Judgment at Santa Monica

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘Patrick brought it to you because he wants to see you again,’ Angie said. ‘He feels bad about how things ended between you.’

  ‘There were no things to end,’ I said, and even as the words came out of my mouth I knew they were pointless. ‘Patrick thinks I’m the greatest lawyer since Oliver Wendell Holmes and he wants to show his new girlfriend how well connected he is.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ Angie pulled out a bag of some kind of granola and poured some into a small bowl. Then she went to the refrigerator and got out some almond milk, which isn’t milk but that’s another story. ‘You don’t know Cynthia Sutton is Patrick’s girlfriend. You don’t know that he has a girlfriend.’

  I pulled the remnants of a BLT out of the fridge and unwrapped the aluminum foil. It had been a pretty good sandwich when I’d bought it, but now the temperature was an issue. The lettuce and tomato should be fairly cold, but the toast and the bacon? No. This was a difficult problem to solve. ‘You weren’t there,’ I told Angie.

  ‘No. That was a mistake on my part. After I talked to Patrick yesterday, I should have insisted on coming with you, but I didn’t know he was going to show up at your trial.’ She poured the almond milk on the granola and started crunching away. I don’t get granola. I’m from New Jersey. Sure, Angie is too, but she actually has respect for her body.

  I took the sandwich apart. It was the only possible solution. The toast and bacon went on a paper plate and into the microwave. The tricky part was heating it just enough to be at room temperature. I settled on ten seconds and could do more if necessary. Never overheat. You’re welcome.

  ‘The absolute last thing you should do is follow me to work,’ I said. ‘I’m just barely managing to create a businesslike, professional reputation in the firm. After Patrick’s case I was basically a curiosity for months.’ Patrick’s murder trial had generated, for lack of a better term, some unwanted publicity just when I was starting at Seaton, Taylor. It had taken months of work to get my colleagues to think of me as a competent attorney and not a very strange visitor from another planet. Which New Jersey, it should be noted, really is.

  The microwave beeped and I took out the toast, now limp, and the bacon, see previous comment. My own fault. I stuck them back in their respective places and started biting. I have no shame.

  ‘Fine,’ Angie said. She was apparently perfecting her impression of my mother.

  I had to leave for the office. I picked up what was left of the sandwich to eat on the drive, and my laptop case. ‘You still offer fine advice,’ I assured Angie.

  ‘Good. Then go to lunch with Patrick.’

  I opened the door and turned back for my exit line. ‘There’s no way I’m having lunch with Patrick McNabb,’ I said.

  So I had lunch with Patrick McNabb. And then I got shot at. So, Tuesday.

  SIX

  ‘You are the most altruistic person I know,’ Patrick McNabb said to me. Patrick, who had once bought me a Ferrari because my 2009 Hyundai was in the shop, was laying it on a little thick. He’d insisted on taking me to a chic Hungarian restaurant in Santa Monica for lunch when he knew my tastes ran more toward exotic frankfurters at a place called Destination Dogs (which is in New Brunswick, New Jersey). I was dressed for a day at the office, so it was OK to be in slightly fancier surroundings, but eating plant-based goulash was not what I’d expected when I woke up this morning.

  ‘Tell me what you want, Patrick,’ I said. ‘You should know better than almost anyone that flattery is not only going to get you nowhere, but it’ll just annoy me.’

  ‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But please call me “Pat”.’

  That was new and different. ‘Since when? I always called you …’ Then it dawned on me. ‘This is about playing someone with multiple personality disorder, isn’t it? You want to try on having more than one persona.’

  ‘It’s called “research”, love, and I need to experience what it’s like if I’m to perform adequately in the role.’ Patrick, eating vegetable soup although he’d considered the chicken paprikash, had to make sure his waist did not expand. The wardrobe on Torn was often quite unforgiving. What? Angie makes me watch it.

  ‘Adequately?’ I said. ‘If your best friend Angie were here, she’d say you were nothing short of brilliant in the role.’

  ‘Oh, you’re allowed to say that word?’ Patrick had mischief in his eyes. It was better for me to look away.

  ‘Them’s the rules, buddy. Take ’em or leave ’em. Besides, you’ve made yourself into an even bigger star on this show than you were on Legality. So much so that you don’t even call old friends anymore.’ Might as well get it right out there, if that’s what this lunch was about.

  He grimaced a little. ‘You know how to hit me where it hurts, Sandy.’

  ‘What are friends for?’

  Patrick rarely breaks out his serious face in public. He likes to be the life of the party, the magic man who can make anything happen and would do literally anything for someone he likes. So, seeing him straighten out his mouth and let some sadness into his eyes left me with two feelings: one, that I’d made him feel bad, and two, that he might very well be acting.

  ‘Sandy, right after my trial I was emotionally exhausted. You could see that. I was so grateful to you for helping me out of that awful situation and we’d gotten really close in a very short period of time.’ He put down his soup spoon, another sign that this was sincere. ‘But you have to remember that it was only a matter of a few months since my wife had died. I was still grieving for Patsy and then I had a role in a film that I had to shoot in Tunisia. I didn’t call you because I was in a kind of turmoil I didn’t understand and then I had to focus on being a two-fisted scientist fighting against neo-Nazis in the desert, for reasons I’m not certain I understand to this day. But the movie will come out in a few months and perhaps I’ll find out then.’

  ‘You were grieving for Patsy? You were in the midst of divorcing Patsy when she died.’ I wasn’t going to let Patrick off the hook that easy. I still had to figure out if he was playing the role of a disconsolate ex- what? Friend? Boyfriend? Client?

  ‘You were there, Sandy. You know I still had feelings for her, even though I knew we couldn’t stay together.’ He had also been accused of her murder, and not without some at least circumstantial evidence.

  ‘Nonetheless.’ The goulash was far tastier than it had any right to be without meat in it. ‘You asked me to lunch for a reason, Patrick, and it wasn’t to explain why you ghosted me after your trial. So, out with it. What’s on the agenda for today?’

  Two young women three tables away were showing some signs of recognizing him. That’s not very typical in LA, where actors of all types are out walking around all the time; people get used to it. And this restaurant was hardly a tourist trap. Patrick had fans everywhere and some were more, let’s say passionate, than others. Patrick didn’t look in their direction, but I knew he’d noticed them staring and asking each other if that was in fact him.

  It was him, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.

  ‘I’m just glad to see you again,’ he said to me. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘For a normal person, sure. Not for you. So what’s up? I’m already taking your new girlfriend’s case. What else is there?’

  Patrick actually snuck a glance at the two onlookers, whose faces darkened at the very suggestion. He didn’t acknowledge them – not yet – but they knew he was aware of their presence. That by itself was a story to tell their friends back at the very expensive sorority house.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ When Patrick turned his attention back to me, he was wearing his innocent face. It was the one that had almost gotten him convicted. ‘Cynthia is a friend, a colleague. She’s in a dire situation and I’m trying to help her out. That’s all it is, Sandy.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, wondering if I meant it. ‘My question is, why did you ask me to come to lunch today? Seems like you already got what you wanted.’

&n
bsp; The two young women, having paid their check, stood up from their table and walked in the opposite direction of the door to the street. Instead, they headed directly to our table.

  While they were walking over, Patrick sighed and said to me, ‘Fine. I was going to ask you to draft a pre-nuptial agreement for me.’

  Before I could answer, the smaller of the young women, the one with dark straight hair and a shy smile (as opposed to the taller one, who had blonde hair and a shy smile) approached Patrick, phone at the ready. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, almost mumbling from her terror that her idol might turn out to be an ogre, ‘Mr McNabb, would you take a selfie with my friend and me?’

  Patrick’s public smile, the one that threatened to meet at the back of his neck and make his head fall off, shone in all its klieg light brilliance. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps we can impose upon my friend here to take it for us.’ He gestured for the woman to hand me her phone.

  It was a newer, more expensive model than mine, so I naturally gave some thought to the idea of taking it and running for the door, but it was probably traceable and I’d just end up having to plead myself down from grand larceny to simple robbery. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  The taller woman looked closely at me as if trying to see if the pores in my nose were larger than those in my forehead. ‘Are you … anybody?’ she asked.

  I motioned them into position, leaning behind Patrick and grinning their tanned, lean faces at me as I focused the lens.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m nobody at all.’

  Patrick and I were out on the street in front of the restaurant before I could gather my thoughts together to have a coherent conversation. The two young women, who had turned out to be college students (‘UCLA’) named Heather and Amy, had done their best to strike up a conversation with Patrick, who was being charming and accommodating because he truly loves his fans and also because he knew I’d be less irate with him if I had time to digest what he’d told me.

  So he’d walked them to the restaurant exit, deliberately not taken any contact information from them and then waved as they headed toward the valet parking station. My ancient Hyundai was parked at the courthouse, where Patrick had insisted on driving me in his brand-spanking-new Tesla, currently charging itself in the restaurant parking lot. In Los Angeles it’s easier to charge an electric car than it is to find a dentist who takes my insurance. Not that I’m bitter.

  ‘So you’re getting married but Cynthia is not your girlfriend?’ I said once we were at a discreet distance from as much of humanity as was possible. The COVID-19 period had left us all with a natural ability to calculate how to remain six feet away from anyone on the street. Or anywhere else. ‘How does that work? Who are you marrying?’

  Patrick had his dark sunglasses on now and a baseball cap (Dodgers, of course) pulled down over his forehead; this was his way of avoiding fans on the street. He didn’t like doing it because secretly he adored the attention, but he knew it was at best inconvenient to have people swarming him wherever he went. He had employed security in the past and I was not sure he had completely given up the practice. There was a large man with a shaved head leaning against the building and watching us while trying very hard to appear nonchalant but actually being pretty chalant.

  ‘You don’t know her,’ Patrick said. ‘She’s not in the industry. Of course, you would be less likely to know her if she was in show business, wouldn’t you, Sandy?’ He thought he could charm me.

  The look I gave him convinced him otherwise.

  He stage-coughed. ‘Right, well I met her when I was buying my new house. You know I moved out of that place I was living in after the divorce.’ The ‘place’ he referred to was a twenty-two-room mansion in which every family member I have ever met could live and never run into each other, which was probably their fondest wish. ‘She was the broker in charge of the listing and walked me through it personally. Things just took off from there, I suppose.’ Patrick wasn’t looking into my eyes probably because he thought I’d let him have it.

  I only sort of did. ‘You’re marrying your realtor?’ I asked.

  ‘Real-estate professional, please.’ I wasn’t sure if Patrick was being sardonic or not.

  ‘Patrick.’ I was starting to worry about the man I had considered a friend, and maybe still did. ‘Isn’t it just a little bit possible you’re doing this on the rebound?’

  Patrick didn’t answer right away, giving me the impression he was thinking about this for the first time. ‘No, not this time,’ he said. ‘Emmie is the woman for me. It’s so cute: yesterday she was angry at me because I forgot it was our four-month anniversary. Isn’t that precious? I thought she was going to throw a coffee mug at me.’

  I really had no answer for that.

  We gave Heather and Amy time to get their car, give Patrick one last longing wave and drive off to count the likes their photo with him was no doubt getting this moment on Instagram. Then Patrick headed toward the valet working the parking lot and handed him his ticket. The young man, who was definitely hoping to make it as an actor, rewarded Patrick with his most ingratiating smile, chose not to offer to email Patrick his head shot and went for the car.

  ‘I’m just saying this is very similar to the way you told me you married Patsy,’ I continued. ‘You tend to dive into things headfirst and worry about the consequences later. I’m worried you could be taking things too fast. Again.’

  Patrick smiled. There was a time that would have had a serious effect on my nervous system, but now it just looked a trifle sad and maybe a little bit regretful.

  ‘I’m very touched that you’re concerned about me, Sandy, but you needn’t worry. I know exactly what I’m doing and nobody is going to hurt me this time. Not even myself.’

  I wanted to ask him about his new fiancée and more about how they met, why he was so smitten (if indeed he was, but I had my suspicions), and for one thing whether I would be invited to the wedding (because Angie, my plus-one, would have been ecstatic). But I didn’t really know how to ask without sounding like I was jealous, which I was not.

  Then I noticed the large man with the shaved head stop leaning against the side of the building, his eyes turned toward the street. He stood up straight, his eyes tracking something in front of him, then started running directly at Patrick and me.

  Mostly Patrick.

  ‘Gun!’ he shouted. ‘Gun!’

  I didn’t have a gun so I couldn’t give him mine. Seriously, that was my first thought. Patrick looked equally puzzled by the sudden mood change and looked toward the bald man. ‘Philip?’ he said.

  Philip (as I now assumed the bald man was named) rushed all the way to us and before I knew it had pretty much tackled Patrick to the pavement. Clearly I was not the one paying the security man’s salary, because he didn’t try very hard to take me down, which I considered slightly insulting.

  ‘Gun!’ he shouted again, in my direction. Then he pointed at the street. And I immediately dove for the sidewalk myself.

  There was indeed a car driving up the street directly toward us and in the back seat behind the driver sat a man wearing sunglasses and a fedora (approximating Patrick’s civilian disguise but for the choice of headwear), as well as – and this was the part I thought was weird – a denim jacket. And that man was aiming a handgun at us.

  He fired and I actually heard the bullet whiz over my head, then another shot which clearly missed us by some distance to my right as the car kept traveling up the street and gathered speed. I tried to look up to get a license-plate number, but the car was too far away already. The best I could do was see that the first letter of the plate was T.

  It took me a long moment to exhale. My neck was stiff, not with pain but with fear. I couldn’t feel my toes, but then I really didn’t want to feel my toes. On the other hand, they would probably help me in standing up, which seemed the thing to do right now.

  ‘What was that about?’ I said from my sitting position (I’d managed to achieve s
itting by now). I was hoping the security man could provide some clarity.

  ‘That vehicle was trying to shoot Mr McNabb,’ the bald guy said. Thanks, bald guy. That much I could figure out on my own.

  Patrick stood up with a strange expression on his face, as if he were somehow pleased about what had happened. ‘Excellent job, Philip,’ he said to the bald man.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Patrick reached down to offer me a hand and I took it. He helped me reach a standing position and looked me directly in the eye, still with that odd smile on his face.

  ‘Rather like old times, isn’t it?’ he said.

  SEVEN

  ‘It’s refreshing that this time you’re actually reporting the shooting immediately after it occurred.’

  Detective Lieutenant K.C. Trench of the Los Angeles Police Department was, actually, a homicide cop. The fact that he was showing some interest in the incident outside the restaurant where Patrick and I had finished lunch indicated there was some larger issue at hand. But Trench would sooner dance the tarantella naked in public than let on anything he didn’t want me to know.

  We had, of course, crossed paths before because Trench was the lead investigator on Patrick’s case. He had testified at trial and probably did as much for me as he did the prosecution. Trench didn’t play sides. So we had a strange cooperative relationship which Trench liked to present as irritation. Whatever worked.

  He was ticked off at me (during Patrick’s trial) because we – Patrick and I – had been shot at and, for various reasons, I had chosen not to report the incident until I had to. Cops don’t like not being consulted when people are firing guns.

  ‘The last time you were the enemy,’ I explained. I was sitting in Trench’s office, which was essentially a glass-encased room, spotless and neat as everything Trench did (and probably everything he owned) was. Through the window to my left I could see across the hallway, where Patrick was being questioned by another detective I recognized as Sergeant Roberts. Patrick looked delighted, Roberts not as much.