Judgment at Santa Monica

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘Thank you, Detective.’ I ended the call as quickly as I could. He’d given me the weapon I’d need in court and didn’t know it. I called Nate.

  ‘Get this man out of here.’ Some people start with ‘hello’, and others are Nate Garrigan.

  ‘I will in a minute. But first I had something to ask you about.’

  Nate’s attention snapped into place. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to send you two pictures. Tell me what you notice.’ I moved the one photograph of Wendy’s body and the expensive carpet next to it onto my desktop, then added a still photograph of Cynthia on the floor in the den holding the dripping statuette. I sent those two photos to Nate and waited.

  ‘OK, I’ve got the two pictures,’ he said. ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘Don’t concentrate on the body so much,’ I answered.

  ‘If you insist.’ Nate has a dry wit. You could use it for kindling.

  ‘Pay attention to the floor next to the body, particularly to the left, which leads into the den,’ I went on. ‘See the area I’m talking about?’

  There was a long pause while Nate looked it over. In the background I could hear Patrick asking if that was me on the phone. Nate didn’t answer.

  He did respond to me, though. ‘It just looks like floor.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Now look at the picture of Cynthia in the den. Look at the award statue she has in her hands.’

  Nate is gruff and likes to play the part of the crusty old ex-cop who’s exasperated with laypeople getting in his way, which he is. But he is also really smart and observant. ‘There’s no trail of blood from the scene of the murder to the place where they found her holding the bloody award statue,’ he said finally. ‘If she’d killed the woman in the one room and then walked into the other holding the murder weapon, there’d be blood all over the floor because it’s still there in the picture in the den.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I could practically hear the lightbulb going on over Nate’s head. ‘So it’s possible that either the body was moved or the object our client had in her hand wasn’t the murder weapon, but was intended to look that way.’

  I felt myself grinning. ‘Welcome to the same case, Nate,’ I said.

  ‘We might not have a guilty defendant on our hands,’ Nate said, mostly to himself.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’

  I could hear Patrick in the background. ‘Haven’t I been saying that all along?’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘We need to mobilize.’

  Patrick McNabb had invited me to his new home for dinner to ‘plot strategy’ in the upcoming Cynthia Sutton case. I was going to decline but Angie was of course going to be there, and she’d spend the evening answering questions about me if I wasn’t in attendance.

  Right now, at a magnificent dining table in Patrick’s ‘sitting room’ (I couldn’t imagine what might have been lurking in the dining room if this was the ancillary), Patrick was holding court as only someone with a really healthy ego can. Although Patrick’s ego is far from the most massive one I’ve met in the entertainment business since I moved to LA.

  ‘Mobilize?’ Angie asked. Given that this was a gathering after business hours, she was not ‘on duty’, as she and Patrick had both assured me. Angie was a guest like me, and Richard Tolbin, the expert on blood spatter Patrick had met while on set on a movie called Deadly Thoughts, and one of the producers of Torn, Lee Browning (‘like the poet’).

  Henderson Meadows, the butler I knew from Patrick’s ‘bachelor pad’, had returned to his native London when Patrick’s trial was over, and – given all that had come out in the courtroom – it was probably best. So now there was a ‘skeleton staff’ consisting of a cook named Luann and a butler called Jason who was considerably less stiff than Meadows. Luann had made us a lovely rack of lamb and Jason was a calm, almost invisible presence, who always seemed to be in the right place when something was needed, having anticipated the problem and already solved it.

  The wild card in this merry group was Emily Webster, whose name didn’t register with me until Patrick called her Emmie. That, I recalled, was the name of the real-estate agent to whom Patrick had been, until I’d stuck my nose in, engaged to be married. She had not glared at me with unmitigated malice. Yet.

  ‘Yes, mobilize,’ Patrick answered Angie. ‘Cynthia’ (who was oddly not present but being discussed at length) ‘is in danger of a very long prison sentence for a murder she did not commit. The police want her to be guilty because that makes them look good and it makes their job easier. So they’re not looking into other possibilities. That means we must find the real killer ourselves.’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ I said loudly. All the heads in the room turned in my direction. ‘Patrick. You should have learned this the last time. We don’t look for the real killer. That’s not our job … my job! I mount the best possible defense for Cynthia, and I think we’ll have a pretty good one by the time the case reaches a courtroom. And if Nate turns up anything in his investigation that leads to the conclusion that someone else killed Wendy Bryan, he will be thrilled to give that information to the police, whose job it is to find the real killer. We – I – don’t do that. It’s not TV. The killer doesn’t confess on the witness stand. OK?’

  ‘Of course!’ Patrick was a master of agreeing to something he had no intention of doing. But as a trained actor and a good one, he could convince himself he believed it at the time he said it and that, for Patrick, made all the difference. For the rest of us it was exhausting.

  ‘I mean it, Patrick.’

  ‘He knows.’ Emily’s eyes didn’t bore holes in me. They weren’t even really trying. I was probably projecting. For all I knew, Patrick hadn’t even mentioned my name when he broke off the engagement. Right?

  ‘Just want to make sure,’ I said.

  ‘So what should our next move be, Sandy?’ Now Patrick was going to pretend to defer to my authority and expertise, while actually plotting, probably as someone with multiple personality disorder, to make my life sixteen times more difficult and be charming doing it. It’s an art.

  The trick now was to make it seem like I was including Patrick in whatever plans I had to defend Cynthia while really giving him nothing to do at all. But Lee wasn’t going to make it easy.

  ‘We could host a fund-raiser,’ he said. ‘Have something on television, maybe, to raise money for Cynthia’s defense.’

  ‘I am Cynthia’s defense, and believe me, she can afford it,’ I said, careful not to emphasize the she because I was almost certain Patrick was paying her legal bills. Why? ‘No, what I think I’m going to have to do is in Richard’s wheelhouse.’

  Richard started at the mention of his name, probably lost in thought about patterns of spatter from the rack of lamb, or maybe he was thinking about who might win the Dodger game that night. Either one of those things was possible.

  ‘Me?’ he asked. It was like he was waking up. I realized we hadn’t exactly been scintillating company, but a nap seemed somewhat out of place.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’m interested in your analysis of these two pictures, if you don’t mind taking a look.’ I called up the two photographs from the scene of Wendy Bryan’s murder on my phone.

  ‘Busman’s holiday,’ Patrick chimed in from across the table.

  ‘Are you showing off those gross pictures again?’ Angie asked. She was teasing me but no one else at the table would know that.

  ‘He’s a professional,’ I said of Richard, speaking of him as if he weren’t actually there himself. ‘He can bill me for the time.’

  ‘It’s perfectly fine,’ Richard said, reaching out for the phone I was offering. ‘I don’t mind answering a question if it’ll help.’

  Richard turned the phone sideways to get a larger view. He did not react at all to the gruesome image, no doubt having seen a few even more vicious (I did not want to think about those) in his time. He simply looked studious and engrossed.

&nbs
p; After swiping from one of the pictures to the other, he looked over at me and said, ‘The TeeVee award is allegedly the murder weapon?’

  I nodded. ‘I’m impressed you knew by sight it was a TeeVee.’

  He shook his head lightly from side to side, probably without knowing he had. ‘I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life,’ Richard said. ‘You get to know the hardware. And I can tell you that what’s sitting in Cynthia’s hands here is not a real TeeVee award.’

  There was a strange silence around the table. Finally I managed to activate my vocal cords. ‘What?’ I sounded as if I’d just swallowed some ground glass.

  ‘A TeeVee award is solid,’ Richard explained. ‘It’s strong. There is no way an average, or even unusually strong, human being could bend the arms and the globe down like that to get to the wings that were used as weapons to stab the woman. That’s a fake TeeVee.’

  ‘What?’ Emmie said.

  I decided on the spot that I’d been right. Emily wasn’t good enough for Patrick.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dinner wasn’t really so much fun after that.

  It wasn’t that Richard’s comment had been necessarily bad for Cynthia’s defense; it was just that it was so unexpected I didn’t know what to make of it, and I tend to think such things are bad until proven otherwise. But we’d had a lovely dessert that Luann had constructed of chocolate in a way that would make even Paul Hollywood smile; it was a cake and a piece of art all at the same time.

  But I did notice that only Angie and I were really enjoying the amazing calorie-packed object. Everyone else seemed to be picking at it, to the point that I almost expected Angie to ask Lee, sitting next to her, if she could have some of his delicate buttercream frosting. In a remarkable demonstration of restraint, she did not, but she did agree to take some of the cake home. And was told we could, so since no one else asked we drove home in separate cars, each with enough rich chocolate cake for six people.

  Life with Angie. I would have only taken one extra slice. But then I supposed donating an extravagant dessert to a Hollywood soup kitchen wouldn’t have been sending the best message. Let them eat cake, indeed.

  Angie got home first, so the lights were on and the door unlocked when I got to the apartment. She had filled our refrigerator with dessert for the next two weeks and I had an equal amount in a bag Jason had anticipated I would need and had already delineated with my name in flowing script. Jason was a keeper.

  ‘You had to ask for dessert to take home?’ I said the minute I closed the apartment door.

  ‘What’d you want me to do?’ Angie countered. ‘Let all that chocolate go into the trash? It wasn’t my fault nobody else there has eaten dessert since 2002.’

  I put my enormous bag of confectionery on the counter in the kitchen. I’d push Angie’s cake out of the way in the fridge later; this story was too good. ‘So what’s the deal with Emmie? Patrick broke off the engagement and she still showed up for dinner?’

  ‘Well, Patrick didn’t exactly break it off. He made his executive assistant do it.’

  I stared at her. ‘You broke off Patrick’s engagement?’

  ‘Yeah. She was pissed. It’s sort of her default emotion.’

  ‘I bet. But she showed up for dinner.’

  ‘I think she has hopes,’ Angie said.

  That was when there was a knock on our apartment door and I stiffened up. I’d already been shot at twice and Judy was off (although her ‘relief’, a woman named Carolyn, was stationed outside the apartment door – but what if an assailant had managed to overpower Carolyn?). I felt more secure when Judy was around.

  Angie tensed up a little too, meaning that she grabbed a knife out of the block on the kitchen counter and wielded it like a weapon. I was spending my time cursing the landlord for not putting security cameras – which under any other circumstances I would consider a violation of my privacy – outside each apartment or at least in every hallway.

  So I texted Carolyn: Who’s out there?

  Almost immediately came the answer: It’s OK. That didn’t tell me who it was, but it gave me the courage to walk to my apartment door, which I hadn’t had before. Carolyn wasn’t Judy, but she wouldn’t sell me up the river. Assuming that the text really had come from Carolyn.

  ‘I’m right behind you,’ Angie said, and sure enough she was, carving knife in hand.

  Somehow that didn’t make me feel better.

  Nonetheless I opened the door and there stood Detective Lieutenant K.C. Trench, in his impeccable suit, perfectly knotted tie and mirror-shined shoes. ‘I hope I am not intruding, Ms Moss,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all, Lieutenant. Come in.’ I relaxed my stomach muscles while Angie put away her lethal weapon and Trench apologized to her for the visit at this late hour.

  ‘I want you to know I don’t have a habit of dropping in unexpectedly at the homes of people involved in cases I’m investigating unless I consider them suspects,’ Trench began. I gestured toward the sofa but he stayed on his feet. ‘And I think it’s obvious I do not consider you a suspect in any crime I’m investigating.’

  ‘Please, Lieutenant, you’ll make me blush.’ From him that admission was an unprecedented flow of emotion. He looked uncomfortable.

  ‘I assure you, Ms Moss, this is not a laughing matter. I was unable to talk to you in my office or at the crime scene out of concern that I might be overheard. I parked my car three miles from here and walked the rest of the way so I could be certain I was not being followed.’ Trench’s face was, as ever, unexpressive. Someone looking from behind a window would have thought he was trying to sell me insurance, except that salesmen are generally more congenial.

  Angie took a seat on one of the barstools near the pass through to the kitchen and observed. Angie, when she’s not being a true Jersey wiseass, is very good at seeing what’s going on and interpreting it later. She’s invaluable as a source of information that isn’t related to the law.

  ‘I don’t want you to think I’m taking it lightly, Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘Please, tell me what you’ve been trying to say for the past few days. Who’s after me, and why?’

  Trench clasped his hands in front of him, as if he were afraid that left to their own devices they would each take up some mischievous task and humiliate him. ‘I can’t tell you that for certain, Ms Moss, and it’s only because I don’t know yet. But you can be certain I am doing some very quiet investigating on the subject and will act accordingly.’

  ‘You sound like you did on the other two occasions you were trying to warn me,’ I pointed out. ‘Now that we’re definitely not being watched or overheard, what can you tell me?’

  ‘You must understand at the outset that this involved some business in the LAPD that I will not and cannot tell someone who is not employed by the department, and even then at its highest levels,’ Trench said. ‘What I have been able to piece together is based partially on unsubstantiated rumor and is therefore by definition not verified.’

  ‘It must be killing you to have to deal with things you can’t prove,’ I said.

  Angie put her hand lightly over her mouth to stifle a laugh, but I’d meant what I said. A man like Trench has to have everything be provable and objective. When he is required to act without knowing all the facts, I have no doubt he is extremely queasy about anything he has to do. And it gets worse when he has to tell a civilian – worse, a defense attorney, who can be seen as the enemy – like me.

  ‘It is not my preference, no,’ he said. ‘But the unit I drove when I was a rookie cop used to have the slogan “To Protect and to Serve”, and I still take that seriously. You need protection, Ms Moss, and I was glad to see you have a security officer outside your front door.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to notice her,’ Angie said. ‘She’s supposed to blend in.’

  ‘A woman can only tie her shoes for so long and look natural,’ Trench told her. ‘I’m a cop.’

  ‘Who do you think is trying to get me to stop being alive, Lieut
enant?’ This hilarious banter could only sustain so much of an evening, especially when I’d already been to a stressful dinner at Patrick McNabb’s house.

  ‘As I said, I cannot be certain about that yet,’ Trench said. Before I could object, he raised his index finger and pointed to the ceiling like a political science professor about to puncture his poor students’ notions of what Socialism was. ‘But I can tell you that the Madelyn Forsythe case has aroused an undue amount of interest with the deputy chief of police.’

  The deputy chief? On a trumped-up prostitution charge that wasn’t worth six months in jail even if it were true? ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘An excellent question. There are some possible ties that I could mention but, as I noted, they are unsubstantiated and you are not a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. Suffice it to say Ms Forsythe’s husband has friends who have connections to the deputy chief and that might have some relevance.’

  ‘So they want to kill the lawyer because somebody wants Maddie Forsythe to be convicted of a ridiculous prostitution rap?’ I said. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Angie piped up. ‘The way you’ve been handling that case, she’ll probably go to prison anyway. Killing you would do them no good.’ You can always count on Angie.

  ‘It goes far beyond the charges on which Ms Forsythe was already convicted,’ Trench said before I could tell my closest friend since high school to shut up. ‘There have been whispers that something might happen to Ms Forsythe if she ever actually sees the inside of a correctional facility, even for just a few nights.’

  That took a second to sink in. ‘Somebody is going to kill Maddie Forsythe in prison?’ I said, mostly just to the room. ‘It’s already been set up?’ I would have to file that appeal as soon as possible and let the judge know there were questions about my client’s safety if she were to be sentenced to anything other than house arrest.

  ‘I’m not saying this is factual and I will not tell a judge that it is if you’re already thinking about filing papers,’ Trench said, possibly reading my mind. ‘I felt you should be cognizant of what I’ve heard because you should take steps. Some of which you have.’