Sex and Violence in Hollywood (40 page)

She stood, arms straight at her sides. Elegant fingernails touched the glass desktop with soft clicks. “I need to explain some things to you. The first is that whether or not you like me is irrelevant. If we had a few years to get to know each other, I am sure we would discover things in common, things we might admire about one another. But we would have to do it under guard, because you will be going to prison soon without proper representation. Our time is short. So we will have to do things my way or not at all. Do you understand, Mr. Julian?”

“Stop calling me that,” Adam said. “Jesus. My dad is...I mean, was Mr. Julian.”

Horowitz stepped over to a sideboard that ran along a row of floor-to-ceiling windows behind her desk. Threads of smoke trailed after the beige cigarette between the first two fingers of her left hand. She picked up a small yellow watering pail with her right, the old-fashioned kind with a spout that dribbled water at the end. Potted plants grew everywhere. They hung from the ceiling, took up shelf-space, stood on the end tables that flanked the sofas. She slowly watered the plants lined up on the sideboard as she spoke.

“I know your life has changed suddenly because of the deaths of your family and your friend,” she said. “But you seem to have no comprehension of exactly how much your life is going to change from now on. It will change, and change again, and then continue to change. Sometimes on an hourly basis. This thing is not even twenty-four hours old, and yet, only a small, negligible percentage of people surveyed thought you were an actor on Home Improvement. Do you see the significance of that, Adam? It means that only very stupid people do not know who you are. You are already a celebrity. The public simply has not decided what it wants to do with you.”

She ran out of water with two more plants left. Walked back along the sideboard, replaced the pail. Made her way slowly around the desk. “You do not like to be called Mr. Julian? How will you feel about being called a murderer by David Letterman? Or Conan O’Brien? They will not be that blunt, of course. They will just make funny jokes about you cruising for chicks with O.J. and being in the same support group as Kyle and Eric Menendez. Soon, the very mention of your name will sound like a setup for a punch line. And everyone will laugh because it’s just a joke, right? But how will you feel about it?” She hopped up onto the edge of the desk and crossed her ankles. A quick, girlish movement that dropped years from her age for a split-second.

Adam said, “I wouldn’t like it, but I could—”

“Wouldn’t like it? You speak as if what I am saying is speculation. These are not ifs, Adam, these are whens. And I can think of at least one who. Who will play you on Saturday Night Live? Week after week? In long, embarrassing sketches that go nowhere? Have you thought about that yet?”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“These are rhetorical questions, Adam. Please stop interrupting me. Do you know that any day now, you will start getting bags of mail? Great big bags of it. It will come from people who hate you and want to see you fry, many of whom will volunteer to pull the switch. From people who want to save your soul and ensure you of eternal life. And there will be many, many declarations of love and proposals of marriage.” She took a deep drag on the cigarette. Smoke came out her mouth and nose as she continued. “Women who are convinced of your innocence. Women who are convinced of your guilt and want to marry you, because of it, not in spite of it, because they happen to be freaks. There will be a lot of freaks, Adam. You will be very popular among their people, an icon in their culture. Next, you will start getting e-mails from them. Then phone calls. Before you know it, they will be showing up at your door. Some of them will be uncommonly beautiful women. Most of them will not. Some will want you to carve your initials into their genitals with a rusty blade. And some, Adam, will be very dangerous and they will want to hurt you.”

When she paused a moment, Adam sighed impatiently. “Are you a defense attorney or a bodyguard?”

“Oh, but we have not even gotten to the trial yet,” Horowitz said. “All of this will happen during the months before the trial. You will be the only topic discussed on Rivera Live for that entire year, unless the president is assassinated, in which case it becomes a horse race. Your face will be on the cover of every magazine, newspaper, and tabloid in the country. One night, you will go to bed knowing they are defending your innocence. The next morning, you will learn over breakfast that the tabloids are claiming you had a sick sexual relationship with your stepmother and everybody wants you to get the death penalty.”

Adam’s heart skipped a beat and he shot to his feet. “What?”

“I am not finished.”

He remained standing. Thought, False alarm, false alarm, please let it be a false alarm.

“These things are going to happen,” she went on. “I anticipate them and deal with them. I prevent them if I can, exploit them to my client’s benefit if I cannot. I control all outgoing information. No one gets photographs, video, or audio of my client unless I approve. My client talks to no one unless I say so. And then my client talks only as I instruct and says only what I tell him to say. I create and maintain an image for my client from the moment I take on the case until it is finished. I determine what the public thinks of my client. I create an image in their minds and a feeling in their guts.”

“What does public opinion have to do with this?” Adam asked abruptly. “They’re just people on the street, they don’t have anything to do with this. It’s the jury that decides—”

Horowitz raised her voice just enough to shut him up. “That jury is chosen from people on the street. They are the ones who will decide whether or not you go to death row, get to be everybody’s favorite love-doll in prison for the rest of your life, or get to go home and eat Doritos in front of the television.” She leaned back and put out her cigarette in a large round marble ashtray on the desk. Lowered her voice as she continued. “I get to them first and shape their opinion early. And opinion has everything to do with this, Adam. What do you think the law is? A list of rules? Speed limits? Tax deadlines? Those things do not make up the law. They have nothing to do with it. Law is opinion, Adam. Our opinions. The opinions of others. A businessman compliments his secretary every day. Her clothes, her hairstyle, her perfume. It is the businessman’s opinion that he is being nice, making his secretary feel good about herself. But it is his secretary’s opinion that she is being sexually harassed, and she takes it to a judge. It is the judge’s opinion that there is sufficient reason to examine the woman’s opinion with a trial. Several people are chosen, based on the opinions of the legal representatives on each side of the case, to decide whose opinion they like better, the secretary’s or the businessman’s. If someone does not like their opinion, they go through the whole process all over again. Opinions, nothing but opinions. What is the pinnacle of success for a law student? Become an attorney, eventually a judge, then get appointed to the Supreme Court. And what do Supreme Court justices do? They write opinions.”

Adam sat on the front edge of the chair again, careful not to let it suck him backward into its gullet. Horowitz was making sense. He did not want her to make sense. He wanted to dismiss her glibly, rudely, to go home and take a nap and wake up to find it was all a dream, to find that there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

Horowitz uncrossed her ankles, dropped from the edge of the desk. “You are in big trouble, Adam. Like it or not, opinions are all you have. That is why Mr. Menkin called me. Because I know how to control opinions. He managed to track me down in the Caribbean, where I was just starting my first vacation in eight years.” She leaned back against the desk and folded her arms again with a sigh.

Adam’s anger was growing. He did not want to listen to another word the smug, stubby woman had to say. All he wanted to do was sleep. And never wake up again.

“Are you trying to make me feel guilty for interrupting your vacation?” he asked.

“Not at all. I am trying to decide if you are worth interrupting my vacation. So far, I would have to say that you are not.” Horowitz pushed away from the desk and walked slowly in a wide circle around Adam. “You have no grasp of your situation. You do not comprehend the depth of the trouble you are in. If you do not know how desperately you need me...then as far as you are concerned, you do not need me at all. In which case you are a waste of my time. Of course, that might change. It is very likely, in fact. You are still in a state of shock. Not only have you lost your family, but you witnessed the death of your friend.”

“It wasn’t a death!” Adam shouted, turning in the chair toward her. He lost his balance on the edge and slid back into the chair’s waiting maw. “He didn’t have a fucking stroke, he wasn’t hit by a bus! He was murdered!”

“I am very sorry about what happened today, Adam. I can only imagine the pain you must be in. I cannot erase it or bring back your friend. Should I decide to represent you, however, I can promise that the police officers who did it will be ruined. Utterly and completely. They will pray for someone to do to them what they did to your friend.” She stood before him, hands joined behind her now. “If we play our cards right, they might even do it to themselves.”

It was a pleasant thought, driving the police officers who had shot Carter to shoot themselves. But Adam knew it was nothing more than a sales pitch. Rona Horowitz was known as one of the best, but she could not be that good. No one was that good.

“When did you last eat?” Horowitz asked, going back behind her desk.

He thought about it. Could not remember. “I don’t know.”

“How about a burger? A cold sandwich, perhaps?”

Adam shrugged.

She picked up the telephone awkwardly, touched a button, did not appear accustomed to using it as she put it to her ear. “I will order.”

After ordering a roast beef sandwich and a chef’s salad, Horowitz told Adam to make himself comfortable on the sofa, then left the office. Rog was waiting in the outer office, where she had banished him before talking to Adam.

He could hear them speaking in hushed tones beyond the closed door as he crossed the office to the sofa. It was worse than the leather chair. The fat cream cushions were feather-soft. His knees rose as his middle sank into the sofa. He put a sneakered foot on the edge of the glass-topped coffee table with blonde-wood frame. Leaned his head back, let his eyelids drop. He opened them again immediately.

The whole day had been a nightmare from which he had been unable to wake. Like a nightmare, it had lapses in logic, gaps in which details blurred or were blacked out completely. Confusion hummed inside his head, and every time he closed his eyes, he saw Carter’s blood splatter the concrete, saw him drop from the poolhouse roof. Heard his neck break.

Adam had cried until his chest ached and his stomach was sick. He had sobbed and blubbered enough to make the two winos and six or eight Neanderthalian guys in the holding cell decide to leave him alone. He did not know how long he had been behind bars. He had dreaded the possibility of going to jail, but once in the cell, he’d hardly noticed it, remembered very little of the experience. Mostly the smell of urine, a residual whiff of which still hovered around him.

Everything had seemed to move so fast, and yet time felt frozen in place. He remembered standing in front of a judge. His skull had been crumbling under the throbbing weight of a headache he was certain would kill him. His voice had cracked when he said, “Not guilty,” when Rog cued him with an inconspicuous nudge. During that time, he’d heard “one million dollars” mentioned a few times. Some discussion about whether or not Adam was a flight risk. But his heart was screaming too loudly for him to absorb anything.

He had ended up in a hospital room. Or perhaps it had been an examination room in a doctor’s office, he was not certain. A silver-haired doctor who smelled of pipe tobacco had examined Adam. A nurse had given him a shot and his brain had melted. It had not yet congealed and reclaimed its proper shape. The doctor prescribed some happy pills and Rog stopped by an all-night drug store to pick them up on their way to Horowitz’s office.

Adam did not know how long Horowitz was gone. Maybe he had dozed on the sofa. It did not occur to him to look around the office for a clock.

When Horowitz returned, she carried a brown grocery bag by its rolled-up top. Stopped at her desk to pick up the folder.

“My assistant just arrived,” she said. “He is going to make coffee. Please take your foot off the coffee table and do not put it there again.” She pulled an ottoman over to the coffee table and sat across from Adam, put the folder on the floor. From the grocery bag, she removed a small white bag and set it on the table. “This is yours.” Then a square Styrofoam container with a plastic fork taped to the lid. She detached the fork, opened the container, tore off the lid and tossed it aside. A small packet of dressing and two packets of saltine crackers were tucked into the corner of the chef’s salad. “If you are anything like most people in your situation, you have not eaten all day. Your blood sugar is low. You feel tired and irritable. I need you to be able to think clearly and listen carefully to everything I say. So even if you do not feel particularly hungry, I would appreciate it if you would humor me and eat.”

Adam struggled forward in the sofa and reluctantly opened the white bag. Removed a small bag of potato chips, a stack of napkins, and his sandwich rolled up in butcher paper. He smelled the cold beef as he unwrapped it, and his stomach stirred.