Reckless Disregard

by Robert Rotstein

  “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.

&n
bsp; “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.

  “By 1987, Felicity’s career was over,” I continue. “At twenty-nine years old she couldn’t get a job as an actress, much less write and direct movies. So she went to you, her old friend and colleague, for help. That’s why she wrote to Scotty that you had her back, that you were her insurance policy, that you were her free ticket out of purgatory. When you refused to help her, she threatened to go public about The Boatman, a Mafia-financed movie showing explicit sex and illegal drug use. Maybe worse, she’d tell the media that you were a shill for the Assembly. You couldn’t let that happen. You were building your career on your image as a man with family values, as one of the few Christian conservatives in Hollywood. Not only would your career have been over, but more importantly, the Sanctified Assembly’s budding attempt to legitimize itself as a mainstream religious movement would have foundered before it began. You’re one of their master spies, and they’ll stop at nothing to make sure you don’t blow your cover. Like the Soviet KGB, the Assembly holds its spies dear. So maybe on your own, maybe on orders from your Supreme Prophet Bradley Kelly, you and your Assembly goons kidnapped and killed Felicity McGrath. And after you abducted her, you drove away in your blue Mercedes-Benz.”

  The room falls silent. Janine, who almost never shows emotion during a deposition, sighs so loudly that her shoulders rise and fall. Frantz looks down at the table with a hangdog expression, as if his futile objections have depleted him of energy.

  “I’ll move to strike Mr. Stern’s absurd monologue as improper argument,” Lovely says. To my shock, she has the hint of a grin on her lips, the look of a chess player who recognizes checkmate three moves before her opponent does. Bishop actually lets out a thin, high-pitched laugh.

  “Do you find something funny, Mr. Bishop?” I ask.

  “I do, Mr. Stern,” he says. “Your vivid imagination. Your silly questions about a movie that never existed, your absurd fairy tale about McGrath. It’s hilarious, actually. All you’re missing is proof. During this entire deposition, you haven’t showed me a shred of evidence supporting what you’ve claimed. Because you don’t have it.”

  Now I know exactly what Lovely Diamond told Bishop during the break, as sure as if I’d huddled with them in the hall. As a law professor, I taught Lovely that you gain nothing in a deposition by asking questions without using your evidence, because the witness will just recant the testimony and claim a refreshed recollection once the evidence comes to light. So showing the witness the evidence first is usually the best approach. Not today.

  I reach into my briefcase and pull out the cast list from The Boatman. I hand it to Bishop without having Janine mark it first. “How about this for proof, Mr. Bishop? A document your minions didn’t sanitize when they raided the Macklin & Cherry archives.”

  Bishop skims the document and begins shaking his head like a batter trying to ward off the effects of a beaning. The shakes almost become tremors.

  “Where did you get this?” he hisses. His cheeks puff out like an expanding bag of microwave popcorn. He crumples up the cast list and hurls it at me. The piece of paper bounces off of my forehead, just missing my right eye. It feels great. I pick up the paper and unfold it, sliding it back toward him.

  “The Boatman is a fantasy that you’re trying to exploit,” he shouts. “This deposition is over. Stern, get out of my building. All of you get out.” With surprising agility for a man his age, he springs out of his chair and walks out the door.

  Lovely slumps down, her lips parted in lingering shock, her eyelids narrow slits through which she searches for what went wrong. She looks gorgeous.

  Frantz seems oddly energized. “Pack up our documents, Lovely,” he says. “And don’t you ever forget again that I’m the boss and you’re just a second-year lawyer who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing. I’ll be in William’s office.” Odds are that he’ll smooth it over with Bishop. If there’s one thing th
at Frantz is good at, it’s schmoozing clients.

  Lovely and I wait wordlessly until the court reporter and videographer leave.

  “Where did you come up with this stuff?” she asks.

  “Attorney-client privilege,” I say. “Which is what I’ll say if you serve an interrogatory asking the question.”

  “Is your mother your source? Did she feed you all this bullshit?” Lovely knows about my past, about my mother, though at the moment I wish she didn’t.

  I give a noncommittal shrug.

  She picks up the cast list and reads it over. “Jesus, McGrath’s name isn’t even on this.”

  “Doesn’t matter. She was the ghostwriter and director. At nineteen, twenty years old, the brains behind the great William the Conqueror. And I will prove it.”

  “How?”

  I have no answer for that. But maybe for the first time since I took this case, I truly believe it. “I’m not going to reveal my strategy to opposing counsel,” I say.

  “You have no evidence.”

  “The cast list shows—”

  “It shows nothing. It might embarrass my client, but it has nothing to do with the case, which is all that matters.”

  “What matters is that Bishop dismiss the lawsuit. He can issue a press release saying that he’s proved his point and he’ll never find Poniard to collect a judgment anyway. Or his PR people can concoct some better excuse. But he should drop the suit for his own good.”

  “Oh, Parker,” she says. “You just don’t get it.”

  “It’s you and your client who don’t—”

  “Billy will never—”

  “So he’s Billy now?” Jealousy can surge without warning.

  “William will never give up. It’s not in his nature. He has too much power to be beaten. He’ll stop at nothing to . . . and he’s in the right. He didn’t do what your client says.”

  “You’re right about one thing only,” I say. “I do believe that he’ll stop at nothing.”

  Three and a half weeks until the trial begins, and I still don’t have a shred of admissible evidence of Bishop’s involvement in Felicity’s disappearance. Poniard won’t budge on revealing Scotty’s identity or Alicia Turner’s whereabouts or on telling me what these people know. I’ve gotten so frustrated with my client that I’ve stopped e-mailing replies or responding to chat requests.