Judgment at Santa Monica

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘I can’t say I understand the vibrations,’ I said. ‘But what we’ll be dealing with in that courtroom is the reality of the criminal justice system and, believe me, that’s something I do understand. I won’t let people turn on us on the witness stand. I’m not going to be taken by surprise. But right now I need to get back to my office so I can prepare for the beginning of the trial. Cynthia, I’d advise you to do the same, and call me if you have any questions or concerns you want to talk about. You know I’ll always take your call.’

  I stood and picked up my purse to indicate that the high-powered attorney Cynthia had hired (are there low-powered attorneys and, if so, can’t they just plug themselves into a wall charger?) was moving into battle mode and couldn’t be stopped. All the while, though, I was asking myself why I was auditioning for a client I hadn’t wanted and had taken all the way to the eve of the trial.

  ‘I don’t know …’ my client said.

  If the trial were as much as a week away, I might have resigned the case on the spot. You want to talk vibrations? I had to see if anyone else in the room was reacting to the earthquake I felt under my feet. They were not, which indicated it was imaginary. I stood rooted to the spot, wanting to scream that they should trust the lawyer with the law and the spiritual advisor with … spiritual advice. Or something. But as usual, Patrick rose up to my rescue. Which was almost always a bad idea.

  Literally, he rose. To his feet. ‘Sandy is right,’ he said to his sister. ‘The law is what is coming for you and Sandy knows the law. I’ve been there and I know. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without Sandy. So do whatever it is she tells you to do and be assured she’ll do everything possible for you. Because Sandy is the best there is.’

  He might have expected applause. He didn’t get any.

  I decided it was best to show that I was a busy woman working hard to keep Cynthia out of jail, so while the others were sitting and staring at Patrick and me, I turned and headed toward the door. Patrick appeared at my side after a moment.

  Behind me I heard Emily say, ‘Patrick …’ with impatience audible in her voice.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t appear to have changed anyone’s mind, but thanks for the defense,’ I said quietly to him as we walked.

  ‘What else would I do?’ he asked. ‘I’m in love with you.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Michael Bryan was a dark-haired man who looked to be auditioning for the role of mannequin, should such a need arise. He had a face that could be described as attractive but had no outstanding characteristics. A police sketch artist could draw a picture of him and have every man in the city arrested on its merits.

  He sat at the Seaton, Taylor conference table with his hands folded in front of him, a very good boy who was paying attention to his lessons and was ready if the teacher were to call on him. It was a wonder he wasn’t wearing a bow tie.

  ‘I didn’t text Cynthia the night my mother died,’ he said. Thankfully Michael did not try to choke back tears on the word died as so many might. I’m sure he must have used inflection occasionally, but only when prescribed by his doctor. ‘I have no idea why she said that I did.’

  Judy, standing in the corner, was looking around constantly, probably trying to determine why no one had decided to put a window into the conference room for her to look through and be vigilant. Finally her gaze landed on the door, the only point of entry for a possible attacker, and stayed there.

  ‘What did you do that night?’ I asked. My dreams of Michael being the key defense witness were rapidly fading. I figured now the best thing to do was to see where he might actually hurt Cynthia’s case and avoid those areas, or skip calling him as a witness at all.

  ‘Are you suggesting I’m a suspect in the murder of my mother?’ Michael asked. He might just as well have been asking me which bus would take him to the Staples Center, and he’d have just as lousy a chance of getting an answer from me.

  ‘I’m the defense attorney, Michael,’ I told him. ‘I don’t decide who’s a suspect. The police do and they’ve arrested your wife in that matter. So please tell me what you did that night.’

  ‘I had a business meeting. On Zoom.’

  Well, that was not impossible to verify but not easy either. ‘With whom?’ I asked.

  ‘The police have already been over this, and so has your investigator when he and Patrick McNabb came to see me.’ The words were somewhat confrontational. The tone was absolutely bland.

  ‘I’m aware of that. I’m asking so I can have some context.’ That sounded reasonable and meant nothing, but I was willing to bet Michael wouldn’t call me on it.

  He didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even sigh, which most aggrieved financial analysts would do under the circumstances, particularly the successful ones. ‘My partner Daniel Reeves, a client of ours whom I will not name to protect their privacy, and a representative of Highsmith Financial.’

  ‘That’s another financial services company like your own?’ I said.

  The slightest tic around the right corner of his mouth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why were you collaborating with a competitor?’

  This time there was the slightest hint of condescension in his eyes. ‘It’s not uncommon on a larger transaction.’

  ‘So this was a large transaction.’ He’d already said that, but now I wanted to irritate Michael a bit and see what happened. Judy, laser-focused on the door, did not seem to care.

  ‘Most of the ones we are involved in are large.’

  Now for the stuff I really wanted to ask Michael. ‘What can you tell me about Rafael?’

  His brow furrowed. Given his demeanor up to now, I feared for his health. ‘My mother’s gallery? I had no business interest in that.’

  ‘None?’ I feigned surprise. ‘Not even on an advisory level?’

  ‘My mother preferred it that way,’ Michael said.

  ‘How did you feel about that?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you my therapist now?’ Michael’s veneer of impassiveness was beginning to dissolve. He had emotions after all. Chiefly anger.

  ‘It just seems to me that a man with your level of expertise in finance might feel somewhat insulted, even upset, when his own mother turned to someone else for all her business needs.’ Before he could ask me again if I considered him a suspect I added, ‘I’m told that the gallery was in a good deal of financial trouble. Do you think you could have helped if your mother had asked?’

  ‘Where have you heard that Rafael was having difficulties?’ Michael was tamping down the anger again. I was starting to agree with Patrick: What did Cynthia ever see in this guy?

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say. To protect my source’s privacy. Was the gallery going under?’

  Michael looked directly into my eyes. ‘How would I know?’ he asked.

  ‘If you don’t know, who would?’

  ‘That,’ Michael Bryan said, ‘is an excellent question.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The opening of Cynthia Sutton’s trial was scheduled for ten a.m., so naturally we were waiting in the courtroom, not nearly as packed as it used to be but with plenty of cameras to record the famous actress’s trial, at 10.38.

  I had my usual pretrial butterflies, exacerbated by the fact that this was only my second case as a defense attorney at a murder trial. And both of those cases involved the same family. I wasn’t even a mob lawyer. My life had taken some weird turns since I’d navigated I-80 out of New Jersey.

  The fact that my most recent criminal case had ended in a conviction for a woman who had done nothing wrong … oh, why go on? It wasn’t helping me calm down.

  The defense table was peopled by me and Jon Irvin, who had insisted on being my second chair. Jon had jammed his two weeks back on the job with the case and now actually knew more about it than I did, truth be told. Jon is a great researcher and tactician but (sorry if you’re reading this, Jon) not the best on his feet in a courtroom situation. He was the perfect s
econd chair and I was happy to have him beside me.

  To my right was my client. Cynthia and I had spent a good deal of time together preparing this case and I thought she was ready for what was to come, but she was clearly shaking despite the heat (the air conditioning in the courtroom was turned on, but it was not exactly state-of-the-art) and paler than I was used to seeing her. She had not attended Patrick’s trial the year before, which explained why I hadn’t ever heard about her before this happened. Cynthia said she had been in Wales filming a movie when Patrick and I were in court, and that she had offered to come but her brother had insisted she stay and finish the job.

  He was seated directly behind me, projecting confidence as he always did, but I saw the tension around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. I think Patrick was more nervous at Cynthia’s trial than he had been at his own. To his right was Angie, of course, representing the brand and being in front of the cameras so Patrick, who normally would relish such a thing, didn’t have to be. Angie understood this part of the business perfectly.

  Behind them was, again without explanation, Emily Webster, who never said much but could have been captain of the Olympic glowering team. The woman could glower with the best of them.

  Across the aisle from me was Marcus Valencia, the deputy district attorney who had caught the case and was preparing to make a name for himself in the annals of Southern California law. I stifled a smile. Prosecutors in Los Angeles didn’t have a fabulous track record in handling celebrity murder cases. Not terrible, but certainly somewhat tarnished.

  Valencia was a tall, slim man who probably spent some time in the gym but not enough to bulk up. He wanted to look like … well, he wanted to look like Patrick when he was on Legality. There were, I would admit, worse things to look like. Valencia was fiddling with the file on his table, trying to exude calm but letting his hands run the perimeter of the file over and over again. I couldn’t tell whether it was nervousness or simple anticipation, but I got the feeling the prosecutor was restraining an impulse to leap up and dance just to get the energy out of his muscles.

  Right behind him was Michael Bryan. He and Cynthia had actually had a short conversation before we’d all sat down and hadn’t been vicious with each other. For a couple divorcing and at the wife’s trial for stabbing the husband’s mother to death, that was something of a minor miracle.

  ‘What’s going to happen first?’ Cynthia whispered to me, despite there being no need to whisper while court wasn’t in session.

  I’d run through the sequence of the trial with her a number of times, but she was nervous and I knew that. ‘First will be jury selection and that’ll probably take the whole day, if not part of tomorrow. You don’t have to worry about anything that’s going to happen today.’

  Cynthia smiled, but it wasn’t terribly convincing, a problem for an actress. ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ she said. ‘I wish we had found the person who really killed Wendy.’

  What was it with this family and thinking lawyers went around solving crimes? ‘Nate has been doing some good work,’ I assured her. ‘We don’t have to prove who committed the murder, just that you didn’t, and within a reasonable doubt. We have a strong case.’ I might not have been as convincing on that last part because I was not so sure myself of the evidence we’d compiled. Nate had done a good job and had some physical evidence to help going ahead. But we didn’t have the slam dunk I’d wanted.

  The bailiff rescued me by announcing the judge and we all stood. Judge Hawthorne was a tall and imposing woman. There’s a reason they make them wear robes (it doesn’t take much convincing; judges love the pomp). You couldn’t walk into that courtroom and wonder who was in charge.

  I’d done my homework on Hawthorne, before whom I’d never appeared until now. This was not a surprise, since I was primarily a family law practitioner and Hawthorne was assigned to the criminal court. From what I’d been able to find out about her, she would not accept a lot in terms of informality, and she would rule pretty much right down the center lane. If there was precedent, Hawthorne would rule with it. She loved a nice precedent. I had compiled (OK, Jon and some paralegals had compiled) as many as I could anticipate needing and four more than that.

  Valencia was easier to read as an example of bro culture than as a lawyer. I’d looked into some of the cases he’d prosecuted and found no discernible pattern, no style that was particularly his. He had a high conviction rate, which wasn’t fabulous news for me, but he wasn’t infallible. Which was lucky, because neither was I.

  Nate Garrigan was not in the courtroom. He was investigating two other cases for my firm but had told me he was continuing to look into Michael Bryan’s financial records and the dealings of Wendy Bryan and trying to locate Leopold Kolensky, Wendy’s financial wizard, who was such a good magician he’d made himself disappear.

  We took our seats again after Judge Hawthorne settled in behind the bench. She looked completely unaffected by the weight of the trial, the level of celebrity and media coverage or the relatively stifling heat in the courtroom. That was probably because I was monopolizing all the worry around those things.

  ‘Any motions?’ Hawthorne asked. It’s not unusual at all for a judge to suggest that just to get all the piddly stuff out of the way before the real trial begins.

  ‘Move to dismiss,’ I said, standing. Why not? It didn’t have a prayer of working but you give it a shot. ‘The evidence against the defendant is circumstantial at best.’

  ‘Denied,’ Hawthorne said. Which part of, ‘it didn’t have a prayer of working’ was unclear?

  ‘Move to dismiss a defense witness,’ Valencia said. He was standing too, but the way he did it looked more like strutting while standing still.

  Dismiss one of my witnesses? ‘Which witness?’ Hawthorne asked him.

  ‘Gail Adams,’ Valencia said, reading off a document in front of him. ‘The representative of the TV academy.’

  That made no sense at all. Why would Valencia even care, unless he knew why I was calling Gail to begin with?

  ‘On what grounds?’ the judge asked.

  ‘Relevance. The TV and Video Academy distributes TeeVee awards. The victim was murdered with a TeeVee award. I don’t see how the connection goes beyond that.’

  There was something he didn’t want to come out and now I was more determined than ever that Gail Adams would testify for the defense. ‘I object,’ I told Hawthorne. ‘There is a great deal of relevance, as the award found in my client’s hands is considered the murder weapon and the design and construction of that award are certainly relevant topics.’

  ‘Your motion is denied,’ Hawthorne told Valencia. ‘Hearing no others, we can move on to jury selection.’

  We all sat down but there was an odd look on Valencia’s face. It wasn’t defeat, which I was hoping for. It was something like satisfaction and that wasn’t good.

  ‘I thought nothing was going to happen,’ Cynthia whispered to me.

  ‘Nothing did,’ I whispered back.

  But I wasn’t certain. Of course, I never am.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jury selection is a very odd process. People think it consists of an attorney reading juror profiles, trying to find unique markers that indicate the person is predisposed to vote one way or another on a verdict for a case they haven’t heard a word about yet and then being clever about getting the favorable ones on the jury and removing the people who will vote against them.

  About ten percent of that is true. We do look over profiles of jurors and we highlight dangerous ones to question should they be called. The favorable ones are considerably more iffy. Just because someone has a redheaded daughter, for example, doesn’t mean she won’t vote to convict a fellow ginger accused of selling cocaine. It’s risky to ask a potential juror a question to which you don’t know the answer, but you do have to get a sense of the person that’s not in the documents you get from the court or from consultants.

  The fourth juror we were considering wa
s Melvin Benson, a man in his sixties who had retired from a job as a forklift operator only the year before. Mr Benson had never heard of Cynthia Sutton, he said, which was either a lie or good for my side. I needed to find out which was the case.

  ‘Mr Benson, have you ever seen a film called Traitor-in-Chief?’ I asked. It was one of Cynthia’s more high-profile roles, in which she played a secretary of state deciding whether to rat on a president who had collaborated with foreign spies. I’d never seen it, but I’ve been told by the star’s brother that she was very good.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Benson answered. ‘What’s it about?’

  I gave him roughly the same plot summary I just gave you and Benson sat there looking bewildered. ‘I don’t think I saw that one,’ he said.

  (Later, Angie told me that Cynthia looked annoyed when he said that. I held a brief conversation with my client after that about not appearing to get pissed off at a juror because he hadn’t seen one of her movies.)

  I went through a list of Cynthia’s credits for two reasons: first, I wanted to see how Benson would react to them (he was at best impassive and did not admit to having seen any of them). Second, I wanted to let the three empaneled jurors be impressed with the actress.

  ‘Guess I didn’t see any of them,’ Benson said when I’d finished.

  I gave him a friendly smile and nodded in his direction, then I looked at the judge. ‘I’d like to exercise one of my peremptory challenges, Your Honor.’

  The courtroom didn’t explode into chaos as I walked back to my table, but Valencia, who was already standing up to do his questioning of Benson, looked slightly stunned. He sat back down.

  Hawthorne, of course, didn’t ask any questions but nodded and made a note on the tablet computer in front of her. When I sat back down, Cynthia was smiling slightly, probably because she thought I’d dismissed Benson (who was walking away from the witness box shaking his head with incredulity) because he’d never had the good taste to watch any of her performances.