Inherit the Shoes

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘We’ve had a difficult time finding you, Silvio,’ Patrick continued. ‘Have you been hiding?’

  ‘If I was hiding,’ Cadenza suggested, ‘you wouldn’t have found me. Now, what do you want? I’m on vacation.’

  ‘From what? I don’t remember you ever doing a day’s work.’ This was a side of Patrick I hadn’t seen a lot of before – one without any of the usual charm he used to get his way.

  ‘I don’t need to get into a pissing contest with you, McNabb. The way you see it, I stole your wife. The way I see it, she was already gone, and I happened to be there when she left. She was in love with me, and I was in love with her. I don’t think you could say the same thing.’

  Patrick didn’t even bother to snort – he ignored the statement. ‘Why did you call me and offer me millions for Jimmy’s shoes, Silvio? You must have thought Patsy would get them in the divorce.’

  ‘Shoes? What shoes? Now I’m a cobbler?’ Cadenza thought he was amusing. He certainly was amusing himself.

  Patrick didn’t have the chance to respond when Garrigan stepped forward. ‘Mr Cadenza, we’re here to investigate the death of Patsy DeNunzio.’

  ‘What’s to investigate?’ Cadenza said, staring directly into Patrick’s eyes. ‘I think we all know who killed her.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, Silvio,’ Patrick said, suddenly softening his voice in what I assumed was some sort of actor’s trick.

  ‘Right. And I didn’t steal your wife. It’s all how you look at it.’ Cadenza, taking on a disgusted look, spoke to Garrigan without making eye contact with anyone but Patrick. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, where were you on the night Patsy was killed?’ Garrigan asked, inserting a little gravel into his voice.

  ‘I was at home, alone. I watched The Bachelorette. What else do you want to know?’

  ‘Any way you can prove you were alone? Or that you were at home?’

  ‘You know,’ Cadenza said, still staring at Patrick, ‘if I’d known I needed an alibi, I probably would have arranged it better. You should have thought of that, too, McNabb. Sloppy, being found there like that.’

  Garrigan broke the invisible line between Patrick and Cadenza by standing between them and commanding Cadenza’s attention. ‘You were the father of Patsy’s baby. Weren’t you, Silvio?’

  Cadenza shrugged. ‘Probably. You want DNA? I’ll pull out a hair.’

  ‘Hair doesn’t have DNA unless you pull it out the right way,’ Garrigan said. ‘You’re taking it awfully well for a guy who was in love with the deceased.’ I saw he was trying to irritate Cadenza, but I couldn’t think why.

  ‘I’ve had some time to collect my thoughts. Is there anything else you need to know?’

  ‘Did you know that someone else had sex with Patsy the night she was murdered?’ Garrigan asked with a wicked leer.

  ‘What do you mean, someone else?’ Cadenza’s face was no longer impassive. This was news to him. I started to understand Garrigan’s ploy.

  ‘He means me,’ Patrick said, stepping out from behind Garrigan. ‘Patsy and I made love before I found her out on the floor of the dining room.’

  Cadenza’s eyes flashed, but then he sat back and sighed. ‘Well, you were her husband, after all. Makes me wonder why you shot her with an arrow. Maybe you couldn’t get anything else into her, huh?’

  Patrick clenched his teeth, but Garrigan, smiling an evil smile and looking right at Cadenza, stepped in Patrick’s way again before the smaller man could move. ‘It might also make you wonder why he would kill her,’ Garrigan said. ‘Maybe someone else did it out of jealousy, huh, Cadenza?’

  ‘I just found out about it five seconds ago,’ Cadenza said, a small bead of sweat starting on his forehead. ‘When did I have time to be jealous?’

  ‘That’s your story,’ said Garrigan.

  ‘And I’m sticking to it.’

  Garrigan nodded, and turned toward the door. Patrick grabbed him by the shoulder, reaching up. ‘What, aren’t you going to ask him about the shoes?’ he said.

  I walked over to Patrick and took him by the arm. ‘Let it go with the shoes, Patrick. You don’t have any evidence at all.’

  ‘I have instinct, and phone records.’ Patrick stood firm. ‘He called me and tried to offer me two and a half million dollars for Jimmy’s shoes.’ He walked to Cadenza and stared into his face, only a few inches away. ‘Why?’

  Cadenza spoke very slowly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  Garrigan grabbed Patrick by the shoulder again and led him toward the door. Patrick tried to shake him off, but the investigator was too big to budge. The rest of us followed them to the door.

  ‘I’m gonna prove it,’ Patrick said, his voice turning more cockney by the second. ‘I’m gonna prove you’ve got Jimmy’s shoes!’ Garrigan then pushed him out into the hallway.

  I stayed in the room long enough to hear Cadenza’s brief comment: ‘Shoes.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Much to Evan’s chagrin, I rode home in Patrick’s Lexus. This had the dual effect of allowing me to see that Patrick actually returned to the United States as quickly as possible (thus reducing the probability that I would end up in jail and without a lawyer’s license) and cutting down on the traveling time, because Patrick drove approximately seventeen times faster than Evan would.

  It also gave me time to berate him again for leaving California to begin with.

  ‘Patrick, you have responsibilities,’ I began. ‘If you don’t care about not going to jail yourself, the least you can do is take into account the fact that I do care about not going to jail. I’d prefer to stay out of prison, if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ he told me. ‘You’re not going to jail.’

  I took a few deep breaths to calm myself. ‘Patrick,’ I said, ‘I hope you were listening to what the judge said at your arraignment. If you leave the state, let alone the country, I’ll be held responsible. He’ll consider me in contempt of court, and I’ll be put in jail. So don’t tell me I’m getting melodramatic.’

  ‘Well, we are on our way back, so you don’t have to worry any longer, love,’ he said with no tension whatsoever. ‘It’ll all work out. I have every confidence in you.’

  ‘You’re impossible.’ We were silent for a few moments, until I could stand it no longer. ‘OK. Tell me about the shoes.’

  ‘What about them?’ He seemed sincerely puzzled by my question.

  ‘I don’t get what the big deal is. Sure, you’re a collector and they’re a rare item. Yes, someone you don’t know supposedly offered you two and a half million dollars for them. But for someone like you, that’s not really even life-changing money. I don’t get why you seem so obsessed with finding these shoes.’

  Patrick stared at the road for such a long time I wondered whether he’d heard me. I stayed silent, though, and waited, and eventually, he spoke without turning his head or moving his eyes. He continued to stare at the road, and I stared at the speedometer, which was pointing at a number that appeared to be over ninety miles per hour.

  ‘I think there’s a note in one of the shoes,’ he said. ‘Patsy used to laugh at me because I was so taken with them, and I would hold them and take them out of their case and measure my feet against them. She thought it was funny.

  ‘But there was a tear in the lining of the left shoe, just under the tongue. Perhaps an inch and a half, and I worried about it. If I left it untended, it could get larger, and damage the shoe. But to repair the lining would be to alter the condition of the shoe as it had come down through the years. It was a dilemma, and Patsy thought that was funny, too. We had something of … a row about it.’

  I desperately wanted to ask what this had to do with a note, but I held my tongue. Patrick was trying to keep some emotion or another in check, and I didn’t want to find out which one it might be. The man was, after all, charged with murder.

  ‘I couldn’t decide what to do, and the
next day, while I was examining the tear, I noticed the corner of a piece of paper sticking out, and I was sure I’d never seen it before. The paper wasn’t yellowed or aged in any way, so I knew it hadn’t been there on my previous examination. I got a pair of tweezers, and took the folded paper out very carefully.

  ‘Once I did, it was obvious the paper was new. It was a sheet of Patsy’s personal note paper. And when I unfolded it, there was a handwritten note from Patsy. It said, ‘Get over it, Patrick. It’s just a shoe. Leave it alone.’ And I laughed for the longest time, and never had the shoe repaired.’

  ‘So you put the note back in, and you think it’s still there?’ I didn’t understand why that note would hold so much value.

  ‘No,’ said Patrick, still stone-faced and watching the road. ‘It became an inside joke of sorts. After we had a fight, Patsy would leave me a note in the shoe. Sometimes she’d apologize, and sometimes she would call on me to apologize. But there was always a note. In her notes, she said the things she just couldn’t say to my face.’ He stopped for a moment, and I thought he might have sniffled a bit. ‘And the last night, when I was there, well, I didn’t really have … time … to check the shoe for a note.’ He was silent, and I chose not to look at him.

  ‘So you think there might be a new one there.’

  A long pause. ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘And it’ll contain the last words I’ll ever get from Patsy. So I want that shoe very badly.’

  We sat and watched the road for the rest of the trip – or, at least, the portion of the trip before the bright flashing lights behind us indicated that Patrick was being pulled over for speeding. Then, I turned to him and spoke.

  ‘Please tell me,’ I said, ‘that we’ve crossed back over the border into California.’

  THIRTY

  The interesting thing about holding cells, I’ve decided, is they give you a lot of time for thinking. Of course, ‘cell’ might be too harsh a word for the windowless room in which Patrick and I were being detained – it was more an institutional waiting area, much like the Division of Motor Vehicles or a private waiting room in an emergency ward at a suburban hospital.

  The police in La Joya, Mexico (roughly a seven-mile drive to the California border) were polite, and spoke excellent English, but Patrick insisted on talking to them in Spanish, which I could only assume was unaccented, or sounded like cockney-Spanish. They were terribly sorry to have to detain the television star, they said, but rules are rules, and when a man is accused of murder in the States, well, there were certain procedures that had to be observed. They said all this in English, so the ‘young lady’ could understand.

  While we waited in a pair of plastic chairs, we said nothing to each other. I was ready to strangle him, and therefore was better off not getting into a discussion with my intended victim that might draw police attention. Patrick, for his part, stared directly into space, with a facial expression that can only be described as serene.

  After being told the Mexican police would ‘check with the Los Angeles court,’ we were left in the cell with the door closed but, as far as I knew, not locked. Why bother? There was nowhere for us to go.

  What bugged me more than anything else was the knowledge that now Evan would probably get home before me, even driving at ten miles under the speed limit the whole way up I-5. Sorry. ‘The Five.’

  As I simmered, I came to the conclusion that there was no point in castigating Patrick. It would make me feel better, but he was incorrigible. He’d simply grin at me and tell me how ‘brilliant’ I was, and that would lead only to certain violence. Still, the silence was starting to get to me.

  ‘Patrick,’ I said finally, ‘who else knew you had the bow and arrow?’ What the hell – I’d been meaning to ask him all day.

  ‘Everyone knew.’ Patrick seemed to wake up when I spoke to him. His head perked up and his face became animated. ‘I’d only had it a month, six weeks maybe. And we’d had a party right after I got it, so I could show it off.’

  ‘Tell me who “everyone” is,’ I pressed, keeping him on topic. ‘Everyone you showed it to at that party, as best you can remember.’

  Patrick sat back and closed his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to sleep. But then he started reciting names, and I had to reach for a pad and pen that were in my purse, which the police – for some reason – had not confiscated.

  ‘Well, Patsy’s sister, Melanie, of course. My producers, Lizz and Manny.’ (These later turned out to be Elizibith Warnell and Emmanuel B. Richler.) ‘Some of the cast from Legality. Patsy’s manager.’

  ‘DuPrez?’

  ‘Yes. And her bass player, Erubiel Santanaya. Maybe one or two other musicians.’

  ‘Was Silvio Cadenza there?’ I wanted to have a clear picture of possible suspects. I couldn’t hang the crime on one of them in court, but if I could arouse suspicion, that might be enough to constitute reasonable doubt in the minds of some of the jurors.

  ‘Yes,’ Patrick’s lip snarled a bit. ‘That was when I began to suspect there was something between them. He kept coming over and touching her on the arm.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t mind by then – that you and Patsy were on the outs already.’

  ‘No man likes it when another man blatantly moves in on his wife,’ Patrick said without opening his eyes. ‘No matter how bad your marriage, you don’t like it.’

  ‘How much didn’t you like it?’ I asked.

  Patrick opened his eyes and turned to me, grinning just a bit. ‘There’s no trust with you, is there? I’ve repeatedly told you I didn’t kill Patsy.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me if I can’t accept that on faith. In court, I have to prove things. I can’t tell the jury, “You have to believe me because me client told me very sincerely that he didn’t do it.”’

  ‘I suppose not,’ he exhaled. ‘Look. There’s a long way between not liking someone and being moved to deadly violence against them. I’m not saying I would have invited Silvio Cadenza to my next birthday bash, but if I were going to kill someone, it probably wouldn’t have been Patsy.’

  ‘Even when you found out she was pregnant?’

  ‘I found out when you told me,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if Patsy herself was aware yet. Besides, this is Hollywood. There are five women in a twenty-mile radius who have children by their actual, current husbands, and three of the husbands are in their eighties.’

  I reminded myself I wasn’t questioning Patrick for the prosecution, and got back on the path I’d started. ‘Who else there might have seen the bow and arrow?’

  ‘There were fifty people there that night – it was a small party,’ he said. ‘But there might have been another hundred who’d seen it in the house on other days. I don’t keep a list of visitors. Perhaps Meadows would know better.’

  ‘Anyone you can think of who had a grudge against Patsy?’

  Patrick closed his eyes again and yawned. ‘When she was on top, sure,’ he said. ‘But in this town, once your star fades, nobody cares about you enough to hate you any more.’

  The door opened, and an officer – the one who had pulled over Patrick’s car – walked in with a clipboard in his hand. Patrick stood up and immediately began talking to him in Spanish. I held up a hand.

  ‘I’m Mr McNabb’s attorney,’ I said. ‘You two really need to speak English, so I can understand the charges against him.’ I stood up and faced the officer.

  ‘The charge against him is speeding,’ the officer said with just the hint of an accent. ‘I’m giving him a ticket.’

  ‘And your inquiry with the California authorities?’ I asked.

  ‘You are free to go,’ the officer said. ‘But the judge – he is not so happy with you.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  After a day of developing strategy and interviewing expert witnesses on film memorabilia, the Legality wrap party was not exactly what I needed. I would have preferred about sixteen uninterrupted hours of sleep, but felt it important to meet some of the possible susp
ects Patrick had mentioned in an informal setting (preferably with alcohol available to loosen some tongues). I also wanted to keep an eye on Angie, who’d returned from Rodeo Drive empty-handed, but had managed to find a suitably jaw-dropping outfit at her usual boutique, Target (which she pronounced ‘Tar-jay’).

  Held in a restaurant so exclusive it had no name and no outdoor sign, the party was an event of either unbearable elegance or horrifying excess, depending on one’s point of view. Angie came down solidly on the side of elegance, while I leaned toward the contrary position.

  The below-ground restaurant, a large rectangular room with no windows, was decorated with the latest in modern design. Seven different shades of beige on the walls were punctuated by splashes of primary color, seemingly lifted straight from a box of Crayolas. I couldn’t see much of the walls, however, because the place was jammed with people, tables, and a bandstand, at which a ten-piece classical ensemble was playing Schubert under the direction of the conductor of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.

  ‘Look at this place.’ I nudged Angie as we headed for a table with Elliott Gould and Raven-Symoné. ‘You half expect to see the ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David urinating vodka.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Angie replied. ‘That would have been cool.’

  I am not a snob by nature, but this occasion certainly seemed to provide a justifiable exception. ‘The amount of money being spent on this one party is obscene,’ I tried again.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Best to drop the subject, I concluded, even while approaching the station at which a man in a chef’s hat and uniform was carving roast beef and handing it to those who walked by. This, and the dinner wasn’t even being served yet.

  Angie headed for the roast beef as Patrick approached us and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Amazing, isn’t he?’ he said, indicating the chef. ‘That’s all soy, you know. Too many vegetarians in the room.’

  I stared in disbelief. ‘It has gristle,’ I pointed out.

  ‘The man’s an artist.’