When she leaves I put the box and the flash drive in a cabinet in the storeroom. The Poniard case is over, or it should be.
I glance around the room, trying to find a way to kill time. As a kind of homage, I decide to watch one of Felicity’s movies—not her hit Fragile Palace, but her ultimate Hollywood defeat, the wonderful disaster Meadows of Deceit, where she plays the aristocratic young Englishwoman who runs off to rural Scotland, becomes a village schoolteacher, and falls in love with the Scottish farmer, played by Sam Turner, the father of Felicity’s daughter.
When Turner first comes on screen, I hit the pause button, rewind ten seconds, and play the scene again. Why didn’t I see it earlier? “Scotty” has to be Sam Turner. Felicity nicknamed him based on the character he played in Meadows of Deceit.
I power on my laptop and find the first letter from McGrath to Scotty, undated but written sometime before May 12, 1987, the date of Turner’s reply. Turner had obviously warned her not to trust Bishop. In her letter, McGrath disagrees, telling Turner that what she’s working on is “just make-believe” and that Bishop is her insurance policy, her “ticket out of purgatory.” In other words, Bishop would help her get her career back by working with her on the film and could provide insurance against anyone who was after her. The Sanctified Assembly? Howard Bishop’s criminal organization?
Turner isn’t buying it, and he says so in his letter of May 12, 1987. He tells her she’s treading over old ground, dangerous ground. “This isn’t some phase,” he continues. “He’s one of them, which means he’s dangerous.” Bishop was one of what? The Sanctified Assembly? The LA mob?
And then, as Turner predicted, things went bad. So Felicity wrote Turner that she was sending him and the child to France. “You’re going to take that trip to Paris you’ve always dreamed about. The tickets have been reserved in your name. The flight leaves in three days.” A trip to Europe on three days’ notice wasn’t a vacation; it was an escape.
Sam Turner was Alicia’s father, but he sure doesn’t sound like Felicity’s lover. Turner died of AIDS in 2005. In a fit of blatant stereotyping, I launch Google and search “Sam Turner actor gay” and discover that he was one of the first uncloseted gay men in Hollywood, coming out at the expense of his career. He moved to France in the late 1980s, just like McGrath asked him to do, and stayed there until his death. So what? A gay man could have fathered McGrath’s daughter.
We missed this information about Turner because Philip Paulsen was murdered. He was investigating Sam and Alicia Turner, and that part of the case got lost after he died and the trial date came upon us so quickly.
I hit the rewind button, but before the tape is out of the cassette, my cell phone rings.
“It’s me,” Lovely says. “It’s all arranged. Four o’clock.”
William Bishop lives in the Sunset Hills above the Chateau Marmont, the hotel favored by actors and rock stars, and most famous as the location of actor John Belushi’s fatal overdose on a heroin-cocaine speedball. In the late seventies, there was a nice concierge named Janelle who looked after me when my mother was partying with the celebs.
I wend my way up an impossibly narrow private road, clear security, pull into a large masonry driveway, and park near the front door. Bishop lives in a Bauhaus-style resort house with a view that spans from downtown to the ocean. He also owns a house in Brittany, a brownstone in New York, and a farm in Australia. When this is over, he’ll probably have another home—state prison.
A butler of sorts or maybe a bodyguard—the man somehow looks both refined and urban tough—leads me through a living room and into a study. Many would-be movie moguls cover the walls of their rooms with posters and awards, but not Bishop. I do recognize an Edward Hopper painting and a huge Jeff Koons rendering of a family with puppies. Lovely is sitting on an antique French Louis XIII Aubusson-upholstered sofa that, according to media reports, cost Bishop $150,000. The serene landscape is embroidered needlepoint—flat-weave tapestry, they call it. I learned all of this from Brenda’s research. I hope she shows up at The Barrista tomorrow so I can fill her in on what’s happening—the parts I can share.
“No Frantz, right?” I say.
“You said you didn’t want him here.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve surprised me. And you haven’t told Bishop about the tape?”
She’s about to snap back at me when Bishop enters the room. He’s dressed in white slacks and an open-collared plaid sports shirt. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without a coat and tie, and now I notice that, though his suntan looks good from the neck up, his chest is leathery and wrinkled, freckled with liver spots and warts, as if the years of sun damage skipped his face and coalesced in this one spot.
“What’s this about, Stern?” he asks. I thought he’d look defeated, but he seems resolute, his eyes hawk-like. Neither of us sits down. He uses his height to great advantage. I take a couple of steps back so I’m looking across from, not up at, him.
“We’re going to watch a movie together,” I say. “I’m sure you still own a VCR.”
“I don’t have time for your games,” he says.
“The movie’s called Satan’s Boatman.” I hold up the videotape.
His cheeks blanch, and he falls into the sofa.
“I’ve made digital copies of the key scene and saved them to various places in the Cloud,” I continue. “So don’t think about using strong-arm tactics.”
“William wouldn’t do something like that,” Lovely says. “He’s—”
“Your client already sent people after me,” I say. “They followed Brenda and me to the Macklin & Cherry file room.”
“Is it true, William?” she asks.
“They had orders not to hurt anyone,” he says. “They just wanted what belonged to me.”
“Orders?” I say. “Tell that to Roland the security guard. He was hit with a Taser and choked.” I hold up the tape again. “Showtime, Bishop. After we watch it, I’m going to call the cops.”
“Why haven’t you done that already?” he says.
“I’m doing your lawyer a favor. Call it . . . professional courtesy. Now, where’s the videotape player?”
His skin takes on a corpse-like pallor. He begins shaking his head slowly.
“You killed Hildy Gish,” I say. “And then you kidnapped and killed McGrath because she was going to tell the cops.”
He just keeps shaking his head.
“I’m done,” I say.
Lovely grabs his sleeve. “William, please.”
He takes a shallow breath, more like a gulp. “OK. OK.” Another gulp. “Someone infiltrated the movie and substituted lethal drugs for the saline solution in the needle.”
“How convenient,” I say. “But I’ll play along. If it wasn’t you, there are only two possibilities. The first is your father’s associates.”
“My father’s associates, as you call them, stopped caring about The Boatman as soon as I paid them their investment back with double the interest. And after my father died, I didn’t have to keep the movie hidden to satisfy him. But I kept the threat alive because I’d changed my life and had a reputation to protect. Even so, in eighty-seven I was willing to jeopardize that reputation so Paula could make her picture. So no, my father’s clients had nothing to do with Hildy’s death.”
Though I don’t find his story plausible, McGrath did make him look better the second time around, as if she was trying to protect his reputation.
“So that leaves the newly organized Church of the Sanctified Assembly,” I say. “Kelly got wind of the reshoot and sabotaged the production so his new church wouldn’t have been strangled in its crib.”
“Kelly wasn’t involved,” Bishop says.
“Why are you so sure? Because you’re a devoted follower of the Assembly?”
“I was never a follower. Neither was Paula. Brad Kelly was a clown. Who ever thought he’d become a deity?”
“The Boatman was a propaganda piece for everything Kelly preached,�
�� I say.
He laughs harshly. “You understand nothing, Stern—as smart as you think you are.”
“Oh, he’s proved that he’s pretty smart,” Lovely says in a voice so soft that it magnifies her disgust with Bishop.
Bishop’s glance of irritation is parried by Lovely’s sarcastic fake smile. He takes a weary breath and says, “Paula wasn’t using Kelly’s ideas. He was using hers. She wanted to make a movie about a Utopian prophet. That’s what The Boatman was originally. She thought the concept up all by herself. At the time, Kelly’s so-called religious thoughts were all confused. Oh, he had these nonsensical ideas about a celestial fountain and a parallel universe—sounded like a goddamned schizophrenic if you ask me—but after The Boatman, he created a coherent story. He changed it around, used it for his own purposes, but he plagiarized Paula’s art to do it. It pissed her off, too. So in the reshoot she decided to make him look like the asshole he was. But mostly she changed the plot for the art, decided that the original was unrealistic, that she’d been too young and naive in seventy-nine to understand the world’s unfairness. Paula was about her art, not about some cult that Bradley Kelly invented.” He pauses. “You’re the one obsessed with the Sanctified Assembly, Stern.”
I don’t enjoy admitting it, but he makes sense. Kelly was a face man with crazy ideas, a persuasive speaker, but not an intellectual. He always needed someone smarter to help him. That’s why he took up with my mother.
“Then who tampered with that needle?” I ask.
“It must’ve been someone working with Paula. But you have to understand that I wasn’t around for most of it. Paula wanted it that way. I scouted the location—that’s what Frederickson was talking about at trial—and was there for only a couple of days of reshooting with Hildy. Most of my scenes were recut from rough footage Paula and I kept, even though my father had forbidden it. Paula reshot the picture on a shoestring budget, with people coming in and out for small jobs. She even operated the camera. I offered to finance it all, but she didn’t want that, not after what happened in seventy-nine with The Boatman being shut down because of me. She used all her own savings for Satan’s Boatman, spent so much that she could hardly pay her rent. And still, she wouldn’t take a nickel from me. When Hildy . . . after the thing happened, I asked Paula to tell me who had access to the props and the saline, but she was trusting, protective of everyone she worked with. She insisted no one would betray her like that and was afraid I’d hurt an innocent person if she named names. She was right, I would’ve hurt someone. And she thought . . .” He hangs his head.
“Tell it,” I say.
“Paula believed Hildy or I put the real thing in the syringe. I was the one . . . in the seventies, I admired Warhol, how his actors would actually have sex or take drugs on screen, and yet it all worked within the plot. I was a foolish child, and my father, God love him, knew that. So did Paula. She never went along with that craziness. By nineteen eighty-seven I’d outgrown it. But Paula was never quite certain of that.” He shrugs helplessly. “I didn’t know what was in the syringe.”
“The girl was dying,” Lovely says. “Why didn’t you call 911?”
“It was too late, Hildy was already dead. And as for the body . . . there was no proof that we weren’t really using heroin. Paula wanted to call the cops, but I would’ve lost my career, my family, my reputation. So I asked her not to. Paula and I, we . . . we loved each other, but we could never. . . . So we moved Hildy to a room upstairs from the bar. Her real name was Hilda Marie Johnson. That’s what her driver’s license said. She had drug problems in the past, no family, she wasn’t a big star, so we let . . . the cops just thought she was a junkie who’d OD’d.” His perfect shoulders slump. As if in purely mechanical response, Lovely exhales, the sound so loud that it might be taken for a sob.
“Your fairy tale left something out,” I say. “What happened to McGrath?”
He stares at me for a long time and then relents, a physical surrender. “I . . .” He squints his eyes hard. “Do you know her movie Meadows of Deceit?”
“Of course.”
He gives me a hard look. “She loved that picture, was obsessed by the way it ended.”
It takes me some time to process what he’s saying, and when I do, I shake my head. “I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” he says.
“I don’t understand,” Lovely says.
“He’s saying that McGrath is alive,” I say. “That it was all a ruse. Just like the dead pilot in Meadows of Deceit was alive at the end.”
“That’s absurd,” Lovely says.
“The whole scene at the beach was staged,” Bishop says, his voice barely above a whisper. “A phony kidnapping produced by Hollywood’s top filmmaker William Bishop and directed by the brilliant Paula McGrath. Her wild behavior in the Tell Tale Bar, the goons, the blood on the pier—McGrath’s actual blood, voluntarily donated—the lost shoes and jewelry, all scripted so she could disappear forever. After Hildy died, Paula wasn’t about to live her life as if nothing happened. I could, but not Paula. She was braver than me. She wanted to escape this Hollywood life, to become someone else. She no longer wanted to be an actress, didn’t want to be a writer or director, didn’t . . . didn’t want to be a mother. She said she was unfit, never wanted to have the kid in the first place. She was despondent, and I . . .” He shrugs helplessly.
Lovely’s gray eyes emit a serrate glare. “What the fuck, William, did you force that poor girl to have the baby and then to abandon it two years later?”
“Paula wasn’t someone you could force into anything.”
Lovely shakes her head in disbelief and then stands and walks to the other side of the room, as far away from Bishop as she can get without leaving.
“The ‘Scotty’ in those letters,” I say. “Sam Turner?”
“Yeah, Paula called him Scotty,” he says.
“Are you the girl’s father?” I ask. “Because I don’t think Sam Turner was.”
Any residual bravado leaks out of him like air from a punctured tire. He fully deflates, becoming old and frail in an instant.
“You never saw her, never even looked for her after Turner died, did you, Bishop?” I say. “What was it? If you pretended Alicia didn’t exist, she wouldn’t? Is that how it works for you?”
“I always made sure Sam Turner had plenty of—”
“Don’t justify your behavior by telling me you provided for her financially,” I say. “I don’t understand people like you.”
“I do,” Lovely says softly.
There’s a difference—when her son Brighton was born, she was twenty years old, trapped in a sordid lifestyle. When Bishop’s daughter was born, he was twice Lovely’s age and on his way to becoming a billionaire. But I leave it alone.
“Did you know that Lovely and I were attacked last night?” I ask.
“One of those crazy followers of your client,” he says. “Killed the Kreisses and your paralegal—crimes you and your client falsely accused me of committing.”
“She says her name’s Courtney,” I say. “Claims to be Felicity’s daughter. There is a resemblance. And Courtney’s the daughter’s middle name.”
He shrugs helplessly. “I can’t believe she’d . . . Your client. He claims to know where she is.”
“Poniard won’t tell me.”
Bishop nods sadly.
“If this fable were true, why wouldn’t you just have asked McGrath to come forward?” I ask. “She could’ve cleared matters up in an hour.”
“She would’ve come back if she really knew what was going on,” he says. “She’s a recluse, too fragile, too sheltered from the outside world. Being back in the spotlight, hounded by the tabloids, picked apart by the online vultures would kill her. I wouldn’t do that to Paula to save my own skin. I did it before, but not again. You must understand what I’m saying now that the world knows you were Parky Gerald.”
I’m not about to let Bishop make this about me. “One l
ast question,” I say. “Given what you just told me, what possessed you to bring a lawsuit and expose yourself to all this public scrutiny?”
“How could I not? What would I have told my wife, the board of directors, the shareholders?” He glances at Lovely across the room. “Lou Frantz told me it was a slam-dunk winner.”
“That’s what he said when he thought you were an honest man,” she says.
We’re all spent, quiet for a long time. Finally, I say, “Here’s what you’re going to do, Mr. Bishop. You’re going to dismiss the lawsuit against Poniard right away. And you’re going to . . .” My eyes fall on the Satan’s Boatman cassette on the end table. For some reason, the movie’s bizarre opening scene projects on my brain. And then I see it.
“I need to use your VCR,” I say. “I know you have one.”
“Stern, I told you I didn’t want to see that—”
“No. I only want to watch the beginning. I need to ask you something about it.”
Nate Ettinger rocks back in his office chair and puffs on his unlit pipe. “I’m glad I could play a small role in finally exposing Bishop for the criminal he is. Of course, it was Clifton Stanley Gold who was the brave one.” He leans forward and clasps his hands loosely. “You’ve freed me, Parker—you and Brenda. I’m so grateful that she convinced you to let me testify. For the first time in years, I no longer feel cowardly. And Bishop can’t harm me anymore.” He frowns. “He can’t, can he?”
“No chance,” I say.
He sits back again, relieved. “You said on the phone there were a few loose ends I could help you with.”
“Something in your book on eighties Hollywood,” I say, picking up the copy I brought and turning to the section on Felicity McGrath. “I was just wondering how you knew that Felicity McGrath was born in Springfield, Illinois.”
“I can’t remember specifically, but I did a lot of research, so it must have been out there somewhere.
“Actually, my staff and I couldn’t find anything like that.”
“I’m an academic. Research is my job.”
Reckless Disregard Page 31