Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  ‘Hey, baby.’ Clem Olsen is speaking to me while he is ogling Dana with lupine looks and yammering in a gravely dialect.

  ‘Long time no see. Got a shake for the Wolfman?’ he says.

  All the while his eyes are eating up Dana.

  We’ve both come here in separate cars, directly from other engagements, me from the office, Dana from some political soirée across town. She has accepted my invitation, but says she can’t stay long.

  ‘Gonna introduce me?’ Clem wants to know. His hands are doing a quick routine of a shake in moves I cannot follow, all variations on a common theme, aping that half of the social order Clem feels is cooler than himself.

  I do the honors, introducing Dana. She gets an embrace and one of Clem’s sloppy specialties on the cheek, which she rubs off with the back of her gloved hand as soon as he turns away.

  Clem has formed a one-man reception line at the door tonight, greeting everything that moves, looking down the front of a lot of dresses, and copping a few good feels under the aegis of kisses and hugs whenever he can.

  Some things never change. Clem is one of them.

  McClesky High’s Twenty-fifth Reunion, and we are gathered in the main ballroom of the Regency, downtown, across from the Capitol. Olsen is decked out in ruffles and formal wear. What little hair he has left on his head is slicked back and thinning, a younger version of Mel Ferrer. He is tall and slender, but with a cop’s gut. From the bulge under his coat I know that he is packing. Cummerbund or not, without a hunk of case-hardened steel wedged in his armpit, Clem would have a terminal identity crisis.

  There are people in stretch limos pulling up outside, women in furs so toxic with moth repellant that these could only have come from some rental warehouse, men with beer bellies and callused hands in alien suits and ties, craning and twisting their necks like cheap imitations of Rodney Dangerfield. Some of these bear faces recognizable from adolescence under unfamiliar domes of balding heads. People putting on the dog, covering the warts of their lives from others they haven’t seen in years, and won’t see again for many more, still hustling the peer groups that eluded them in youth; others striving to recapture the popularity they haven’t known since.

  A slap on the arm. ‘Later on, buddy. I’ll catch you for a drink.’ Clem gives me a wink and a wave. He has already moved on to the next group coming through the door, rationing the charm. I see one of his hands has slipped low on the silk-encased rump of a woman, one of the pom-pom girls of yore.

  ‘How about if we find a table?’

  ‘Great,’ says Dana.

  She takes my arm and we walk, heading toward the back so we can leave early. I steer her past the punch bowl and the no-host bar, spouses of alumni who don’t know anybody, all jockeying in an effort to put themselves into an early alcoholic buzz, their port in this social storm. Anything to get through the evening.

  Some guy sticks his hand in my gut, stops me in midst ride.

  ‘Mike Wagner, city fireman,’ he says.

  Vague recollections of football, some animal of intimidation from my youth who at fourteen had a beard, and a body like Attila, who towered over me, but who hasn’t grown a millimeter in a quarter century. I now have twenty pounds and three inches on him.

  I shake his hand. ‘Paul Madriani, lawyer,’ I say.

  No conversation, but he introduces his wife, brunette and twenty-eight if she’s a day, dressed in a slinky black outfit, chewing gum and shifting weight from one thigh to another like some taxi dancer with her meter running. I have vague recollections of his first wife, a high school sweetheart who, if she is here, is no doubt throwing daggers from across the room with her eyes at this moment. I move out of target range.

  Dana and I take seats at a round table, like Arthur’s knights. I shake hands, and we extend a few greetings with three other couples already there, none of whom I recognize from school, a place where we can talk, uninterrupted.

  My only reason for being here this evening is the price of a favor from Olsen, though I haven’t told Dana this.

  Lately she has taken a few hits from Morgan Cassidy for her presence in the courtroom during motions. I have heard tales of some quiet backstabbing, palace intrigues in the darker corners of the fairer kingdom, Cassidy moving in the shadows to get the Queen’s Bench to pull its judicial endorsement from Dana. Morgan no doubt views her presence on our side of the aisle as a mortal breach of fealty in the guild of cops and prosecutors. Though Cassidy’s efforts would appear to be in vain. From all accounts, when it comes to the appointment, Dana seems to have already pulled this sword from the stone. According to reports, her name alone is headed for Washington.

  Tonight she is shimmering in a black evening dress, hair up, spiked high heels of patent leather. The ever-enigmatic smile on her lips. Two of the other women at our table are looking at her as if they might like to corral their husbands’ eyes to keep them from roving.

  We exchange a little small talk, people settle back into their chairs, and Dana looks over.

  ‘How did the jury go?’ she asks. Dressed to kill, and she’s into shop talk. It seems lately that we are either in the sack or talking trials, hers or mine. We have yet to find that middle ground of intimacy, though there is enough growth to the relationship that we are both still looking, chopping our own paths through the jungle of lust.

  I have finished eight days of jury selection in Laurel’s trial. Eight women and four men, with another guy and three more women as alternates. I am happy with the gender gap. I tell Dana this.

  With a victim and a defendant who are women, men on the panel are an enigma. A bad marriage and they could hate their ex, taking it out on Laurel. And guys in a stable marriage would not feel threatened by Melanie as a sexual predator in the same way as women.

  The fairer sex will either love Laurel or hate her, see her as the avenging angel in a bad marriage or as a vengeful shrew, depending on their own life situation. The jurors I have gone for are in their late thirties and older. Three are divorced, like Laurel, raising families alone, people who know there’s a ragged edge to real life, who will form a chain of empathy with my client.

  Pitching a theory at trial is not unlike the pursuit of marketing leads in the world of commerce. You pick your pigeon and fling your seeds. My particular bag of popcorn has Jack as a man with an ego, familiar with the exercise of power and the perks of privilege. If he’s on his way out, maybe looking at a term in the joint made more modest by his cooperation with Dana and her friends, his psyche would be stretched to the limit. You have to wonder what a man like this would do under these circumstances if, apart from his other travails, he suddenly discovered that his younger wife had another lover.

  My candidate of the week for Lothario at this moment is the late George Merlow, the man feeding fish. I think maybe Melanie had warned George that Jack was on to them. If he was keeping a watch when Melanie took the dive in her bathtub, and saw the killer, my guess is Merlow decided he’d rather not play family feud.

  ‘It would help,’ I tell Dana, ‘if your people could come up with the informant.’ I’m talking of the man Dana told me about, the one who saw Jack in the bar across the river doing business with the courier, over beers.

  ‘They’re looking,’ she says. ‘It takes time.’

  ‘If he’s on vacation, he ought to be coming back soon.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ she tells me. It seems this man they are looking for is facing some time of his own, on an unrelated state charge. He may have reasons for an extended holiday.

  ‘You’re telling me he’s a fugitive?’

  ‘No. Not yet anyway,’ she says. ‘We’ll find him.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s before the trial’s over.’

  The band is striking up, strains from the sixties. I go to get us some drinks, tickets in hand. It’s a mob scene at the bar.

  Some gal sashays by, dark hair to the shoulders like Cleopatra, first name Sharon, but it’s all I can pull from the
recesses of pubescent recall. It’s what sticks in the memory of the fifteen-year-old male – big chest and a first name. She’s wearing a black crochet dress that with a candle from behind you can see through, and from the view I am getting, not much else. The way it hugs her body would be enough to stop most grandmothers from knitting. She pretends she doesn’t notice all the gawking from the bar, until some guy, three sheets up and blowing, gives her a catcall, something wild from the northern woods that for an instant suppresses all the chatter at the bar. Then it picks up slowly, snickering laughter and the drone of voices. Not nine o’clock and it’s already getting rowdy.

  I squeeze my way in and order two drinks. Some kid with pimples who doesn’t look old enough to be handling the bottles is pouring.

  ‘Hey – those are mine!’

  I turn and it’s Clem, a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Put ’em on my ticket,’ he says.

  The kid makes a note on a napkin.

  Leave it to Clem to open a ticket at a no-host bar. He turns for a second and is busy making introductions with the other hand, two guys who want to meet the woman in black. As if by royal command, night of nights, he reaches out, sticks his own hook into a loop of crochet. Got an itch and wanna scratch, Clem as facilitator.

  Just as quickly he is back to me.

  ‘Great night, uh? Good crowd.’ Clem pats his stomach through the cummerbund, a satisfied smile, while he looks around taking in all that is his, like he invented the species.

  ‘Havin’ a good time?’

  The way he says this makes me think that if I say no, Clem would add another day to the creation, one devoted entirely to the making of merriment.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I tell him.

  ‘Good to see the old crowd, isn’t it?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah. Couldn’t wait,’ I tell him.

  ‘Nice threads,’ he says. He’s feeling the lapel of my suitcoat. ‘Musta set you back.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I don’t tell him that I’m on my way from work and haven’t changed.

  The drinks are on the bar.

  ‘I know you’re busy,’ I say, ‘but I got a couple of favors.’

  ‘Heyyy, anything for a pal.’ He’s looking around. I think he’s wondering who I want to hit on, and, given the dazzling looks of Dana, why.

  I reach into my inside coat pocket and take out an envelope, open it, and remove the little picture, the DMV shot of the courier from the post office that Dana had given to me the other night.

  ‘I need you to run a make,’ I tell him. ‘On this guy.’

  A look on Clem’s face. ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d think ulterior motives,’ he says.

  ‘Hey – you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

  ‘I hope this can wait,’ he says.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to do it right now.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ he says. ‘I thought I was going to have to get my cape and find a phone booth.’

  ‘You can wait till Monday,’ I tell him.

  ‘And this is all you got, I suppose?’ He’s looking at the picture.

  ‘That and a name. Try Lyle Simmons, alias Frank Jordan, aka James Hays. There may be others. I don’t know. The guy’s got more faces than Eve,’ I tell him.

  ‘What about a birth date, social security number?’

  ‘Try DMV,’ I tell him. ‘That’s where the picture came from.’

  ‘What is it ya wanna know?’ He’s making microscopic notes with a ballpoint pen, light ink-squiggles on the back of the picture.

  ‘Any addresses. Whether the guy did time, either here or in another state, when and where. Anything you can tell me about his background, military, civilian. Whether he’s got any family.’

  ‘What the fuck did he do, shoot the Pope? Skip out on a legal fee?’

  I ignore him. ‘And one more item.’ I pull a little plastic baggie from my coat pocket, the acrylic paint on the tube now hard as cement with the ridges and swirls of Kathy Merlow’s thumbprint.

  ‘Can you get the computer guys to run a check on this?’ I point to the print.

  ‘You don’t want much,’ he tells me.

  ‘It’s important,’ I tell him. ‘Do this and I’ll owe you big time.’

  ‘Fuckin’-a,’ he says. Clem knows that by doing this, sharing information off of CI & I, the state Justice computers, possible criminal-history data, he is putting his head on the block. Such items are confidential by state law, available only to law enforcement for specified purposes. Criminal sanctions would flow for a violation. His ass could be grass.

  I’m running a gambit that Dana’s people may not have given her everything on the man known as Lyle Simmons. It never hurts to check another source. It could be something that came their way, something they didn’t think was significant. Clem may be many things, but on an errand like this he is above all else discreet.

  ‘No promises,’ he says, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell him.

  ‘What’s a buddy for?’ he says. ‘Besides, you may need all the friends you can get.’

  I give him a look.

  ‘Word is that Jimmy Lama’s got his sword out for you, sharpening it on a fine stone,’ says Clem. ‘That business over pretrial motions.’

  Lama’s embarrassment, the fact that he was called on the carpet by Woodruff, is the talk of the cop shops in town.

  Lama’s enmity is nothing new. I tell him this.

  ‘Yeah. Well, just don’t turn your back,’ he says.

  We talk for a few moments, I grab my drinks and head back toward the table. Halfway there I notice that a guy has moved in next to Dana, the empty chair on the other side. He’s looking nervous, little glances to the side, wondering how to open conversation.

  ‘My old high-school special – double rum and Coke,’ I tell her. ‘What fueled my engine on Saturday nights.’ I put the drink in front of her.

  The guy on the other side is crestfallen, the look of some wasted auto worker facing life on the line after missing super-lotto by one number.

  Dana takes a sip, makes a face.

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘I’ve tasted better paint thinner,’ she says. ‘You must have been a real ace in school.’

  We make talk for a few minutes and the guy on the other side does what could pass for a discreet exit. The other couples from the table are all on the floor, dancing, Dana and I alone.

  ‘Come on, let’s blow this place. I’ll mix something special back at the house.’

  ‘Can’t tonight,’ she says. ‘I’m going to have to go in just a few minutes. I’ve got to fly to D.C. in the morning.’

  ‘What, are these coronation bells I hear?’

  ‘For the moment just little tinkles,’ she says. ‘First in a series of interviews. Checking for any skeletons that might make an entrance come confirmation in the Senate,’ she tells me.

  The first verification from Dana that this thing, her appointment to the bench, is in fact going to happen.

  She reads concern in my face.

  ‘You were hoping for something more tonight,’ she says.

  ‘That too,’ I say.

  ‘Oh. It’s Jack’s case.’

  I make a face, like I can read between the lines. If she leaves her positions, what assurance is there that I won’t have to do blitzkrieg with her office to get the dirt on Jack into evidence in my case?

  ‘Not to worry,’ she says. ‘I made a promise. I’ll keep it. Besides, I have something else.’

  She takes another sip from the bitter cup and curls her tongue, like maybe she forgot.

  ‘Fit this into your puzzle and see if you get a picture,’ she says. ‘Yesterday afternoon I’m going over transcripts of the telephone tapes from Jack’s house.’

  These are now a few months old, she tells me. Most of it is drivel. According to Dana, Jack kept most of the darker side of life away from the house.

  ‘But there was one conversation, on the eigh
teenth of August,’ she says. ‘A physician called – Melanie’s doctor. She wasn’t home, so Jack took the call. The doctor simply wanted to leave a message to have Melanie call him back. But Vega became very insistent. It was one of those calls where you read between the lines, that something wasn’t right. He wanted to know what it was. The doc tried to assure him that everything was fine. You know Jack,’ she says.

  I can picture Jack; nervous Nelly threatening to have the state medical board revoke the guy’s license for maintaining a confidence.

  ‘The doc finally relented,’ she says. ‘Said it was against his better judgment, but under the circumstances they should be quite happy, being as they were about to become new parents.’

  Dana’s painted eyebrows are doing heavy arches at this moment.

  ‘The message,’ she says, ‘the pregnancy test was positive.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ I say. ‘How did Jack take it?’

  ‘I don’t know who the telephone carrier was, but I’ll bet it’s true.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That you could hear a pin drop,’ she says.

  Chapter 19

  Laurel has had a friend, a woman from work, assemble these things, a few more outfits from her closet, and put them into a hanging valise for me.

  Tonight, on the eve of trial, I deliver them to the county jail, where they will be stored in a wardrobe warehouse on the main level, a thousand automated hooks like a mechanical snake on the ceiling that moves with the press of a button to produce the exact outfit for the right inmate. One of the many assembly lines of justice.

  It is all in the inane belief that the defendant, who has been locked in this hellhole for months, labeled with the scarlet letter of crime and told to scrap for her very existence among the castoffs of this world, will look like you and me when the guards drop the shackles and waltz her into court in the morning. One of the fictions of our system.

  I drop the valise with a matron on the bottom floor. They rifle my briefcase and search me, pat-down and metal detector, hand me a clip-on badge, and lead me by the nose upstairs, all without a single word that could be called civil, to the pods, to see Laurel.