Blind justice, p.1
Blind Justice, page 1
part #2 of Emerson Justice Series
Blind Justice
Emerson Justice Book 2
Rachel Sinclair
Copyright © 2019 by Debra Moore
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 1
Bianca
Bianca Giancomo hummed some bars into her special computer that translated her voice into notes. She’d always seen music in her mind, although she wasn’t quite clear exactly how that worked, as she had never seen anything, in real life. Yet, by the time that she was only two years old, she had seen music in her mind’s eye. She could still remember being very young, and hearing the melodic voice of her mother, who was trained as an opera singer, but never really made a splash in the opera scene. Bianca knew that that was the frustration of her mother’s life, for Olivia Giancomo never made a living doing what she loved.
Bianca, on the other hand, even though she was the woman, the girl, who was never supposed to go anywhere in life, did just that. A brilliant composer, compared by some to be the blind Mozart, Bianca was composing her own music at the age of four. That was when a music teacher had noticed her ability, and that music teacher bought her her first computer program that translated the music in her head into actual notes on a bar. He had to buy her this particular computer program, as it was very expensive, and her mother made her living as a bartender in the bar that was directly below Bianca and Olivia’s apartment. As Olivia had grown up in New York City, where the rent was notoriously expensive, Olivia barely made enough money to pay that rent, even though the apartment was rent-controlled.
By the age of 21, she had graduated with her Master’s from Julliard, and she was on her way. In the world of today, the great composers were not necessarily composing music for the masses, or for opera. The specter of Mozart or Beethoven writing compositions that were to be played in front of large audiences, without any context, was not really where it was at in today’s classical music world. It certainly was not where the money was. No, the Beethovens and the Mozarts of today were working in the movie industry, just like Bianca was. Of course, just like many other industries, the movie composer industry was dominated by men, mainly white men. The names everybody knew – Hans Zimmer, John Williams, John Barry, Thomas Newman, James Horner, etc. - were definitely a certain gender and a certain color. Which made it all the more remarkable that Bianca, the daughter of an Italian immigrant bartender, would make the splash that she did. She was the first woman to ever win an Academy Award for best original score, winning this award for a period piece that she did for Ang Lee. Mr. Lee was the first director to really give her a shot on one of his earlier films, and he had used her ever since.
She took a deep breath, and thought about the fight that had happened that morning between her and her sometime boyfriend, Chris Jenkins, another poor kid who made good, in front of the camera. He was widely regarded to be the next big thing, after nailing a slew of indie parts in his younger years, giving him cred, before headlining his first big blockbuster action film. Now, he was sought after by every hot director in town, for his blockbuster made a ton of money, and even earned him an Oscar nomination, which was very unusual for action stars. Chris was different than many action stars, however, because he used method acting to get into his role.
Bianca actually hated that about him. Whatever role it was that he was working on, he became that person, no matter how psychotic that person happened to be. And his action star role was more of a antihero, because he was portraying a serial killer vigilante, a kind of Dexter for the big screen, and, since his character was a lone wolf psychotic person who was determined to rid the world of evil, one person at a time, Chris was very difficult to be around while he was working on these films. Bianca found him to be paranoid while he was inhabiting the role of James Palmer, the vigilante serial killer. He told Bianca that there were nefarious plots all around him, people out to get him, and Bianca wondered if he was actually going into full-blown psychosis, or if it was just simply him deeply inhabiting the part of James.
In between the films that he made, the blockbusters that were known as the blood films - Blood, New Blood and Blood Sacrifice were the three films that he had made that featured James Palmer, and the studio had planned at least three more - Bianca encouraged him to take on lighter roles. She wanted him to inhabit a character who wasn’t so dark. She was an avid reader of braille, and always had been fascinated with the lives of movie stars in the days gone by. One in particular was Marlon Brando, and she was taken in by his story of profound mental illness, which might or might not have been a result of his method acting, of which he was one of the first proponents. Then again, some of the biographies that she had read about him said that he had suffered from mental illness even as a child, and it was caused by, at least in part, his alcoholic mother and tyrannical father. Still, Bianca concluded that Brando’s method of inhabiting his characters’ psyches could not have helped matters much on the mental illness front. Likewise, she was sure that Chris’ method acting was not helping his psyche, either.
She walked to her window, felt the chill, and went and got one of her sweaters out of her closet.
She went back to her computer to continue composing the score that she was working on for a new director in town, Jonathan Wilson, who was eager to work with her on an independent film that was based on the life of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
It was then that she got the call.
The call that she never wanted to get, yet somehow, she knew that she would at some point. Chris was just too volatile, too paranoid, too violent, for him to live a long and normal life. She knew in her heart that he was going to be dead sooner as opposed to later, so, when she got the call that he had been killed on the set when a prop gun that he was using turned out to have actual bullets in it, she slumped in her chair, but she was not surprised.
Oh, she was surprised that apparently Chris was killed by a freak accident, as opposed to being killed by his own hand, which was how she always assumed he would go.
But she was not surprised that, at the age of 27, Chris Jenkins’ remarkable Hollywood run had come to an end in a most violent way.
Chapter 2
Emerson Justice
“Arabella, I’m warning you, get your butt down here right this very second and get ready for school.” I knew that taking in a headstrong, extremely intelligent, 14-year-old girl whose parents were drug addicts who both died young, was going to be difficult, but I could not imagine just how difficult it would be. Thank God Luna kept Arabella around. I knew that if Luna were not around, Arabella would’ve been living on the streets by now. But, since she would never leave Luna, her nine-year-old sister, Arabella reluctantly stayed in my condo, where she belonged, and didn’t try to run away and live with some hoodlums on the street, like I knew she really wanted to do in her heart. Arabella was a girl who did not like rules, and I had to impose nothing but rules on her.
She was standing at the top of the steps, or, rather, she was sitting on the top step, her head in her hands. Her nails were black, as usual, as that was the one thing that she always made sure that she did – paint them black every other day, because, if she didn’t, she would walk around with chipped nails, and she hated that more than anything. Her dark hair had streaks of dark blue running through the strands, and she wore the usual heavy makeup that made her look like Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure, or Edward Scissorhands, in spite of the fact that, underneath all that garish makeup, she was actually a very beautiful girl. But she chose to hide it under pancake makeup, black lipstick, black eyeliner and eyeshadow.
Luna was standing next to me, already ready for school, with her little backpack slung over her right shoulder. She was wearing a yellow dress and sandals, her dark hair held back with a ponytail. She quietly watched her sister at the top of the stairs, not saying a word, because that was the way she was. I could never quite get into Luna’s head anymore than I could get into Arabella’s, and, for all I knew, Luna was just as messed up as her sister inside, but she just didn’t show it. I got the impression that Luna was a girl who did want to follow all the rules, but, deep down, there was a deep well of depression and volatility that was churning just below the surface. Her therapist thought the same thing, and cautioned me that just because Luna did not act out the way her sister did, did not mean that she was well-adjusted. So, in a way, I thought that I had to worry about Luna more than I did Arabella. At least with Arabella, her dysfunction was right there on the surface – she always told me what she felt,
“Where’s Margot?” Arabella demanded. My mother, Margot, was the only person that Arabella got along with. I knew it was because mom was permissive, and also because mom, like Arabella, was left of center. Very left of center.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. She’s probably still in her room, nursing a hangover. Why do you ask that question?”
“Because I want her to take her to me to school, not you. She told me yesterday that she would.”
“Well, maybe her tarot cards told her that today was not a good day to be taking you to school. So in the meantime, I suggest that you get down here right this very second, get your backpack on your back, and come with me and Luna to your school. I don’t have time for this nonsense this morning. I have a hearing that is very important, to say the very least.”
I looked at my watch. It was already 7:30, which meant that both girls were going to be late, as they both started school at 8, and there was a good chance that I was also going to be late for my 9 AM hearing. I didn’t want to be late for this particular hearing, because I knew that the media was going to be swarming the courthouse. And, as what usually happened when the media swarms the courthouse in anticipation of a big arraignment, I was going to be even more late. All because I had a 14-year-old daughter who somehow thought she could not go to school unless my hungover mother took her.
She just crossed her arms. “You go in and see Margot, and you tell her that she promised to take me to school today. I’m not gonna go nowhere until she makes good on her promise.”
What was I going to do? I could go up there and physically pick her up and carry her kicking and screaming down to the underground garage where my SUV was, at which case I would certainly be late for court, because I would be arrested for child abuse. Or, I could go and see if my mother was awake and tell her that she was going to be taking Arabella and Luna to school, whether she liked it or not.
I hated that I was giving into my daughter. All the parenting books in the world would say that what I was about to do was a no no – you are never to give into bullying and intimidation coming from your own child, because kids will always test you, and you always had to be ready with some kind of strategy to show them that you are the boss, not them. But, at the moment, I was at a loss for any kind of strategy that I was supposed to be using with this girl, and I was going to be late for my first hearing for Bianca Giancomo, my new client.
I thought that defending the kid who was accused of murdering Addison Wentworth, an A-list actress who turned up alive, was going to be a zoo. Try defending an Oscar-winning blind composer who was accused of murdering her boyfriend, an A-list actor who was at the very top of his game, who was widely predicted to bring back the era of the true male superstar. There was a hunger for somebody who had the kind of blockbuster big-name of somebody like Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but without the box office misfires that those two men endured all the time. Tom Cruise’s star had been on the wane for many years, starting, really, with the time that he jumped on Oprah’s couch and insulted Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants after the birth of her first child caused a severe postpartum depression. So, in the last few years, there had been a void of male Big Names.
Chris Jenkins was well on his way of being just that – Tom Cruise of 20 years ago, at the top of his game, headlining both action films and heavy drama with equal aplomb and ability. He was going to be that, until he was shot dead on the set of his latest action film, Family Blood, which was to be the fourth “Blood” film in the hugely profitable Blood series that had catapulted Chris to the very top of the industry.
“I don’t have time for this.” At the same time, I knew that Luna had to get to school, and I knew that if Arabella missed one more day, the truant officer was going to be on my ass. I was already in trouble with the school, because she had missed too many days, mainly because most of the time she would get to school, and then ditch. Somehow, I was responsible for her ditching, so I had gotten a warning about making sure that Arabella attended school on a more regular basis. That was the thing about those fancy private schools – they were much more likely to be on the parent’s rear end when their kids would miss a lot of school than public schools were.
At least, this fancy private school was like that.
I looked up at Arabella, saw that she was not going to move a muscle, and immediately went to my mother’s room and knocked on her door. “Mom, can I come in?”
My mother immediately opened the door when I knocked on it. “Of course, dear. You’re always welcome to come into my room. You don’t have to knock. You know that.”
I followed her into her room, and saw that on her table was a tarot spread. She pointed at it. “You’re going into an auspicious time, Emerson. Which is good, because you certainly do deserve it. As you can see, this spread ends with The Chariot, which is a very good card. Victory, overcoming obstacles, meeting challenges. A very auspicious card for you. A very auspicious card indeed.” She nodded her head in approval. “All the surrounding cards are good as well, in their way. Although you do have The Devil in here, and in the position it is in, I have to tell you that you’re going to have to try to not be so much in your head, with your obsessive thoughts. You just have to just go with it, and just let the spirit guide you. If you do that, you’ll come out on top.”
I took a deep breath. “Did the tarot cards tell you that you’re supposed to be taking Arabella to school today? Or any of your spirit guides, did they tell you this? Because if they didn’t, I would fire them, because Arabella is waiting for you to take her to school, while you’re sitting here dithering with these tarot cards.”
She suddenly waved her bony hand in the air, and then gestured to the tarot spread. “I knew when I woke up that I had to do a spread for you. There was just a voice that was calling me to do this. I did not forget about Arabella, but I thought that this was more important. Especially because I knew that you have a hearing on that composer lady scheduled for this morning, and I knew that you would be very nervous about it. Don’t forget that I had predicted that you would get this case, when that poor young man was murdered on the set of his latest movie. I knew it the second Bianca was arrested. Don’t forget I told you that. I told you that she would hire you.”
Well, she was right about that. I didn’t think that Bianca would hire me. After all, in this town, she had her pick of high-powered attorneys. But, it turned out that she was impressed with the last case that I had that was high-profile, that of Carter Dixon, who was accused of murdering Addison Wentworth, who is a legendary actress in her own right. Bianca explained that she wanted to hire me because she saw the compassion that I showed for young Carter, who was a kid who didn’t have anything but a drunk mother. Now, of course, he had everything he wanted – Addison had gifted him $10 million after she turned up alive, because she knew that he was going to have a very good ground to sue her for mental distress, because he was accused of her murder and he went through hell before she turned up alive, having faked her own death. So, in lieu of him dragging her into court and sullying her good name even further, Addison chose to give Carter money in exchange for him signing a contract that stated that he would not sue her in the future. He was happy to take it, and now he was living his dream.
We should all be so lucky.
I took another deep breath. “Mom, did you just tell me that doing a tarot spread was more important than making sure that Arabella got to school on time? I don’t need to remind you that I’m already in trouble with her school, because of all the ditching that she’s been doing.”
