‘What is it you want me to determine?’
Dr Sidney Chao, a psychiatrist with twenty-three years’ experience in the field and six as a witness in (mostly divorce) trials, didn’t care for Zoom calls, but he was an hour away from my office without traffic, which is never the condition in Los Angeles, and he didn’t care for traffic even more. So we’d agreed to meet on our screens and let the fake backgrounds be damned. I was in my actual office and he was clearly in his home, which was a lot nicer than mine. I had realized long before that I could never be considered a candidate to consult on one of the cable news networks because I don’t have enough bookshelves in my apartment. Blame the landlord.
‘I don’t want to prejudice your findings, Sidney. You know that.’ Dr Chao and I had worked together on a number of cases, dealing with everything from a husband’s state of mind when he’d decided to have an affair with a cocktail waitress, to the toll a divorce had taken on a twelve-year-old girl who wanted desperately to emancipate herself from her parents. This was the first time I’d consulted with him on a criminal case. ‘But the client is insisting here that his wife, who admitted to having an affair with the victim of the crime, is having delusions and never did any such thing. It would be helpful to know your opinion on her grasp of reality. Is that the technical term?’
‘No. I believe what you’re looking at is whether or not she’s nutsy coo-coo.’ Sidney is not without a sense of humor, something he luckily keeps to himself when he’s on the witness stand. Jurors hate a funny expert witness.
‘That would be helpful too,’ I admitted. ‘Does it bother you to be consulting on a murder case?’ Some people don’t want that kind of responsibility.
‘No,’ Sidney answered. ‘I offer an educated opinion and I don’t pretend it’s anything else. It’s the jury that decides if it proves innocence or guilt.’
‘So how will you make a determination?’ Not all shrinks work the same. Sidney is careful and thoughtful in his work and he’s very good at explaining himself, which makes him a wonderful expert witness.
‘There are a number of tests I can choose from, but mostly it’ll be a series of questions that will determine her ability to distinguish between fictional and real situations. I’ll make the questions more personal as we proceed so that eventually she’ll be answering strictly about things that have and have not happened to her.’
I know very little about human psychology, which is why I’m a lawyer. So that sounded fairly reasonable. ‘How will you know if she’s lying?’ I asked.
‘I carry a bullshit detector with me to every session,’ Sidney said.
‘I don’t suppose you could tell me where you bought that,’ I said. ‘It would shorten trials and improve the country’s backlogged justice system beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.’
‘Sorry,’ Sidney answered. ‘The company went out of business right after I was born.’
‘You’re a real shrink, Sidney.’
‘Please. We prefer the full term, headshrinker.’
‘Stop it. The technical jargon is overwhelming me.’
‘How much time do I have to make a report, Sandy?’ he asked.
‘Believe it or not, the trial is scheduled to begin in six weeks, but I’ve applied for an adjournment, so I’m pretty sure we’ll have a few more months to prepare. Guess four months as a minimum and we’ll work forward.’ I looked around at my office and realized I didn’t have much in the way of bookshelves here either. Was I anti-book? I shuddered to think of it. The problem probably was that in the digital age we use physical books less than we ever did and all the information we need is at our fingertips (literally) all the time. It would be weird to decorate my office with novels by Hank Phillippi Ryan and short stories by Annie Proulx. But they might class up the place, now that I thought about it.
‘That should be enough. When do I get to meet this woman for the first time?’ Sidney never looked around the room he was in. He lived there. He knew what it looked like. He was a logical man.
‘I’m meeting with her for the first time tomorrow and then I’ll tell her when she can meet with you. What works for your schedule?’ I asked. I liked doing the take-charge persona that intimidated Robert Reeves enough to back down and let me interview his wife alone.
‘How’s next Tuesday, around three?’ Sidney was clearly consulting a calendar elsewhere on his screen.
‘I’ll make it work,’ I said. ‘Thanks, Sidney.’
‘Don’t thank me. Just pay up on time.’
I hit the End Meeting For All button and turned my attention once again to the police report that had been the basis of the charges against my client. It seemed a little circumstantial and thin to charge Reeves, even if his wife was sleeping with the victim, based on the physical evidence cited in Trench’s report. And that was very unlike Trench.
But there wasn’t anything in the report now that hadn’t been there before. The crane’s cables were cut but the method wasn’t clear and no implement had been discovered. The suspect’s wife had reportedly been having an affair with the victim. The suspect, as director of the film, had unlimited access to the set. Fine. So it (barely) covered the bases of access, motive and ability. But – extramarital activity aside – there were dozens of other people who could have done it. I could ask Trench why he’d focused so exclusively on Robert Reeves but he’d just be Trench and say something inscrutable. I’m the police, Ms Moss. I know about these things. Except pithier.
I’d given Nate Garrigan a look at the report and had yet to hear back. I was stalled.
So I called Patrick because sometimes it’s better to talk to your boyfriend than the non-existent books on your non-existent shelves.
Patrick was between shots on Torn, which is the case most of the time. Patrick says film acting (or in this case, television acting) is ‘mostly waiting, doing one thing, and then waiting again.’ He understands why it has to be that way – although I’m not really clear on it – and doesn’t complain about it. But the rigors of not doing all that much in a row make it easier to get in touch when necessary, or in this case simply wanted.
He told me virtually nothing about how his day was going, largely because he knew I would understand about half of it (which is an improvement over when we met) and think the other half was odd. I respect Patrick’s work but only because I see how much preparation he puts into it. Still feels like a game of pretend to me.
Then Patrick made the mistake of asking how I was doing and got the full libretto of the Robert Reeves opera. I did leave out anything that would be considered evidential because Patrick was still a potential witness in the case and had to be kept in the dark on the details of the crime. It was more about the machinery of the court, and even then I left out the names. If Renfro ever got to question Patrick, I didn’t want any of my personal impressions to color his answers.
It’s exhausting being ethical.
‘I think you need a night out,’ he said when I was finished. ‘I’m getting done by six tonight. Where do you want to go for dinner?’
‘Someplace easy,’ I said.
‘Done. And Sandy. Don’t let them get you. You’ll get your adjournment and you’ll build a case that’ll get Reeves exonerated.’
I wanted to say that was what I was afraid of, but again, don’t prejudice the witness. ‘Thanks, Patrick.’ He really was dear when he wanted to be, which was most of the time.
‘No charge, love.’
Before the conversation could get too adorable, I saw an email appear on my screen from the office of the courts. ‘I’ll see you later,’ I said to Patrick, and hung up.
I reached for the mouse to open the email and immediately my phone rang, with Nate Garrigan calling. I clicked on the email and answered the call at the same moment. ‘What’s up?’ I said to Nate. I can be as abrupt as the next woman, assuming the next woman is somewhat uncomfortable being abrupt.
The first paragraph of the email informed me that the adjournment I had requested had indeed been granted by Judge Franklin. So I breathed a little easier.
‘Why did you send your crazy roommate here to follow me around?’ Nate demanded. Apparently he thought I knew what he was talking about. Silly Nate.
I re-listened to his question in my head. ‘Angie’s there?’
Hang on. The rest of the notice from the court said that the new date for the trial was … in nine weeks? Franklin had given me another three whole weeks to prepare a capital defense in a murder case I’d first heard about two days before? Was he nuts?
‘Yeah, Angie’s here. Apparently your lunatic boyfriend thought she should be riding shotgun on my investigation and she won’t leave until he tells her to go home.’ Nate has a natural sense of outrage that colors virtually everything he says. But he did sound unusually steamed about this one. You’d think, given the choice between having Patrick dog his steps and Angie doing the same, he’d go for Angie. But I was finding out how little I knew about the people I’d met in Los Angeles in the past two years.
‘Why?’ I said, trying to do the math about nine weeks. That was sixty-three days. I had, at this moment, enough evidence to perhaps, if I was extremely cunning and lucky, reduce Robert Reeves’s sentence to twenty years with no chance of parole. That was probably not good enough at the prices we were charging.
‘How could I know? Actors are crazy.’
It was at that moment that I decided to take up yoga. ‘Put Angie on,’ I said.
The next voice I heard was familiar from Westfield High School. ‘What is this guy’s problem?’ Angie said. ‘It’s not like he never met me before.’
‘He never thought of you as an assistant investigator, and neither did I. What are you doing there?’
In sixty-three days, I’d maybe be able to get a psychiatric evaluation of Tracy Reeves from Sidney Chao. Sidney was good and he’d understand deadline pressure. Nate had worked under a tighter deadline in Patrick’s case and we’d won, although much of the most relevant evidence was turned up after the trial had already started. I’d never be able to visit the scene of the murder because it no longer existed, although Griffith Park was still there. I could find maybe three or four expert witnesses, but would I be able to talk to everyone who was on the set that day? Sixty-three days sounds like a lot. Trust me, it isn’t.
‘Patrick was worried that you had to get this big murder case together and he’d kind of been the reason,’ Angie said. ‘He couldn’t come with Nate himself because he’s shooting, you know, so he sent me. It’s only part-time.’
A part-time investigator’s … what? Assistant? While being the executive assistant for a famous television actor and head of a production company. It was amazing Angie had time to squeeze in being my best friend.
‘What are you supposed to do?’ I asked. I had to get to Judge Franklin and speak to him personally. The last time there had been sabotage; this time there had clearly been a misunderstanding.
‘I’m supposed to help Nate find out the stuff he wants to find out,’ Angie said. That was specific.
‘Uh-huh. And here’s the thing: As Robert Reeves’s attorney, I’m telling you that you can’t report back to Patrick on anything Nate finds out.’
I could picture the blank expression on Angie’s face. ‘Huh?’
‘You heard me. Patrick’s a potential witness and he’s not allowed to know anything about what we find in any investigation. He gets to testify on what he knows and nothing else. Got it? So you can stay there with Nate all you like but you can’t tell Patrick any of it. And I’ll bet Nate isn’t that crazy about having you tag along anyway.’
In the background I could hear Nate saying, ‘You got that right.’
‘Don’t worry about Nate,’ Angie told me. ‘He’ll be my best friend by the end of the day.’
I pretended to pout. ‘I thought I was your best friend.’
‘You’re my BFF. He’ll just be my BF.’
‘I’m not going to be anybody’s B anything,’ Nate grumbled.
‘Seriously, Ang,’ I said. ‘You can’t tell a word of it to Patrick. There’s no point in you staying.’
‘I get that. But he sent me here and I’m kinda into it, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s only a couple of half-days a week.’ The Angie in my mind’s eye was already grinning over at Nate to flirt with him. It’s her go-to tactic when a bare-knuckle brawl isn’t appropriate.
‘No it isn’t,’ Nate said, but his voice was already less steady than before. Angie can flirt with the best of them.
‘Put Nate on,’ I told Angie. It was, now that I recalled, his phone to begin with.
‘She’s crazy,’ he groused at me.
‘Yeah, but she’s smart and observant and she’s fun for you to look at, so you’ll put up with it but she’s off limits to you,’ I said. ‘Now. What have you found out in your thorough investigation?’
‘She’s young enough to be my daughter,’ Nate said. ‘Don’t be disgusting.’ He meant it, too.
‘The case, Nate.’
‘Yeah. I’m looking for an expert on the crane, the company that rented it to them and the kind of cable that got cut. We need someone to tell us what would have done enough damage to snap when the guy was attached to it but not be obvious before, when the stunt coordinator was checking it for safety.’
Yeah. The stunt coordinator. ‘You mean Burke Henderson,’ I said.
‘I know that.’
‘Reeves says Burke is incompetent and that Drake was actually having an affair with Burke’s wife, not his own.’
‘Well, aside from Burke being gay that makes tons of sense.’ Nate wanted me to know that he’d already looked into the possibility. ‘He could be bisexual, I guess, but I don’t know of any other women who could testify to that. No, the word that I have is from three different people from the film company and they all say it was Reeves’s wife Stacy who was bopping the stunt guy.’
Damn. That meant – ‘Stacy?’
‘Yeah. Stacy Reeves.’
‘Nate, Reeves’s wife is named Tracy. Patricia, to be exact.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘No, but I’m going to tomorrow. Reeves says she’s got mental health issues. You think she uses two names? Like multiple personality disorder?’ That would figure. It’s an extremely rare disorder, despite what shows like Patrick’s Torn would have you believe.
‘No,’ Nate answered. ‘I’ve traced Stacy back to her childhood in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Nobody made her up recently. Maybe Tracy is the alternative personality, but you know, that doesn’t happen too often.’
‘I know.’ Tell that to the producers of Patrick’s TV show.
There was a long pause. ‘Sandy,’ Nate said slowly, ‘there’s a real possibility that Robert Reeves has two wives.’
‘Ooh!’ I heard Angie say.