Judge Hawthorne, apparently waiting for more from the DA, got nothing and waited a moment to turn to me. ‘Ms Moss?’
‘Thank you, Your Honor.’ I stood up and approached the witness box. ‘Lieutenant Trench, how long did Cynthia Sutton stay inside the house after you saw her go inside?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘Because I left almost as soon as she went inside. I had no idea a crime was being committed or had been committed inside the home.’ Trench was being careful, which was not in the least uncharacteristic of him. But I did see Valencia flinch a tiny bit at ‘or had been committed’.
‘Was the defendant carrying a TeeVee award when she went inside?’ I asked.
‘No.’
Valencia gave a thought to standing up and objecting that the TeeVee was kept inside the house but decided against it. If he had redirect he could clarify that; if not he could simply mention it in his closing statement.
‘Lieutenant, were you staking out Wendy Bryan’s home?’ I really wanted to know why Trench was there the night of the murder and he wouldn’t tell me in conversation.
‘No.’ The man must have been a riot at dinner parties.
‘But you were parked in front of it at a very crucial time.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your Honor, the defense is not asking a question.’ Valencia didn’t bother to stand.
‘Please ask a question, Ms Moss.’ Neither did the judge. To be fair, if she stood everybody would probably leave the courtroom so that was better.
‘Certainly,’ I said, as if I had an alternative. ‘Lieutenant Trench, how far from the other car were you parked when the person you saw enter the house got out?’
‘Roughly seventeen yards,’ Trench answered. Roughly.
‘Are you certain the person you saw was Cynthia Sutton?’
‘Yes. I checked her license plates when she drove up.’ For Trench that was an emotional outburst. ‘They matched the vehicle registered to Cynthia Sutton. In addition, I had seen the defendant in a film and recognized her.’ So he did go to the movies!
Trench identifying Cynthia was not exactly a devastating blow to my defense. The police had found her inside the house holding the murder weapon so we were conceding the point that she was there. ‘Lieutenant Trench,’ I said, ‘did you see the defendant stab Wendy Bryan with the TeeVee award?’
‘No,’ Trench said.
‘Did you hear her say she wanted to kill her mother-in-law?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any facts at all that would indicate the defendant is the one who killed Wendy Bryan?’
‘I have no access to data that the arresting officers and Detective Brisbane, who led the investigation, already have,’ Trench answered. ‘I did not investigate the crime on my own.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘You were already very near the crime scene.’
‘I am not a member of the Santa Monica Police Department,’ Trench answered. ‘The case was assigned to Detective Brisbane. I had no relevant information to give him so I did not attempt to do so.’
‘So you can’t personally tie the defendant to this crime, is that correct?’ Make sure to frame it in the form of a question, Jeopardy! fans.
‘No, I cannot,’ Trench answered.
I thanked him and sat down. When asked, Valencia said he would like to ask the lieutenant one question on redirect and Judge Hawthorne allowed it. Valencia stood up, buttoning his suit jacket, and approached Trench the way a dog approaches a cat that has scratched its nose more than once.
‘Lieutenant, you said, when the defense counsel asked you so cleverly, that you have no information that ties the defendant to the murder.’ He did not wait for the judge to tell him to ask a question. ‘Do you have any information that proves the defendant did not murder Wendy Bryan?’
Trench didn’t exactly sneer but his left eyelid twitched a little. ‘No.’
Valencia smiled and nodded. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant.’ He sat down, indicating his questioning of Trench was completed.
‘What was that?’ Cynthia asked me in a whisper.
‘He thinks that helped him,’ I answered. ‘I don’t know why he thinks that, but he thinks it.’
THIRTY-THREE
‘Trench wasn’t assigned to investigate Leopold Kolensky’s death, but I’m betting that’s what he was doing,’ Nate Garrigan said. ‘Kolensky died in his home, not in Santa Monica.’
Nate rarely came to my apartment. In fact, he had never come to my apartment before. But he’d called and said he wanted to talk about some case-related stuff and was in my area. Angie and I were taking it easy after the day in court. Angie was taking it easier than I was, so she had to go get dressed when I told her Nate was on his way.
I was in a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt with the Ben & Jerry’s logo on it because I’m incredibly classy, but Nate had insisted and I was too tired and too hot to change back into professional clothing. To Nate’s credit, he did not comment. I know men who would.
Nate burped. ‘Sorry,’ he said. It was a lie. ‘I’m here because there’s definitely something going on with the finances at Rafael.’
‘The art gallery Wendy Bryan ran,’ Angie said.
‘Yeah. It’s under water.’
I looked hard at him. ‘I assume you don’t mean the building has been flooded,’ I said. ‘You’re saying Wendy wasn’t paying the rent?’
‘Worse than that,’ Nate told me. ‘She owned the building. She wasn’t paying the mortgage and she wasn’t paying an equity loan she took out on the place two years ago. Wendy, as we say in the business, was broke.’
‘How much water?’ Angie asked.
Nate looked at her. ‘What?’
‘How much water was Wendy under? How much did she owe?’
There is nothing an ex-cop likes better than to pretend to still be a cop. So Nate was downright smug in his ability to shock people while remaining world-weary at the same time. ‘About eleven million dollars,’ Nate said, barely hiding his satisfaction.
I refused to be amazed even as my brain was saying, Eleven million dollars! I like Nate but I needed him to remember who his employer was right at the moment. ‘How did we not know this until now?’ I said. ‘This has got to be a matter of public record.’
‘Not where she got the money.’ Nate’s smugness had a secret and it was dying to tell me.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said, just to let him know I knew what he meant. And for a change, I actually did.
Angie didn’t. ‘What?’ she asked.
I kept my gaze on the investigator. ‘You’re saying Wendy Bryan, mother of a major stockbroker and mother-in-law of an actual movie star, was borrowing money from the mob? Do you guys even have a mob out here?’ In New Jersey they practically had storefronts that said ‘MOB’ on them, but Los Angeles seemed so … sunny. It was hard to picture Tony Soprano doing well in Bel Air.
‘Of course there’s organized crime in Los Angeles.’ Nate seemed almost insulted. ‘But these guys, well, organized might be overstating it. They’re a group of overgrown petty criminals who ended up building their business into something that could afford to loan Wendy Bryan millions. But they wouldn’t be happy with her once she stopped paying. No matter how high the interest rate is, it doesn’t matter if the customer doesn’t pay.’
Angie was already shaking her head. ‘I don’t get it. Wendy had this great big house and this prestigious art gallery. She could go to a real bank if she needed money that badly.’
‘She did.’ Nate was becoming less insufferable as we discussed the facts of the case. He was a good investigator and was serious about his work. ‘Part of what she was doing with the money she’d borrowed was to pay off loans she’d gotten from Bank of America, legit. When her credit rating got low enough that she couldn’t pay those off on time, she went to our pals and that’s when the real fun began.’
This was getting to be too much. Ev
erything I’d heard about Wendy Bryan over these months was that she was practically a reincarnation of Pearl Mesta, the original society grande dame. She’d worn expensive clothes and jewelry. She had an enormous mansion decorated to the nth degree. She threw dinner parties that would be the talk of the town for months. This did not in any way seem like a woman who was at all concerned about her finances.
‘Was it her spending that did her in?’ I asked. ‘All the jewels and the clothes and all that? Was she taking from the business to pay for all that?’
‘The opposite.’ Nate shook his head and took another swig of beer. He didn’t seem that interested in the drink, frankly, except to use it as a prop. ‘She had pawned most of her really good jewelry and was wearing fakes. The house was a rental. She’d sold it to a dentist who needed a deficit to show on his taxes three years ago. Everything she did was a pretense. None of it was real except the gallery. She cared about that and would do pretty much anything to keep it from going under.’
‘I’ve got to go into court tomorrow,’ I told him. ‘The prosecution is still putting on its case but I don’t think it’ll last past lunch. He’ll rest and then it’ll be my turn. I can’t put an anonymous group of Southern California mobsters on trial. I need to raise the possibility that maybe Wendy Bryan didn’t die because her daughter-in-law couldn’t stand her. So what can I say that I can prove?’
‘Nothing yet.’ Nate wasn’t happy about bringing the bad news but he’d do it if he had to. ‘I know what I know but I don’t have hard evidence yet. That’ll take a couple of days at least.’
Angie walked over to him and looked deeply into his eyes. Nate seemed bewildered by her sudden attention but, like most men who met Angie, didn’t mind it at all. ‘Are you in danger?’ she asked him.
Nate busted out laughing. ‘Me? From these guys? Oh, you had me worried there for a minute. No. I can handle them, especially since I don’t need to name them to prove that Bryan was in debt up to her neck and then some.’
‘Leopold,’ I said.
‘Yes. About Leopold. Like I told you, he had dinner with Wendy the night he died. The ME was called because he died alone, and ruled it natural causes. Myocardial infarction. But the timing is at least a signal that more needed to be asked, so I started asking.’
‘And?’ Angie doesn’t have a lot of patience for the outcome. That has proven to be quite a boon for some men she’s known.
‘And we have some local wise guys on the finances and then her “executive director” decides to have a heart attack and die. What I’ve found out from doctors is that there are a lot of poisons that can cause heart problems or look like heart problems to the degree that even a trained pathologist won’t notice the flags. It’s a tough case but there are signs all over the place that it’s hinky.’
‘Geez, Nate,’ I said. ‘Do you think you can get Edward G. Robinson to play you in the movie?’
Nate stood up, leaving half the bottle of beer full on the table beside him. ‘I’ll go see the ME,’ he said, giving my remark all the attention it deserved. ‘And about that up-and-coming star in the art world, Pete Conway and his manager. From what I’ve found out so far, Pete has an inflated opinion of his own talent and his manager Ms Hannigan helped inflate it. So maybe they were mad at Wendy for running her gallery into the ground. Because the odds were that she’d have been closing the doors two months ago if not sooner.’
He turned toward the door, thinking he’d been macho enough to exit on that pronouncement. But I stopped him and made him look me in the eye. ‘Nate. Do we have any idea who killed Wendy Bryan?’
Nate took a long moment and his face changed from one of complete conviction (perhaps that’s not the word I wanted to use in this case) to slight embarrassment, like the young student who has been caught having not read the book for the book report.
‘No,’ he said, and left.
THIRTY-FOUR
‘Did you ever witness an argument between the defendant and Wendy Bryan?’
Valencia was questioning Isobel Sanchez, who held advanced degrees in economics and finance from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and had been Wendy Bryan’s housekeeper since arriving in Los Angeles seven years earlier. Sanchez, who wore a look of mild irritation, did not betray any emotion in her voice and spoke English almost without an accent. I took four years of Spanish in high school and can order paella with confidence, but that’s about it.
‘I saw a number of arguments between them,’ she answered. She was trying not to look at Valencia, although she was a witness he had called. She didn’t appear to like him much.
‘Can you tell us what those arguments were about?’
‘They varied.’ Sanchez said. I think even the prosecutor who had clearly instructed the witness to offer no more than a direct answer was probably just a little bit disappointed in the tenor of her answers. Could I expect she’d be more welcoming when I cross-examined her?
‘Was there one topic they disagreed on more than anything else?’ Valencia asked.
‘Yes.’
Valencia, no doubt lamenting his lack of a dental license given all the teeth he was pulling, did his best to get to the point. ‘What was that topic?’
‘Her son.’
‘Michael Bryan, Wendy Bryan’s son and the defendant’s husband,’ Valencia clarified.
I stood. ‘Estranged husband,’ I said. I could do some clarifying of my own. I glanced at Michael, sitting in the front row as usual, and he cringed just a little bit when I said that, which was the effect I’d been hoping to create.
‘Sit down, Ms Moss, unless you have some legal objection,’ Judge Hawthorne, well, ordered. So I sat.
‘What about Mr Bryan did the defendant and her victim disagree upon?’ Valencia asked.
I stood up. ‘Now I have an objection,’ I said to the judge.
Hawthorne nodded. ‘Mr Valencia, you’ll restrain yourself from referring to Mrs Bryan as the defendant’s victim. The defendant is considered innocent until proven guilty and you are well aware of that, I assume, having graduated from law school.’
‘Sorry, Your Honor. Her alleged victim.’ Valencia started toward the witness box again.
‘Mr Valencia.’ Hawthorne was having none of the prosecutor’s hilarious wit.
‘Sorry, Your Honor. It won’t happen again.’ Before the judge could tell him that it sure as hell wouldn’t, he got back to questioning his witness, who looked as though she wanted to stab him with a well-polished salad fork. ‘Mrs Sanchez, you said that you witnessed a number of arguments between the defendant Ms Sutton and the victim. What specifically did they argue about concerning Mrs Bryan’s son?’
‘Ms Sutton believed that Mrs Bryan dominated her son and kept him from doing things he wanted to do,’ Sanchez said. ‘Mrs Bryan believed her son should have more respect for his mother and that Ms Sutton was a negative influence on him.’
Valencia, having finally gotten more than three words out of his witness, nodded appreciatively. ‘What kind of things did Ms Sutton suggest her husband’ – he looked at me – ‘sorry, estranged husband, might have wanted to do that his mother was in some way making him forgo?’
‘The last time I heard them yelling at each other it was about Mr Bryan’s work. Mr Bryan wanted to become a movie producer and his mother thought that was because his wife was an actress,’ Sanchez said, looking at Michael. ‘She believed that Ms Sutton was trying to drive a wedge between her husband and his mother and that making him a producer on her films would have been the final blow. She told Mr Bryan if he gave up his successful career to take a chance on that because of a pretty girl, he would never see any of her estate.’
‘How did Ms Sutton respond?’
‘She called Mrs Bryan a bitch.’
Valencia looked around, perhaps expecting a gasp from the spectators. He got none, so he moved on. He was a professional.
‘Did Ms Sutton ever threaten violence on Mrs Bryan?’ he asked.
&nb
sp; What? If you never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to, and Valencia clearly wanted an affirmative answer …
‘Yes,’ Sanchez said.
Oh boy.
‘In what terms?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘She said that if Mrs Bryan tried to turn her husband against her, she’d cut out Mrs Bryan’s heart.’ Sanchez was looking at her shoes now, upset with the information she had to impart.
I didn’t look at my client because I didn’t want the jury to know this was news to me. But Cynthia passed me a note that read, ‘I said that.’
‘And that was how long before Mrs Bryan was murdered?’ Valencia asked.
‘About two weeks,’ the witness answered.
‘No further questions.’ Valencia, this time having actually scored some points, did his best not to sport the obnoxious grin as he sat down. He mostly succeeded.
I felt it was important in my cross-examination not to look like I was berating Isobel Sanchez. This was partially because I wanted the jury on my side and partially because I wanted Sanchez on my side. It also had vaguely to do with the fact that I really didn’t want to berate Isobel Sanchez.
‘Ms Sanchez,’ I began.
‘It’s Mrs,’ the witness corrected me. Not a great start.
I nodded and smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. ‘Mrs Sanchez, you said that Mrs Bryan was upset that her son was intending to go into film production with his wife, Ms Sutton. Did that impact her finances at all?’
Sanchez gave me a withering look. ‘How would I know?’ she asked.
‘Fair enough.’ The whole be-nice-to-the-witness thing wasn’t going quite as I’d hoped. ‘Did Mrs Bryan pay you on time?’
‘On time?’ Surely Sanchez didn’t need an explanation of the term.
I gave her one anyway. ‘Yes. Was Mrs Bryan ever late in her payment?’
Sanchez looked away, which was interesting. She looked at the judge. ‘Do I have to answer that?’ she asked.
‘I agree,’ said Valencia, on his feet. ‘Mrs Bryan is not being accused of her own murder. What does the frequency with which she paid her maid have to do with this case?’
Judgment at Santa Monica Page 19