Excerpt of The Bad Witness by Laura Van Wormer

Chapter One

"She can’t be dying, Mother," I say quickly into my cell phone, before the light on Sunset Boulevard turns green and the cars start rumbling by again. †I just saw her at the garden center. She was screaming at everybody and looked perfectly healthy to me? W?re speaking of Marion ?Hearn, a woman from my hometown who maintains a somewhat poisonous relationship with my family.

“No, it’s true, darling,” Mother tells me. “She’s been diagnosed with a virulent form of liver cancer.”

I swallow, changing the cell phone from my left hand to my right and rising from the table, covering my right ear against the noise that has resumed on Sunset. I’m not being rude, because my luncheon companion is sitting at another table trying to make up with his girlfriend, which is why I’m here for lunch in the first place.

Mother is saying something, but I can’t make out what. I excuse myself as I slip around a waiter to step inside to a quiet corner of the restaurant, at the side of the bar. “I’m sorry, Mother, what did you say?”

“She really is dying.”

“But why does she want to see me?” I ask incredulously.

“I don’t know, darling.” Mother pauses. “Phillip says she’s dying and keeps asking to see you.”

“Mother, this is SO screwed up!” I finally cry, prompting the bartender to look over in concern. I smile slightly, embarrassed, turn away and lower my voice. Outside I can see that my luncheon companion has just had a glass of water thrown in his face. “Phillip O’Hearn murdered your husband,” I remind her, “and so now he’s calling you to say Marion wants to see me on her deathbed?”

“Sally, please, just come home. See her and then you can fly right back out. I wouldn’t ask you unless I thought it was very, very important.”

If you knew my mother, you would understand how impossible it is to say no to her. She would never ask such a thing of me unless she considered it imperative.

“All right,” I finally say. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call you back as soon as I know when I can get there.”

I disconnect the phone, sighing. My father was killed twenty-two years ago last month in a collapsing building that, it turned out, had been rigged to fall on him. The man responsible was Phillip O’Hearn, a friend, if you can believe, my father had set up in the construction business. Twenty-two years later, the evidence is long gone. O’Hearn Construction is a booming enterprise across seven states, the O’Hearns are filthy rich, my father’s still dead, and my mother wants me to sit at the deathbed of Mrs. O’Hearn and make peace.

God help me.

I walk back outside to my table where Burton Kott is trying to blot water from his suit and shirt with cloth napkins. His girlfriend has fled the restaurant.

Burton is an associate attorney who has been assigned to baby-sit me until I am called into court to testify in the sensational “Mafia Boss Murder” trial currently unfolding at the Santa Monica courthouse.

“Didn’t go so well, huh?” I ask, sliding back into my sea. I squint against the combination of sunlight and car exhaust. It is a typical November weekend in Los Angeles.

“She threw a glass of water at me,” he says.

“I saw. So what did you say? It must have been something pretty bad.”

He looks up from his suit to glare at me. “What makes you think I said anything?”

Inwardly I smile. I went to college in Los Angeles, at UCLA, and have lived among the Burton Kotts of this world. The trick to understanding these children of parents who hit it big in the entertainment business is to understand that they have been pampered as geniuses from day one and have had very little experience with people who might think otherwise. They have only known the best food, education, medical and dental care, toys clothing, cultural experiences, charge accounts and credit cards. As a result, until they reach adulthood (if and when they reach adulthood), you have to make them think every good idea is their idea if you want to get anywhere with them, either personally or professionally. Otherwise, they will reject it.

“It’s a genetic trait women have,” I say to Burton, explaining why I assume it was something he said that made his girlfriend lose her temper. “We always throw things when men hint they never found us sexually attractive, anyway.”

He stares at me a moment. And then he frowns. “Do you think that’s what she thought I meant?”

“I don’t know what you said.”

“I said—” He hesitates. “Well, she said I was too self- involved, and then I said so was she, like when we were— Oh, ” he says despondently, sagging in his chair.

“Yeah,” I say. I pick up a napkin and tell him to hand me his glasses so I can clean the water drops off.

“But you know?” he asks me a moment later. “When a man is not allowed to be a man…” His voice trails off as he looks at me meaningfully. I think I am to understand there was not enough sex in his relationship. I hand him his glasses back.

“She’s probably not good enough for you, anyway,” I tell him.

His eyes settle on the table. “That’s what my mom says.”

I smile.

My name, by the way, is Sally Harrington. I am a producer for DBS News in New York and as I mentioned before, I am here in L.A. waiting to testify in a murder trial. Burton’s firm is defending Jonathan Small, former president of production at Monarch Studios. Jonathan is on trial for shooting Nick Arlenetta, an organized-crime boss from the East Coast. The mainstay of Jonathan’s defense is that Arlenetta was on a killing spree, and to kill him first was the only way to stop him. I’m a witness for the defense because Nick Arlenetta nearly murdered me, too.

“Burton,” I try to say gently, yet loudly enough to carry over the noise of a truck rattling by, “I hate to change the subject—”

“Change the subject,” he begs, signaling to the waiter for a check although neither of us has finished our lunch.

“My mother needs me to go home to Connecticut for a day. Someone close to our family is dying.”

He instantly appears deeply pained and slaps his hand down on the table, making the plates and silverware jump. “No way! You’re going to be called to the stand any minute!”

“You’ve been saying that for two days,” I point out. “And I’m still just sitting around.” I soften my voice and lean forward. “Maybe you could at least check with the big boss and make sure that I am being called to the stand— like today or tomorrow? Or ask him to reschedule me a day later so I can go home and get back?”

Burton absently touches his stomach while he considers this and I wonder if he’s in the right line of business. (My on-again, off-again boyfriend back in Connecticut, Doug Wrentham, is an assistant district attorney in New Haven and I know for a fact that a prerequisite for practicing criminal law is an iron stomach.) Burton stands up, pushing his chair back. Diners are looking at him, no doubt because his wet hair is every which way, and you can see his flesh through his wet white shirt. “We gotta get to the courthouse. I’ll pay the check inside.”

“I wouldn’t ask,” I add, “unless it was very important.”

As Burton is shoving his chair under the table to get clear, I am astonished to see a car slowly driving over the sidewalk in our direction. I shout, “Watch out!” and all the diners react, except for a young man sitting directly in the car’s path who can’t hear me because he has a CD player headset on. I dash across the terrace to haul him backward out of his chair. The car, an old Toyota, crashes through the wrought-iron fencing, crushing it with ease, and comes to a stop on the terrace, the engine still running. The CD listener’s table is decimated underneath. There is the smell of gasoline.

“Call 911,” I yell, moving over to the driver’s window. The diners are stumbling through overturned tables and chairs, fleeing to the street.

The driver is an older man who looks dazed and confused. When he doesn’t respond to my question asking if he’s all right, I ask him in Spanish and he says no. I look down inside the car and see that the front of the car has caved in around his left leg, trapping him. Gingerly I reach into the car, through the steering wheel, to turn off the ignition. “Don’t touch him,” I tell the waiter who has appeared at my side.

“We have to go!” someone whispers in my ear. I look back over my shoulder and Burton taps his watch. “Court!”

I send the waiter inside for tablecloths. When he returns, I gingerly cover the driver as best I can. He’s in shock; he’s starting to shiver. I hear sirens and relax a little, murmuring words I hope are comforting to the old man.

Two police officers appear and I back away from the car. An EMT vehicle pulls in.

“We’ve got to GO,” Burton whispers urgently.

“But we’re witnesses,” I tell him.

“Shit!” he says. “I thought you wanted to go home!”

“Okay, okay,” I say. A large, athletic-looking young fellow blocks my path. I recognize him as the CD listener I had pulled out of harm’s way.

“Thank you,” he says, squeezing my arm. “God, thank you. I would have been killed.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Sally!” Burton whines with some urgency.

I write down the number of Lawrence Bank’s law firm on the back of my card and give it to a waiter to offer to the police. The car valet is quick to retrieve Kott’s BMW and soon we’re on our way.

Sort of. The accident has brought Sunset Boulevard to a crawl. Burton calls into his firm to tell them we’re on our way back to the courthouse.

“Tell them I have to go to Connecticut,” I whisper.

Burton dutifully relays that someone close to me is on their deathbed in Connecticut and I need a day to fly home and then back again. Whoever he’s talking to wants to talk to me directly and Burton hands me the phone.

“Hello?”

“Your mother’s dying?” a female voice asks.

“Not my mother, but someone else,” I say. “But it’s my mother who’s begging me to come home to see this person before she dies.” I hear the woman repeat this information to someone else.

“Oh, hell,” a deep male voice then says into the phone, and I realize it’s the big kahuna himself, Lawrence J. Banks, lead counsel for the defense of Jonathan Small. “Look, I’m sorry and everything,” he says, “but how long do you think she’ll last?”

“Maybe a week,” I say as traffic stops again. As Lawrence (yes, the great attorney is only to be called Lawrence) talks with his office staff, Burton pulls a U-turn back the other way on Sunset, honks his way through traffic to turn onto Olive Drive, and then shoots west on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Lawrence comes back on the phone. “Get to the courthouse,” he says gruffly, and hangs up.

“What did he say?”

“He’ll see us at the courthouse.”

The prosecution finished presenting their witnesses last week, and on Friday the defense started calling theirs. As the third witness for the defense, I was supposed to be out of here by now, but instead have been waiting around since Monday. I’ve been sitting in a room drinking coffee and trying to get some work done until Burton comes to fetch me for breaks and for lunch. Then I am put back into the room and left until about four-thirty, at which time I am taken to the Shangri-la Hotel on Ocean Avenue. From there I spend at least four hours on the phone with DBS in New York, offering whatever assistance I can with the coverage of the trial since I know more about the background of this case than just about anyone.

The elements of “The Mafia Boss Murder,” as it is known, make this trial a tremendous crowd pleaser: a slain organized-crime don, a Hollywood movie-studio executive, an Oscar nominated actress and tons of money. The entire area around the Santa Monica courthouse has become a media war zone. Entrances and exits have been sectioned off with concrete barricades and there are cops everywhere. We have a special plate in the windshield of Burton’s car that gets us waved through the tight security. The perimeter of the courthouse complex is jammed with media. Since cameras are not allowed in the courtroom for the trial, five network news outfits have built scaffolding to the sky to accommodate cameras and shotgun microphones to see and hear all that they can outside. As a witness, this includes me.

I have, to be honest, become somewhat of a sideline story to this trial in my own right. Nick Arlenetta, the “victim” in this case, nearly murdered me last March. At the time I had been covering a story for DBS News about the disappearance of actress Lilliana Martin and inadvertently stepped into the middle of the mob war that has resulted in the trial. Happily, nearly being killed with Lilliana Martin gave me the inside track on this multigenerational war between East Coast crime families— the Arlenettas and the Presarios—and the result was that I wrote and produced the recent DBS News documentary miniseries, The Family.

The first two hours of The Family ran on Sunday, September 9, and it won its time slot as the most-watched program on television. On Monday night, September 10, it came in second. Then the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon horribly unfolded the next day and we turned to a twenty-four-hour all-news format for the next ten days. We put The Family on the shelf until the ratings sweeps in November (lat week) and ran the series in its entirety. It did not win the number one spot on any night, but the ratings for DBS were excellent and I am sort of a hero.

I am still, however, very much the new kid on the TV block. I only joined DBS News full-time last summer from the world of print journalism, and although my title has been boosted from assistant producer to producer, my job is essentially to be the right hand of anchorwoman Alexandra Waring, uncontested queen of the airwaves. On good days, I am gratefully astonished at my rapid climb at DBS News. On bad days I dwell on the fact that no matter what anyone says, my job is still “Handmaiden to the Star,” which is what I was way back, when at age twenty- one in this very town, Los Angeles, I began my career as an intern to the gossip editor at Boulevard magazine.

At any rate, my picture has been in the paper a lot lately, particularly as I am also witness in the “Mafia Boss Murder” trial. “Don’t kid yourself,” Alexandra said to me. “If you weren’t so pretty, the press wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

I don’t know how pretty I am, but I do know that all of my life people have found my looks pleasing. I’m five foot seven, have light brown hair (streaked with blond at the moment, my concession to LaLa Land) and blue eyes. I’ve always gotten regular exercise and now that I’m in the world of TV, I hate to admit it, I watch what I eat. (You never know, they may let me on the air someday. You cannot imagine the tremendous jump in my salary if they do… No, I am not greedy. You grow up with scarcely two nickels to rub together and then you tell me money’s not important. Right… Only if you’ve been there do you know what I’m talking about.)

Where was I? Ah, yes, my alleged good looks. Well, let me tell you, it’s nothing I’ve done, certainly, it’s all in the genetics. My mother, Belle, is a genuine beauty, and my father, Dodge, was a very good-looking fellow. I’m afraid, though, that while my mother—like any genuine beauty—is truly beautiful on the inside (kind, gentle, gracious, patient), I am, like any genetically contrived good-looking person, chaotic and conflicted on the inside (nice, but a workaholic, alternately euphoric and cranky, dreadfully impulsive). At any rate, it’s still very strange to see my face in the big newspapers, because I am from a small city in central Connecticut no one’s ever heard of—Castleford—and I never dreamed I would end up at a TV network, much less be the focus of the press.

Interestingly, it is my mother who has taken all of these recent events in my life in stride, as if she always knew my life would evolve like this. Her only major worry seems to be that I remember to occasionally brush my hair. I usually wear it parted in the middle, and secure the two front pieces back with barrettes. This is what the New York Post insists on calling my “boarding school do,” although I went to public school, thank you very much.

As Burton drives me into the courthouse compound, I think I should have brushed my hair because cameras, I know, are trying to zoom in on me for a close-up. As I walk from the secured parking area into the courthouse, I single out the DBS camera on the scaffolding and give a little wave.

Inside the courthouse it is cool and well lit. We walk down the corridor, where I am, once again, ushered into a small windowless room. I sit down at the plain oak table and look at the clock, wondering if there is time to begin testifying this afternoon so I can get out of here.

Let me tell you a little something about this trial. The case is essentially about two “normal” families, linked by marriage in the 1950s, whose patriarchs worked on the business side of organized crime. One branch, the Arlenettas, operated under the Gambino crime family out of New York City; the second family, the Presarios, operated under the Genovese crime family in New Jersey. The Arlenettas were in restaurant and hotel service; the Presarios, in unions, first construction and then office and hotel and telephone workers.

In the mid 1970s, the second generation of the New Jersey family, headed by Frank Presario, started cleaning up their act—and their unions—to go straight. The New York family, the Arlenettas, embodied by a bold young murderer named Nick Arlenetta, tried to push past the Presario unions to expand into Atlantic City. When Frank Presario blocked the Arlenettas, the Arlenettas put out a hit on him. Unfortunately, Frank’s wife, Celia, was killed instead. Frank appealed to Celia’s relative, Angelo Bruno, the don of Philadelphia, for revenge against the Arlenettas, but Bruno was murdered before he could act. And so, Frank Presario turned state’s evidence to the federal government against the Arlenettas. Young Nick Arlenetta escaped the noose, but his father, Joe Arlenetta, was sent to prison, where he died. Frank Presario then took his two children, a girl and a boy, and disappeared into the witness protection program.

Fast forward to last March: Jonathan Small, president of production for Monarch Studios here in L.A., shot and killed Nick Arlenetta in his office. Jonathan Small, it turned out, was, in fact, Frank Presario’s son, known as a child as Taylor Presario. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, that was shortly after the actress Lilliana Martin and I were nearly killed by Nick Arlenetta. Lilliana Martin, you see, was Frank Presario’s daughter, known as a child as Lise Presario. It was the near murder of us—Lilliana and myself—which, the defense is maintaining, provoked Jonathan Small into killing Nick Arlenetta.

I sit at the table and look at a clock, wondering if anyone will really come to see me. The defense team always says this person or that one will drop in and see me, but nobody ever does, save Burton, who never seems to know what is going on.

I’ve been spending most of my time in this room looking over reams of confidential computer printouts that make up the DBS News network organizational system. Alexandra gave them to me with the vague instructions that I should know the personnel, budget numbers and organizational flow backward and forward, and be prepared to offer suggestions for improvement. Since DBS News encompasses more than three hundred part-time and full-time employees in twelve countries, and my management experience largely consists of being in charge of the milkshake machine at the Castleford McDonald’s when I was sixteen, I am flying a bit blind. The only motivation I can attribute to Alexandra for giving me this assignment is that it is yet another attempt to test my skills.

Alexandra has been throwing all kinds of jobs at me ever since I arrived at DBS News: rewrite this, overhaul that, fly to Atlanta and produce this field report, rehearse this new on-air reporter, work with the techs on reediting the opening visuals of DBS Magazine, watch the new audio man to see if there might be a sexual harassment suit pending, fly to St. Louis and check the affiliate’s field cameras, write and produce a documentary series on the Presario-Arlenetta families, visit showrooms in search of new chair models for the newsroom, set up an interview for Alexandra with Senator Clinton, find out which racehorse in America has the highest stud fees, create five detailed proposals for new programming out of the news division, change the story lineup for tonight, find out if the cafeteria has any avocados.

So now I’m supposed to assess the structure of the entire news organization.

I’m startled when the door to my room suddenly swings open. “We’re going on,” Burton announces breathlessly. “Half an hour.” He closes the door behind him and hastens across the room, grabbing a chair and swinging it around backward to straddle it. “Lawrence is putting you on next.”

The great Lawrence J. Banks, Esquire, is one of the most expensive criminal defense attorneys in the country. Personally, I can’t get past this thing Banks has with, er, big hair. I don’t know how else to describe it. His gray hair is suddenly and rather startlingly fluffed up with hair spray in the middle of his head. He’s pretty big, like six foot four, heavyset, around sixty years old, with immaculate Armani suits, perfect teeth, perfect tan (hey, we’re in L.A.), but then he’s got this big-hair thing going on in the middle of his head. Go figure.

There is another knock on the door before it swings open. It is Cecelie Blake. Cecelie is one of those good-looking twenty-first century women of some exotic unknown ethnic origin. She has a light brown skin, gorgeous long brown hair and slightly oriental eyes. She wears a rock of a diamond on her hand with her wedding band; her husband, I understand, is a professional golfer.

Cecelie comes swooping in and stands across the table, squinting down at me with a critical eye. “The hair,” she says, making her way around the table.

“I was just going to—” I say, rising.

She pushes me back down into the chair with surprising strength. “I was going to say the hair is good. You can comb it a little, but keep the strands falling out of the clips.” She takes my jaw in her hand to turn my face toward her. “Take off the eyeliner. A little mascara, blush, but no lipstick, either, okay? We want you pretty but vulnerable. A little frightened-looking would be even better. Okay?”

“Scared hair, got it,” I say, making motions to get up again, but waiting for her approval in case she’s going to slam me back down in my chair again.

“Go on,” she says.

“Relax,” I hear Burton say behind me as I step into the bathroom. (Witnesses waiting to testify have their own powder rooms attached to their waiting rooms. It’s probably to keep us from getting murdered or something.) I hold the bathroom door open a crack behind me to listen. “She’ll be great,” Burton says.

“She better be,” Cecelie says.

Hmm. Things are not going as well as expected.

Of course, the prosecution did present sixteen straight witnesses whose testimony spelled out that the murder of Nick Arlenetta had to have been premeditated by Jonathan Small.

I look in the mirror over the sink critically. I take the barrettes out and lean over to brush my hair upside down. I straighten up, brush again, then secure my hair. Much better. Then I carefully pull out some strands and let them hang down, hoping they look scared.

Blue eyes are clear and admittedly pretty. I wipe off whatever smudges of eyeliner I had on. I wipe away the shadow of mascara under my right eye. I put on a little new mascara. Good. Nose is good. Cheekbones still high, but I look a little pale. She said blush, right? A touch of contour stuff in the hollows. Voilà. Good. Look good. Brush off shoulders of blue suit. Button jacket. Smooth skirt. Yeah, I’m good. Good Samaritan. Ready to go, ready to testify."