook in physical reaction to the gravity of the moment. How could I sleep when I knew the next two days would determine the rest of my life? When deep down I knew that, should things go wrong, I would choose not to live this way for very long? I would make my escape one way or the other and I would be free.
Incarceration does that. Makes you think about what is beyond the last wall. They can take your belt and shoelaces away but they can’t stop you from going over it. I’ve had three clients go over that wall in the weeks after conviction. Now that I had personally experienced the prospect of long-term incarceration, I understood their choice and respected it. I knew it would be my choice as well.
Deputy Pressley got me to the courthouse early and I was in courtside holding, waiting for trial to begin, when Maggie and Cisco were allowed back for a precourt conference. I could tell by their faces that there was bad news.
“Still no sign of Opparizio?” I guessed.
“No,” Maggie said. “It’s worse.”
“He’s dead,” Cisco said.
“We have to rethink everything,” Maggie said. “We need to reset the order of wit—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “Back up. What happened? What do you mean he’s dead?”
“They whacked him,” Cisco said. “His body was found last night. He was dumped on the side of the road near Kingman.”
“That’s on the road up to Vegas. How did this happen when twenty-four hours ago your guys supposedly had him locked down?”
“Remember I told you they had a camera on his door? They reviewed the tape this morning, and Opparizio got room service Monday night. No big deal, he took all his meals in. But this time his dinner was rolled in on a cart with a tablecloth on it.”
“That’s how they got him out?”
“Yeah, hidden in the cart. I think a guy posing as a room-service waiter whacked him in the room, put him under the cart, and wheeled him out. He had intercepted the food delivery at the service elevator. My guys found the real room-service guy at his apartment. He admitted he got paid to turn over his red jacket and go home. The guy was drunk as a skunk.”
“So how did this... room-service hit man know where he was?”
“I figure Opparizio called somebody and revealed that he’d been hit with our subpoena. They told him they’d get him out of there and set up the room-service gag. Only then they whacked him.”
“Why?”
“Who knows? They probably didn’t want to risk him testifying. They knew he was compromised.”
I looked at Maggie to see if she had a take.
“It could be any number of reasons,” she said. “It’s safe to say he became a liability. But we can’t dwell on that, Mickey. This changes everything. What is our defense now? How do we point the finger at Opparizio when he’s dead?”
“What about Bosch?” I asked. “Does he know about this?”
“I told him,” Cisco said. “He’s got contacts in Arizona and Nevada from his LAPD days. He was going to make some calls, see what he could find out.”
I sat in silence for a long moment. I was brooding, trying to figure out how to reboot a third-party-culpability defense without the third party. I knew that Opparizio’s death did not change the defense theory, but as Maggie had said, it made it harder to point a finger at him.
“All right,” I finally said. “We need to get through today and then regroup and see where we are tonight. Who do we have who’s ready to go?”
“Well, we’ve got Schultz, the EPA guy,” Maggie said. “He got in last night. I told him we probably were going to hold him till tomorrow but we can get him ready for today. He’s just over at the Biltmore.”
“Do it,” I said. “We also have Drucker. We can put him on first. Then go with the EPA guy.”
“We supposedly have the Ventura County detective who arrested Sam the last time coming in today,” Cisco said. “Harry talked him into it. But that’s not a subpoena, so I’ll believe it when I see him. And we have Moira from the Redwood and the Rohypnol expert on subpoena. As soon as we’re done here, I’ll see who’s out in the hallway.”
“What about Opparizio’s girlfriend?” I asked.
“We served her the same night we papered Opparizio,” Cisco said. “She’s supposed to come in Thursday, but now with him dead, she probably split and is hiding. We took the eyes off her to put them on Opparizio, so...”
“We don’t know where she is,” I finished. “So we don’t have her unless she decides to honor the subpoena. I would put the chances of that at zero.”
“We also have you,” Maggie said.
“I wasn’t going to testify,” I said.
“Well, you may have to now,” she said. “Without Opparizio to pin the tail on, we’re probably going to need you to pull it all together.”