“Nobody wins here. But I will take you to see your mother.”
Her smirk becomes frozen in the ether, and her disbelieving eyes study me for a long time.
“It’s true,” I say.
And only then does this strange woman’s mask disappear, melted by tears that reflect the first genuine show of emotion that I’ve seen from the individual known as Poniard.
North of Santa Monica Beach, the Pacific Coast Highway becomes primitive. Fires, floods, and landslides foil the residents’ fruitless attempts to swindle nature. The dwarf mountains rise over the Pacific, the hills blanketed by coast live oak, toyon, sycamore, chamise, California lilac. The ocean, a murky green-blue at the Santa Monica pier, becomes ever more pristine after Topanga Canyon, and by Zuma the sea has turned a deep azure just as the mountains become less habitable.
I roll the windows and inhale the fresh salt air, feel the offshore breeze on my skin. I could’ve taken the freeway and saved an hour, but something about this route will help cleanse the grime and horror of the past months. And I’ll have more time to try to convince Brenda—I can’t bring myself to call her by any other name—to explain the unexplainable. She hasn’t spoken in the twenty minutes since we left The Barrista.
“You should’ve told me,” I finally say. “It would’ve made things easier.”
She blinks her eyes twice and continues to stare out the window in a kind of catatonic derision. Is she angry with me? You’d think she’d be ecstatic about my legal services. I’ve accomplished far more than she expected. Is she angry because Courtney—real name Melanie Oliver—is in jail? She should be grateful, because I haven’t told the cops who Courtney really is, haven’t implicated Banquo. Or maybe she’s silent for another reason entirely. Maybe there’s nothing for her but the game, and now that her game with me has ended, there’s a void. If that’s true, maybe it’s the key to getting her to communicate.
“When Poniard first contacted me back at JADS and I thought the firm’s computers had been hacked,” I say. “You were just chatting with me from outside my office, right? Logged in on the firm’s system. No hack at all?”
With a slight upturn of the lips but still staring out the window, she says, “I had to alter the firm’s system to use the handle ‘Poniard’ and make sure that our chats weren’t logged by JADS’s IT Department. But that little tweak only took ten minutes. Easy peasy.”
“And all the Poniard chats? What for?”
“You had to believe that there was a client out there.”
Something still doesn’t make sense. “There were times you were with me when Poniard initiated the chat. How . . . ?”
Now she condescends to share a smug smile. “Vlad did hack into the JADS system. Just to see if he could. It didn’t take him long. He’s good at following a script. It ensured you wouldn’t suspect me.”
“And you just walked the Scotty letters into Judge Mitchell’s office?”
She tips her shoulder and smiles. “My favorite part was my deposition. That technology is the future, something Vlad and Melanie and I have been working on . . .” The smile fades. “I underestimated your girlfriend, though.”
She is all about the game—so unlike her Brenda character. Trying to know another person is like trying to gauge the taste of food by looking at the packaging. Worse, we use our imagination to invent the packaging. But that’s the way it has to be—if we continually questioned who others really are, we’d soon go mad. Still, there’s a calculus we make about other humans, an estimate based on the perceived ratio between their personas and their souls. In my estimation, this woman is closer to the snarky, arrogant Poniard of the chat room than to my sweet assistant Brenda.
“I asked you this before, but now you can tell me the truth,” I say. “Why me?”
“Oh, my father—Sam—was always ranting about William the Conqueror Bishop and his hypocrisy and his dirty secrets, railing against Bradley Kelly and the Sanctified Assembly. Just as I told you, you’d done well against the Assembly and Frantz. But mostly I had to keep you as my attorney because I was already embedded inside JADS. I worked hard to have hands-on control over my lawyer and I couldn’t lose that.”
“How did you figure out I was Parky Gerald?”
“The Internet is one big cyber-archive. No one found it before because they didn’t look hard enough. Parky Gerald wasn’t worth the effort. Though, I have to say I’m surprised at the outpouring. I’d never heard of you.”
“You’re too young to remember, that’s all. But isn’t it interesting? You can’t blackmail me anymore. My secret is out, but I’m one of the few people in the world who knows that you’re the great genius Poniard.”
Though I’m watching the road, I feel her body tense. I have the power.
“What are you going to do?” she says, now straining to keep her voice even.
“I’m your lawyer.” I let a moment pass, long enough to let the tension subside, but not long enough to lose the conversational momentum. “What made you think Bishop was involved in Felicity’s disappearance?”
“After Sam died, I found those letters between him and my mother, where he said not to trust Bishop. That’s when I knew.”
“But you didn’t know, did you?”
“We will see.”
I think for a long time about what I’m going to say next. But I’m sick of the pretending. “Brenda . . . Alicia . . . I know Sam Turner raised you, but William Bishop is your biological—”
“Don’t you dare!” she says. I glance over at her. Her eyes are venomous—a woman capable of violence.
“My mother told me that my father’s identity was none of my goddamned business,” I say. “I still don’t know who my father is.”
“Well, then I envy you, Parker Stern.”
Listening to her speak, I finally realize why McGrath’s voice sounded so familiar when I watched her movies—Brenda sounds like her mother. And what I took for a mild speech impediment is a barely detectible French accent.
We speed past south-facing Malibu, with its stealthy, lethal riptides.
“Your damned video game,” I say. “The stages with the Kreiss killings and the attack on Triggs. Melanie Oliver, or Courtney or whoever she is? Banquo?”
“Vlad would never . . .” She actually sounds indignant.
“Then what’s his part in this? Does he really go around dressing up like your characters?”
“He’s my right hand. He’s good at winning people over, enjoys it. I don’t. And it was a perfect way for him to blend in.”
“Are you and he . . . ?”
“Of course not. He fell for Courtney the very moment I introduced them at school. He’d do anything for her, thinks he can rescue her . . . thought he could. And he believes in Poniard, would do anything for Poniard and The Cause.”
“You know who else referred to himself in the third person? Bradley Kelly.”
From the way she forces her upper teeth against her lip, she’s about to tell me to fuck off, but instead she takes a deep breath and says, “I fight for a noble cause. Kelly didn’t.”
“The fight Banquo had with Frantz’s process server,” I say. “You started it, didn’t you?”
“I had to get you out of JADS and focused only on my case. I thought the cosplayers hanging around there would do it, but when that didn’t work, we had to take more radical action.”
“Why didn’t you stop Courtney?”
“I thought . . . I truly thought it was Bishop.”
“Really? I think you found out she was hacking Abduction!, and when you told her to stop, she got violent. That’s how you got that black eye.”
“I never thought that she’d harm anyone else. For years, the three of us, we’ve . . . we’ve all been playing a game, she became competitive with me, and it got out of control.”
I grip the steering wheel and try to squeeze the anger out through my fingers. “Some game. She hacked Abduction! to show the Kreiss killing and the attack on Judge Tr
iggs, didn’t she? And the last stage, the courtroom melee?”
Petulant silence.
“You knew she was violent, and you did nothing. And because of it Philip is dead, Bud and Isla Kreiss are dead.” I slow the car and glance at her. “Or maybe you found out that Philip was on to you and—”
“Goddamn it, don’t you lay that shit on me. I still do not know what the truth is. That fucking Bishop could’ve . . . damn it, Parker, she’s my comrade-in-arms!”
“In your made-up war. But it’s refreshing to see that you can show genuine emotion. By the way, nice touch to have Brenda act like a prude. I see that Alicia Turner isn’t so constrained.”
There’s a sudden change in her demeanor, a wide-eyed, timid look—the Brenda I knew. She reaches out and squeezes my arm. “I want you to represent Courtney. She needs your help. You know I can afford—”
“Even if I wanted to, which I do not, I couldn’t. I’m a witness in Philip’s death and a victim of her assault.”
“I just thought. . . . You’re the best. I want to protect my friend.”
Or maybe it’s the opposite. Hiring me would ensure that Melanie Oliver would fry. Is that her goal? “She wanted to be you—to be Felicity McGrath’s daughter, to be as great as Poniard. She even changed her name to take on your middle name, to be you, and you went along with it—you even still call her Courtney.”
Another floppy shoulder shrug, like a teenager being asked to admit she broke curfew. “She wanted to be called Courtney. So what? People have the right to choose whatever character they want to be.”
“Is everything a game with you?”
“Life is a game.”
“Real life only starts when you realize it’s not a game.”
And with that, we’ve exhausted all words. I’m not sure that Alicia Turner, aka Poniard, has anything to say when she’s not dissembling or pontificating. Fortunately, Mumford & Sons and Arcade Fire stave off the painful silence for the rest of the drive.
A little after one in the afternoon, we reach a hidden beach about forty-five minutes north of Santa Barbara. I pull off Highway 101 somewhere near Gaviota and go west until I find an unmarked private road, pitted with potholes and barely wide enough for one car to pass. The road dead ends at the beach, and I turn right onto a gravel path so narrow that if I were to veer even six inches one way or another, I’d become stuck in the sand. We stop at a locked gate with a camera mounted on top. We wait for some minutes for security to let us pass. When the gate finally opens, I drive to an isolated light-blue Cape Cod–style home, title to which is held by an offshore corporation owned by William Bishop.
Brenda gets out of the car without saying good-bye. As she walks toward the house, it’s as if she’s stepped into a movie screen, because she’s greeted by a person who I once thought existed only on film: Paula Felicity McGrath—in her mid-fifties now, no longer a beautiful starlet, but McGrath nonetheless. The women awkwardly embrace. When they drop their arms and turn toward the house, it’s as if the director has called for a long master shot, with the two figures both visible in full frame until they walk through the front door and disappear.
I circle the driveway and head back to Highway 101. Los Angeles and home lie to the south. If I were to turn north up the coast, I could disappear forever, escaping Parky Gerald and a legal career that sends me into spasms of terror whenever I go to court. I’ve obliterated my past before, and I could do it again in those lush coastal towns with the strange names—Pismo, Cambria, Paso Robles, Big Sur, Carmel, Mendocino, Bodega, Coos Bay, Neskowin, Willapa, Vancouver. Unfamiliar places where, like Poniard, I could walk the streets anonymous and free.
My cell phone has coverage again. Someone left a voice-mail message. I reach Highway 101 and, while stopped at the busy intersection, press play on my iPhone.
“Hey, Parker, it’s Lovely. I was just wondering. . . . So, it seems that my son Brighton has this stupid school project where he has to interview someone who works in his future profession, and the kid says he wants to be a lawyer. I thought he was smarter than that, but. . . . Anyway, it can’t be a parent, and I suggested Lou or some others at the firm, but the kid insists on you, so. . . . Maybe you could call me and the three of us could get together? If you have the time. OK, bye.”
When an impatient driver behind me honks his horn, I hit the accelerator hard and turn onto the highway.
Thank you: Matthew Sharpe, Les Edgerton, Robert Wolff, Lisa Doctor, Karen Karl, Suzanne Ely, Terry Hoffman, Leigh Luveen, Terri Cheney, and Natalie Karl; Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra, and Elise Capron of The Sandra Dijkstra Agency; Dan Mayer, Jill Maxick, Meghan Quinn, Melissa Raé Shofner, Jade Zora Scibilia, and Julia DeGraf of Seventh Street Books; and my family.
Robert Rotstein grew up in Culver City, California, then the location of the famed MGM Studios and so the true “Hollywood.” (To this day, the city’s motto is “The Heart of Screenland.”) Robert’s elementary school was caddy-corner to one of the studio’s back lots. At an early age, he became hooked on legal dramas—not only Perry Mason, the archetype of the legal mystery, but also the politically charged The Defenders and lesser-known shows like Judd for the Defense, The Young Lawyers, and The Trials of O’Brien, which depicted lawyers solving crimes and doing justice. Perhaps this early combination of life in an entertainment-company town and fascination with the lawyer-as-hero made it inevitable that Robert would one day become an attorney whose practice focuses on the entertainment industry, and later a writer of legal thrillers.
He earned an undergraduate degree from UCLA and graduated with honors from the UCLA School of Law, where he was an editor of the law review. After graduation, he was a law clerk to the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy, then Circuit Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and currently Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Robert then went into private practice with a Beverly Hills law firm that focused on the entertainment industry and copyright law. His first trial involved a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a well-known science fiction writer against a major movie studio. Over the course of his career, Robert has handled lawsuits on behalf of Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Lionel Ritchie, John Sayles, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, James Cameron, and all the major motion-picture studios, among others. He authored a law review article that explores the relationship between literary theory and copyright law, and has taught as an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School, in Los Angeles, California. Robert is currently a partner in a major Los Angeles law firm, where he cochairs the firm’s intellectual property department.
His first Parker Stern novel is Corrupt Practices (Seventh Street Books, 2013). He currently lives in Los Angeles with his family, where he’s at work on the third Parker Stern novel.
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