The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [94]
“We identified ourselves and said we were conducting an investigation of a crime. Didn’t say what it was, just said it was serious. We asked if we could come inside to ask her a few questions. She said yes, so we entered.”
I felt a vibration in my pocket and knew I had received a text on my cell phone. I slipped it out of my pocket and held it down below the table so the judge would not see it. The message was from Cisco.
Need to talk, show you something.
I texted back and we had a quick digital conversation:
You verify the letter?
No, something else. Still working the letter.
Then after court. Get me the letter.
I put the phone away and went back to watching Freeman’s direct examination. The letter in question had come in the afternoon before in the mail to my P.O. box. It came anonymously but if its contents could be confirmed by Cisco I would have a new weapon. A powerful weapon.
“What was Ms. Trammel’s demeanor when you met her?” Freeman asked.
“She seemed pretty calm to me,” Kurlen said. “She didn’t seem particularly curious about why we wanted to talk to her or what the crime was. She was nonchalant about the whole thing.”
“Where did you and your partner speak to her?”
“She walked us into the kitchen where there was a table and she invited us to sit down. She asked if we wanted water or coffee and we both said no.”
“And you started asking her questions then?”
“Yes, we started by asking if she had been in the house all morning. She said she had been except for when she drove her son to school in Sherman Oaks at eight. I asked if she had made any other stops on the way home and she said no.”
“And what did that mean to you?”
“Well, that somebody was lying. We had the witness who put her near the bank at close to nine. So somebody was wrong or somebody was lying.”
“What did you do at that point?”
“I asked if she would be willing to come with us to the police station where she would be interviewed and asked to look at some photographs. She said yes and we took her to Van Nuys.”
“Did you first apprise her of her constitutional rights not to speak to you without an attorney present?”
“Not at that time. She was not a suspect at this point. She was simply a person of interest whose name had come to the surface. I didn’t believe that we needed to give her the rights warning until we crossed that threshold. We weren’t close to being there yet. We had a discrepancy between what she told us and what a witness had told us. We needed to explore that further before anybody became a suspect.”
Freeman was at it again. Trying to patch holes before I could tear them open. It was frustrating but there was nothing I could do about it. I was busy writing down questions I would later ask Kurlen, ones that Freeman wouldn’t anticipate.
Skillfully Freeman led Kurlen back to Van Nuys station and the interview room where he had sat with my client. She used him to introduce the video of the session. It was played for the jury on two overhead screens. Aronson had ably argued against showing the interview but to no avail. Judge Perry had allowed it. We could appeal after conviction but success there was a long shot. I had to turn things now. I had to find a way to make the jury see it as an unfair process, a trap into which my innocent client had stumbled.
The video was shot from an overhead angle and the defense scored a minor point right off the bat because Howard Kurlen was a big man and Lisa Trammel was small. Sitting across a table from Trammel, Kurlen looked like he was crowding her, cornering her, even bullying her. This was good. This was part of a theme I planned to put into my cross-examination.
The audio was clear and the sound crisp. Over my objection, the jurors as well as the other players in the trial had been given transcripts with which to read along. I had objected because I didn’t want the jurors reading. I wanted them watching. I wanted them to see the big man bullying the little woman. There was sympathy to be gained there, but not in the words on the page.
Kurlen started casually,