Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  With all the anguish of an open custody battle, and Jack’s short temper with the boy, Danny still cares about his father.

  ‘Your dad’s fine.’

  He starts to eat again.

  ‘But Melanie is dead,’ I say.

  He stops for a moment and looks at me, swallows hard. There was no love lost with Melanie, the usual friction of kids with a stepparent. But still I can tell that he is rattled by this news. To the young, life is an infinite, never-ending party. Even for kids like Danny, who live outside the loop of their peers, death is a vagrant who wanders another street. I had watched him at Nikki’s funeral. To Danny it was something surreal to have known someone, to have talked to and touched someone who was no longer with us.

  ‘How’d it happen?’ he asks.

  ‘They don’t know for sure. The police are still investigating.’

  ‘The cops?’ he says.

  ‘They investigate any cause of death that is not natural,’ I tell him.

  ‘Oh – I guess so,’ he says.

  He’s back to the spoon. But I can tell things are rattling around upstairs under that mop of hair.

  ‘I guess Dad’s pretty shook up.’

  ‘You could say that.’

  I don’t tell him that the police are looking to question his mother. He will find out soon enough. I can hope that in the interim, circumstances might conspire to put her in the clear. Little sense in worrying the kid until I know more.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I say. I’m eyeing him as this news goes down with the soup to be digested.

  ‘The wax,’ he says, ‘is it white, pretty clear?’

  ‘Emm?’

  ‘For the model,’ he says.

  ‘Ah. Yeah. In a block,’ I say. ‘A white block, as I remember.’

  ‘Will you help me find it first thing?’ he says.

  ‘Sure. Eat and get some sleep.’ Earth to Danny. The kid is off on a frequency of his own. What is left of my family is coming apart, and Danny Vega is worried about wax.

  This morning I am running on adrenaline and something that looks like the discharge from the Exxon Valdez. I take a sip and my tongue curls like a slug in death throes. An hour’s sleep in a night can do funny things to your eyes. I wonder if maybe the sign over the little drive-in stall read ‘Esso’ instead of’ ‘Espresso.’

  When I arrive, Harry Hinds is in my office, borrowing my morning paper. Harry has an office down the hall. We share a library and reception services and have talked about a partnership. It’s one of those things, we talk, but neither of us is willing to make the first move. Like Harry says, ‘Why ruin a good friendship with marriage?’

  Hinds is almost twenty years my senior, a fixture in the legal community of this city. A balding head and a nose like Karl Malden’s, he has done some heavy-duty criminal work in his day, and now talks a lot about retirement. Those who know him well tell me that Harry has been talking about retirement since he passed the bar forty years ago. I have no doubt that when the end comes they will have to pry Harry’s dead fingers from his briefcase, which he packs like a portable office. For Harry there are too many psychic battles ahead to pitch it in. He now feeds on referrals from my practice along with a steady diet of his own clients and acts as my number two in heavier cases.

  This morning Harry’s on a roll, newspaper in hand, feet propped on the edge of my wastebasket, uttering suppressed profanities, little whispered vulgarities mixed with what for Harry when talking politics passes for reason. Harry hates all things official, with a special fetish for politicians and their hangers-on. He is not a Republican or Democrat. Harry is of his own affiliation, a party conceived under the tree of distrust for government and fueled by a zealot’s devotion to a creed. He is what I would call a ‘social contrarian.’ Harry is largely against everything.

  Lately he’s gone into the clipping services, taping articles from the morning papers to various areas on my desk. It is his effort to enlist the apathetic. Each day I find a new batch of these, his musings penned on square-inch Post-It notes, the travails of the world, all the things Harry can do nothing about but bitch.

  His interests are eclectic – world trade; the national debt, which is too big, and the nation’s defenses, which are too small; the environment, which is overly protected, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it seems the polar hole in the ozone has its effect on Harry. On those days he joins the Greens. Never let it be said that Harry is bewitched by the forces of consistency. And always there is a side to him floating just above the waterline of humor, when you never know if Harry is truly on the level.

  Without even saying hello, Harry is reading to me, a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. It seems the federal government has sold two truckloads of used computer equipment for forty-five dollars. Harry bitches about the price, the dousing of taxpayers, until he discovers further on that the government wants the equipment back. In an instant, less time than it would take to squeeze a trigger, Harry has chained himself to the bulwarks of free enterprise, shouting the battle cry: ‘fucking Indian givers.’

  Another paragraph and Harry discovers why the government is reneging. These particular computers contain confidential information, the names and addresses of hundreds of federally protected witnesses, carted away for their own safety, information which a government technician has failed to adequately erase before selling the computers. Questions of political theory land in the dustbin as Harry sees a wedge of opportunity.

  ‘Can you imagine all the puckered assholes?’ He says this with a wicked gleam in his eye, like a schoolboy who’s discovered a treasure map.

  ‘You know,’ he says, ‘we should hang this on the bulletin board in the county jail. Your government at work for you. A snitch’s worst nightmare.’ Then he giggles in the pitch of a cheap tenor.

  This is the Harry I know. He can go every direction at once, with the only true course change coming on the winds of opportunity. The notion of some prosecutor whose case would be creamed because his ace witness suddenly grew legs and walked, or suffered a bout of terminal laryngitis on the eve of trial, these are thoughts destined to catch Harry’s fancy.

  After all things are said, Harry is a defender, dyed-in-the-wool, sworn to the cause of the underdog. He views any commitment to the objective processes of the law as its own form of treason. In trial before the bar, Harry takes no prisoners. He will seize and hold tenaciously any edge that is offered by circumstance. It is just that Harry’s idea of happy circumstance can at times be a little skewed.

  For the moment I leave Harry in his negative nirvana, uttering the party mantra over the sacred scrolls.

  I pick up the phone to call Clem Olsen, a friend at police dispatch. Clem and I went to high school together. He has always been a straight shooter. When he can he will talk, little musings like the oracle on Delphi – he will tell me what is wafting on the airwaves of the police band.

  I get him after two rings.

  ‘Clem,’ I say. ‘Paul Madriani here.’ Light-voiced, I make it sound like a social call.

  ‘Hey, baby.’ Clem has called everyone he knows ‘baby’ since the tenth grade. I have heard him on tapes do homicide calls like the Wolfman, while frantic citizens scream hysterical gibberish about blood and bullets on the nine-eleven number.

  Clem never made it to college, instead he did the woodshop routine and left school without a clue, until the Army got ahold of him in the Vietnam draft. They taught him how to kill, and later radios. From these Clem found his own way to the police department.

  ‘You gonna make the reunion?’ he says. This affair, it seems, occurs every five years now, where Clem, for one shining night, rises to the level of some higher aspiration as class MC.

  ‘Gonna try,’ I say.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You remember the girl, the blonde from homeroom our senior year, the one with the hooters like two dead cone-heads? Do you remember her name?’ he says. ‘Can’t find her on the mailing list.’

  This, a girl’s fo
rm from twenty-five years ago, is something Clem would etch in his mind like the inscriptions of the Commandments in stone.

  I tell him I can’t remember. I don’t puncture the illusion that nature has by now probably worked its will, and that gravity has no doubt taken its toll. I could tell him to look at his own love handles, which now sag like sodden saddlebags from his hips. But with Clem, memories of the past are always more valid than images of the present.

  ‘Listen, I got a favor to ask.’

  ‘If I can,’ he says.

  ‘Last night there was a shooting – a legislator’s wife out in the east area.’

  He cannot have missed this. Melanie’s death, while too late to make the first-edition papers, has hit the a.m. news shows, both TV and radio, with all the cheery dignity of checkout-counter journalism. The video cameras panned the body all the way into the coroner’s van. The reporters with their mikes and plastered hair did everything but zip open the body bag to see if she was wearing her nightie.

  ‘I heard,’ he says.

  ‘If you can tell me,’ I say, ‘have there been any APBs? Anybody they’re looking for in connection, maybe for questioning?’

  A long pause, like he knows but is not sure whether he should tell me.

  ‘Wouldn’t be you got a client?’ he says.

  Clem is a friend, but he has never been close enough to climb my family tree. He has no sense of my kinship to Laurel, or for that matter her former relationship to the grieving legislator.

  ‘Not at this time.’ I won’t lie to him, but I shave the edges of truth a little.

  ‘I’d have to check the overnight dispatches,’ he says. ‘Can I call you back?’ Clem wants to make discreet inquiries to determine exactly how much he can tell me.

  ‘Sure thing. I’ll be here all morning.’ I give him the backline number so he can call direct, around my receptionist. On items like this Clem doesn’t like to talk through middlemen.

  Harry’s into another incantation, with more gusto now that I am off the phone, still chanting from behind his curtain of newsprint.

  ‘Health-care reform by the same crowd who gave us tax simplification,’ says Harry. ‘Why don’t I believe it?’

  I ignore him and hope it will go away.

  ‘You know they will exempt themselves,’ he says.

  I don’t know who he’s talking about, and I don’t want to ask. But Harry volunteers.

  ‘Fuckers in Congress,’ he says. ‘They wanna be able to roll their asses over to Bethesda at the first sign of a sniffle, for the red carpet treatment. A private suite with hot and cold running Navy nurses,’ he says. ‘That’s so they can have a good grope and get saluted at the same time.’

  Harry fans a page and looks for more grist for his mill.

  ‘So there’s no word on her?’ He says this in a different tone. This time I can’t mistake the subject of his inquiry. He’s talking about Laurel. Harry knows that I am in a family way on this thing. I called Harry early this morning. Got him out of bed and told him about my all-night stand at Vega’s house and the attempt at inquisition by Jimmy Lama.

  ‘No word,’ I say.

  ‘You can always hope,’ he says. ‘Who knows? Maybe they’ve given her up. Found another suspect.’

  ‘I might feel better if I knew what the the cops had.’

  ‘Maybe you wouldn’t,’ he says. ‘Maybe she did it.’ This is Harry, soothing you with his blarney one instant and honing the knife’s edge on your open wounds the next.

  I give him a look, like thanks for the comforting thoughts.

  ‘Well, hey, it does happen,’ he says. ‘Crime of passion, the tangled triangle,’ says Harry. ‘Two women doing battle over the same man. Jealous ex and the beautiful younger wife.’ He gives me arched eyebrows over the press-cut edges of the morning paper.

  ‘Vega would love you for the thought,’ I tell him. ‘The women in his life ready to kill for Jack. It’s a premise to fatten his ego.’

  The Capitol dome will float ten feet higher if this notion were to find public expression. But Harry is right. It’s a theory not likely to be lost on an eager prosecutor.

  ‘And where did she go?’ Harry’s talking about Laurel.

  ‘You think it’s just coincidence?’ he says. ‘She happens to vanish the night her ex’s latest squeeze buys it. Doesn’t tell the kids where she’s going. Just takes off for parts unknown.’ Harry’s playing kibitzer for the devil, musing behind the paper, foraging for something more to raise the level of his bile.

  ‘Irrespective of your feelings,’ he says, ‘I think you gotta admit, the cops might have good reason for suspicions.’

  ‘Joining the force, are you?’

  ‘My feet aren’t flat enough,’ he says.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ I tell him. ‘Lama must have thought he was having a wet dream the minute he found out Laurel and I were related. Blood, marriage, it wouldn’t matter. It’s any way to drive the sword with that one.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ says Harry. ‘How’s it feel?’ He wiggles his ass a little deeper into the chair, as if to reveal where Lama might have buried this thing in me.

  ‘From what I hear,’ he says, ‘whenever Jimmy is in pain, it is your name he takes in vain.’

  I don’t answer him.

  The phone rings on my desk.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Clem here.’

  ‘That didn’t take you long,’ I say.

  ‘Heyyyy, the Wolfman don’t disappoint.’ A voice like somebody sandblasted his vocal cords. ‘You must be clairbuoyant.’ Clem’s understanding of the language does not come from reading it.

  ‘Like you said, APB went out at oh-two-twenty today,’ he says. ‘Issued for one Laurel Jane Vega, age thirty-six, height…’

  ‘That’s all I need.’ I cut him off.

  ‘And a bad actor at that,’ he says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Listed as possibly armed and dangerous.’

  This means that Laurel, if she is found, would be taken at the point of a loaded pistol. Some foolish gesture, a wave of a loose hand through her hair, and I could be minus one more family member. More stark than this is the thought that Clem’s superiors have allowed this information to come my way. Whatever they have linking Laurel to murder, they see as solid.

  Chapter 4

  Like clockwork I do the gym every Thursday at noon, the place Laurel used to work before she disappeared.

  It’s a dozen blocks from my office to the Capital Gymnasium and Athletic Club. At twelve-fifteen I get an urgent message delivered on the squash court. I take my leave, to one of the white telephones lined in cloistered booths in the foyer.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Paul.’ She is breathless.

  When I hear the voice I have a single question: ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘I don’t have much time. Where’s Julie and Danny?’ Laurel’s voice is strained and tired. What I would expect from someone who has been on the lam for nearly two days now.

  ‘Half the county is looking for you.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Then where are you? Why did you run?’

  ‘I can’t talk.’

  ‘Come in, give yourself up,’ I tell her. ‘They’re calling you armed and dangerous.’

  She laughs at this. A nervous titter.

  ‘It’s no joke. Cops with an adrenaline rush have a habit of shooting,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’ll be okay. Do you have the kids?’ Laurel’s mind at this moment is a monorail, single track and rolling with her children on board.

  ‘I did until yesterday. Jack had ’em picked up from school by one of his AAs.’ These are gofers who do menial tasks for legislators – lackeys-in-waiting.

  ‘Damn it.’ Silence on the phone while she thinks. I can smell it like burning neoprene coming over the line, the machinations of panic on the run. Still, Laurel has not completely lost her mind. She has found me in the one
place where Lama is not likely to be eavesdropping. With Jimmy you can’t take much comfort in the formalities of magistrates and judicially ordered wiretaps. I’ve suspected for days now that my phone has suddenly become a party line.

  ‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. Her kids.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want them out of there.’

  I think her brain is scrambled. ‘You want them on the run with you?’

  ‘No. No. A friend,’ she says. ‘In Michigan.’

  ‘That’s not my biggest concern at this moment,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ and she’s gone from the phone – a receding voice, sound vanishing like fog on a warming day.

  ‘Hello. Are you there?’ I get mental images – Laurel swinging around some corner, enough tension on the phone cord to break it. Then I hear her breathing closer again.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Police just swung by in the parking lot,’ she says. ‘It’s okay. They’re gone now. Probably just a coffee break,’ she tells me. ‘My picture is everywhere,’ she says. ‘Even up here.’

  I could get a map and play with little pins, my twenty best guesses on where ‘up’ is.

  ‘Use your head,’ I tell her. ‘You’re no good to your kids dead or in prison. Come in and we’ll deal with it.’ I try to engage her in conversation. I ask her where she was the night of Melanie’s death, hoping for an alibi, something I can bootstrap into an argument for our side, to induce her in.

  ‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. She’s back to her children.

  ‘They’re fine. You’re the one in trouble,’ I tell her. ‘Come in, I’ll meet you, pick you up. I’ll make arrangements with the DA to surrender,’ I say. ‘It’ll go much better at trial. We’ll have a shot at bail,’ I tell her. I’ve got more closers than a used-car salesman. None of them working.

  ‘Not till the kids are gone,’ she says. ‘Out-of-town. Then I’ll surrender.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I have a friend in Michigan. Went to college together. She’s willing to take the kids, keep them there quietly until this is over.’

  ‘Your kids can handle it,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take care of them, keep them out of it.’