Witness for the Persecution, page 17
Law is a funny business. From the outside.
‘But you’re not going to testify against Sandy,’ Cynthia said. Cynthia has no British accent because she is in fact Patrick’s half-sister and grew up in Pensacola, Florida, after their father had relocated there sans Patrick’s mom and their children. ‘Aren’t there rules against that?’
‘There are rules that say a spouse isn’t obligated to testify against their wife or husband who stands accused and can refuse to do so,’ I explained. ‘There’s nothing that says if you’re dating someone they can’t testify for one side or the other, if an attorney is involved. It might seem a conflict of interest, but in this case Patrick isn’t going to testify either way, I’m pretty sure. He wasn’t there when the incident occurred.’ I looked at Patrick. ‘But just to be safe, that’s all I’m going to say about the case.’
‘There exists a video that shows me there in the park when they were testing the stunt,’ Patrick told Cynthia, despite my trying to communicate how he shouldn’t. A kick under the table used to mean so much more. ‘But I wasn’t there and I can’t figure it out.’
I tried chatting about things other than Robert Reeves and whether he’d killed a man for reasons that didn’t make any sense (that lack of real motive was going to be a key part of my defense, particularly if we ever managed to find Tracy Reeves or whoever she was), like Patrick’s premiere the following week, which got me a wry look from Patrick who was still waiting for an answer to his invitation.
Honestly, I’m never this indecisive about anything. I don’t always make the right decisions, but I always make decisions. And this nagging feeling that committing to the premiere meant I was agreeing to live with Patrick was complicating my mind in ways that were completely unfamiliar. I just didn’t think this way.
Patrick’s previous romantic history was certainly a stumbling block. He was a champion at falling head over heels for someone and pursuing her. But once she responded, he wasn’t great at sustaining the relationship. His marriage to Patsy had been headed for divorce before she was murdered. His most recent engagement, to a real-estate agent named Emily, was official before Patrick could honestly remember the color of his fiancée’s eyes, and broken off after a five-minute conversation with me. And the aftermath of that, for the record, didn’t go great.
He’d asked me to marry him seconds after I realized I was in love with him, and it took months before he’d take no for an answer. If I agreed to take him up on his offer and live in this enormous house, would Patrick immediately decide the hunt had been the fun part and try to find a diplomatic way to move me back into the apartment with Angie? Would Angie be able to keep her job? I didn’t think Patrick would be that petty, but it was certainly a concern.
But yes. The dinner party. Right.
‘It’s going to be a weird affair,’ Patrick was saying about the Desert Siege premiere. ‘I mean, a man died on set, the director is on trial for his murder and I’m in the middle of it. The press will undoubtedly be brutal.’ He looked directly at me. ‘I find myself dreading the red carpet. Does that make sense?’
‘Of course it does,’ said Cynthia. A veteran of films and prestige television, she could weigh in knowledgeably about the need to do difficult promotional tours for films, although as far as I knew, no one had ever died while making one of her movies. ‘I get nervous before one of these things and that’s without someone being murdered while the movie was being made.’ She stopped, looked at Patrick and then at me. ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
I assured her there was no need to feel that way. ‘I’m just the lawyer,’ I said. I was thinking of excuses I could use to leave the party early, because my stomach was clenching just thinking about showing up in court the next day. That was an excuse, wasn’t it? I should say that.
‘I get nervous before court every time,’ Jon said. Was he stealing my excuse? I looked at his face. Nah. The man was in earnest. ‘I’m sure Sandy is really nervous, even if it’s clear the evidence against her client is at best circumstantial.’
Nate coughed. It wasn’t because he was sick. Still, he seemed surprised when everyone turned in his direction. He sat back as if being attacked and blinked a couple of times. In a conversation about being nervous, I realized I’d never seen Nate look at all anxious before.
‘Sorry,’ he said, although I’m not sure for what. ‘It’s just that the evidence isn’t all circumstantial.’ He made eye contact with me and I knew where he was going, but the subject was already out on the table. ‘We have video of the accused going after those steel cables with something that might have been a bottle of acid. And if we have it, you can be pretty sure the prosecution is going to have it.’
People like stories about crimes and trials when they’re not directly involved. Cynthia, who had been so traumatized by her accusation and the events that surrounded it that she hadn’t worked for six months, now seemed absolutely enthralled. ‘Really! So your client did kill the stuntman?’ she asked.
‘No, that’s not what it means,’ I told Cynthia. ‘That video could show a lot of things. We don’t know yet.’
A phone buzzed and Angie reached into her jacket pocket to pull out her phone, but the work one Patrick had given her and not her personal line. She looked at the screen and her eyebrows dropped to half-staff. She hit a button and said quietly, ‘Patrick McNabb.’ I knew she wasn’t Patrick McNabb but that was how she answered that phone. She listened for a while. ‘Hold on. I’ll see if I can find him.’
‘Whoever it is, tell them I’m not available,’ Patrick said. ‘The movies can wait.’ He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, which always worked.
‘Apparently there’s someone at the door who wants to see you,’ Angie said.
‘Tell them I’m not home,’ he said. ‘How did they get this address?’
Angie’s face looked pained. ‘It’s Lieutenant Trench,’ she said. ‘I gather he has a subpoena for you.’
Patrick swiveled his head to look at me. I put up my hands. ‘Let him in,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re going to be a witness.’
Naturally. For Patrick, Trench came himself.
TWENTY-EIGHT
If Judge Walter Franklin’s house was anything like his courtroom, it would have been terrifying to be invited to one of his dinner parties. He was maniacal in his insistence on neatness and order. Lawyers appearing before the judge knew better than to scatter paperwork all over their respective tables. Custodial staff in the courthouse were advised to keep the floors and all wooden surfaces polished, to wash the windows inside and out daily, and to make sure there were wastepaper baskets near both tables and at the end of every aisle of seats for spectators. There had better be no used facial tissues on the floor or there would be hell to pay.
So naturally the first time I’d been in Franklin’s court I had been attacked by a woman with a condom full of fake blood. It had not been neat. And I believed that the judge carried a grudge. Against me. For standing there while she threw it at me. He probably believed I should have known better.
Today I had put on my most professional attire, sprayed with a product that claimed to repel liquids. I had my hair pulled back in a bun. My purse was stocked with disinfectant wipes. I was wearing low heels with soles that would make it less likely for me to slip.
I was taking no chances because this case was anything but a sure thing and I needed every advantage I could get.
Jury selection had been fairly quick. No misogynistic tweets from Robert Reeves had ever surfaced. He hadn’t been accused of being anything other than slightly difficult to work with (these are Hollywood standards, and as far as I knew he’d never thrown a stapler at an employee), and he didn’t seem to discriminate based on gender, sexual identity, race, religion or political affiliation. So I hadn’t had to worry too much about demographics when we were seating the jury.
I had disqualified one man who had seen a previous film of Reeves’s, Dead Even, and considered it ‘stupid’. The prosecution had asked to have two jurors excused, one because he had once dated a cousin of the defendant’s (I would have done the same if it had come to me) and one because she thought artists ‘live outside the law’. That one had to be escorted away by security. I had made sure to look for something under my table as she passed by.
None of the prospective jurors had ever worked on a film set, which was something of an anomaly in Los Angeles, so no one with a special affection for or bias against stunt performers, stunt coordinators or film directors had been called. We had a jury seated with two alternates by ten a.m.
The press coverage resembled something that would have fallen between the Summer Olympics and Carnival in Rio, but with enough ghoulish fascination with the death of a stunt performer trying to do his job that I resolved to never watch the news on television again. I like a newspaper, but I spotted reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, Variety and even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, so I’d just have to duck all possible news outlets in every medium until two weeks after this trial was finished. Sure. That’d be a snap.
And that was fewer than had covered either Patrick’s or Cynthia’s trials, I reminded myself. That just got me to shaking my head in wonderment, which got me some seriously puzzled looks from my crew. Angie, Jon, Nate, and of course Reeves himself, looking like a man pretending he wore a suit to work every day, were present. And there was Penny, waiting like a puppy for some affection from her boss.
I had banished Patrick from attending until he was required for testimony for my opposition, which apparently was not going to be the case on the first day of the trial. He had protested, but in the end understood the logic in my not wanting a prosecution witness sitting right behind me, and besides he had to go be three or four characters on the set of Torn every day for the next week.
‘Who’s testifying first?’ Reeves asked me after we returned from the break following the jury being seated.
‘I’m not privy to the order of the prosecution’s case,’ I said. ‘We’ll find out as soon as Renfro tells us, but don’t worry. There’s no such thing as a surprise witness. We know everyone he has on his list.’
So the first witness Renfro called was not included on his list. I immediately objected when he named Alice V. Mandrill. ‘Your Honor, this witness is not included on the prosecution’s list and I have not been able to prepare for her.’
But even before I had stood up to object, I’d noticed the look on Reeves’s face when he’d heard the name. He even tried to grab for my sleeve and shook his head, but it was too late. Judge Franklin looked over at the prosecution’s table. ‘Mr Renfro?’
‘My apologies, Your Honor. The witness is listed on our information under her assumed name, Tracy Reeves.’
Of course. Now I was the idiot. Nicely done, Renfro.
‘Withdrawn, Your Honor.’
Franklin didn’t roll his eyes but I knew he wanted to. ‘I should think so.’
Tracy, who had been waiting outside the courtroom, entered when a security guard at the door opened it for her. She wasn’t playing the bombshell today, but I did notice a good number of the men in the spectator area straighten up as she walked by them and approached the witness stand. She paid them no attention at all.
After being sworn in, she sat down primly and folded her hands in her lap. Her skirt was not short. Her makeup was not overly noticeable. Her hair was pulled back in a bun exactly like mine. She was good.
‘What’s she going to say that I don’t want to hear?’ I asked Reeves.
He shrugged. ‘Her middle name is Virginia?’
Clearly my client wasn’t going to be much help. And apparently Renfro had either tracked Tracy (Alice) down where she was hiding or had been keeping her under wraps since I (and her fake husband) had seen her last. That could only indicate that he considered her to be a very important witness, but I couldn’t figure out why. The best she could testify to was that she actually wasn’t married to Robert Reeves and so therefore he would have had no jealousy of her alleged affair with James Drake and no reason to kill him. How did that help Renfro’s case?
I guessed we were about to find out.
‘Ms Mandrill,’ Renfro began, after whoever this was had been sworn in, ‘have you ever gone by another name?’
Yeah, Benedict Arnold, I thought.
‘Yes,’ Mandrill – I’m going to call her Mandrill – answered. ‘For eight months I went by the name Tracy Reeves.’
‘You were married to the defendant, Robert Reeves?’ Renfro asked.
My client, the aforementioned defendant, looked completely baffled.
‘Yes,’ Mandrill said.
I stood up. ‘Objection, Your Honor. To my knowledge there exists no record of such a marriage taking place.’
But Renfro was already reaching down into his folder for a document that couldn’t possibly exist, and yet there it was. ‘I have a valid marriage certificate in my hand, dated just a little less than one year ago,’ he said.
‘I’d like to examine that document if Mr Renfro intends to introduce it into evidence,’ I told Franklin. ‘The defense has done an extensive search and found no such marriage to have been recorded in the state of California.’
Renfro brought the paper to the bench for Franklin to examine it. ‘For good reason,’ he told the judge. ‘The marriage was recorded in Tijuana, Mexico.’
And my client went absolutely pale.
Reeves looked at me but he wasn’t seeing me. He spoke, but to himself, and yet it was audible to anyone within a reasonable distance in the courtroom.
‘That thing was real?’ he said.
TWENTY-NINE
As you might expect, the rest of Mandrill’s testimony did not go favorably for my client. She confirmed that she and Robert had been married in Tijuana with a valid marriage license and a ceremony performed by a local judge, just in case Franklin wanted to feel some camaraderie with the presiding party. Then Renfro, in his aw-shucks boy-next-door style, asked her about her ‘relationship’ with the victim in the case, James Drake.
‘Jimmy and I were … we had a physical relationship,’ Mandrill said, no doubt stopping herself from using a word that she’d never seen in a TV courtroom drama. ‘It started around the time shooting began on Desert Siege.’
‘And when did it end?’
‘When Jimmy died.’ Aspiring actress Mandrill did not overplay her role and sniff back a tear at that point. She’d probably had lessons from someone who had once read a book by Konstantin Stanislavsky.
‘Was your husband, Mr Reeves,’ (in case the jury had forgotten who was on trial) ‘aware of this sexual relationship?’ Renfro wanted the jury thinking dirty thoughts, and ‘physical’ just wasn’t a suggestive enough word to use. Damn, he was good.
‘Yes he was. In fact, it was Robert who introduced me to Jimmy at a party before shooting started. He said we looked good together.’ I had always assumed she’d been lying about that, but repeating it in court made me rethink that assumption. It’s not that people don’t ever lie under oath, but most people are afraid of the penalty that comes with perjury, and this seemed like a trivial point to risk jail time about.
I looked at Reeves. He appeared to be severely nauseated. His face was pale (which in tan-centric Los Angeles is not easy to achieve) and there were beads of perspiration across his hairline. He didn’t look at me because he was staring at Mandrill. And he didn’t look angry. He looked incalculably disappointed.
‘Did your husband, Mr Reeves, express any reaction about your relationship with Mr Drake after you and he had started seeing each other regularly?’ Renfro asked.
‘Yes.’ Mandrill was responding to her pre-trial briefing, which had clearly included the instruction that she should never offer anything but a direct answer to the question. They’d had her for some time.
‘How did he react?’
‘He was angry.’
‘Did he say anything in particular that indicated he was angry?’ Renfro said.
‘He said Jimmy wasn’t good enough for me and told me to stop seeing him.’
I looked over at Nate and he was holding up his hands, as if showing me his palms were going to make this all go away. It was his way of telling me he didn’t know how Renfro had gotten hold of the marriage license when Nate hadn’t been able to find it himself.
‘Was he angry because you were his wife and you were sleeping with another man?’ the prosecutor asked.
Mandrill had to think about that one. ‘No, because he had another wife stashed away in San Bernardino.’
That sent the expected shock wave through the room. People in the spectator area registered surprise and shook their heads, but I didn’t care about them because they didn’t hold my client’s fate in their hands.
The jury did and they looked positively angry. At Reeves. Like he’d lied to them, and he hadn’t even taken the stand yet. If he ever would, which I was thinking would be the Mount Rushmore of mistakes, unless you count Mount Rushmore, if you’re an indigenous person in South Dakota, but that’s another whole issue.
This was bad on so many levels. The worst part is that I wasn’t prepared for it because I’d been assured that there was no marriage and there was no jealousy. But now bigamy was also on the table and that was going to complicate matters.
‘Another wife?’ Yeah, Renfro, like you didn’t know.
‘Yeah. Stacy.’
‘Were you aware of that when you married him?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘Yes.’ Then Mandrill violated her pre-trial instruction and went beyond answering the question. ‘See, I was more like an employee than a wife.’
Now. You have to know that Renfro knew all about the business arrangement between Mandrill and Reeves. And he had to know that the Mexican marriage certificate was, at best, questionable. But if his goal was to paint my client as an arrogant, unfeeling user of people, well, how could I argue with that? It did not, however, make him a murderer. Renfro no doubt knew that, too.
