The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [126]
“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.”
The story was starting to have the ring of truth to it. I thought about the LeMure deal. Opparizio had been in the process of setting up the sale of ALOFT to the publicly traded company. It was prudent business practice to keep tabs on any potential threats to the deal before it was finished in February. That could even include Lisa Trammel. Bad publicity could hinder the sale. Stockholders always want squeaky-clean acquisitions.
“Okay, what else?”
“Not a whole lot else. Just intelligence gathering. I got close to Lisa but then like a month later she got popped for the murder. Danny came back then. I thought he was going to say deal’s off because she was in jail. But he said he wanted me to put up the money and get her out. He gave me the money in a bag—two hundred thou. Then when I got her out I was supposed to do the same thing again, only with you people. Get inside the defense camp, see what was going on and report back.”
I looked over at Cisco. His pensive moves were no longer an act. We both knew that Dahl could be the tip of an iceberg that would tear the bottom out of the prosecution’s case and sink it. We also knew we might have a client in Lisa Trammel who was completely unlikable but innocent.
And if she was innocent…
“Where does Opparizio come into this?” I asked.
“Well, he sort of doesn’t—at least, not directly. But when I call Danny to check in he always wants