What seemed most likely was that I could prove to the judge (because an appeal is not a retrial, so there would be no jury) that Sergeant LeRoy had been, to abuse a word, overzealous in her pursuit of Maddie Forsythe because she was hoping to find out who Maddie’s pimp was and therefore move up the chain of command. Problem was that Maddie actually wasn’t a prostitute so there was no pimp and now LeRoy was facing the prospect of looking incredibly foolish in front of a judge, something I sincerely hoped to encourage.
I called in Jon Irvin, the attorney who had started at Seaton, Taylor a year or so before me and who Holly had appointed my second chair for Cynthia’s case. Jon had a background as a public defender, something he’d done for exactly six months before the frustration had sent him looking for a more lucrative, if not nobler, branch of the law to practice. He was the only other lawyer in the firm with this kind of criminal law experience and, now that I was being forced back into that area, I figured Jon could provide some critical help, noting weaknesses in my case and helping me to bolster the arguments I’d be making. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be upset that he was essentially my right-hand man despite his longer tenure at the firm. When parents wanted to explain the word easygoing to their children, they showed the kids a video of Jon doing anything.
He sat down in the client chair, which was considerably cushier than mine. Jon was in his early forties, a few years older than me (he’d come to the law later in life than I had, having first tried to make it as a screenwriter – this was LA after all) and probably eight to ten pounds heavier than he’d been in law school. He said he’d only started eating well when he had gotten married. His wife was a graphic designer, I thought.
We discussed Maddie’s case for a few minutes and then Jon looked over my notes for an opening statement. ‘I think you’re going the wrong way trying to tear down the cop,’ he said after a moment to consider. ‘People don’t like cops, but they are afraid to see them disrespected. It makes juries uncomfortable.’
That shot a big fat hole right through my main line of defense and I wasn’t about to give up without a fight. ‘But that’s the crux of the case,’ I said. ‘The fact is that LeRoy really did want to raise her profile in the department by making a few busts of suburban prostitutes, of which I’m sure there are some.’
‘There are.’ Jon sounded quite convincing. I felt it was best not to ask how he’d come by this information.
‘She had been working mostly traffic control and was trying to get some attention. She couldn’t stumble into a big murder case or supersede an actual detective, so this was one step up. She coerced Maddie into some online shenanigans and then entrapped her without Maddie even knowing it. How can I argue anything else when the facts are so clear?’
Jon took a long pause. ‘Shenanigans?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I think you need to find another way around it. You can discredit the evidence without discrediting the officer. Particularly a female officer trying to make a vice bust. It’s going to make you look mean and juries hate that.’
I moaned. Another man telling me how women should treat each other. Worse, he was probably right. ‘Madelyn Forsythe isn’t a prostitute,’ I said.
‘No, she isn’t. But Sergeant LeRoy isn’t a dirty cop, either, and you can’t make that stick.’
I closed my eyes. He had a point and I hated that. ‘This is going to take a long time,’ I said finally. ‘You want to get some lunch?’
‘What? And give up my planned excursion to the Seaton, Taylor cafeteria?’
We decided to go to a Japanese restaurant two blocks from the office, where I could get sushi and Jon could get something that wasn’t sushi. He hates fish. To each one’s own, as long as I can get sushi.
But we hadn’t gotten more than fifty feet from the revolving doors of the Seaton, Taylor building when I noticed a man in a denim jacket walking toward us. It wasn’t the man so much as the jacket. The temperature was well over eighty degrees Fahrenheit that day (welcome to fall in Southern California), so the jacket seemed like a strange thing to be wearing when everyone else on the street, including me, was sleeveless. Even the businessmen in suits had long since abandoned their jackets inside their air-conditioned offices and rolled up their shirtsleeves. Scandalous.
So the denim jacket caught my eye and so did the way this guy was walking directly toward me, as if I were his destination. At the last possible second, I remembered Lieutenant Trench’s warning about people in high places being angry with me.
Instinctively I veered away from the guy as he approached, but in doing so I stumbled all over Jon’s feet and that made him stumble as we headed for the street. Then I wasn’t sure what was happening but I heard a loud report like a tire hitting a really sharp nail at eighty miles an hour on the New Jersey Turnpike and don’t ask me how I know what that sounds like. People shouted and some ran. My ankles gave out from the stumbling and I ended up on the concrete, more embarrassed than injured. I had scraped my left knee a little and rendered the pants from this suit unusable but that was about it.
I sat up and turned toward Jon, who had also sat down on the pavement. ‘What happened?’ I asked, because I figured he’d had a better vantage point before I’d basically tripped over him.
Jon stuck out his right hand and pointed, but his mouth just opened and closed without any sound coming out. And then I saw the red stain on the lower part of his shirt, just on the left side. Jon, having used up his energy, fell back on the pavement and I just managed to cushion the blow the back of his skull would have sustained by catching him and lowering his head slowly.
‘He’s been shot!’ a woman shouted, as if that hadn’t been obvious enough.
Just to make sure I was included in the festival of redundant clichés, I screamed, ‘Call nine-one-one!’ despite the fact that at least four people already had their phones out.
I leaned over Jon. ‘You’re gonna be OK,’ I promised him. And I’ll admit to being a jerk and saying it quietly, so that if he died no one would know I’d assured him of that except me. ‘They’ll take care of you. Hang on.’
He looked at me but I wasn’t sure whether he could actually see my face or not. He closed his eyes and very deliberately, with great effort, said, ‘Why?’
I wished I had an answer to that. I had already scanned the crowd for the guy in the denim jacket but he was nowhere to be seen. Probably three blocks away by now. He’d probably taken the jacket off, too.
I removed my own jacket and rolled it up to put under Jon’s head. His midsection wasn’t exactly gushing blood but it was definitely not living the good life at the moment. He was breathing but his respiration was shallow and where the hell was the ambulance already?
Actually, it was pulling up at that moment, and two people, a man and a woman, pretty much exploded out of it. The man immediately began extracting a gurney from the back of the van and the woman rushed over to Jon and me.
‘When was he shot?’ she asked me. No fooling around with details.
‘Like, two minutes ago.’ Or a half-hour. Like I knew.
She examined the wound and noted its location. ‘Missed his heart by a mile but he could still be in trouble,’ she said mostly to herself.
‘Trouble?’ Was I going to have to call Jon’s wife? Could I remember her name? Did they have kids? Why couldn’t I remember anything?
‘We’re not going to worry about that now,’ the EMT said. ‘We’re going to get him to where they can help.’
Holy shit. That meant Jon could die.
‘Can I go with him?’ I asked.
‘Not in the ambulance,’ she said definitively. ‘We’re going to take him to SoCal. That’s right near here. You can follow. But you know the cops will be here any second and they’re going to need you to answer questions.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And I know exactly which detective is going to show up.’
THIRTEEN
Detective Lieutenant K.C. Trench was not
a gleeful man. Nor was he an unfeeling one. But I decided three minutes after he arrived (when the EMTs had already driven Jon away and I had in fact put in a call to his wife, whose name was Diane, and imparted the bad news) that Trench was in a perverse way enjoying this terrifying situation.
‘Two shooting attempts in two days,’ he said after Sergeant Roberts had thoroughly grilled me on everything I’d seen, mostly the man in the denim jacket, whose face I had not seen clearly. I hadn’t actually gotten a look at the gun either, largely because I didn’t know it was there until after the shot was fired. ‘That’s a new record even for you, isn’t it, Ms Moss?’
‘It’s not funny, Trench.’ I wasn’t in the mood. A friend and colleague had just been shot because of me (probably) and carted off to the hospital. Witty banter wasn’t really at the top of my priority list.
‘I wasn’t suggesting for a single second that it was,’ Trench responded. ‘I was commenting on the fact that I’d warned you about this just yesterday and yet there you were, without Patrick McNabb, walking out of a building in the middle of a major city and not employing any security at all. Does that strike you as wise?’
‘If you’re trying to get to the point that my friend was shot and could die and it’s my fault, I’m a mile ahead of you, Lieutenant.’ I was noticing my breathing. I was taking deep breaths. Not rapid ones. I wasn’t hyperventilating. That was worth knowing.
Trench watched me sit down on the steps to the building again. Standing just seemed a little too much effort right at the moment. ‘I was not trying to ascribe blame,’ he said quietly. ‘The only person responsible here is the one who fired the gun. And the more you can tell us about him, the closer we can get to making him pay for his actions. No, Ms Moss, my intended purpose here was to impress you with the seriousness of the situation you’re in.’
He was saying something without saying it or, more to the point, saying only enough that I would be frightened without actually being informed. ‘Lieutenant, if you think I’m not taking it seriously that a friend of mine just got shot a foot and a half from where I was standing, and that it’s more than likely the shooter was coming for me, I think you’re not reading the situation very well. And since I know you’re very good at reading situations, I’m willing to bet that’s just a way to warn me to be careful. And it would really help if I knew what I was being careful about. So are you going to tell me what’s going on or not?’
Trench didn’t look at me and that was unusual. He was a man who made eye contact because he wanted to observe you and make judgments. Instead he stared away from me, toward the street where the guy in the denim jacket had been walking toward me with the intention of shooting me. If the lieutenant wanted me to be aware of my apparent danger, he was having a bang-up day.
So to speak.
‘The man who shot Mr Irvin: was he tall or short?’
What was Trench up to, other than not answering my question? ‘I’ve already done my best describing him to Sergeant Roberts,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes, but you were still in shock from the events that had happened. Was he tall or short?’
‘He was a little taller than average. But since I don’t really know what average height is for a man, I can’t give you numbers. You want me to guess his weight as well?’ I was getting tired. After all, I’d been involved in my second shooting in two days and I was trying to pull teeth out of the police detective obviously vying for the Lieutenant Coy of the Year award. In Los Angeles they like nothing better than giving out awards.
‘If you could that would be helpful.’ Not just coy. Trench was approaching cute, which was an unusually long drive for him.
‘I’m going to go with average,’ I said. ‘Now how about you tell me who I should be afraid of and then I can take the necessary steps to protect myself, since it seems the LAPD might be among the suspects.’
That got him, just as I’d intended it to. Trench turned back in my direction and, if he had been capable of an expression of rage, I’m sure this would have been it. His face was two degrees angrier than normal. ‘If you’re insinuating that the Los Angeles Police Department is trying to kill you, Ms Moss, I’d advise you to turn your attention elsewhere.’
I stood up to look him as close to in-the-eyes as I could get. ‘You were the one who spoke in hushed tones about people in high places being upset with me and you suggested it might have something to do with a trial I’m working on,’ I shot back. ‘So if you don’t want me to assume that the cops are at least involved in something that involves me possibly getting killed, why not tell me what you were talking about?’
Again his expression went to his standby, which was impassive but knowledgeable. ‘I am not at liberty to tell you any more than I already have,’ Trench said. He turned as if he was going to walk away and then pivoted on his heel and faced me again. ‘But rest assured that the LAPD has at least one member who will do his best to see to it that you remain alive.’
I slow-clapped him to show his planned exit line had not landed as he intended. ‘Thanks for caring, Lieutenant.’
‘I was referring to Sergeant Roberts. He hates an incomplete suspect description.’
‘Uh-huh. This is bothering you, Trench. There’s something you want to tell me and, for whatever reasons, you feel like you can’t. That’s odd for you. I think maybe you need to unburden yourself or at least advise me on the kind of protection you think I need right now.’
From behind me I heard the familiar voice that couldn’t be there but it seemed always was. ‘Protection!’
Trench looked past me and his mouth tightened a little. ‘Mr McNabb,’ he said.
‘Lieutenant! So good to see you again. Has something happened here? I know you are assigned to the homicide division, aren’t you?’
Patrick walked up to my right and shook Trench’s hand, which was something Trench clearly found less than desirable. Patrick was old school, when people used to shake hands a lot. Trench probably didn’t like it since he was seven years old because it would assume a level of familiarity that would make it impossible for him to be impartial and deductive, so was therefore something to avoid.
‘We also investigate attempted homicides,’ the detective said, disengaging from Patrick’s hand as soon as he conceivably could. ‘And I am finished investigating this crime scene so I will be on my way.’
He turned and strode off, discreetly using hand sanitizer, before Patrick could question his statement, which meant Patrick would immediately begin questioning me.
My best battle plan was a preemptive strike. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked Patrick before he could ask me anything.
‘Why is he here?’ The other ever-present voice. Sure enough, Angie appeared just behind Patrick, her eyes darting around until she saw the bloodstain on the concrete. ‘Sand! What happened?’
There was nothing else to do; I told them the whole story, left out nothing because Angie would know, and sat back down on the concrete steps. The area had been cordoned off with yellow police tape so people were walking around it but I, privileged as I was, could stay inside. It was a way of keeping people away. Except Angie and Patrick, who just showed up whenever they decided I needed them. Whether I did or not.
Patrick’s usual buoyant smile flattened itself into concern. ‘Someone shot at you and I wasn’t here?’ He’s an intelligent man despite his desperate attempts to prove otherwise, and he was putting two and two together and coming up with the right solution. ‘Does that mean they weren’t aiming for me yesterday?’
‘That seems to be what Lieutenant Trench thinks,’ I said. ‘He’s hinting at something but he’s being very Lieutenant Trench about it.’
‘What do you want from a man who won’t tell you his first name?’ Angie pointed out.
Patrick reached a hand down to me and I took it. He pulled me to my feet a little bit more fervently than I might have expected. Patrick was worried about me. ‘You are not going to argue with me, Sandy. I am hiring security p
ersonnel to stay with you and you will do what they tell you to do, right? I will not allow any resistance.’
‘I’m not going to offer any,’ I told him. ‘I’m scared enough. Thank you, Patrick. Will Angie and I be seeing your pal Philip at our apartment soon?’
‘Oh good lord, no,’ Patrick answered. ‘Philip is on my personal detail. No, we’ll be getting you an entirely new group. In fact, I’ll get my assistant on that immediately.’
Then he did what I should have expected and totally didn’t. He turned toward Angie and said, ‘Would you please call Executive Security and tell them I want a full team on Sandy ASAP?’
Angie nodded. ‘I’m way ahead of you.’ She had already pulled a much more up-to-date cell phone than the one I knew she owned and was pushing its screen furiously. She put it to her ear. ‘I’m calling Mr Anthony. This is Patrick McNabb’s executive assistant.’
I looked at Patrick, who was trying to suppress his smile. ‘She told me she had a lunch meeting today that was a second interview for an assistant position,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t I see this coming?’
‘Because you see Angie as your friend the ice-cream manager from New Jersey,’ Patrick said. ‘I see her as someone who has a great deal of knowledge, terrific instincts and unlimited potential.’
Angie was still talking on the phone behind me. I regarded Patrick very seriously. ‘Just promise me you won’t sleep with her.’ Because I knew Angie and I knew how men saw her.
Patrick looked lightly offended. ‘Never,’ he said solemnly. ‘That would be unspeakably unprofessional.’
‘Not to mention it would piss me off.’ Patrick, without intending to do so, tended to leave women crying in his wake. That was not going to happen to Angie.
‘Message received. You need not worry. I just got out of a painful breakup.’
Judgment at Santa Monica Page 8
