Reckless Disregard (24 page)

Poniard:

>It’s good because I want you as my lawyer. Nothing else matters. And OK, because you say it’s important, I’ll appear for deposition via Skype video, I am not a California resident so they can’t make me come in person, right?

PStern

>
Seriously? You’ll appear by video?

Poniard:

>Yep

PStern

>I’m stunned. You’re serious? You’ll appear on a Skype video and show your face? The deposition will be tape recorded and could be publicly available in the court record.

Poniard:

>Make sure the deposition is kept confidential!

PStern

>Of course. But why agree to this now? After all this time?

Poniard:

>Desperate times, desperate measures

PStern

>Very good.

Poniard:

>There are conditions. Only you and one opposing counsel can be present at the deposition. And it takes place at a neutral site so I can verify by webcam that there are no others present and no bugs

PStern

>This won’t work. They’ll insist on Frantz deposing you, but he won’t know the case like she does, so they’ll want her there to help him. As the plaintiff, Bishop has a right to be there. And I’ll need my assistant Brenda there. And a court reporter, of course. They’ll also want it in their office.

Poniard:

>Only one of Bishop’s attorneys, you, and the court reporter; they’ll take the deal rather than get no video deposition at all

PStern

>Unlikely.

Poniard:

>Then no deposition; I’ll send you details about how to connect w/ me on Skype. Bye

PStern

>Poniard, wait! In the future, you MUST alert me about what’s happening in
Abduction!
so I’m not caught by surprise again. Philip Paulsen could play the game well, but I can’t.

Poniard has signed off.

A chat with Poniard always raises more questions than it answers. Has he really lost control over his own game? Why has he agreed to the video deposition? The Poniard that I’ve been dealing with these past months would never allow it, despite the murders of Kreiss and Paulsen. Once again, I’ve deluded myself into believing that I know something about the entity on the other side of the Internet routers. When you’re communicating through a computer screen, the other person seems so close, but he couldn’t be more anonymous, a formless blank in an endless stream of bytes. That’s what our information age has wrought—a sense of intimacy when all is distant, a sense of familiarity when everyone’s faceless, a sense of omniscience when nothing’s clear.

I go into the back room to tell Brenda about the chat. She’s hunched over her computer keyboard. Her hair is flyaway, her eye makeup smudged from sweat, which glistens on her brow as if she’s channeling Philip Paulsen.
Abduction!
is playing on the monitor.

“I beat Level One,” she says wearily.

The only way to get my opponents to agree to Poniard’s conditions for appearing at a video deposition is to entice them into asking for a favor first. As soon as I sign off with Poniard, I notice William Bishop’s deposition for the law offices of Parker Stern, also known as The Barrista storeroom. After a flurry of e-mails with Lovely that start out detached and professional and end up harsh and threatening, I agree that I’ll take Bishop’s deposition in his office at the Parapet Media Corporation complex in the San Fernando Valley. In exchange, Poniard will be deposed at a neutral location with only one of Bishop’s lawyers, the court reporter, and me present. Both sides will keep the very existence of the deposition strictly confidential so the media won’t learn of it. It doesn’t seem like Bishop is getting much for what he’s giving up, but corporate moguls like him will do almost anything to stay on their own turf.

Once the deal is done, I e-mail Poniard repeatedly, asking for a Skype meeting or at least an Internet chat so that I can prepare him for the deposition—explain the procedure, identify pitfalls, and practice a cross-examination. I get identical replies—
no need, counselor, I got it covered
. While William Bishop suffers from the arrogance of power, Poniard suffers from the arrogance of fame, and that’s worse, because while power always has some currency behind it—money, friendship, favors owed, the ability and willingness to do violence—fame is counterfeit, subject to the irrational whims of a faceless public.

On Christmas Eve we close The Barrista early, and I impulsively ask Brenda if she has plans, tell her that there are a lot of good restaurants that stay open on Christmas Eve, that one in particular on the Santa Monica Pier has great food, good martinis, and a panoramic view of the bay. “My treat,” I say. “And there’s no problem getting a table with an ocean view. I know the maître d’.”

She forces a smile, mumbles, “Thank you, I’ve never been to a place like that,” and tells me she’s spending the holiday with her sister. I didn’t know she had a sister. At closing time, she says a hurried “Happy Holidays,” almost runs out the front door, and disappears.

I spend the evening alone in my condo, sipping the remainder of a bottle of single-malt Scotch that Harmon Cherry gave me one Christmas and performing Boolean searches on the Internet—all variants of
The Boatman
AND (
William Bishop
OR
Felicity McGrath
). On Christmas Day, I walk the deserted beaches from the Marina Peninsula to the Santa Monica Pier, the general area of Felicity’s disappearance. I pose irrelevant, rhetorical questions that merely enlarge the voids in my life. How is Lovely Diamond, a devout Jew, struggling to accommodate the background of her son, a child raised by a decidedly non-Jewish great-aunt who condemned Lovely’s mother’s marriage to a Jewish pornographer? Where does Brenda’s sister live? How has my mother and her team of propagandists connived this year to pervert Christmas and expand the power of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly?

On the morning of December 30, a day when even the most contentious lawyers are hibernating in Mammoth or Maui until after the New Year, I drive to the Manchester Airport Hotel for Poniard’s deposition. I’ll be accompanied at the deposition not by a live witness but by a Dell laptop, two external computer speakers, and a fifty-five-inch high-definition monitor. The court reporter will capture the video of the session on her computer hard drive.

During the fifteen-minute ride from the marina, I continually check the rearview mirror to make sure that I’m not being followed. If word were to leak out, the media would like nothing better than to crash the deposition of the elusive individual known as Poniard. I leave my car with the valet and go to the elevator. The deposition will take place in a twenty-sixth-floor suite. Opposing counsel and I already have key cards, delivered to us yesterday. As I walk across the immense business hotel lobby to the bank of elevators, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and a man says in a broken-steam-pipe whisper, “Keep your eyes forward and walk past the elevators and through that far door.” The plier-like grip sends a burning sensation up my neck, discouraging any dissent. Until I glance up at the man.

“What the fuck, Ed?”

“Just keep walking, Parky. I’ll explain when we get outside. I don’t want Lovely to see us together. Nor do you.”

“How would Lovely . . . ? You mean
she’s
the one taking the deposition? Not Frantz?” I can’t believe Bishop would let Lovely Diamond, a junior lawyer, handle the most important deposition in the case, though, granted, she isn’t your ordinary junior lawyer. I also shouldn’t have acknowledged that there is a deposition. That’s supposed to be top secret.

“Frantz doesn’t know shit about the lawsuit. And anyway, she’s good. Great. You have your hands full. Now let’s go.”

It’s been two weeks since I met with Ed Diamond and asked him to look into
The Boatman
, and I’d given up on him, figuring that he didn’t learn anything, or worse, that he’d obtained some essential information and shared it only with Lovely. Now, he virtually pushes me out a service door and into an alley behind the hotel where service trucks crash and bang while making morning deliveries. A good place to make sure no one overhears our conversation.

“I have something,” Ed says.

“Why the hell did you wait until now? And how did you know about the deposition? It’s confidential. Did Lovely—”

“I’m her father. She lives in my home.”

“Still—”

“She didn’t tell me. The kid figured it out.”

“How? He’s what, ten years old?”

“Because he’s smart. Perceptive like his mother, which makes things difficult, let me tell you. But that’s neither here nor there. Do you want to hear what I have to say or not?”

Over the din of the linen trucks and the Dumpsters and the voices of the hotel laborers, he tells me the story of
The Boatman
.

Although the suite is supposed to be in the hotel’s nonsmoking wing, it reeks of stale tobacco smoke. The furniture is standard-issue hotel drab. There are stains on the metallic-gray acrylic carpeting. Lovely sits on the right side of the couch, and I take a seat all the way to the left, far enough away from her to put some space between us. Despite the distance, I smell her orange blossom and ginger perfume. She’s started wearing it again, as if a suitable mourning period for the death of our relationship has passed. Her deposition outline and laptop are on the coffee table, and she has to lean forward to reach them—hardly the optimal ergonomics for asking questions and taking notes.

Twelve feet across from us, the huge LED monitor sits on an audiovisual stand on wheels, a rat’s nest of wires and cables cascading from its rear and connecting into a surge-protected power outlet and an Ethernet wall jack. Poniard will appear on that screen in a kind of reality TV–style reveal. The court reporter, Janine—a professorial woman in her late fifties whom I’ve known for years, Macklin & Cherry’s favorite court reporter—is the only person whom both Lovely and I trust to keep this deposition confidential. She sits to our left in a folding chair, half-facing the huge monitor so she can watch Poniard’s lips and then turn to us when we speak on the record. She pulls her silver hair back—she’s shunned cosmetic surgery and hair coloring but still looks youthful because she keeps fit biking and riding horses—and stretches her pianist fingers in a kind of pregame warm-up ritual. Her stenography machine and notebook computer are perched precariously on a room service tray that serves as a makeshift table. Also on the tray is a webcam with a lens wide enough to include Lovely and me in the shot that Poniard will see on his end.

For an exorbitant fee of $199.99, the hotel has provided us our own secure Internet connection. We also have our own Skype account, to be used only for this deposition and then immediately closed. Poniard insisted on setting it up, and after two days of nasty e-mails back and forth, Lovely and Lou Frantz finally capitulated.

Poniard agreed to sign on at ten o’clock sharp. We wait, Lovely and I staring at the sky-blue Skype wallpaper, complete with wispy clouds. Janine is sitting only a few feet from me, and when I lean forward I notice that she’s reading a paperback edition of
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
.