Reckless Disregard (29 page)

“Really, sir? What about illegal hacking of Congressman Lake Knolls’s e-mail account? Do you consider that open and aboveboard?” Lake Knolls is an Academy Award–winning actor and ambitious politician who ran into some trouble a few years ago. One of Bishop’s tabloid newspapers illegally intercepted his personal e-mails.

Frantz makes a harrumphing series of objections and instructs Bishop not to answer.

Returning to a more conventional approach to depositions, I lead Bishop through his educational and occupational background—he’s an alumnus of an East Coast prep school in 1960, a time when the children of even the wealthiest Los Angeles families attended public school. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the NYU Film School and a master’s degree in business from the University of Chicago. After that, he worked a series of low-level jobs in a talent agency and on film productions and eventually began producing his own movies. He had a string of top-grossing hits and took over as the head of a studio, which he transformed into the international conglomerate Parapet Media Corporation.

“I’m going to list some names,” I say. “And I’d like you to tell me if you know them, and if so, how.” I don’t expect truthful answers, but I want to gauge his reaction—trial lawyer’s poker. “Bradley Kelly?”

“Founder of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly,” he says. “If that’s the Kelly you mean.”

“Also an actor?”

“Debatable. Pretty face.”

Interesting. A true Assembly devotee wouldn’t speak that way about Kelly—unless Bishop is part of the group’s elite Covert Vanguard, with orders to infiltrate the highest levels of business and government and work to increase the Assembly’s power and influence.

“Did you ever work with Kelly?”

“He was in some movies I produced. I never had anything to do with him.”

“Parky Gerald.”

“Cute kid, OK for a child actor, hellish stage mother. He had some bit parts in some of my movies before he got big. Turned twelve and wasn’t cute anymore.”

Lovely chews on her lip to stifle a laugh. I suppose I asked for it.

“Nathan Ettinger?” I ask.

He frowns. “Always looking for production deals from every studio in town. Much better college professor than a producer.”

“Ever work with him?”

“No. He was a producer on the Parapet lot for a short time before I acquired Parapet. Never got a movie made.”

“How do you know he’s a professor?”

“I have a vast knowledge of the motion-picture industry and all its players large and small,” he says without any apparent awareness of how arrogant he sounds. “That’s how I’ve managed to become so successful.” More likely he’s been keeping tabs because Ettinger worked on
The Boatman
. No wonder Ettinger is frightened.

“Why do you say Ettinger is a better professor than he was a producer?”

“Because he couldn’t be worse.”

“Hildy Gish.”

“Don’t know that name.”

I go through the remaining names on the list. He denies knowing any of them.

“Paula Felicity McGrath?” I ask.

Without missing a beat, he says, “Felicity McGrath had small parts in a couple of movies produced by a studio where at one time I worked as a mid-level creative executive. I wasn’t involved in any of those movies.”

Next I show him copies of the letters between Felicity McGrath and Scotty and ask about their authenticity and substance. Despite the document examiner’s opinion, he maintains that the letters are forgeries. He says he doesn’t know who Scotty is, much less why Felicity would write, “Big Bad Billy Bishop has our Backs” or that he was her “insurance policy.”

“Let’s turn to another topic,” I say. “Earlier when I asked you about your employment history, you didn’t mention acting as part of your motion-picture career. Have you ever appeared as an actor? And by that I mean at any time in your life, professionally or otherwise.”

“I played Papa Bear in my fourth-grade presentation of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
.” His smile is practiced, intended for Janine and the videographer. “As I recall, we did it in Spanish.”

“No other acting roles in your entire life?”

“None that I can think of. Though I didn’t have the time to study my fifth- or sixth-grade yearbooks to see if there were any pageants in those years.”

“So you’ve never appeared in a motion picture?”

“Objection, asked and answered,” Frantz says.

“Never,” he says.

“Have you ever written a screenplay or directed a motion picture?” I ask.

“Alas, never. I don’t have the talent for it. I’m a big picture man, pardon the pun.” He sits even taller in his chair, something I thought impossible, as if he needs to counterbalance the false humility with a physical show of arrogance.

“What about
The Boatman
?” I say.

“Counsel, I just said I never . . .” There’s glitch in his voice. He gives Frantz a sidelong glance. Lovely looks at me with probing gray eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

He knows exactly what I’m talking about—for the first time all morning, he’s broken eye contact. Now I’ll see how he reacts when I drop Ed Diamond’s information on him.

“Let’s see if I can refresh your recollection,” I say. “
The Boatman
was a movie that was filmed in 1979 but was never released, correct?”

“I don’t know of any such movie,” Bishop says.

“You were credited as the writer and director on
The Boatman
and also acted in it?”

“Objection,” Frantz says. “He’s testified three times that he doesn’t know anything about this so-called movie.”

I hardly hear Frantz, have no awareness of Lovely or Janine or the videographer. At this moment, only Bishop and I are present. “I won’t be satisfied until I hear the truth, Mr. Bishop. Now,
The Boatman
was based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, wasn’t it?”

Like pre-programmed automatons, Frantz repeats the same objection and Bishop the same answer to this and each of my subsequent questions, and Janine pounds soft keystrokes into her steno machine and tries so hard not to react that that the cords in her neck tighten visibly, and the bearlike videographer sits forward in his seat as if he were in a movie theater about to watch the hero and villain do battle at last, and Lovely—well, Lovely keeps her head down and furiously takes notes, and that’s when I know I’m doing well, because she has no reason to take notes with Janine here pounding out an instant transcript that appears on Lovely’s computer screen almost the moment the witness’s words are spoken. Questions aren’t supposed to tell a story, but that’s exactly what lawyers’ questions do, as if we were the original postmodernists, spinning out narratives in an unconventional form. My series of questions recount the tale of
The Boatman
as told to me by Ed Diamond. Bishop plays Miles Boatman, an alcohol- and drug-abusing singer-songwriter with middling talent. Boatman loves Eurydice Jones, played by a little-known African American actress named Hildy Gish. Eurydice is a beautiful but troubled cocktail waitress who works at the hardscrabble dive where Boatman performs. She resists Boatman’s naive, awkward advances at first but finally gives in when he sings her a love song he wrote especially for her. After a series of torrid love scenes—the sex is supposedly real—Eurydice suddenly and without explanation breaks things off. A broken-hearted Boatman disappears but returns a year later, hailed by a growing number of fans as a mystical poet and prophet who speaks for his generation as Bob Dylan did for his. Boatman now makes music so hypnotic and transcendent that some suggest that, like blues great Robert Johnson, he’s gone down to The Crossroads and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical genius.

When Miles Boatman returns to town, Eurydice is addicted to heroin. Gish supposedly shot up on screen using real smack. Eurydice has become the mistress of a vicious mafioso, who’s in league with a dissolute parish priest in spiritual control over the neighborhood. Boatman vanquishes the villains and, in a montage dream sequence, reveals to Eurydice that he was about to commit suicide when an invisible force led him on a journey down a river that flows through the far side of the universe. The healing waters cleansed him of the cellular contaminants of alcoholism, self-loathing, and suicidal thoughts and gave him the true power of song and poetry. The movie ends with Boatman guiding Eurydice out of her living hell and to the celestial river so that she, too, can be cleansed.

By the time I finish, Bishop looks ten years older. His makeup has congealed with the perspiration on his cheeks and forehead. He’s not a man accustomed to sweating.

“Are you a follower of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly?” I ask.

Frantz’s neck elongates like a septuagenarian jack-in-the-box. “You’ve got to be kidding, pal. You and your client’s crazy obsession with the Sanctified Assembly has nothing to do with this lawsuit.”

“Answer the question, Mr. Bishop,” I say.

“I’ve heard of that organization,” he says.

“
The Boatman
was an allegory for the way the actor Bradley Kelly supposedly started his new religion, wasn’t it?” I ask.

“I don’t know of any such—”

“You don’t know of any such movie? Didn’t Bradley Kelly himself appear in it? You cast him as the crooked priest.”

“How . . . ?” The word is little more than an involuntary whoosh of air out of his vocal cords.

“Do you have something to add, Mr. Bishop?” I ask.

“Ask a question, counsel,” Frantz barks.

“I just did,” I say.

“Move on,” Frantz says.

“But you didn’t really cast anyone on
The Boatman
,” I say. “Or write or direct the film. Felicity McGrath did, am I right?”

Bishop doesn’t answer, but I don’t need him to. This isn’t about making a record. It’s about forcing him to give up.

“Howard Bishop was your father?” I ask.

“I need a break,” Bishop says.

“Why don’t you answer my question first? It’s not a tough one.”

“I want to speak to my counsel.” He stands, as do Frantz and Lovely. Bishop points at Frantz. “Not you. Just her.”

Frantz sits down, sticks his fingers under his necktie, and pulls at it as if he’s strangling. His jaw flaps once, but he doesn’t speak. Lovely walks outside with Bishop.

“Let me guess,” I say. “Lovely pressed your client on the Skanktified Assembly scene in the video game, he refused to discuss it, and you supported him. And now Bishop realizes that Lovely is the one who knows what she’s doing. So he’s publicly humiliating you, just like he does to anyone else he considers his subordinate.” It isn’t nice to kick a man when he’s down, but sometimes you just can’t help it.

“You’re grandstanding, not lawyering, Stern.”

“Since you’re the grandstanding wizard, I take that as a compliment.”

“Fuck you,” he says. With fists clenched, he gets up walks out the door. I’m tempted to follow him to see whether he avoids Bishop and Diamond or tries to join them.

All this time Janine has pretended to edit her transcript. Now she looks up and says, “Parker, I don’t know if your depositions are making me old before my time because of the pressure or are keeping me young because I never get bored.”

“Do you want me to hire someone else next time?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I hate to be bored.”

The videographer is working at his laptop. He’s a large man, but he says, “I don’t like being scared, and this whole thing is getting scary. I mean we’re talking about that girl’s disappearance and the Sanctified Assembly . . .”

I point to his laptop. “If you don’t like to be scared, I assume you’re not playing
Abduction!
” After what happened to Philip Paulsen and the Kreisses, my comment is in tasteless humor, but bad taste can sometimes restore your equilibrium, like a bracing splash of ice water.

He visibly shudders. “No way. Too creepy for me. This whole case is.”

When my opponents return a few minutes later, Lovely, not Frantz, sits next to Bishop. In the five minutes since we broke, the droopy bags under Frantz’s eyes seemed to have sagged another inch. Bishop sets his jaw and fixes his eyes on me with a slight smile that almost makes him seem amused.

“The seating arrangements are up to you,” I say. “But only one person can object or participate, and that’s Lou, because he made the first objection.”

“I’ll be handling the rest of the deposition,” Lovely says. “Take it up with Judge Grass if you don’t like it.”

I don’t mind giving in on this one. It won’t matter. “Back on the record,” I say. “Mr. Bishop, Howard Bishop was your father, correct?”

“Correct.”

“He was a music lawyer?”

“Yes.”

“But he also did business with a man named Carmine Scibetta?”

“At this point I’ll object and instruct the witness not to answer,” Lovely says. “Violates his right of privacy.”

“The name of his father’s business associate violates his right of privacy?”

“His relationship with his father is personal,” Lovely says. “I instruct him not to answer.”

And so she instructs when I ask Bishop whether Carmine Scibetta was an organized crime figure associated in the 1950s with Los Angeles racketeer Jack Dragna and later with the infamous Mickey Cohen, and whether Scibetta, a devout Catholic and virulent racist, was the prime investor in
The Boatman
, and whether he shut down production of
The Boatman
when he learned that the movie was a propaganda piece for a budding cult that sought to promote itself at the expense of the Catholic Church and portrayed interracial romance to boot.

Finally, I abandon the pretext of asking questions. Let them leave if they don’t like it. “Here’s what happened,” I say. “Mr. Bishop, you were an early follower of Bradley Kelly and are a current devotee of the Church of the Sanctified Assembly. In fact, you’re one of its Covert Vanguard. Felicity McGrath was also Covert Vanguard in 1979, or maybe she was never with you, was just a kid who wanted to make a movie no matter what it was about.” I sense that my voice has gotten too loud, my cadence too fast, that I’m pleading a case to a nonexistent jury with too much passion, but I can’t help myself. Frantz objects, and then Lovely does too, but I talk over them. Despite my unprofessional diatribe, they don’t get up and walk out; it’s as if they’re enthralled by what I’m saying.