Reckless Disregard (20 page)

The next day, I learn details from Detective Tringali, the cop in charge of the Kreiss homicide. Philip was trying to dial 911 before he died. Though it was daylight on a crowded street, there were no witnesses. He suffered four stab wounds to the torso and a cut to the throat. The coroner’s conclusion as to cause of death is hemorrhagic shock as a result of injury to the heart by a double-edged knife.

A poniard is a double-edged knife.

As I did with the Kreiss killing and yesterday at the crime scene, I suggest that Tringali look into whether William Bishop had anything to do with Philip’s murder.

“We’ll check out all leads, of course,” she says because it’s the politically correct thing to say. “Right now I’m more interested in your client’s involvement. Have you and your client had any discussions that could shed light on what happened to Mr. Paulsen?”

“Attorney-client privilege, detective. Just like the last time.” I hesitate, but not long enough. “Is there anything in my client’s video game about the Paulsen killing?” I’ve just revealed that I don’t trust Poniard.

“We were going to ask you about that, counselor.”

“I have no idea how to play that game.”

She’s quiet for a long time, debating whether to make me suffer because I haven’t helped her. She takes pity on me. “There’s nothing in the game that we can find. Yet.”

Good thing for Poniard, because if Philip’s death were depicted in
Abduction!
I would scour heaven, earth, and cyberspace to track down my client and expose him to the world.

“I trust that if you discover something before we do, you’ll let us know,” she says.

“As long as it’s not privileged. What do you think happened?”

“Chances are that Mr. Paulsen was the victim of random violence, with robbery the motive. His wallet was gone. There’s been a rash of crime around that campus lately. Rough area.”

“Yeah, but in broad daylight so close to a crowded diner? Some stranger just opens his door and starts stabbing him?”

“Paulsen’s wife and friends say he was kind to a fault. He probably played Good Samaritan for the wrong person.”

Neither of us believes it.

Philip’s funeral takes place three days later, on the city side of Griffith Park at a Catholic cemetery old enough to have the diverse rough-hewn headstones that mark not just lost lives but a lost era. There’s a large crowd there, people bridging Philip’s two careers.

Brenda has been inconsolable the past couple of days but doesn’t show up at the funeral. I try her cell phone, but she doesn’t answer. The service begins, and Philip is eulogized as loving husband, loyal friend, canon law expert, fly fisherman extraordinaire, and crackerjack paralegal who knew more about a case than most of the attorneys he worked for.

After it’s over, I get in the long line to pay my respects to Joyce. As I get closer I see that her lips are frozen in one of those rote half-grins you see at funerals, but I’m sure the only reason it looks anything like a smile is because her sunglasses conceal her eyes. When I reach her, she frowns.

“Oh, Parker, he so liked you,” she says. “He’d tell me you always needed help but wouldn’t ask for it. So when this time you asked him to work on this case of yours, he knew how desperately you must have needed him, couldn’t say no, couldn’t bear to let you down.”

“Joyce, I’m so sorry. About what happened of course, but I want to apologize for asking Philip to—”

She holds up her hand. “Don’t you dare! You did nothing wrong, and Philip was a bull-headed man. It was his choice, not yours. I just wish . . .” She reaches out, gives me a soft handshake, and turns to the next person.

I walk back to the parking lot, waiting for the core emptiness to fill again with anger and guilt—the emotions that spur action. But the void is filled with grief, and I wait for the tears to stop before I start the car, all the while wondering where Brenda is.

I drive down Los Feliz Boulevard, intending to turn right on Franklin and head back to The Barrista, but before I reach the intersection, a car changes lanes in front of me and hits its brakes, and I have to hit mine hard to avoid a collision. I want to move to my left, but I’m flanked by another car that won’t give me room. I check the rearview mirror. A third car is tailgating inches behind my back bumper. There’s nothing to my right except sidewalk. All three cars are blue Mercedes.

Just as I get to the intersection, the driver in the car next to me honks his horn twice, lowers the passenger window, and gestures for me to turn left instead of right. He eases off, giving me room to change lanes but now follows close. I make the left turn, not that I have much choice.

Surrounding me like middle-of-the pack NASCAR racers, my entourage forces me on a twenty-minute drive downtown. Just before we reach Figueroa, we turn into a long driveway and stop at a high-security gate. When the gate swings open, I gun my Lexus and kiss the bumper of the Mercedes in front of me. It’s not a gentle kiss. The driver stops his car and gets out, the cords in his neck so taut that they appear about to snap like over-wound guitar strings. He’s wearing a black suit, red tie, and sunglasses, the standard livery of Church of the Sanctified Assembly thugs. I roll down my window and give him my best Parky Gerald smirk. “Just take me to Quiana.”

He almost rips his sunglasses off his face. Behind the Assembly-mandated poker face, his eyes smolder. There are some names that you don’t take in vain around devotees of the Sanctified Assembly, and Quiana Gottschalk’s is one of them. After all, that person supposedly doesn’t exist.

He starts to say something but thinks better of it, instead walking back to his car and beginning the slow crawl toward the main building. When we stop, the three drivers hurry over. The guy whose bumper I hit pulls my driver’s side door open, grabs my arm, drags me outside, and shoves me against the car. I don’t resist. That would be unwise. He pats me down while the other two search my car. Only when they’re satisfied that I’m not carrying a weapon or a recording device do they back off.

We pass through the massive gilded doors. I wait in the foyer, an entryway in theory only because the room is as large as my entire condominium, with a Carrera marble floor and a huge gallery chandelier with Bohemian crystal and a platinum finish. Two of the dark-suited drivers come inside and go to opposite sides of the room, assuming identical poses. They stand like the Queen’s Guard, rigid posture, arms to pinned their sides, faces forward. There’s a clack of high heels on marble, and Quiana Gottschalk, the shadowy cofounder and mysterious elder of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly, walks toward me in a zip-line. Without breaking stride, she slaps my face hard.

I force myself not to react. As a child, I had years of practicing how not to react. I say in my calmest voice, “I guess we can add assault and battery to the false imprisonment charge, don’t you think? Mother?”

She tries to slap me a second time, but I grab her wrist. She’s petite, weighing about a hundred pounds, so it’s easy to deflect her blow. The two guards start forward but stop in their tracks when she raises her free hand.

I release her arm. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Harriet?”

“Your defective behavior continues to break my heart, Parky.” She tinkers with the bun in her brown hair, adjusting the rubber band and pulling her hair so tight that the skin on her forehead becomes even tauter, something that seems impossible given the cosmetic surgery she’s had.

Harriet Stern’s tryst with Bradley Kelly saved her from what seemed like an inevitable death from a drug overdose or suicide. Together, they found a loophole in the Coogan Act, the law that protects child actors from unscrupulous parents, and used my trust fund to finance Kelly’s new church. Through Kelly’s messianic charisma and my mother’s business acumen, they built one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. I call it a cult. They separate adherents from their non-believing families, extort money from devotees in the guise of tithing, seek to infiltrate governments and powerful corporations, and believe that disease results from spiritual impurity. When they started, their so-called rituals were illegal and perverse. They returned my money only after I escaped their clutches at age fifteen, became an emancipated minor, and threatened to expose secrets that would have put them and other Assembly founders behind bars for the rest of their lives. Since then, Quiana Gottschalk has become a recluse, a goddess, someone whose very existence the Assembly denies to the outside world.

“I hold you responsible for the gutter blasphemy that’s all over the Internet,” she says. “Put a stop to it.”

“I’m not in the mood for this, Harriet. I just came from the funeral of a dear man who was murdered on my watch.”

No condolences. Assembly devotees don’t offer condolences to the family and friends of a nonbeliever. “This Poniard creature shouldn’t be your client,” she says. “As long as he is, you’ll be held responsible for anything he says about us.”

“You had your soldiers bring me here just to tell me that?”

“I want you to know how serious this is. I’m only one person. My influence extends only so far. You’re not popular with the Assembly.”

We stare at each other for a long time. Finally, I say, “Tell me about
The Boatman
, Harriet.”

Her eyes widen, and behind the surprise I see the complexity that is, and has always been, my mother. She’s calculating whether to lie, and that already tells me a lot.

“You’re as resourceful as ever, Parker.”

“
The Boatman
, Harriet. I was in it, remember?”

“You were only in one scene.” She takes a slow, relenting breath. “It was a play on that Greek myth . . .”

“Orpheus?”

“Yeah, a modern version, supposedly. Except, it had already been done by Marcel Camus, Tennessee Williams, Sidney Lumet. Billy Bishop’s father wasn’t happy, and he was the main investor. At some point, production shut down, and then Howard Bishop’s people came in to destroy all the dailies, the rough cuts. They were worried about videotapes, new technology. They visited everyone personally and made certain no one had a copy.”

“Howard Bishop was a lawyer. How did he have the power to—?”

“He was a man with dangerous friends.”

Of course. The music industry and the mob were still closely connected in the late seventies. Howard Bishop must have called in a favor. Still, why would Nate Ettinger be frightened after all these years?

“My sources tell me that Felicity McGrath was one of the actresses,” I say.

Harriet arches her indelible eyebrows. “That annoying McGrath girl did not act in
The Boatman
.”

At first I think that Harry Cherry’s revelation was the product of a senescent mind, but then I realize that Harry never said that Felicity
acted
in
The Boatman
. He only said that she was
on
the picture.

“If she didn’t act, what did she do?” I ask.

“She was supposedly the writer and director.”

“At twenty years old?”

“She was a manipulative, coquettish dilettante, a little girl pretending to be an artiste.”

So now I know one truth about Felicity McGrath—she was a prodigy, the creative force behind whatever
The Boatman
was. My mother gave it away by singing the word “artiste” in a sharp falsetto that was meant to convey sarcasm but that instead revealed envy. Harriet always wanted to be an artist and a great man’s love, and no matter how grand her position in the Sanctified Assembly hierarchy, she’s neither.

“Any reason to believe that Felicity disappeared because of her work on that movie?” I ask.

“How would I know?”

“There’s a world of secrets you know that you don’t reveal. How about sharing this one? Is William Bishop an Assembly Devotee? He drove a blue Mercedes in 1987.”

The sentries have for a while blended into the statuary, but when I ask this question, the guy on my left takes a halting step forward before righting himself and clasping his hands in front of him. Nothing is more top secret than the Assembly’s membership roll.

She shakes a finger at me as if I were eight.

“Then tell me about Nate Ettinger,” I say.