Reckless Disregard

by Robert Rotstein

  So I sit alone at my back-corner table watching the only three customers in the place nurse their lattes and sap our Internet bandwidth. At about eleven o’clock, Brenda comes inside carrying a large shopping bag. She walks over to me and sets the bag on a chair. She doesn’t remove her sunglasses.

  I tell her about the visit from the police detective and the cops’ suspicions about Poniard—which are also my suspicions.

  “But the evidence is on our side,” she says. “And he’s our client.” She has the typical naïveté of someone who hasn’t been around the legal system. She truly believes that someone has to be right and someone has to be wrong. It doesn’t always work that way.

  “The truth is that we don’t have a client at all,” I say. “We’re representing a ghost. Maybe worse, a murderer.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it would be so easy for you to quit, but you haven’t. You think you’re staying on the case because of that blonde lady lawyer, but you’re not. Not anymore. You’re doing it because Bishop’s filthy dirty. He’s lying about not knowing Felicity. He denies that the letters are real. He worked with her on The Boatman in 1979, and he’s lying about that, too. And poor Detective Kreiss put him at the scene of the crime, and he gets . . . I’ve watched you work. You don’t give up until you see justice done.”

  She just described me perfectly. Or maybe not. Maybe I haven’t quit the case because I simply need to stay in the public eye as a way of compensating for having no family, no friends, no law firm, no future as a trial lawyer—and no Lovely Diamond. Now these black thoughts coalesce and take aim at Brenda Sica’s knockoff Oakleys.

  “Will you take those glasses off, Brenda? It’s hard to talk to someone when you can’t see their eyes.”

  She lifts her hand and removes the sunglasses, and I’m immediately seized with guilt. Her right eye is mottled blood-purple. The caked-on makeup, intended to hide the contusion, only accentuates it.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “No one did anything to me.”

  “Please don’t say you walked into a door.”

  She puts the sunglasses back on. “I’m going to say it’s none of your business.” She’s never spoken to me in that tone before.

  “No one should do that to a person. If there’s anything I can—”

  “Here’s what you can do for me. You can watch these.” She lifts the shopping bag onto the table and goes to the back room.

  I open the bag to find a DVD of The Fragile Palace and VHS tapes of the other four films that Felicity McGrath starred in between 1983 and her disappearance in 1987. Brenda has been searching for all but The Fragile Palace, Felicity’s breakout movie, for weeks. The boxes for the lesser-known movies are scratched and without shrink-wrap. Brenda obviously bought the movies over eBay or from online merchants who specialize in used videos. I’m irrationally disappointed—there isn’t a copy of The Boatman.

  I examine the cover art for The Fragile Palace. A sepia image of a sultry Felicity stares at me, the right side of her face in full focus, the left side feathered and blurred to a cloud white. Her lips are parted orgasmically; she has coruscating, opium eyes. And the log line, Too hot to touch . . . Too cold for love.

  Because of Felicity’s disappearance, The Fragile Palace has become a cult classic. I’ve seen it more than once and so am more interested in the other movies that Brenda has found. But something about that contrived cover image of Felicity makes me want to watch the movie again. So I start to insert The Fragile Palace into my computer’s DVD drive, but instead I pick up the shopping bag and go into the back room. Brenda is so engrossed in whatever’s on her computer screen that she jumps when she sees me. She’s taken her sunglasses off and now reaches for them, but she puts them down again, apparently realizing how silly it would be for her to wear them in dim light. She lowers her head, as though that could possibly hide the bruising.

  “Did you watch any of these?” I say, making sure to look directly at her.

  “I didn’t. I wanted to get them to you right away.”

  “But surely you’ve seen The Fragile Palace.”

  “Not the kind of thing I watch.”

  Lately, Romulo and I use this room for storage, and it’s surprisingly large, so large that when Deanna was alive, she’d sometimes clear it out and use it for private parties. The room can comfortably hold twenty, though Deanna would fit twice as many people inside. I unlock a cabinet on the far wall, revealing an expensive HDTV entertainment center—a vestige of happier days.

  Brenda widens her eyes and winces. “I thought they kept coffee grinders up there.”

  I find the remote control, power on the system, and insert The Fragile Palace into the DVD player. I bring in two chairs from the main room and put them side by side in front of the big screen TV.

  “Come on,” I say. “Sit down.”

  Brenda gives a timorous shake of the head. “I have lots of work to do.”

  “It can wait. We’ll sit in the dark and watch movies as if we’re in a movie theater. No popcorn, but I can get us some cookies and scones.”

  When she still hesitates I go to the main room and ask Romulo to have someone bring us pastries and coffee. When I come back in, I take Brenda’s hand and lead her to the television. I bow and make a show of pulling out her chair for her. Giggling in spite of herself, she sits down and crosses her legs. When the barista comes in with the food, I dim the lights and hit play on the remote.

  In The Fragile Palace, Felicity plays Molly, a young housewife who turns to sex and drugs out of boredom and plunges into inevitable degradation. The film is a combination melodrama/sexploitation flick, a cheesy rip-off of Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. But Felicity was brilliant. She used her icy, detached screen presence to show with frightening clarity how the most ordinary person can be destroyed by her hidden desires. As I watch, there’s something odd—Felicity’s voice sounds familiar to me. Did she and I perform together in some TV commercial or sitcom pilot that never made the Internet movie databases?

  Though I was only eight or nine years old when the movie came out, I was an industry insider, so still remember the outrage of critics and fans who believed that Felicity deserved an Academy Award nomination, that she was robbed because the Establishment would never allow an unknown actress whose previous films had bordered on soft-core porn to compete with the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, and Meryl Streep.

  When the movie ends, I get up to turn on the lights.

  “Not yet,” Brenda says. “Please.”

  I sit down.

  “She was awesome,” Brenda says. “I had no idea.” She looks down at her hands, which are folded in her lap. “Mr. Stern . . . Parker . . . would it be OK if we watch the others? I think we should watch them to really get to know her.” She points toward the shelf. “There’s a VCR player, right?”

  I nod. Deanna ran a full-service establishment in every way. I power on the tape player and switch the video input. It makes sense to watch the other films. In a way, we’re representing Paula Felicity McGrath as well as Poniard. These movies are the main record of her life. We spend the afternoon and evening watching Felicity’s movies in the makeshift Barrista Movie Theater, I scarfing down pastries and guzzling coffee, and Brenda sipping at chai tea lattes and daintily nibbling on scone crumbs.

  Three of the four later movies are shoddy rehashes of The Fragile Palace. The directors of these films seemed to think that The Fragile Palace worked not because of Felicity’s talent, but because of how good she looked naked. Some of the sex scenes in the later films are so gratuitous and explicit that I can feel Brenda’s discomfort. Can she feel my arousal? How could Felicity have made such dreadful career choices? If she had a manager back then she should have fired him; if not, she should have hired one.

  After eight dismal and increasingly bleary-eyed hours watching Felicity’s career decline, we launch Meadows of Deceit, her last f
ilm. I don’t think either of us wants to see it—the descending spiral in Felicity’s life is already too obvious, too disheartening—but like marathon runners in pain, we’ve come this far, so why not finish?

  From the opening scene, it’s obvious that Meadows of Deceit was Felicity McGrath’s last-ditch attempt to break out of the good-girl turned druggie-slut roles. An indie film released in 1986, the year before her disappearance, the story is set in England and Scotland of the late 1930s. Felicity stars as Patricia Marlowe, an aristocratic young Englishwoman who rebels against her controlling mother, an elitist who’s infatuated with Hitler’s Germany. Patricia runs off to rural Scotland, where she takes a position as the village schoolteacher and falls in love with Hadley Rossiter—played by an actor named Samuel Turner. Rossiter is the handsome son of a local farmer. They plan to be married, but when Germany invades Poland, he enlists in the RAF, gets shot down during the Battle of Britain, and goes missing over Dunkirk. Patricia returns to London, appealing to her well-connected mother to get information on Rossiter’s fate. The mother confirms that Rossiter is dead. Despite her mother’s entreaties to marry someone of her own class, a desolate Patricia devotes herself to the war effort, vowing to return to Scotland and her schoolchildren someday. When the war ends, a blind Rossiter returns, having spent the war years in a German prison camp and a military hospital. It turns out that Patricia’s duplicitous mother knew all along that Rossiter was alive.

  Meadows of Deceit ended Felicity’s career. The critics panned the film as a flabby melodrama and flayed Felicity for daring to take on a role beyond her abilities. One reviewer called her a starlet without acting chops, a born floozy who couldn’t play a sober virgin convincingly for five minutes, much less a hundred and ten. Revising history, they questioned her performance in Fragile Palace, attributing her success to luck and a good director.

  They didn’t get it—Felicity was magnificent. A few of the critics grudgingly admitted that her British accent was passable, when in truth it was so authentic that if you didn’t known better you would’ve thought she was a member of the Royal Family. But they mistook her remarkable control for a lack of effort, her spontaneity for a lack of discipline. They didn’t see, perhaps refused to see, how she could elicit a deep emotional response with the crook of a finger or a blink of an eye. And there was something else—her voice. I performed with many fine actors in my career, listened to many more with a professional ear, and I’ve never heard a voice so mellifluous, yet so resonant.

  In the end, the problem with Felicity’s performance in Meadows of Deceit was that movies aren’t circumscribed by the opening fade-in and the end credits. Rather, the actor’s past performances, even her personal life—especially her personal life—color what the viewer sees. On the screen and in life, Felicity had played the bad girl, and the critics couldn’t envision anything else.

  When the movie ends, I turn to Brenda. She’s crying.

  Two weeks later, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, Brenda and I take the elevator to a level below the parking garage. The doors open to a dark, fusty corridor that contains an electrical room, a building supply room, various closets, and the Macklin & Cherry archives. We former firm partners can’t recycle the files, because they might become relevant someday—in a malpractice suit against the firm for some old representation, in a rights dispute between a studio and a screenwriter’s heirs, or in any number of other unforeseen legal battles. In some sense, a law firm breakup is like a divorce with children involved—you can never end the relationship.

  The elevator opens to a security desk, behind which sits a ruddy-faced man in his forties, dressed in a powder-blue security guard shirt and a sea captain’s cap, which he keeps on his head indoors because he thinks it makes him look more official.

  He greets us with a formal scowl until he recognizes me. “Parker Stern? Hey, man. Long time no see.” He speaks in a West Texas drawl, though he’s lived in California for thirty years. He shakes his head. “How about those Lakers, huh? You can’t stop the aging process.” He loves the Lakers, loves basketball in general. In our younger days, he and I played on the firm’s basketball team together. He wasn’t much of an athlete, had a beer gut and no stamina, but at six-three, two hundred and forty pounds, he could bang bodies and grab rebounds no matter how out of shape he was. He’s probably put on another twenty pounds since I last saw him.

  “Good to see you, Roland.” I introduce Brenda and say, “OK if we look through the old firm files? We’re working on a case and need to search something.”

  “All yours,” he says. “You still got your old key? I don’t think anyone changed the locks.”

  Brenda and I walk to the end of the hall and enter a poorly lit room, which smells of mold and dust and parched paper. The rickety Casablanca ceiling fans merely rearrange the heavy air. I hear only our own footsteps and the rattle of those overhead fans. In the old days, Philip Paulsen would spend days on end down in this dungeon, supervising massive document productions. But he’s not with us today because his wife Joyce put her foot down, worried that the air would harm Philip’s lungs.

  “I do not like it down here,” Brenda says.

  “It’s fine. Just a storage room.”

  “Creepy, creepy. Should we really be down here, anyway? I mean, is it ethical?”

  “I was a partner in the firm. We have every right to be down here.” That’s what I argue to myself. The legal niceties aren’t so clear. I might have been a former partner of Macklin & Cherry, but I’m also Bishop’s adversary and am about to rifle through his files.

  I lead her to a cubbyhole that once served as an office for the people who worked in the archives. These days, someone comes in once a week and dusts the place, and an outside service retrieves documents as needed. The obsolete Gateway desktop computer is still there, and even better, it boots up. I launch the equally outdated document management program and enter my old password.

  “Damn,” I say.

  Brenda lowers her head, as she does every time I curse.

  “The password’s not working,” I say. “Either they locked me out, or I forgot . . . I couldn’t have forgotten.”

  “It’s been a long time, Mr. Stern, right?”

  I try the password again—childstar, one that I’ll never forget. It still doesn’t work. I try as many variations I can think of—lowercase, all caps, initial caps. All the while Brenda peers over my shoulder, chewing on a thumbnail.

  “I can’t get into the system,” I say. “We’ll have to search the files manually.”

  “They’re arranged in alphabetical order?”

  “No, by client number, unfortunately.”

  “Do you remember Bishop’s client number?”

  “That’s why it was so important to get into the digital index. We’ll just have to look at the labels.”

  She puts her hands on her head and sighs, and then says, “OK, let’s go. How about I start on one side and you take the other. And . . . could I take this side? It’s so dark in the back, and I have nightmares about rats.”

  I make my way to the far side of the room and survey the rows upon rows of file folders. I use my hand to brush away the cobwebs, and when I open a file, I check for black widow spiders that might be lurking in the crevices of a Redweld expandable. On another day, I might be fascinated by ancient contracts for the services of Stanley Kubrick, Steve McQueen, and Elizabeth Taylor, but now they’re just annoyances. There are no files for The Boatman, no files that have anything to do with William Bishop, Parapet Media, or any of his other companies. He and his corporations were clients of the firm for years. Someone scrubbed this place clean—no, not someone, Bishop’s lackeys. I’ll have to ask Roland on the way out if he has a record of Bishop’s people being here.

  Brenda’s shriek echoes off the rafters. I run back to her side of the room. I don’t know if I’ll have to kill a rodent or fight off one of Bishop’s thugs.

  She’s sitting in front of the computer, her smile
brighter than the ceiling lights.

  “Are you OK?” I ask.

  “I’m great.” She hands me a file folder.

  The tag says Hilda Marie Johnson, a name that means nothing to me.

  “It’s the real name of an actress named Hildy Gish,” Brenda says. “You told me that Harry Cherry mentioned her, right?”

  I nod. “How did you figure this out?”

  “The computer. I searched for Hildy, but there was nothing, but there was an entry for Hilda, and it’s close, so I pulled the file.”

  “How did you even get into the computer?”

  “Your password, childstar. It worked with an initial cap and a question mark at the end. A lot of these programs make you have capitals and a special character. So I just capitalized the first letter and tried some punctuation marks and the question mark worked and I got in right away.”

  “But I was sure that I . . .” Then I remember that in the last years of the firm, the new fascistic head of the IT department forced all the lawyers to make their passwords more secure. He probably made me change mine. My case assistant is certainly resourceful.

  “They wiped this place clean,” I say.

  “Well, they missed this one.” She hands me the file folder.

  The file shows that several times during the eighties, William Bishop hired Hildy Gish to act in his movies, all before Felicity disappeared. Gish obviously wasn’t a big-time actress, so most of the agreements are simple day-player contracts. When Brenda shows me the document at the bottom of the file, I struggle not to shout. I’m looking at Hildy Gish’s acting contract to appear in The Boatman. Whoever sanitized the file for Bishop obviously didn’t know Hildy Gish’s real name. What makes me want to pump my fist in triumph is that, attached to the contract, is The Boatman’s cast list.