Reckless Disregard

by Robert Rotstein

  This morning at The Barrista has been hectic—I’ve been researching the law, drafting the trial brief, responding to the other side’s spate of motions to keep evidence out, none of which Brenda can help me with—and it gets more frenzied when she comes running out of the storeroom and shrieks, “Parker!” She collides with Romulo, who drops a tray of lattes, the crash of shattering glass resulting in the awkward applause that always follows such a restaurant mishap. Brenda doesn’t cower, doesn’t apologize, doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Parker, you’ll never guess—”

  I hold up my hand, concerned that she’s about to divulge something confidential to everyone in the place. She cranes her neck and looks around the room, eyes blinking like a drying-out inebriate becoming aware of her surroundings. The customers and staff are gawking. Only now does she go to help Romulo clean up the spilled coffee and broken glass.

  “Oh, my, I’m so . . .” She bends down to help clean up.

  “It’s OK, I got it,” he says, clearly unhappy with my assistant. On the best of days, Romulo and others on The Barrista staff view her presence in the shop as an annoyance.

  “Yeah, OK, sorry,” she says. “I owe you. Parker, come into the back room with me.”

  When we’re inside the storeroom, she claps her hands and bobs up and down like a joyful nine-year-old who’s just unwrapped her biggest birthday present. She gestures toward her computer screen, which shows an e-mail message sent via a website that Philip Paulsen set up to receive unsolicited e-mails about the case. I haven’t looked at the site since it launched—not after reading the messages from obsessed Poniard fans, spammers whom Bishop probably hired to flood the system, and kooks who claimed to have sighted Felicity McGrath over the past twenty-five years at locations ranging from an In-N-Out drive-thru in Lodi, California (Felicity was slinging double-double burgers animal-style), to The Borghese Museum in Rome (she was volunteering as a docent). Evidently Brenda has continued to monitor the website.

  This e-mail’s subject line is “The Queen Ant,” and the body reads, “Learn to Act, Stage, Screen, Earn Money as an Extra in the Exciting Entertainment Industry—Taught by a Trained Actress—Echo Park Actors Studio.”

  “A virus or a Trojan horse,” I say. “Bishop’s cyber-attack.”

  “I thought so at first. But then I . . .” She clicks on the link, which spawns a garish website that announces its worth in blaring blue and red oversized printing that has no subtlety, no finesse—a kind of nineteen-fifties discount-groceries ad transplanted into cyberspace. The left side of the page is in English, the right in Russian Cyrillic. Inside the distracting mess of testimonials and puffed claims is the black-and-white photo of a raven-haired, wrinkle-free woman who calls herself Marina Shalamitski.

  “Who is she?” I ask.

  “No idea. But we have to check her out, right?”

  “This is Bishop hacking us. Or if not that, a kook who wants attention.”

  Her quick half-shrug conveys uncharacteristic impatience. “This woman is reaching out to us. Parker, please.” She bites her lower lip like an ingénue in a chick flick, and I wonder if it’s calculated, because despite what you read in novels, women rarely bite their lips that way.

  “Get your things,” I say. “We might as well visit Madame Marina.”

  From the outside, the Echo Park Actors Studio looks as grungy as its website. Located a few miles east of Hollywood, the studio occupies one unit of a dilapidated square gray stucco commercial building across the street from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Echo Park division and three units away from Apex Bail Bonds. I expect to meet not an acting teacher but a scam artist promising to make movie stars out of heavily accented Russian greenhorns, desperate dreamers who’ve fled abuse or boredom or depression, and innocent young bumpkins unaware that this era’s true stars appear not in movies but in reality TV shows.

  Brenda and I enter into a darkened room that smells like a combination musty gymnasium and patchouli-scented ashram. At the back of the room is a small stage. Folding chairs are stacked against the wall.

  The woman who calls herself Marina Shalamitski looks up at us from a collapsible table that serves as a makeshift desk. She’s dressed young, in dancer’s black leggings and a pink sweatshirt with a silkscreened picture of a green springing deer on the front—the logo for John Deere tractors. The cosmetic surgery can’t hide the woman’s true age—late fifties or older.

  “How may I help you?” she asks without a trace of a Russian accent.

  “Parker Stern and Brenda Sica,” I say. “We’re here . . . we’re here about the Queen Ant.”

  There’s no sign of recognition. Does she not know what I’m talking about or has all the Botox made even the slightest show of emotion impossible?

  I’m startled by the appearance at the stage door of an antiquated man. His bald pate is mottled with liver spots. A fringe of white hair forms a wispy semicircle around his skull, and his goatee looks as if strands of a cotton ball have floated over and stuck to his chin. An irregularly shaped wen bulges from his brow, making him look like a hideous fairy tale troll. He wears hearing aids, and not the modern high-tech micro brand but large, unsightly, flesh-colored buttons. Behind thick bifocals his eyes are so puffy that the lids look glued together. He shuffles over in a walker that gets traction from fluorescent yellow tennis balls stuck on two of the legs.

  “Your business isn’t with my wife, it’s with me,” he says in a voice that’s shockingly resonant and youthful. And that’s how, despite his mask of decay, I recognize him—Clifton Stanley Gold, former Broadway actor, second banana in innumerable fifties and sixties sitcoms, for years top-row middle-square on the TV game show Hollywood Squares, and once the preeminent acting teacher outside of New York City. His students included child star Parky Gerald.

  There’s no way he could recognize me. The last time I saw him I was eleven years old, with a prepubescent voice, smooth cheeks, and blond hair. He’d certainly remember my mother, though. He repeatedly kicked her out of his acting studio—for shouting at him because he gave another actor the lead in a scene from The Boy with Green Hair, for showing up drunk to drive me to an audition, and for trashing his teaching methods in front of my fellow students and their parents. The last incident resulted in my expulsion. The memory of her behavior embarrasses me to this day, and I find myself looking down at my hands as if I were still that child and he’d just chided me for ignoring his direction.

  “You’re here about the e-mail,” he says. “I’m Cliff Gold.”

  Marina puts her hand on his shoulder and says, “What’s this about, Clifton?”

  “Mr. Stern is a lawyer,” he says. “And this young lady is . . . ?”

  Brenda introduces herself.

  “I represent a video game designer and artist known as Poniard in a lawsuit,” I say. “The case was brought by William Bishop, the chairman and CEO of Parapet—”

  “We know who William Bishop is,” Shalamitski says. “What’s that have to do with us?”

  “I e-mailed Mr. Stern,” Gold says. “I want to tell them some things about Paula McGrath.”

  His wife grips his upper arm, and not gently. “Clifton, what could you possibly know about some silly lawsuit?”

  “I know something about Paula,” he says. “They deserve to hear what I know. Marina, leave us alone.”

  Shalamitski shakes her head. “Clifton, I really don’t think you should—”

  “We really need to talk to him, miss,” Brenda says in a dismissive tone.

  “Forgive my colleague’s abruptness,” I say apologetically, more to seem reasonable in front of Gold than to placate Shalamitski.

  “Give us some time,” he says to his wife. She reluctantly goes back to her table. Gold gestures toward the folding chairs stacked near the wall. “Mr. Stern, if you’d assist me.”

  I grab two chairs, Brenda takes a third, and we set them up near the stage. Gold tries to get into the chair without assistance, but h
e’s so feeble that Brenda has to help him.

  “I’ve been following your lawsuit in the news,” he says. “My youngest granddaughter plays your client’s video game, and I asked her to show me what all the fuss was about. I saw the level that you were just referring to where the Paula character—she’s called Felicity, of course, but I call her Paula because that’s who she was when she started taking lessons from me as a thirteen-year-old middle-schooler from the neighborhood, exactly my granddaughter’s age, incidentally—where the Paula character makes an appeal for help. And the video game character is absolutely right—Paula deserves closure. So with my granddaughter’s help I e-mailed you on that website of yours. My granddaughter didn’t think I should be too specific with all she’s read about in the news, so . . .” He takes a peek over his shoulder. “Besides, I knew Marina wouldn’t like it.”

  Could it be that after all these months, Poniard’s attempt to use Abduction! to gather information has finally paid off?

  “What can you tell us about Felicity’s . . . Paula’s disappearance?” I ask.

  He tells us how “Paula” was the most talented student he ever had, a triple threat who was not only a brilliant actor but also a talented writer and director. He’d wanted her to go to New York and perform in live theater to hone her craft, but she wanted only to work in films and become a mega-star. After they clashed over her career direction, she stopped taking classes. Years after their falling out, she showed up not long after the Meadows of Deceit debacle and asked him to help change her image and resurrect her career.

  “That was early 1987,” he says. “We worked together on and off until she disappeared. At first she seemed serious, dedicated. But then, she started to deteriorate, drinking, maybe worse. A couple of months before her disappearance, she started boasting about this magnificent new movie she was working on, a picture that would not only restart her career but leave a legacy. Very grandiose statements.”

  Felicity’s roommate Natalie Owen said that on the day of the kidnapping, Felicity had mentioned going to a night-shoot for some unidentified film.

  “Paula would share no details about this so-called project, would become agitated if I pressed her,” Gold says. “But here’s the interesting thing. On one occasion—to be honest, the words seemed to slip out inadvertently—she claimed that she was working with Billy Bishop, that he was ‘making it all happen.’ It didn’t make much sense, because Bishop was an A-list producer by then, and there was no way he’d work with box-office cyanide Felicity McGrath.”

  “We have information that in the late seventies they worked on an unreleased picture called The Boatman together,” I say. “Maybe Bishop hired her for old time’s sake?”

  He considers this. “I don’t know about The Boatman or any other project they worked on in those early days. But they did both take classes from me around that time. Before either of them was anyone. And I shouldn’t say this but—” He tilts his head and looks at us, the practiced pause of a gossip who wants to feel that he parted with the salacious information reluctantly—“they often traveled to and from class together, and they played opposite each other in some passionate love scenes. I’m a good teacher. I can usually tell what’s acting and what’s real. Their body heat was genuine. Paula might have been a good enough actor to fool me, but not Billy.”

  “Would you testify to that in court?” I ask.

  “About their being in my acting class together, of course. About an affair, not on your life. Billy’s still married to the same woman, and after all, it’s just my educated speculation. I never peered into their bedroom window. But I’m not sure any of this helps you.” A stage actor’s pause. “Her behavior was erratic in the weeks before she disappeared. As I told you before, she would often come to class drunk or hungover. Other times she was hyperactive. I worried about cocaine. There were a lot of men, I think, though that was nothing new with Paula. I was frightened for her.”

  “None of that means she wasn’t working with Bishop,” Brenda says.

  “True, but it doesn’t make sense,” he says. “She claimed to be working with a top commercial producer on a movie that was as confidential as the Manhattan Project. Nonsense. In my view, the entire story was a fantasy, a wish that a troubled mind came to confuse with reality. Their romantic relationship makes that scenario more likely. Paula was reliving her past glory.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it was true about the movie or not,” Brenda says. “Bishop denies knowing McGrath.”

  “Yes, I read that,” Gold says. “That’s why I came forward. I expect others are frightened. There was a lot of bully in Billy Bishop even back then. I’m too old to be afraid.” His jaundiced eyes are glistening. “You know, some speculated back then that Paula picked up those men at that bar, slept with them, and afterwards took her own life. I don’t dismiss that. Her obsession with this imaginary movie was manic in its intensity. I realize with the benefit of hindsight that Paula was probably bipolar. During the worst of her mood swings, she could suffer from delusions. She was subject to dark bouts of depression. The disease began to manifest itself in her late teens, I see now, just as she was becoming successful. It was triggered by the untimely death of her mother. It probably explains her remarkable creativity. But in the days before the disappearance, she was ready to crash, and I fear . . .”

  Brenda rustles in her seat, half-stands, sits again, and puts her hand on her forehead as if trying to ward off a migraine. “Mr. Gold, she did not commit suicide. There was blood on a pylon. A witness saw . . .” Fortunately, she catches herself before revealing our theory of the case. She’s been a true believer from the start. I’m glad, because it counterbalances my ingrained cynicism.

  “Murder is certainly a possibility,” Gold says. “But you know, murder, suicide—after all these years I don’t know which is worse.”

  “Suicide is worse,” Brenda says. “Much, much worse.”

  I’m not so sure. As horrible as suicide is, there’s individual choice. Among the many reasons that murder is abhorrent is that it’s so damned unfair. Brenda and I have never discussed this, really haven’t talked about anything important beyond the case. You can spend days and nights with a person, but the gaps in what you know are immeasurable.

  “Do you have any reason to believe McGrath was involved with the Church of the Sanctified Assembly?” I ask.

  “Paula? I highly doubt it. She did not take direction very well and certainly wouldn’t take it from a hack like Kelly. I taught Kelly only once and bluntly told him he didn’t have talent. Only years later did I learn that I’d disparaged a ‘divine prophet.’ But I can’t believe Paula would have anything to do with Kelly. Paula was about the art.”

  “What about Bishop and the Assembly?” I ask.

  “Billy Bishop worshipped at the church of Billy Bishop, just as he does now.” He thinks for a moment. “With one exception—I think he worshipped Paula McGrath.”

  Not the answers I expected, at least not with such certainty.

  We question Gold for another ten minutes. He tells us that he knows nothing about any of Felicity’s surviving friends or family. After Felicity disappeared in 1987, he told the cops what he just told us, even told them that he believed that Bishop and McGrath had had an affair. The cops seemed uninterested.

  “Our trial starts in three weeks,” I say. “We can arrange to get you to court if you need help.”

  He glances in the direction of his wife. “I no longer drive, but Marina will take me. Just serve me with one of those . . . what do you call them? So I have to show up by court order, and Marina can’t . . .”

  “A subpoena,” I say. “Of course.”

  I help him to his feet, and he insists on leaning on my arm and seeing us to the door. When we get there, he asks Brenda to bring him his walker. As soon as she’s out of earshot he leans in close to me and whispers, “So glad you’re OK, Parky. I’ve worried about you over the years. A glorious coincidence, don’t you think?” With a
scrawny hand, he pats me on the shoulder, the same show of approval he’d give when as I child I’d nail a scene.

  Ever since Poniard decided to play a dead king of England at his deposition, I’ve limited our communications. I have sent periodic e-mail updates—“Gorecki depo not productive,” “Bishop depo went well,” “Document examiners testified as expected”—but don’t reply when he asks for more detail. No matter how much he pushes, I will no longer share confidential information, haven’t said a word about Clifton Stanley Gold. Poniard needs protection from himself. Brenda keeps reminding me that I have an ethical duty to keep my so-called client informed, so I activate the chat program one last time before the trial and renew a futile plea.

  PStern

  >You need to appear and testify at trial tomorrow.

  Poniard:

  >LOL, counselor

  PStern

  >No joke. It’s never been a joke. It’s the only way to win—you testify what Scotty told you about Bishop, what Alicia Turner told you.

  Poniard:

  >Alicia didn’t tell me anything. I’m protecting her from Bishop

  PStern

  >Still, the other side has a right to question you about her. And if she does know something that can help, you should share it. We have to prove you had a pure state of mind, that you didn’t act with reckless disregard for the truth when you accused Bishop.

  Bishop is a public figure. In the nineteen sixties, the US Supreme Court held that a public figure can only win a libel case if he proves that the defendant actually knew the statements were false or otherwise acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Even a grossly negligent defendant gets off the hook. It’s a pro-defendant standard, one that recognizes only the worst conduct should be penalized when speech is concerned. I hope to prove that Poniard didn’t act with reckless disregard for the truth because he truly believed that Bishop kidnapped Felicity because of what Scotty and Alicia Turner told him—whatever that is.