“Oh, really?” Kennedy said, in total surprise.
“Yes, during the entire time you were interviewing Ms. Judy Siddons, she didn’t once take her eyes off you — she was totally transfixed by you and your every word. If you asked me, I’d say you could have persuaded her to tell you anything you wanted.”
Kennedy smiled at his superior as he bade him goodbye. He didn’t quite have the heart to tell Superintendent Thomas Castle that less than fifteen minutes ago he had been equally convinced that the very same Ms. Judy Siddons was deeply involved in the death of her ex-boyfriend.
For the Memoir
by Robert S. Levinson
Robert S. Levinson, longtime contributor to and friend of this magazine, passed away in March of this year. He was the author of 13 novels and dozens of short stories, and winner of a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He is currently nominated for the PWA’s Shamus Award for his 2017 EQMM story “Rosalie Marx Is Missing.” We have two more of his stories coming up in 2019.
So, Adam, like you wanted, I’m speaking slowly and distinctly into this damn tape recorder with some more stream-of-consciousness stuff for you to work into shape for the memoir I got going, picking up where we left off on Tuesday...
Out of the blue I got this phone call from G. Jerry Jones, Esq., telling me in a silky baritone I had come highly recommended by a mutual friend and, therefore, was the public-relations guy he wanted to hire to create his image as L.A.’s preeminent criminal attorney-at-law. I’d never heard of G. Jerry Jones, Esq., but I did know the actress he named.
She was new to the business, a beautiful but invisible face, when I took her on as a client.
I pulled strings to get her on The Tonight Show, and that exposure led to her landing the title role in a network series and the costarring spot in a big-budget movie extravaganza over at Paramount. She showed her gratitude by firing me, saying her agent told her she now needed a PR firm bigger than my one-man operation, Michael Allen and Associates, the associates being my cats Velez and Yolanda.
I suppose sending G. Jerry Jones, Esq., to me was her way of making amends, but I had to explain to him that he would be my first client specializing in criminal law and I had serious doubts about how well I could do by him.
He shrugged off my concerns.
It was a gamble he could afford to take, he said. He was prepared to settle for simple, honest effort, recognizing that miracles take longer.
Ours was a successful relationship from the onset.
I portrayed G. Jerry as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that other attorneys feared to compete against in a courtroom showdown.
That image caught on quickly.
The quantity of his cases and the quality of his clientele escalated.
He landed on the cover of Time and Business Week the same week, and we celebrated with dinner at Chasen’s, where they seated us at one of the plush, see-and-be-seen booths off the entrance that usually went to rich and famous faces like Hitchcock, Stewart, Cagney, Tracy, Liz Taylor, and Gregory Peck.
G. Jerry accepted congratulations and handshakes graciously, but otherwise was not his usual cheery self. He seemed edgy, rarely flashed the neon smile he often turned on to sway a jury when the weight of evidence was working against his client. I waited for the right moment to wonder if something was bothering him.
He answered reluctantly after finishing his brandy and soda and signaling our waiter to bring him another. He had to let me go, he said, but not because of the job I’d done for him. He had to let me go because I’d done too good a job portraying him as the new “King of Criminal Law.” His ex-wife Melanie was taking him back into court, using the mountain of publicity I’d scored for him to seek five times the alimony she had agreed to in G. Jerry’s less affluent years.
It’s an unwritten rule in the PR game that you hide the hurt and the anger when you’re dumped — I never understood why that was, but it was — so I sucked in my resentment and told him I understood. We spent the rest of the evening getting drunker than Irish mourners at a wake and parted after sharing bear hugs, a handshake, tears, and one of those whiskey promises sincere in the moment but easily forgotten with the dawn of sobriety and a splitting headache.
Not long afterward, G. Jerry was front-page news again without any help from me.
He had become lead counsel on the defense team representing Dr. Maxwell Edwards, the notorious “Dr. Doom,” who would be facing a third trial for the brutal rape and murder of his pregnant wife Audrey. The jury in the first trial found Edwards guilty of second-degree murder and he received a life sentence, but the conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court after Edwards had served ten years in prison. His retrial ended in a hung jury. Dr. Doom’s people were gambling that the King of Criminal Law would work his courtroom magic and pull a not-guilty verdict from his top hat.
He did.
Genetic testing had come along by then and G. Jerry held up its results as “conclusive evidence” the blood found on Dr. Edwards’s clothing, on wife Audrey’s bludgeoned body, on walls, floors, and elsewhere throughout their Encino home was from a third party, identity unknown. G. Jerry harped on the fact no murder weapon was found at the scene. Most of all, he hammered home, there was absolutely no evidence tying Dr. Edwards to the killing of his beloved Audrey and the child she was carrying.
The prosecution offered the same case it had twice before, unable to effectively puncture any of the new arguments raised by G. Jerry, whose courtroom manner was universally hailed by the media as performance art at its finest.
The jury returned with its not-guilty verdict after deliberating for a scant ten and a half hours. Edwards sat motionless and wept. The King of Criminal Law rose and smiled broadly for the press photographers flooding the courtroom, hands locked and arms raised like a boxer who had proven once more his right to wear the heavyweight crown.
Looking after my own public relations, I called G. Jerry’s office and left a congratulatory message. That was that, or so I believed right up until I got called six months later by his private secretary. Mr. Jones was inviting me to dinner, she said. She told me when, where, and the time like it was a command performance. I asked the reason. She pleaded ignorance in a way that told me she knew more than she was saying.
The Garlic Potato was a blue-collar restaurant tucked away on a side street in a sleepy section of North Hollywood, one of those places where you had to know where you were going to get there — or were someone looking to avoid being noticed.
The place reeked of garlic.
The bar was alive, but the dining room had seen busier hours.
The elevator music Muzak was pumping out featured golden oldies by pop-song stylists like Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney, Pat Boone, Tom Jones, and, of course, “Ol’ Blue Eyes” himself, Mr. Sinatra.
I mentioned G. Jerry’s name and the hostess nodded knowingly and led me to a draped-off private room at the rear.
G. Jerry rose to greet me.
He wasn’t alone.
Over the years I had seen his other guest’s face in the papers and on the television news often enough to recognize Dr. Maxwell Edwards without needing an introduction, but G. Jerry introduced us anyway. Edwards was a muscular six-footer with a grip of iron, strong cheekbones, and a receding hairline. His dull blue eyes seemed to be off visiting some distant planet and he’d forgotten how to smile. His one-dimension voice lacked melody, even when he claimed pleasure at meeting me and urged me to call him “Max.”