Until Proven Innocent

by Gene Grossman

  “Yes, she’s very nice. My office manager said you wanted to discuss her fee. I told April to talk to her about it, but then was sent over here. What’s on your mind?”

  “As you can see, we’re doing some scenes here that are supposed to take place in a courtroom. Unfortunately, the screenwriter doesn’t know a thing about the law or trial procedures, and the only thing we know is what we learned by watching O.J.’s trial. What I’m trying to say is, we’re badly in need of a real lawyer as a consultant on this film. Ordinarily, we’d pay about a thousand dollars for some lawyer to advise us for a couple of days, but since you’re helping out April, I can arrange to have you put on for the whole five weeks of shooting. If you go through the entire script and keep our film looking as authentic as show business allows, I can arrange for you to get about three thousand a week, and you won’t have to be here more than an hour or so each day.”

  This is interesting. I didn’t know that I’d have to take another job just to get paid for April’s legal fee, but considering the fact that this assignment will be an interesting one that might produce about fifteen grand, he’s definitely got my attention.

  “Whatta ya say, Mister Sharp? Are you going to come on board with us?”

  The deal is done. We go back inside, Joe has some young big-busted production assistant give me a script to read, and we shake hands. On the way out, I give my business card and social security number to another bimbette and head back to the Marina, now a proud member of the entertainment industry.

  *****

  The script is definitely not a Witness for the Prosecution or Twelve Angry Men. In fact, it’s so predictable and lacking in plot twist that I wonder why they’re even wasting their time and money making it. Every idea in the film has been done before, and there’s no difficulty figuring out way in advance how it will end, what the verdict will be, and why.

  I’ve heard that in this town everything depends on who you know, so I guess the producers of this turkey must know some really connected people. After reading the part about the trial, I can see why they need a consultant. This film makes the same mistakes that all the others do, by having the lawyers prance around in between the counsel tables and the bench. In real courtrooms, that area is referred to as the ‘well,’ and it’s definitely off limits to everyone but the bailiff, unless the judge gives the attorneys permission to approach the bench for a ‘sidebar.’

  The other big error is that the script calls for one of the attorneys to stand next to the witness stand and badger the person testifying. In a real trial, the only time you can get near a testifying witness is with the judge’s permission, and that’s only granted on rare occasions.

  Aside from that, there are some minor errors in objections being made - and the lawyers testifying. They don’t take the witness stand, and if it’s not an opening statement or closing argument, all a lawyer is supposed to do is ask questions – not comment on the testimony by arguing with the witness and slipping in new facts.

  One part of the script that I can’t help them with is where a ballistics expert is brought in to testify, because his testimony uses words that I never heard before. I’m pretty familiar with fingerprint jargon, but bullets are another category. Joe Caulfield told me that I would be responsible for accuracy of the whole courtroom scene, so I’m going to have to learn about that subject. All I now know is what I see the crime lab people do on CSI television shows, like compare bullets for similar markings, to see if they were fired from the same gun. Maybe a trip to Tony the cop’s target range with him isn’t as out of the question as I thought it was.

  Returning to the boat, I see Tony the cop sitting on our dock box. He greets me with the news.

  “I’ve been suspended, and they took my gun.”

  “You mean the big cannon?”

  He opens up his sport coat to show me the .50 caliber long revolver in its shoulder holster.

  “Naw, they have no right to take this one. I bought it myself. The one they took back is the 9mm peashooter that was issued to me when I first joined the force.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Did they give you any particular reason?”

  “Yeah, it’s because of that fruitcake shrink. He complained that I threatened him with my gun.”

  “That’s interesting, because the only time you showed him the gun was when he was out on the ledge. In order to turn you in for that, he’d have to admit that he was out on the ledge.”

  “Yeah you’re right, but he says he knew I was coming to see him, so his being out on the ledge was a special psychological test he designed for me. Anyway, this time my leave of absence is without pay, so if you need any detective work done, you know where my boat is.”

  I sure hope that my urging the shrink to sign Tony’s certificate didn’t have anything to do with his decision to drop a dime on Tony, because this cop is definitely one guy who I don’t want to have mad at me. I board the boat and use my special method of originating a dogmail. One of the cabinets over our sink contains a box of hard dog biscuits. All I have to do is take out the box and shake it a little. Bernie hears the familiar sound of his food rattling, and immediately appears at my feet. While I hand him a biscuit, I tuck a note in his collar, letting the little princess know that Tony’s available for investigation assignments.

  As usual, the kid is two steps ahead of me. She already knows about Tony’s suspension, and an email from her tells me that the dog has been sent over to Tony’s boat to give him a new assignment. He’s now working on April’s case. By the way she’s spending money to investigate the manager of April’s apartment building, I now realize that the fee I’m getting for being a legal consultant on the film won’t belong entirely to me. Now it’s a firm matter – a house account.

  When I first signed on as the adult part of our law firm, our deal provided for me to share any outside fee with the office only if it entailed the office’s assistance in advancing fees, investigation, or other services. Anything I did outside on my own was mine to keep in full. Ever since then, the kid spends almost full time figuring out how to turn my outside work into ‘firm’ matters, so that she can glom onto part of the fee, and it looks like once again she’s succeeded in getting her hooks into me.

  My only consolation today is in knowing that she won’t get part of my dinner. Stuart is picking up our dinner tab tonight over at the Charthouse Restaurant, while he’s trying to lure me into his business deal.

  *****

  Stuart’s Lincoln Town Car pulls up, and from my seat at the bar I can see him waddle into the restaurant. It seems like he adds about twenty pounds for every new business he starts. After we’ve had a cocktail or two, our table is ready and we order our dinner. Stuart can’t resist any more. He starts out. “Peter, you are now looking at number 579.”

  “What is that Stuart, the amount of pounds you intend to weigh by the end of the year?”

  “Oh contraire, mon frer, that is my West Coast code number. It’s the number I have to say when calling in to my California broker.”

  “ So, what have you got going now, some stock scam?”

  “Not really. I’m betting on baseball, and 579 is my account number with the local bookie I’m using.”

  “That’s it? That’s the new business deal you’re so excited about? You’re now a professional gambler? Stuart, I’m surprised at you. You should know better than that. You can’t win in the long run. The odds are against you.”

  “Uh-uh, Pete. That’s where you’re wrong. The odds are with me. I can’t lose.”

  “Oh boy, that’s great. You’d better hope that they don’t hear about your sure-fire winning plan in Las Vegas, because if they do, they’ll probably send a chartered plane for you. They love people with systems up there, especially people like you, who have plenty of money.”

  “Peter, you know me better than that. I’m a conservative businessman. This is a plan that’s got real math to back it up.”

  “Stuart, please spare me the det
ails. You’d be better off trying to invent some perpetual motion machine. Come to think of it, you may have, because planning on winning by gambling is a perpetual loss machine.”

  “All right, that’s enough tearing me apart. Listen, here’s the plan, and when you hear it, you’ll realize how simple it is.

  “Last week I flew up to New Jersey to meet with my car supplier, you know, Billy Z. Well, before I left, I told Vinnie to try and get me down for five hundred on the Dodgers-Mets game. I never heard from Vinnie, so when I got to Billy’s office, I told him I wanted to bet on the game. He vouched for me and turned me on to his New York connection. This guy told me that if I wanted to bet on the Dodgers, he could give me seven-to-five odds. I took it, and bet five hundred on the Blue Team.

  “The next day, I finally got hold of Vinnie. As usual, he and Olive screwed up my instructions completely, and they bet five hundred of my money out here in California on the Mets. But here’s the good part: strangely enough, the odds were the same – but the other way. They got seven to five too.

  “Now you know that normal baseball games can’t end in a tie, so stop for a second and look at the arithmetic of what happened. I can’t win on both bets, so that means I’ve gotta lose five hundred bucks on one of the bets. But, by the same token, I’m also guaranteed to win seven hundred bucks on the other bet. That means I’m guaranteed a winning spread of two hundred, no matter who wins.”

  Something is wrong here. Not only am I actually understanding what Stuart is telling me, but it sounds logical.

  “Wait a minute, Stu, you mean to say that the bookies know that the odds are different on each coast, but they each take your bets anyway?”

  “Sure they do. In fact, they probably lay off money between each other in the same way. Bettors act on emotion. Bookies act on business. When teams are evenly matched, you can almost always get odds against your home team’s victory by placing your bet on them in the other team’s town. That’s because home teams are such favorites with the local fans. All you have to do is find out what the spread is, and establish a line of credit with the bookies. Billy Z took care of my New York connection, and I’ve got a woman’s clothing salesman out here that makes book in the merchandise mart. The only down side is that I’m limited to a thousand dollars a game, so all I can make is an average of about one or two hundred on each. But there are so many hundreds of games going on a year, I can probably pull in over a hundred and fifty grand each season.”

  “That’s nice Stu, but what are you going to do about the income tax?”

  “Ah, I knew you were going to ask that. I asked each of the bookies to pay me by money order, so every cent that comes in will be reported on my return.”

  “What about the payments?”

  “Even better. The clothing salesman will accept my check and Billy Z will pay the New York bookie. He’ll let me reimburse him by adding the extra amounts onto the car purchases I make from him.

  “Every penny that comes in and goes out will be reported to the IRS, and they can audit me any time they want to.”

  He did it again. Stuart is absolutely the most amazing person I’ve ever met when it comes to figuring out ways to make money. I only can see one hole in his entire plan. If he gets called in for an audit by the IRS, as I’m sure he will when they see ‘gambling’ as a listed source of income on his return, he’ll have to name his betting connections, which will no doubt lead to audits of the California guy, Billy Zee, and the New York bookie.

  I’ve never been involved with the gambling community, but I have a strong feeling that they won’t like getting arrested, audited, and sent to prison for illegal bookmaking operations and federal income tax evasion. I hope Stuart makes a lot of money with his plan, because he may have to hire quite a few bodyguards next year.

  Walking down to our boat on C4200 dock after an educational, complimentary early dinner, I see Tony the cop sitting on our dock box again. He hands me a small envelope.

  “Here’s the info on that cell phone number you gave me.”

  “Thanks, Tony. By the way, do you know anything about ballistics?”

  “All I know is that without me, those experts would be out of work. Why, you got some problem with a bullet?”

  “No, it’s just this movie I’ve been brought in on as a legal consultant. They’ve got a part where some ballistics expert is called to the witness stand. The rest of the witnesses are mostly cops.”

  “I can’t help you with the ballistics part, but I sure can straighten you out about how the cops testify. All I know about bullets is what I’ve learned from reloading my own.”

  “You mean you reuse your bullets?”

  “Sure. The new .50 caliber ammo for this revolver can cost up to three bucks each. If I go to the firing range three or four times a month, that can cost me several hundred a month. By reloading, I cut that cost down by around two-thirds.”

  “What do you have to do, pour in some more powder and put a new bullet head on?”

  “Yeah, I wish it was that easy. Actually, I use a single-stage center-fire metallic press, with a separate powder measure and a hand-priming tool. The press sits on a ledge in my boat near a portlight. Maybe you’ve seen it there when passing by my slip.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did happen to notice it. I thought it was a special device you used to make coffee with. What’s involved in reloading ammunition? Is it a complicated process?”

  “Not really. There are only five steps. Clean and lubricate the press, resize and decap the cases, re-prime the cases, charge the cases with powder, then seat the bullet in and crimp it. Actually, it’s not that hard. I’ve even taught your little Suzi how to do it. She saw the press and wouldn’t leave me alone until she knew how it worked. Hope you don’t mind my giving her lessons. She wants to go to the range with me too, but I told her she’s a little small for that, and she’d have to get your permission first. About the only thing she could fire that wouldn’t push her back onto her rear end would probably be a little .22 caliber pistol.”

  Okay. So he doesn’t know anything about ballistics – just how to recycle killing tools and teach my little roommate the skill. I know that the kid feels like we still owe him for his previous and possibly future help on our cases, so maybe I can get him a job with coaching the movie cops in testifying, especially if I tell Joe Caulfield that Tony will work for less than a thousand a week. That’s the easy part. Now it’s time for the tough question.

  “Would you have any problem working for a black guy?”

  “Not at all. Is it a job about coaching actors to testify like cops? Because if it isn’t, I’m not interested in being a rent-a-cop working as a security guard.”

  “Wait a minute, Tony, I thought you were supposed to have some reputation as not caring for black people. Is that only when you’re on active police duty, and doesn’t apply when you’re on suspension?” He’s a little surprised by my assessment of his feelings.

  “Hey, wait a minute. I have nothing against any person just because of the color of his skin. It’s certain cultures that I’m not happy with. We were at war with Germany and Japan just fifty years ago, and now we all drive German and Japanese cars and count them as our allies and our friends. Some blacks were forced into slavery over a hundred and fifty years ago, and hundreds of thousands of white soldiers died in a civil war to help them gain freedom, but every time you see some loudmouth opportunist like Jesse Jackson on television, he’s got his hand out for the poor black people who are being discriminated against.

  “Well, my question to him is, who’s holding guns to the heads of black kids and forcing them to drop out of school? And how does their dropout rate compare to that of Japanese kids? It’s not the color of their skin that’s doing ‘em in, it’s their culture.

  “I’ll bet that when you were a kid, one of your parents read a book to you once in a while, or a nursery story. And they probably also told you to obey the law, stay in school, go to college, and become a useful member of
society. Do you think that black kids in the ghetto are getting read to, or being told to stay in school, or helped with their homework? I don’t think so, and that’s what I don’t like. I didn’t like school at all, but if I missed a day and my father found out about it, I was in for a beating.

  “If someone can show me that they have a respect for other people’s rights, and for the law, then I’ve got no problem with them. If they can’t, then they deserve whatever they get. Remember, it wasn’t a white guy who walked into that Mexican restaurant to hold it up and probably kill everyone there. I didn’t go out of my way to hurt him. He brought it on by himself.

  “Now who’s this black guy I might be working for, and where’s the job?”

  He sure set me straight. I guess you can’t judge a book by its reputation. Maybe Tony has been getting a bum rap, but being predisposed to dislike any culture is not a healthy way to look at people. I tell him I’ll try to get him the job, but I also realize that we can never be close friends.

  Back on the boat, I open the envelope he gave me, and see that the cell phone number of the guy that’s been bugging Olive is registered to a Hershel Belsky in Beverly Hills. Okay Hershel, it’s nice to meet you.

  * * * * * *

  Chapter 5

  I like it when there’s some action going on. The few irons I have in the fire this month aren’t exactly high profile capital murder cases, but there’s still enough to keep my interest level up.

  Aside from Olive’s Hershel, there’s April’s crooked apartment building manager, and my budding career in the entertainment industry. April left a message for me that she actually did go out and get one of those pooper-scoopers on a pole, so I feel good knowing that I made an honest woman out of her. Olive hasn’t heard from Hershel in a while, so I’ve still got some time to set up a surprise for him, and I’ve already got a nice one in mind. I told the kid to have Tony check him out a little more.

  And as far as Tony’s job is concerned, Joe Caulfield wants to meet with him. He’s already agreed with my suggestion to bring in a technical consultant on the cop testimony part of the script, so now it’s just a matter of the two of them seeing eye to eye. I’ve set up a meeting for them on the soundstage. I hope Tony doesn’t shoot him until the movie is finished, or at least until I’ve been paid.