Judgment at Santa Monica Page 10

Pierre and Penelope, the Pretentious Twins, exchanged a knowing look. ‘Oh yes,’ Penelope practically crooned. ‘She mentioned her daughter-in-law.’

  ‘And what did she say about Ms Sutton?’ Nate asked, trying in vain to take control of the conversation away from Patrick.

  The ceiling fan, in addition to the very efficient air conditioning, was making me regret not wearing a jacket over my sleeveless shell. But I think the chilliness I felt from our two witnesses had something to do with the gooseflesh on my arms.

  ‘Let’s just say it wasn’t complimentary,’ Penelope attempted.

  ‘She hated Cynthia Sutton,’ Pete said. Pete hadn’t yet acquired the filter an artist needs when talking to ‘civilians’, particularly those admitted to the bar. ‘Wendy said her daughter-in-law wanted her to die.’

  Well, that wasn’t good.

  ‘Those were her exact words?’ Nate asked. ‘“She wants me to die”?’

  ‘Verbatim,’ Pete said, nodding.

  It was fairly clear these two would not be on my witness list, but I could count on them testifying for the prosecution. Now all I had to do was figure out how to get them to shut up.

  SIXTEEN

  Nate asked me to come along to one other interview and I had to resist the impulse to run away and hide, but told him I would as long as it wasn’t Cynthia Sutton’s estranged husband and son of the victim, Michael Bryan. Nate assured me it would not be Michael, and he wasn’t lying. He knew better than to dupe me into an extremely uncomfortable conversation that he didn’t need me for in a legal capacity.

  Instead, he, Patrick and I (because we couldn’t convince Patrick we were just going back to our offices separately no matter how hard we tried) ended up at the door to the office of Leopold Kolensky, who Nate had found listed on the financial records of Rafael as ‘executive manager’, a title which didn’t mean anything at all. I was along to see if there were issues with Leopold (Leopold?) possibly incriminating himself on the stand if the rumors about Wendy Bryan’s business floundering turned out to be true. Men don’t like to admit they screwed something up. It’s why they invented GPS.

  I’d called Jon Irvin’s wife Diane, reluctantly because I felt the shooting was my fault and she’d probably yell at me. But even though she was clearly very shaken, she did not mention how I might have gotten her husband killed.

  Instead she reported that Jon had tolerated the surgery well, had lost one kidney but could get by with the one he had left, and that now they were hoping no infections would set in and that the loss of blood would not continue to affect him badly. I’d told her to let me know if there was anything I could do, and the words sounded just as empty then as any other time anyone has ever said them. Diane had said Jon couldn’t have visitors yet but that she’d let me know when he could.

  ‘I’m not gonna knock,’ I told Nate. ‘You knock.’ I wanted to blend into the wallpaper here, not because it was an especially scary place but because someone had shot at me and that tends to put one a little bit on edge. Trust me; I have experience in these areas.

  ‘Knock?’ Nate didn’t exactly sneer, but you couldn’t say he didn’t, either. He pushed the door open and walked in. What do I know? In New Jersey we knock.

  The offices were, in a word, bare. There was no receptionist’s desk, no waiting area. There were no chairs. There was no rug. There was a corridor off the room just inside the entrance and three other doors off that hallway. The lights were on, so the place had utilities, but other than that it was …

  ‘Abandoned,’ Nate finished my thought. ‘Or there was never anything here. Could be just a mailing address for someone.’

  Patrick felt bold enough to walk down the corridor without any compunction and open each door. ‘There’s nothing in any of these rooms,’ he reported back. But Judy, who had been silently dogging me from the time we’d left my office (and had done and said virtually nothing except stand and look concerned, in a professional, intimidating way) insisted on following behind him and confirming each empty room.

  ‘If you were a front for something, would you leave the office door unlocked?’ I asked Nate.

  ‘I would if I had to leave in a hurry and didn’t care what somebody found after I was gone,’ he said. Nate walked the perimeter of the main room then called down the corridor. ‘Any dust in there? Markings where there used to be furniture?’

  ‘That’s a negative.’ Judy. Like I had to tell you.

  Nate nodded to himself; that confirmed what he’d been thinking. ‘Somebody left here in a hurry, and not long ago.’

  Patrick emerged from the hallway, and from the sound of it, had used the restroom at the end of the hallway and then washed his hands, which he was wiping with a brown paper towel that would have had to have bulked up to be one-ply. ‘The accommodations here are not lush,’ he noted.

  ‘Yeah, it doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would be affiliated with a higher-end art gallery, does it?’ I asked Nate. I wasn’t basing the question on the thin paper towels in the bathroom so much as the dark fake-wood paneling on the walls.

  ‘No. There’s something very fishy going on and it’s too big a coincidence that the one client we know this guy worked for got herself murdered with a TeeVee award.’ Nate was doing his tough cop act. He had once been a tough cop, but now it was an act.

  There was nothing to do but take a few pictures on Nate’s phone in case we needed references about the office, look around without any success for any papers or other indicators of what Kolensky Associates did for a living, and then head back out. I made Nate drive me to the Seaton, Taylor office building, which I entered through the parking garage because I wasn’t up to the front entrance again just yet.

  Judy, now just outside my office but visible through the glass, stood in the hallway and looked for all the world like she was waiting for a general to come by and inspect her. Her hands were clasped behind her back and her posture was absolutely straight. She moved in such tiny increments that a causal passerby might think she was a mannequin for the least distinctive clothing imaginable.

  I felt the only thing to do was call Angie, who had left Cynthia’s house and was heading back to the studio to follow Patrick around. I reached her in Patrick’s Tesla because of course.

  ‘What does the empty office mean about Cynthia?’ Angie said.

  ‘Anybody’s guess. I’m guessing it doesn’t mean she was about to start issuing stock. What are you and your boss up to?’

  ‘Patrick is out with Nate Garrigan talking to her husband and I’m sure that’s going to be great fun for both of them.’

  I groaned. I didn’t hold back the groan, despite the fact that I was now officially talking to Angie about her boss. ‘I just left them! He really doesn’t have a clue that he’s getting in Nate’s way and messing up the investigation, does he?’

  ‘He’s Patrick.’ That’s Angie being diplomatic.

  ‘On the incredibly unlikely chance that anything at all of interest comes from that meeting, I’m sure Nate will tell me about it when he reports back,’ I said. ‘But try to keep Patrick from calling me every ten minutes with his latest brilliant idea of how to defend this case, OK?’

  ‘So you’re allowed to say “brilliant” and he’s not?’ Angie’s smile was audible.

  ‘Hey. Whose side are you on?’

  ‘I’m on company time. Right now Patrick is paying my half of our rent.’

  ‘Between us,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea why he was so gung-ho about me defending Cynthia? I mean, do they have a past or something? What’s Patrick’s stake in this?’ I thought I knew Patrick pretty well and I had been wondering about this question since he’d first showed up in Judge Coffey’s courtroom insisting I should handle Cynthia’s divorce. Those were the days.

  ‘All I can tell is that they’re friends and Patrick is doing his knight-in-shining-armor bit,’ Angie answered. ‘You know how he gets when a friend is under siege.’

  I glanced out at Judy, who had
not visibly moved a muscle since the last time I’d checked. ‘Yeah. I know how he gets.’ Seriously, that woman needed to move around or her whole body would stiffen and she’d be a subject of much interest at Madame Tussaud’s.

  ‘So that’s what I think is behind this. Why? Are you jealous?’ Angie, the most Jersey of Jersey girls, is incapable of speaking without at least a hint of sarcasm, but that last word practically dripped irony off the phone and onto the carpet.

  ‘No, I am not jealous,’ I told her. Definitively. ‘I’m skeptical. This is Hollywood. People don’t often act out of altruism in the entertainment business. I’m trying to figure out what the upside is for Patrick in paying the bills for a woman who could easily afford her legal bills out of the craft services budget from her last movie.’

  ‘That’s “people”, not Patrick,’ Angie countered. ‘And you are too jealous. But I’m here to tell you, there’s nothing to worry about. Patrick’s not in love with Cynthia.’

  ‘No, he’s in love with his real-estate agent,’ I said. ‘To the point that he was going to marry her about twenty minutes after meeting her until I gave him a talking-to.’

  ‘Yeah, she was pissed at him even before he broke it off because he insisted on actually having friends who were women and not her. She’s nuts,’ Angie said.

  ‘You’ve met the latest crush?’

  Angie laughed. ‘Good thing you’re not jealous.’

  ‘You’re going to be impossible now that you’re working for him,’ I mused.

  ‘I’ve always been impossible,’ Angie said.

  ‘True. Listen, try to find things for him to do so he’s not dogging Nate’s steps every second of every day, would you?’ Patrick, in the guise of ‘helping’, could do more to damage a case than anyone I’d ever seen who was actually trying to mess things up.

  ‘Sandy, the man’s shooting a television series and working with a ghostwriter on a novelization of the series. He’s got movie offers coming in every half-hour and a publisher is after him for a memoir. He already doesn’t have time to do what he’s doing right at this minute. The only way I could slow him down would be tie him to a chair.’

  ‘It’s an idea.’ I hung up a minute later. I’d already lost Maddie Forsythe’s case and now I had to work on appeal to undo that mistake (how did I lose that case?) while trying not to repeat the same process in Cynthia’s murder trial.

  I’d already filed for a preliminary hearing for Cynthia and it had been scheduled for the middle of the following week. She was out on her own recognizance so there was no urgency on my part. The more time I had before there was a trial, the better off Cynthia was, and she knew that. She was shell-shocked but not stupid.

  The police report was just as helpful as you’d expect, especially given that it was the first to be filed and did not have the results of the medical examiner’s investigation. Edward Brisbane, whom I had never met, had covered the place with video and photography so there were plenty of grisly photographs for me to see. His prose, however, left something to be desired. He was the very epitome of a drudge cop, less Lieutenant Trench and more Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet. Just the facts, ma’am, and not in a way that will lead to any insight. It was as if he’d sent a drone into the crime scene and it had written the report for him.

  The bottom line was that Wendy Bryan had been killed with a TeeVee award, possibly the first time that had ever happened in TV Academy history. There were stab wounds in her chest and her back. She’d lost a lot of blood but the damage to her heart and lungs were probably enough to have killed her on their own. We’d know more when the ME issued a complete autopsy report, which probably wouldn’t be for a couple of weeks at best.

  What Brisbane had noted, as much as he could be said to have really noted anything, was that the body was in an unusual position but did not appear to have been moved after death. There was no trail of blood leading from anywhere else. The murder weapon, of course, had been discovered in the hands of my client, sitting practically in the fetal position in the adjoining room. It had been examined for fingerprints and guess what? Cynthia Sutton’s were all over it. Big surprise.

  At the moment the song stuck in my head was ‘Walk of Life’ by Dire Straits, which seemed incongruous given the circumstances under which I was operating. I barely even noticed it, except that when I was getting ready to scroll down to the next page on the crime-scene report, I was making sure to do so before Mark Knopfler hit the ‘J’ on ‘Johnny’ the second time. So I forced myself to slow down and concentrate on every word, or at least every phrase.

  That was when I found something that seemed out of place in the report of Wendy Bryan’s murder. In the photos, which Brisbane had included just to ruin my appetite for the entire month, were four aimed at the body but which also showed the floor of the center hall, where she’d been discovered, in plain view.

  Then I checked on some of the video from when the uniformed officers first on the scene had found Cynthia in the den, sitting on the floor and clutching the award in question close to her chest. The first officer, who according to the label on the image was named Crawford, asked Cynthia her name and she just rocked back and forth on the floor like one of those crazy women in the movies who seem to revert to early childhood given any unusual level of stress. I was embarrassed that my client was adhering so closely to the insulting cliché.

  From off camera I could hear the other officer, named Lyons if the transcript was correct (which wasn’t as certain a bet as you might reasonably expect), say, ‘That’s Cynthia Sutton. I know her from The Broken Mirror.’

  Crawford: The Broken Mirror? Is that like a support group for people with body-image problems?

  Lyons (with an exasperated sigh): No. It’s a movie. The Broken Mirror. You don’t remember? It was about this woman who suffers a disfiguring accident and …

  Crawford: I don’t care.

  Lyons (mumbling): She should have won an Oscar.

  Crawford (to Cynthia): Ma’am? Are you Cynthia Sutton?

  Cynthia kept rocking but might have nodded.

  Crawford (encouraged): Do you know who that is in the next room?

  No response from Cynthia.

  Crawford: She’s too far gone. What’s the ETA on the ambulance?

  Lyons: They’ll be here in three. (To Cynthia): Um … Miss Sutton? What have you got in your hands there?

  Cynthia (in fully normal conversational voice): It’s a TeeVee award, idiot.

  And that’s when the questioning began. Cynthia, without her lawyer (who didn’t even know she was Cynthia’s criminal defender yet) present, didn’t say much, thank goodness. She admitted to being herself, which was reasonable. She said she had recognized her mother-in-law and had ‘probably’ found her on the floor in the next room. And she said, much to her lawyer’s dismay, that the pointy object in her hands, with blood still dripping off of it, was hers.

  With blood still dripping off of it.

  That was the key. I called the cops and asked for Brisbane, who answered with a surprisingly soothing voice. I identified myself and his voice didn’t change tone, which it often does when cops (or prosecutors, like I used to be) talk to defense lawyers. ‘What can I do for you, Ms Moss?’

  ‘I’m representing Cynthia Sutton.’

  ‘Yes.’ No snarky comment. What was wrong with this guy?

  ‘I’ve been looking over your report and I have a few questions,’ I plowed on.

  ‘OK.’ I got the impression Brisbane was looking at his computer and thinking about something that wasn’t what I was asking, but he’d go ahead anyway.

  ‘How did you get the call about the murder at Wendy Bryan’s house?’ I asked.

  ‘I got a call on my phone like always.’ He sounded puzzled that I’d ask.

  ‘I mean, is it a rotation and you just caught the case, or was there something about this homicide that made the dispatcher think of you?’

  Brisbane didn’t sigh but I knew he wanted to. ‘I don’t decide w
ho calls me or why. I’m a homicide cop. I get called when there’s a homicide.’

  I wanted to ease into what I was asking him because if I ever got him on the stand – and that was a pretty sure bet – I didn’t want him to think I was calling him just for that. Even though I was. ‘I get that, but I’m wondering if you’ve dealt with a lot of cases that involve the entertainment industry.’

  I could have written his response myself: ‘This is Santa Monica. This is LA County.’

  Great. Now I’d have Sheryl Crow in my head the rest of the day, and she makes me speed up. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

  ‘That’s true, Detective,’ I said. ‘So it didn’t impress you one way or the other that the suspect was a movie star and the victim owned an art gallery.’

  ‘No. What’s that got to do with the facts of the case?’

  He’d played right into the subject I wanted to discuss. ‘About that, Detective.’

  At that moment Brisbane decided (or it was simply a reflex) that he wanted to be friendly with me. ‘Ed,’ he said.

  Luckily it wasn’t a Zoom call so he couldn’t see my eye roll. ‘Ed. Of course. I wanted to ask about some of the photographs from the crime scene.’

  ‘Pretty bloody, aren’t they?’ ‘Ed’ suggested.

  ‘That’s my question. There’s blood all over the place except in one area.’

  Suddenly my pal seemed to sit up and take notice. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘To the left of the body on the floor,’ I told him.

  There was a great clamor of clicking keys. He was calling up the pictures on his screen. It took a while. Municipal government computers. Then his voice came back, a little moony like he was mesmerized by what he was seeing. ‘You’re right.’

  I was right. The defense attorney was right about me being right. I’d noticed something the crack homicide detective hadn’t gotten despite being on the scene in addition to looking at these very photographs, I assumed, a number of times. ‘How do you account for that?’ I asked.

  Brisbane sounded like I shouldn’t have asked. ‘I guess she didn’t bleed that way,’ he said.