Write to die, p.1
Write to Die, page 1
ALSO BY CHARLES ROSENBERG
Death on a High Floor
Long Knives
Paris Ransom
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Charles Rosenberg
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503937611
ISBN-10: 1503937615
Cover design by Dan Stiles
For Sally Anne, the best wife anyone could ever hope to have.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter 1
SUNDAY
The story began when his phone rang.
He struggled out of a deep Sunday morning sleep, fumbled the phone to his ear, got out “Hello” and heard a deep voice say, “Rory, Joe Stanton. I need to see you.”
“Joe, I just saw you on Friday.”
“Well, so what? I need you again. My office. Five o’clock.”
Rory wanted to say, “It’s Sunday, and I have plans.” But he knew he had no real choice. Joe’s studio, TheSun/TheMoon/TheStars, was his firm’s largest client. Joe was the general counsel—the guy who distributed all of the litigation work on which Rory’s law firm feasted. But even as he stifled his real thoughts and said, “Okay, see you there,” he realized Stanton had already hung up.
Rory had been on the studio lot so frequently in the past few years that they had finally caved and given him a drive-on pass, something unheard of for outside lawyers. He flashed it at the guard gate—the security camera would later document that he drove through at 5:06 p.m.—and made his way, via the fake streets used to film cityscapes, to the oddly named Executive Office Structure. There were a few other cars around, but not many, and Rory amused himself by sliding into the slot reserved for the studio head.
Joe’s office was on the top floor, and Rory took the steps up, the better to add a little more exercise to his day. His bad knee always did better going up than down. It had surprised him that the entry door into the stairwell was unlocked and annoyed him that he was out of breath by the time he got to the top.
The door to Joe’s assistant’s office was wide open, and nobody was at the desk—amazing in itself because when Joe was in the office, an assistant was always there, too, day or night. The door to Joe’s own office was to the right of the assistant’s desk. It was closed.
Rory knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked again, louder, eased the door open and peeked around the edge. Joe was sitting in his leather chair, behind his over-large black granite desk, his body tilted slightly to the left. An ugly black-and-blue bruise spanned his neck from ear to ear, and his swollen tongue protruded from his mouth. Blood clotted in his hair.
What went through Rory’s head was remarkably rational, considering that his heart rate had accelerated to twice normal speed. If I go in there, I’ll get my fingerprints and probably my DNA all over everything. And the guy’s clearly dead, so I can’t help him.
He closed the door, but not all the way, called 911 on his cell, calmly reported the body and its location and waited. While he waited there in the assistant’s office, the door to Joe’s office swung entirely open again on its own. He wanted to turn away, but he had the odd feeling it was somehow disrespectful to the body to do that. So he just stared at it until suddenly a breeze, or something, slammed the door shut again.
The 911 call had apparently alerted studio security, as well as the city’s emergency system, because within a few minutes a studio cop showed up, out of breath from running up the steps. Rory pointed to the door and tried to say, “Dead,” but all that came out was a croak. He tried again and got the word out.
“Anyone else in there?”
“Don’t think so, but I’m not sure. I opened the door, but then it closed again on its own. The wind, maybe.”
The guard motioned him away, drew his gun, flattened himself to the wall beside the door and, while turning the doorknob with his spare hand, kicked the door wide open. Crouching slightly and holding the gun straight out in front of him, he cleared first the open doorway and then, moving inside, the space to each side of the door. Rory thought it a brave thing. If somebody had been inside with a gun or a knife, the guard could’ve bought the farm.
“The room’s clear,” the man said. Then, as if he had not yet really focused on the corpse in the chair, he added, “Oh my God.”
Rory heard the sirens as the police and paramedics arrived, and he watched LAPD uniforms stream out of the stairway, consult the studio guard and go through the same routine of clearing the room, guns drawn. Within ten minutes, there were six more people, including men and women wearing white coats with the LAPD insignia stitched above the pockets. Suddenly, yellow crime scene tape was everywhere.
Rory heard the studio guard on his walkie-talkie, telling the front gate, “Don’t let any media in here . . . No, nobody, even if they’ve got a pass . . . They’ll be coming soon; they’ve probably already heard about it on the police scanner. And post somebody on the walk-in gate on the back lot.”
A Detective Johnson, according to his nameplate, a big African American guy who was actually taller than Rory’s own six foot five, and maybe heavier, too, emerged from Joe’s office wearing white bootees and latex gloves. He peeled the gloves off and took out a small notebook. “You the guy who found him?”
“Yeah.”
“The other detectives will want to talk to you later. I’ll get the basics from you now.”
It didn’t take long. Rory answered that he didn’t know if Joe had any enemies, in part because he didn’t know the victim very well.
“Any idea why he wanted to meet with you?”
Rory shrugged. “I’m an outside entertainment lawyer representing the studio in a big copyright case. There’s a court hearing going on about it right now. Maybe he wanted to talk about that. But he didn’t say. Just said he wanted to see me today.”
“I see.”
“So, Detective,” Rory said, “is there any way he could have . . . choked himself, somehow? Is that possible?”
“Not unless you can strangle yourself and make the rope disappear afterward.”
“No sign of it?”
He shook his head. “It was good you didn’t go in there. A lot of people would have. How did you have the smarts not to?”
“A long time ago, I was a deputy DA. You learn stuff in that job.”
“And now you’re—what did you say? An entertainment lawyer?” Without waiting for Rory to confirm, he rolled on: “Hey, have you heard this one?”
Here we go, Rory thought. Even in the middle of a gruesome crime scene.
“What’s the difference between a dead lawyer and a dead armadillo in the road, Counselor?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“No skid marks in front of the lawyer.” He guffawed at his own joke.
Rory had been thinking up good responses to lawyer jokes for years. Maybe this wasn’t the time to try one out, but then again, maybe it was.
“That’s funny, Detective, but what about this one? How many clients does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
“Uh, I dunno.”
“Well, no one knows, because clients always call their lawyers to come over and help.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a client joke.”
“I gotta think about that one.”
“Yes.”
“You have my card. If any of the other detectives need to talk to me, please tell ’em to give me a call.”
“I expect they will.” He paused. “Say, do lawyers often tell each other client jokes?”
“Nope, but they should.”
Rory left Detective Johnson, walked back to his car in the parking lot and opened the door. Then he turned around and threw up on the asphalt, getting some on his pants. When he felt like it wasn’t going to happen again, he drove home, cleaned up and tried to eat something. But he wasn’t hungry. Then he tried to sleep but found it hard. He finally got up, rummaged in his medicine cabinet and found a bottle of Valium that an old girlfriend had left behind. He took one and fell into a troubled sleep.
Chapter 2
MONDAY MORNING
FEDERAL COURT—CIVIL DOCKET
Broom v. TheSun/TheMoon/TheStars
Xavier X. Cabraal, the oldest federal district court judge in Los Angeles, perched in his chair beneath the Great Seal of the United States. Well-liked and already into the late stages of avuncularity, he cast his rheumy eyes down upon attorney Kathryn Thistle, who was sitting at the plaintiff’s table. Kathryn was thin, somewhere in that not-yet-middle-aged place between thirty-five and forty, with a pageboy haircut bleached to a bright platinum.
“Ms. Thistle, I’ve read your very well-written motion papers, listened to your eloquent arguments and carefully considered what you have had to say on behalf of your client. But, although I haven’t fully made up my mind as yet, I’m strongly inclined to deny your motion to enjoin the defendant studio, TheSun/TheMoon/TheStars, from distributing its new movie, Extorted.”
Scrunched uncomfortably into his much-too-small chair at the defense table, Rory was surprised Judge Cabraal had decided to move directly into his views on the case. He’d half expected him to begin the hearing by mentioning the death of Joe Stanton and offering his condolences to the studio and Joe’s friends and colleagues. After all, Joe had been in his courtroom only a few days before. Perhaps the judge thought it awkward in the midst of such a hard-fought case. But it hardly mattered. They were gonna win, which was the best memorial possible for poor Joe.
“May I ask your reasoning, Your Honor?” Kathryn said.
“Assuming a final review of the papers already submitted doesn’t change my mind, my written opinion, which I’ll draft tonight and file tomorrow, will say that although there may be similarities between the script your client, Mary Broom, allegedly wrote—of which we have at this point only a detailed outline, by the way—and the studio’s shooting script for the movie, they are not similar enough to suggest that the studio stole the script. So you will almost certainly not win a copyright infringement suit at trial. As you well know, if I can’t conclude that you are likely to win at trial, I can’t properly issue an injunction.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor—” Kathryn began, rising from the table, clearly agitated.
“Please let me finish, Counsel. Even if an argument can be made that the scripts are more similar than I believe them to be, there is still the fact that, other than your client’s bald statement that she submitted the finished script to the studio years ago, there is no corroborating evidence—no cover letter, no receipt, no e-mail, no nothing. And, in fact, no actual copy of the script she says she wrote, just the so-called detailed outline, which in my view isn’t very detailed.”
“Saying you can’t find a written record of something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, Your Honor.”
“True. But both the studio head and the film’s writer-director have flat-out denied in sworn declarations that they ever received or saw your client’s script or the outline of it. So there’s no proof whatever that either one of them had access to Ms. Broom’s script. And how you steal something without getting access to it is a mystery to me.”
Rory wasn’t the least bit surprised. Kathryn’s case had been weak from the start. He wasn’t sure why she’d even bothered to bring it.
Meanwhile, half the reporters had left the courtroom so they could tweet the result of the hearing. Rory suspected they were gonna miss the best part, because Kathryn had her fists clenched and had moved to the lectern between his table and hers, directly facing the court.
“Your Honor, permission to speak freely?”
“Well, Counsel, in my experience, you always speak freely, with or without permission, so go ahead.”
“Your Honor, the expert whose declaration we filed states that he has never seen two film plots and sets of characters that were so similar unless they were simply two different drafts of the same script. He concludes that the studio’s script, which the studio admits was written only two years ago, could only have been copied from my client Mary Broom’s earlier detailed outline.”
“Yes, Counsel, but I’d have been astounded if your expert had said anything else. Let’s face it: sad as it is, experts are paid to say what the lawyers who hire them want them to say. And the studio submitted a declaration by its own expert, who said just the opposite. Plus, to me—and I’m the decider on the similarity issue for the moment—the not-so-detailed outline and the script seem quite different.”
Kathryn was quiet for a moment, as if trying to decide if she really wanted to say what she was thinking of saying. She took a deep breath. “Your Honor, candidly, you only think they’re different because every judge in this courthouse regards the studios as the home team. No studio has ever lost an infringement case brought by a nobody. And probably never will.”
Rory cringed. Kathryn had only last year been sanctioned by the state bar for telling a reporter for the LA Times that a certain state judge lacked the smarts needed to peel carrots. She later claimed that the comment was off the record (and had told Rory privately that what she had actually said was that there might as well have been a carrot sitting on the bench). But the state bar didn’t care what record the comment was on or off and publically reproved her. It also made her attend twenty hours of continuing legal education ethics training—a fate worse than death, in Rory’s view.
Cabraal stared at Kathryn for a few seconds, then burst into laughter.
“Counsel, as I said, it’s late in the day, plus this injunction hearing has been hard fought, and we’re all tired. Especially a certain eighty-five-year-old judge. Would you like to apologize?”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. It’s just that—”
“Apology accepted.”
“But—”
“Stop while you’re ahead, Ms. Thistle.” He took a sip from a large glass of what he always claimed was Coca-Cola, kept handy on the bench.
Rory looked over at Thistle to see if she would retreat or march forward into danger.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said.
“Mr. Calburton, since Ms. Thistle has spoken at length, do you have anything you want to add?”
Rory had a lot he wanted to add. Which included leaping up and raining down scorn on Kathryn and her client. He had a well-deserved reputation around the courthouse for an acid tongue. But back when he was a baby lawyer, an early mentor, who had reminded him very much of Yoda, had taught him that if opposing counsel is busy digging himself a deep hole, there ain’t no need to grab a shovel and help. So Rory locked his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, channeled Yoda and just said, “No, Your Honor. Nothing at all to add.”
“In that case I will have the last word,” Cabraal said. “And it is this, Ms. Thistle. If you were actually to look into the record of the judges of this court instead of getting your information from TQEN or TMZ or wherever you get it, I think you’d find that they have bent over backward to deal evenhandedly with the powerful and ordinary citizens alike.”
“I respectfully disagree,” Kathryn said.
“At the risk of continuing this dialogue when I claim to have ended it, Ms. Thistle, do you honestly believe that the plaintiff here, Mary Broom, is a nobody?”
“Yes, when put up against a billion-dollar studio.”
“As I recall, she used to be one of the most famous actors on the planet, at least until she disappeared herself to Nepal.”
“It was India, Your Honor, and she didn’t ‘disappear herself.’ And she apologizes for not being present today. She’s out of the country.”
“Well, there’s no requirement, of course, that she be here for this type of hearing, in which we take witness testimony only by written declaration. But wherever she was before she filed her lawsuit, and whatever she was doing there, Ms. Broom apparently failed to notice until little over a month ago that ‘her’ script had been stolen—despite all the publicity the movie has received while it was in production. Which is just one more factor that makes it difficult to enjoin the release of a film on which the studio has spent over a hundred million dollars and which is scheduled to be released late next week. The premiere is in just a few days, I believe.”
