Reckless Disregard (34 page)

Gorecki speaks directly to the judge. It’s clear that he’s been waiting to give this answer all morning. “Detective Kreiss was demoted because he was an alcoholic. His alcoholism affected his ability to perform his job duties. Before his demotion, he’d undergone extensive counseling and had been disciplined more than once. He was intoxicated while on duty several times in the months leading up to his demotion. To put it bluntly, he and Luther Frederickson were occasional drinking buddies. He was lucky he didn’t lose his badge.” He turns toward me. “Bud Kreiss’s struggles are well documented in his employment file if you want to verify this. So his demotion had to do with protecting the citizens of the City of Los Angeles, not with some imagined cover-up that you’ve made up to try to get your client out of this mess.”

So Kreiss wasn’t forthright with us. Now I know why Frantz didn’t explore the issue on direct. He knew I’d walk right into the trap.

I glance at my opponents’ table. Frantz and Diamond are both leaning back in their chairs with arms crossed, as if they’re formerly ravenous diners who’ve just polished off a prime piece of meat.

“You didn’t mention Kreiss’s alleged alcoholism in your deposition, did you, Mr. Gorecki?” I ask.

“You didn’t ask me about it,” he says. “I thought you would, but you dropped it. And it wasn’t
alleged
alcoholism, sir.”

When a witness hurts you on cross-examination, the short-term goal is to look unfazed, and the easiest way to do that is to ask another question immediately, as though the bad answer was innocuous.

“Mr. Gorecki, you told us earlier that after you left the force you worked in private security,” I say. “What was the name of your company?”

“Majestic Security Systems,” he says. “I was one of the founders.”

Next to me, Brenda starts inputting keystrokes into her computer. We were ready for this.

“Do you still work with Majestic Security?” I ask.

“The company was bought out by a large public company several years ago. I’m still a major shareholder and also a consultant. I retired from full-time work three years ago.”

“What’s your role in the company?”

“Threat management. Protecting individuals who because of their stature may be likely kidnap victims or targets of stalkers.”

“The same kind of work that Detective Bud Kreiss did when he left the police force, correct?”

“In broad strokes, true, but Bud Kreiss catered to a different clientele.”

“You mean your clients were richer and more important?”

He shrugs.

“Excuse me for one moment, Your Honor, while my colleague projects something on the courtroom monitors,” I say.

“Hurry it up, counsel,” the judge says.

The webpage of Gorecki’s company appears on the courtroom LED screens.

“Your company Majestic Security Systems was acquired by a subsidiary of Parapet Media Corporation, wasn’t it?”

Frantz springs out of his seat with the agility of a man half his age. Good—he didn’t do a background check on his own witness. That often happens when the witness is an ex-cop—lawyers, even great ones, believe they’re automatically credible.

“Objection! Irrelevant,” Frantz says. My question couldn’t be more relevant, but Frantz is hoping that his friend Anita will sustain his objection anyway. Even she can’t go that far.

“Overruled,” she says, sounding almost apologetic. She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms, her lips pressed into a one-dimensional line.

“Mr. Gorecki, was Majestic Security acquired by an affiliate of Mr. Bishop’s Parapet Media?” I repeat.

His knee bouncing revs up. He folds his arms across his chest so tightly that his undersize jacket looks as if it might split at the seams. His shoulders and arms are still huge, and from the expression on his face, I’m sure he’d like to use them to snap my spine. “We were . . . yeah, a company very far down the Parapet Media chain acquired us. It’s a security company. Mr. Bishop didn’t run it, probably didn’t know about it.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong about that,” I say.

Gorecki relaxes a moment, and his leg stops bouncing. Not for long.

I nod to Brenda, and she projects the Majestic Security webpage titled “Clients and Testimonials” on the courtroom monitors. Over the next fifteen minutes, I get Gorecki to admit that Majestic Securities represented twenty-two affiliates of Parapet Media Corporation, Bishop’s conglomerate, and that Parapet also referred outside business to Majestic. The inference is clear. As payback for covering up his role in Felicity McGrath’s kidnapping, Bishop, upon Gorecki’s retirement, rewarded the ex-cop with lucrative security work and ultimately made him a multimillionaire.

I finally let him leave the stand. He lumbers past me on creaky arthritic knees, and for a moment I imagine him as an actual level boss in
Abduction!
whom I’ve just defeated. He did damage to our case with his revelation about Bud Kreiss’s alcoholism, but in the end, I avoided the ultimate trap that Frantz and Diamond laid for me.

Or so I think until Judge Grass says, “Mr. Frantz, call your next witness,” and Lovely Diamond says, “Plaintiff calls Luther Frederickson,” and up to the stand walks Boardwalk Freddy, looking more like a retired Vegas croupier than a one-time derelict who lived on the rough streets of Venice Beach twenty-seven years ago.

Philip and Brenda searched diligently for Luther Frederickson. When they couldn’t find a trace, they concluded that he’d OD’d or died of cirrhosis of the liver, or as Poniard believed, was killed by Felicity’s kidnapper to silence him. He was the only known witness through whom I could have proved that what Poniard says in
Abduction!
is true. And that’s why no plaintiff’s attorney of sound mind would have let Frederickson come within fifty miles of this courthouse. Frantz and Diamond are hardly irrational. But they have a powerful client who’s accustomed to getting whatever he wants, and Bishop wants not just victory but vindication. In that way, Poniard and William the Conqueror are alike—they’re both rich megalomaniacs who’ll listen to no one. Frederickson is here to refute what Bud Kreiss told me.

Lovely stands at the lectern, so close that I can smell her perfume. Without so much as a glance at me, she grips each side of the lectern, squeezing so hard that her fingers turn blue at the tips. I’m not the only anxious lawyer in the courtroom.

Frederickson takes the witness stand and swears to tell the truth. We’ll see. He’s a tall, thin man with a wiry body and a flabby, pallid face. He’s mostly bald, with several strands of gray-blond hair combed over to the side. He has an eighties-style moustache, but it doesn’t look old-fashioned because he has a strong chin. His eyes are slightly crossed, which is probably why he tilts his head back and squints at Lovely as if using his longish nose as a gun sight. He’s dressed in baggy blue polyester slacks and a red and gray plaid sport shirt that doesn’t completely hide an ugly scar that runs horizontally across his chest just below the neck.

“What’s your name, sir?” Lovely asks.

“Luther Grant Frederickson. Back in the eighties when I was living on the beach they called me Boardwalk Freddy.” He speaks in an even Great Plains twang. He points a hitchhiker’s thumb at his chest. “Yeah, that’s me, Boardwalk Freddy. I got that name from Officer Bud Kreiss, the Venice Beach beat cop, who later became a detective, you know what I mean? When I was on a bender, he’d holler, ‘Get off the boardwalk, Freddy!’ And the name stuck. Of course, I never left the boardwalk.” His gap-toothed smile makes him look like an elderly Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon character from those old
Mad
magazines that Harmon Cherry collected.

Lovely returns Freddy’s smile, but hers is as forced as his is genuine.

“Let’s slow down, Mr. Frederickson,” she says. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m on disability. Have been for many years. I have vision problems, so I can’t drive, amblyopia, a lazy eye they call it, since childhood. I’m a diabetic, other problems, bad back, so I can’t work much. Had thyroid cancer, but I’m cancer-free. Sometimes I do people’s income taxes, simple stuff, kind of like H&R Block, because back in the day before I moved to San Francisco, I was an accountant for the movie industry. Of course, I was on food stamps after that, and then on the streets. But mostly I can’t work anymore.”

“You were living on the Venice Beach boardwalk in July 1987, correct?”

You’re not supposed to lead your own witness, but there’s an exception for background questions, which this is. I stand and object anyway just because Freddy’s first rambling answer broke Lovely’s rhythm, and I want to see if I can throw her off some more. I’m ready to duck and cover in response to what I expect will be Judge Grass’s rebuke for my spurious objection—I used the same technique against her when she and I were trial adversaries—but to my surprise she says, “Sustained.”

“It’s foundational, Your Honor,” Lovely says. “I’m just trying to save time.”

“Don’t argue with my rulings, Ms. Diamond,” the judge says.

Brenda slides a document over to me, a computer printout from a website called Following the Law, one of those supposedly anonymous forums where disgruntled attorneys can complain about judges with impunity. Seven people say that Judge Grass dislikes attractive female lawyers. Of course—she’s the girl who didn’t get invited to the prom and has exacted revenge ever since. Did Frantz’s team fail to discover this tidbit? Or, maybe they did find it. Lovely has dressed more conservatively since Grass became the judge—pants instead of skirts, neutral colors, less makeup. But while Brenda can make herself look plain, Lovely can’t. Not to mention Lovely’s porn past, which must disgust a repressed feminist like Grass. So Lovely Diamond and I are vying to see which of us the judge dislikes least.

Lovely takes a tension-reducing deep breath. “Mr. Frederickson, where were you living in July of 1987?”

He nods solemnly and proceeds to show that the judge should have allowed Lovely’s leading question. “Well, before I was living in Carthay Circle and went up to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, which was 1967, you know what I mean? I lived in the Haight until it got raunchy and then tried a commune in Mendocino, and after that came apart when some of the founders went capitalist and started selling weed commercially, I moved to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where I lived throughout the seventies, but things were never the same up north after the Stones concert at Altamont, you know what I mean? I was there, and let me tell you, the Hell’s Angels were out of control. And after that I moved up to Humboldt County and then Seattle . . .” He spends the next few minutes describing his travels after leaving Seattle and won’t stop even though Lovely tries to interrupt him. Eventually, he testifies that from January of 1985 to July or August 1987, he was homeless in Venice Beach.

Listening to the man’s ramblings, I realize that had my mother not seen the Celestial Light and instead continued to drink and abuse drugs into middle age, Boardwalk Freddy is the person she’d have become. Some would call it “drug burnout,” but that’s not Freddy’s problem. The fire still burns but erratically, as if fickle winds alternately fan the flame and threaten to extinguish it. I doubt that in her short tenure at the US Attorney’s office, Lovely faced a witness as uncontrollable as Boardwalk Freddy Frederickson. From the way Lou Frantz keeps looking in her direction and grimacing, there’s no way he saw this coming—which means that Lovely prepared Frederickson for trial on her own and will take the blame if he falters.

“Let’s focus on my questions, Mr. Frederickson,” Lovely says. “Can you do that?” She’s trying to sound warm and ingratiating, but the frustration comes through.

“Sure, I can focus, Blondie,” Freddy says. “I do tax returns.”

Judge Grass employs an aggressive head turn and a sharp look to stifle the gallery’s laughter.

“Mr. Frederickson, in the summer of 1987, did you know who Felicity McGrath was?” Lovely asks.

“Sure did. She was a famous actress and also started hanging around the Tell Tale Bar in Venice.”

“When was that?”

“Maybe April, May of 1987. I saw her all the time, because that was my territory, panhandling, sleeping there. Warm sea breeze, fresh air. Sunny California.”

“Can you tell us what Ms. McGrath was doing the times you saw her?” Lovely asks.

I object to the question as calling for a narrative, but the judge overrules me.

“Most of the time she was hanging out at the Tell Tale Bar drinking and picking up men,” Freddy says. “That was the rumor, because they wouldn’t let someone like me inside the bar, you know what I mean? A lot of the street people thought she was a hooker, but I knew who she was from the movies; I thought she was down there working on a film or something, scouting locations and what not. Celebrities didn’t hang out in that part of Venice in the eighties. Dangerous place, not like now. Felicity was pretty kind for an actress, like one time she bought me a burger and fries, just out of the blue, you know what I mean? And a few times she slipped me a five-dollar bill. Real sweet kid, so I don’t think she was hooking or anything, just lonely, or maybe liked to bang tough guys or something.” There’s no logic to when Freddy stops talking, the length and content of his answers apparently determined solely by faulty brain chemistry.