Reckless Disregard (30 page)

“By 1987, Felicity’s career was over,” I continue. “At twenty-nine years old she couldn’t get a job as an actress, much less write and direct movies. So she went to you, her old friend and colleague, for help. That’s why she wrote to Scotty that you had her back, that you were her insurance policy, that you were her free ticket out of purgatory. When you refused to help her, she threatened to go public about
The Boatman
, a Mafia-financed movie showing explicit sex and illegal drug use. Maybe worse, she’d tell the media that you were a shill for the Assembly. You couldn’t let that happen. You were building your career on your image as a man with
family values
, as one of the few Christian conservatives in Hollywood. Not only would your career have been over, but more importantly, the Sanctified Assembly’s budding attempt to legitimize itself as a mainstream religious movement would have foundered before it began. You’re one of their master spies, and they’ll stop at nothing to make sure you don’t blow your cover. Like the Soviet KGB, the Assembly holds its spies dear. So maybe on your own, maybe on orders from your Supreme Prophet Bradley Kelly, you and your Assembly goons kidnapped and killed Felicity McGrath. And after you abducted her, you drove away in your blue Mercedes-Benz.”

The room falls silent. Janine, who almost never shows emotion during a deposition, sighs so loudly that her shoulders rise and fall. Frantz looks down at the table with a hangdog expression, as if his futile objections have depleted him of energy.

“I’ll move to strike Mr. Stern’s absurd monologue as improper argument,” Lovely says. To my shock, she has the hint of a grin on her lips, the look of a chess player who recognizes checkmate three moves before her opponent does. Bishop actually lets out a thin, high-pitched laugh.

“Do you find something funny, Mr. Bishop?” I ask.

“I do, Mr. Stern,” he says. “Your vivid imagination. Your silly questions about a movie that never existed, your absurd fairy tale about McGrath. It’s hilarious, actually. All you’re missing is proof. During this entire deposition, you haven’t showed me a shred of evidence supporting what you’ve claimed. Because you don’t have it.”

Now I know exactly what Lovely Diamond told Bishop during the break, as sure as if I’d huddled with them in the hall. As a law professor, I taught Lovely that you gain nothing in a deposition by asking questions without using your evidence, because the witness will just recant the testimony and claim a refreshed recollection once the evidence comes to light. So showing the witness the evidence first is usually the best approach. Not today.

I reach into my briefcase and pull out the cast list from
The Boatman
. I hand it to Bishop without having Janine mark it first. “How about this for proof, Mr. Bishop? A document your minions didn’t sanitize when they raided the Macklin & Cherry archives.”

Bishop skims the document and begins shaking his head like a batter trying to ward off the effects of a beaning. The shakes almost become tremors.

“Where did you get this?” he hisses. His cheeks puff out like an expanding bag of microwave popcorn. He crumples up the cast list and hurls it at me. The piece of paper bounces off of my forehead, just missing my right eye. It feels great. I pick up the paper and unfold it, sliding it back toward him.

“
The Boatman
is a fantasy that you’re trying to exploit,” he shouts. “This deposition is over. Stern, get out of my building. All of you get out.” With surprising agility for a man his age, he springs out of his chair and walks out the door.

Lovely slumps down, her lips parted in lingering shock, her eyelids narrow slits through which she searches for what went wrong. She looks gorgeous.

Frantz seems oddly energized. “Pack up our documents, Lovely,” he says. “And don’t you ever forget again that I’m the boss and you’re just a second-year lawyer who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing. I’ll be in William’s office.” Odds are that he’ll smooth it over with Bishop. If there’s one thing that Frantz is good at, it’s schmoozing clients.

Lovely and I wait wordlessly until the court reporter and videographer leave.

“Where did you come up with this stuff?” she asks.

“Attorney-client privilege,” I say. “Which is what I’ll say if you serve an interrogatory asking the question.”

“Is your mother your source? Did she feed you all this bullshit?” Lovely knows about my past, about my mother, though at the moment I wish she didn’t.

I give a noncommittal shrug.

She picks up the cast list and reads it over. “Jesus, McGrath’s name isn’t even on this.”

“Doesn’t matter. She was the ghostwriter and director. At nineteen, twenty years old, the brains behind the great William the Conqueror. And I will prove it.”

“How?”

I have no answer for that. But maybe for the first time since I took this case, I truly believe it. “I’m not going to reveal my strategy to opposing counsel,” I say.

“You have no evidence.”

“The cast list shows—”

“It shows nothing. It might embarrass my client, but it has nothing to do with the case, which is all that matters.”

“What matters is that Bishop dismiss the lawsuit. He can issue a press release saying that he’s proved his point and he’ll never find Poniard to collect a judgment anyway. Or his PR people can concoct some better excuse. But he should drop the suit for his own good.”

“Oh, Parker,” she says. “You just don’t get it.”

“It’s you and your client who don’t—”

“Billy will never—”

“So he’s Billy now?” Jealousy can surge without warning.

“William will never give up. It’s not in his nature. He has too much power to be beaten. He’ll stop at nothing to . . . and he’s in the right. He didn’t do what your client says.”

“You’re right about one thing only,” I say. “I do believe that he’ll stop at nothing.”

Three and a half weeks until the trial begins, and I still don’t have a shred of admissible evidence of Bishop’s involvement in Felicity’s disappearance. Poniard won’t budge on revealing Scotty’s identity or Alicia Turner’s whereabouts or on telling me what these people know. I’ve gotten so frustrated with my client that I’ve stopped e-mailing replies or responding to chat requests.

This morning at The Barrista has been hectic—I’ve been researching the law, drafting the trial brief, responding to the other side’s spate of motions to keep evidence out, none of which Brenda can help me with—and it gets more frenzied when she comes running out of the storeroom and shrieks, “Parker!” She collides with Romulo, who drops a tray of lattes, the crash of shattering glass resulting in the awkward applause that always follows such a restaurant mishap. Brenda doesn’t cower, doesn’t apologize, doesn’t seem to notice.

“Parker, you’ll never guess—”

I hold up my hand, concerned that she’s about to divulge something confidential to everyone in the place. She cranes her neck and looks around the room, eyes blinking like a drying-out inebriate becoming aware of her surroundings. The customers and staff are gawking. Only now does she go to help Romulo clean up the spilled coffee and broken glass.

“Oh, my, I’m so . . .” She bends down to help clean up.

“It’s OK, I got it,” he says, clearly unhappy with my assistant. On the best of days, Romulo and others on The Barrista staff view her presence in the shop as an annoyance.

“Yeah, OK, sorry,” she says. “I owe you. Parker, come into the back room with me.”

When we’re inside the storeroom, she claps her hands and bobs up and down like a joyful nine-year-old who’s just unwrapped her biggest birthday present. She gestures toward her computer screen, which shows an e-mail message sent via a website that Philip Paulsen set up to receive unsolicited e-mails about the case. I haven’t looked at the site since it launched—not after reading the messages from obsessed Poniard fans, spammers whom Bishop probably hired to flood the system, and kooks who claimed to have sighted Felicity McGrath over the past twenty-five years at locations ranging from an In-N-Out drive-thru in Lodi, California (Felicity was slinging double-double burgers animal-style), to The Borghese Museum in Rome (she was volunteering as a docent). Evidently Brenda has continued to monitor the website.

This e-mail’s subject line is “The Queen Ant,” and the body reads, “Learn to Act, Stage, Screen, Earn Money as an Extra in the Exciting Entertainment Industry—Taught by a Trained Actress—Echo Park Actors Studio.”

“A virus or a Trojan horse,” I say. “Bishop’s cyber-attack.”

“I thought so at first. But then I . . .” She clicks on the link, which spawns a garish website that announces its worth in blaring blue and red oversized printing that has no subtlety, no finesse—a kind of nineteen-fifties discount-groceries ad transplanted into cyberspace. The left side of the page is in English, the right in Russian Cyrillic. Inside the distracting mess of testimonials and puffed claims is the black-and-white photo of a raven-haired, wrinkle-free woman who calls herself Marina Shalamitski.

“Who is she?” I ask.

“No idea. But we have to check her out, right?”

“This is Bishop hacking us. Or if not that, a kook who wants attention.”

Her quick half-shrug conveys uncharacteristic impatience. “This woman is reaching out to us. Parker,
please
.” She bites her lower lip like an ingénue in a chick flick, and I wonder if it’s calculated, because despite what you read in novels, women rarely bite their lips that way.

“Get your things,” I say. “We might as well visit Madame Marina.”

From the outside, the Echo Park Actors Studio looks as grungy as its website. Located a few miles east of Hollywood, the studio occupies one unit of a dilapidated square gray stucco commercial building across the street from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Echo Park division and three units away from Apex Bail Bonds. I expect to meet not an acting teacher but a scam artist promising to make movie stars out of heavily accented Russian greenhorns, desperate dreamers who’ve fled abuse or boredom or depression, and innocent young bumpkins unaware that this era’s true stars appear not in movies but in reality TV shows.

Brenda and I enter into a darkened room that smells like a combination musty gymnasium and patchouli-scented ashram. At the back of the room is a small stage. Folding chairs are stacked against the wall.

The woman who calls herself Marina Shalamitski looks up at us from a collapsible table that serves as a makeshift desk. She’s dressed young, in dancer’s black leggings and a pink sweatshirt with a silkscreened picture of a green springing deer on the front—the logo for John Deere tractors. The cosmetic surgery can’t hide the woman’s true age—late fifties or older.

“How may I help you?” she asks without a trace of a Russian accent.

“Parker Stern and Brenda Sica,” I say. “We’re here . . . we’re here about the Queen Ant.”

There’s no sign of recognition. Does she not know what I’m talking about or has all the Botox made even the slightest show of emotion impossible?

I’m startled by the appearance at the stage door of an antiquated man. His bald pate is mottled with liver spots. A fringe of white hair forms a wispy semicircle around his skull, and his goatee looks as if strands of a cotton ball have floated over and stuck to his chin. An irregularly shaped wen bulges from his brow, making him look like a hideous fairy tale troll. He wears hearing aids, and not the modern high-tech micro brand but large, unsightly, flesh-colored buttons. Behind thick bifocals his eyes are so puffy that the lids look glued together. He shuffles over in a walker that gets traction from fluorescent yellow tennis balls stuck on two of the legs.

“Your business isn’t with my wife, it’s with me,” he says in a voice that’s shockingly resonant and youthful. And that’s how, despite his mask of decay, I recognize him—Clifton Stanley Gold, former Broadway actor, second banana in innumerable fifties and sixties sitcoms, for years top-row middle-square on the TV game show
Hollywood Squares
, and once the preeminent acting teacher outside of New York City. His students included child star Parky Gerald.

There’s no way he could recognize me. The last time I saw him I was eleven years old, with a prepubescent voice, smooth cheeks, and blond hair. He’d certainly remember my mother, though. He repeatedly kicked her out of his acting studio—for shouting at him because he gave another actor the lead in a scene from
The Boy with Green Hair
, for showing up drunk to drive me to an audition, and for trashing his teaching methods in front of my fellow students and their parents. The last incident resulted in my expulsion. The memory of her behavior embarrasses me to this day, and I find myself looking down at my hands as if I were still that child and he’d just chided me for ignoring his direction.