The Brass Verdict (10 page)

“Okay, all of that’s real good — if we get Elliot. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. What else do we have?”

Lorna looked disappointed that I didn’t want to linger over the money and celebrate her discovery. She had lost sight of the fact that I still had to nail Elliot down. Technically, he was a free agent. I would get the first shot at him but I still had to secure him as a client before I could consider what it would be like to get a $250,000 trial fee.

Lorna answered my question in a monotone.

“We had a series of visitors while you were in court.”

“Who?”

“First, one of the investigators Jerry used came by after hearing the news. He took one look at Cisco and almost got into it with him. Then he got smart and backed down.”

“Who was it?”

“Bruce Carlin. Jerry hired him to work the Elliot case.”

I nodded. Bruce Carlin was a former LAPD bull who had crossed to the dark side and did defense work now. A lot of attorneys used him because of his insider’s knowledge of how things worked in the cop shop. I had used him on a case once and thought he was living off an undeserved reputation. I never hired him again.

“Call him back,” I said. “Set up a time for him to come back in.”

“Why, Mick? You’ve got Cisco.”

“I know I’ve got Cisco but Carlin was doing work on Elliot and I doubt it’s all in the files. You know how it is. If you keep it out of the file, you keep it out of discovery. So bring him in. Cisco can sit down with him and find out what he’s got. Pay him for his time — whatever his hourly rate is — and then cut him loose when he’s no longer useful. What else? Who else came in?”

“A real loser’s parade. Carney Andrews waltzed in, thinking she was going to just pick the Elliot case up off the pile and waltz back out with it. I sent her away empty-handed. I then looked through the P and Os in the operating account and saw she was hired five months ago as associate counsel on Elliot. A month later she was dropped.”

I nodded and understood. Vincent had been judge shopping for Elliot. Carney Andrews was an untalented attorney and weasel, but she was married to a superior court judge named Bryce Andrews. He had spent twenty-five years as a prosecutor before being appointed to the bench. In the view of most criminal defense attorneys who worked in the CCB, he had never left the DA’s office. He was believed to be one of the toughest judges in the building, one who at times acted in concert with, if not as a direct arm of, the prosecutor’s office. This created a cottage industry in which his wife made a very comfortable living by being hired as co-counsel on cases in her husband’s court, thereby creating a conflict of interest that would require the reassignment of the cases to other, hopefully more lenient, judges.

It worked like a charm and the best part was that Carney Andrews never really had to practice law. She just had to sign on to a case, make an appearance as co-counsel in court and then wait until it was reassigned from her husband’s calendar. She could then collect a substantial fee and move on to the next case.

I didn’t have to even look into the Elliot file to see what had happened. I knew. Case assignments were generated by random selection in the chief judge’s office. The Elliot case had obviously been initially assigned to Bryce Andrews’s court and Vincent didn’t like his chances there. For starters, Andrews would never allow bail on a double-murder case, let alone the hard line he would take against the defendant when it got to trial. So Vincent hired the judge’s wife as co-counsel and the problem went away. The case was then randomly reassigned to Judge James P. Stanton, whose reputation was completely the opposite of Andrews’s. The bottom line was that whatever Vincent had paid Carney, it had been worth it.

“Did you check?” I asked Lorna. “How much did he pay her?”

“She took ten percent of the initial advance.”

I whistled. Twenty-five thousand dollars for nothing. That at least explained where some of the first quarter million went.

“Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

“But then you’d have to sleep at night with Bryce Andrews,” Lorna said. “I’m not sure that would be worth it.”

Cisco laughed. I didn’t but Lorna did have a point. Bryce Andrews had at least twenty years and almost two hundred pounds on his wife. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

“That it on the visitors?” I asked.

“No,” Lorna said. “We also had a couple of clients drop by to ask for their files after they heard on the radio about Jerry’s death.”

“And?”

“We stalled them. I told them that only you could turn over a file and that you would get back to them within twenty-four hours. It looked like they wanted to argue about it but with Cisco here they decided it would be better to wait.”

She smiled at Cisco and the big man bowed as if to say “at your service.”

Lorna handed me a slip of paper.

“Those are the names. There’s contact info, too.”

I looked at the names. One was in the dog pile, so I would be happily turning the file over. The other was a public indecency case that I thought I could do something with. The woman was charged when a sheriff’s deputy ordered her out of the water on a Malibu beach. She was swimming nude but this was not apparent until the deputy ordered her out of the water. Because the charge was a misdemeanor, the deputy had to witness the crime to make an arrest. But by ordering her out of the water, he created the crime he arrested her for. That wouldn’t fly in court. It was a case I knew I could get dismissed.

“I’ll go see these two tonight,” I said. “In fact, I want to hit the road with all of the cases soon. Starting with a stop at Archway Pictures. I’m going to take Cisco with me, and Lorna, I want you to gather up whatever you need from here and head on home. I don’t want you being here by yourself.”

She nodded but then said, “Are you sure Cisco should go with you?”

I was surprised she had asked the question in front of him. She was referring to his size and appearance — the tattoos, the earring, the boots, leather vest and so on — the overall menace his appearance projected. Her concern was that he might scare away more clients than he would help lock down.

“Yeah,” I said. “He should go. When I want to be subtle he can just wait in the car. Besides I want him driving so I can look at the files.”

I looked at Cisco. He nodded and seemed fine with the arrangement. He might look foolish in his bike vest behind the wheel of a Lincoln but he wasn’t complaining yet.

“Speaking of the files,” I said. “We have nothing in federal court, right?”

Lorna shook her head.

“Not that I know of.”

I nodded. It confirmed what I had indicated to Bosch and made me more curious about why he had asked about federal cases. I was beginning to get an idea about it and planned to bring it up when I saw him the next morning.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s time for me to be a Lincoln lawyer again. Let’s hit the road.”

Twelve

I
n the last decade Archway Pictures had grown from a movie industry fringe dweller to a major force. This was because of the one thing that had always ruled Hollywood. Money. As the cost of producing films grew exponentially at the same time the industry focused on the most expensive kinds of films to make, the major studios began increasingly to look for partners to share the cost and risk.

This is where Walter Elliot and Archway Pictures came in. Archway was previously an overrun lot. It was on Melrose Avenue just a few blocks from the behemoth that was Paramount Studios. Archway was built to act as the remora fish does with the great white shark. It would hover near the mouth of the bigger fish and take whatever torn scraps somehow missed being sucked into the giant maw. Archway offered production facilities and soundstages for rent when everything was booked at the big studios. It leased office space to would-be and has been producers who weren’t up to the standards of or didn’t have the same deals as on-lot producers. It nurtured independent films, the movies that were less expensive to make but more risky and supposedly less likely to be hits than their studio-bred counterparts.

Walter Elliot and Archway Pictures limped along in this fashion for a decade, until luck and lightning struck twice. In a space of only three years Elliot hit gold with two of the independent films he’d backed by providing soundstages, equipment and production facilities in exchange for a piece of the action. The films went on to defy Hollywood expectations and became huge hits — critically and financially. One even took home the Academy Award as best picture. Walter and his stepchild studio suddenly basked in the glow of huge success. More than one hundred million people heard Walter being personally thanked on the Academy Awards broadcast. And, more important, Archway’s worldwide cut from the two films was more than a hundred million dollars apiece.

Walter did a wise thing with that newfound money. He fed it to the sharks, cofinancing a number of productions in which the big studios were looking for risk partners. There were some misses, of course. The business, after all, was Hollywood. But there were enough hits to keep the nest egg growing. Over the next decade Walter Elliot doubled and then tripled his stake and along the way became a player who made regular appearances on the power 100 lists in industry minds and magazines. Elliot had taken Archway from being an address associated with Hollywood pariahs to a place where there was a three-year wait for a windowless office.

All the while, Elliot’s personal wealth grew commensurately. Though he had come west twenty-five years before as the rich scion of a Florida phosphate family, that money was nothing like the riches provided by Hollywood. Like many on those power 100 lists, Elliot traded in his wife for a newer model and together they started accumulating houses. First in the canyons, then down in the Beverly Hills flats and then on out to Malibu and up to Santa Barbara. According to the information in the files I had, Walter Elliot and his wife owned seven different homes and two ranches in or around Los Angeles. Never mind how often they used each place. Real estate was a way of keeping score in Hollywood.

All those properties and top 100 lists came in handy when Elliot was charged with double murder. The studio boss flexed his political and financial muscles and pulled off something rarely accomplished in a murder case. He got bail. With the prosecution objecting all the way, bail was set at $20 million and Elliot quickly ponied it up in real estate. He’d been out of jail and awaiting trial ever since — his brief flirtation with bail revocation the week before notwithstanding.

One of the properties Elliot put up as collateral for bail was the house where the murders took place. It was a waterfront weekender on a secluded cove. On the bail escrow its value was listed at $6 million. It was there that thirty-nine-year-old Mitzi Elliot was murdered along with her lover in a twelve-hundred-square-foot bedroom with a glass wall that looked out on the big blue Pacific.

The discovery file was replete with forensic reports and color copies of the crime scene photographs. The death room was completely white — walls, carpet, furniture and bedding. Two naked bodies were sprawled on the bed and floor. Mitzi Elliot and Johan Rilz. The scene was red on white. Two large bullet holes in the man’s chest. Two in the woman’s chest and one in her forehead. He by the bedroom door. She on the bed. Red on white. It was not a clean scene. The wounds were large. Though the murder weapon was missing, an accompanying report said that slugs had been identified through ballistic markings as coming from a Smith & Wesson model 29, a .44 magnum revolver. Fired at close quarters, it was overkill.

Walter Elliot had been suspicious about his wife. She had announced her intentions to divorce him and he believed there was another man involved. He told the sheriff’s homicide investigators that he had gone to the Malibu beach house because his wife had told him she was going to meet with the interior designer. Elliot thought that was a lie and timed his approach so that he would be able to confront her with a paramour. He loved her and wanted her back. He was willing to fight for her. He had gone to confront, he repeated, not to kill. He didn’t own a .44 magnum, he told them. He didn’t own any guns.

According to the statement he gave investigators, when Elliot got to Malibu he found his wife and her lover naked and already dead. It turned out that the lover was in fact the interior designer, Johan Rilz, a German national Elliot had always thought was gay.

Elliot left the house and got back in his car. He started to drive away but then thought better of it. He decided to do the right thing. He turned around and pulled back into the driveway. He called 911 and waited out front for the deputies to arrive.

The chronology and details of how the investigation proceeded from that point would be important in mounting a defense. According to the reports in the file, Elliot gave investigators an initial account of his discovery of the two bodies. He was then transported by two detectives to the Malibu substation so he would be out of the way while the investigation of the crime scene proceeded. He was not under arrest at this time. He was placed in an unlocked interview room where he waited three long hours for the two lead detectives to finally clear the crime scene and come to the substation. A videotaped interview was then conducted but, according to the transcript I reviewed, quickly crossed the line into interrogation. At this point Elliot was finally advised of his rights and asked if he wanted to continue to answer questions. Elliot wisely chose to stop talking and to ask for an attorney. It was a decision made better late than never but Elliot would have been better off if he had never said word one to the investigators. He should’ve just taken the nickel and kept his mouth shut.

While investigators had been working the crime scene and Elliot was cooling his heels in the substation interview room, a homicide investigator working in the sheriff’s headquarters in Whittier drew up several search warrants that were faxed to a superior court judge and signed. These allowed investigators to search throughout the beach house and Elliot’s car and permitted them to conduct a gunshot residue test on Elliot’s hands and clothes to determine if there were gas nitrates and microscopic particles of burned gunpowder on them. After Elliot refused further cooperation, his hands were bagged in plastic at the substation and he was transported to Sheriff’s Headquarters, where a criminalist conducted the GSR test in the crime lab. This consisted of wiping chemically treated disks on Elliot’s hands and clothing. When the disks were processed by a lab technician, those that had been wiped on his hands and sleeves tested positive for high levels of gunshot residue.