Inherit the Shoes

by E. J. Copperman

  Patrick was there already, of course, leaving me to wonder when he got time to step before the cameras for Legality. He said it was lucky there was only one episode left to film this season, because it was distracting his attention from the investigation of Patsy’s death. I kept my observations on the subject of ‘luck’ to myself.

  DuPrez was a man in his mid-forties who obviously couldn’t decide between being a successful business executive and keepin’ it real in the world of rap, yo. He’d chosen to straddle the fence, and wore a suit jacket and black T-shirt, with baggy leather pants and enough gold around his neck to keep every dentist in the world in fillings for the next fifty years.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ he was saying in his high-backed leather chair, behind a dark oak desk the size of my office, ‘Patsy’s death is a loss, but if I’m going to be completely honest, not a great loss. I mean, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but the woman’s career was gone and buried long before her.’

  Patrick’s cheeks were bulging and relaxing, bulging and relaxing, as if he were doing his best to keep from throttling DuPrez by exercising his jaw.

  Garrigan asked, ‘She was still making a large amount of money, though, wasn’t she, Mr DuPrez?’

  DuPrez raised one eyebrow and tilted his head, as if to say, ‘Large? What’s large?’ Then he said, ‘Large? What’s large? She made a couple of million a year, but she really had to work at it – making personal appearances at every car show and mall opening in the country. She made enough to get by, but nothing like what she was doing two, three years ago.’

  ‘A couple million a year,’ Garrigan says. ‘Sounds awful. And you only getting, what, fifteen percent?’

  ‘Twenty,’ DuPrez corrected. ‘I was her personal manager as well as her business manager.’

  ‘So if she made two million, you got four hundred thousand a year. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ DuPrez agreed. ‘Like I said, barely worth the trouble.’

  ‘Plenty for doing nothing,’ Patrick muttered.

  ‘Nothing?’ DuPrez’s tender sensibilities were clearly injured. ‘I worked my ass off for that girl.’

  ‘Funny,’ McNabb said, ‘from where I’m sitting, it’s still there, and quite formidable.’

  I couldn’t initially understand why Garrigan wasn’t intervening in this, er, discussion, but I realized after a moment that he wanted to observe the interaction and see if, in the heat of anger, one man or the other would say something he might not think through beforehand.

  ‘You might not have been privy to her finances, Patrick, but that girl would have been on the breadline but for the way I handled her money.’

  ‘I’ll bet you handled it quite thoroughly,’ said McNabb, ‘and stop calling her “that girl.” She had a name.’

  ‘Forgive me for being inconsiderate,’ said DuPrez, sarcasm dripping from his voice, ‘but at least when I was calling her “that girl,” I wasn’t firing an arrow at her.’

  Patrick’s eyes flared, and I could see he was considering lunging at DuPrez, but when he saw no one was going to stop him, he restrained his urge. He stayed still, and his voice was preternaturally calm.

  ‘Neither was I,’ was all he said.

  A remarkably uncomfortable silence followed, after which Garrigan cleared his throat. ‘So, Mr DuPrez, what were Patsy’s plans? Did she have bookings that she cannot fulfill now? Any recording sessions in the works? What did she leave behind?’

  DuPrez, still staring at Patrick, sniffed. ‘Behind? She left nothing behind. A stupid rap album that sounded like Eliza Doolittle Goes Hip-Hop. Couldn’t sell that to Paris Hilton on a shopping binge. Lohan wouldn’t even shoplift it. That’s what that … Patsy left behind.’

  ‘I don’t see any point to staying here, then,’ Patrick said, standing. ‘The smell is starting to get to me.’ He headed for the door and seemed surprised when no one rose to follow him, but he left anyway.

  When the door closed, DuPrez seemed to exhale for the first time. ‘I’m sorry for my behavior,’ he told the remaining group, ‘but that man has always brought out the worst in me. Can we start again?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Garrigan. ‘Why don’t you start by telling us why you have such resentment against Patrick McNabb.’

  ‘Even when Patsy was alive, he hated me,’ DuPrez began. ‘Always hinting I was cheating her, always intimating that his manager could do better for her. He said I didn’t believe in her talent. Can you believe that? I found the girl when she was nothing – a little string bean with an OK voice singing at county fairs – and I turned her into someone who didn’t even need a last name! I paid for her breast implants, OK? And here’s this guy, this actor, this TV star, telling her she should dump me because I was crooked! Then he goes and kills her, and comes in here like it’s my fault. Can you imagine?’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Garrigan said, but DuPrez didn’t add to his story.

  ‘You seem awfully upset,’ I said. ‘Were you close to Patsy?’

  ‘If you mean was I sleeping with her, the answer’s no,’ said DuPrez, his voice quivering a bit. ‘But we had a lot of years together, and I do miss her. Look, I know you’re the defense people and all, but could you … is it possible for you to make sure McNabb goes to jail? Maybe do your jobs badly or something? I’d hate to see him get off on a technicality.’

  ‘First of all, Mr DuPrez, people don’t really get off on a technicality,’ I said. ‘That’s a TV thing. And besides, how can you be sure Patrick McNabb was the person who killed his wife?’

  ‘I saw them together,’ he said. ‘I know how much they fought. If it wasn’t McNabb, then who loved her enough to kill her?’

  I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but it was worth pursuing. ‘That’s a good question, Mr DuPrez,’ I said. ‘But I’m sorry. We’re obligated to do our jobs to the best of our ability and provide our client with the best possible defense. You know, he’s innocent until proven guilty.’

  ‘Well, if I can help you prove it, you let me know,’ DuPrez told her. ‘The guy who killed my little Patsy should spend the rest of his life in prison.’

  I didn’t expect to see Patrick again that day, but he was standing outside the building when I left with Garrigan and Evan. He had reverted to bubbly Patrick.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘whom shall we see next?’

  ‘It’s “who,” actually,’ I said, although I wasn’t the least bit sure. ‘And we’re not going to see anyone. I’m going back to read through the files and start preparing a list of witnesses we want to testify, and you’re going back to acting on a TV show. Nate here will go about investigating, and he’ll report back to us on anything he finds. Right, Nate?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Garrigan said, grinning.

  ‘Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, I think Mr Garrigan should pay a call on Silvio Cadenza,’ Patrick said, a dare in his eye.

  I was an eyelash from asking who this person might be when Garrigan said, ‘Patsy’s latest boyfriend. The building contractor who came to your house while you were still married with the idea of putting on an addition, and instead stole your wife. That’s the guy, right?’

  An addition? I thought. They have a house that an entire country could live in, and they needed an addition?

  ‘Yes,’ was all Patrick said, apparently accepting the fact that Garrigan could interview Cadenza alone.

  Before Patrick could make a Lamborghini appear, Evan and I bid a hasty retreat to Evan’s car. I considered asking if I could drive, but that would spoil his mood (which I wanted to keep at a high level of anticipation), and besides, he really did know the streets here better than I did. So did most people who had lived here longer than a day.

  ‘You haven’t changed your mind about tonight,’ Evan said as he crawled the car through relatively clear streets (for L.A.).

  ‘No, of course not,’ I told him. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’ My God, Moss, you sound like he’s invited you to his cousin’s eight
h grade science fair! You’re talking about sex!

  ‘Good,’ Evan said. Because his tone wasn’t exactly inspiring wild erotic fantasies, I started to wonder if we were talking about the same thing. But before I got a chance to think of a tactful way to ask if I would see him naked later that night, Evan added, ‘You know, I’ve been doing some thinking about the case.’

  ‘Really.’ Wow. A true romantic.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying.’ I’d accosted him so much about taking the lead in the case that Evan was being tentative. Great. I’d scared him off professionally, and we were discussing sex as if it were a real estate closing. Nice work, Sandy, you’ve done it again.

  ‘No, go ahead.’

  ‘I think the defense should be built on the lack of physical evidence. All they have is the arrow, which he could have touched trying to remove it from her chest, or at any other time since he bought it. They don’t know that he fired it at Patsy, or if he was trying to kill her. A bow and arrow isn’t exactly the weapon of choice in the twenty-first century.’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘The defense has to be built on the law. All the evidence against Patrick is circumstantial. It’s another way of saying what you said, but the fact is, if they can’t prove, with a witness or a piece of physical evidence, that Patrick was the only one who could have killed Patsy, then the jury can’t convict.’

  ‘Don’t you think the jury needs to be led emotionally?’ Evan moved into a turn with the agility of a panther, carrying a grand piano on its back. ‘They’re going to react to Patrick and the other witnesses with some degree of emotion, and that’s going to influence their votes.’

  ‘You can’t think that way,’ I told him with a slight edge of condescension in my voice. Listen up, kid, and I’ll tell you how the legal system really works. ‘If they get the proper instructions from the judge, they’ll know they have to base their decisions on the evidence, not who makes them feel more nurturing.’ I thought a moment. Still, it won’t hurt to get a lot of women on the jury. Those crinkling eyes …

  Evan raised his eyebrows. ‘Wow. You really know your stuff. I wouldn’t have thought of that.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ I answered. Yes. I’d like a jury with at least five women. A few gay men would be good, too.

  We drove in silence as I tried to decide how to get the topic back to sex. It occurred to me that if he did that as slowly as he drove, Evan could be a true find.

  But I didn’t have time to maneuver the conversation in that direction. ‘You didn’t tell me about the Barbie doll,’ Evan said quietly.

  My head practically swiveled all the way around. ‘How’d you find out about that?’ I asked.

  ‘Holly Wentworth told me,’ Evan said. ‘Apparently, it’s the talk of the office.’ Swell. Religious Barbie fanatics are creating a reputation for me at my place of work.

  ‘I was going to tell you,’ I said. ‘It just happened last night.’

  ‘What do you think it means?’ Evan asked as he pulled into the office building’s underground lot.

  ‘I think it’s plain enough,’ I said. ‘Somebody thinks I’m a bitch and wants me to die.’

  ‘Who would want that?’

  ‘Well, it’s got something to do with the case, obviously.’ We got out of the car and headed for the elevator. ‘But I can’t figure out whether it’s people who think I’m defending Patsy’s killer, or people who don’t think I’m doing a good enough job for Patrick. Either way, the letters scratched on the doll’s belly …’

  Evan stopped and stared. ‘There were letters scratched on the doll’s belly?’

  I didn’t know why, but that made me feel good. ‘You mean Holly didn’t know that? Yeah, it spelled out the word “pious.” Any idea what that might mean?’

  The elevator doors opened and we got on as Evan’s face got even more serious than usual, which was really saying something. ‘I can’t think of anything,’ he said as we started to rise. ‘If a person is pious, why do they want someone else to die?’

  Try not to be too emotionally distraught, I thought. They’re talking about me, you know. Maybe I was doing too good a job hiding my abject terror.

  We were silent the rest of the ride, and went our separate ways when the elevator reached the 32nd floor. Grateful to be acting like a lawyer and not a gumshoe again, I immersed myself in the McNabb file.

  During the next hour, I completely forgot about the amended police report Trench had given me, and I couldn’t help but say ‘idiot’ out loud as I went through my briefcase to find it. It was not terribly thick, but I started in on it as if it held some well-hidden key to my life, and resolved to find every nuance I could.

  That diligence wasn’t necessary, however. I found what I needed in the medical examiner’s report, and it was so obvious, it might just as well have been written in neon.

  Patsy DeNunzio had been two months pregnant at the time of her death, and based on the blood type, the baby was not Patrick McNabb’s.

  NINETEEN

  ‘This goes right to motive,’ I said. Evan, comfortably deposited on my sofa, was drinking a glass of the red wine he’d brought, and looking like this month’s centerfold in Better Homes and Gardens. In a jacket but no tie, blue pants but not jeans, casual shoes but not sneakers, he was the epitome of playing it safe. Exactly my type.

  ‘I don’t see how,’ he said, watching me with a puppy-dog devotion both touching and a little creepy. ‘She was having another man’s baby. McNabb admits he knew she was having affairs.’

  I opened the oven and took out a perfectly prepared roast duck (I’d had enough turkey to last me three more Thanksgivings). Forget the fact that I’d bought it at Trader Joe’s – it’s the thought that counts. ‘It doesn’t matter that he knew about the affairs. The shock of hearing about the pregnancy could have gotten him emotional, out of control. That’s how the prosecution will play it.’

  Evan’s eyebrows crinkled, which wasn’t quite the same as Patrick’s eyes crinkling, but did indicate thought. ‘So he immediately ran into the next room, picked up his bow and arrow, and did an impression of Robin Hood?’ He shook his head. ‘No. This doesn’t play as a crime of passion. You can counter it.’

  ‘Come eat,’ I said, and put the duck on a platter, and the platter on the table. Evan walked to the table and smiled at the way I’d set it.

  ‘This is really nice,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

  ‘You’re a poor law student,’ I said jokingly. ‘You probably haven’t had a good meal since …’

  ‘Lunch?’ We both laughed. I held out the carving knife and offered it to Evan.

  ‘Carve?’

  ‘Oh, no thanks. I’d just hash it up, and you went to all this trouble. You go ahead.’

  Great. I had no idea how to carve a duck, or even if you should carve a duck. Maybe you just cut pieces off and eat it with your fingers. For all I knew, I should have put out wooden sticks and made Duckcicles.

  ‘I’m not the best at this,’ I admitted, but soldiered on. It was surprisingly easy, once I got the hang of it, and we were both eating in a minute. Trader Joe had done a fine job.

  ‘Was there anything else in the new police report?’ Evan asked after the requisite compliments about the food, which I deflected, knowing I’d disposed of all evidence it was store-bought.

  ‘I thought we weren’t going to talk shop.’

  ‘Sorry. We don’t have to. I’m curious.’

  I’d never had duck before, and though not exactly like chicken, it wasn’t bad. I chewed for a while, drank some wine, and said, ‘It’s OK. Only one other detail wasn’t in the first report – that the arrow went directly into Patsy’s heart. Considering everything, a terrific shot.’

  Evan put down his fork. Maybe he didn’t like the duck. What did I care – I didn’t cook it. But still … ‘If Patrick wasn’t terribly proficient with a bow …’

  ‘I asked him,’ I said. ‘He had traini
ng for a Western he made in Australia ten years ago. He was playing a Comanche; can you imagine it? Patrick? But he keeps up with target practice twice a week at a place in Encino. He’s supposedly very good.’

  Evan stuck out his lips in disappointment. They were nice lips, and I could think of other things they should do.

  It was the wine talking; honestly. I never sounded like this. I mean, it had been a while since … you know … but I’m just not the aggressive type in this sort of situation. But I am, lamentably, a very cheap drunk. And after two glasses of wine, I was hearing thoughts in my head that weren’t mine, or Angie’s. They were from Wanton Woman, the sexual superheroine.

  ‘That’s a problem,’ Evan said, unaware of the carnal presence in the room. ‘How will you counter that when the prosecution brings it up?’

  ‘It depends on who their witness will be, but the best argument is that they don’t have anyone who saw Patrick with the bow in his hand, and they can’t prove he’d ever fired a shot at a living person. That dining room, no matter how big, isn’t the best place to shoot off an arrow with any accuracy.’

  ‘Maybe get an archery expert,’ Evan suggested through a bite of potato.

  ‘Yes, I’m planning on that.’ OK, so I’m planning on it now. ‘Very good.’

  He grinned, the apt pupil complimented by his encouraging mentor. ‘Thanks.’

  Time to change the subject. ‘So, how come, for a guy getting his law degree in the evening, you have all these nights free?’ I asked.

  Evan actually blushed, which was so adorable I almost leapt over the table at him. ‘I’ve been cutting class,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be with you.’

  What does that mean? He wants to be with me, or he wants to be with me on the case? Who cares! He wants to be with me!

  ‘Maybe,’ I said softly, ‘we should have dessert later.’

  He grinned again, and I no longer cared about motive. Evan stood, walked to my chair, and pulled it out for me to get up, a gesture I would’ve lambasted if done by anyone else, but one I found charming coming from him.