Try Fear

by James Scott Bell

  It was like a different country on this side of the 5. Brown and dusty, it could have been a set in a Mexican caper movie. Over on the green of the links, it was a golfer’s paradise.

  I went into the front office of the pre-engineered steel building and found a gaunt, smiling man sitting at a desk, holding a fly swatter.

  “Hey hey,” he said.

  Hey hey? “How you doing,” I said, going with the mood.

  He laughed and nodded his head. Then swatted something on the desk.

  I assume it was a fly. But now I’m not sure.

  “Do for what?” he said. Thick accent. Russian?

  “Is the boss around?” I said.

  The Swatter laughed and nodded. “Yea boy.”

  I laughed and nodded.

  He swatted something else.

  “So can I talk to him?” I said.

  “More chesty,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He laughed and nodded.

  “Maybe I’ll just go find him myself,” I said. I didn’t know where I’d go, but anywhere but here seemed a step in the right direction.

  “Sit, sit,” he said. He got up and waved his swatter like a baton, presumably showing me to sit.

  I laughed and nodded.

  He went out a back door. A few minutes later he was back with a goateed man, tall, in a long-sleeved shirt with purple and red stripes, and jeans. About forty, younger than the Swatter.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “My name’s Buchanan,” I said. “You are?”

  “Mike Ezzo.” He did not offer his hand.

  “I wanted to ask you about Carl Richess.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m representing his brother.”

  “So?”

  “Carl worked for you, right?”

  “So?”

  “If I could ask you some questions—”

  “Carl Richess was a troublemaker,” Ezzo said.

  The Swatter laughed and nodded.

  I said, “So that means he might have had some people mad at him. People like Nick Molina, say.”

  Ezzo squinted at me. “What’ve you been doing, snooping around?”

  “Look, friend, I’m just doing my job, like you do your job. I’m not out to make any trouble for you or anybody else. I just want to know what happened.”

  “You are making trouble. I don’t have time for this.”

  “Why was Carl a troublemaker?”

  “Because he made trouble,” Ezzo said.

  “Hey hey,” Swatter said.

  I gave Ezzo my card and said I’d appreciate a call if he changed his mind.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” he said.

  I laughed, nodded, and left.

  80

  I SPENT THE rest of the day putting in calls to a couple of forensic labs. I’d need an expert or two in my pocket.

  I got back to St. Monica’s around four and headed straight to my home at the northeast corner. Father Bob was watering some flowers he’d planted outside his trailer.

  “She got another one,” he said.

  I knew he meant an e-mail. This one was a full-on assault. Another graphic description, another drawing of a nun that looked like Sister Mary, and a couplet of sexual rhyme.

  “She doing okay?” I said.

  “She is, but Sister Hildegarde is about to bust a gasket.”

  “Is that a Catholic thing?”

  “It does not bode well for any of us, Sister Mary especially.”

  I went into my own trailer. Hoping to hear from Sid about the e-mail. I microwaved some macaroni and cheese and read some of my Jake Ehrlich book. I liked the guy’s attitude. I liked his approach to trial work. Stay on offense. Find the lie.

  You can always find the lie, he said, especially in cross-examination.

  When I looked up it was dark outside. I had dozed off. Someone was knocking on my door.

  I opened it.

  Kimberly Pincus stood there, lit by moonlight and holding a bottle of wine. “Busy?” she said.

  81

  “IT’S NOT EXACTLY the Ritz,” I said. “But I call it home.”

  Kimberly sat at the kitchenette table and started opening the wine with the corkscrew she’d brought. “Quaint,” she said.

  “I’ve designed it in early Desi Arnaz. How did you find me?”

  “Darling, this is Kimberly.” She pulled the cork. “Have you got wineglasses?”

  “Sure.” I snagged two white foam cups from the package on an open shelf. “Don’t drop them.”

  She poured white wine in the cups and we thudded them, then sipped.

  “You like it?” she said.

  “Crisp, light. Jocular without being flippant.”

  She laughed. “Wine snob.”

  “I meant you.”

  She shook her head, and we sipped again. Her smile was easy and warm.

  “I’m glad you came by,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re glad. I want to ask you something.”

  “I’m a captive audience. There’s no back door.”

  “I’m thinking of leaving the city attorney’s office.”

  “So soon?”

  “It’s been four years,” she said. “I want to open my own office.”

  “That’s a tough go, solo,” I said. “Unless you have overhead like mine.” I waved my hand around the trailer.

  “Who said anything about solo?” she said. “I want a partner. Somebody who is a knock-down great trial lawyer, and also tall and handsome. Know anybody like that?”

  I looked into her jade lamps, and saw she was serious. “You and me, partners?”

  “What I said.” She put her cup on the table and folded her hands. “I’ve been working it out in my head. Both of us can try cases like bats out of hell—”

  “Around here we say avenging angels.”

  “Either way, that’s what we do. That’s what we live for, in fact. It’s one of those things you know you were born for. So we start a little boutique firm, and all we do is trial. We’re not litigators. We don’t sit around conference rooms and jaw. We go to court. We aren’t corporate or criminal lawyers. We are trial lawyers, period. And that’s why we start at seven-fifty an hour. Am I making sense?”

  “Wow.” I sat back and saw the whole picture unfold. A true power couple practicing law together, going to court, handling the highest profiles. Kimberly Pincus and Ty Buchanan. It would be a killer combination, that’s for sure. Maybe it really was the time for my trailer days to come to an end. All parties, sacred and profane, could return to normal. Sister Hildegarde would cheer.

  “You’ll consider the offer?” Kimberly said.

  “I’m stunned.”

  “Remember, things move fast in L.A. Think what we could do if both of us had a foot on the accelerator.”

  “I will think about it, Kimberly. After the trial. I need to stay focused. But after the trial, I will definitely think about it.”

  “Will you be conversational without being verbose?”

  “I promise.”

  “Deal,” she said. She lifted her cup and offered it as a toast. Before we thudded someone knocked on the door.

  “I’m Mr. Popular all of a sudden,” I said. I went to the door, opened it.

  Sister Hildegarde said, “Can you please step outside for a moment?”

  82

  “YOU MAY NOT entertain guests, especially of the opposite sex,” Sister Hildegarde said after I half-closed the door behind me.

  I said, “You have a security camera or something?”

  “A woman with long hair and a bottle of wine is hard to miss in a place like this.”

  “She’s a colleague,” I said.

  “She’s going to have to leave.”

  “After the wine and a few hours of making out, okay?”

  In the moonlight I could see Sister Hildegarde’s face get all Lon Chaney, Jr. on me.

  “Kidding,” I said. “I will escort the young lady off the
grounds.”

  “See that you do,” she said. “Immediately.”

  I went back inside. “I guess I have to—”

  “I heard,” she said, standing. “I can see myself out. You stay and have more wine, and dream about big-time trials. And anything else you care to dream about.”

  I put my arm around her waist and gave her one kiss, but one that counted. One that would last me through a trial.

  83

  THE NEXT MORNING I went down to the Sip. Pick fixed me up his Expresso Espresso, which he says fosters free speech. He sat at my table and lit his pipe. “Hats are the answer,” he said.

  “What’s the question?” I said.

  “Why is society hacking and wheezing in an agony of slow death? Hats! If people wore hats, we’d be much better off.”

  “I see,” I said, not seeing.

  Pick took a couple of contemplative puffs. “Listen. When was this city a calm, law abiding place to live? It was when men and women wore hats. Think about it. In the 1950s, on Dragnet, Joe Friday wore a fedora, am I right?”

  “A little before my time.”

  “Trust me. Men wore fedoras, women wore ladies’ hats. Crime was way down. Now, when Dragnet came back in the late sixties, guess what? No more hat. And I ask you, was crime up or down?”

  “I’m guessing up.”

  “I rest my case, Counselor! And it’s only gotten worse. I say, fight back! Wear a hat!”

  He got up to help a customer, a woman, who sheepishly stood at the door.

  I was wondering if Pick would accept a Cat-in-the-Hat hat for his comeback when my phone went off. It was Sid, the computer guy. He said he was able to trace the source of the last e-mail. It came from a computer in the Lakeview Terrace Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Sid even gave me the ID of the terminal used.

  “I thought I was the man,” I told him. “But you are the man.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I am the man.”

  I thanked him, then called Devonshire Division and left a message for Detective Fronterotta, who had this matter on his desk.

  When I got a call back ten minutes later, it was not the detective. It was an earful of very impolite language. From Nick Molina. When he paused for a breath I asked him what the matter was.

  “You got me fired,” he said.

  “How did I do that?”

  “You know. You lawyers are all just slime. Now I got to do something about it.”

  I waited. When he didn’t continue I said, “What do you want to do about it, Nick?”

  “I’ll decide what I do about it, that’s what. And you won’t know when, you hear me? You won’t know when.”

  “Calm yourself, Nick—”

  He did by hanging up.

  Wonderful. I love it when I make new friends. Now I had one that wanted to find me when I wasn’t looking.

  My legal acumen was having such a wonderful effect on people. I thought about a new career then. Maybe I should do something else. Being a price checker at the 99¢ store seemed like a good option. Anything but this.

  Fronterotta did call back about an hour later. I gave him the information from Sid, and he thought he could do something with it. He asked me if there was anything else he could do for me right now. I thought that was nice.

  “Maybe you could wear a hat,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A friend of mine thinks crime was down in L.A. back when people wore hats. Because they wore hats.”

  “You have interesting friends,” he said.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  84

  THE WEEK BEFORE Eric’s trial, the city showed itself hatless.

  There was a shoot-out between the Grape Street Crips and two LAPD officers that ended in the death of an innocent bystander who popped his head out of the house at the wrong time.

  Taggers were everywhere. It’s always graffiti season. They didn’t even try to hide themselves or hurry up anymore. I drove by some in commuter traffic on the 101 midmorning. Three of them. Happily doing their urination by spray paint on the sound wall.

  And what was the city council doing? Passing a new city ordinance limiting the ownership of chickens.

  Yes, cockfighting was on the rise, so while gunfire strafed innocent people almost daily, our brave leaders were taking on the scofflaws of the fighting-chicken set.

  The mayor and chief of police were making public appearances together, flapping their lips about all they were doing to keep rogue cops in line. A better pair of actors you haven’t seen since Abbott and Costello.

  The rich were keeping their riches, the poor were flooding in, and the middle was moving to Arizona and Florida.

  It was a great time to live and breathe in L.A.

  Unless, of course, you were a chicken.

  Or a trial lawyer getting ready to try a case that was as thin as the pursed lips of a New England Calvinist.

  Trial is war.

  It’s not cricket, with tea and scones and white pants, pinkies held in the air.

  It’s not Canasta, Go Fish, or Twister.

  Maybe it’s a little bit of Balderdash, but mostly it’s war.

  Kimberly Pincus was right about that much. It’s like Butkus, hitting the QB so hard the head separates from the body.

  You don’t go into a courtroom to dance or preen or show off your suits.

  You go in to lay your opponent out on a slab. You obey the rules, so you don’t get disbarred, but you do everything you can to prove your case and torch your opponent’s. Your weapons come from the Rules of Evidence and whatever rhetorical skills you bring.

  Which includes imagination and the touch of the poet.

  Oh, yes.

  Poetry and literature and painting are the products of the mind, putting the picture together on the page or the canvas. And so the trial lawyer paints a picture for the jury, using not just legal concepts—because the lawyer who depends upon the law alone is the lawyer who loses—but ideas turned into images.

  The great trial lawyer has to make the jury see a picture, a coming together of the facts in a compelling and vivid whole. That picture has to grab them, educate them, and make them want to go to bat for your client.

  Poet. Teacher. Warrior. The best trial lawyers are all three at once.

  It’s not a profession for the dilettante or the fearful.

  Or for those who are hesitant about taking off the gloves.

  If you win, you can shake the hand of your opponent and invite him out for a drink.

  If you lose, you look in his eye and say, “Good job,” all the while letting your look say, I hope we have the chance to do this again, because I want another shot. I know you now. Next time, I’ll take you down.

  A trial is Patton against Rommel. Magic and Bird. Ali–Frazier. To approach it any other way is to do your client ill.

  85

  THE MURDER TRIAL of Eric Richess began on a Monday morning in the courtroom of Judge Neil Hughes.

  Sister Mary and I got an early start. We drove to the Park-and-Ride on Canoga and took the Orange Line to North Hollywood. From there it was the Red Line downtown.

  Yeah, L.A. has a subway. Don’t laugh.

  Now, there’s nothing this town likes more than a good murder, but thankfully Eric’s had flown under the media radar. There was another trial going on downtown that had all the juice—the Miracle Mile Madam, who ran an escort service for mid-Wilshire businessmen and lawyers and was threatening to name names. That sucked up all the press, and I was glad about that.

  Kate met us in front of the courthouse. A retired neighbor, a nice older woman named Babs Fambry, had offered to be her driver for the trial. Kate said she was too nervous to get behind the wheel.

  I kept my arm around her shoulders all the way up to the courtroom.

  As soon as I walked in, the clerk motioned for me and said Judge Hughes wanted to see me in chambers.

  Radavich was already there when I came in.

  “Sit
down,” Hughes said. He was a tall, sinewy man. Sort of a Gary Cooper quality about him. He was sixty-six years old and had been on the bench longer than I’d been alive. “Mr. Radavich has a concern.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it,” I said.

  “I understand you want to have a nun sitting at the counsel table with you,” Radavich said.

  “Not just any nun. This one’s my investigator.”

  “Your Honor, this is a blatant attempt to attract sympathy from the jury. He wants to have a nun right next to his client during the trial. It will be a complete distraction.”

  The judge said, “Mr. Buchanan, is this true?”

  “She is my investigator. She is integral to this case.”

  “But she’s a nun?”

  “That’s still legal in the United States. And it’s also a constitutional guarantee that a client has a choice of lawyer and the lawyer has a choice of investigator.”

  “But does she wear a habit?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A full habit,” Radavich said.

  “It’s also legal in the United States for nuns to wear habits,” I said. “I don’t think the Supreme Court has ruled on it, but I’d be willing to guess they’d be all in favor.”

  “If I thought for even one second that you were trying to pull something, Mr. Buchanan, do you know what I would do to you?”

  “Judge, I guarantee that if I ever try to pull something on you I’ll tell you about it afterward. Or before. Whatever works for you. But I’m not pulling anything now.”

  “I still ask Your Honor to find that this is prejudicial,” Radavich said.

  “This is a new one on me,” the judge said. “But I don’t know that there is any law that says a nun can’t be an investigator. So what can I say? She can sit there. But Mr. Buchanan…”

  “Yes, Your Honor?”

  “If she crosses herself during your opening statement, I’m sending her out.”

  86

  WE BEGAN UNPICKING our jury.

  The process is called voir dire, which is French for “speak the truth,” which doesn’t always happen in courts of law. That’s why lawyers get to question the venire, the panel of prospective jurors, and root around for fissures of trouble.