Sedona Law 4: A Legal thriller

by Dave Daren

  He laughed. “Alright, point taken. But, I want you to know, son, I’m really proud of you.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “No, I’m serious,” he said. “Your mother and I have a certain way of seeing life, seeing the world, we have our own set of values. When we decided to have kids, we had a specific parenting philosophy, a way we wanted to raise you guys. We want you to be free thinkers, artists, and we wanted you to stand up for what you believed in, and make the world a better place. And, I guess we had a certain idea of what that looked like. And we didn’t understand when you had your own ideas. Which, I guess that’s on us, we wanted to raise a free thinker, and we got one. But, I see you, and I see what you mean to this town, and... geez... what you did for Harmony... and I realize, you’re doing exactly what we always hoped you’d do. Making a difference and standing up for what’s right. And that makes me really proud, and your mother too. She brags about you all the time.”

  “Does she really?” I chuckled.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You would think she doesn’t have any other kids.”

  “I thought Phoenix was the golden child,” I said.

  “Phoenix is the baby,” he began, “and always will be, but he has yet to find his place in the world. But, you know who you are, and you’re out there kicking ass.”

  “Well, thanks, Dad,” I said.

  Neither of us knew quite what to do in the aftermath of such an uncharacteristic outpouring of emotion. So, he flipped on Jimi to fill in the space. Finally, he pointed up the street to a place called Wade’s Garden Center.

  “How about we stop up here?” he asked.

  “You’re really going to do the garden, then?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Don’t you want to research it all, find out what you’re getting into?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Your mother and I had one in the eighties, before you kids were born. We used to eat out of that garden every night. I know what to get.”

  We went inside the garden center, and I had to admit, I was kind of into it. I’ve never owned land, I didn’t even own the small plot I lived on. But, a garden, a sense of coming back to the earth from where we sprung, awakened a primal sense in me. I didn’t ponder it long, though. I got drawn into a conversation with Wade, the shop’s sixty-year-old owner.

  Wade was sufficiently impressed by the recent second coming of Jimi Hendrix, but more impressed with loading up my dad with every instrument and tool that had been introduced to the gardening industry in the past forty years. We did end up needing that trailer hitched to the Jeep after all.

  Later that night, Vicki and I reconvened at the cottage.

  “How were the vortexes?” I asked.

  “I’m starting to see why you’re jaded and cynical,” she said.

  I laughed. “That bad?”

  “I think I’ll stick with my culturally appropriated pseudo-Hindu exploration,” she said.

  “I like that one,” I said. “It’s the one with the Kama Sutra.”

  She laughed. “It’s sad that your entire concept of world religions is based on sex.”

  “I guess I should base it on Jimi Hendrix, then,” I said.

  She laughed. “I don’t think there would be much of a difference.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said.

  So, with the aid of our digital canonical text, we turned out to be quite devout followers of our new religious persuasion, even without the tea.

  I awoke early the next morning, and after a sunrise jog, picked us up breakfast from a taco stand near the house. I arrived back home, and Vicki and I lounged in bed over eggs, tacos, and coffee. We hashed out the day’s schedule.

  “We have the interview at The Herald,” she said as she glanced through her phone.

  “Matt sent me an e-mail,” I said. “Prep questions.”

  “Ohhh,” she said. “Prep questions.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s a video interview, so they want to do it with as little editing as possible. They sent over the questions ahead of time, so that we can come up with good answers.”

  “That sounds ominous,” she said. “What are they going to ask? Have you ever had an infectious disease? Do you believe in aliens?”

  I took a bite of my taco and got a mouthful of fluffy eggs, cheese, and spicy potato pieces wrapped in a soft tortilla. Pure bliss. I set it down, wiped off my fingers, and then pulled up the email on my phone.

  “It looks like...” I paused as I skimmed the questions, “he’s got it divided into topical sections. The first section is all about education and that kind of thing.”

  “This is so weird,” she said. “I’ve never been interviewed.”

  “I haven’t, either, not like this anyway,” I said.

  “‘Then he asks about some of our specific cases,” he said. “‘Talk about Horace Uvalde’s murder case. What made you take that on, and how were you convinced he was innocent?’”

  “Geez,” she said. “How do you answer that?”

  “‘From a technical perspective, how was it challenging?’ I don’t know,” I said and tossed my phone on the bed.

  “It’s the price of being a pseudo-celebrity,” she mocked and grabbed the phone. “Okay, the next question, ‘What do you love about being an attorney in Sedona?’”

  I sighed. “That sounds like one of those personal inventory questions you do at some corporate retreat or something.”

  “Right?” she laughed. “Right before you do the trust fall.”

  “The trust fall,” I rolled my eyes. “I never could do that one.”

  “Oooh,” she mocked. “Do you have trust issues, Henry?”

  “I have trust issues with anything coming from Starbright Media,” I muttered.

  “I don’t think I’d blame you there one bit,” she laughed as she read the document. “Why didn’t I become a reporter? It’s so much easier to ask all of the questions than to answer them.”

  “It doesn’t pay for shit,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she said. “My cousin’s a journalism major. She took out sixty thousand in student loans back in the early 2000s and now she works in the lingerie department at Dillard’s.”

  “Lingerie, huh?” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe I got the wrong cousin.”

  She smacked me and laughed.

  We dressed and headed out to the office, where we found the machinery of our legal firm firmly in motion.

  Landon and AJ were already there working on the video. Landon had brought in a large screen monitor and had it set up with his laptop in the conference room. It was a mess of wires and odd gadgets that made it look like serious work was being done. He was running video footage he had of the last few weeks.

  “Is this raw?” I asked as I leaned against the door frame.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going through what I have. There’s a lot here. I also shot some stuff at the vortex, and I didn’t get anything of the arraignment, but I might be able to get some news footage.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, there’s plenty of that.”

  He laughed. “I saw the interview. Slick, man, slick.”

  “We got anything usable here?” I asked.

  He ran his hands through his hair. “There’s a lot of stuff. A whole lot. Right now, I’m just sifting through everything. I called one of my professors to figure out a starting point, to get an angle.”

  I nodded. “Well, we have yet to uncover the government conspiracy.”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Senator Malone? Dude, if you get him under oath, you can get him to crack to like Jack Nicholson.”

  I rolled my eyes. I hated every Tom Cruise legal thriller ever made.

  “What have you gotten so far?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Alright, let me show you.”

  I pulled up a chair beside him, and he clicked around on his laptop for a minute and then cued up a video on the monit
or. Edgy graphics played against a hardcore theme song, and then a title screen read, “Before the Gavel Falls: A Behind the Scenes Look at the American Legal System.”

  I felt my defenses rise at the title’s insinuation of dirty deeds, but I kept watching. After the theme song ended, the camera ran footage of Sedona’s natural parks.

  “Sedona Arizona,” Landon’s voiceover said. “It’s a small town in the southwest Arizona desert, known for its natural landscape, thriving arts community, and a town built on openness, exploration, health, and wellness.”

  More B-roll footage played of lean, attractive couples meditating in the Red Rocks, and then it jumped to some of our health and alternative wellness shops, and a montage of our arts district.

  “But,” the voiceover continued, “even in a picture perfect town, there is a dark side.”

  The next shots were footage of the dance performance, with the date of that night.

  “That’s about as far as I’ve gotten,” he said. “Now I want to do talking head interviews for the backstory.”

  I nodded. “Looks good so far.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll need you to do a couple of talking head shots, if you could.”

  Vicki poked her head in the conference room. “We have that interview with Matt Chelmi?”

  “Ah,” I said. “Yes. Showtime.”

  I rose from the chair and then turned back to Landon. “We’ll have to put a pin in that interview. We’ll get something for you.”

  “Right on,” he smiled and stroked his beard.

  Vicki and I drove across town to a generic three story office building halfway across town.

  “You know I looked at this place when we moved here,” I said.

  “I don’t remember that,” she said.

  “Of course, you wouldn’t,” I said. “No one would. That’s why I passed on it.”

  We walked into the building, and it was all glass and linoleum floors, and it lacked any personality or warmth. We took the elevator to the third floor and found the suite number for The Herald.

  A glass wall opened into a hallway leading into a large empty room. Along the hallways were open office doors where people talked on phones or stared into monitors.

  In one corner was a Formica counter where a couple of twenty somethings were dressed head to toe in Urban Outfitters and had their legs propped up on chairs, while they pounded away on laptops.

  “Those are some of our remote reporters,” Matt’s voice came from behind us.

  Matt looked to be in his late thirties, clean shaven, with dark expressive eyes, and a blue button down and brown khakis.

  “They look... casual,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Most of our reporting is done by contract reporters, a lot of them are part-time students. They have a login, and they cover stories, and write from home. It works for us. We have an open counter they can use if they want.”

  “Not what I expected,” Vicki remarked. “I thought newspapers had a bullpen of reporters in cubicles one upping each other for the best stories.”

  Matt laughed. “Not if you want to be successful. Back in Iakova’s day it was like that--ink stained journalists, and all their egos bouncing off each other all day. But, the industry’s changed. We have a couple of section editors in-house full time, and they all coordinate digitally with teams of part-time writers out in the community. It’s a much more efficient model overall.”

  He took us down the hall. “Thank you guys for coming out. We really appreciate this interview. This is a big win for us.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked. “We’ve been looking for an angle to do on you guys since you moved here.”

  He showed us into a conference room with a long white table and about a dozen black swivel chairs.

  “Have a seat,” he motioned, and then he gestured toward a full coffee bar.

  “We’ve got coffee and water,” he said. “Help yourselves.”

  Vicki and I shook our heads and sat down at the table. Matt picked up a phone.

  “Josh?” he said. “They’re here. Get everyone. Thanks.”

  Matt sat down with us and rubbed his palms together. “We’ve got a pretty big team on this story. Did you get a chance to go over the prep document?”

  “We did a bit this morning,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Vicki said.

  “Great,” he said. “‘A bit’ is perfect. What we want from these interviews is for you to be natural and yet prepared.”

  A crowd of about five people appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, guys,” Matt gestured them in, and they filed into the room. “This is Vicki and Henry.”

  “Hi,” one young man stepped out from the crowd and shook our hands. “I’m Josh, I’m the video editor, and can I just say, we are really excited to meet you.”

  “Hello, Josh,” I said. “Well, we’re really excited to meet you, too.”

  Josh looked to be about Phoenix’s age, tall, lanky, with a brown shoulder length ponytail, and he wore jeans and a black t-shirt.

  “Josh is really good,” Matt said. “He’s going to be directing this piece.”

  Everyone slowly took their seats, and Josh leaned into the table as he spoke.

  “What we,” Josh gestured around the table to his compatriots, “really admire about you, is your success both in Los Angeles, and here in Sedona. A lot of people in this town look up to you. They think you’re amazing. And your style, you’re like... GQ man.”

  Everyone laughed in agreement, and I shifted in my seat and glanced over at Vicki, who looked just as uncomfortable as I felt.

  “Well,” I said. “They just haven’t told you about the cases I’ve lost, then.”

  Everyone in the room laughed at that.

  “Or how bad his breath smells in the morning,” Vicki said.

  Everyone laughed harder, and I turned to Vicki and raised an eyebrow. She just laughed.

  “So, now,” Matt said as he gestured with a pen in his hand. “You two are together, right?”

  We both nodded.

  Matt leaned forward in his chair, as if he were preparing for an exciting tale. “What’s your story?”

  Vicki and I looked at each other, and finally she started it. “So, the first time I met him, he doesn’t know this, but it was at a screening.”

  “What?” I asked. “No, we first met in the coffee room. I asked you if there was any more sugar and, then you bent over in that red skirt--”

  This revelation caused laughter and whistles around the gathered staff.

  “No,” she shook her head. “And I still have that skirt by the way. That’s just what you think. We met before, you just don’t remember.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “So,” she said. “We both worked for this firm in L.A., and he had just made partner, and I had just started working there. I found out quickly that Henry Irving was a big deal, he was the heartthrob of the office.”

  “I was?” I repeated. “I don’t remember this.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Everyone was trying to get with you. You didn’t notice?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I was there for this part of my life.”

  “He’s being modest,” she said.

  “Okay,” I admitted, “there were a couple of women that I was talking to, but--”

  “A couple?” she repeated. “There were cat fights over you.”

  “Cat fights? Who?” I asked.

  “Like I’d tell you,” she said.

  Everyone laughed at the banter, and then she continued her story.

  “So anyway,” she said, “you guys have heard of Downton Abbey?”

  There was a murmur of approval.

  “Our firm did the American licensing for that show,” she said. “So, we did a big screening party for the U.S. release. Everyone was there, even the director and some of the cast flew in from London.”

  “You were
at that party?” I asked.

  She winked. “So, I went with a couple of friends from the office, and I saw Henry sitting with some Heidi Klum knockoff in a skanky blue dress.”

  That part of the story I very much remembered, but I sure wasn’t going to let Vicki know.

  “During the viewing, my friends and I sat a few rows behind them,” she said. “I saw him clearly trying to make moves on this woman, but I didn’t think anything of it. Then, after the screening, there was a cocktail party, and everyone was hanging out and drinking, and I saw Blue Dress get into a car with someone else. I was intrigued. Henry Irving just went up in flames.”

  “Not my finest hour, I admit.” I muttered, and everyone laughed.

  “So,” Vicki said, “I saw an opportunity with the hottest guy in the office. So, I went up to him, with my best moves, and he totally blows me off.”

  Everyone booed at this revelation.

  “I really don’t remember this,” I said.

  “Oh, it was so bad that it was cute,” she said. “He was sitting at the bar, drunk and miserable, whining to some friend about Blue Dress, and I asked him if I could buy him a drink. He didn’t even look up and handed me the glass like I was a waiter.”

  “I’m sorry, is all I have to say about that,” I said.

  “So,” she said. “I wasn’t one to be defeated. Now that I knew the Great Henry Irving was single and on the hunt, I decided to go to war. The next day, I wore my sexiest work skirt, a tight red Marc Jacobs number, and waited all day for the best opportunity to talk to him. Finally, I saw him on his way to the coffee room, and I beat him there, and there was mysteriously no sugar. And that was how it all began.”

  “Aww, that’s a great story,” Matt said.

  “And you guys have such chemistry.” Josh said. “Is it hard to work together and live together?”

  Vicki and I glanced at each other for a beat.

  “Surprisingly no,” I said. “We get along really well, I think.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Except his bad breath in the morning.”

  Everyone laughed, and I just shook my head.

  “No,” she said. “I tease him, but we do have a great connection. I think it helps to build a relationship on a really great friendship, which is what we had in California. We didn’t get together until we came out here.”