By the time Gloria and Trudy left the Mammoth Agency, they were so consumed with hate that their fistfight was inevitable. Add to that the fact they were stuck together in unmoving traffic for nearly three hours, courtesy of the Assistant District Attorney, and the surprising thing was that they almost became friends.
But let's start at the point when they were both pissed off.
Trudy drove Gloria through the flats of Beverly Hills as giant imported palm trees swayed above their heads. It was one of those perfect L.A. days. Light smog and cool enough to rationalize wearing a hip jacket, the Crayola blue sky boasted just a few tiny puffs of clouds. These days are rare here, but both women were too furious to notice.
Gloria told Trudy about Robby's rape charge with all the sarcasm and cynicism she could muster. Trudy was horrified, which Gloria used to her advantage to hit back at the woman who had publicly called her a "whore."
"You didn't know?" Gloria asked, seemingly flabbergasted. "How could you not know? It was all over the news. He's your husband, for crying out loud."
Trudy was too embarrassed to even comment. But when she learned that the plan was for the secretary to be Robby's lawyer, she grew more livid than before.
"Why you?" she cried. "What do you know about the law?"
"I'm a Stanford law graduate," Gloria said, softly steaming. "If you have any better ideas as to who could defend him on a second's notice, I'm all ears."
"How 'bout any lawyer in the yellow pages," responded the wife.
That was the gist of their first argument. Who knows? Maybe they would've tried to kill each other right then had they not been interrupted by Gloria's cell phone.
It was one of the Stanford professors she had called, one she hadn't slept with.
She explained the situation to the teacher. He was intrigued with the celebrity case and thrilled that his brilliant student had returned to the noble profession. He told her he would give her as much help as he could, but he had a class later that afternoon.
"You have to cancel," Gloria insisted. "Or let your T.A. teach today -- you did that with us all the time. Or swap with another professor. I need you to be available to me all day in case I run into a problem. I'll pay you back somehow, I promise."
He was barely able to utter a few words of protest before Gloria jumped in again.
"This is a good man, sir. He loves his wife and his son. He couldn't have possibly done what they say he did. Please."
The teacher hemmed and hawed, so Gloria resorted to flattery, quoting back to him his own views on justice that he had taught her years ago.
Trudy couldn't help be impressed with the girl's commitment to help her husband. Not only was she persuasive, but it was also clear the professor wasn't getting off the phone until he agreed to help Robby.
"Okay," he finally said. "You got me."
Trudy's contempt for Gloria vanished as she found herself overcome with gratitude.
"All you have to do is get him out on bail," began the teacher. "You don't have to worry about proving him innocent today. So you enter a not guilty plea, the D.A.'ll try to set bail, whatever he asks for you cut by a third, and the judge'll pick something in between. All you have to worry about is the D.A. insisting on no bail at all.
"If that's the case, you make an argument," the teacher continued. "And it's this. He's no flight risk. He has a wife, a kid, and a profession that keeps him put. He's not going to jump bail because no one else in the world is going to pay him that ungodly TV money."
"Got it," Gloria answered.
"Now, the D.A.'s going to avoid all that," said the professor. "He'll insist the guy's a detriment to society and that he'll rape again. It's completely irrelevant. Don't get sucked into it or you'll lose. Instead, what you say is--"
And the line became very staticky.
"Bail... society..." garbled the teacher. "Guilty... innocent..."
And as they drove up into the canyon, the traffic became increasingly heavy. Trudy's forty m.p.h. was forcibly slowed down to a mere five. They didn't know there were roadblocks up ahead, mandated by an unscrupulous D.A. All they knew was that they were barely moving, and they were losing the professor.
"Hello?" Gloria yelled. "Professor? Hello?"
And the line went dead.
"He'll be there when we get over," Gloria confidently told Trudy.
Trudy took a deep breath and sincerely thanked her former adversary.
Gloria was moved. She also knew that if she were to be Robby's agent, a good relationship with his wife would be a huge plus. This was as good a place as any to start.
"Nothing happened last night," she admitted. "I wanted it to, but HE didn't."
Trudy sighed, pleased yet still a tad suspicious. "Why did you want it to?"
"For the same reason you love him," she answered. "He's a wonderful man."
"Yes, he is," sighed Trudy.
"You're lucky to have someone like him care so much about you," she said.
"Yes, I am," answered Trudy.
And as traffic came to a virtual dead stop - the annoying traffic that makes so many Southern Californians want to shoot each other -- Trudy shoved the gearshift into "park" and the two women bonded.
Trudy explained her affair with Artie and told her it was over for good.
Gloria confessed her ambitions to be an agent, why she had walked away from a budding legal career, and everything she planned to do for Robby.
Trudy knew that Artie was doing nothing for her husband, and honestly came to believe that this young woman would bust her ass for him. She had seen her do it with the law professor and didn't see why she wouldn't do that same thing to get Robby a job.
Gloria admitted that she secretly envied the life Trudy had. A wonderful man, a child, a house, the perfect "School, Sweet School" life. She had just never met a single man as great as Mr. Bell. She had slept with many men, some she liked, some she detested, some she even believed she loved until she discovered otherwise.
And Trudy confessed an admiration for the young secretary. She had taken huge risks to give up a solid law career to live in the utterly insecure world she wanted. From what Trudy could see, it was going to pay off for the girl.
Gloria almost blushed at the compliment and felt a genuine warmth for the woman sweep over her. She let her know it.
"If I didn't have such a thing for your husband," she told her, "I think you and I could be the best of friends."
It was a bad choice of words to express how she felt, and she knew it the second Trudy's eyes turned red.
"Well, get over your little crush, my dear," Trudy sniped coldly. "I believe you'll do a fine job representing him, but if you ever lay just one of your fake-nailed fingers on him, I'll kill you."
"That's not what I meant," Gloria began to explain.
"No, it's just not what you meant to SAY," Trudy responded. "It's exactly what you meant."
"No, it's not," pleaded the potential mistress. "It's just that he's an icon--"
"Is this how you're going to get all your clients?" answered the wife. "By sleeping with them?"
"I'm not sleeping with your husband--"
"Then you can sleep with the executives to get the deal made. Why don't you just put a naked ad on the Internet and save yourself the trouble because you're nothing but a two-bit whore."
"Anymore!" responded Gloria, having tried as much as she could. "I'm not sleeping with him ANYMORE!"
"You already told me nothing happened."
"I lied," Gloria lied. "Because I felt sorry for your pitiful homemaker ass!"
"B.S.," Trudy said nervously. "You can dream, but you'll never have him."
"You can dream, but you already lost him!"
"Get out," demanded Trudy.
"What?" asked Gloria.
"Get out of my car now, you little tramp."
"Here?" asked an incredulous Gloria. "No."
Trudy leaned over across Gloria's lap, opened her door and tried to push the secretary out of the car.
"Out!"
"You're insane!" said Gloria who pushed her off.
"You're a slut!" yelled Trudy as she pushed back.
Four arms slapped and flew over the gearshift until Trudy's hand landed on Gloria's throat and she squeezed. Gloria gagged as she lunged her entire body forward, forcing Trudy across the car until the back of her head crashed against the driver-side window. Trudy yelled in pain and anger as splashes of blood splattered over the glass.
But Gloria didn't lessen the pressure, and now it was she who choked the wife. Trudy could only reach behind her to find the door handle and open it, as the two women toppled out of the Cherokee onto the paved canyon road.
Gloria was younger and did TaeBo three times a week and was therefore in better shape. But Trudy was raised a farm girl with five older brothers, thereby making it a fair fight. And so they rolled, and so they fought.
The other travelers stuck their heads out of their windows to see the oddity. A few teen-age boys actually got out of their cars to get a better view of the two goddesses going at each other, as if they were sneaking up to the good seats at a mud wrestling joint.
The rookie cops up ahead, who didn't know why they had to put up roadblocks in the first place, wondered if they should stay at their posts or run down to investigate the shouting they heard. But when the shouting got louder and they heard more car doors opening, they knew they had to hurry down the road.
As they first turned the bend, they could see a stylishly-dressed blonde woman shove a stylishly-dressed brunette woman's face into the damp brush. The brunette, who was already bleeding profusely from the back of her head, spit and sputtered as canyon dirt filled her mouth. But somehow she managed to grab hold of the blonde's long mane and pull. The blonde screamed as she was yanked back, and the brunette took the opportunity to grab her arm and twist it around her back, forcing it higher and higher up towards the nape of her neck till it snapped. One of the teen-age spectators threw up at the loud CRACK of the breaking bone.
The rookie cops arrived moments after that and yanked the women apart, cuffed them, read them their rights and then called the paramedics who drove the screaming beauties to the nearest E.R.
Many hours later, the illustrious Norman Jackson defended the women at their bail hearings. Roughly an hour after that, the two women greeted the two men in the jailhouse lobby.
The moment Trudy saw her beaten husband, she threw her arms around him.
"You poor thing," she cried, her true emotions revealed to anyone who bothered to watch. "What did they do to you?"
"Doesn't matter," he answered, throwing his arms around his wife as well. "I'm so sorry about what happened last--"
"Shah," she said as she ran her fingers through his reddish-brown hair. "Shah."
"Nothing happened last night, I swear," he said.
"Good," she said. "But if it did, I don't care. I'm the one who messed up, Robby. I'm the one who's so, so sorry."
"I love you," he said as his eyes welled up.
"I love you so much," she said crying.
Gloria watched the husband and wife gaze into each other's eyes oblivious to the array of cops and thugs milling about the jailhouse, and she just wanted to puke.
She'd never get to represent this guy now, she realized.
She kicked herself for letting Robby down like this. She was supposed to help get him out, not the other way around. She didn't live up to her end of the bargain, so he had no reason to live up to his. And even if someday she could convince him to let her represent him, there was no way the wife would ever go along with it after she virtually rendered her unconscious. She kicked herself for that, too, for losing control and showing her true feelings. She still had so much to learn from Artie.
And she knew that before she could ever even broach the subject with Robby again, she would have to break up his marriage for good.
She smiled to herself as she realized it wouldn't be too hard.
*** Up Next: "Artie Saves His Ass" ***
The main characters in this e-novel are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual individuals, whether living or dead (except for Jeff Abugov who is a real screenwriter, director and producer.) Although certain real people and companies are mentioned in this e-novel, all of the events are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual events.
Copyright © 2015 Tinseltrash, Inc.