Inherit the Shoes Page 13

  ‘We want a continuance because we don’t have a single shred of evidence that even suggests you didn’t kill Patsy!’ I barked at him. ‘We want a continuance because there’s never been a trial this high-profile in history that went off this fast! We want a continuance because I don’t know how to save you!’

  That last part just slipped out.

  Patrick only smiled more broadly. ‘You’ll think of something,’ he said. ‘You’re …’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  Angie’s brow furrowed and she stopped gawking at Patrick for a moment, despite his insistence on seeing us while lounging on his silk-sheeted bed. I thought Angie was going to come to my rescue, but instead, she turned her disapproving gaze on me.

  ‘You don’t have to yell,’ she said.

  I heard noises coming out of my own mouth. I was sure I was trying to say something, but instead, sounds that one usually associates with fictional characters were emitting from within me. Characters like Frankenstein’s monster and Rocky Balboa. And Elmer Fudd.

  ‘Didn’t you … don’t you … did you hear …?’

  ‘Mr McNabb has such heartwarming confidence in you, Sand, and all you want to do is tear him down,’ Angie continued as I opened and closed my lips to no effect. ‘Try to focus on the facts, not on your emotions.’

  The whole world has gone insane. There’s nothing left for a rational person like me to do. Maybe I should move, like to Saturn or something.

  ‘Call me Patrick,’ McNabb said to Angie, who looked back at him with an expression of adoration usually associated with Renaissance paintings of religious figures.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said. I couldn’t recognize the woman sitting on the chair next to where I was pacing. It looked like my longtime friend, but it didn’t act like her at all. I began to wonder if an evil genius had created a robot Angie and was using it to destroy my tenuous hold on reality. I realized I hadn’t actually called Angie on the phone since this thing had arrived at my door, and couldn’t be completely sure she wasn’t home. But then, wouldn’t the evil genius have found a way to forward Angie’s calls to her cell?

  ‘I’m so sorry we woke you,’ the Angie Thing continued. ‘We didn’t think you’d be in this time of night.’

  ‘Oh, television is a very demanding mistress,’ Patrick twinkled. ‘We’re still shooting, you know, and I have a six a.m. call tomorrow. Later today, really.’

  Angie – if she was Angie – practically launched herself out of her chair. ‘Then we shouldn’t be keeping you up.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ Patrick told her. ‘I’m only in two scenes tomorrow. Perhaps you’d like to come by and watch.’

  Perhaps? Angie would miss her mother’s funeral to watch them film Legality.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she/it said, all but melting into the carpet.

  It was time to seize back control of the conversation. ‘Patrick. Your defense. We’re going to get the discovery from the prosecution tomorrow. That’s everything they have to use against you that they have to show us. After you finish filming …’

  ‘Then there will be a wrap party,’ Patrick said, still looking at the imposter in the room. ‘I hope you’ll both attend.’

  Perhaps this was Angie, after all, because she reacted just as I would have predicted. ‘Of course we will!’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you will,’ I interjected, ‘but I’ll be going over the evidence. Patrick, please …’

  ‘The day after tomorrow, I promise, Sandy. I’ll be all yours then, all right? But I have to attend the wrap party. The crew counts on our showing up.’

  I felt like the mother of an especially precocious five-year-old child. Oh, all right, but brush your teeth afterward, and no crossing the streets by yourself!

  ‘OK, Patrick. But it’s got to be the next day.’ I decided it was no longer possible to do anything that would help my case. I’d simply go to trial, lose, and hope that the world ended before the inevitable appeal also failed. I turned and headed for the door, Angie reluctantly behind me. Then I stopped, and regarded him for a moment. ‘Patrick. The shoes. Where are they?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Forget butter; light margarine wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

  ‘You should know – you went with Patsy’s sister to get them. You should know because I saw you had a Bergdorf’s bag when you got back and it did not have shirts in it. You should know because you’ve already got the pedestal set up to display them in your entranceway, with an engraved plaque sitting right there. So don’t bullshit me, Patrick. Where are Cagney’s shoes?’

  Worried that Angie would actually resort to violence in her hero’s defense, I didn’t dare look at my best friend’s face. But Patrick, switching from debonair to defeated, sighed and hung his head.

  ‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘I did go there that night with every intention of removing Jimmy’s shoes from the bedroom in Patsy’s house.’ Then he raised his head so his eyes were looking directly into mine. ‘But I swear to you, Sandy, when I got there, they had already been taken. They were gone.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No, truly,’ he said. ‘I had the bag, and a shoebox inside, all ready to carry them away, carefully, and hide them here until the trial was over. But the case had been opened, the shoes were taken, and I couldn’t report the theft to the police, or they’d think I’d taken them.’

  ‘That’s awful!’ said Angie, from just to my right. ‘Who would do such a thing?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest,’ Patrick said, playing to a more sympathetic audience. ‘But it’s been killing me since then. Sandy, do you think Mr Garrigan might be able to investigate?’

  ‘Mr Garrigan is paid to investigate how we might keep you out of the gas chamber,’ I said, trying to jar Patrick into something approaching candor. California actually uses lethal injection, on those rare occasions it doesn’t kill by being too sunny all the time. ‘Not to track down nostalgic footwear. How do the shoes fit into all this? Why all this drama over some old movie props?’

  Patrick McNabb was a good actor, so his sputtering and shock almost seemed convincing. ‘Old movie props!’ he erupted. ‘Do you have any idea how rare, how important to the history of the cinema, how …’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘How much what?’ Patrick seemed genuinely confused.

  ‘How much can someone get for them? I did some looking on eBay, and I’ve got to tell you, Patrick, no matter how beloved and rarefied those shoes are, as far as I can tell, they’re not likely to pull in much more than thirty or forty thousand dollars. Not really worth all this fuss to a guy like you, is it?’

  ‘Sandy!’ Angie couldn’t restrain herself any longer. ‘Do you really think that poor Patrick here is concerning himself with the value of …’

  ‘Two-point-five million dollars,’ Patrick said. We stared at him for a moment. ‘I don’t know why, but I was contacted about a month ago by an anonymous buyer who offered two-point-five million for Jimmy’s shoes. Naturally, I didn’t want to give them up, but …’

  ‘But since you’d found that big a sucker, you were going to forego sentiment,’ I said, nodding. ‘That was right when you and Patsy were really hitting the skids, and just a couple of weeks before she was killed. Do you think it was for the shoes?’

  Angie was aghast at her hero’s alleged avarice, and unable to do much more than exercise her jaw soundlessly for a few moments. Patrick looked at me, and shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Patsy needed the money, but would someone have killed her for the shoes?’

  ‘Was that reason enough to kill her?’ I asked.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been necessary,’ Patrick said. ‘There were more than enough reasons to kill her.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Ten hours later, I was on my second extremely caffeinated cup of coffee of the day, sitting at my desk, and reading over the file of discovery materials sent over by the McNabb prosecutor, Bertram Cates. So far, I hadn’t garnered much i
n the way of new information. Included in the packet were the M.E.’s report that showed Patsy was pregnant, the police report describing the 911 call, as well as a recording of the call itself (Patrick sounded far too calm to be sympathetic, and the prosecution would use that). The police report also detailed the scene as the officers entered the house, McNabb kneeling over the body with the bloody arrow in his hand.

  I was glad I hadn’t ordered a cinnamon bun to go with the coffee. The evidence against my client was making me nauseous.

  Still, there remained a huge file of documents yet to be examined, and I could be hopeful. Maybe the smoking gun (or in this case, the flying arrow) could still be ferreted out.

  Angie was at my apartment, trying to decide what to wear to Legality’s wrap party, a mere ten hours hence. I knew she’d be deciding until the last minute, and then would go with something guaranteed to draw gasps, although not necessarily the appreciative kind.

  Evan appeared in the doorway, carrying two cups of coffee, and looked disappointed when he saw I already had one. It seemed I was programmed to disappoint Evan at every turn, despite my ever-stronger desire to do anything but. I smiled and waved him in.

  ‘Oh good, you got coffee,’ I said, throwing my almost-full cup into the wastebasket. ‘I was out.’

  Once again useful, he grinned and handed me a cup from the Starbucks not far from the office. At least the coffee would be better than the stuff I’d gotten from the newsstand downstairs.

  ‘You look like you’ve been up all night,’ Evan said, sinking into the chair in front of my desk.

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘I mean, you seem a little tired.’ He gestured toward the papers in front of me. ‘Is that the discovery?’

  I nodded. ‘I haven’t found anything yet. But there’s plenty more, and I need to look over their list of witnesses, and add the few we can call. We need an expert on archery, an expert in movie memorabilia, character references for Patrick …’

  ‘Do we really need those?’ Evan asked, looking over the autopsy report. ‘Everyone’s heard of Patrick McNabb.’

  ‘Yeah, but everyone doesn’t know what kind of person he really is,’ I answered.

  Evan puckered up his lips in an expression of dislike. ‘I don’t see how it’ll help if they know that,’ he said.

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head. ‘You have to stop acting like a fifth grader who’s got a crush,’ I said. ‘Patrick’s not a bad guy. He’s very warm hearted and considerate, even if he is kind of nuts. He’s not the gigantic ego attached to a person that most actors are.’

  Evan exhaled heavily and looked at me. ‘You’ve dealt with actors before?’

  ‘I dated one from New York when I was in college,’ I told him, adding, ‘It’s not an experience I’d care to repeat.’

  ‘What can I do to help?’ Evan said. I was undeniably grateful he’d decided to change gears and get with the program.

  ‘OK. First, I’ve got a request for a continuance. Three weeks to prepare for this trial is outrageous. I should have filed it a week ago. So I need you to go down to the courthouse today and file it.’

  He sighed. ‘Can’t that be done electronically?

  ‘I want to be certain it gets into the judge’s hands. That’s your job.’

  He reached for the file I had in my hand. ‘Right.’

  But I didn’t let go. ‘It’s got to be today, Evan. If the judge doesn’t approve the request for a continuance, given how little we have left, we have no chance. OK?’

  ‘Of course, OK. No problem.’ He looked hurt that I’d even suggest such a thing, so I let the document pass into his hand and smiled.

  ‘Second,’ I continued, ‘Nate Garrigan has had no luck finding Silvio Cadenza, Patsy’s boyfriend and probably the father of her child. See if you can help him out with that. Also, you mentioned knowing something about archery …’

  ‘Yes. A little. From high school.’ My high school had been lucky to have a basketball and his had an archery program.

  ‘Find me a bona fide expert on the subject who can testify that Patrick McNabb couldn’t possibly have fired that arrow, and I’ll be really grateful.’

  ‘How grateful?’ Evan asked playfully, his grin as wide as I could’ve hoped.

  After Evan left to file the motion for a continuance, I chugged the coffee he’d brought and went back to looking through the D.A.’s case against Patrick McNabb. It was tiring work, reading through the police report over and over (it failed to yield anything I hadn’t seen before), the medical examiner’s report (see previous parenthetical statement), and financial records from Patrick and Patsy, before and during their marriage. I felt like I was trying to understand a person’s life by reading his electric bill: usage was up this month, so he must have been depressed.

  From the new information, such as it was, I extracted the list of witnesses the prosecution intended to call. The M.E. who had performed the autopsy on Patsy was no surprise. Neither was the appearance of Lucien DuPrez, Patsy’s business manager. No doubt the coroner would testify that Patsy had been killed by an arrow through her chest – big news – and DuPrez would attest to her decline in popularity and profitability. That meant the D.A. was going to use the money Patrick would have lost in the divorce as his main motive for murder. Normally in California the property would be divided neatly in half, but Patrick and Patsy were married in Las Vegas. The ninety-eight-vs.-two-percent argument they’d been having, which had been the key to the inflammatory meeting I’d messed up, might well have gone with Patrick getting the two. In a normal person that would be a motive. And the prosecutor, bless him, thought Patrick was a normal person.

  Patsy’s sister, Melanie DeNunzio, was also on the D.A.’s witness list and I figured she’d testify about Patsy’s state of mind and the animosity between Patsy and Patrick leading up to the settlement conference, where things truly got dicey. Would the D.A. bring up the issue of Cagney’s shoes? I didn’t think it likely, because they seemed to have nothing to do with Patsy’s murder, and were only a side issue. Perhaps, though, I should be ready to question sister Melanie about the day Patrick went to steal the shoes, to show how valuable they were to him, and to counter any notion the tap shoes were Patrick’s motive for killing Patsy.

  I had to stop and think about that theory of the case – a grown man killing his wife over a pair of eighty-year-old tap shoes. Life was indeed an odd journey.

  Still, the fact that someone was willing to pay two-and-a-half million dollars for the shoes – if true – threw a wrinkle into the case. It was at least possible the anonymous buyer was inflating the price of Jimmy’s shoes (even I’d begun calling them that) as a way of increasing Patsy’s worth once the divorce became final, even if California law and not the pre-nuptial agreement or Nevada law were enforced (any of which might have been a possibility if the divorce had reached the court). Someone wanted Patsy to get half the value of the shoes, and wanted that value to be substantial. It was a possibility, but there was no evidence to support it.

  Eating lunch four hours after starting on the discovery file, I noted that the prosecutor’s witness list included a number of financial experts, producers from Legality, record producers Patsy had worked with, one expert on show business memorabilia (so they were going to talk about the shoes!), Henderson T. Meadows – it took me a moment to realize that was Patrick’s butler – a host of psychologists, one of whom had actually spoken to Patrick for fifteen minutes on the night he was arrested, and a few names I didn’t recognize. I’d ask Patrick about them later.

  It surprised me that no prosecution expert would be called on the subject of archery, but I supposed that, because no claim had been made that someone else had fired the arrow (with the exception of Patrick’s saying he hadn’t done it), there was no need for expert testimony. Everyone knows how a bow and arrow works.

  There was one last name, however, that I did recognize, and its inclusion on the list was, to say the least, surprising – Juniu
s K. Bach.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘How should I know why my name is on their list?’ Bach asked as I stood in front of his desk holding the document in my hand. ‘I haven’t been served with a subpoena yet.’

  ‘You will be, and soon,’ I said.

  Bach smiled a thin smile. ‘I had suspicions, of course,’ he said with almost no inflection. ‘But I had no confirmation until you walked in here just now.’

  He knew! He knew he was going to be called, and he didn’t say anything to me! What kind of a lawyer deliberately holds back information on a case handled by a firm with his name in it? Was he trying to … yes! That must be it!

  ‘You’re trying to lose this case,’ I said, unaware I was speaking out loud to my boss and quite likely stringing up my own noose. ‘You’re doing your best to make sure your own client is found guilty. Why would you do such a thing?’

  Bach did his best to look shocked, but his best wasn’t very good – the most he could manage was slightly miffed, which is a long way from the devastation he was aiming at. ‘I’m going to pretend you didn’t even suggest such a thing to me,’ he sniffed.

  ‘Then I’ll suggest it again,’ I persisted, anger driving my voice this time. This time, it wasn’t the wine speaking – it was the coffee. I didn’t care any more that this guy could make or break my future with the firm. I wasn’t about to let him interfere with my case. ‘You’re sabotaging this case, and I’m at a loss to understand why.’

  Bach raised one eyebrow. ‘Are you?’

  I stared at him for a long moment, confusion turning to disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious. All this is because I messed up at the first task I was ever assigned for your firm? Because I was thrown into a situation with no warning whatsoever on my first day of practicing a new kind of law and I let my emotions get the best of me for ten seconds? For that, you’re breaching all sorts of ethics and shooting torpedoes at your own firm’s biggest case? You must be kidding!’