Reckless Disregard (18 page)

“My god,” the HF Queen says. “That son-of-a-bitch Poniard is not only a murderer, he’s suicidal.”

Then comes the concluding cutscene, in which Komodo William Bishop yells
Cut! And that’s a wrap!
His eyes shoot daggers at the game player—literally. He laughs, his double-bass hoot so loud and malevolent that it causes Brighton’s subwoofer to rattle the walls and windows like a California quake.

I spend three days trying to get Poniard’s attention so he can explain the addition of the
Skanktified Assemblage
level to
Abduction!
That’s wrong—there is no explanation for taunting a formidable cult that wouldn’t hesitate to destroy you. Finally, during morning rush at The Barrista (if you can call it a rush):

Poniard:

>I know you’re upset at me, counselor, but I had to do it. It’s a lead, and it’s a shitty little level anyway . . . not much time to put it together

PStern

>You HAD to antagonize the Church of the Sanctified Assembly? You HAD to hint at Bradley Kelly’s involvement so you could you blow the element of surprise? Bishop and Frantz didn’t know about Kelly or
The Boatman.
Now they might figure it out.

Poniard:

>The public is my audience. They have millions and millions of brains, the best Internet there is, more powerful than a super-computer. They can help us solve this . . . but I have to give them the facts, keep the pressure on Bishop. And Abduction! is in part procedurally generated

PStern

>What’s procedurally generated?

Poniard:

>An algorithm determines what happens depending on individual players, so my audience can actually change the game and hopefully find out what happened to Felicity. Which means we win the lawsuit

PStern

>You know nothing about the law or how it works. And the fact that you added this level so quickly plays into the hands of those who say you killed Bud and Isla Kreiss.

Poniard:

>Whatever

PStern

>Did you know about
The Boatman
when you hired me? That I was in it? Are you playing me with all this?

Poniard:

>
Nothing about
The Boatman
. You found that

PStern

>Did you suspect the Sanctified Assembly?

Poniard:

>No proof just vague rumblings—rumor & innuendo, as you lawyers call it

PStern

>That’s insanity!

Poniard:

>Also, I worried that you wouldn’t take my case if I mentioned the Assembly. Because of your trial against them. I’m sure you agree they deserve whatever I say about them . . . creepy fascist cult. I’m not scared of them, and I know you aren’t, Parker Stern

PStern

>
You’re so wrong. Only a fool isn’t afraid of the Sanctified Assembly. They’re relentless and will try to find out who you are and make you pay for this. And I don’t mean in court. They’re orders of magnitude better at that than William Bishop, with all his resources. And by the way, there’s no evidence that the Assembly has anything to do with McGrath’s disappearance.

Poniard:

>Bradley Kelly

PStern

>Kelly was a working actor, so of course he appeared in movies. That doesn’t mean that the Assembly is involved. Your imagination is getting in your way. You’re hiding something from me. What?

Poniard:

>I only hide what I need to hide, just like you

PStern

>You’ve drunk at that well once too often, Poniard. You and I are different. Do you know why?

Poniard:

>I’ll take the bait

PStern

>I’ve never used my secrets to manipulate others.

Poniard:

>LOL. The ONLY reason anybody keeps secrets is to manipulate others. Just have patience . . . the game will reveal all

Poniard has signed off.

What to make of Kelly’s and my involvement in
The Boatman
? I don’t remember that film—I was four or five years old, constantly working since I’d turned three, and my memory of most of my performances at that age is long gone.
The Boatman
was supposedly filmed in 1979, a year after Kelly’s journey through a crease in the universe that allowed him to find the Celestial Fountain of All That Is, which transmitted the Celestial Laws to him. Although Kelly ever after proselytized and gradually formed his clandestine cult of wealthy devotees who treated his lethal propaganda as truth and willingly engaged in his warped Assembly rituals, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly wasn’t formally founded until 1987. It’s never occurred to me before—why would it?—but 1987 was the very year in which Paula Felicity McGrath went missing. Is there really a connection?

I go into the back room where Brenda is working at her computer. As I tell her about my chat with Poniard, she continues to stare at the screen and type on her keyboard.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’ve been researching this Sanctified Assembly.”

“You hadn’t heard of them before?”

“Sort of. I knew you had a big case against them. But I had no idea how scary they are. Some ex-members claim that the Assembly uses these good-looking chicks as bait to lure them in and take all their money. Supposedly the Assembly believes that suicide is caused by contagious germs. Some say that once you’re a member, you can’t leave the church even if you want to, that if they can’t shut their critics up by using the courts, they’ll do it by threats, beatings, blackmail, even murder. One judge who ruled against them was found dead a few weeks later, supposedly a hiking accident, but no witnesses. The Assembly tries to get celebrities to join so they can attract new members. And they hate you, Parker.” She finally stops gazing at her monitor and turns to me. “So, I was thinking. Is it possible that Bishop is a Sanctified Assembly member?”

The sudden confluence between stored data and flash memory sparks an insight that I should have had long ago. When Brenda and I interviewed Bud Kreiss, he told us that on the night of Felicity’s disappearance, Bishop drove up to the scene of the abduction in a blue Mercedes-Benz. Bradley Kelly required all Assembly employees to drive blue Mercedes. The Sanctified Assembly believes that blue is the color of the celestial angels’ wings.

It isn’t that I haven’t gotten job offers during the past couple of years. After my trial against the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, firms large and small called and asked me to head up their trial departments. I received offers of full partnerships, seats on management committees, seven-figure guarantees. Or I could’ve opened up my own shop, picking and choosing my cases. I don’t lack for potential clients who are eager to hire a lawyer who’s taken on one of the most dangerous and powerful organizations in the country. But I didn’t do any of those things. Paradoxically, though being with Lovely Diamond helped blunt the crippling stage fright, it also took away my desire to continue in a job that institutionalizes struggle against an adversary. And now, she’s my adversary.

Precisely at nine o’clock, I retrieve the Felicity/Scotty letters from my bank safety deposit box and take them to a rented suite in the Manchester Airport Hotel on Sepulveda Boulevard near LAX, right under the flight pattern. The location is more convenient for both of the document experts, who’ll fly in, test the letters, and immediately fly out to another venue and another case. Besides, I can’t have the inspection take place at The Barrista, and I’m not about to do it in my condo—not with Lovely there.

We’ve both hired expert consultants. QD examiners, they’re called, because they examine questioned documents. They arrive together precisely at ten o’clock, the time that Lovely has scheduled for the inspection. Tops in their field, they’re on opposite sides of almost every important lawsuit where document authenticity is at issue. They repeatedly perform parallel Electrostatic Detection Apparatus investigations, sample ink and paper using polypropylene-capped tubes, and examine handwriting for forgery. Middle-aged former college science professors who’ve become wealthy serving as professional witnesses. They both wear gray business suits, brown-rimmed eyeglasses, and oxford shoes, and they have matching haircuts, as if they’ve been thrown together so often they’ve unwittingly become mirror images of each other, though my expert is a woman and Lovely’s is a man.

We wait for Lovely while they bicker over who has the better ink library, an argument that must’ve repeated itself a hundred times. Lovely is twenty-five minutes late. She’s wearing a cutout peasant blouse and black jeans, as if she’s taking the day off. Her blonde hair, which she usually wears up or in a ponytail during work hours, falls loosely almost to her shoulders.

“Kind of you to join us,” I say.

“Let’s just get this over with,” she says. “I have a busy day.” She looks around the room and says, “Didn’t bring that pretty little assistant of yours?”

“Let’s get started,” I say to the experts.

The QD examiners nod at each other and go over to the table on which I put the documents. They start with the first letter to Scotty, dated May 4, 1987, a few months before Felicity McGrath’s disappearance:
As always, you worry too much. Bad vibrations. It’s just make-believe, remember? And Big Bad Billy Bishop has our Backs (how’s that for alliteration?) Anyway, my darling, he’s my insurance policy. Stop worrying. Free ticket out of purgatory. So relax while I enjoy for once.
Using a blunt hypodermic needle, they each take six miniscule samples, which they put in a vial. To add the solvent, one expert uses a syringe and the other a small-volume pipette, leading to another obviously well-worn argument between them. When they poke holes in the words
alliteration
and
worrying
, I cringe, because as tiny as the samples are, I haven’t asked Poniard’s permission for such destructive testing. They take six samples from the second letter, which is undated but obviously written shortly before Felicity’s disappearance:
Surprise! You’re going to take that trip to Paris you’ve always dreamed about. The tickets have been reserved in your name. The flight leaves in three days. Au revoir, my sweet.
This letter is shorter, so the sampling is even more invasive. Next, trying to determine whether the type of paper existed in 1987, they examine the document to see how it fluoresces under ultraviolet light. For exemplars of Felicity’s signature, they use copies of a handwritten shopping list that the cops found in Felicity’s apartment, which they’ll compare to Poniard’s letters.

The process takes a little over an hour. Lovely and I sit on opposite sides of the room, she working at the standard hotel-issue Formica desk, and I on the nubby sofa, which must harbor renegade bed bugs, because after a while my skin begins to crawl. She reads on her iPad, confers with her expert, and doesn’t look at me once. I review a stack of documents as a pretense, getting nothing accomplished. All the while, I try so hard not to look at her that she’s all I can think about. I feel her every move, know without looking when she lifts a hand to brush a strand of hair off her face and when she crosses and uncrosses her legs. It’s torture that I wish would last forever.

The experts pack up and head off to their next assignment. Lovely gets up to leave but turns to me and says, “Your client is unstable. Dangerous.”

“And yours is a lying psychopath.”

She closes her eyes, no more than an extended blink and walks over to me. I’m certain that she’s about to shred me with her sharp-ice voice, or worse, turn around and storm out. She raises her right arm as if to strike me, and I think,
Lovely, if you do slap my face I’ll welcome the touch of your flesh on mine
, but she doesn’t slap me, only lays her hand gently on my cheek, and it’s then that I learn that it’s not a myth, that the heart is truly the reservoir of love and emotion, because my own heart gambols and twirls and finds a jubilant equilibrium I thought was gone forever. I draw her close and we kiss, the heat of her body a paradox, new and familiar. When she abruptly pulls away, I once again get confirmation about how easily I delude myself.