Witness for the Persecution Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by E.J. Copperman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Here

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Two: There?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Cast of Characters

  Author’s Notes

  Also by E.J. Copperman

  Jersey Girl Legal mysteries

  INHERIT THE SHOES *

  JUDGMENT AT SANTA MONICA *

  Haunted Guesthouse mysteries

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEED

  AN UNINVITED GHOST

  OLD HAUNTS

  CHANCE OF A GHOST

  THE THRILL OF THE HAUNT

  INSPECTOR SPECTER

  GHOST IN THE WIND

  SPOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

  THE HOSTESS WITH THE GHOSTESS

  BONES BEHIND THE WHEEL

  Asperger’s mysteries (with Jeff Cohen)

  THE QUESTION OF THE MISSING HEAD

  THE QUESTION OF THE UNFAMILIAR HUSBAND

  THE QUESTION OF THE FELONIOUS FRIEND

  THE QUESTION OF THE ABSENTEE FATHER

  THE QUESTION OF THE DEAD MISTRESS

  Mysterious Detective mysteries

  WRITTEN OFF

  EDITED OUT

  Agent to the Paws mysteries

  DOG DISH OF DOOM

  BIRD, BATH, AND BEYOND

  * available from Severn House

  WITNESS FOR THE PERSECUTION

  E.J. Copperman

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © E.J. Copperman, 2022

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of E.J. Copperman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5076-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0811-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0810-1 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To the people who made the works that helped get us through these past couple of years:

  Call My Agent!

  The Great British Bake Off (Great British Baking Show on my side of the pond)

  Somebody Feed Phil

  The Repair Shop

  Ted Lasso

  You can’t possibly know how much good you’ve done. Bravo.

  PART ONE

  Here

  ONE

  The thing about a red carpet is that it smells like a regular carpet. You think it should be different, in some way better, than an average living-room wall-to-wall, but the truth is that whoever is supposedly honoring actors, directors and assorted celebrities is less interested in the honors and more in the perception of them. So they go out to a rental house and get a rollable expanse of cheap rug that will stretch from the curb to the door.

  This was an especially redolent one, I thought. I hadn’t been on many in my life – none until six months before – but I was noticing the scent of fresh polyester (you’d think in this eco-friendly a town they’d have used natural fibers, or better, nothing) more than I had before.

  It was hardly the only thing assaulting my senses. Being a ‘plus one’ here affords a person the chance to take in the experience more than the star or wannabe-star attracting attention from the ‘press’ in the area, the fans lining the streets for a glimpse and the relentless, nova-bright lights.

  I looked over at Patrick McNabb to my right, holding my hand and leading – I’m sure Patrick would say ‘leading’ and not ‘dragging’, which is more what it felt like – me toward the interview area, where we would stop and Patrick would speak about what a privilege it had been for him to work on Desert Siege, in which my boyfriend (although he hadn’t been that when the movie was shot) played a two-fisted research sociologist who stumbles across neo-Nazis in the Arizona desert and has to stop them from … doing something I had never understood despite having seen the movie twice. Maybe at the screening tonight, which would constitute Viewing #3, I’d pick up the subtle nuances I’d missed the first two times.

  ‘McNabb!’ ‘Patrick!’ ‘Hey, Pat!’ The photographers lining the runway were doing their collective best to get Patrick looking in their direction, ideally in the midst of a remarkably unflattering facial expression. As the ‘arm candy’ (although I felt I was more like ‘arm brussels sprouts’) I could be assured my ‘look’, which had taken two solid hours to achieve despite my best efforts to sabotage it, would appear to be an attempt to look as much like a raccoon as possible if it ever appeared in print or pixel.

  Patrick was practiced enough to ignore their shouts. His eyes were fixed on the woman standing about twenty yards from us. The one holding a microphone.

  The one with the light in front of her and the TV camera trained
at her upper body, which was impressive. But I’m sure they managed to get her face in the shot as well, just for balance.

  ‘We’ll get this done and then we can go inside and relax,’ he said in my ear as his grip on my right hand tightened. I’d seen him at these things before. Patrick’s idea of relax and mine were clearly two different things. But I nodded dutifully. Because this whole evening was going to be about duty. I was a dutiful girlfriend, and nobody was going to deny that.

  We walked toward the woman, whose name I’m sure I was supposed to know, and her already incandescent smile brightened to blinding when she noticed Patrick approaching. Patrick is a handsome man and a commanding presence, but my guess was she knew she was going to get a good interview and, if she could, get exposure outside the Los Angeles area. Everyone comes to LA to get noticed and then wants to get noticed everywhere except in LA.

  I’d been here a little under two years and I’d been paying puzzled attention.

  Just as Patrick reached the TV woman and let go of my hand (which was a relief to my fingers), I heard someone behind me shout, ‘Hey Sandy!’

  It’s my natural inclination when hearing my name shouted to assume either that I have done something terribly wrong or, as in this case, that someone else named Sandy was nearby and surely the person calling out meant them. So I kept walking, just to Patrick’s left but out of camera range, because there was surely no one watching whatever infotainment show this was who would know or care who the hell I was. The women watching would resent me for being with Patrick and the men would likely be more interested in the reporter’s upper body, which had been getting so much well-deserved attention.

  ‘Sandy!’ the call came again and instinctively I turned. The man calling out was holding a sheaf of papers and approaching me faster than I thought was appropriate in such a public place. I have been lunged at before, more often than I cared to think about, by people with the intent of doing me harm. I flinched a little.

  Behind me I heard Patrick saying, ‘… such a layered, complex character. It was a privilege …’

  Before I could think of a way to escape without damaging Patrick’s moment the man, wiping sweat from his brow (welcome to Southern California), extended the sheaf of what I could tell now were legal documents. ‘Sandy!’ he shouted again.

  Patrick turned to look over his shoulder at me. His expression was either annoyed or concerned but I didn’t get a long enough look to determine which before the sweating man reached me and said, ‘What about the Langhorne case?’

  The Langhorne case? What did that have to do with Desert Siege? ‘The Langhorne case!’ the moist little guy said again. ‘You’re behind!’

  Now Patrick was next to me. ‘What about ’er behind?’ His accent always reverted to Cockney when he was angry. I thought it was charming but Patrick believed it to be coarse and did his best to conceal it when he had control of himself, which was almost all the time.

  ‘You’re behind on the case!’ This guy was so melodramatic he could have been an actor on the British soap opera in which Patrick told me he’d made his first big break seven years earlier. This man would not play one of the romantic leads. He’d be the doctor nobody wanted to get at the hospital, or a delivery guy who never let go of his bike.

  ‘A little, but I can get on it tomorrow,’ I said. My voice was getting lost in the tumult around me. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘The Langhorne case!’ he hollered again.

  ‘Let her go!’ Patrick demanded, despite the man not touching me at all. I’d never seen Patrick look like this before, except when he was acting and about to ‘hit’ someone.

  ‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘This man is talking to me about a case.’

  ‘The Langhorne case!’ What was the point, really?

  ‘Get away from her or I’ll kill you,’ Patrick said quietly but with malice in his voice.

  ‘Patrick!’ I said.

  But it was too late. Patrick leapt at the little perspiring man and had him on the red carpet in seconds. Photographers swarmed around them while I tried desperately to pull my suddenly volatile boyfriend away, already calculating the irreparable damage done to his career and, in my lawyer’s mind, estimating what charges the police might bring when they inevitably arrived.

  And man, did that carpet smell bad.

  ‘Sandy,’ Patrick said, snapping his fingers in front of my face, ‘it’s me, Patrick. You’re completely ignoring your sandwich.’

  I shook myself back to reality. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just daydreaming for a second.’

  Patrick smiled that irresistible little grin that the camera adored and I knew was him hiding his concern. ‘More like having a daymare,’ he said. ‘What were you thinking about?’

  Could I say I’d been living a nightmare scenario of his movie premiere in my head? Patrick knew it was part of his job, but he labored under the delusion that I found all the glitter intoxicating like my best friend (and Patrick’s executive assistant) Angie does. I find it pretty distasteful, to tell the truth. Or couldn’t you tell?

  ‘Just something from work,’ I said. ‘The Langhorne case.’

  Now Patrick’s smile, with a touch of regret in it, was sincere. ‘Sandy, my love. If you don’t want to go to the premiere, you can just say that. It’s months until the thing and you’re already in a state about it.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to go,’ I answered. ‘It’s more in the area that you knew what I was thinking about that scares me.’

  ‘I’m an actor, darling. I observe.’

  I chose not to think too hard about that.

  We were sitting in Patrick’s kitchen, an expanse in which my entire apartment could fit, having what he called ‘a casual lunch’. The fact that it had been served by a staff of two sort of contradicted that description, but there was no arguing with Patrick. Ever. There just wasn’t much point to it. I’d learned through hundreds of attempts.

  ‘Don’t think that I don’t want to be with you,’ I told Patrick. ‘I just always feel so out of place at those things, and I’m afraid of embarrassing you and ending your career.’

  Patrick’s laugh is one of the things I love about him. It’s unforced and delighted, like a child’s laugh but with so much more insight behind it. So when he came within inches of roaring now, it only bothered me a little bit.

  ‘Oh Sandy,’ he said when he could catch his breath, ‘you truly do make me see things differently. Why don’t you m—’

  Patrick had asked me to marry him seven times since the historic first attempt on the floor of the Glendale courthouse. It had gotten to be such a habit that I’d had to impose a strict ban on proposals. I raised a finger to the ceiling and he caught himself. ‘Move in with me.’

  Now that was a new one! ‘Move in here?’ I said. It wasn’t like I didn’t know this was Patrick’s house and that was what he’d meant. I was buying myself time because some knee-jerk impulse in my brain (if brains have knees) was telling me to say no.

  ‘I think there’s probably enough room,’ Patrick said with the desired twinkle in his eye. Patrick does a hell of a twinkle.

  ‘There’s enough room for the 101st Airborne Division,’ I said. ‘The room isn’t the point.’

  Patrick let out a long breath and tossed his (yes, cloth) napkin on to the table. ‘What is the point, Sandy?’ he asked.

  Could I go back to the daydream about the suffocating red carpet? ‘Look, it’s not that I hate the idea.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very encouraging.’ Patrick was rarely moody and almost never petulant, but hey, I have a way with men. ‘Your not-loathing the idea of living with me really makes my day.’

  I stood and walked over to him and took his face in my hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t how I meant it to sound. But it’s a big decision and we shouldn’t just rush into it because I did or didn’t want to go to your premiere.’ Before I moved to LA I wouldn’t have known what a red-carpet premiere was, let alone dreamed
of attending one.

  When I’d first met Patrick, I didn’t know he was a very famous television and occasional film actor. I wasn’t much into popular culture like Angie is. I knew Patrick as the first client I’d met at Seaton, Taylor, Evans and Bach (now Seaton, Taylor, Evans and Wentworth and good riddance to Bach), a family law firm with which I’d recently accepted a job so I could get away from the criminal law I was practicing as an assistant county prosecutor in New Jersey. Then Patrick was charged with murder, I became his lawyer, and the whole not-practicing-criminal-law thing pretty much flew out the window.

  Having now spent some time in Patrick’s orbit, I knew some more entertainment industry terms that I never would have been familiar with before. I still didn’t know how anything worked or what a ‘best boy’ was, but I did know about red carpets and how they smell.

  ‘I told you,’ Patrick said. ‘You don’t have to go to the premiere if you don’t want to. I thought you’d find it fun.’

  ‘I know.’ I nodded to prove that I knew. It’s a futile gesture, but I’m really good at those. ‘Hesitating about moving in here is not about the red carpet.’

  ‘Then what’s it about?’ Patrick asked.

  I hugged him because I didn’t know the answer and my cell phone rescued me by ringing. I dug it out of the front pocket of my jeans. You’ll never catch me butt-dialing someone. I thigh-dial them.

  The Caller ID showed Holiday Wentworth was on the line. Since Holly is my boss, I figured it was probably a good idea to take the call. And I could put off continuing this conversation with Patrick.

  ‘What’s up, Holly?’ I asked, trying to sound like it must be an emergency, when I knew it was probably Holly calling to ask about the Langhorne case, which was actually a pretty simple child-custody matter that was probably never going to see the inside of a courtroom. I just had to find a way to make my client, a well-known talent agent, not act like a jerk.

  Not that he was acting.

  ‘I need you to come in.’ Holly sounded like it might actually be an emergency. What some people think are emergencies in a family law firm are … well, I could tell you stories from New Jersey that would curl your hair. Seriously, if you’re thinking of getting a perm, call me up and ask about the small-time weed dealer (before New Jersey legalized) and the melon baller.