Judgment at Santa Monica

by E. J. Copperman

  There were cops surrounding the man with the arm wound, since he could answer questions. The other one, whom Judy had told me she’d shot in the chest, was in no condition to answer questions and never would be again. I wasn’t that upset about those circumstances, but then I didn’t have to call his mother that night. Everybody is some mother’s child.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t dead, and I considered that a major plus. It’s all in how you look at things.

  Judy was going to be questioned by the cops for quite some time, so she had already called for Carolyn to fill in for her. I couldn’t argue since my need for a guard had been very recently confirmed in a rather graphic fashion. Carolyn would be here in twenty minutes, Judy said.

  What was it Trench had asked me just now?

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, shaking the cobwebs out of my brain. ‘It would be nice to know who is interested enough to put in all the time and money. Anyone in your sphere of influence leap to mind, Lieutenant?’

  Trench is, I’m certain, capable of looking uncomfortable. He came close at that moment, but the best he could manage was to squint just a little and it was a sunny day in Southern California. You might have heard we have a few of those out here every year.

  ‘If I knew that, arrests would be made,’ he answered in his usual tone. ‘The real question is: what can be done to keep you away from people with homicide on their minds?’

  ‘Catching the bad guys is probably the most efficient way to do that,’ I suggested.

  ‘Another is for you to advise Ms Forsythe to accept her guilty verdict and negotiate a very short prison sentence for her,’ Trench said. ‘If the person or people behind this are truly only interested in you because of her case, you would have it done and Ms Forsythe would have served a relatively light penalty.’

  That was as stunning a statement as I’d ever heard from him. I lowered my voice in case the uniformed officer questioning Patrick nearby was involved in the enormous police conspiracy against me that I’d created in my own mind. ‘You told me yourself that something very bad might happen to her if she goes to jail,’ I told him. ‘That is not to mention the fact that she’s not guilty of the ridiculous charges.’

  ‘I might be able to arrange some form of protection for her, if you can talk a judge into putting her in a Los Angeles County jail,’ Trench suggested. ‘I can’t guarantee it beyond any doubt, but I do have a bit of influence.’

  Patrick looked as if he was having the time of his life being questioned about almost getting shot. People in the entertainment business like nothing more than attention, and the circumstances surrounding it are rarely a deterrent. He caught my eye and winked at me, which I’m sure the officer noticed. Now the cop was probably going to report to his superiors that he suspected Patrick and I had arranged to get ourselves shot at so we could become bigger deals in LA. Which was ridiculous because Patrick was already about as big a deal as you could be, and I was not any kind of deal.

  Certainly not a plea deal for Maddie Forsythe, anyway. ‘I don’t think so, Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell a client that she needs to go to jail for something she didn’t do just so I can sleep a little easier at night.’

  ‘Your call, Ms Moss. I see your substitute protection has arrived.’ He nodded toward the street, where Carolyn was being dropped off by an Uber. She strode purposefully (they all strode purposefully) toward me, glancing at Judy as she approached.

  ‘Lieutenant Trench,’ Carolyn said when she reached us.

  ‘Ms Townsend.’ No hint of an opinion in Trench’s voice. How did they know each other?

  ‘Used to be Officer Townsend,’ Carolyn reminded him.

  ‘I recall.’ Look up the word inscrutable in the dictionary. It might not be next to a picture of Trench, but you can bet he personally wrote the definition.

  ‘I thought you might.’ They were holding a contest in advanced emotional suppression. It was like watching Mr Spock look in a mirror.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your work, then.’ Trench glanced toward me. ‘Ms Moss.’ He walked to one of the officers who was questioning the man with the bullet in his arm, which no one seemed especially concerned about. Except that the guy kept pointing at the bleeding wound and seemed to be suggesting that medical care should be forthcoming. The cop speaking to him nodded reassuringly but did nothing else.

  Patrick, released from the interrogation he had so utterly enjoyed, walked over to us smiling his usual hundred-watt beamer. ‘Are we all finished here?’ he asked.

  ‘We got shot at,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I’m aware, but I’ve told them everything I know about it, which isn’t very much. What about you? Have you mentioned to the police that this is the third time you’ve been shot at in as many days?’

  I knew it was his way of trying to lighten the moment, but I didn’t need my moment lightened just now. ‘No. I didn’t see that as relevant,’ I said. ‘What do you think, Patrick?’

  ‘So where are we off to?’ Patrick asked, like we had just finished a refreshing beverage and were about to continue our day.

  ‘I’m taking you back to wherever you need to be and then I’m going to see my client,’ I answered. I was approaching Patrick overload and needed to park him somewhere as soon as possible.

  He looked confused. ‘We just came from Cynthia’s house,’ he said.

  ‘My other client.’ I actually had thirteen cases open at the moment, but most of them were divorces. Only two in the criminal system, and in my opinion that was two over my limit.

  Patrick nodded. ‘Of course. You need to work on the prostitute.’ He caught himself and grinned naughtily. ‘I suppose that was a rather unfortunate turn of phrase.’

  ‘She was just assaulted with a knife right outside her home,’ I said with a considerable amount of ice in my voice. ‘I’m going to make sure she’s all right. Now, where am I dropping you off?’ I started to walk toward my car. If Trench or one of the uniforms wanted to stop and question me some more, this was their big chance. Nobody made any move toward me so I kept walking.

  Patrick didn’t answer right away. I was paying attention to the cops so I didn’t notice immediately, always a mistake with Patrick. Even when you don’t give him time to ruminate, he’s going to come up with something that he thinks is wonderful and you will spend the rest of your day (if you’re lucky) regretting.

  ‘I think perhaps I should go with you,’ he said when we reached the car and Carolyn, without scanning for bombs, did a quick check before allowing me to open the driver’s side door and get in. ‘This seems to be a situation that is tied to the people who shot at us, don’t you think?’

  He got in next to me, which Carolyn seemed to find annoying but didn’t protest. She took a position in the back and gave me a look that indicated I should not tell Patrick to change seats with her.

  ‘I think there is no question that they’re related and no, you’re not coming with us, Patrick. This is an attorney meeting with a client and there will be no intrusions. And you, my friend, are an intrusion.’

  I started the car and set the GPS toward Patrick’s office at his production company, which was where we’d been heading before the world had gone crazy, again. I pulled out of the space where the Hyundai had been parked, noting mentally that – despite Carolyn failing to drop to the ground and look under the car – it had not blown up. Luck, or a demonstration that perhaps Judy was overcautious? (I had snuck a glance under the car before I got in and didn’t know what I was looking for. Apparently it hadn’t been there.)

  Somehow, driving away from having survived a murder attempt largely because of Judy, an abundance of caution didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

  ‘How about this?’ Patrick went on undeterred. ‘I will stay outside the room where you are conferring with your client so that I cannot make any comment or ask any questions that would embarrass you. I will not attempt to listen through the door, and you can post Carolyn here as a guard to ensure it. I just wan
t to go along, say hello to the prost … to the woman – and offer my sincerest hopes that she was not injured and will not suffer such an indignity again. How’s that?’

  This would go on until we reached Dunwoody Inc. (Patrick had decided to use his birth name for his production company because ‘it reminds me where I came from’) and I had Carolyn physically remove him from the car and toss him to the pavement. But I couldn’t do that. So I glanced quickly over at him.

  ‘One condition,’ I said.

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Call your executive assistant and get her to meet us there.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Naturally Madelyn Forsythe was upset. She’d been convicted of soliciting an undercover officer for sex and money online and had been threatened in front of her apartment building (her home since the divorce) with a knife, all in less than forty-eight hours. Anybody who wasn’t upset after a period like that is on some serious anti-anxiety medication.

  But Maddie was not the type to throw things or berate employees (like, for example, her increasingly unconfident attorney). She was more the sort who would sit very still and quiet when upset, chew over her own thoughts, reach a conclusion and then never in a million years let you know what it was. Maddie was a little scary, frankly.

  We were sitting in her bedroom (the scene of her alleged crime), which was large enough for a king-sized bed, a small lamp table by the window, and two chairs in which we were seated at the moment. It was certainly upper-middle-class, but the lower end of upper, if you know what I mean. Tasteful without bragging about it.

  ‘I was trying to get to my hairdresser,’ she said. ‘I was walking to the curb because my Uber driver Marvin was only two blocks away in his red Toyota Prius.’ She coughed.

  ‘Did you notice the man who approached you?’ I asked. Immediately I was reminded of the day before, when a man with a gun had approached me and shot Jon, who was still in the ICU but expected to recover, according to the email from his wife.

  ‘Not at first,’ she said, which was exactly what I had told the cops on the scene outside my office. Maddie, to her credit, was answering the questions directly and thoughtfully. She was clearly very shaken but was not letting that get in the way of telling her attorney what had happened. ‘I did notice he was wearing a jean jacket and that was weird because it was so hot today. Nobody else on the street was wearing any kind of jacket.’

  A jean jacket! Could it have been the same man who’d come at me yesterday? He’d shot Jon and this guy had tried to stab Maddie. Maybe it wasn’t the same man. Did they have a uniform?

  ‘How did you manage to get away?’ I asked.

  Maddie looked surprised and maybe a little amused. ‘Get away?’ she said. ‘I didn’t get away. I took that jerk down in two moves and didn’t even break a sweat. And it was ninety-eight degrees out.’

  That shook me a little. ‘How?’

  ‘I’ve been taking martial arts training for years,’ Maddie explained. ‘I started with tae kwon do and then I switched to karate. Now I’m studying karate and traditional Chinese kung fu. I’ve been planning on starting kickboxing, but then all this happened.’ At that point the emotions did seem to get hold of Maddie and her eyes welled up, but she didn’t so much as sniffle, breathed in and seemed to swallow whatever had been about to escape through her mouth. ‘Once I saw the knife I knew exactly how to disarm and take him down.’

  I hadn’t been able to get a police report yet simply because there hadn’t been time, but I would ask someone from the office to pick it up as soon as I left here. I knew I had to keep the interview with Maddie short because Patrick was in the next room, probably with a glass to the outside of the door like in old movies, trying to hear what was going on. I really couldn’t figure exactly what about Maddie’s case was fascinating him so completely.

  ‘So you called nine-one-one?’ I asked. ‘The cops came and arrested this man. Did he say anything to them when that happened?’

  ‘He handed them a business card with the name of his attorney and refused to say another word,’ Maddie told me. ‘They hauled him away and I never once heard his voice at all. It was like he’d been ready to get arrested all along.’

  He probably had. This sounded like some kind of coordinated effort and that meant the men with the weapons were hired hands, not the masterminds. The question was, who had hired the hands and whose minds were doing the mastering?

  That’s two questions.

  ‘Why all the martial arts?’ I asked, largely because I couldn’t ask Maddie who had hired the assassins. That would just be too damn easy.

  She raised her eyebrows a little. ‘I’m back on the dating market, Sandy. I’ve got to stay in shape and I’ve got to be ready if someone tries to go a little too far.’

  When we left the bedroom Patrick, as I had suspected, was sitting as close to the door as he possibly could. No glass in sight but there was probably an app on his phone that could hear through walls. I put nothing past Patrick.

  ‘I do hope you weren’t badly hurt, my dear lady,’ he said to Maddie, taking her hand the way he had with Carolyn in the coffee shop. She, a fan of his current TV show, stared into Patrick’s eyes and smiled.

  ‘You have nothing to worry about,’ she told him. ‘It was the man who attacked me that they needed to take to the emergency room.’

  ‘Oh, good for you.’

  Carolyn was standing near the window, of course, but within range of the door to the den, where we were standing now. She was preparing for any form of attack, which should have made me feel more secure but actually had the opposite effect.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me, Maddie. I’ll get in touch with you very soon.’ I extracted Patrick from the death grip he’d had on Maddie’s hand and pointed him in the direction of the exit.

  ‘Do you think what happened today will help with my case?’ Maddie asked. That stopped me on the way to the door. ‘I mean, if someone’s trying to kill me that means they don’t want the truth to get out, right?’

  She was so naïve I wanted to give her a hug. ‘We can hope,’ I said. The fact was that an attempt on her life would probably be used by the prosecution to suggest that Maddie had ties to known criminals and was therefore more likely, not less, to be involved in illegal activities.

  Patrick waited until we got outside – and Maddie had said goodbye to him a few more times – to say confidentially to me, ‘Does she have a chance on appeal?’ He knew enough about studying lawyers (mostly me) when he was playing one that he knew the right words to use when discussing criminal cases.

  ‘Sure she does,’ I answered. ‘The charges were absurd and they have the least damning evidence I have ever seen.’

  ‘I’d like to see the file,’ Patrick said in his most lawyerly tone.

  ‘I’d like to see six million dollars in my checking account,’ I said. ‘You don’t always get to see what you want, with apologies to Mick Jagger.’

  Patrick stopped walking. ‘Why do you need six million dollars?’ he asked. He reached into his pocket and I thought he was going to reach for his phone and Venmo it to me.

  ‘I don’t. It was a figure of speech. Hey, where’s Angie? I thought she was going to meet us here.’

  He took his hand out of his pocket, thankfully. ‘She’ll be around.’

  ‘We’re clear,’ Carolyn said. Even that she didn’t sound very happy about.

  ‘We should wait for Angie,’ Patrick said. ‘She’ll be here—’

  That is, of course, when Angie pulled up in Patrick’s snazzy Tesla, no doubt her very favorite perk of the new job. She stopped right behind where my Hyundai was parked, got out of the car and looked at us. ‘Are you two all right?’ she demanded. ‘Philip said there was shooting.’

  ‘Just another day in LA,’ I told her.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Patrick said. ‘Are you ready to work?’

  Angie, now smiling but clearly in business mode, nodded. ‘Fire away, boss. Oops. Sorry. Too soon?’


  Patrick ignored the remark, just as I did. Carolyn probably hadn’t even heard it because she was busy looking back and forth on the street for any possible new assailants. Or she was trying to find a Krispy Kreme. What do I know?

  ‘You’re assigned to Sandy for the rest of the day,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m driving back to the studio for some night scenes later, so I need the car. You go with Sandy and assist her with both Cynthia’s case and the woman who was running a prostitution service out of her house.’

  ‘She wasn’t …’ Oh, what was the point?

  Angie just glossed over it. ‘Gotcha.’ I got that she was Patrick’s employee now, in a real job, but it was still a little weird. You should never visit your roommate/best friend at work.

  We all walked over to my car, despite Patrick having insisted that he was driving his own car back to his job. I couldn’t figure out why he was tagging along, but being an actor, Patrick was probably looking for the perfect exit line before he could separate from us.

  Carolyn stood by the passenger door, not to be denied her vantage point again. Angie followed me, no doubt to take the back seat behind the driver. Patrick also stuck with me and spoke softly, perhaps trying not to be heard by Carolyn. He wasn’t shying from Angie, so I guessed it was OK if she was in on the conversation.

  ‘It’s about the engagement,’ he said in a perfect stage whisper.

  ‘Or lack thereof,’ Angie stuck in.

  Patrick winced a bit at her volume but didn’t comment on it. ‘The reason I cancelled my forthcoming marriage,’ he said.

  ‘I thought it was because I pointed out that you were rushing into something the way you did with Patsy, and that it hadn’t worked out so well the first time.’

  Carolyn, who seemingly didn’t notice our lagging around, was studying cars going by, no doubt wondering if one of them was carrying people carrying poisoned blow darts. Anything was possible these days.