Witness for the Persecution, page 14
So I put Franklin on speakerphone.
‘You’re right, Ms Moss. I’m not happy about that request. I’m going to need some context. If you want to withdraw you have to give me a very good reason.’
I put the judge on mute and looked at Reeves. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘Don’t underestimate me, Bob. You’re going to come clean to me – and I mean spotless – or I’m not your lawyer anymore. Make up your mind.’
Franklin said, ‘Ms Moss?’
‘Sorry, Your Honor.’ Yes, I had taken him off mute first. ‘Just one quick moment.’ I looked at Reeves again. ‘So?’
The color had drained from his face. His eyes looked like he’d sat on a very sharp block of ice. He shook his head. ‘OK. OK. I’ll tell you whatever you need to know. Don’t drop the case.’
I took Franklin off mute again. ‘Sorry to bother you, Your Honor. I’ve decided not to request withdrawal.’ Then I looked Reeves right in the face. ‘At this time.’
‘I’m both pleased and puzzled, Ms Moss,’ the judge said. ‘Someday you must explain yourself to me.’
‘It’s a promise, Judge.’ We disconnected the call. I put down the phone and put my elbows on my desk, resting my chin in my hands. ‘I can call him back, Bob. Let’s hear it.’
‘OK,’ Robert Reeves said.
PART TWO
There?
TWENTY-THREE
‘You have to understand what this business is like,’ Robert Reeves said.
I had been, at the very least, an interested observer of ‘this business’ for more than a year now and, frankly, there wasn’t a lot of it I was eager to understand better. But I let my client begin that way because it would have taken too long to get him to start over again. He was finally in a compliant mood and I wanted him to stay that way until I could get a handle on how to defend him.
Because so far it wasn’t seeming all that possible.
‘What about it?’ I threw him a lifeline.
‘You work for years, from the time you’re in high school, to get to a point where you can make movies that people actually want to see,’ he said. ‘And it takes a long time but that’s OK because you can see the prize at the end.’
‘Desert Siege,’ I said. It slipped out.
But Reeves didn’t catch the irony and luckily Patrick wasn’t there. But I’d seen their film and it was, in a word, silly. Not in a good way. ‘Exactly,’ my client said. ‘An action movie with a big budget and you get to direct those because the people with all the power have come to trust you based on all your years of experience.’
I didn’t see how this woe-is-me diatribe (if that’s what it was) pertained to his having two wives, at least one of them legally wed to him, but I figured he was getting there sooner or later. ‘I understand,’ I lied.
Reeves shook his head; no, I didn’t understand, but he was going to explain it to me in great detail. ‘The problem is this town is obsessed with youth. Oh sure they love Spielberg because he can buy and sell everyone he knows, and they love Scorsese because the critics told them they have to, but they really want the next kid making two-minute videos on TikTok because they think he’ll bring in the eighteen-year-olds and he’ll work cheap.’
Still nothing about any of his numerous wives or whether or not he’d sabotaged the cables that snapped and sent poor Jim Drake to his grisly death. But did I show any impatience? Did I tell the film director to cut to the chase? Did I point out that the next kid making TikTok videos to work their way up might be a she or a they? I did not. I was the very model of restraint.
‘You’re worried you’re aging out of action movies?’ I asked.
Reeves looked at me as if wondering whether he should have let this idiot woman resign from his case after all. ‘No. I am at the peak of my craft right now and my experience leading up to this point in my career is exactly why I should be doing what I’m doing.’
I was trying to follow him but he was blending into the surroundings like a chameleon. ‘So what’s the problem?’ I said, still graciously not adding, and what the hell does it have to do with you being married too much?
‘The problem is that they could think I’m aging out of action movies,’ Reeves said, his face so forlorn that two basset hounds came to my office door to observe out of professional courtesy but Judy shooed them away. ‘And in this town …’ (People in Los Angeles always refer to the movie business as ‘this town’. In New Jersey we refer to New York as ‘The City’, but it doesn’t mean the same thing.) ‘… people see you as being as old as the person on your arm when you’re on the red carpet.’
Immediately images of me and Patrick on red carpets leapt to my mind. I mean, we weren’t really all that far apart in age, and Patrick is actually two years older than me but …
Hey. Wait a minute!
I tried to hold my temper in check but my fury on behalf of all women was boiling just under the surface. I hoped. ‘So you’re saying that you married Tracy so you could be seen with a younger woman and be thought of as younger yourself?’ My teeth weren’t clenched but they wanted to be.
‘Oh, no,’ Reeves said. ‘That’s not what happened at all.’
OK. So the system wasn’t as awful as I’d thought it was and my client wasn’t a shallow, career-driven misogynist and nobody was looking at me and Patrick at a premiere and wondering why I wasn’t younger and let’s face it, prettier. My body temperature went down a degree or two.
‘Then what did happen?’ I asked.
‘I never married Tracy,’ he said. ‘I hired her to be my wife.’
Naturally. This was definitely not helping my case. ‘There’s a name for that and it’s not legal in this state,’ I pointed out.
Whatever Reeves was about to tell me was clearly extremely painful to him. I could tell by his face and the way he suddenly refused to meet my eyes. There was a spot on the ceiling of my office, just to the left of the hanging plant, that appeared to fascinate him beyond any reasonable level of polite interest. Besides, it was a fake plant. I tried very hard to remember that he was a human being and by virtue of that worthy of my empathy. I tried.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, but his voice had lost the arrogance it had featured … every other time I’d spoken with him. He was putting on a front. ‘Tracey and I are in a business relationship. We have never’ – he coughed – ‘been intimate.’
My mind was racing ahead but at the same time I was trying to take stock and some of it spilled out of my mouth as I did. ‘So you hired a young woman to pretend to be your wife in public and then went home every night to Stacy, who I’m assuming is your real wife?’
He nodded. He might have brushed a tear from his eye.
‘Tracy is not pretending,’ he said, with just a hint of condescension. ‘She is playing a role.’
Naturally. ‘She’s an aspiring actress,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘She took the gig because as your wife she might get some movie roles.’
Reeves actually sat up and took his eyes off my ceiling. No, that’s not a double entendre.
‘She took the gig because it is prestigious to be seen as my wife and because I pay her very well, in cash.’
‘Sure. You can’t deduct fake wife from your income tax form.’ Oh my, I’d said that out loud. Should really watch that habit.
But Reeves did not seem to be offended by that, which was unexpected. ‘No. But my accountant says if I give her a role in my next movie it will save me a bundle and the studio will pay much of her salary.’ No irony at all. None.
‘Why didn’t you just divorce Stacy and marry Tracy? And what’s with the names? Is that just a coincidence?’
His lips flattened out at the very mention of the word coincidence. ‘I don’t believe in such things. They’re bad storytelling. No, I asked her to take the name Tracy because it was so close to my wife’s name. So if a name sounding like that was mentioned, I wouldn’t react badly. If we’d used Virginia, her real name, and someone referred to my wife Virginia, I might not always immediately respond the way I should. It was a safety mechanism.’
This is the kind of logic the movie business encourages. Considering his first three marriages, I pressed on. ‘Again, why didn’t you divorce Stacy and legally marry the young thing you wanted on your arm at the Oscars?’ (Like Reeves was ever going to be invited to the Oscars.)
He looked offended by the question. ‘I love my wife.’
Of course he did. ‘Listen to me. We need to plot a strategy for your trial, which will be here before you know it,’ I told my client. ‘And if you think that this dizzy scheme won’t be uncovered, I’d advise you to start thinking of ways to “divorce” Tracy because if I can find this out the district attorney definitely can and they’ll use it against you.’
‘How?’ Reeves said. ‘The only reason I told you is because it would prove that I wasn’t the least bit jealous about any supposed affair that Tracy was having with Drake. Why would I care if we weren’t even dating?’
‘For that to work I’ll have to reveal your secret in court,’ I reminded him.
‘Then reveal it. Just don’t ask me why I did it on the stand.’
‘Then I won’t put you on the stand,’ I said. ‘You can’t testify. But Tracy will because she’ll be subpoenaed, and she can’t refuse because you two aren’t really married. She had better not consider committing perjury.’
Reeves looked like there were fishing swimming around his head and he was watching them go by. ‘This just keeps getting worse,’ he said.
‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,’ I told him. ‘The trial hasn’t even started. We have a few weeks to figure out how your marriages impact your defense and you need to come extremely clean with me about what happened right before Mr Drake fell off that crane. And I mean now.’
My client – I had to keep reminding myself that this was my client and not the opposition, because frankly I would have been much more comfortable prosecuting this case – had the nerve to look confused by what I’d said. ‘I have been completely open with you about all that,’ he said.
‘You told me you barely knew the man and had probably never spoken to him,’ I reminded him.
He gestured with his hands: OK, so mostly. ‘I was almost completely open. So I knew him a little and I’d heard rumors that he was sleeping with my wife, who wasn’t my wife, so I truly didn’t care. Why is that a big deal?’
‘It’s a big deal because you left out the part where you tampered with the cables that held James Drake up, right before they no longer held him up and he died,’ I said. I really felt like I was cross-examining a hostile witness and dropping the damning evidence right in his lap. I waited for Reeves’s humble plea for forgiveness.
Instead he stared blankly at me. ‘What are you talking about?’
I had expected something more humble but I was prepared. I turned my laptop around to face him. He looked at the screen and the lost expression in his eyes only deepened. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘Watch.’ I started the file of the home-video footage Nate had supplied, edited down to begin at the time Reeves started talking to James Drake at the base of the crane that would reach down to lift him up once he was properly outfitted … he thought. Reeves watched the beginning of the video and his face took on a look of impatience.
‘This is terribly shot,’ he said. ‘So I was a little short with the stuntman. So what?’
‘Keep looking.’
He rolled his eyes a bit but did as directed (see what I did there?). And then, I could tell from the sound, he got to the moment where the video showed him very clearly tampering with the cables on the crane.
‘What’s that?’ Reeves’s voice was almost breathless, strained. ‘Who filmed this?’ Was he finally going to confess now that I’d caught him dead to rights, with the evidence clearly exposed in front of his eyes?
Of course not. ‘That’s you messing with the cables on the crane,’ I said. ‘I can’t see what kind of tool you have in your hand, but it’s clear you weren’t testing them for strength. Fifteen minutes later James Drake would fall seventy-five feet to his death. So what do you want to tell me now?’
‘That’s not what happened,’ he said.
This case wasn’t getting any easier.
That was equally true when Brady O’Toole called me later in the day. Already having the kind of week that would cause a lesser woman to regularly dissolve into tears – which I’d only done once – I picked up my phone with my thumb and forefinger only, as if afraid it was going to explode. It didn’t.
‘Tell me something I want to hear, Brady,’ I said. ‘Hello’ is so mundane.
‘I’m not sure whether you’ll want to hear this or not,’ he answered. ‘But I’ve been doing some research on the type of crane that the production you told me about was using and the cables that would have been primarily responsible for holding up the stuntman.’
‘Primarily responsible?’ Already I was in over my head.
‘Yes. There are backup systems and fail-safes all over these things. Remember they’re usually used on construction sites in populated areas and insurance companies insist on cranes not dropping heavy things on innocent bystanders.’ Brady clearly had been doing his homework, and had started off with considerably more knowledge of the subject than I’d had. ‘This one wasn’t the best I’ve ever seen but it wasn’t the worst, either.’
I braced myself because I felt like the news wasn’t going to be great for my case. ‘What’d you find out?’ I asked Brady.
‘The good news is your client definitely didn’t cut those cables,’ he started.
I knew enough to brace for the rest of the information. ‘What’s the bad news?’
‘Nobody cut through those cables. There’s really no implement that would do the job right there in front of anybody and not be incredibly noticeable.’
‘So how is it that James Drake fell from five stories up and died?’ I asked. I’ll admit I closed my eyes after the question.
‘The cables were burned through,’ Brady said. ‘From what I can tell from eyewitness reports and the police documents, somebody had given them regular treatments of hydrochloric acid for at least twelve hours before the rehearsal took place.’
‘What do you mean, regular?’ I asked.
‘It couldn’t be done all at once. You can’t just pour the whole bottle of acid on the cables and have them burn through just enough so no one would notice but ready to snap when the stunt performer was dangled over the edge. Whoever did this did it a little at a time, progressively over maybe twelve to – at most – fourteen hours, and could tell when to stop, which probably would have been shortly before the rehearsal began.’
I’d sent Brady the video footage Nate had provided. ‘You saw the video,’ I said. ‘Is that what Robert Reeves is doing at the end of that clip?’
‘I can’t say for sure, but it’s entirely possible.’
‘I’m not going to ask you to testify, Brady,’ I said.
‘That’s OK. The DA was happy to take my call.’
TWENTY-FOUR
‘Even by Hollywood standards, Reeves’s love life is a corker,’ Patrick said.
I had been very careful not to tell him any of the legal maneuvers I intended to try in my defense or anything that, as a potential witness (especially given the footage of him standing and watching as the stunt was being prepared and while Reeves, who denied it unequivocally, appeared to be sabotaging the instrument by which Drake had died), he should not know ahead of the trial. But the stuff about Reeves’s scheme to be seen with a younger, less ‘dowdy’ (per Angie) woman had resonated with me.
Since moving to Los Angeles I’d been comparing myself, just barely subconsciously, to the many actresses and other women I’d seen in the streets and offices where I worked. And I’d been coming up short in my own mind. It was strictly a physical thing, and I didn’t think I was a hideous beast or anything, but the competition in Southern California is just a hair more intense than it is in Central New Jersey. Don’t get me wrong; the Garden State has its share of lookers, but they’re not everywhere. Even if you’re not concentrating on it as you go through your day, the intimidation becomes ingrained.
So yeah, I’d told Patrick about Stacy and Tracy and why they were Stacy and Tracy. I’d told him because I wanted to see how he would react to such a thing. Because he wanted me to move in with him now, but in a couple of years?
‘I mean, I understand why he did it, but it is still quite the scheme,’ Patrick went on.
That wasn’t boding well for me.
We were at a restaurant called OK, which was less intense and upscale than Voilà! Because I had better defined my idea of ‘easy’ with Patrick and he had, being Patrick, taken it all in and overcompensated. If Applebee’s was a touch less fancy, it would look like this place.
‘You understand why?’ I said.
‘Certainly. I don’t agree with it, but the business does have a focus on youth because that’s where most of their ticket buyers are,’ he said, scanning the menu, which featured items like the OKBurger and the Chicken Fried Chicken. I’m not a food snob but this place was testing my limits. ‘Being seen as an older man might limit the kind of projects Robert might be offered in the future.’
Did I really want to be eating in a place where the only alternate side dish to French fries was curly fries? ‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘I mean, it is the point but it’s not the one I’m trying to make right now. It’s ridiculous that people in your business think a guy over forty can’t direct a movie people under twenty-five – and oh my lord maybe even people older than twenty-five – might want to see.’
‘Then what’s the point?’ Patrick had given up looking at the menu and was scanning the chalkboard over my right shoulder for hope of a special for the night that would fall into the general category of Food.
