Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘And that was the last time you saw either child?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Have you reported them missing to the police?’

  ‘For what good it would do,’ he says. ‘She knows where they are and won’t tell.’

  ‘Objection.’ I’m on my feet. ‘Move to strike.’

  Woodruff orders the comment stricken from the record and tells the jury to disregard it. But the seed is planted.

  ‘They’re treating it as a civil domestic matter,’ says Jack.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Objection. Calls for speculation.’

  ‘Sustained.’

  ‘Mr. Vega, were you involved in a battle with the defendant over legal custody of your children?’

  ‘I was. She made it very bitter,’ he says. ‘And then she blamed it all on my wife, Melanie.’

  ‘Objection, your honor.’

  Woodruff is getting angry with Vega. ‘Sir, do you know what a question is?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Jack.

  ‘Then just answer the questions and keep the commentary to yourself. Do I make myself clear?’

  Jack forgets that he is not in the Legislature, the forum of political princes who float on an ether of arrogance without rules of conduct or evidence. He is not used to such treatment. He doesn’t answer Woodruff, but instead gives him a curt nod.

  ‘Yes or no for the record,’ says Woodruff. The road to contempt if Jack keeps it up.

  ‘I understand,’ says Vega.

  ‘Do you recall during this custody battle a physical assault made by the defendant, Laurel Vega, on the deceased Melanie Vega?’ says Cassidy.

  ‘I remember it very well,’ he says. ‘She.’ He points to Laurel. ‘She hit her, Melanie, very hard with a heavy purse. My wife complained to me later about a bruise and a sore arm as a result.’

  ‘And do you remember threats being uttered against Melanie Vega by the defendant at the time of this attack?’

  ‘You bet,’ he says. Jack can hardly contain himself in the box. Given a platform, he would be doing some hefty table dancing at this moment.

  ‘She said she wanted to kill Melanie.’

  ‘Those were her words?’

  ‘No. She said she wanted to “kill the bitch.” ’ As Jack says this he looks at Laurel and me, fire in his eyes. He has been suppressing this venom for months. Now it spills like some oozing toxic gel over the witness box.

  They embellish this around the edges, a few more pithy quotes all attributed to Laurel, who by now, if you could defame the dead, would be standing trial for slander. Jack should be writing headlines for the tabloids. Then Cassidy has him identify the rug from the evidence cart. Jack is adamant that this scrap of carpet was located in the master bath of his home the night Melanie was murdered. The only way Laurel could have gotten it, according to Jack, is if she had been present in the home that night.

  Morgan then takes him on a blistering cruise of several conversations, most of which I suspect never took place. These are supposedly private encounters between him and Laurel during periods of visitation when she would come by the house to deliver or pick up the kids. To listen to Jack, these were angry tirades issued by Laurel, none of which were provoked by either him or Melanie.

  Through most of this, tight-lipped and tense, Laurel is restraining herself, protesting only quietly in my ear. Then at one point she says, ‘He’s a fucking liar.’ Almost loud enough for Woodruff to hear.

  When I look over she is not smiling.

  During one of these encounters, according to Jack, there was a particularly ugly conversation during which Laurel said she wished the two of them, he and Melanie, were dead.

  ‘I suppose half a loaf is better than none,’ she whispers through a cupped hand in my ear.

  Cassidy, I think, hears it, though the jury does not.

  When I look at Laurel there is a willful gleam in her eye. It is the reason I worry about putting her on the stand.

  ‘Laurel was always jealous and angry, particularly at Melanie,’ says Jack. ‘She couldn’t deal with younger women,’ he says.

  ‘Maybe if you’d screwed fewer of them during our marriage my outlook would have been different.’

  Several of the women on the jury giggle.

  Woodruff slams the gavel on this and points it at Laurel. ‘Madam – you can be bound and gagged in that chair,’ he says. ‘Counsel, control your client,’ he tells me.

  I apologize for her conduct. I’m telling her to cool it, in tones that the court can hear.

  ‘Go on,’ says the judge.

  Cassidy saves the emotional blast for last, the story of how Jack came home and found his young wife dead, shot through the head in the bath. Jack relates all of this in morbid detail, and actually produces a tear, a single lonely bead running down one cheek for the jury to see.

  All the while Laurel has one hand on top of the table, rubbing two fingers together in an obvious gesture, the world’s tiniest violin.

  I move as quickly as I can to cover her hand, but Cassidy sees this and complains.

  ‘A nervous tic,’ says Laurel.

  ‘Your honor, she’s sending signals to the jury,’ says Cassidy. ‘Commenting on the evidence.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ says Laurel. ‘It’s a nervous condition I have whenever the sonofabitch lies.’

  ‘That’s it,’ says Woodruff. ‘Counsel to the bench. And you, madam. You shut your mouth. Do you understand?’

  We go up and Woodruff makes a show of fairness, but most of the hunks taken are out of my ass. He tells me if I cannot control her he will do it, and the picture for the jury will not be pleasant.

  We go back out and Cassidy picks up again with Jack.

  Vega tells the court that he lost not only a wife but a child.

  ‘Mr. Vega,’ says Cassidy, ‘can you tell the court when it was that you first learned that Melanie was pregnant?’

  On this Jack weaves a yarn that it was Melanie who first told him, that they were looking forward to the new child, a melding of his existing family, the older children with the new. He tells the jury that they had taken no precautions, that Melanie was not on the pill.

  I am incredulous. He says nothing about his own vasectomy. At this moment it hits me. Jack has told Morgan nothing about this. Vega, the ultimate deceiver, has laid her bare on the biggest element of our case, Jack’s jealousies, the motive for murder, that somebody else had fathered his wife’s child.

  It is on this plateau of martyrdom that Morgan leaves Jack, turning him over to me on cross.

  For a long moment, one of those watersheds, a dramatic pause at trial, Jack and I study each other with wary eyes as I approach the witness box. I make a face for the jury to see, like I accept only a small portion of his testimony as gospel. In dealing with Jack, the order of evidence is critical. My task is clear: to dismantle his character a stick at a time and then hammer on the joint themes of motive and opportunity.

  ‘Mr. Vega. We know each other, don’t we?’

  He looks at me but does not answer, uncertain whether I am referring to kinship, or perhaps the fact that I know him by character.

  ‘I mean to say that we were once related by marriage. Is that not so?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. He tells the court that he once considered me a friend. His use of the past tense is not lost on the jury.

  I want to get this before them early so Jack cannot use it later, inferences that I bear personal animus toward him based solely on the sorry family experiences between him and Laurel. Jack would use this like a shield, as if I am beating on him in some personal vendetta.

  Then I ease into it, reading one of his statements to the police the night of the murder, when he told them he never owned a gun. He insists that he does not. I remind him about the chrome-plated collector’s item, the nine-millimeter pistol given to him by some lobbyist to toughen his stance against a gun-control bill, years before.

&
nbsp; Darting eyes in the box, he decides to tough this out, my word against his.

  ‘I, ah – I have no recollection of that,’ he says. It is classic Jack. No denial, just a weak memory.

  The paper blizzard starts. I hand copies to Cassidy and the court clerk for use by the judge.

  ‘Mr. Vega, do you recognize this document?’ I hand him a copy. He pulls a pair of cheaters from his pocket and reads.

  ‘Looks familiar,’ he says.

  ‘It should,’ I say. ‘Is that your signature at the bottom of the last page?’

  He looks. ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Is this not the property-settlement agreement you signed with the defendant, Laurel Vega, at the time of your divorce?’

  Then it dawns on him. ‘I remember now,’ he says. ‘There was a gun. Long time ago. I’d forgotten,’ he says.

  ‘Would you look at page twelve, item eighty-seven?’

  ‘I’ve already said I remember about the gun.’

  ‘Fine. Now look for the item.’

  A lot of anger in his eyes, Jack flips through the pages and finds it.

  ‘Could you read that one item?’

  ‘Fine, for what it’s worth,’ he says. ‘To the Petitioner, one chrome-plated nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in walnut box,’ he says. ‘There. I already told you about it.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell the police about it the night of the murder. Why not?’

  ‘For the obvious reason that I forgot.’

  ‘What happened to the gun, Mr. Vega?’

  ‘I, ah … I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember.’

  I am convinced that this is not the murder weapon. Jack may be a fool, but he is not demented. He would never use a gun that could be traced back to himself, not when it is so easy to get another weapon and somebody else to pull the trigger. What this does, however, is to set a pattern for the jury, of Vega’s convenient memory.

  ‘So it wasn’t true what you told the police the night of the murder,’ I say. ‘That you never owned a gun?’

  ‘People forget things,’ he says. ‘How am I supposed to remember everything I owned all of my life?’

  ‘Do you often have trouble with your memory?’ I say. It is a stinging question, but not subject to objection.

  He doesn’t answer, but gives me a look, something that might turn the more timid to stone.

  ‘Well, then, let me ask you this,’ I say. ‘Do you consider the listing of items in this document, the property-settlement agreement signed by yourself and the defendant, to be a more accurate reflection of physical possessions, yours and the defendant’s, than your memory?’ I say.

  ‘That’s why people usually write things down, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Because they tend to forget.’

  He puts all the emphasis on the last word, like this should be obvious to any idiot.

  ‘Precisely,’ I say.

  He tries to hand the document back to me.

  ‘Not quite yet,’ I say. ‘Would you turn to page four, item twenty-six?’

  He flips pages.

  ‘Please read it aloud to the court?’

  He scans it first, then looks at me, an expression like some doe about to be nailed by a train.

  ‘Read it,’ I say, my tone stiffening.

  ‘To Respondent–’ He stops reading and silently absorbs this.

  ‘Fine. With the court’s permission I’ll read it. “To the Respondent, one handcrafted white woven bath rug, with geometric floral design, label ‘by Gerri.’”

  ‘But she didn’t get it,’ he says. ‘I did.’ Jack’s coming out of the chair.

  ‘Did you sign this agreement?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘And who was the Respondent in your divorce?’ I ask him.

  He’s seemingly baffled, wondering how this could have happened. The gun is one thing. He doesn’t answer the question.

  ‘You were the Petitioner. Isn’t it a fact that the bathroom rug with the label “by Gerri” belonged to your former wife, to Laurel Vega? Isn’t it a fact, sir, that it went to her as part of the property-settlement agreement following your divorce?’

  A lot of shrugging shoulders. Jack looking at the print on the page like if he studies it long enough it might disappear.

  I retreat to the evidence cart and grab the rug, approach the witness box, and flip the back of the carpet, sticking it six inches under Jack’s nose.

  ‘Tell the jury what that label says,’ I tell him. ‘Read it to the jury.’

  When he looks up at me, the cheaters have slid halfway down his nose.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘ “By Gerri,” ’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  I leave the rug balanced in front of him on the railing, like an albatross around his neck, and turn. When I do, I see Cassidy looking at me, wondering how they could have missed this. I cannot blame them. I would never have found it myself, except for my recollections about Jack’s antics with the gun, and Laurel’s admonition the day I met with her in the jail, that Vega had raised such a stink about the pistol, demanding that his claim be embedded in the settlement agreement. When I got to reading, one item lead to another. What Jack must be thinking at this moment – the things we do that bite us in the butt.

  There is now a major cloud hovering over the last piece of physical evidence linking Laurel to Melanie’s murder. And while Jack is still insisting that the rug was in his house the night she was killed, he has no clever explanation for its appearance under Laurel’s column in the property-settlement agreement.

  This afternoon Harry drinks his lunch in celebration of this, two Manhattans and a Long Island Tea. His nose is redder than Rudolph’s by the time we return to court, where a courier is waiting for me with a large box. True to her word, Dana has delivered Jack into our arms, not with a kiss, but a kick.

  We retire to one of the rooms back of the court, where Harry and I examine this stuff privately. It is gold; certified copies of the grand jury indictment and record of conviction, Jack’s plea to the federal district court on multiple counts of political corruption. Dana has even provided copies for Woodruff and opposing counsel, with a note that the press will be alerted to the conviction at two this afternoon. Jack can expect a crowd on his way out, boom mikes in the face and bright lights.

  This afternoon Harry is ready to subpoena Vega’s bank records, personal and legislative, a legal copy service is waiting for him to telephone with the word. If Jack hired somebody to do the deed, as Dana suspects, there should be some large cash withdrawal in the period just before and possibly just after Melanie’s murder. When it comes to money, Vega is a prudent man. He would want to work on the installment plan.

  This afternoon I go to work on a theme that will become central to our case, that Jack has every reason in the world for incriminating Laurel in this case. I ask him if he is sorry to see his former wife, the mother of his children here, at the defense table charged with murder.

  In the tempered terms of a statesman he calls it ‘a tragedy.’

  We review Lama’s earlier testimony that it was Jack who immediately fingered Laurel without a shred of hard evidence the night of the murder.

  ‘They asked me if I knew anyone who might want to kill my wife,’ he says. ‘She’d made death threats. What was I supposed to say?’ Jack has spent the noon hour having his ass kicked by Cassidy. He is now doing better, and he knows it.

  ‘When did you take legal custody of the children?’ I ask.

  He gives me a date.

  ‘Then it was after the arrest of their mother for murder that you finally got what you wanted?’

  ‘She was no longer available to care for them. What else was there to do?’

  ‘She wasn’t available because she was in jail, based largely on your accusations.’

  ‘That she made death threats against Melanie,’ he says.

  ‘And the assertion that the bathroom carpet found in her possession was from your house.�
� This is not a question, but he answers it.

  ‘It was not an assertion. It was the truth,’ he says.

  ‘Based solely on your word,’ I tell him. ‘And the fact remains, you got the children and she went to jail. I suppose that’s one way to end a bitter custody battle.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he says.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ Better from his mouth than mine.

  ‘If you’re trying to imply that I falsely accused her, you’re wrong. Worse,’ he says, ‘you’re a liar.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t do anything like that? You would never knowingly deceive the authorities in their investigation of the case?’

  ‘No,’ he says. Jack puts up a wholly indignant look, the pious and trusted public official.

  ‘You just forgot about the gun?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Let’s talk about how you found out your wife was pregnant. You told the court in earlier testimony that your wife told you about this. Is that correct?’

  He looks at me. ‘To the best of my recollection.’ More faulty memory.

  ‘To the best of your recollection?’ I smile broadly and turn toward the jury. ‘This is your wife telling you that she was about to have your child. Surely you would remember something like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I remember it.’

  ‘And when was this, approximately?’

  He thinks for a moment.

  ‘Late last summer sometime.’

  ‘Can’t you be more specific?’

  ‘I think it was August or September. I can’t be sure.’

  ‘And where did she tell you this? What were you doing?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I think it was in the living room. I was probably reading.’

  ‘You can’t remember what you were doing? This news must have made a real impression on you,’ I say.

  He looks at me. If Jack had something in his hand at this moment he would throw it.

  ‘Mr. Vega, do you remember receiving a telephone call on October tenth from a Dr. John Phillips, your wife’s obstetrician, when she was out of the house?’

  It is a thick look I get from him, a flicker of eyelids questioning how could I know that.

  ‘Do you remember being told at that time by Dr. Phillips that Melanie was pregnant?’ As I say this I am holding telephone records in my hand, the familiar forms by the local carrier in this area with red lettering across the top that I am perusing. Jack cannot miss this. What he doesn’t know is that these are mine from my house, not his or the physician’s.