“Walter, we have work here,” I said.
He didn’t take the call and reluctantly put the phone away. I continued.
“Okay, during the prosecution phase we are going to use cross-examination to make one thing crystal clear to the jury. That is, that once that GSR test came back positive on you, then—”
“False positive!”
“Whatever. The point is, once they had what they believed was a positive indication that you had very recently fired a weapon, all bets were off. A wide-open investigation became very tightly focused on one thing. You. It went from what they call a full-field investigation to a full investigation of you. So, what happened is that they left a lot of stones unturned. For example, Rilz had only been in this country four years. Not a single investigator went to Germany to check on his background and whether he had any enemies back there who wanted him dead. That’s just one thing. They didn’t thoroughly background the guy in L.A. either. This was a man who was allowed entry into the homes and lives of some of the wealthiest women in this city. Excuse my bluntness, but was he banging other married clients, or just your wife? Were there other important and powerful men he could have angered, or just you?”
Elliot didn’t respond to the crude questions. I had asked them that way on purpose, to see if it got a rise out of him or any reaction that contradicted his statements of loving his wife. But he showed no reaction either way.
“You see what I’m getting at, Walter? The focus, from almost the very start, was on you. When it’s the defense’s turn, we’re going to put it on Rilz. And from that we’ll grow doubts like stalks in a cornfield.”
Elliot nodded thoughtfully as he looked down at his reflection in the polished tabletop.
“But this can’t be the magic bullet Jerry told you about,” I said. “And there are risks in going after Rilz.”
Elliot raised his eyes to mine.
“Because the prosecutor knows this was a deficiency when the investigators brought in the case. He’s had five months to anticipate that we might go this way, and if he is good, as I am sure he is, then he’s been quietly getting ready for us to go in this direction.”
“Wouldn’t that come out in the discovery material?”
“Not always. There is an art to discovery. Most of the time it’s what is not in the discovery file that is important and that you have to watch out for. Jeffrey Golantz is a seasoned pro. He knows just what he has to put in and what he can keep for himself.”
“You know Golantz? You’ve gone to trial against him before?”
“I don’t know him and have never gone up against him. It’s his reputation I know. He’s never lost at trial. He’s something like twenty-seven and oh.”
I checked my watch. The time had passed quickly and I needed to keep things moving if I was going to pick my daughter up on time.
“Okay,” I said. “There are a couple other things we need to cover. Let’s talk about whether you testify.”
“That’s not a question. That’s a given. I want to clear my name. The jury will want me to say I did not do this.”
“I knew you were going to say that and I appreciate the fervor I see in your denials. But your testimony has to be more than that. It has to offer an explanation and that’s where we can get into trouble.”
“I don’t care.”
“Did you kill your wife and her lover?”
“No!”
“Then why did you go out there to the house?”
“I was suspicious. If she was there with somebody, I was going to confront her and throw him out on his ass.”
“You expect this jury to believe that a man who runs a billion-dollar movie studio took the afternoon off to drive out to Malibu to spy on his wife?”
“No, I’m no spy. I had suspicions and went out there to see for myself.”
“And to confront her with a gun?”
Elliot opened his mouth to speak but then hesitated and didn’t respond.
“You see, Walter?” I said. “You get up there and you open yourself up to anything—most of it not good.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t care. It’s a given. Guilty guys don’t testify. Everybody knows it. I’m testifying that I did not do this.”
He poked a finger at me with each syllable of the last sentence. I still liked his forcefulness. He was believable. Maybe he could survive on the stand.
“Well, ultimately it is your decision,” I said. “We’ll get you prepared to testify but we won’t make the decision until we get into the defense phase of the trial and we see where we stand.”
“It’s decided now. I’m testifying.”
His face began to turn a deep shade of crimson. I had to tread lightly here. I didn’t want him to testify but it was unethical for me to forbid it. It was a client decision, and if he ever claimed I took it away from him or refused to let him testify, I would have the bar swarming me like angry bees.
“Look, Walter,” I said. “You’re a powerful man. You run a studio and make movies and put millions of dollars on the line every day. I understand all of that. You are used to making decisions with nobody questioning them. But when we go into trial, I’m the boss. And while it will be you who makes this decision, I need to know that you are listening to me and considering my counsel. There’s no use going further if you don’t.”
He rubbed his hand roughly across his face. This was hard for him.
“Okay. I understand. We make a final decision on this later.”
He said it grudgingly. It was a concession he didn’t want to make. No man wants to relinquish his power to another.
“Okay, Walter,” I said. “I think that puts us on the same page.”
I checked my watch again. There were a few more things on my list and I still had some time.
“Okay, let’s move on,” I said.
“Please.”
“I want to add a couple people to the defense team. They will be ex—”
“No. I told you, the more lawyers a defendant has, the guiltier he looks. Look at Barry Bonds. Tell me people don’t think he’s guilty. He’s got more lawyers than teammates.”
“Walter, you didn’t let me finish. These are not lawyers I’m talking about, and when we go to trial, I promise it is going to be just you and me sitting at the table.”
“Then, who do you want to add?”
“A jury-selection consultant and somebody to work with you on image and testimony, all of that.”
“No jury consultant. Makes it look like you’re trying to rig things.”
“Look, the person I want to hire will be sitting out in the gallery. No one will notice her. She plays poker for a living and just reads people’s faces and looks for tells—little giveaways. That’s it.”
“No, I won’t pay for that mumbo jumbo.”
“Are you sure, Walter?”
I spent five minutes trying to convince him, telling him that picking the jury might be the most important part of the trial. I stressed that in circumstantial cases the priority had to be in picking jurors with open minds, ones who didn’t believe that just because the police or prosecution say something, it’s automatically true. I told him that I prided myself on my skills in picking a jury but that I could use the help of an expert who knew how to read faces and gestures. At the end of my plea Elliot simply shook his head.
“Mumbo jumbo. I will trust your skills.”
I studied him for a moment and decided we’d talked enough for the day. I would bring up the rest with him the next time. I had come to realize that while he was paying lip service to the idea that I was the trial boss, there was no doubt that he was firmly in charge of things.
And I couldn’t help but believe it might lead him straight to prison.
Twenty
By the time I dropped Patrick back at his car in downtown and headed to the Valley in heavy evening traffic, I knew I was going to be late and would tip off another confrontation with my ex-wife. I called to let
her know but she didn’t pick up and I left a message. When I finally got to her apartment complex in Sherman Oaks it was almost seven forty and I found mother and daughter out at the curb, waiting. Hayley had her head down and was looking at the sidewalk. I noticed she had begun to adopt this posture whenever her parents came into close proximity of one another. It was like she was just standing on the transporter circle and waiting to be beamed far away from us.
I popped the locks as I pulled to a stop, and Maggie helped Hayley into the back with her school backpack and her overnight bag.
“Thanks for being on time,” she said in a flat voice.
“No problem,” I said, just to see if it would put the flares in her eyes. “Must be a hot date if you’re waiting out here for me.”
“No, not really. Parent-teacher conference at the school.”
That got through my defenses and hit me in the jaw.
“You should’ve told me. We could’ve gotten a babysitter and gone together.”
“I’m not a baby,” Hayley said from behind me.
“We tried that,” Maggie said from my left. “Remember? You jumped on the teacher so badly about Hayley’s math grade—the circumstance of which you knew nothing about—that they asked me to handle communications with the school.”
The incident sounded only vaguely familiar. It had been safely locked away somewhere in my oxycodone-corrupted memory banks. But I felt the burn of embarrassment on my face and neck. I didn’t have a comeback.
“I have to go,” Maggie said quickly. “Hayley, I love you. Be good for your father and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mom.”
I stared out the window for a moment at my ex-wife before pulling away.
“Give ’em hell, Maggie McFierce,” I said.
I pulled away from the curb and put my window up. My daughter asked me why her mother was nicknamed Maggie McFierce.
“Because when she goes into battle, she always knows she is going to win,” I said.
“What battle?”
“Any battle.”
We drove silently down Ventura Boulevard and stopped for dinner at DuPar’s. It was my daughter’s favorite place to eat dinner because I always let her order pancakes. Somehow, the kid thought ordering breakfast for dinner was crossing some line and it made her feel rebellious and brave.
I ordered a BLT with Thousand Island dressing on it and, considering my last cholesterol count, figured I was the one being rebellious and brave. We did her homework together, which was a breeze for her and taxing for me, then I asked her what she wanted to do. I was willing to do anything—a movie, the mall, whatever she wanted—but I was hoping she’d just want to go home to my place and hang out, maybe pull out some old family scrapbooks and look at the yellowed photos.
She hesitated in responding and I thought I knew why.
“There’s nobody staying at my place if that’s what you’re worried about, Hay. The lady you met, Lanie? She doesn’t visit me anymore.”
“You mean like she’s not your girlfriend anymore?”
“She never was my girlfriend. She was a friend. Remember when I stayed in the hospital last year? I met her there and we became friends. We try to watch out for each other, and every now and then she comes over when she doesn’t want to stay home alone.”
It was the shaded truth. Lanie Ross and I had met in rehab during group therapy. We continued the relationship after leaving the program but never consummated it as a romance, because we were emotionally incapable of it. The addiction had cauterized those nerve endings and they were slow to come back. We spent time with each other and were there for each other—a two-person support group. But once we were back in the real world, I began to recognize in Lanie a weakness. I instinctively knew she wasn’t going to go the distance and I couldn’t make the journey with her. There are three roads that can be taken in recovery. There is the clean path of sobriety and there is the road to relapse. The third way is the fast out. It is when the traveler realizes that relapse is just a slow suicide and there is no reason to wait. I didn’t know which of those second two roads Lanie would go down but I couldn’t follow either one. We finally went our separate ways, the day after Hayley had met her.
“You know, Hayley, you can always tell me if you don’t like something or there’s something I am doing that is bothering you.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
We were silent for a few moments and I thought she wanted to say something else. I gave her the time to work up to it.
“Hey Dad?”
“What, baby?”
“If that lady wasn’t your girlfriend, does that mean you and Mom might get back together?”
The question left me without words for a few moments. I could see the hope in Hayley’s eyes and wanted her to see the same in mine.
“I don’t know, Hay. I messed things up pretty good when we tried that last year.”
Now the pain entered her eyes, like the shadows of clouds on the ocean.
“But I’m still working on it, baby,” I said quickly. “We just have to take it one day at a time. I’m trying to show her that we should be a family again.”
She didn’t respond. She looked down at her plate.
“Okay, baby?”
“Okay.”
“Did you decide what you want to do?”
“I think I just want to go home and watch TV.”
“Good. That’s what I want to do.”
We packed up her schoolbooks and I put money down on the bill. On the drive over the hill, she said her mother had told her I had gotten an important new job. I was surprised but happy.
“Well, it’s sort of a new job. I’m going back to work doing what I always did. But I have a lot of new cases and one big one. Did your mom tell you that?”
“She said you had a big case and everybody would be jealous but you would do real good.”
“She said that?”
“Yeah.”
I drove for a while, thinking about that and what it might mean. Maybe I hadn’t entirely blown things with Maggie. She still respected me on some level. Maybe that meant something.
“Um…”
I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror. It was dark out now but I could see her eyes looking out the window and away from mine. Children are so easy to read sometimes. If only grown-ups were the same.
“What’s up, Hay?”
“Um, I was just wondering, sort of, why you can’t do what Mom does.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like putting bad people in jail. She said your big case is with a man who killed two people. It’s like you’re always working for the bad guys.”
I was quiet for a moment before finding my words.
“The man I am defending is accused of killing two people, Hayley. Nobody has proved he did anything wrong. Right now he’s not guilty of anything.”
She didn’t respond and her skepticism was almost palpably emanating from the backseat. So much for the innocence of children.
“Hayley, what I do is just as important as what your mother does. When somebody is accused of a crime in our country, they are entitled to defend themselves. What if at school you were accused of cheating and you knew that you didn’t cheat? Wouldn’t you want to be able to explain and defend yourself?”
“I think so.”
“I think so, too. It’s like that with the courts. If you get accused of a crime, you can have a lawyer like me help you explain and defend yourself. The laws are very complicated and it’s hard for someone to do it by themselves when they don’t know all the rules of evidence and things like that. So I help them. It doesn’t mean I agree with them or what they have done—if they have done it. But it’s part of the system. An important part.”
The explanation felt hollow to me as I said it. On an intellectual level I understood and believed the argument, every word of it. But on a father-daughter level I felt like one of my clients, squirming on th
e witness stand. How could I get her to believe it when I wasn’t sure I believed it anymore myself?
“Have you helped any innocent people?” my daughter asked.
This time I didn’t look in the mirror.
“A few, yes.”
It was the best I could honestly say.
“Mom’s made a lot of bad people go to jail.”
I nodded.
“Yes, she has. I used to think we were a great balancing act. What she did and what I did. Now…”
There was no need to finish the thought. I turned the radio on and hit the preset button that tuned in the Disney music channel.
The last thing I thought about on the drive home was that maybe grown-ups were just as easy to read as their children.
Twenty-one
After dropping my daughter off at school Thursday morning I drove directly to Jerry Vincent’s law offices. It was still early and traffic was light. When I got into the garage adjoining the Legal Center, I found that I almost had my pick of the place—most lawyers don’t get into the office until closer to nine, when court starts. I had all of them beat by at least an hour. I drove up to the second level so I could park on the same floor as the office. Each level of the garage had its own entrance into the building.
I drove by the spot where Jerry Vincent had been parked when he was shot to death and parked farther up the ramp. As I walked toward the bridge that connected the garage to the Legal Center, I noticed a parked Subaru station wagon with surfboard racks on the roof. There was a sticker on the back window that showed the silhouette of a surfer riding the nose of a board. It said one world on the sticker.
The back windows on the wagon were darkly tinted and I couldn’t see in. I moved up to the front and looked into the car through the driver’s side window. I could see that the backseat had been folded flat. Half the rear area was cluttered with open cardboard boxes full of clothes and personal belongings. The other half served as a bed for Patrick Henson. I knew this because he was lying there asleep, his face turned from the light into the folds of a sleeping bag. And it was only then that I remembered something he had said during our first phone conversation when I had asked if he was interested in a job as my driver. He had told me he was living out of his car and sleeping in a lifeguard stand.