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“Where exactly did you find this letter in Mr. Haller’s warehouse?”

“There was a small closet toward the back of this place. The door was kind of hidden behind a rack of clothes. But we found it, and inside we found some file cabinets. The drawers were full of files and didn’t really seem to be in any order. We found a file on Sam Scales and the letter was inside it.”

“And when you read the letter, did you recognize it as potential evidence in the case?”

“Yes, right away. It was a demand—a final demand—for money that Haller believed he was owed.”

“Did you perceive the letter as a threat to Sam Scales?”

Maggie hit my arm and nodded toward the witness stand. She wanted me to object before Drucker could answer—giving an opinion on what should be a jury decision. But I shook my head. I wanted Drucker’s answer so that I could turn it against him when it was my time.

“Yes, definitely a threat,” Drucker said. “It says right in the letter that this was the final request before serious action would follow.”

“Thank you, Detective,” Berg said. “Now the final thing I want to do is have you introduce a video in which you spoke to the defendant, but in his capacity as his own lawyer. Do you recall that conversation?”

“I do.”

“And it was video-recorded?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s play that for the jury.”

Maggie leaned in to me.

“What is this?” she whispered.

“His last try to get me to confess,” I whispered back. “I told him to fuck off.”

The video was played on the big wall screen over the clerk’s station. It was from an interview room at Twin Towers. I had already been jailed for a week or so when Drucker and his partner, Lopes, came to see me to tell me what they had and to see if I would roll over.

“We see you’re going to defend yourself on this thing,” Drucker said. “So, we’re here today to talk to you as a lawyer, not as the defendant, okay?”

“Whatever,” I said. “If you’re going to talk to me as a lawyer, you should have a prosecutor with you. But you’ve had your head up your ass on this from the beginning, Drucker. Why do I get the dumbest pair of detectives on the squad who can’t see what this is?”

“Sorry we’re so dumb. What is it we aren’t seeing?”

“It’s a setup. Somebody did this to me and you bought it hook, line, and sinker. You’re pathetic.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here. I know you said you won’t talk to us, and that’s your right. So we’re telling you, the attorney of record on this, what we’ve got and what the evidence shows. Maybe it changes your ‘client’s’ mind, maybe it doesn’t. But now is the time if you want to try to talk to us.”

“Go ahead, tell me what you got.”

“Well, we’ve got the body of Sam Scales in the trunk of your car. And we can prove through ballistics and other evidence that he was killed in your garage when you were supposedly upstairs twiddling your thumbs.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re trying to bluff me. You think I’m that stupid?”

“We’ve got blood on the floor and ballistics—we found the slug on the floor of your garage, Haller. You did this and we can prove it. And I gotta tell you, it looks like it was planned. That’s first-degree and that’s life without parole. You have—your client has—a kid. If he ever wants to see that kid again outside a prison, now is the time for him to come in and tell us exactly what happened. Was it heat of the moment, a fight, what? You see what I mean, Counselor? Your client is fucked. And there is a small window here where we can go see the D.A. to explain this and get you—uh, him—the best deal possible.”

There was a long beat of silence on the video as I just stared at Drucker. I realized that this was what Dana Berg wanted the jury to see. The hesitation looked like I was considering the offer from Drucker—and wouldn’t only a guilty man pause to weigh the choice? That, of course, was not what I was doing. I was trying to think of a way to elicit more information about the case. Drucker had just mentioned two key pieces of evidence that at the time were new to me. Blood and ballistics—a bullet slug found in my garage. I wanted to trick out more from him, and that was what the pause was all about. But the jury would not read it that way.

“You want me to make a deal?” I said on the video. “Fuck your deal. What else you got?”

Drucker clearly smiled on the video. He knew what I was doing. He had given up all he was going to.

“Okay,” he said. “Just remember this moment, when we gave you the chance.”

Drucker started to get up from the table. Berg ended the video.

“Your Honor,” she said. “At this time I have no more questions for Detective Drucker but I request leave to bring him back for further testimony as the state’s case progresses.”

“Very well,” Judge Warfield said. “It is a little too early to take the afternoon break. Mr. Haller, Ms. McPherson, do you have questions for this witness?”

I stood and moved to the lectern.

“Your Honor,” I began. “Detective Drucker will be a key witness during the defense phase of the trial and I’ll defer the bulk of my questions until then. But if I may, I will ask the witness a few questions now regarding the testimony he’s given since the lunch break. There were things said that were incomplete and inexcusable and I don’t want them to languish in the minds of the jurors for even a day.”

Berg stood up immediately.

“Judge, I object to the characterization of the witness and his testimony,” she said. “Counsel is trying to—”

“Sustained,” Warfield said. “You inquire, Mr. Haller. You do not argue. Keep your tone and opinions to yourself.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, acting as though there had been no rebuke.

I checked the notes I had scribbled on a yellow pad just a few minutes before.

“Okay, Detective Drucker,” I began. “Let’s talk about this letter you say you interpreted as a threat to violence.”

“I called it a threat,” Drucker said. “I didn’t call it a threat to violence.”

“But isn’t that what you are really saying, Detective? We’re here because this is a murder case, correct?”

“Yes, this is a murder case. No, I did not say the letter was a threat to violence.”

“You didn’t say it, but you want the jury to make that leap for you, correct?”

Berg objected, saying I was already badgering the witness three questions into the cross-examination. The judge told me to watch my tone but said that the witness could answer the question.

“I am stating facts,” Drucker answered. “The jury can draw whatever conclusion or connection they see fit.”

“You said this mysterious closet where you found this letter was hidden behind a rack of clothes, correct?” I asked.

“Yes, there was a stand-up rack of clothes that obscured the door and that we had to move.”

“So, now it’s obscured and not hidden?”

“Is that a question?”

“This rack of clothes that hid or obscured the closet door—was it on wheels, Detective Drucker?”

“Uh, yes, I believe so.”

“So when you said you and your fellow searchers had to move it, you mean you just rolled it out of the way, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And, by the way, was I present at this search?”

“You were.”

“But you didn’t mention that earlier in your testimony, did you?”

“No, it didn’t come up.”

“And was I not the one who told you to move the rack of clothes to get to the closet where I kept my financial records?”

“I don’t recall that.”

“Really? You don’t recall coming to my home with your search warrant and my volunteering to take you to my warehouse, where I kept the records you wanted to search?”

“You did agree to meet us at the warehouse and open it for us so we wouldn’t have to break the lock.”

“Okay, and once we were there and you found this so-called hidden closet, did I not tell you what file drawer to look in for communications between me and Sam Scales?”

“I don’t remember it that way, no.”

“Well, how many file cabinets were in the storage room, Detective?”

“I don’t remember.”

“More than one?”

“Yes.”

“More than two?”

“I don’t remember how many there were.”

I disengaged from Drucker and looked up at the judge.

“Objection, Your Honor,” I said. “The witness is unresponsive to the question asked.”

“Answer the question, Detective,” the judge told the detective.

“There were more than two,” Drucker said. “There may have been as many as five.”

“Thank you, Detective,” I said. “Did you search all five of those filing cabinets?”

“No. You said most of them contained client files and were covered by attorney-client privilege. You refused to unlock them.”

“But I unlocked the filing cabinet containing my financial records, isn’t that right, Detective?”

“I don’t remember whether it was locked.”

“But you remember that you were prohibited from searching some filing cabinets but not the one you searched, is that correct?”

“I suppose that is correct.”

“So, first you didn’t remember that I showed you the filing cabinet containing my financial documents, but now you admit that in fact I did show you where to search for my financial records. Do I have that right, Detective?”

“Objection!” Berg shouted.

Warfield raised her hand to cut off anything further.

“This is cross-examination, Ms. Berg,” she said. “Impeachment of the witness’s credibility is a proper issue of inquiry. Answer the question, Detective.”

“You did direct us to the filing cabinet,” Drucker said. “I apologize for my misstatement. I was not visualizing the events as I experienced them.”

“Okay, let’s move on here,” I said. “You said you searched the cabinet, found the file on Sam Scales, and removed the document now marked as state’s L. Do I have all that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you look for or take any other documents during the search of my records?”

“Yes. There were two earlier letters to Sam Scales of similar nature—asking for money.”

“You mean asking him to pay his legal bills?”

“Yes.”

“Did they include threats to violence if he did not pay?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Is that why they have not been introduced in court today?”

Berg objected and asked for a sidebar. I was on a roll with Drucker and didn’t want to lose momentum. I withdrew the question, negating the objection and need for a sidebar, then pressed on.

“Did you take anything else from my storage files, Detective Drucker?”

“No. The warrant covered only financial communications between you and the victim.”

“So, you did not ask the judge who signed the warrant for permission to check my tax returns to see if I had written off the Sam Scales debt as a business loss?”

Drucker had to think for a moment before answering. This was completely new information to be considered.

“It’s a simple question, Detective,” I prompted. “Did you—”

“No, we did not ask for tax returns,” Drucker said.

“Do you think if you had known that this debt was turned into a tax deduction, it would have mitigated your belief that it was the motive behind the killing of Sam Scales?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it might have been good information to have as you investigated the case?”

“All information is good to have. We like to throw out a wide net.”

“But not wide enough in this case, correct?”

Berg objected to the question, saying it was argumentative. The judge sustained the objection, and that was what I wanted. I didn’t want Drucker to answer the question. It was meant for the jury.

“Your Honor,” I said. “I have no further questions at this time but will be calling Detective Drucker back as a defense witness.”

I returned to the defense table while Berg called her next witness. Maggie gave me the nod for my first swing at Drucker.

“Good stuff,” she said. “Should I have Lorna go to the warehouse and pull the tax return? We could use it as a defense exhibit.”

“No,” I whispered. “There is no deduction.”

“What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t know this because you’ve spent your life in public service. Same with Berg and same with Drucker. Even the judge was a public defender before she got elected. But a private attorney can’t deduct unpaid fees as a business loss. The IRS won’t allow it. You just have to eat the loss.”

“So it was a bluff?”

“Pretty much. About as much bullshit as them saying that letter I sent Sam was a threat to kill without really saying it.”

Maggie leaned back and stared straight ahead as she computed this.

“Welcome to criminal defense,” I whispered.

linear, methodical, routine—Dana Berg was following textbook case delivery. The prosecution usually had such advantages in terms of its wealth and reach that that was usually all it took. The state overwhelmed with its power and might. Prosecutors could afford to be unimaginative, even stodgy. They trotted out their cases to the jury like furniture instructions from Ikea. Step-by-step with big illustrations, all the tools you needed included. No need to look elsewhere. No need to worry. And at the end you have a sturdy table that is both stylish and functional.

Berg ran out the afternoon with testimony and video from the lead criminalist who had been in charge of the crime scene and then the deputy coroner who had conducted the autopsy on the victim. Both witnesses were part of the building blocks of the state’s case, even if they offered no evidence that directly implicated me. With the criminalist, I passed on the opportunity to ask questions. There was nothing to be gained there. With the coroner, Berg ran her direct examination past the usual 4:30 p.m. cutoff for testimony. Judge Warfield liked to use the last half hour of the day to dismiss the jury with warnings about avoiding media reports and discussing the case on social media or anywhere else, and then to check with the lawyers for any new business to consider.

But I stood up to address the court before she could do it.

“Your Honor, I have only a few questions for the witness,” I said. “If I can get them in today, the prosecution can start tomorrow with a new witness and Dr. Jackson will be able to go back to his important work at the coroner’s office.”

“If you’re sure, Mr. Haller,” the judge responded, a suspicious tone in her voice.

“Five minutes, Judge. Maybe less.”

“Very well.”

I went to the lectern with only my copy of the autopsy report and nodded to the witness, Dr. Philip Jackson.

“Dr. Jackson, good afternoon,” I began. “Can you tell the jury if it was your opinion that the victim in this case was obese?”

“He was overweight, yes,” Jackson said. “I’m not sure he would be considered obese.”

“How much did he weigh at autopsy?”

Jackson referred to his own copy of the autopsy report before responding.

“He weighed two hundred six pounds,” he said.

“And how tall was he?” I followed.

“He was five foot eight.”

“Are you aware that the National Institutes of Health table of desired weights for adults places the maximum optimum weight of an adult male five foot eight in height at one hundred fifty-eight pounds?”

“Not off the top of my head, no.”

“Would you like to review the table, Doctor?”

“No. That sounds about right. I don’t dispute it.”

“Okay. How tall are you, Dr. Jackson?”

“Uh, six foot even.”

“And your weight?”

As I expected, Berg stood and objected on the grounds of relevancy.

“Where are we going with this, Judge?” she asked.

“Mr. Haller,” the judge said. “We are going to adjourn and take this up in the—”

“Your Honor,” I interrupted. “Three more questions and we’ll be there. And the relevancy will be clear.”

“Hurry, Mr. Haller,” Warfield said. “You may answer the question, Dr. Jackson.”

“One ninety,” Jackson said. “Last I checked.”

There was a slight murmur of laughter from the jury box and gallery.

“Okay, so you’re a relatively big guy,” I said. “When it came time during the autopsy to examine the victim’s back for injuries, did you turn the body over yourself?”

“No, I had help,” Jackson said.

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s difficult to move a body that weighs more than yourself.”

“I imagine so, Dr. Jackson. Who helped you?”

“As I recall, Detective Drucker witnessed the autopsy and I enlisted his help in turning the body over.”

“Judge, I have no further questions.”

Berg had no redirect and Warfield moved to adjourn court for the day. As she gave the jury the routine warnings, Maggie reached over and patted my hand.

“That was good,” she whispered.

I nodded and liked how she had touched me. It was my hope that the five-minute cross-examination of Jackson would leave the jury with something to think about as they went home for the night.

So far, Berg had offered nothing in the way of testimony or evidence that explained how I had gotten Sam Scales, who was essentially built like a mailbox, into the trunk of my car in order to shoot him. The possibilities ranged from my having an accomplice to help move an incapacitated Sam into the trunk to my drugging him and then ordering him into the trunk at gunpoint before those drugs took effect. I didn’t know whether Berg was planning to avoid the issue altogether or if something was coming further down the line in her presentation.

But for the moment, at least, I had control of the issue. And it was a bonus that my weight loss since my initial arrest had now reached nearly thirty pounds, leaving me at least fifty pounds lighter than Sam Scales at death. I had checked the jury during my final questions to Jackson and several were looking at me instead of the witness, most likely sizing up whether I could have manhandled the 206-pound mailbox into the trunk of my car.

Going to trial is always a gamble. The prosecution is always the house in this game. It holds the bank and deals the cards. You take any win you can get. As Deputy Chan came to collect me and take me back into courtside holding, I felt good about the day. I had spent less than fifteen minutes cross-examining the state’s witnesses but felt I had scored points and put a hit on the house. Sometimes that was all you could ask for. You plant seeds that help keep jurors thinking and that hopefully sprout and bloom during the defense phase of the trial. For the third trial day in a row, I felt momentum building.

I changed into my blues in the holding cell and waited for a runner to come get me and take me down to the dock. Sitting on the bench, I thought about where Dana Berg would take the trial next. It seemed to me that the case had largely been delivered to the jury through Drucker.

Tomorrow would certainly center on my garage. The state’s wit list included another criminalist, who had handled the search there the morning after the killing, a DNA expert who would testify that the blood collected from the floor of the garage came from Sam Scales, and a ballistics expert who would testify about the analysis of the bullet evidence.

But I couldn’t help thinking that there was going to be something else. Something not on a list. An October surprise, as members of the defense bar liked to call a sandbagging by the prosecution.

There was a clue to something coming. I had noticed that Kent Drucker left the courtroom after his testimony concluded. He was not replaced by his partner, Lopes, which meant that Berg was flying blind through the rest of the afternoon—no case detective on hand in case she needed documents or a refresher on aspects of the case. This rarely happened in a murder trial and it told me something was up. Drucker and Lopes were working on something. It had to be case-related, because they would have been taken out of the homicide rotation once the trial started. I was sure there was an October surprise coming.

This was how the rules of fairness in trial procedure were subverted. By putting off the investigative work on a witness or piece of evidence until trial is underway, the prosecutor can claim that it was a newfound witness or piece of evidence and that is why there was no forewarning to opposing counsel. The defense did it as well—I’d had people poised to drop a subpoena on Louis Opparizio, who would be my own October surprise. But there was something inappropriate and unfair about it when the prosecution, which held all the power and all the cards, did it. It was like the New York Yankees always getting the best players because they had the most money. It was why my favorite team in baseball was whatever team was playing the Yankees.

My thoughts were interrupted when the runner came to the holding cell to escort me down to the prisoner transport dock in the courthouse basement. Twenty minutes later I was in the back of a sheriff’s cruiser being driven solo back to Twin Towers, courtesy of the order from Judge Warfield. I noticed that the driver was a different deputy from the one who had driven me that morning and last week. This driver seemed familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. Between the jail and the courthouse I had seen so many different deputies in the past four months that there was no way I could remember them all.

After we pulled out of the courthouse complex and onto Spring, I leaned forward to the metal grille that separated the driver from the rear compartment, where I was locked into a plastic form-fitting seat.

“What happened to Bennet?” I asked.

I had noted the name on the new guy’s uniform when he was putting me into the car. Pressley. It, too, was familiar but not enough for me to place it.

“Assignment change,” Pressley said. “I’ll be driving you the rest of this week.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Have you worked in the keep-away module lately?”

“No, I’m in transport.”

“Thought I recognized you.”

“That’s because I’ve sat behind you in court a few times.”

“Really? This case?”

“No, this goes back. Alvin Pressley is my nephew. You had him as a client for a while.”

Alvin Pressley. The name, followed by a face, came back to me. A twenty-one-year-old kid from the projects caught slinging dope with enough quantity in his pockets to qualify for a big-time prison sentence. I was able to score him a better deal: a year in the county stockade.

“Oh, yeah. Alvin,” I said. “You stood for him at the sentencing, right? I remember his uncle was a deputy.”

“I did.”

Here was the hard question.

“So, how’s Alvin doing these days?”

“He’s doing good. That was a wake-up call for him. Got his shit together, moved out to Riverside to get away from all the crap. He lives with my brother out there. They got a restaurant.”

“Good to hear.”

“Anyway, you did right by me with Alvin, so I’m going to do right by you. There’s people in the jail not happy with you.”

“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.”

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