Corrupt Practices (22 page)

The seventy-three-page complaint in
Church of the Sanctified Assembly v. Estate of Baxter
pleads causes of action for fraud, constructive fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and conversion. The Assembly prays for compensatory damages in the sum of $17,000,634, for punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, and for such other relief as the court may deem just and proper. Lou Frantz’s name appears on the last page, his signature executed in a bombastic flourish worthy of a superlawyer. Stripped of the formal language, the complaint charges that over several years, Rich Baxter stole more than seventeen million dollars from the Assembly and that his estate has to pay it back, along with millions more to punish him.

When I phone Raymond to discuss the case the first thing he says is, “I want you to sue them for malicious prosecution.”

“We can only do that if we win.”

“Then let’s win. How long will it take?”

“LA Central’s got a crowded docket. Usually two years minimum, more likely three.”

“That’s too long. I’m seventy-eight years old, and—”

“That’s why I said
usually
. Since you’re over seventy, you can get an early trial date if you can prove that the state of your health is such that you’ll suffer prejudice without one.”

He’s quiet for a moment. There’s a hoarse sound with every breath he takes. “By that legalese, you mean I only get to trial early if I’m so sick I’ll probably die in the next two years?”

“That’s about right.”

He laughs bitterly. “I’ve got stage-three emphysema and a bad heart. Triple bypass surgery three years ago. An assortment of less severe though no less annoying ailments. And chronic back pain from spinal stenosis, though I supposed that doesn’t count.”

“It all counts. I’ll file the petition for a preference today.”

An hour after I submit the petition, Frantz’s office files a response. I thought they’d oppose just to harass me, but to my surprise they’ve agreed with my position. Frantz isn’t doing me a favor. Far from it. He obviously thinks that a quick trial works to his advantage because he has the better facts, that delay couldn’t make his case any better than it already is.

Late in the afternoon, the court clerk calls. He tells me that the judge just settled a case, which opens up a slot for our trial at the end of May, only four months away. I hadn’t expected this. My heartbeat speeds up, and I begin to sweat the way I do when I walk into a courtroom. Even expedited cases usually take more than a year to get to trial. Four months isn’t nearly enough time to get ready. I’m the victim of what attorneys call a
rocket docket
. But there’s nothing I can do about it—I was the one who asked for a quick trial, so how can I complain about getting it? I tell the clerk that the May trial date is fine.

Harmon Cherry used to insist that, despite what the general public and all too many lawyers think, the vast majority of judges and other court personnel are honest people who take their oaths of office seriously and remain impervious to outside pressures. But after my call with the clerk, I wonder. Did Frantz agree to an early trial date because he had inside information about the judge’s schedule? Worse, did he actually influence the judge’s decision? With his legal connections and the Assembly’s raw power, it’s a strong possibility.

During the day, The Barrista is packed with young professionals, would-be screenwriters, stay-at-home moms and their toddlers, and senior citizens stopping for coffee after their morning walks. The knotty pine beamed ceilings, wrought-iron fences, and redwood tables give the place a benign, welcoming feeling, especially when the sun is shining through the skylight. But at night, the place caters to neo-punks, Goths, and bikers, groups that don’t always mesh. This diversity creates a tense, enticing ambience. Quarrels that escalate into fistfights aren’t uncommon.

“They keep me entertained,” Deanna once told me when I asked her about her nighttime clientele. “You know how I like to be entertained.”

On this Tuesday night, the crowd is particularly rowdy. Deanna isn’t here. She has a date, one of the baristas tells me. For the first time in years, I don’t wonder with whom. I imagine how out of place I must look, the studious lawyer sitting in a corner drafting pleadings and reading legal opinions and jotting down notes while all around me young rebels and edgy misfits shout and laugh and curse.

I spend some time writing the answer to the Assembly’s complaint, denying the allegations of wrongdoing. I next turn to the anonymous e-mails sent to Monica Baxter, who left copies with Deanna. The first reads:

Dearest Monica,

Rich was strangled by the demon who shot Harmon. You and your child are next—death by throat-slitting. Your Assembly can’t protect you, not against the conjoined wrath of Satan and God, even less the wrath of man. You CANNOT trust. Disloyalty lingers on the tongue, acrid taste of scorched earth. Escape is your obligation, your communion. Soon we’ll all be awash in blood
.

The other messages are just as gory and just as unenlightening. Rejected pages from a slasher film script, sparing neither mother nor child. By the time I finish, driblets of coffee speckle the papers, the product of trembling hands.

I put the e-mails aside and turn to the Tyler Daniels obscenity prosecution. I want to be prepared when Lovely finishes drafting the motion to dismiss the felony charges. I grew up in Hollywood of the 1980s, when censorship seemed a quaint vestige of the past. So I, like Lovely, had assumed at first that the government couldn’t legally stop anyone from publishing words. I was wrong. During Tyler’s arraignment, Neal Latham tried to tell Judge Harvey about a 1973 Supreme Court case called
Kaplan v. California
. The defendant, who owned an adult bookstore, had the bad luck to sell an undercover cop a book with the rather obvious title
Suite 69
. Warren Burger, the chief justice at the time, noted that the book contained a tenuous plot and descriptions of every conceivable variety of sexual contact, both gay and straight. He wrote that
Suite 69
was so explicit and offensive as to be “nauseous.” The case is a major problem for us because, like Tyler’s stories,
Suite 69
contained no photos or drawings or cartoons—just words. Yet the Supreme Court held that a jury could find the book obscene and therefore illegal. In the face of
Kaplan
, we’ll have to convince Judge Harvey that times have changed, that words shouldn’t be found illegal just because they might make a judge want to puke.

For the next few hours, I guzzle coffee and immerse myself in a series of law review articles about obscenity prosecutions against famous books—
Ulysses
,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,
Tropic of Cancer
. Works by literary giants, part of the curriculum in university lit classes. Any mention of these historical injustices fuels Lovely’s moral outrage at the government’s prosecution of Tyler. “Persecution,” Lovely calls it. She insists that as far as the First Amendment is concerned, Tyler Daniels stands on equal footing with James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller. She quotes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of a work of art.” But while Joyce, Lawrence, and Miller created art, Tyler Daniels littered the Internet with filth. It shouldn’t take a PhD in literature to know that there’s a difference between the two, so what’s so bad about letting the law distinguish between the sublime and the obscene? Is it really true that judges and juries make bad critics?

I hear the jangling of keys in the background. I look up to find The Barrista employees closing up for the night. I check my watch. It’s already five past midnight. I slide my laptop and my papers into my computer bag and sling the bag over my shoulder. I take a last sip of coffee and leave.

It was still warm when I arrived this evening, so I’m dressed in a light T-shirt. Now, a biting wind blows off the ocean. Even though The Barrista fronts on a major thoroughfare, the street is deserted. Los Angeles isn’t like New York or San Francisco, where you can see large numbers of people walking on the streets long past midnight. LA is like some gawky adolescent who grew too fast and so hunches his shoulders in a futile attempt to hide his size.

I start walking to my car, which I parked two blocks north on a quiet residential street. It’s my usual parking place, the closest street that doesn’t have restricted parking.

Most of the houses are dark. The people in this neighborhood go to bed early, probably because they’re mostly families with small children or seniors who’ve owned their homes for decades. The only light comes from the dim, outdated streetlamps, which do little more than cast shadows and attract moths. There are no sounds—no whirring of automobile engines, no music or voices coming from the houses, no birds chirping or dogs barking. And fortunately, no footsteps, not even mine, because I’m wearing sneakers.

The wind blasts through a large pepper tree, rattling the branches. Leaves rain down on the sidewalk in front of me. The dust swirls and blows into my eyes, abrading them when I blink.

Just before I reach the corner, I hear a loud metallic
click
. I’m not sure what it was or where it came from. Maybe it was the sound of a car radiator settling in the night air. I chide myself for being so skittish. I’ve gone down this street late at night a hundred times before.

I walk the next block quickly. As fast as I’m going, the cold has gotten the better of me, and my teeth begin to chatter. I stop where I think I parked my car. It’s gone.

I turn and look back before hurrying down the street another quarter block, but there’s no sign of my car. I retrace my steps a block back. Nothing. I rummage in my pocket for my security key. If I hit the panic button, the car alarm will go off, and I’ll be able to locate the car—unless it’s been stolen. Then it dawns on me that when I arrived at The Barrista, it was street-cleaning time on this side of the street. To avoid a ticket I made a U-turn and parked on the other side. When I look across the street and see my Lexus, I exhale in relief.

I start across the street, passing between two closely parked cars. I turn sideways so I can fit more easily in the space between the bumpers. That’s when the hand grips the back of my neck and shoves me facedown onto the hood of the car in front of me.

I try to pull away, but he pins first one arm and then the other behind me. His sheer strength sends a sickening chill through me.

The beating starts immediately. He’s not alone. They aim their fists at my back and side, their kidney and liver punches generating pain that turns in on itself, increasing by orders of magnitude with each succeeding blow. I cry out for help as loudly as I can, but I’m breathless, the pain like an iron straitjacket that compresses my chest, collapses my lungs, forces me to gasp for air in small gulps. I draw in so little of it that my frenzied shouts come out as thin, impotent grunts.

There could be as few as two and as many as four, all sheathed in black and wearing masks. I don’t know if they’re smiling or gritting their teeth or going about their business impassively, don’t know which of them is punching me at this moment, or maybe they all are because I can’t tell where one blow ends and another begins.

They’re not taunting me, not cursing, not laughing. Their workmanlike silence is more ominous than if they were. This battering feels nothing like that sharp, stunning, heroic pain you feel when someone punches you in the head. This pain is dull and internal and primitive, the kind that makes you sure that when the beating ends—if it ever ends—you’ll piss rivers of blood, you’ll forever walk stooped over in chronic misery, you’ll never go outside at night again, you’ll always sleep with the light on, you’ll die a lingering death. The maxim
kill the body and the head will die
rattles through my brain. And then they beat it out of me.

I struggle, don’t stop struggling, but it’s useless because someone is pinning my arms expertly in some sort of wrestling or martial arts hold. And if he were to let go, I wouldn’t have the strength to fight back, couldn’t lift my arms or legs, much less counterattack. Yet I’m fully conscious, hyperaware, and I sense that that’s exactly how they want me so I’ll remember every second of this beating—some sort of brutal object lesson. They continue jackhammering their fists into my torso. Finally, I retch, spewing liquefying chunks of a half-digested turkey sandwich and five cups of coffee all over the hood of the car. One of my attackers grabs me by the hair and jerks my head back.

“I got a message for you and your loved ones,” he says, his voice like coarse-grade sandpaper. He forces my face back down into the rancid bile and rubs my nose in it. “This thing with the Assembly? Back away. Back completely away.”