Witness for the Persecution Page 4

  He spoke very carefully. ‘My wife has been having some health issues … mental health issues, and doesn’t always have a firm grasp on reality. She did not have a physical relationship with Drake. But she imagines things.’

  Sure. ‘Then we will need a complete evaluation of her by a recognized psychiatrist and it will have to be certified before we go to trial, which I am hoping will be more than three months from now,’ I said. ‘If you and your wife don’t agree to that condition, I will withdraw from the case. Are we clear?’

  I don’t know how, but you can hear teeth clench even when the person speaking is not in your view. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need to have a long conference to go over every aspect of this case and your role in it,’ I continued. ‘What time can you make it tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow! I can’t—’

  ‘I’m sure your next lawyer can be much more accommodating of your schedule,’ I said.

  ‘Fine.’ Barely audible. ‘I can see you tomorrow at ten in the morning.’

  ‘Make it nine, at my office,’ I said, and hung up before he could protest.

  I felt like I’d been holding my breath for three whole minutes. Patrick stood up and reached for my hand. ‘You are amazing,’ he said tenderly.

  ‘If you ever recommend one of your movie friends to me again, yours will be the next murder and I’ll be defending myself!’ I shouted. Patrick looked baffled.

  ‘Um … all right,’ he said.

  ‘You two should definitely move in together,’ Angie said.

  SIX

  I spent the night at my apartment doing research. I can’t do research at Patrick’s house; it’s too nice. My place is just downscale enough (by comparison) that it doesn’t distract me from the task at hand. Another reason I shouldn’t move in with Patrick. I’d never get anything done.

  Making excuses? Me? Perish the thought.

  There had been press coverage of the incident right after it happened and more when Reeves had been arrested and charged. I tend to miss all those things because first of all I insist on reading actual newspapers and not online sources whenever possible, and second because I don’t read the entertainment news. Patrick reads that religiously, I believe out of a central insecurity in his personality that’s convinced he’ll be washed up and forgotten by the middle of next week, all the time. I see no reason to follow it. I do google Patrick’s name every now and again, but we were not together when he was filming Desert Siege and I wasn’t paying the same level of attention to his career (or, I was afraid to say, his personal life) as I do now.

  From what I was able to piece together from the press coverage, the police report, and the discovery supplied by the district attorney’s office, it seemed that a nine-one-one call had been made from the set by Catherine Briggs, the assistant director (who no doubt wanted to be a director director), who had been present when the stunt was being rehearsed. The cameras had not been turned on so there was no video record of James Drake falling to his death, which I considered a major plus for the defense. Once jurors saw the man plummeting and screaming, they’d convict their own mothers of the crime.

  Paramedics arrived at the scene, which was actually in a closed-off area of Griffith Park, within ten minutes, but no one believed there was anything that could have been done for Drake. He had been hoisted fifty feet in the air, suspended from steel cables that were to have been strategically hidden so they didn’t appear on camera, and fell into a ditch of another twenty feet. There were photographs of the remains in the police report, but I spent as little time as possible examining them. I’d hire a forensic expert to testify if necessary.

  Robert Reeves, who of course had been supervising the rehearsal, had been ‘uncooperative’ when the police arrived. His assistant Penny Kanter told Trench – get ready – that Reeves was ‘concentrating on his vision of the piece as a whole’, and couldn’t think about the individual pieces, like a man dying.

  That was going to play really well with a jury.

  I figured the next day’s conference with my client would be, if you’ll pardon the expression, a trial. Reeves was not exactly cooperative, not exactly respectful, and not exactly believable, a difficult mixture at best. His superior attitude would be something of a deficit with any jurors, should we actually get to trial, and the evidence against him was piling up to the point that the prosecutor who lived in my head was advising me to take a plea deal if one was available. Best to get in touch with the assistant DA handling the case, Justin Renfro, first thing in the morning and see what might be offered. At least I could present it to my client at the meeting and watch him look down his nose at me in person.

  There are people who think my job is cushy. They watch too many lawyer shows on television. But don’t tell Patrick I said that.

  I slept, let’s say, periodically that night, and woke up the next morning less refreshed than badly preserved. My hair looked like it had been stored overnight in an accordion and my face was wan and drawn. If I’d run into me in the street, I’d have assumed I’d had a date the night before. With Dracula.

  One low-fat corn muffin and a gallon or so of coffee later I was pulling my ancient Hyundai into the municipal parking lot at the office of the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, an imposing building with Hall of Justice carved into its side. I’d been there before so I didn’t bother to look for justice there. What I was coming for today was a deal.

  Justin Renfro worked upstairs in an office that looked like every other municipal office in the world (except maybe in France; do they have nicer offices there?), with government-issued furniture and a paint job that had (impressively) been recently refreshed, but was still as bland a color as exists on Earth. If there hadn’t been palm trees visible through the window (if you looked down far enough), I could have closed my eyes and imagined I was back in New Jersey, where we don’t have palm trees but there’s little danger of your town combusting spontaneously. There are trade-offs in everything we do.

  Justin Renfro turned out to be a man of less than average height, curly brown hair and a waist that suggested he did a lot of sit-ups before work every morning.

  ‘I want to be clear,’ I told Renfro. ‘I have not discussed any possible plea offers with my client. I’m not certain he’s even open to the proposition. But I thought I’d come and ask you what might be possible so I’d know what I could tell him when we meet later today.’

  Renfro smiled, a friendly smile. We could have been colleagues, his smile was saying. He knew my side of the argument, it suggested. Certainly we could reach an equitable agreement.

  ‘I’m glad you said that,’ he told me. ‘You haven’t asked your client about a deal yet. That’s good. Because we’re not offering a deal.’

  That couldn’t be right. A prosecutor would at least discuss a plea bargain with a defendant, unless he had an absolute slam-dunk of a case, and Renfro did not possess one of those here. Yes, there was circumstantial evidence piling up against Robert Reeves, but he had no witnesses I was aware of and no murder weapon (whatever had cut through the metal cords), so it was going to take some serious convincing to get a conviction here. Why wouldn’t he at least allow the possibility of getting this case off his agenda?

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said. ‘You won’t even discuss the idea of a possible offer?’

  The smile dimmed not one watt. ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Renfro,’ I began.

  ‘Justin,’ he corrected.

  ‘Justin. I’ve spent more time as a prosecutor than I have as a defense attorney, and I have to say I’m baffled by your stance. You can’t possibly believe that you have an open-and-shut case against Robert Reeves. There are plenty of holes in the charges and you can count on me exploiting each and every one of them in court. I’m here as a courtesy and a matter of policy. Candidly, why isn’t your office more interested in a plea deal here?’

  ‘May I call you Sandra?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Sandy. Feel free.’

  ‘OK, Sandy. We’re not offering a plea deal because we want your client to stand trial in front of a jury of people who don’t like the elite members of the movie business. In Los Angeles it’s not hard to find jurors like that. We could mail in our evidence and get a conviction.’

  I shook my head to indicate I was baffled. ‘You’ve got nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been on this case, what? About a day?’

  ‘Wow. Have you been bugging my office?’

  Renfro’s grin grew a little. ‘No. Don’t worry. Yesterday we got the paperwork indicating that Herb Bronson had withdrawn from the case. Today you showed up. I wasn’t a math major but that’s not hard to calculate.’

  Dammit! Now I liked the guy. ‘So what has my time on the case got to do with you not being reasonable about a plea?’ I asked.

  ‘You just haven’t had time to really dig in on it yet,’ he said. ‘All you’ve seen is the police report and all you’ve heard is your client’s story, which is at best thin. I’m telling you we have enough physical evidence to convict Reeves in a day and that’s what we intend to do.’

  ‘Fine. Blow me away. Tell me something that will have me despairing of my ability to defend this guy.’ I probably shouldn’t have said that.

  ‘I have witnesses, I have motive, I have a prior statement of hostility and a threat of violence. If I had actual video of your client cutting the cables himself, it would be only slightly easier to convict him.’

  OK, that was bad. But I could defend against it in court because apparently Renfro’s witness hadn’t actually seen Robert Reeves sawing away viciously at the cables and cackling to himself. So I wasn’t devastated. Yet.

  ‘So you have one witness who saw my client somewhere near the crane but probably not attacking the
cables with a chain saw. I’m not losing sleep. And the other one?’ I asked.

  Renfro couldn’t resist the impulse to grin. ‘The other one heard Robert Reeves say that he was going to kill James Drake because of the affair with Reeves’s wife.’

  I stood up and nodded toward Renfro. ‘Nice meeting you, Justin,’ I said. ‘Thanks for reassuring me.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Reassuring you? I just told you about two damning witnesses against your client.’

  ‘I’ll see you in court. I assume more discovery will be on its way.’ I let myself smile just a little.

  Renfro, seemingly stunned, nodded. ‘I’ll email it over. Bronson should have had it already. Nice to meet you, Sandy.’ He thought about sticking out his hand but had noticed that wasn’t my preference and tilted his head in my direction.

  The instant I was outside his office door, I called Holiday Wentworth. She asked what was going on with the murder case. I told her Patrick had worked with the defendant and Holly was disappointingly uninterested, particularly when I told her I had no intention of calling him as a witness.

  ‘Tell me what you need going forward,’ she said and that left me no choice.

  ‘The DA has two witnesses who are going to lose me this case,’ I said. ‘I need Nate Garrigan.’

  SEVEN

  ‘So we meet again,’ Nate Garrigan said. I couldn’t see him but I knew Nate well enough to hear the sardonic glint in his eye.

  ‘It’s our third case together, Nate. You’re not the cavalry coming over the hill. I’m asking you to investigate for me, not rescue me from a high tower.’

  I was in my office, finally. It was a nicer office than the one I’d been assigned when I first arrived at Seaton, Taylor, largely because I’d scored with a few cases, some of which involved no violence at all. Well, not physical violence. Now I was head of the criminal justice division and I got a window. Not a big window, but a window. People in law firms value such things. This whole private practice thing had taken some getting used to, but I was starting to get a taste for it.

  ‘You need to know what really happened with this Reeves guy and you want me to find out, right?’ Nate was savoring his moment. I liked the guy with his ex-cop gruffness and blunt charm, but he wanted to always have the upper hand and sometimes there’s just no hand.

  ‘Without any major melodrama, if you can make that happen,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m the very picture of discretion. Just one thing—’

  ‘Patrick’s not involved this time,’ I said, cutting him off.

  ‘How did you know I was going to ask?’ It’s not that Nate and Patrick don’t get along. Well, yes it is, but it’s not because they dislike each other; it’s because Patrick often thinks he’s being helpful when in fact he’s setting you back a couple of eons with his enthusiasm.

  ‘I’m psychic. The thing is, he might end up being a witness in this trial, although I think it’s unlikely. He was working on the movie where this stuntman was killed.’

  A sound came through the phone. At first blush it seemed to be a beluga whale dying of old age, but it turned out to be Nate groaning. ‘How is that not involved?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s not involved because he wasn’t there when it happened. He won’t have anything to do with the investigation. As a possible witness – although again, he hasn’t been subpoenaed and isn’t even mentioned in the police report – he knows he can’t have any involvement in my work because that could compromise my case and he definitely doesn’t want to do that.’

  ‘My god, you’re dating him,’ Nate said. ‘I saw it coming but it was like a train wreck that you just can’t get out of the way of.’

  ‘Don’t end sentences on prepositions,’ I said, and hung up.

  I had worked with Nate enough to know that once I sent him the information I had (which I did immediately after disconnecting the phone), he wouldn’t need me to tell him what to investigate. He’d know I needed expert witnesses on the kinds of cables used to ‘fly’ actors and what sort of implements would be both available on a film set and capable of cutting through those cables. He’d know I needed to find witnesses who might have seen Robert Reeves not being on the set when the cables were cut, preferably some who would have seen a person other than my client involved in the task, although that was almost certainly asking for too much. And Nate would know that if he found people who had motives other than James Drake shtupping Reeves’s wife, that would be a big help. Character witnesses, given Reeves’s normal disposition, would probably be few and far between, but that didn’t mean nonexistent. Nate would look for them too.

  I had about an hour to review the added discovery that Renfro, as good as his word, had sent over. His witness list included Burke Henderson, the stunt coordinator Reeves had said was incompetent and a cause of Drake’s death, and Penny Kanter, Reeves’s assistant. That last one was curious. Did Penny know something that was going to damn her boss? I could imagine what working for Reeves was like, and the possibility didn’t sound entirely implausible.

  There was also the head of a studio’s computer effects department, which I thought was odd. The scene in which Jim Drake died was not computer generated, so the use of CGI or computer-generated imagery would not have been necessary. One of the tasks ahead of me was figuring out why CGI might be relevant to the case against Robert Reeves.

  Another was figuring out whether or not I thought my client had actually arranged for a stuntman in his employ to die horribly.

  He arrived at my office with some fanfare, preceded by his assistant, Penny Kanter, who announced his coming as if he were a head of state at a fancy-dress ball in 1887. Janine McKenzie, our receptionist, looked a little panicky at the fuss when Penny shouted out, ‘Robert Reeves is here!’ Maybe Penny expected us to throw rose petals in her boss’s path or something. At least she hadn’t said that Robert Reeves had arrived, because the alliteration might have been just a tad over the top.

  Reeves himself, head held just a little too high and chest puffed out just a little too much, looked like a cartoon rooster on a cardboard bucket of fried chicken. He strode into the reception area, no doubt awaiting a sash declaring him Client of the Year, and looked a little miffed at receiving none. I was watching from my office, which is adjacent to the reception area, and immediately called Janine to tell her that Reeves should wait a minute before being admitted. Let him sit and read magazines like everyone else. We even stock Variety.

  I couldn’t hear his reaction because the glass in my office door’s window is quite thick, but I could see Reeves’s eyes widen and his nostrils flare. Which should tell you something because I was at least twenty feet away. A nostril really has to work hard to be seen flaring from that distance.

  I waited until the second he sat down to buzz Janine and tell her to let my client in. Snarky? Maybe. But there was a point to be made and I was just the lawyer to make it.

  Reeves seemed to be sniffing the air as he entered my office, wondering if it was safe to breathe in this space. ‘Ms Moss,’ he said before I could make a sound, ‘I don’t like being kept waiting.’

  ‘Neither does anyone else, Robert. Sit down, won’t you?’ I looked over at Penny, who was attempting to enter behind her boss. ‘Can you wait outside, please?’ I said to her. ‘I need for this conference to be confidential.’

  Penny did what came instinctively to her, which was to look at her boss for direction. He was a director, after all. His eyebrows rose to the point that I thought they might hover over his forehead and he said, ‘Anything you say to me you can say in front of Penny.’

  Usually this sort of contest would have required the presence of at least part of another man but I wasn’t giving in. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then both of you can wait outside until you want to come in here and talk to your attorney, Robert. I’m sure Janine will be able to schedule you an appointment sometime next week.’ I sat down and opened a file on my computer. Reeves and Penny couldn’t see the screen so I opened a game called MacBrickout, which is somewhat simple but oddly addictive.

  Before I could start the game I heard Reeves sigh. ‘Fine,’ he said, dragging it out to an indeterminate number of syllables. ‘Penny, please wait in the reception area. I’ll let you know when you can come back in here.’