by Dave Daren
The camera spanned a refugee camp in Columbia where Venuzealans were fleeing from conditions back home. The video zoned in on the children at the heart of the camp, and had subtitles as they talked about leaving beloved toys and friends and schools. It broke my heart really.
“He’s good,” Vicki commented.
“I know,” AJ said. “I’ve seen this website. There’s some good stuff on here. He told Landon he met a couple of guys that were into film and he learned a lot of techniques from them.
I clicked on a few more video clips, and I just couldn’t believe how professionally done this stuff was. Phoenix’s last film had paper mache hippos. Vicki eyed me with a smile. She knew what I was thinking.
“Give it time,” she said. “It’s a big, big, project. Let him get settled in back home, see how this all plays out.”
“What plays out?” AJ asked.
Vicki and I let a pregnant silence fall before I answered the question.
“I know too many filmmakers,” I said. “It’s a shame you guys can’t all find each other.”
“I know, right?” AJ laughed. “The old guard is changing out here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “Clifton’s death was sad. But, it’s changed a lot of things.”
“How so?” I asked.
“It’s more…” she trailed off as she tried to find words. “People that I know that do film, now that he’s not at the center of the film community, it’s kind of a free for for all, I guess. It’s fresh, new, life. It’s Change. A lot of people are doing some new stuff these days. Real avante garde experimental stuff. New projects, new filmmakers popping up all the time”
She turned from her keyboard and her words came out fast, and passionate, and her eyes lit up. “There’s so much more energy in the film community now. It’s super exciting, and that’s the kind of… zeitgeist… I guess Leila and I got swept up in.”
I didn’t respond. Maybe we really were on the ground floor of something new and fresh in Sedona.
I also couldn’t believe someone had just used the word zeitgeist properly in a sentence without sounding like a pretentious asshole.
Chapter 6
I met the remaining members of the James Matthews band at Slingers that evening. I perfectly timed my arrival so as to miss the majority of the Merle Haggard covers, but not late enough that the guys would have disbanded for the evening. But, it was clear as I walked through the parking lot that I hadn’t quite missed all of the Merle as the loud music blared down the whole block.
Slingers was an old west cowboy bar, with spurs on light up sign and real wooden saloon doors. Inside, were black and photos of Roy Orbison and John Wayne, and there was a wall inside that had recently acquired a sign stating that Billy the Kid had once shot it. The sign was accompanied by a burn hole, that I suspect was created by a screwdriver and a blow torch.
I walked in to a bored looking tattoo covered bouncer with a handlebar mustache and a patriotic t-shirt.
He eyed me with much less suspicion than he had the first time I had had to come here. But I was still not quite sure he liked me.
“Land o’ the free,” I fist pumped as I passed him.
He grinned and nodded vigorously. “Don’t tread on me.”
I was now officially on the approved list at Slingers. I entered the dimly lit room, and ordered a beer from a waitress dressed like a bar wench.
It was the tail end of Mama Tried done without James Matthews. I sipped my beer, and listened reverently to the band members whose grief spilled out of their music.
The set ended, and the man I recognized as Gary from the photo, glanced toward me and conferenced with the band. They all approached me.
“Hi,” I stood and shook their hands. “I’m Henry Irving. I wondered if I could have a word with you.”
The band members all nodded somberly and took seats at the table with me and then they introduced themselves. They all looked to be in their thirties or early forties. Steve’s mid-neck length wavy hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he wore baggy slacks and a polo. Charlie had a salt and pepper beard and wire rimmed glasses, and Tim wore a black fedora hat, black sport jacket with a blue dress shirt, and jeans.
Roy was a burly man about ten years older than all of them, and my first impression of him was that he could be a bouncer. He had silver hair that reached his mid neck, and big meaty hands. Today he wore black slacks, and a black button down shirt that barely hid his ample beer belly.
Gary and I had spoken earlier, and he had light brown hair, tousled neatly, and deep set blue eyes. He wore a plain blue t-shirt and jeans, with a black windbreaker.
The bar wench waitress handed beers all around.
“On the house,” she said. “James was a good man.”
“Thank you,” Roy raised his bottle to her, and she smiled and left.
“Henry Irving,” Charlie the bassist said and he shook his head. “Your dad’s a shredder.”
The guys all laughed and agreed, and I listened to them tell a couple of stories about my dad.
“Good man, good man,” Charlie concluded.
“Yes, he is,” I said. “But that’s not who we’re here to talk about.”
The mood at the table sobered immediately.
“Kelsi is in a lot of trouble,” I said. “I know that you guys care about each other, your wives. What I want to know is--”
“I love James,” Charlie interrupted me. “Don’t get me wrong. May he rest in peace. But, he was…”
“A shrewd businessman,” Gary finished.
Everyone at the table agreed.
“In a good way,” Tim added.
His lack of sincerity was transparent. I was onto something here.
“In what ways?” I asked.
“We weren’t getting paid a lot after shows,” Gary admitted. “James would take the check after the show, and then he’d make up some kind of reason. We would have a bunch of shows in a row, and he’d say ‘Oh, I’ll just put in all one in big check,’ and then when the final checks came out, it was like...this is not for four or five shows.”
Embezzlement. I had seen that before.
“Well now,” Roy, the band’s manager, interrupted. “We had a lot of overhead. And I gave you those numbers. Despite whatever personal issues you might have had with James, the money was legit.”
Gary and Charlie exchanged glances and then looked down at the table.
“Anyway,” Charlie raised his eyebrows dismissively. “The big deal was this thing in Vegas.”
“Vegas,” Gary and Tim repeated in unison.
“So, the thing in Vegas…” Tim rolled his eyes and then sipped his beer and slammed the bottle on the table. “Should we even talk about Vegas? Is that all water under the bridge, considering that you know, it’s not going to happen?”
“He’s trying to free Kelsi,” Gary gestured toward me. “He needs to know everything that was going on.”
“Is it relevant, though, to Kelsi’s case?” Tim asked.
“Who knows?” Gary answered.
“Fuck it,” Charlie shrugged in agreement. “The residency in Vegas was originally supposed to be--”
“He cut us all out,” Tim interrupted. “He said that they only wanted him and that they were going to hire a whole new batch of guys. He told us earlier that night at SNL.”
“So he had fired all of you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tim rolled his eyes and rubbed his palms on his jeans. “Tacky. Just a real lack of class.”
“SNL was supposed to be our last show together,” Gary said. “In a way it was.”
“That’s rough, but what I’m more interested in,” I said, “is what happened in Africa.”
Tim snorted. “No one smuggled elephant tusks into the country.”
“For real man,” Gary said. “This is insane.”
“Yeah,” Charlie leaned forward and made eye contact with me. “We go to Kenya, and we go o
n this wildlife expedition.”
“Oh, God, Charlie,” Tim whined sarcastically.
“What?” Charlie turned back to him.
“Just admit that, why don’t you?” Tim snorted. “Kelsi’s in jail for smuggling, and you just told her lawyer we all went on safari in Kenya.
“So Kelsi was on this wildlife expedition?” I clarified.
“Oh God,” Tim groaned and rose from the table. He pointed at Charlie. “You fix this.”
I watched Tim walk away in frustration.
“I already knew all of that anyway, Tim,” I called after him.
“Okay,” Charlie clarified. “Kelsi was not on the wildlife expedition. She went home like...three days earlier.”
“There was something with one of the kids,” Roy explained. “He got sick and he was with the nanny. So, Kelsi flew home early. She should have the plane ticket, and maybe the doctor’s records.”
I nodded. We would need those, but they still didn’t really prove anything. The prosecution would argue that she could have gotten the tusks at any time during her visit, or even had them somehow delivered to her at any time before, during, or after her overseas trip.
I did wonder why she didn’t tell me this herself. But, then, why would she tell me about a safari she didn’t go on? If she had gone to Kenya, whether she left earlier than intended wouldn’t have been immediately relevant.
“So the band went on a wildlife expedition,” I repeated. “Did James go?”
“Yeah,” Charlie looked hesitant. “He was all like…”
Charlie started laughing and then the rest of the band cracked up.
“He was all like, ‘oh worship nature,’” Charlie mocked. “He got kinda…”
“Weeeird,” Gary laughed.
“Yeah,” Charlie shook his head. “He went off with his notebook and started writing poetry about the animals. And he got super defensive and then he donated to the wildlife conservation charity there that was sponsoring the expedition.”
“He donated to a wildlife charity?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “He was in one of those moods, ‘James Weirdness,’ we called it.”
The rest of the band laughed and repeated the phrase.
“He gets all moody,” Gary said. “And all morose and poetic and you want to be like, ‘I don’t know who you are right now.’”
“You just have to let it pass,” Charlie said. “There’s no way to get him out of that funk. He’s just going to be a pretentious asshole for a while until it blows over.”
A shadow passed across Charlie’s face and the table got quiet.
“Do you know how much he donated?” I asked.
“Uh,” Charlie scratched his leg in thought, and Tim returned to the table.
“How much did James donate to that wildlife fund thing in Kenya?” Charlie asked Tim.
Tim blinked in thought. “It wasn’t pocket change, I know that much.”
“How did he do it?” I asked. “Is there a record?”
“It was a card,” Roy, the manager remembered. He had been largely silent for the conversation.
“Did they give him any kind of paperwork, receipt…” I asked.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Roy shook his head. “I just remember he talked to the manager for a long time, and they went into an office for a while. Too long. So I went to check on them, we were all waiting and I saw a credit card on the desk.”
I eyed Roy as he told the story, and everyone stared at him.
“When I say it that way…” Roy’s voice croaked.
“He went into a private office,” Tim finished his earlier thought, “and no one really knows what happened in that conversation.”
“It was a donation,” Roy insisted. “He gave a private donation.”
“I’m sure that’s what was on the books,” I said. “But the prosecution will argue that the donation was a front.”
“You never told us that story,” Charlie turned to Roy.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Roy shrugged. “He was in a mood, and we had to get to Nairobi in the morning for another show, and it wasn’t something that I would remember. In fact, I had forgotten all about it, until Charlie said something.”
“So,” I said. “This fact can either work for us or against us. I’ll need to find out the name of the charity and how much was donated.”
“It was,” Charlie scanned the ceiling as he searched his brain. “The Kenyan Wildlife Foundation.”
I scrawled the name down on my notepad. “And you don’t know how much he donated?”
The band members all shook their heads.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I can get Kelsi to look that up.”
“Look,” Tim said. “We’ve all got our beef with James. He wasn’t all that nice in the years before his death. JMB was getting some recognition out there, and I think it changed him. But, beneath the bullshit, we all knew the real James.”
Nods and murmurs of agreement followed.
“So,” Tim continued. “This whole...smuggling this, is offensive. It’s offensive to our grief. It’s offensive to Kelsi’s grief. It’s offensive to the man’s memory. James had a dark side, so do all of us. This is outrageous. For his darkside to be magnified and scrutinized at the end of his life like this.”
He clenched his fist and mimed slamming the table, but didn’t.
“I want to grab these federal agents,” he mimed a neck wringing gesture. “And just tell them, ‘Have you no shame?’”
I raised an eyebrow, because I saw through the thinly veiled misdirection and knew the comment was a threat directed at me.
“I certainly understand your concern,” I said as I closed my padfolio. “I’m trying to get justice for Kelsi.”
“See, I hear you say that,” Tim snorted. “Justice for Kelsi. What does that even mean? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to make sure a grieving widow stays out of jail.”
“Dude,” Charlie said. “You sound really defensive right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Tim raised his palms in a surrender gesture. “My emotions are just fucked to shit with all of this. I’ve known James since high school, and I grew up next door to Kelsi. She’s basically like a little sister to me.”
“Tim,” I said. “Can I be frank?”
“I would prefer that, yes,” he held my gaze as he fingered the label on his beer bottle.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to make sure the law is upheld either way. So there is a chance Kelsi could do time for this. But, on the other hand, I’ve defended a lot of falsely accused people. And I’ve uncovered the truth each time. So... you have to trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know she’s like your sister, and trust me, I know how that feels. I’ve defended my own sister when she was falsely accused.”
Everyone at the table looked surprised at the revelation.
“One of the silver linings to that case,” I said, “was that it was my introduction into criminal law. Now, when I approach clients, I know it’s personal for them. I know what it feels like to have your whole life ripped out from under you like that. Believe me, I’m going to give Kelsi the same level of devotion that I gave my sister, and that I’ve given every client that has been falsely accused.”
The band members all nodded and listened quietly.
“Now,” I said. “How you guys can help, is total transparency.”
I rose and handed out my card to the band members.
“If any of you think of something else,” I said, “or know something you didn’t feel comfortable saying tonight, give me a call.”
“Thanks man,” Gary said.
Tim just nodded solemnly and studied the card. I shook hands around the table and left the bar.
When I arrived home, Vicki was already there and so was my sister. When I walked in the door, they both sat on the floor with wine glasses, surrounded by books and magazine and flowers, all in that telltale silver an
d white wedding color palette.
“Wedding planning,” I stated as I walked through the door.
“Hey,” Vicki greeted me with a peck on the cheek. “So we’ve got a couple of color schemes.”
She held up a palette chart.
“I was thinking, black and white,” she said. “Sleek, sophisticated.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Could work.”
“But black to a wedding?” Harmony protested. “I know people do it, but it just doesn’t belong.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We haven’t even set a date or a location.”
“I was thinking, April,” Vicki said. “Six months from now.”
“April, huh?” I helped myself to a glass of their wine and settled into the couch.
“Yeah,” she said. “It will give us six months to plan.”
I picked up a notebook on the coffee table. It was a wedding planning guide, and Vicki’s handwritten notes filled a timeline page.
“We need to find a planner,” she said. “Someone that will do all of this for us. There are several here. Or we could call people from L.A.”
“I do know one thing,” I said. “I don’t want a big, glitzy L.A. wedding. That’s not us anymore. I want a laid back Sedona wedding.”
“Totally,” Vicki said. “Casual, outdoors, maybe.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“Oooh,” Harmony said. “I know of a place. What about the Million Dollar Theatre?”
The Million Dollar Theatre was a restored theatre from the 1920’s, that still showed movies now and then. We had been to a screening there for one of Phoenix’s movies not too long ago. It definitely had a charm, and I could see doing a wedding there but it didn’t feel right.
Vicki spoke first, “I want something personal. Intimate.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sophisticated, but not overly pretentious.”
“Although,” Vicki held up a finger. “The dress…”
“Oh my god,” Harmony laughed. “The dress.”
I laughed. “I don’t know that I’ll be helpful for any of this. Just tell me what time to be there, and I’ll show up.”
Vicki and Harmony laughed, and I spent the rest of the evening drinking wine, and poring over color pallettes, and wedding planner websites, and somewhat working.
