‘Did that help or hurt?’ I asked Jon.
We were on a recess for lunch and sitting at an outdoor café two blocks from the courthouse. Unlike the other two murder trials I’d done in Los Angeles, the defendant was not a famous actor, so we could be out on the street without any danger of my client being accosted by fans, detractors or other civilians. Patrick wasn’t with us – it was me, Judy, Angie, Jon, Nate and Reeves (with the ubiquitous Penny) – so we just looked like normal people sharing a business lunch.
We were planning ways to keep a man out of jail but hey, that’s a business, isn’t it?
Jon is a savant-level tactician in the courtroom and can plan seven steps ahead of almost any lawyer I’ve ever seen. Until fairly recently I’d thought he was less strong in the courtroom, but then he’d gotten me out of jail so that opinion was currently under review. It was always, though, a good idea to talk to him about strategy.
He wiped some salsa from the corner of his mouth with the paper napkins supplied, guaranteed to fly away at the slightest breeze if not held down by a soda. ‘I think it cut both ways. The jury wasn’t happy to hear that Robert is a bigamist, but there was no evidence that he was in a particular rage about James Drake and certainly nothing that indicated he’d be violent toward the man.’
‘You know I’m right here, don’t you?’ Reeves said. He was dealing with my choice of a lunch spot when he was generally used to places that had cloth napkins and, you know, roofs.
‘You’ve been holding back on us since you hired us,’ I said to him. ‘You told me that you weren’t really married to Tracy.’
‘I wasn’t!’ the defendant protested. Then his puffery lost some of its volume and he added, ‘At least I didn’t think I was.’
‘So tell me about Mexico,’ I said. ‘And don’t leave anything out or change anything to make yourself look better. I need all the facts.’
‘Yeah.’ Angie looked thrilled with the idea of hearing about Mexico because she, like the jury undoubtedly did, figured it was a really juicy, sexy story. I was hoping it was not.
Reeves scowled and flattened his lips out. He looked around the table for support and found only Judy, who was trying at an outdoor café not to have her back to either the street or the restaurant. Judy hadn’t protested at my choice of venue; that’s not her style. But her neck was on auto-swivel and would not ever stop turning her head to look for threats. She wasn’t going to offer Reeves an especially sympathetic smile, or any other facial expression.
‘We went down there after we reached our business agreement, and I swear that’s all it was ever supposed to be,’ he began.
‘If you swear to that in court, it had better be true and you’d better be able to prove it,’ I told him. I was finding that it was possible to defend a man against murder charges without liking him at all. I was still deciding whether that was worth knowing.
‘It’s true,’ my client insisted. ‘I’m not sure I can prove it because it was a verbal agreement.’
That seemed implausible. A guy like Reeves would never operate on a handshake deal. ‘There was no written contract?’ I asked.
‘Not as such. We had a handshake deal on it and there was absolutely no mention of a real marriage.’
‘Why did you go to Tijuana?’ Jon was right back on point and acting very much like a prosecutor. Good for him; we needed to question Reeves with an almost adversarial tone if we wanted to get anything resembling facts from him.
‘It was a celebration,’ he said. There followed a fairly long pause while we stared at him. ‘Virginia had just taken a job, I’d solved a problem, and it was only a few hours away.’
‘Did your wife go with you?’ Angie asked.
Reeves’s mouth tightened a bit. ‘Having Stacy there when the whole point was to celebrate Tracy would have been contradictory. It makes no sense.’ I’m sure you’d think it was Reeves who said that but no, it was Penny. Because that was her job as Head Toady.
‘I had to maintain the image,’ was what Reeves chimed in. It wasn’t better, but at least it was from the person who had been asked the question.
Remembering I was the lawyer, I decided to take the reins of the conversation. ‘And you don’t remember actually marrying Alice, or Virginia, or Tracy, or whoever?’ I already had some attorneys with better experience in Mexican law (you’d be surprised how often it comes up in Southern California) at Seaton, Taylor looking over the scan of the document that the former fake Mrs Reeves had insisted made her the former real Mrs Reeves.
‘I mean, I had been doing some drinking, but I wasn’t that drunk.’ Reeves looked like the damage to his dignity was worse than the damage to his case in court, which was not the, you know, case. ‘I figured it was a silly souvenir thing that Virginia had bought at the gift shop because there’s a gift shop everywhere in Tijuana, and it was all in Spanish. She said sign it and I assumed it was part of the gag.’
‘So you signed it,’ I said.
‘So I signed it.’ He looked miserable. Good. Not good that he signed it; I was holding out hope that the signature had been forged. You don’t always get what you hope for in life. In case you were wondering.
Of course, as a woman with a very nice job in a big exciting city, dating a remarkably successful actor, I had very little to complain about. But my roots are deep, and we from the Garden State enjoy nothing as much as a good gripe. It’s because we live between New York City and Philadelphia and we have middle-child syndrome.
But I digress.
‘OK, well, there’s nothing we can do about that,’ I told my client. ‘When we get some indication of how authentic the document is, we’ll have a plan to go forward. I’m getting ready for both possible outcomes. But what I need to know is if you had any access to a supply of hydrochloric acid.’
I specifically hadn’t mentioned this to Reeves in any of our phone conversations because I wanted to see the look on his face when I did, and it wasn’t just because I didn’t like the guy. I needed to know whether he’d ever told me the truth for a full minute since we’d met.
His eyes narrowed and his mouth half-opened. It wasn’t an expression of surprise, which I might have expected, or of dread if I’d caught him in a lie. It was more a look of confusion, like I’d just told him that the next thing we’d do in court was bring in a flock of doves.
‘Hydro … what now?’ he said.
He was very good at selling the disconnect, but I did notice that Penny gave her boss a very quick, almost imperceptible, look of something that appeared to be worry, like I’d touched a nerve that she was afraid would send him to jail.
‘Come on,’ I said to Reeves. ‘You’ve heard of hydrochloric acid before.’
The director went back to his favorite attitude, which was condescension. ‘I’m sure this will come as a shock to you, Sandy, but I was not a chemistry major in school. What does hydrochloric acid have to do with anything?’
‘It’s the tool that was used to wear down the cables so they’d snap at just the right moment,’ I informed him on the odd chance that he didn’t know. ‘And I need an honest answer from you about whether or not you could have had access to some before Jim Drake fell off the crane.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Reeves said.
But Penny was already tapping away furiously at her smartphone. ‘Hydrochloric acid is readily available at hardware stores and many other retail outlets in the United States and abroad,’ she (clearly) read. ‘Anyone could have access to it for less than five dollars.’ I’m pretty sure that last part was Penny editorializing.
I decided, diplomatically, to ignore her and turned back toward Reeves. ‘OK. So who on the set would be able to get that close to those cables a number of times over the course of the twelve hours before James Drake fell?’
Reeves the Director took over. His brows dropped and met at the center and he put his hand to his chin. If he’d been directing himself, he would have said that the ‘thinking’ pose was too on-the-nose. Or maybe not. I had to ask Patrick how good he was at dealing with actors.
‘If it wasn’t for the twelve-hours thing it could be virtually anyone,’ he began. ‘But we were on set at six thirty a.m. and that would mean that whoever did this would have had to basically sleep in Griffith Park the night before. There’s security on the set so that means it would probably have to be someone the security people knew. There might be records.’
I looked at Nate. ‘I’m on it,’ he said.
‘OK.’ I looked over my tuna sandwich and decided it could make a decent lunch tomorrow if I brought it home tonight after time in the courtroom break-area fridge. ‘Let’s get back to court.’