Inherit the Shoes Read online

  Make me dinner? I might have to sleep with him twice on the first date!

  ‘Normally, I wouldn’t,’ I said when my mind cleared. ‘First dates should be in public … you know. But I think you’re pretty trustworthy.’

  Evan’s eyes widened a little at the suggestion he might be anything other than a Boy Scout. ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about me, Sandra.’

  ‘Sandy.’

  ‘Sandy. I’m completely trustworthy. I won’t even make a move on you after a couple of glasses of wine.’

  I was disappointed. ‘You won’t?’

  Evan never so much as smiled. ‘No. I want you to be comfortable with me.’

  Damn! I thought. I’ll have to make the move myself!

  But in the end, I didn’t. Evan was a perfect gentleman the whole evening, which was infuriating and a little insulting, because I was trying my best to be alluring. For goodness sake, my inner Angie said to me, at least show him you have cleavage, so I wore a T-shirt tight enough to prove I could have cleavage if I chose to. And tight pants, to show off the … well, OK, maybe not too tight. I knew I could lose a little – not a lot – off my tight-jeans area, so I wore pants a little less obvious, but tailored well enough to conceal how less obvious I was being.

  Defying Angie’s imagined pleas, I didn’t choose a skirt to ‘show off the gams,’ because I felt the gams weren’t anything special. Everyone in Los Angeles either was in the movies or looked like they should be, and I wasn’t ready to compete. I was, I felt, at best a minor leaguer, and not a very high-level one at that (OK, so maybe I was being a little tough on myself).

  Evan opened the door to his apartment, a slightly less luxurious one than mine, in the San Fernando Valley. Clearly not giving much thought to his wardrobe, he was dressed in a pair of slightly worn jeans and a USC T-shirt that had seen better days. But he was smiling a warm smile when I entered.

  The place smelled wonderful – Evan, it turned out, was making Chicken Diane, and was an excellent cook. If he got any more perfect, I thought, I’d have to drug him and marry him against his will.

  Over dinner, we talked about the law. Evan was an especially earnest law student, having already worked in the profession, albeit at a relatively low level. He was fascinated by the way the intent of the law and its wording could sometimes be in conflict, subject to the interpretation of famed (and not so famed) jurists. I had a hard time keeping up with some of the discussion, since my natural inclination in most discussions of criminal cases, based on my prosecutorial experience, was to simply assume the defendant was guilty.

  ‘In eight years as an assistant prosecutor, I ran into maybe three cases where the defendant wasn’t at least a little guilty,’ I told Evan after dinner. We sat on the slightly worn sofa, in front of a fireplace he said didn’t work (which was fine with me, since it was still over seventy degrees outside), drinking red wine. ‘If they weren’t a hundred percent guilty of the charge, they were at least peripherally involved in the crime, and most often had criminal records that indicated they were intending to be as involved as possible.’

  ‘But you can’t make that assumption,’ Evan said, sounding almost personally insulted. ‘The law assumes innocence, and the idea of guilt through previous crimes is inadmissible in most cases.’

  ‘I’m not talking about theory,’ I said, stifling a smile at his naïveté. ‘I’m talking about the way it works in real life.’

  Stop being the older, more experienced lawyer, and start being a hot babe, the Inner Angie screamed, or you’ll end up in bed alone tonight – again!

  I made a note to tell the voice in my head that I wasn’t all that much older than Evan, and then noted that the voice should shut up. Sometimes, having a best friend in your head can be a decided nuisance.

  Still, I leaned closer to Evan and made what I considered to be a seductive moaning sound quietly in the back of my throat. Of course, the way he reacted, it was clear that what he heard was more like the call of a moose who’d gotten her hoof caught in a bear trap, but you can’t have everything.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Evan asked, pulling back from me a bit.

  ‘Sure,’ I answered in a low tone. ‘I’m just getting comfortable.’

  ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Good.’ He looked around the room a little desperately, and stood, which almost sent me face down on the couch. I thanked my genes for the ability to balance despite two imbibed glasses of wine. Well, almost two.

  Evan blinked a couple of times and said, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but I have to get up really early tomorrow. I run fifteen miles before work every day, and I have class tomorrow night, so …’

  ‘No problem,’ I said, standing awkwardly. ‘I should really get to bed early myself.’ Maybe the word ‘bed’ would give him an idea.

  It did. It evidently gave Evan the idea of walking to the door and opening it for me to leave. Wrong idea! the Inner Angie scolded. I walked to the door, determined to win at least a small victory.

  The hallway was narrow, but not as narrow as I decided to make it. In walking to the door, which Evan held open, I pressed as close as I could to him and murmured, ‘Well, good night.’ Then, intending to make a show of snuggling by him, I pressed my body into his, except for one little misstep.

  I tripped and stumbled into Evan, forcing him to put up his hands to catch me. They would have caught me in the upper arms, too, right where Evan had aimed, but, trying to right myself as I fell, I came in at a different angle, and Evan’s hands ended up right where my implied cleavage was advancing.

  He looked absolutely mortified for a moment, then locked eyes with me and whispered, ‘There’s only so much a man can take, you know,’ and put his hands behind me, drawing me closer to him. Evan kissed me luxuriously, longingly, then almost furiously, and I reveled in every second of it.

  When we finally separated, he said, ‘Now, get out of here before I forget I’m trying to be a nice guy,’ and opened the door a little wider.

  I grinned and walked out, saying, ‘You don’t have to be that nice.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Now, scram.’

  He closed the door behind me, smiling, and the night air, warm though it was, sobered me right up. I was alert as could be as I drove home with what I’m sure was a stupid grin on my face.

  Once I got home, my apartment brought me back down from the near reverie I’d achieved during that evening’s one perfect minute. The place was still full of boxes, they were still vomiting books all over everything, and I was still a colossal failure at my new job.

  It didn’t help that I finally checked my voice mail and found a message, and that Holiday Wentworth’s voice sounded a little frantic in asking where I might be, and why the office didn’t have a cell phone number for me (I hadn’t bothered to get a California number yet, and had left my New Jersey cell phone at home tonight). Holly said to call ‘whenever you get in, no matter how late it is.’

  So I called, and Holly did indeed sound flustered. ‘You’ve got to get down to the Beverly Hills police station right away,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a criminal case for you.’

  ‘We’re a family law firm,’ I said. ‘I thought we didn’t handle any criminal cases.’

  ‘We don’t, but this client insisted on you, and only you.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said, my lovely evening entirely gone now. ‘What did Pat McNabb do?’

  ‘Well,’ Holiday said slowly, ‘if you believe the LAPD, he murdered his ex-wife tonight.’

  FOUR

  Bel Air is a Los Angeles suburb so upscale it looks down on Beverly Hills. There is no In-N-Out Burger here. In fact, if there were a fast-food outlet in Bel Air, it would most likely serve Crispy Pheasant Strips and fried caviar sandwiches. And you would have the ability to supersize your champagne.

  It also has no police station, leaving such unsavory details of life to the peons in Beverly Hills, most of whom look down on the rest of the world and wonder what the heck Bel Air’s got that’s so much better. It drives
some into therapy, others into producing reality TV shows.

  I drove up to the Beverly Hills station in the 2009 Hyundai I’d driven to Los Angeles from New Jersey. I hadn’t been able to have the car washed since arriving, and driving into the ritziest neighborhood on the continent, give or take a few, I felt like I might as well be riding up on a tricycle. The cop cars at the station would probably be Lexuses (Lexi?).

  I walked into the station and located the desk sergeant, sitting behind an immaculate barrier in a space more nicely appointed than anything in my apartment. I considered asking if I could move into the police station, but thought about moving all those boxes again and decided against it.

  Forty minutes later, after documents were signed and I was searched much too thoroughly for my taste, I sat in an interrogation room directly out of Elle Decor magazine and faced my client.

  ‘It’s horrible here,’ McNabb said on arrival. ‘We’ve done prison scenes on the show, and I’ve got to tell you, they’re not nearly realistic enough. When can I get out?’

  I looked around at the furnishings in the room and wondered if McNabb was complaining merely because the mauve in the seat cushions didn’t match the shade on the wallpaper. But there were more serious issues to settle. ‘There will be an arraignment tomorrow morning – I mean, this morning – and in all probability, the judge will set bail. Then …’

  ‘I know all that,’ my client told me. ‘I play a lawyer on television. I just want to know if I’ll be able to get out immediately after the arraignment.’

  ‘Patrick,’ I began, hoping to muster some semblance of patience at two in the morning, ‘if we’re going to function here, you need to trust me with the legal decisions. Playing a lawyer on TV is a wonderful thing, but would you trust Hugh Laurie to take out your appendix?’

  McNabb looked confused. ‘Laurie?’ he asked. ‘He diagnosed patients; he didn’t do an appendix.’

  Great. This was going to be easy. ‘Let’s just agree,’ I went on, ‘that you’re going to do what I tell you, and let me handle all the legal work.’

  ‘Of course.’ McNabb seemed almost insulted by the implication. ‘That’s why I demanded that you handle the case. I trust you implicitly.’

  I wanted to ask why. We’d met seventeen hours earlier, spent twenty-five minutes together (during which I made a monumental error), and he trusted me implicitly? But I went on. ‘Just tell me what happened.’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ McNabb said. ‘I went over to see Patsy at about ten. I felt badly about the way we’d yelled at each other at the meeting. There was no need for things to be so acrimonious. I did love her once, you know.’

  I thought, probably more than once, but, once again, I showed admirable restraint. ‘So you went over merely to smooth over the meeting at our office this morning, to tell her you were sorry you’d lost your temper?’

  McNabb looked away, not wanting to meet my eyes. ‘Well …’ he said. ‘There was a little more to it than that.’

  ‘You wanted to talk to her about the shoes.’ It was been the only thing that had registered emotionally with McNabb at the meeting.

  McNabb’s head came to attention, swiveling so fast to meet my eyes that I was afraid he’d hurt himself, or that his head would keep spinning from sheer momentum. ‘That’s brilliant! How could you have known that?’

  ‘That’s not the issue. What I don’t understand is …’

  ‘No, it’s a huge issue,’ McNabb answered, his face supremely attentive. ‘If it’s a great lawyer trick, I might be able to use it!’

  ‘Patrick,’ I breathed, hoping to get through the static around McNabb’s head that prevented simple words to penetrate, ‘you can’t be thinking about acting right now. You’re being accused of an extremely serious crime, and your life is very much on the line.’

  McNabb pursed his lips, which I first thought meant he was digesting the information he’d just been given. But a moment later, I realized it was just his way of dismissing what I’d said. ‘I have nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘I have two enormous advantages. First of all, I didn’t kill Patsy.’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘Second, I have you. You’re brilliant.’

  I’m dealing with a raving maniac, Angie. He seems like a nice, handsome, normal man, but in reality, well …

  ‘Whether or not I’m brilliant, you have to answer the questions, Patrick, and you have to focus on doing that. So tell me what was so important about these shoes.’

  He stared at me as if I’d just suggested he should flap his wings and fly out of the room. McNabb’s eyes blinked a few times, and he shook his head. ‘Jimmy’s shoes?’ he asked. ‘You don’t know why I care about Jimmy’s shoes?’

  ‘No. Suppose you tell me. Start with who Jimmy might be.’

  McNabb nodded. Oh, that was why I wasn’t being reverent enough. ‘Jimmy was one Mr James Cagney, an actor you might have heard of.’ McNabb’s accent, in this time of stress, was leaning a little more heavily on its cockney roots. ‘The shoes are the very tap shoes he wore while filming the title number in a movie called Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ He sat there, possibly expecting me to cross myself, but I just looked at him.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, they came into my possession through a series of very favorable circumstances just after I married Patsy. We have them … had them, in a glass case in the bedroom. Used to look at them every night. Even took ’em out every once in a while just to feel them in my hands. His feet were smaller than mine.’ McNabb grinned.

  ‘You tried them on.’ I wasn’t sure why I was asking about the shoes, but I believed deep in my soul that, eventually, the conversation would lead to something relevant.

  McNabb looked offended. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, his voice an open question as to whether his attorney was the right person for him or not. ‘I just … held them against my feet, to compare.’

  ‘So you went over to get the shoes? Is that it?’ Believing deep in your soul is a lovely thing, but I wanted to still be in my mid-thirties when I understood what I had to defend.

  He looked away. ‘No, of course not. I really did feel badly about how we’d left it, and so I went over to apologize, more or less.’

  ‘And how did it work out?’

  ‘Well. She and I had agreed to split everything half and half, and I would get Jimmy’s shoes. She was going to call her lawyer in the morning.’

  Uh-huh. Cruella de Vil had become Shirley Temple in the course of one conversation, and then conveniently ended up dead, so she couldn’t confirm or deny his version of the story.

  ‘So you left right after that?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I stayed a while, and then she went to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine, to toast our agreement. I heard a noise, then I heard some sounds I couldn’t identify. I ran out of the bedroom and found Patsy on the floor in the dining room. She was bleeding rather badly.’

  ‘You were in the bedroom?’

  Again, he looked away, which didn’t leave him much to look at besides the ceiling and the lovely potted palm in the corner. And the coffee table with a selection of current upscale magazines. And the cappuccino machine. ‘That’s where the shoes were.’ So he was embarrassed about his devotion to the footwear. That was certainly understandable.

  ‘So you went in and found her bleeding. Had she been shot?’ I searched his eyes, but found only disappointment – in me.

  ‘They didn’t tell you what happened?’ McNabb asked.

  ‘No, I won’t get the police report until I leave here. They’re probably typing it up now.’ On a computer that’s cleaner, more expensive, and newer than mine.

  ‘Well, Patsy wasn’t shot, exactly,’ McNabb said, biting his lower lip. ‘Not with a gun, anyway.’

  ‘What else can you be shot with?’ I had to ask. Clearly, I was going from brilliant to imbecile pretty rapidly.

  ‘An arrow,’ he said.

  FIVE

  ‘An arrow?’ Angie asked. ‘She got
shot with an arrow? We’re supposed to believe that Cochise happened by and decided to have a little target practice at Pat and Patsy’s place?’

  ‘Quiet down,’ I said in my still-echoing kitchen. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you anything about this. And you can’t tell anybody. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow, anyway.’

  ‘Who’s going to hear me?’ Angie chuckled. ‘I’m 3,000 miles away, Sandra. Even I’m not that loud.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘So did he do it?’

  My eyes rolled up into my eyelids. It was five in the morning in Los Angeles. Angie was getting ready to go to work in New Jersey. I hadn’t been to bed yet, and Angie had gotten up from a full night’s sleep an hour ago. How was this possible?

  ‘He says no. He says that after she went to get a bottle of wine, he heard a noise, so he came out to the dining room and found her bleeding on the extremely expensive Persian rug. With an arrow sticking out of her chest.’ Even I was having trouble saying it with a straight face. ‘He called nine-one-one, but she was dead before they arrived.’

  I could imagine Angie’s triangular face shifting into ‘thinking’ mode, which meant her eyebrows lowered and her lips inverted as she chewed on them. It was amazing people didn’t shriek in horror and run screaming from the area whenever this happened, but Angie managed to pull it off with aplomb.

  ‘They must have found the, um, murder weapon, right? I mean, if some guy was running away from a fancy estate like that carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows, he’d be pretty conspicuous.’

  ‘You should have been a cop,’ I told my friend. ‘But they didn’t have to look very far. The bow was Patrick’s – part of his collection. Apparently, it was an original from The Searchers, with John Wayne.’

  ‘And it’s got Patrick’s fingerprints all over it, right?’

  ‘Right. But he says that’s natural, since it was his. He has all kinds of movie crap all over the house.’

  ‘It’s not crap. That’s important historical stuff.’ Angie was a pop culture fanatic, and believed that a sword used by Russell Crowe would be more valuable than one wielded by Sir Lancelot himself – if there had been a Sir Lancelot. Maybe that’s a bad example.