Sedona Law 4: A Legal thriller

  Chapter 1

  Once, several years ago, I attended the Academy Awards. I represented a client who had been in a movie with Steve Carrell, and the film was nominated for an Oscar. It was a pretty crappy movie, and nominated for one of those side categories like Best Hair and Make-Up that doesn’t get televised. It didn’t even win that.

  But, the nomination ensured that my client, along with the milieu of industry types that surrounded her, were invited to the ceremony and the various galas and parties that popped up in and around L.A. during Oscar week.

  On the night of the ceremony, my client and her team, comprised of an agent, an assistant, a publicist, myself, and the date that her publicist had arranged, all accompanied her to the event. The entire day was a confusing mess of layered security, hyped up egos, and the stringent protocol that kept them all in check.

  What they don’t televise about awards shows, is the incredible amount of time that’s spent standing around waiting. I spent the majority of the late afternoon and early evening standing in a roped off section with all the other industry suits. In penguin tuxedos and formal evening wear at four o’clock in the afternoon, we all glad handed, one upped each other, and patted our own backs for being masters of the universe.

  They didn’t show it on the broadcast, but there were protesters there that night. I don’t think I ever quite figured out what they were protesting. Trump had just gotten elected, and it seemed like no one in L.A. was happy about that, but I wasn’t sure if that was part of their agenda or not. Maybe they wanted a spot on Entertainment Tonight to spout their politics? Or maybe they just wanted to protest Hollywood itself. I don’t know.

  But, whatever the reason, I got spat on by an angry lady waving a protest sign. Yes, spat on. I don’t know why she chose me. I was making my way through the secure area for another cup of coffee to get through the next two hours of industry bullshit and pre-pre-pre-events. I guess I got too close to the line and put myself in spitting distance.

  She called me a “media whoremonger,” and hurled a hefty dosage of warm saliva at my face. Security promptly escorted her away, while she yelled, “I don’t know how you sleep at night!”

  “Two Ambien and a shot of vodka?” I quipped. Two muscular security guards carted her screaming body off, and I never saw her again.

  I thought about pressing charges, it wouldn’t have been difficult since I’m sure someone got footage of it. But, I also thought it would make me the laughing stock of the entertainment law community. I would win my case, but no judge, or fellow lawyer, would ever look at me the same again. So, I wiped the spittle off, doused myself in Purell, and let it go.

  Finally, my client was announced, and I applauded as I watched her, and her assigned date walk the red carpet. She did look dazzling, that’s for sure. Although anyone would look that good after dropping the twenty grand in beauty treatments and dermal fillers that she claimed were “business expenses.”

  But during her thirty second walk of pure glory, I looked around at the media cameras and flashbulbs, and the throngs of fans going wild out of their minds, and I felt a surge of superiority. She was a star, and everyone wanted a piece of her. At twenty-five, I was the man behind the curtain. Well, one of them anyway. I was Cassandra Jones’ lawyer.

  I thought about that moment as I pulled up to the Performing Arts Hall in Sedona, Arizona. Life was taking me in quite a different direction these days, but the scene somewhat reminded me of that day at the Oscars.

  My girlfriend Vicki and I were on our way to see a performing arts troupe called Ghoti. They were quite controversial because well…

  “So, halfway through the first act,” Vicki read from the promotional material on her phone, “they will shed all of their costumes to symbolize how humans can bare their soul and get back to their emotional cores. Their physical nudity will symbolize their emotional nudity.”

  I searched for parking while I maneuvered my black BMW past the protesters that lined the sidewalk. Porn is not art, read a cardboard sign. Respect Yourself, Dress Yourself, read another.

  “Yada, yada,” I said, “they dance nude.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “That’s very subtle,” I mused sarcastically as a red faced woman almost attacked my window and yelled something about degrading women.

  “It’s also supposed to be about making love to the audience,” she began, “something about the--’

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I slammed on the brakes as a group of protesters laid down in the middle of the street right in front of my car.

  “Call Marvin?” she suggested.

  Marvin Iakova was the only reason we were attending this event in the first place. He was a media mogul whose empire spanned most of the state of Arizona, and he had assisted in bringing the dance troupe to town.

  He and I had recently developed a professional connection, when one of my clients, a close friend of Marvin’s, had died. I manage the client’s posthumous estate now, and Marvin is on the board of trustees. He invited us to this event as his guests. I didn’t care about nude performance artists one way or the other, really, but when Marvin Iakova invites someone somewhere, they go.

  Security guards and police officers appeared and tried to get the bodies out of the road, but they weren’t responding. Thank you, Ghandi. Behind me, traffic started to back up and horns honked.

  “Geez,” Vicki said as she checked her make-up in the visor mirror. “I vote you just drive over them.”

  “It’s tempting,” I said. “Very tempting. How would you feel about being with a man with manslaughter charges?”

  “I don’t know,” she teased and looked me over. “It depends on how you looked in the prison jumpsuit.”

  She laughed and reapplied her lipstick. Vicki looked stunning tonight. It was a formal event and was as close to the Oscars as we ever got these days. Tonight she was wearing a dark red knee length silk dress that flared out into a full bodied skirt. Her dainty silver heels were mired in slim, sexy straps that accentuated silky, smooth and toned legs that went on for days.

  She was of Korean descent, and she had these dark features and creamy complexion that drove me batshit crazy. Her long black hair was pulled into a high updo with silver pins and revealed long, dangling diamond earrings. A pendant necklace gravitated toward a plunging neckline that held enough allure to turn heads, but enough sophistication to make me feel like the luckiest man on earth. Stunning. Absolutely stunning.

  A cop came and knocked on my window, and I slid it open. I didn’t recognize the officer.

  “You Henry Irving?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We heard word you were out here,” the officer replied. “Mr. Iakova said to make sure you made it inside.”

  She gestured toward the reverse traffic lane. “Go ahead and go around that way, and we’ll clear the way for you.”

  “Got it,” I said and toggled the window closed as the officer directed my car.

  “VIP treatment,” Vicki said. “Sexy.”

  “You know it,” I replied. “I’ve got connections in this town.”

  She laughed. “No, we’ve got connections in this town.”

  “That’s what I said, ‘we’,” I chuckled.

  She laughed. Vicki and I met at work. We both worked at a flashy entertainment law firm in Los Angeles. I was a senior partner, and she was a paralegal. We had that sort of coded office banter that in the movies, cues the viewers up for that inevitable passionate love scene over discovery files and Chinese take-out.

  Which makes for great TV, but in real life, people aren’t that reckless with their careers, especially with high powered jobs like we had. So we kept i
t work appropriate, and just enjoyed the daily buzz of unrequited sexual tension.

  Meanwhile, I defended sexy pop stars and entitled actors and got tangled up in multi-million dollar squabbles of, “he stole my song,” and “no, I had it first.” In high end designer labels and flashy smiles, I did everything I could to hide my small town roots and was doing a damn good job at it.

  Just years out of law school, I was bringing in millions for the company and could tango with the best the City of Angels could throw at me. No one would ever guess I was just some kid out of Sedona, Arizona.

  Vicki, however, had been stunted in her career. She never intended to be a paralegal, she wanted to be a lawyer, and she was as qualified as anyone. It’s just the California bar exam is the most difficult in the country, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t pass it. It seemed she was destined to live with her dreams literally in sight, but forever out of reach.

  Everything would have stayed that way, more or less, if my sister back in Sedona hadn’t gotten framed for a murder. I flew back home to help sort out the situation, and it was worse than I thought. With Sedona’s finest as a public defender, and the evidence stacking up, Harmony didn’t stand a chance.

  I spent days on end sorting through evidence and security footage, and came up against wall after wall, her lethargic lawyer not the least of my problems. Then, when it seemed I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go with her case, there was a knock on my parents’ door. It was Vicki. She had heard about my quest in Sedona, and came out to offer her legal assistance. I had never been so grateful to see anyone in my life.

  We set up a makeshift legal office-slash-love nest in my parents treehouse and then recruited the help of the only other person in Sedona that we found that might believe in my sister’s innocence. It was local crime blogger, nineteen year old AJ Castillo.

  Harmony’s lawyer, however, was firmly settled on a plea deal that would send her on a nice little Piper Chapman quickie, with a felony record in the fine print. We went behind his back and did his job for him, and uncovered evidence that went all the way back to the Russian mob. But her lawyer, with whom we have since mended fences, would hear nothing of it. So, Vicki and I both busted our asses to pass the bar in Arizona, got licensed before the trial, and then ousted the crappy public defender.

  After we cleared Harmony’s name, and the dust all settled, we realized we had something here. Vicki was now an Arizona licensed attorney, and AJ, who had been a somewhat directionless community college girl, seemed to have found her calling after cracking a murder case. And I had started my own legal team with nothing but a treehouse and a cell phone. How could we just walk away from all of that? Well, we didn’t.

  Within a month’s time, we packed up everything, and Vicki and I moved in together into a cozy cottage in Sedona. Then, we got a small office space, and I started my own practice with Vicki and AJ. That was about eight months ago.

  We’ve got enough clients to keep us busy, and now here we were climbing the ladder to the top of the small town food chain. And that was something. It may not have seemed that much to me during those L.A. years, but the longer I’m here, the more I realize, it really is something.

  The police escort led us to go the opposite direction in the other lane and approach the performance hall from the other side, while the rest of the traffic jam waited for the disturbance to clear. Finally, I parked and squeezed Vicki’s hand, and she smiled.

  “Here we go,” she said. “Ready to see some nakedness?”

  “Not this kind,” I mumbled.

  We got out of the car and approached the steps to the Performing Arts Hall. If the scene down the block was bad, the scene on the steps was worse. There must have been close to a hundred protestors, which surprised me in a town like this.

  “Geez,” I told Vicki, “I’m from here. We’re not like this.”

  “Apparently we are now,” she said as she checked her phone. “AJ’s just now leaving.”

  “Good for her,” I muttered. “Maybe she’ll miss all this.”

  Two news vans pulled up and reporters rushed out carrying cameras and boom mics. Bystanders filled the sidewalks unapologetically filming on their phones and digital cameras.

  We snaked through the filming crowds and neared the protest groups. I dodged a waving sign that said in large orange letters, Arizona’s Hot, But Hell is Hotter. The groups got louder once they saw the reporters.

  From what I could tell, there were two groups. Lining one side of the steps were the verifiable religious nuts, from whom I gathered believed that Jesus didn’t believe in nakedness.

  Even Adam and Eve Covered Their Nakedness read one sign, Sexual Deviants Will Have Their Place in the Lake of Fire, read another. “No, no, sinful art has got to go,” they chanted as a reporter set up shop in front of them.

  On the other side, were the just-as-nutty feminists. I recognized the red faced woman that had almost attacked my car. She was decked out in a full cheetah ensemble, head to toe, cap, blouse, leggings and dress coat. All she was missing were costume ears.

  She now yelled in a shrill voice, “Women, you deserve better than this!” Someone stuck a handheld recorder in her face, and she got more excited. “You don’t have to degrade yourself for the sake of art! Art comes from what’s between your ears, not what’s between your legs!”

  I couldn’t escape the irony that she wanted to argue about women being dehumanized, yet she wanted to dress up like a jungle animal. Her camp had more signs of Porn Hurts Women, and You Are More than Your Body. They lined the steps on either side, so we had to walk the gauntlet between the two camps and listen to their yelling. In front of us were two middle aged men, and the angry cheetah lady stuck her phone in one of their faces.

  “I’m filming you go into this den of whores,” she yelled. He shot her a middle finger and tried to push her phone out of his way, which only encouraged her. “What’s your name, sir, what’s your name? You don’t want to tell me your name? You don’t want to stand up for your choices, huh? Whatcha packing in there, big man, that you aren’t man enough to stand up for what you do and where you spend your leisure time? See this?”

  He tried to walk on, but she followed him. “I’ve got this saved, and I’m posting it to social media so that everyone can see that you went inside this event to gawk at naked women. We’ll find out your name, too, and tag you in it. We’ll find out. Don’t you worry about that!”

  “It’s art, you morons,” the guy muttered.

  I shook my head. Don’t even try, dude, don’t even try.

  “Oh, art, huh? This is what you call art?” the cheetah lady shrieked. “Degrading and objectifying women? Do you know that pornography is what feeds human trafficking? How do you know the actors in this show aren’t enslaved?”

  “How do you know any of them are enslaved?” the guy stopped and turned to her in agitation.

  His tirade effectively stopped foot traffic into the building, and created a crowd on the steps that flowed down onto the sidewalk below. Cell phone videos dotted the steps and sidewalk like digital votives at a funeral vigil.

  I ducked as a news reporter turned his focus on the exchange between the two parties. Vicki and I stood in the crowd, sandwiched between the two groups, filmed at every angle.

  “Isn’t the minimum wage fry cook at McDonald’s enslaved in a sense?” the guy continued. “I mean, really, aren’t we all slaves to capitalism? It’s just art, lady, don’t get your panties in a wad.”

  Some people clapped at the insult, and there were a few cheers.

  “Oh,” she yelled and shook a rigid finger in his face, “How dare you discuss my undergarments! You don’t have that right! You don’t have that right!”

  “You flatter yourself,” he said. “No man in America wants to even think about what’s in your undergarments. Feminazi bush that hadn’t been trimmed since the eighties.”

  The crowd erupted into a massive cheer, and the angry lady exploded and jumped over t
he railing to attack the man. The news camera man shoved his way through the crowd and crouched down to get a good shot.

  The woman’s compatriots tried to restrain her, while one of the religious nuts yelled, “You know what another culture thought of as art? The Romans called art sacrificing enemies of state to lions and watching it as entertainment. Would you watch that?”

  The guy laughed. “It was the Christians they sacrificed, and yes, I would watch if you were one of them. Pay per view, buddy. Pay per view.”

  The religious nuts oohhed in fake compassion at the burn. “That’s okay, sir. That’s okay. You’ll find the truth one day. I just hope it’s not too late before you do.”

  The cheetah lady had been restrained now, and was trying to regain her composure by being consoled with, “He’s not worth it. He’s not worth it.”

  “Sir, sir,” one of the men from the religious side tried to get the attention of the guy’s friend who had been largely passive throughout the exchange. “Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior? It’s not too late. There is still time for you. You don’t have to be blinded and enslaved by the lust of the flesh. I, too, was once addicted to--”

  The man turned and looked at his opponent dead in the eye and said with sincerity and compassion. “I have no problem with God. I just think he needs better representation. Are you genuinely the best he can do?”

  He then turned and walked into the building on that note. Several people applauded, and I was impressed by the response myself. Vicki and I then reached the cheetah lady. She looked at me like she wanted to cue up her camera. I caught her eye and shot her a withering, condescending glare and I saw a hint of fear in her face, and she left me alone. She went on to harass the people behind us.

  As we walked on, I heard the religious nuts launch into a chorus of Amazing Grace. We approached the door, and encountered a scruffy looking hipster sitting on the ground strumming a guitar and singing “Your Body is a Wonderland.” I smirked and entered the building.

  Vicki and I finally got inside and into the Performing Arts Hall, and there were a couple hundred people milling about. The energy was a little higher considering the scene outside, but mainly it was Sedona’s upper crust out to enjoy an avante garde performance.