It was late and the studio was emptying out for the day. Patrick was able to get a parking spot right in front of Elliot’s bungalow. Patrick was excited because he had never been inside the gates of a movie studio. I told him he was free to look around but to keep his phone handy because I was unsure how long the meeting with my client would last and I needed to stick to a schedule for picking up my daughter.
As I followed Nina in I asked her if there was a place for me to meet with Elliot other than his office. I said I had paperwork to spread out and that the table we had sat at the day before was too small. She said she would take me to the executive boardroom and I could set up there while she went to get her boss and bring him to the meeting. I said that would be fine. But the truth was I wasn’t going to spread documents out. I just wanted to meet with Elliot in a neutral spot. If I was sitting across from him at his worktable, he would have command of the meeting. That was made clear during our first encounter. Elliot was a forceful personality. But I needed to be the one in charge from here on out.
It was a big room with twelve black leather chairs around the polished oval table. There was an overhead projector and a long box on the far wall containing the drop-down screen. The other walls were hung with framed posters of the movies that had been made on the lot. I assumed that these were the films that had made the studio money.
I took a seat and pulled the case files out of my bag. Twenty-five minutes later I was looking through the state’s discovery documents when the door opened and Elliot finally walked in. I didn’t bother to get up or extend my hand. I tried to look annoyed as I pointed him to a chair across the table from me.
Nina trailed him into the room to see what she could get us for refreshment.
“Nothing, Nina,” I said before Elliot could respond. “We’re going to be fine and we need to get started. We’ll let you know if we need anything.”
She seemed momentarily taken aback by the issuance of orders from someone other than Elliot. She looked to him for clarification and he simply nodded. She left, closing the double doors behind her. Elliot sat down in the chair I had pointed him to.
I looked across the table at my client for a long moment before speaking.
“I can’t figure you out, Walter.”
“What do you mean? What’s to figure out?”
“Well, for starters, you spend a lot of time protesting your innocence. But I don’t think you are taking this that seriously.”
“You’re wrong about that.”
“Am I? You understand that if you lose this trial, you are going to prison? And there won’t be any bail on a double-murder conviction while you appeal. You get a bad verdict and they’ll cuff you in the courtroom and take you away.”
Elliot leaned a few inches toward me before responding again.
“I understand exactly the position I am in. So don’t dare tell me I am not taking it seriously.”
“Okay, then, when we set a meeting, let’s be on time for it. There is a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time to cover it. I know you have a studio to run but that is no longer the priority. For the next two weeks you have one priority. This case.”
Now he looked at me for a long moment before responding. It may have been the first time in his life he had been chided for being late and then told what to do. Finally, he nodded.
“Fair enough,” he said.
I nodded back. Our positions were now understood. We were in his boardroom and on his studio lot, but I was the alpha dog now. His future depended on me.
“Good,” I said. “Now, the first thing I need to ask is whether we are speaking privately in here.”
“Of course we are.”
“Well, we weren’t yesterday. It was pretty clear that Nina’s got your office wired. That may be fine for your movie meetings but it’s not fine when we’re discussing your case. I’m your lawyer, and no one should hear our discussion. No one. Nina has no privilege. She could be subpoenaed to testify against you. In fact, it won’t surprise me if she ends up on the prosecution’s witness list.”
Elliot leaned back in his padded chair and raised his face toward the ceiling.
“Nina,” he said. “Mute the feed. If I need anything I will call you on the line.”
He looked at me and opened his hands. I nodded that I was satisfied.
“Thank you, Walter. Now let’s get to work.”
“I have a question first.”
“Sure.”
“Is this the meeting where I tell you I didn’t do it and then you tell me that it doesn’t matter to you whether I did it or not?”
I nodded.
“Whether you did it or not is irrelevant, Walter. It’s what the state can prove beyond a—”
“No!”
He slammed an open palm down on the table. It sounded like a shot. I was startled but hoped I didn’t show it.
“I am tired of that legal bullshit! That it doesn’t matter whether I did it, only what can be proved. It does matter! Don’t you see? It does matter. I need to be believed, goddamnit! I need you to believe me. I don’t care what the evidence is against me. I did NOT do this. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? If my own lawyer doesn’t believe me or care, then I don’t have a chance.”
I was sure Nina was going to come charging in to see if everything was all right. I leaned back in my padded chair and waited for her and to make sure Elliot was finished.
As expected, one of the doors opened and Nina was about to step in. But Elliot dismissed her with a wave of his hand and a harsh command not to bother us. The door closed again and he locked eyes with me. I held my hand up to stop him from speaking. It was my turn.
“Walter, there are two things I have to concern myself with,” I said calmly. “Whether I understand the state’s case and whether I can knock it down.”
I tapped a finger on the discovery file as I spoke.
“At the moment I do understand the state’s case. It’s straightforward prosecution one-oh-one. The state believes that they have motive and opportunity in spades.
“Let’s go with motive first. Your wife was having an affair and that made you angry. Not only that, but the prenuptial agreement she signed twelve years before had vested and the only way you could get rid of her without splitting everything up was to kill her. Next is opportunity. They have the time your car left through the gate at Archway that morning. They’ve made the run and timed it again and again and say you could’ve easily been at the Malibu house at the time of the killings. That is opportunity.
“And what the state is counting on is motive and opportunity being enough to sway the jury and win the day, while the actual evidence against you is quite thin and very circumstantial. So my job is to figure out a way of making the jury understand that there is a lot of smoke here but no real fire. If I do that, then you walk away.”
“I still want to know if you believe I am innocent.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“Walter, I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me. One way or the other, I need to know.”
I relented and held my hands up in surrender.
“All right, then, I’ll tell you what I think, Walter. I have studied the file forwards and backwards. I’ve read everything in here at least twice and most of it three times. I have now been out to the beach house where this unfortunate event happened and studied the geography of these murders. I have done all of that and I can see the very real possibility that you are innocent of these charges. Does that mean that I believe that you are an innocent man? No, Walter, it doesn’t. I’m sorry but I have been doing this too long, and the reality is, I haven’t seen too many innocent clients. So the best I can tell you is that I don’t know. If that’s not good enough for you, then I am sure you will have no trouble finding a lawyer who will tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether he believes it or not.”
I rocked back in my chair while awaiting his response. He clasped his h
ands together on the table in front of him while he chewed on my words and then he finally nodded.
“Then, I guess that is the best I can ask for,” he said.
I tried to let out my breath without his noticing. I still had the case. For the moment.
“But you know what I do believe, Walter?”
“What do you believe?”
“That you’re holding out on me.”
“Holding out? What are you talking about?”
“There’s something I don’t know about this case and you are holding back on it with me.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You are too confident, Walter. It’s like you know you are going to walk.”
“I am going to walk. I’m innocent.”
“Being innocent is not enough. Innocent men sometimes get convicted and deep down everybody knows it. That’s why I’ve never met a truly innocent man who wasn’t scared. Scared that the system won’t work right, that it’s built to find guilty people guilty and not innocent people innocent. That’s what you’re missing, Walter. You’re not scared.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why should I be scared?”
I stared across the table at him, trying to read him. I knew my instincts were right. There was something I didn’t know, something that I had missed in the files or that Vincent had carried in his head instead of his files. Whatever it was, Elliot wasn’t sharing it with me yet.
For now that was okay. Sometimes you don’t want to know what your client knows, because once the smoke comes out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in.
“All right, Walter,” I said. “To be continued. Meantime, let’s go to work.”
Without waiting for a reply I opened the defense file and looked at the notes I had written on the inside flap.
“I think we’re set in terms of witnesses and strategy when it comes to the state’s case. What I have not found in the file is a solid strategy for putting forth your defense.”
“What do you mean?” Elliot asked. “Jerry told me we were ready.”
“Maybe not, Walter. I know it’s not something you want to see or hear but I found this in the file.”
I slid a two-page document across the polished table to him. He glanced at it but didn’t really look at it.
“What is it?”
“That is a motion for a continuance. Jerry drew it up but hadn’t filed it. But it seems clear that he wanted to delay the trial. The coding on the motion indicates he printed it out Monday—just a few hours before he was killed.”
Elliot shook his head and shoved the document back across the table.
“No, we talked about it and he agreed with me to move forward on schedule.”
“That was Monday?”
“Yes, Monday. The last time I talked to him.”
I nodded. That covered one of the questions I had. Vincent kept billing records in each of his files, and I had noted in the Elliot file that he had billed an hour on the day of his murder.
“Was that a conference at his office or yours?”
“It was a phone call. Monday afternoon. He’d left a message earlier and I called him back. Nina can get you the exact time if you need it.”
“He has it down here at three. He talked to you about a delay?”
“That’s right but I told him no delay.”
Vincent had billed an hour. I wondered how long he and Elliot had sparred over the delay.
“Why did he want a continuance?” I asked.
“He just wanted more time to prepare and maybe pad his bill. I told him we were ready, like I’m telling you. We are ready!”
I sort of laughed and shook my head.
“The thing is, you’re not the lawyer here, Walter. I am. And that’s what I’m trying to tell you, I’m not seeing much here in terms of a defense strategy. I think that’s why Jerry wanted to delay the trial. He didn’t have a case.”
“No, it’s the prosecution that doesn’t have the case.”
I was growing tired of Elliot and his insistence on calling the legal shots.
“Let me explain how this works,” I said wearily. “And forgive me if you know all of this, Walter. It’s going to be a two-part trial, okay? The prosecutor goes first and he lays out his case. We get a chance to attack it as he goes. Then we get our shot and that’s when we put up our evidence and alternate theories of the crime.”
“Okay.”
“And what I can tell from my study of the files is that Jerry Vincent was relying more on the prosecution’s case than on a defense case. There are—”
“How so?”
“What I’m saying is that he’s locked and loaded on the prosecution side. He has counter witnesses and cross-examination plans ready for everything the prosecution is going to put forward. But I’m missing something on the defense side of the equation. We’ve got no alibi, no alternate suspects, no alternate theories, nothing. At least nothing in the file. And that’s what I mean when I say we have no case. Did he ever discuss with you how he planned to roll out the defense?”
“No. We were going to have that conversation but then he got killed. He told me that he was working all of that out. He said he had the magic bullet and the less I knew, the better. He was going to tell me when we got closer to trial but he never did. He never got the chance.”
I knew the term. The “magic bullet” was your get-out-of-jail-and-go-home card. It was the witness or piece of evidence that you had in your back pocket that was going to either knock all the evidence down like dominoes or firmly and permanently fix reasonable doubt in the mind of every juror on the panel. If Vincent had a magic bullet, he hadn’t noted it in the case file. And if he had a magic bullet, why was he talking about a delay on Monday?
“You have no idea what this magic bullet was?” I asked Elliot.
“Just what he told me, that he found something that was going to blow the state out of the water.”
“That doesn’t make sense if on Monday he was talking about delaying the trial.”
Elliot shrugged.
“I told you, he just wanted more time to be prepared. Probably more time to charge me more money. But I told him, when we make a movie, we pick a date, and that movie comes out on that date no matter what. I told him we were going to trial without delay.”
I nodded my head at Elliot’s no-delay mantra. But my mind was on Vincent’s missing laptop. Was the magic bullet in there? Had he saved his plan on the computer and not put it into the hard file? Was the magic bullet the reason for his murder? Had his discovery been so sensitive or dangerous that someone had killed him for it?
I decided to move on with Elliot while I had him in front of me.
“Well, Walter, I don’t have the magic bullet. But if Jerry could find it, then so can I. I will.”
I checked my watch and tried to give the outward appearance that I was not troubled by not knowing what was assuredly the key element in the case.
“Okay. Let’s talk about an alternate theory.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that the state has its theory and we should have ours. The state’s theory is that you were upset over your wife’s infidelity and what it would cost you to divorce her. So you went out to Malibu and killed both your wife and her lover. You then got rid of the murder weapon in some way—either hid it or threw it into the ocean—and then called nine-one-one to report that you had discovered the murders. That theory gives them all they need. Motive and opportunity. But to back it up they have the GSR and almost nothing else.”
“GSR?”
“Gunshot residue. Their evidentiary case—what little there is—firmly rests on it.”
“That test was a false positive!” Elliot said forcefully. “I never shot any weapon. And Jerry told me he was bringing in the top expert in the country to knock it all down. A woman from John Jay in New York. She’ll testify that the sheriff’s lab procedures were sloppy and lax, prone to come up with
the false positive.”
I nodded. I liked the fervor of his denial. It could be useful if he testified.
“Yes, Dr. Arslanian—we still have her coming in,” I said. “But she’s no magic bullet, Walter. The prosecution will counter with their own expert saying exactly the opposite—that the lab is well run and that all procedures were followed. At best, the GSR will be a wash. The prosecution will still be leaning heavily on motive and opportunity.”
“What motive? I loved her and I didn’t even know about Rilz. I thought he was a faggot.”
I held my hands up in a slow-it-down gesture.
“Look, do yourself a favor, Walter, and don’t call him that. In court or anywhere else. If it is appropriate to reference his sexual orientation, you say you thought he was gay. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now, the prosecution will simply say that you did know Johan Rilz was your wife’s lover, and they’ll trot out evidence and testimony that will indicate that a divorce forced by your wife’s infidelity would cost you in excess of a hundred million dollars and possibly dilute your control of the studio. They plant all of that in the jury’s minds and you start having a pretty good motivation for murder.”
“And it’s all bullshit.”
“And I’ll be able to potshot the hell out of it at trial. A lot of their positives can be turned into negatives. It will be a dance, Walter. We’ll trade punches. We’ll try to distort and destroy but ultimately they’ll land more punches than we can block and that’s why we’re the underdog and why it’s always good for the defense to float an alternate theory. We give the jury a plausible explanation for why these two people were killed. We throw suspicion away from you and at somebody else.”
“Like the one-armed man in The Fugitive?”
I shook my head.
“Not exactly.”
I remembered the movie and the television show before it. In both cases, there actually was a one-armed man. I was talking about a smoke screen, an alternate theory concocted by the defense because I wasn’t buying into Elliot’s “I-am-innocent rap”—at least not yet.
There was a buzzing sound and Elliot took a phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen.