Inherit the Shoes

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘Yes. My car is in the shop, so I got this one to borrow until it was fixed.’

  Trench sat down behind his immaculate desk, which looked as if it were not only neatened but vacuumed, polished, and refinished on a daily basis. He sat back in his chair, his hands joined behind his head, and still looked as if he might pounce out of his chair and attack me if I said the wrong thing.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘That fails to explain why the car was registered in your name yesterday. It does not explain why another car, also registered in your name, is currently undergoing body work at Bob’s Auto Body Shop in the City of Industry, to repair damage caused by gunfire. As a criminal attorney you should know body shops are required to report bullet holes in cars they repair. It also fails to explain where you suddenly came up with two hundred thousand dollars to pay for a car, since it seems to have been bought with cash. Now, can you shed some light on these questions?’

  The man’s fingernails glistened. He must have had regular manicures. I shuddered to think about his toenails.

  ‘It’s very simple. Well, OK, it’s not very simple. It’s just … here’s what happened. My car, which is the 2009 Hyundai in the body shop, was involved in an incident two days ago during which guns fired at it. Obviously, it required some repair, so …’

  ‘Guns were fired at it?’ Trench leaned forward and put his hands on his desk. ‘Guns – more than one gun – were fired at your car two days ago, and this is the first the police are hearing about it?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know if it was more than one gun. It might have been one gun firing a number of bullets. I was driving, so I couldn’t see …’

  ‘Why didn’t you report the shooting?’ Trench pronounced every consonant. The man’s middle name was probably ‘Impeccable.’ Except that doesn’t start with a ‘C.’

  ‘This is L.A.,’ I said. ‘I figured everybody was involved in a drive-by shooting sooner or later. Besides, no one was hurt.’

  Trench’s surprisingly thin lips were pulled back in a rather controlled smile, one that resembled a straight horizontal line. ‘Ms Moss, it is not a Southern California social custom to welcome a newcomer by blowing out the back window of her car and seriously threatening her life. We don’t like you well enough to do something like that. I also know that a black Escalade, with stolen license plates, was found wrapped around a telephone pole, and a shotgun, all fingerprints and identification numbers removed, was found in its back seat on the day in question. So spare me the cute little evasions and tell me how you came into possession of an extremely expensive automobile that exploded within four hours of being in your possession.’ He gave me utterly no wiggle room.

  ‘It was a gift from a client. I intended to give it back as soon as my car was repaired.’

  ‘You only have one client so far,’ Trench noted.

  ‘Do the math,’ I said.

  ‘So the man accused of murdering his wife, a man who was shot by a sniper yesterday on the campus of UCLA Law School, who I would bet my mortgage was in the car with you when guns were fired at it – that man gave you a brand-new Ferrari as a gift after having known you for …’

  ‘Three days.’

  Trench nodded once or twice, but it seemed more an exercise to loosen his neck muscles. ‘Three … days. He gave you a Ferrari after three days. You must be some …’

  ‘Watch yourself, Trench.’

  ‘… lawyer, Ms Moss.’ His eyes showed appreciation for my anger – the bully is always respectful of one who stands up to him.

  ‘I am. And in about six to eight months, I’d estimate, you’ll be able to see exactly how good a lawyer I am. I imagine you’ll be at Mr McNabb’s trial.’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it. But I think the six-to-eight months is a little optimistic on your part.’ Trench knew something I didn’t, and I wasn’t happy about it.

  ‘You don’t think it’ll come to trial that fast?’

  ‘On the contrary. I’ve been served notice that Judge Fleming has accelerated the court date and you’ll be showing me just how good a lawyer you are in about six weeks.’

  Six weeks? SIX WEEKS?

  ‘That’s not possible, Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘No court system in the country could …’

  ‘We’re getting tired of celebrity trials out here, Ms Moss,’ Trench said. ‘We don’t like the spotlight that much, especially on those rare occasions when we lose one.’

  ‘Rare?’

  Trench’s eyes flashed. ‘And so we’re trying to expedite this matter as swiftly as possible. The judge has moved this up to the front burner.’

  The word continuance began playing a continuous loop in my head, and would continue to do so until I could file a motion.

  ‘Now that we’ve established your need for speed, Ms Moss,’ Trench was saying, ‘suppose you help your own case along by telling me about the car that shot at you, and then we can talk about the car that blew up a few scant yards from you. You don’t seem to have very good luck with vehicles, do you?’

  ‘I was doing fine until I moved here. I think it’s you guys, personally.’ (This might be the moment to mention that I was doing my best to keep a brave face with the cops, who let’s face it were on the prosecution side of the ledger, while my intestines were liquefying over the fact that I could have been in as many pieces as that Ferrari if I’d waited to unlock the car until Patrick and I were standing next to it.)

  ‘That’s very amusing,’ Trench said, although his face did not look at all amused. ‘I must remember it for Skit Night at the next departmental retreat. Very well then, Ms Moss, let’s cut to the chase and ask you, who do you think is trying to kill you?’

  ‘I honestly don’t have the faintest idea, Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘I wish I did. If I did, I’d tell you. I swear.’

  ‘Like you told us about the shooting?’

  I looked into the hallway. Patrick had been joined by Evan, and the two of them were sitting, one plastic folding chair between their own, but they might as well have been in separate states. Careful not to look at each other, they sat in polar body postures, one sure to change immediately if the other’s arms crossed or legs stretched in anything resembling the same position. Four-year-olds would have envied their childishness.

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Lieutenant?’ I asked. ‘There are two men waiting for me in your hallway.’

  Trench had never so much as glanced in their direction. ‘Are they waiting for you, Ms Moss, or are they just trying their damnedest not to notice each other?’

  ‘A good question. But if you’re really trying to cut down on the violence in this city, perhaps you’d better let me go out there and claim one of them.’

  ‘Oh, all right. But which one are you going to claim?’ Trench made it sound dirty.

  I didn’t know why, but I liked Lieutenant Trench, and I wanted him to like me. ‘Cards on the table, Lieutenant? Just between us? Off the record?’

  ‘My lord, aren’t there any other clichés you can brandish? Go on.’

  ‘I don’t get how Patrick McNabb was arrested so quickly. All the evidence against him is circumstantial, and while I understand he merits suspicion, it’s not nearly enough for arrest and arraignment. What have you guys got that’s not in the police report?’

  Trench’s eyes narrowed, and it wasn’t with the sarcasm I expected. Something on his face was showing either surprise at my question, or amazement that I’d graduated from high school, let alone passed the bar.

  ‘That depends. Did you get the preliminary police report, or the complete one, with the medical examiner’s findings?’ OK, so there was something Trench knew that he clearly believed I’d known, and it wasn’t good.

  ‘I wasn’t aware you had issued anything more than one report,’ I said.

  ‘You must have picked yours up the night of the arrest. No?’ said Trench.

  I nodded.

  ‘Your office should have someone here every day for such things, Ms Moss
. I’ll have the sergeant hand you one of the final reports on your way out. Now, if there’s nothing else you care to lie about at the moment, I have other cases on my desk.’

  I reached for the door and turned back to face him. Trench’s head was already down, and he was reading a file in front of him.

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’

  He waved his arm wearily at me as I closed the door.

  Both men in the hallway stood as I walked out, and they walked in the same direction toward me, but without appearing to walk together. It was truly something to admire.

  But when I reached them, Evan, in a fit of possessiveness, engulfed me in an embrace and held me tight to his chest. Head pushed to the side, I could see Trench through his office window, and he was grinning, or the Trench version of grinning, which was a slight twitch of the upper lip.

  I pushed away. ‘Evan!’

  ‘Sandy, I’m so sorry. When I heard about the car …’ He hugged me again, and this time my head was pointed toward Patrick, who merely looked sour.

  ‘Really,’ Patrick said in his most British of accents, ‘we weren’t anywhere near the car when it blew up.’

  Evan let go quickly and spun on his heel to face McNabb. ‘I blame you!’ he shouted. Heads turned all the way down the hallway. ‘If it weren’t for you, she wouldn’t be in danger!’

  I felt my face flush with embarrassment, like it was radiating heat beams people could use to follow in a power emergency. ‘Gentlemen,’ I hissed, ‘can we please get off the set of Days of Our Lives and discuss this calmly outside?’

  To my amazement, they agreed, and walked outside like two repentant boys, eyes fixed on their shoes. Evan even had a forelock dangling in his eyes that made him look about twelve years old. It annoyed me that I found this adorable.

  After retrieving the revised incident report on Patsy’s murder from Sgt Roberts, I stood them out on the sun-drenched pavement like the two naughty schoolboys they were, and read them the Riot Act, v. 9.0, on How Not to Treat a Professional (or any other) Woman in Public.

  ‘Honestly, the two of you act like I’m the pretty red ball you both want to play with. I’m a woman, and I’m your lawyer.’ I pointed at Patrick. ‘And if you want to get technical, I’m your boss,’ I said to Evan, ‘so from now on, you’re both going to do what I want. Is that clear?’

  They mumbled something resembling ‘yes, ma’am,’ and looked at their feet some more.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ I continued. ‘I’m going home. Evan, can you give me a ride?’

  Patrick looked up, his face bright. ‘No need!’ he said. ‘I’ve had a car …’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘I acted like an idiot,’ Evan said. ‘I acted like an obsessive, jealous, possessive, vindictive …’

  ‘You could have stopped at “obsessive,”’ I told him from the passenger seat, wondering if he’d ever go even one mile over the speed limit, or perhaps move sometime out of the right lane.

  ‘The point is,’ he continued, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have stormed out of your apartment like that, but it caught me off-guard that he’d had your place cleaned and bought you dinner, and all that.’ You should have been around for the Ferrari, I thought.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I can see how Patrick can be … overwhelming, but there’s nothing between us. Nothing at all. Sometimes, I don’t even like the guy.’

  ‘Sometimes?’

  My lip curled. ‘You don’t go through an intense period like this – getting shot at, him getting shot, almost blown up – without developing a little affection for the person who’s been with you through it all. Either that, or I’ll shoot him myself, and you’ll be trying to keep me out of jail.’

  ‘It’s an option,’ Evan scowled. He drove in silence for a few minutes, which took us all of a city block, and there wasn’t even that much traffic.

  When he finally turned, it took me a moment to realize we were going the wrong way. ‘This isn’t the way to my building, is it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, you don’t know some L.A. shortcut I’m not familiar with, do you?’

  ‘I’m taking you to my place,’ Evan said.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. The last thing I felt at this moment was romantic, but I couldn’t tell Evan that without wounding his rather obvious ego. ‘Evan, as much as I’d like to …’

  ‘No good sentence starts that way,’ he said grimly.

  ‘I don’t have a toothbrush or anything, and I look lousy …’

  ‘You don’t. You look …’

  ‘You know, just because a girl doesn’t want to spend the night at your apartment after her car blows up, doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you.’ We chuckled. ‘There’s a sentence you don’t hear every day.’

  ‘Around you I do.’

  ‘Tomorrow night. Can we make it tomorrow night? I promise I won’t have anything blow up near me tomorrow, and I’ll be in a much better mood. Really. I might not even be scared to death, like I am now.’

  ‘You hide it well.’

  ‘Better mood. I promise.’

  I saw Evan sneak a glance at me from the corner of his eye, a wild maneuver for a man who kept both hands on the steering wheel, at ten and two o’clock, the whole time he drove. ‘How much better?’

  I grinned. ‘Much.’

  ‘OK.’ Evan turned the car at the next corner, and headed for my apartment.

  Once there, Evan parked in the underground lot again. ‘You want to come up for a snack?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got a ton of turkey left over.’

  Evan pulled me close and kissed me with more passion than you’d expect from a guy who always obeyed the speed limit. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. And you’ll be in a much better mood. Much.’

  ‘I swear, I will.’ I kissed him this time, and it was even better. I considered re-thinking this whole ‘tired’ thing.

  But Evan got out and actually opened my car door. I had no choice but to respond to such a chivalrous gesture. I hugged him, then watched as he got back into the car and drove away.

  In the elevator on the way up, I watched a young couple practically inhale each other’s faces, and wondered if I’d looked that way with Evan. I preferred not to think so, but hey, love isn’t always pretty.

  Love?

  Attraction! Attraction isn’t always pretty! That’s what I meant to say! When I reached my floor, I managed to wedge myself around the groping couple, who were all but naked, other than their body piercings and tattoos. I got out of the elevator, and heard them groan behind me as the door closed. I worked very hard at not thinking about what was going on in the elevator as I walked to my apartment door. I’d have to use that elevator again sometime.

  I gasped when I reached the door, and this time, it wasn’t because everything inside was neat and clean. In fact, I didn’t even manage to get the door open.

  Nailed to the door of my apartment was a Barbie doll, with something approximating blood – probably Karo syrup and food coloring – dripping from the nail wound. The head was turned around, and the legs and arms were bent in grotesque positions. The doll was naked, and behind it was a piece of paper, on which, in the same substance as the ‘blood,’ was written in block letters, ‘DIE, BITCH!’ On the doll’s abdomen, such as it was, had been scratched the word ‘PIOUS.’ What could THAT mean? Now I was involved in a religious controversy? But even that, I’ll admit, wasn’t my first thought.

  A Barbie doll? I go to law school for three years, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office for eight, and then a trip out to L.A. to work in a civil law practice, and they think of me as a Barbie doll?

  Who could have done such a thing, and why would they want to? I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles long enough to inspire this kind of anger. And after shooting at me, wounding my client, and blowing up ‘my’ two hundred thousand dollar car, they thought a mutilated Barbie doll would send me over the emotional top? Wha
t did they expect, that I’d cry tears of horror, rush inside, quit the law firm, and book a flight back to Newark? Was that what they thought of me?

  One thing was certain – this whole case was really beginning to piss me off.

  EIGHTEEN

  Angie was not pleased about the exploding Ferrari, but the Barbie doll nailed to my front door was enough to have her practically jumping through the phone. It was at times like these that I felt Angie most resembled my own mother (whom I had assiduously avoided telling anything but the bare bones of the McNabb case), and her insistence on ‘being careful’ was just short of quaint. How exactly could I have been vigilant enough to prevent someone from nailing a plastic symbol of sexism to my door?

  So I found myself calming Angie down when it should have been the other way around. And then I went to bed. Luckily, Angie never slept – in fact, considered it a waste of time (‘I’ll sleep for a really long time when I’m dead’) – so I could call at virtually any hour and find my best friend awake.

  I dreamed, but didn’t remember anything when I woke up – only a general sense of anxiety. A swell way to start the day. Followed by a bus ride to the office, something no self-respecting Southern Californian would ever even consider. Luckily, I was neither.

  The work day began with a meeting in Bach’s office, during which he managed to point out every flaw in what had been done so far, but refused to supplement my efforts with more attorneys (‘we are not a criminal firm, Ms Moss – except for you’), and smiled vaguely at how badly everything was going. It was really going to satisfy him when he got to fire me after the trial was over and Patrick was in jail.

  After that, I met Garrigan and Evan at the office of Lucien DuPrez, Patsy’s business manager, who’d been on Patrick’s list when he’d been interviewing people independently. Patrick had insisted on meeting DuPrez, then further insisted on having me present, and by now, we all realized there was virtually no point in mentioning what a complete and total waste of our time this would be.