Grass takes her glasses off and rubs her eyes, unable to hide her disappointment. “Although I was prepared to disqualify Mr. Stern, it’s your call, Mr. Frantz,” she says. “At some point, we’ll schedule trial, to be tried by the court, not a jury according to the record.”
I stand, but Frantz remains seated and says, “It’s good to see you, Anita,” to which she replies “Same here, Lou.” I exit chambers, leaving my adversaries to have a pleasant chat with their friend the judge.
The courtroom is empty, except for Brenda, who’s still sitting in the same row. She looks like a forlorn child. When I walk over to her, I see tears in her eyes.
“Thinking about Philip,” she says. A tear rolls down her cheek.
As if she were my daughter, I pull my shirt cuff over my palm and use it to caress the tear away. She doesn’t recoil, just smiles sadly. At that moment, Lovely Diamond comes out of the back room carrying papers under her arm.
“I forgot to give you these,” she says, her eyes seething with reproach. “Do I give them to you or your . . . assistant?”
We look at each other, my silence conveying that I don’t owe her an explanation. “Either of us is fine,” I say. “Brenda and I are a team.”
“I’ll take them,” Brenda says. As if literally closing ranks, she moves so near that our bodies touch. “And you know what, Ms. Diamond? I think you’re being very disloyal to Mr. Stern.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about what you think,” Lovely says. She turns sideways so her back is toward Brenda and says, “I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I am about Philip Paulsen. You used to say such nice things about him. I’m sorry that I never got a chance—”
“You should be sorry that your client murdered him,” Brenda says.
“Are you going to let her talk to me like that?” Lovely says.
“Is there anything else we need to discuss?” I say.
Lovely’s jaw goes half-slack. She slowly shakes her head and leaves the room without waiting for Frantz, who’s evidently still in chambers schmoozing the Wicked Witch of the California Judiciary.
“She’s not nice,” Brenda says as she skims Lovely’s legal pleading. “A trashy mouth.”
“She’s—”
“Oh, my.” Brenda hands me Lovely’s document. It’s a formal notice scheduling Poniard’s deposition for Monday, December 30, 2013, eleven days from now, to take place in the offices of Louis Frantz. The notice demands that Poniard appear in person, in violation of Judge Triggs’s order early in the case. The scary part is, now that Anita Grass is the judge, I don’t know if Judge Triggs’s order is in effect anymore.
When we leave the courtroom, the reporters surround us and ask why Poniard wants to kill Judge Triggs. I take Brenda’s arm and push through the inner circle of media reps and the outer ring of court watchers. Then the crowd magically parts and creates an opening, through which Detective Tringali and a uniformed police officer emerge.
“Mr. Stern, Ms. Sica, you’re coming with me now,” Tringali says.
Detective Tringali takes us to police headquarters, where she interrogates me about the threat on Judge Triggs and about the Kreiss and Paulsen murders. I don’t answer, repeatedly invoking the attorney-client privilege and emphasizing that it would make no sense for Poniard to attack our supporters. I especially don’t want to talk about Philip, don’t want to revisit yet again the discovery of his shredded body, especially after I’ve gone over the story with the cops many times. They’ve made no progress on finding his killer, undoubtedly because they refuse to investigate William the Conqueror. Tringali demands that I provide her with Poniard’s mailing address and phone number, refusing to believe that I don’t know them. When I insist that she investigate Bishop’s role in the murders and the threat on Judge Triggs, she responds that the department is following up on all possible leads.
“I’m beginning to think that you and the department are in Bishop’s pocket,” I say. “Just like your predecessors were back in 1987 when Bud Kreiss was kicked off the force.”
If this were an earlier era, she’d have a couple of burly jailers take me into a back room and teach me a lesson, but instead she exacts her revenge by keeping me in the interrogation room another hour while she comes in and out and asks the same questions over and over. When she finally lets me go, I find Brenda waiting for me in the lobby. She says they questioned her for only fifteen minutes.
We get back to The Barrista just as the lunch rush is ending. Brenda goes into the back room. I order a coffee, sit down at my usual table, and boot up my computer. Improbably, my client is there as soon as the Yahoo! chat program launches.
Poniard:
>The Triggs level was a mistake
PStern
>Please tell me you were hacked.
Poniard:
>I’m responsible for anything that appears in my video games
PStern
>Are you saying that you included the Triggs level? And the Kreiss level?
PStern
>Was your server hacked?
Poniard:
>I’m Poniard
PStern
>Answer my questions!
Poniard:
>Asked and answered, I am Poniard
PStern
>Well, Poniard, I want you to shut Abduction! down immediately. Enough is enough.
Poniard:
>Not until justice is done
PStern
>People’s lives are at stake, and besides that, the damn game is hurting our chances of winning a lawsuit.
Poniard:
>A game can’t kill anyone
PStern
>Many think video games kill, and that yours is the most dangerous.
Poniard:
>I will NOT disable the game, not until we know its outcome
PStern
>Don’t you know the outcome already? It’s your game.
Poniard:
>No. You and the players are responsible for how the game ends
PStern
>Well, here’s something I don’t control—Frantz and Diamond have scheduled your deposition for December 30th, 11 days from now. And he wants you to appear in person.
Poniard:
>Judge Triggs’s order says I don’t have to do that
PStern
>Judge Triggs recused himself today because of the threat against him. The new judge, Anita Grass, dislikes me—so much so that Frantz withdrew the disqualification motion so I could stay on the case.
Poniard:
>Good news
PStern
>Not so good. She’s biased against me, which means she’s biased against you.
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 a
ssistant 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 f
orward 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.
“The book is much better than the movie,” she says without turning around.
At 10:05, Lovely crosses her legs and begins bouncing the top one up and down. She twirls a strand of hair around her finger. At 10:10, she shakes her head, making her silver earrings wobble. “I’ll give him ten more minutes and then I’m out of here. I knew this was all a big joke.”
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