Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  ‘That may be our best chance to find him,’ I say. ‘His work.’ Though I don’t have a clue what it is. I try to remember the tenor of our conversation that night. But it wasn’t a meeting where small talk predominated. Kathy Merlow was too busy looking for bodies.

  On the far side at the back of the house there’s a low deck. This leads to a small dining area off the kitchen. Harry tries the sliding door. It’s locked.

  I look at him, raised eyebrows.

  ‘I just want to look,’ he says.

  Upstairs there’s a balcony, turned spindles, and glossy white handrailings, what every little girl would like on her dollhouse. This runs the entire width of the house, to the second-story turret, where the balcony becomes a descending staircase, spiral and wrought-iron to the ground.

  Harry and I climb. On the balcony, the slider between the large bay window and the stairs is locked. Harry has checked this. He’s now wiping little smudges from his fingers off the glass with the bottom of his coat.

  I peer through a small window by the stairs. As vacant as below, a bedroom. My guess is the master. I can see a large adjoining bath.

  The bay on the other side, closest to the Vega house, is a small den. A man’s room. A wet bar, brown wallpaper with ships. There’s a built-in entertainment center on the far wall, a cabinet with one door not closed. There’s a built-in desk in the bay of the window. Depressions in the carpet tell me that furniture was placed in front of this. My guess is a swivel desk chair, something to take advantage of the views from the window over the desk, that could be turned to the TV.

  ‘Nothing here,’ says Harry. ‘We can run ’em down from postal records.’ He’s thinking change of address.

  I’m thinking three strikes and you’re out. Something in my bones tells me that George and Kathy Merlow will not be that easy to find.

  We turn to leave, and I stop, dead in my tracks. Harry’s halfway to the stairs before he realizes I’m not behind him.

  I’m looking from the balcony, the view from the bay window, Merlow’s study. Like a seat in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium, it looks down, over the fence, and directly into a large window in Jack Vega’s house. This is not just any window. It is one of those greenhouse affairs that could house a small family – a glass wall curving from roof to foundation, bigger than the bubble on a B-29.

  Set in the window is a massive bathtub, Jacuzzi heaven, white porcelain on a platform of tile. Strands of yellow police tape bar the door to the bathroom. Something left in Jack’s wake of departure.

  Harry’s finally joined me back at the railing, tracking on the view.

  ‘It’s still preserved,’ he says. ‘We oughta get a court order for Jack’s house.’ Harry wants a look at where it happened. Leaning against the railing, he looks over his shoulder at the gaping glass of what we must assume was George Merlow’s study.

  ‘And we need to find your friend George Merlow,’ he says.

  Chapter 7

  The fourth floor of the county courthouse accommodates the probation department, the cafeteria, and the master calendar of the municipal court. Muni court in this state does small-dollar civil cases, misdemeanor trials, and gets most of its publicity by serving as the clearinghouse for arraignments on major felonies.

  A further arraignment is why I am here this morning, facing a bank of lights and running with my briefcase under one arm through the loading chute of pack journalism, trying to avoid being roped and branded.

  There are a dozen questions shouted my way. The cameras hold back, a lot of long shots with the strobes, file film they can use on another day, when some notorious event occurs, when your client has been drawn and quartered in legal fashion, and you are seen on the tube grinning and cavorting like it’s all in a day’s work.

  Some asshole sticks a mike in my face and asks if my client did it.

  Criminal confessions – film at five.

  From the tenor of his question I’m not sure the guy has a clue as to specifically what it is, other than one of the usual infamous acts certain to nourish an inquiring mind. Otherwise why would his producer have sent him? The information highway, all the shimmering depth of quicksilver.

  I passed Jack Vega on the steps on my way in. He seemed more hostile than usual. Perhaps he was just skulking, trying to find his own way in around the press and cameras.

  I get inside the courtroom door and shut out the din of the unwashed. It is quieter here, more subdued, muted tones, a humming undercurrent of courthouse gossip. Some of these are the legal groupies. What used to be all guys, and now some women, regulars who live in the court’s bullpen, the pressroom downstairs. They have more access to the judges than any lawyer. Some of them have their own keys to the clerk’s office so they can burn the midnight oil.

  They’ll do a filler on page ten from a probate case one day, some Daddy Warbucks who left ten million in trust to his pooch, a shar-pei with a face like somebody’s other end. They’ll do a big-bucks tort the next. But give them a choice, and murder among the tony set will always hit the top on their charts. Rumpled reporters who know how to rifle a clerk’s file. The people you gotta watch. Turn your back, a loose word in the wrong ear, and you become news, not the kind you want to read about.

  I hear my name, the topic of banter. Somebody breaking from one of the cabals in the front row.

  When I turn I am staring Glen Dicks in the face.

  ‘Glen,’ I say.

  ‘How you doin’, Paul?’ Everything is first-name here, but we don’t shake hands. These are secondary relationships. Not ugly, just business.

  Dicks writes for the Herald. One of two papers in this city. He has the edge on the out-of-towners who have come to see because of the political fallout of the case. A legislator’s naked wife found shot has potential.

  Dicks is gray curling hair to the lobes of his ears, and a mustache to sweep your porch with. He wears a sport coat with more things sticking out of pockets than a porcupine’s ass, and bears a gut like a Victorian bustle, which has opened and jettisoned a button on the belly of his shirt.

  He gives me the old saw about a lawyer defending himself. Then he asks me: ‘Is that anything like defending a relative?’

  ‘I don’t know. You should ask my sister-in-law if she feels like a fool,’ I tell him.

  He laughs a little. Dicks is shrewd enough, a goer to events, the watcher of a thousand courtroom brawls, to know there is a tactical downside to my representation of family. Played to the jury in the right tone, a backhanded compliment by a prosecutor, it could sound as if I don’t believe in her case so much as feel an obligation.

  Glen inserts a few delicate probes, looking for anything to get a pencil into. The time frame for trial. Whether it’s likely the defendant will take the stand. Ideas on the number of defense witnesses. He gets quotes he can print, but no information.

  ‘What’s happening here today?’ he says.

  ‘You should ask the DA.’

  ‘Amended indictment,’ he says. ‘They didn’t tell you anything?’

  I pass it off as minor stuff. ‘I assume it’s mostly technical. T’s and I’s,’ I tell him. ‘Crossing and dotting.’

  ‘Emm.’ He is writing this down.

  ‘Any theory of a defense?’ he says.

  ‘Sure. And I’d like to share it with you, just as soon as I have confirmation that the DA is deaf, blind, and doesn’t read Braille.’

  A nervous grin. A look like he had to try.

  ‘How is she taking it?’ He’s talking about Laurel. If he can’t get a real story he’ll go for the human interest angle.

  ‘Except for the bars and the ladies who do the screaming meemies at night, she tells me it’s just like home.’

  He would laugh, but Glen is sensitive enough to get the picture. He’s nodding like he understands, so I give him something he can write.

  ‘She’s facing serious charges,’ I say.

  Little squiggles in his book.

  ‘She doesn’t have a c
lue as to what happened. And like any mother, she misses her kids.’

  ‘The children, they’re with their father,’ he says. Not a question so much as seeking confirmation.

  I nod. ‘They’re not orphans yet. They have their dad.’

  ‘At least for the moment,’ he says.

  A look like maybe I should depose him. My turn for information. He misses only a beat.

  ‘Well, you hear things,’ he says. ‘Courthouse bureau talks to the Capitol bureau. Things like that,’ he says.

  ‘Things like what?’

  ‘Stuff on the assemblyman.’ He tells me this, and then, like speak of the devil, his note pad is up to the corner of his mouth, shading it from any lip-reading, a nervous eye to the door.

  Jack Vega has just entered the courtroom.

  Dicks screws up his face a little, like maybe he’s not sure whether I’ve undone this particular family knot. Maybe Jack and I split poker pots on Thursday nights.

  I let him know, in a few words under my breath, that there is no love lost.

  ‘What are you hearing?’ I say.

  ‘That he’s coming under some intense scrutiny – of the federal variety.’ He gives me a face like some Frenchmen judging a foreign wine. ‘FBI, and the U.S. Attorney,’ he says.

  There has been talk of a hot federal probe for months, a lot of smoke but no fire. Everybody figured the air was clear when a state senator, the acknowledged subject of the inquiry, was given a clean bill of health. It came in a bland statement by the Justice Department, like a medical press briefing on the condition of the legislature – the patient has cancer coming out its ass, but we can’t find it on the X rays.

  Still, maybe Jack’s power party is about to end. He has been doing business with an ardent passion lately, shaking the givers out of the political money tree. With his term ending, Jack’s running out of time, trying to sell his ass before it sinks to the value of Confederate currency.

  ‘What are they looking at, the feds?’ I ask him.

  ‘If we knew that, we’d be doing a story,’ he says. ‘But word is he’s under investigation,’ says Dicks. ‘We hear rumors, no sufficient confirmation yet, just rumors, of another federal grand jury.’

  I would not want to shatter Dicks’ illusions, but if Jack is wearing a wire, he is no longer the one under investigation. Suddenly Vega’s electronic connections are beginning to make sense. It had nothing to do with Melanie’s murder. My guess is that Jack is aboard the good ship justice, chained and manacled, and in the brig. With a full federal court press, the squeeze on, if they got him on film taking a bribe, some hotshot agent looking for an Oscar, Vega would whittle in his pants on show night.

  He would convince the feds that the Capitol is a den of thieves, not that they would need much convincing. And if anyone whispered the word wire, there is not a doubt in my mind Jack would show up with cables coming out his ears and a car battery strapped to his ass.

  I see a guard bringing Laurel in through the steel door that leads from the holding cells. My conversation with Dicks comes to an end. He drifts off to circle again with the pack. Having planted this seed in my curiosity patch, he will no doubt watch to see if it sprouts during trial.

  Laurel is sans the shackles and chains, though she is still wearing the orange jail jumper, like some farmer’s daughter in papa’s overalls. With no jury in the box, for the moment, her looks are irrelevant to the interest of justice.

  She sits down at the counsel table and I join her.

  Not a word, she takes my hand on top of the table. Her look over at me is only fleeting, a smile, forced in bad times. In our few conversations she has seemed embarrassed that her grief has been laid on my plate. There have been repeated promises that she will pay every dime of her legal fees. At one point she even told me to bring on the public defender. She would qualify for services.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ she says. ‘Here today.’

  ‘Just conforming charges to evidence,’ I tell her. It is hard to imagine that they could do more damage. I am thinking maybe some legally ham-handed effort to shore up their special circumstances, to bolster the theory that Laurel was skulking around Jack’s house that night, hiding in closets, waiting for Melanie to come around a corner.

  Harry has his own theory. He is guessing that they will charge Laurel with robbery – the theft of the bathroom rug that she was washing in Reno, and which she has yet to explain. The crime of robbery in connection with a murder falls under the felony-murder doctrine, its own form of special circumstances that justifies a death sentence.

  I have told Harry this is garbage. Robbery would require evidence that Laurel formed the intent to take the rug before she confronted Melanie. No one has ever accused Nelson and his staff of being mentally wounded. It would take such an assumption for the state to try this case on the theory that Laurel murdered Melanie over a scrap of carpet.

  Commotion, bodies moving, shadows in the corridor beside the judge’s bench. First I see Jimmy Lama, then a feline form coming out ahead of the bailiff. Duane Nelson has made his assignment of counsel, the prosecutor who will do this case.

  Morgan Cassidy is part of Nelson’s A-list, one of four or five top trial deputies out of nearly a hundred lawyers in the office. She does only heavy-duty stuff, a woman with a death wish for every defendant. Five-foot-six, trim in the way only frenetic people are, a Dutch-cut brunette, she is not a lawyer to inspire trust among the defense bar. She has been known to win a few cases at any cost, a woman who will tangle with a judge, and in the best two falls out of three will come up wearing his balls.

  She is driven, obsessed with the chase, one of those people who flail themselves hourly for their few missteps in life, who are haunted in their quest for success, but once victorious find no enjoyment in it. A trial against her is like milking a cow in competition with a machine. She has a plug on every leak in your case, with the suction turned on supercharge.

  What is as distressing as her presence here is the fact that she comes to the courtroom from the direction of the judge’s chambers. With anyone else I might not care. With Morgan I am wondering what plot she hatches.

  Cassidy doesn’t look at me, but Lama gives me a smirk as he passes in front of our table. He does a little shifting of the eyes under this shit-eating grin, to Cassidy then back to me as if to say, ‘Looky what warped soul I brought you.’

  They get to their table and arrange a few papers. Lama will sit with her during the trial, the people’s representative. They are entitled to one, and as the detective in charge, Jimmy would be most familiar with the evidence – real, and, at times in Lama’s career, manufactured.

  I would get up and talk to Cassidy, ply her a little, but there is no time. On their shadow is Tim Bone, presiding judge of the municipal court. He is up on the bench swinging wood and coming to order.

  ‘The matter of the People versus Laurel Jane Vega.’

  The clerk reads the file number. The stenographer hitting the keys, taking notes.

  Bone is tight-lipped, a skinny little man, bald as a baby’s ass, and not to be screwed with. He has a face like yesterday’s wash left too long in the dryer, a lot of wrinkles, and cold.

  ‘I believe the defendant was informed of her rights at the initial arraignment,’ says Bone. ‘So we can dispense with that here.

  ‘Ms. Cassidy, have you delivered a copy of the indictment to counsel yet?’ The way he says this makes me think that it has been the subject of some conversation in chambers between the two of them. Like maybe Bone is not happy that we’ve received no notice. As a legal principle it doesn’t matter. The purpose of the arraignment is to identify the defendant and to advise us of the charges pending. But Bone is a stickler for courtesy.

  ‘Doing it now, your honor.’ Cassidy snaps her attaché case open, takes out a sheaf of papers, and waltzes over to hand it to me. It is stapled, numbered in the left margin, and looks about the same as what we received in the first arraignment.

 
‘Mr. Madriani, you should take a few moments.’ Bone is beckoning me to read. ‘I’ve told Ms. Cassidy that this is not to happen again. Not in my court. In the future you will deliver copies of charging documents to opposing counsel in advance of arraignment,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, your honor.’ About as chastened as a hooker caught with her john.

  I am reading down the page, the single count of murder, followed by the allegations of special circumstances – lying in wait. So far so good. If Cassidy has goosed it for advantage, I don’t see this. I flip the page. Nothing new. Turn it over. On page three, centered in the middle, big bold print:

  COUNT TWO

  As and for a second and separate count, it is further alleged and the defendant is charged with violation of Section 187 of the Penal Code in that on October 19th of this year, she did unlawfully take the life of John Doe, an unborn male child…

  For an instant I sit there glazed, my eyes no longer focusing on the page. I slide it at an angle so that Laurel can read over my shoulder, my finger moving under the operative words ‘unborn male child.’

  By her expression she is wondering why it is necessary for her to be reviewing technical revisions of the indictment. Then the words settle in. Big eyes, she is reading, swallowing air.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she says. Hand to her mouth, she is suddenly ill, like a sucker punch to the gut. She retches, a deep convulsion, but comes up dry. Hand to stomach, she is still reading, like maybe the words on the page will change. Vanishing ink.

  I am thankful that at this moment there is no jury in the box to witness this. There is a lot of satisfaction spreading across Cassidy’s face, she and Lama busy studying the defendant for affect. In their eyes Laurel’s actions possess all the confirmation of guilty knowledge, the ultimate import of her dark deed. I am struck in this moment by the irrefutable fact that a trial with these two is not likely to be a religious experience.

  I stumble to my feet to object, without much purpose, and before I fully comprehend. What can I say? They have surprised us. We respectfully request that the court dismiss the charge? Cassidy knows her tactics constitute a wrong without a remedy.