Judgment at Santa Monica

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘And yet here you are drinking at only six in the evening.’ Angie likes to tease me. Angie thinks she’s witty. Angie isn’t always right. ‘You know he’s in love with you.’ See?

  Angie was lying on the floor in sweats doing bicycle legs because I was drinking a beer. Show-off.

  ‘I don’t even want to discuss this,’ I told her. ‘Tell me something else. Anything else.’

  ‘I interviewed for a job today,’ Angie said. Her grin indicated there was a really good story behind what she’d told me.

  I sat up a little straighter. ‘No kidding! What kind of a job?’

  The grin got bigger. ‘I’m not gonna tell you.’ In a singsong voice. The world was conspiring to annoy me as much as possible and my best friend was leading the opposition.

  ‘Come on,’ I whined. ‘I had a real bad day. People shot at me.’

  ‘OK. It’s an assistant position.’ I waited, but that was it.

  ‘With whom?’ Let it be known that stress brings out the best in my grammar.

  ‘I don’t want to jinx it,’ Angie said. ‘I’ll tell you when I hear if I got it.’

  Who had the energy to argue? Well, probably Patrick did because he never seemed to lose his verve. Whoever shot at me? They probably had tons of pep and were arranging to bump me off in some other way even as I pondered the question. I mean, Trench had said he’d have police cruisers pass by my apartment building more often than usual, but what were the odds they’d be there at the exact moment someone decided to off me? Luckily, I had Angie, who would blow up anyone who tried to harm me, no matter what. She never slept, so it was basically a 24/7 kind of arrangement. She was an amazing friend. I had to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  I told her OK, she didn’t have to explain anything until she got/didn’t get the job, which she estimated would take a few days. I got up off the barstool and headed to the couch to close my eyes just as Angie, who had switched to raised-leg crunches, flipped over for push-ups. I got more tired just watching her. So I stopped watching, put my head back, and examined the insides of my eyelids, which I found rewarding.

  Joseph Dombrowski, the attorney for Michael Bryan, had taken my phone call on the third ring.

  ‘Michael isn’t asking for anything unreasonable,’ he’d insisted after I explained that I was Cynthia’s new attorney. ‘They both have adequate resources but Mrs Bryan is an established celebrity in the entertainment business and her income is more substantial than Michael’s at this point. Why shouldn’t she bear the heavier load, especially since it was Michael who filed to end the marriage?’

  ‘Exactly for those reasons,’ I countered, having anticipated this plan of attack and not bothering to correct him about my client’s name. There’d be time for that. ‘Cynthia’s income is very high right now but careers in the movie and TV business are short. She can’t be expected to maintain this level of financial stability forever. And since her husband did file for the divorce, it’s clear he has a more urgent need to end the marriage. I won’t speculate on why.’

  I could hear the smile in Dombrowski’s voice. ‘Oh, speculate away, Ms Moss,’ he said. ‘There was no infidelity on Michael Bryan’s part.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed. ‘And there wasn’t any on Cynthia’s, either. I would have guessed that Michael filed for divorce because his mother told him to. How far off am I?’

  There was a momentary silence. ‘I don’t comment on the mother,’ Dombrowski said.

  I’d struck a nerve. Maybe what Cynthia had told me wasn’t that far off the mark. Not about the couple reconciling without the mother hovering over her son, because that wasn’t any of my business, but if Michael really was that far under Wendy’s thumb, it might explain why he was being so uncharacteristically (according to Cynthia) unreasonable about the terms of their divorce.

  ‘OK,’ I said, although Dombrowski hardly needed my permission to not talk about Michael Bryan’s mother. ‘So when can we get together and talk about some compromise that doesn’t actually take everything my client owns for no reason at all?’

  ‘We can’t.’ The answer came immediately and it sounded definitive. ‘Michael will not budge off one single request in that agreement. If you turn it down, I promise you we’ll come back with something even more favorable to Michael, go to court and take our chances with a judge, probably one who’s a man and, in this county, one who’s been divorced and feels fleeced. Do you want to go that route?’

  You don’t often get a declaration of war sent quite so clearly these days. And they would, I’d assume, usually sound angrier than the one from Dombrowski. He was just confident, or was trying to sound confident. It was working. I was a little unnerved.

  But you don’t win cases by letting your opponent know their tactics are effective against you. ‘I guess we’ll see you in court, then,’ I said. ‘Because Cynthia Sutton is not going to let you pick her pockets and then tell her how nice she looks in those jeans.’

  Let’s just say we’d left it at that.

  Angie stood up, having done more exercise in the past half-hour than I’d done in the previous year and yes, I do actually run down to the tiendita every now and again. She didn’t even have the good grace to be excessively sweaty. ‘What do you want to order for dinner?’ she asked.

  Now, I need to be careful here because otherwise my behavior in this situation might be seen as petty or mean, neither of which was intended. But the fact was that Angie had refused to touch her savings account and was now living in what was essentially my apartment since she was paying no rent. And she was eating whatever food I bought. So the idea of ordering delivery and then paying for it myself was not a new one; it was the fact that she just expected it that hit my last nerve on this incredibly long and trying day.

  ‘Why don’t you spend your time during the day when you’re not working and learn to cook?’ I asked. ‘We could save me some money if we didn’t order in every single night.’

  Again, I feel some explanation is in order. We didn’t, in fact, order in every night. It just felt that way because we did it more than I hoped we would. And I did think Angie should take the time now to learn some new skills while she was looking for a job. She’d had this interview today and that was good, but she’d had a lot of interviews in the past six months and not one had panned out, so there was no reason to expect this one would be any different.

  She didn’t seem terribly offended. Angie is great at deflecting the things she doesn’t want to deal with. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Because, you know, I can’t cook at all, can I?’ (In the interest of full disclosure, Angie is a really good cook, particularly of Italian food, and I am, you know, not.)

  I let out a long sigh. ‘You know what kind of day I’ve had,’ I said, as if that gave me a pass for being a jerk.

  ‘Yeah. And you know that I’ve been actively searching for a source of income so I could pay my half out here. Remember that when you decided to move to LA you did it because you’d been offered a really good job. I did it because I wanted to save your life.’

  And I couldn’t even accuse her of exaggeration.

  I honestly felt like I didn’t have the strength to open my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and it didn’t even sound convincing to me. ‘You are a good cook. And you are looking for work, and I hope you get the job you interviewed for today. But sometimes things pile up on me and you’re the only person around for me to unload on.’

  ‘See? If you’d admit that Patrick is in love with you, then you could be with him and I wouldn’t get unloaded on so often.’ I couldn’t see her but I knew she was smiling so joyfully I’d want to pummel her. And Angie, if she wanted to, could kill me in at least eight different ways.

  ‘Patrick. Is. Not. In Love. With. Me.’

  ‘Think what you want.’

  It was just as well that my phone rang just then because I didn’t have a sharp, witty comeback to use. The Caller ID indicated the call was coming from my office, but not from Holly Wentworth or a
ny of the other attorneys. It was from the front desk, which was only a little odd. That’s who you get when the message is not from a partner or a specific colleague.

  ‘Ms Moss, this is Janine at the front desk.’ OK, so I knew Janine. ‘I wanted you to know there was a call about one of your clients from the Santa Monica Police.’

  Maddie Forsythe? Just out of the blue at the end of the day? How was that possible?

  ‘What did they want with Ms Forsythe?’ I asked Janine.

  ‘Forsythe?’ She sounded confused. ‘They called about Ms Sutton.’

  Cynthia? ‘What about her?’ Since when do the cops call about a divorce?

  ‘She was arrested for murder.’

  Having my eyes closed had been so good. I rubbed them but it just wasn’t the same. For a moment I forgot I was talking to Janine, or for that matter anyone else. Angie looked at me as if I might need a quick trip to the ER.

  ‘She offed the husband, didn’t she?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Janine said. ‘They’re charging her with killing his mother.’

  TEN

  Cynthia Sutton didn’t look like the first time I’d met her in Judge Coffey’s courtroom. She wasn’t about to get unhinged because someone didn’t know who she was. She wasn’t waving her posture around in everyone’s face. She didn’t even seem as confident as she’d been in the conference room at Seaton, Taylor, and that hadn’t been terribly confident.

  Right now, she was scared.

  Without makeup, her hair uncombed, wearing sweats, Cynthia was almost unrecognizable. She was so dowdy she could have been me.

  I sat down next to her in the interrogation room of the Santa Monica police station. I’d let the arresting officers know I was Cynthia’s attorney and that she would be answering a grand total of no questions tonight. They’d just have to go and watch Law & Order reruns if they wanted something that quick.

  The room was as nondescript as you’d imagine, with linoleum tile floors and a plain white ceiling. The walls were painted in something resembling a color, probably beige. Or off-white. Or something that nobody had ever thought about in history and would continue to not think about until they got painted again, at which time no doubt it would take a meeting of the city council to approve the new color, which would probably be beige. Or off-white.

  From the outside, the Santa Monica police department is exactly what would be expected from a town with an amusement pier and a desperate need to be liked, mostly by rich people. It was modern and dynamic and pleasing to the eye, which is a strange thing for a police station to be. Inside, on the other hand, it was just a police station.

  Cynthia had not been brought in from the jail section, which is larger than in most city precincts. She hadn’t been arraigned yet and would not be until the next morning. I might be able to get into night court to ask for her release, but first I had to determine if I had a chance of convincing a judge to do that.

  I’d picked up the police report on the death of Wendy Bryan (legal name) and it was a doozy. This was just the preliminary findings, by the way, not the full report that would be issued after the medical examiner’s autopsy and any further indications from the investigating detective, who I saw was named Edward Brisbane and not K.C. Trench. More to my disadvantage if I was going to defend Cynthia, which I hoped I was not.

  ‘It says here that they found you in the room next to where the body was found, in your mother-in-law’s home, and that you were curled up on the floor and crying,’ I told Cynthia. ‘Is that true?’ I wanted to see if the cops who had first arrived on the scene had exaggerated the facts and made too quick an arrest.

  ‘Pretty much.’ Cynthia’s voice wavered. She was fighting back tears now, too. ‘I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even stand. They practically had to pick me up to take me to the police car.’

  My first priority was to calm Cynthia down. My second was to try and get her released on her own recognizance (California is among the states that have ended the practice of cash bail). My third, but perhaps most important, was to find her another lawyer. I’d done one murder trial in LA; it had involved a television star and it had been perhaps – no, not perhaps – the most harrowing experience of my life. I had no desire to relive that ordeal.

  ‘First things first,’ I told her. ‘Tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out and don’t lie to me. I’m your lawyer, for right now, and I can’t be blindsided with things the police will say and I won’t know. Why were you in Wendy’s house?’

  ‘Michael texted me.’ Cynthia was still in some sort of shock but I was forcing her to focus. I’d recommend her attorney have her examined by a doctor as soon as possible. It could have some bearing on her defense, assuming she didn’t want to plead guilty and hope for the best in negotiations with the prosecutor. ‘He said he wanted to talk about the divorce and it should be on neutral ground. He said his mother’s place was neutral ground, can you believe it?’

  I had so many questions, most of which were why didn’t you say no? But I let her talk. There would be time to fill in the gaps when I had the general framework of the case.

  ‘So you got there and Michael wasn’t in the house?’ There had been no mention of Cynthia’s husband in the police report.

  ‘That’s right. I walked in and the place seemed deserted. I called a few times but nobody answered. And then …’

  I waited, but nothing followed. ‘And then what?’ I asked.

  ‘And then …’ Another long pause, then Cynthia took a deep breath and the words came out in a torrent. ‘I went into the center hall and I found her on the floor. She was bleeding, like, all over the place and I didn’t scream, I just ran over to her, but she was already dead, I swear, Sandy!’

  I put my hand on her forearm. ‘OK. OK. So why didn’t you call the police? They said the nine-one-one call came in from a cell phone that Wendy owned.’

  Cynthia sniffed. ‘I was just so shocked. I guess I ran into the den, you know, the next room, and I just sat there and cried. The next thing I knew there were cops standing there with me.’

  I glanced at the report again so Cynthia could compose herself. You learn as an attorney not to try and play psychotherapist, but you’re not devoid of feelings. The woman had indeed gone through an incredibly rough night, whether she’d killed Wendy Bryan or not.

  When I felt a reasonable interval had gone by, I asked, ‘The report says she was stabbed with a statuette? How is that possible? Was it a really sharp one?’

  Cynthia’s face took on a small fraction of the haughtiness she’d shown at our first meeting. ‘It was a TeeVee award,’ she said, something she clearly thought I should have known. ‘The figure on the statue has wings that are very pointy. That’s what Wendy was stabbed with.’

  OK, so it was a TeeVee award. Now, who in that family might own a TeeVee award?

  ‘Was Wendy at all involved in the television business?’ I asked hopefully.

  Cynthia once again regarded me as if I had just asked her what I should be breathing, that I’d heard air was good but wanted the straight story from her. ‘Of course not,’ she answered. ‘She was in the art business. The TeeVee was mine.’

  ‘And the police report said you were found holding it in the adjacent room, but the globe the statue was holding had been bent down. Did that make it easier to stab her?’ There was no point in beating around the bush. If Cynthia killed Wendy, it was time to start planning for the plea bargain.

  ‘How would I know?’ Cynthia said.

  I felt it was best not to answer that question. ‘Why were you holding the award when the police found you?’ If the answer was, so it would be easier to find the murder weapon with my fingerprints on it, that would make things easier. For me.

  Cynthia shook her head. ‘I really don’t remember,’ she said. ‘I saw her on the floor and I saw the TeeVee next to it, all bent like that, and the next thing I knew I was crying in the den, on the floor, not even the sofa.’

  ‘And you were holding the T
eeVee,’ I pointed out.

  Cynthia didn’t have the time to respond because the door opened and Patrick McNabb walked in. That would have been surreal enough, but Patrick being Patrick there had to be added an air of theatricality. He was wearing a wig of curly hair and a pencil mustache that his makeup artist had clearly glued on sometime that day.

  ‘Cynthia, dear, I got in the car as soon as I heard!’ Patrick flew to her side and knelt by Cynthia’s chair.

  ‘How … how …’ That was me. Cynthia seemed completely at ease with Patrick just showing up out of nowhere in an outlandish costume. ‘How did you get in here?’

  Patrick looked up, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was there. ‘Sandy, thank goodness!’ He turned toward Cynthia again. ‘If anyone can get you out of this, Sandy can, love. She’s the best ever. Don’t you worry about a thing.’

  Cynthia, beaming at Patrick with something nauseatingly approaching adoration, turned her attention back to me because Patrick had told her she should. I spent the time trying to get myself back into a professional state of mind.

  ‘Patrick,’ I said finally, ‘how did you get into this room? There are I don’t know how many cops out there whose job it is specifically not to let you in.’

  Patrick took a seat next to Cynthia, which in itself was an accomplishment. He’d had to take the one on my side of the table that had been left in case two detectives would want to interrogate a suspect at the same time. He smiled at me as well, confident in me at the exact moment I didn’t want him to be.

  ‘There are a good many police officers out there,’ he said. ‘You’re right. And they were adamant about my not being in here until I told them who I am.’

  The multiple personality thing again. Oy. ‘And who is it you think you are today?’ I asked.