Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Danny Vega,’ she says.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. Shall I send him in?’

  The shock of my life. ‘Go ahead,’ I say.

  A minute later shadows on the translucent glass of the door, and Danny ambles into my office. He’s lost some weight and looks like he hasn’t shaved the light peach fuzz from his chin in a few days. His clothes have the look of travel, a wrinkled shirt and jeans with tailored fraying around the knees that could use a washing, dark athletic shoes like combat boots, and no socks.

  ‘Uncle Paul,’ he says. It’s always the same with Danny. He will be calling me Uncle Paul when he is thirty-five and I am walking with a crutch. A shy grin. He holds out his hand for me to shake.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I’m standing over my desk, gripping his hand. I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but Danny’s timing has always left something to be desired. He was safely ensconced a half continent away for the duration, and neither I nor his mother need this distraction at the moment.

  ‘I was worried about Mom,’ he says. ‘Thought maybe she could use some support.’

  ‘Where’s Julie?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s fine. She’s back there,’ he tells me. We are still playing cryptic games as to where precisely this is. ‘I came out on the bus,’ he says. ‘Maggie knows. I just couldn’t stay there anymore. I had to see how Mom was doing.

  ‘She’s fine,’ I tell him. ‘I have a feeling she’s going to be pretty upset when she finds out you’re back here.’

  ‘Yeah. Well …’ He shrugs a little, like maybe she asked for too much.

  ‘I saw the morning paper,’ he says. ‘The news about Dad.’

  He could not miss this. Every paper in the state is carrying it on the front page: LONGTIME LEGISLATOR CONVICTED OF CORRUPTION.

  As much as Danny does not get on with his father, he takes no pleasure in Jack’s misfortune. He asks me if it’s really true. I tell him that it is, and Danny floors me with his perception.

  ‘I guess I always knew that someday he’d get in trouble,’ he says. ‘What will happen to him?’ he asks.

  I shake my head, like I haven’t a clue.

  ‘Will he go to jail too?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘That’s up to the judge.’

  ‘But it helped Mom’s case?’ he says. ‘I mean the information about him.’ In the tradeoffs of life Danny can live with this, his father’s conviction, if it helps Laurel.

  ‘It helped,’ I say. How can I tell the boy that I’m trying to put the ring of murder around his father’s neck?

  ‘Things are going well for your mother at the moment.’ I leave it at that and change the subject before he can pursue further. ‘You can’t stay here,’ I tell him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The court in the custody case has an outstanding order,’ I say.

  ‘Have I done something wrong?’

  ‘No, but your dad has custody.’

  Danny was thinking that maybe the news in the paper changed all that. I assure him that it did not. If his father is sentenced to time in prison, and Laurel is still in jail, Danny and Julie will become wards of the court. If that happens I will wade in and try for custody.

  ‘I’ll stay at Mom’s apartment,’ he says. ‘Nobody will look there.’ It’s like he’s already figured this out.

  What can I say? ‘Why don’t you go now. And clean up. I’ll have some food sent over. Groceries,’ I tell him. Harry knows a woman who can take care of this. ‘Do you have clean clothes over there?’

  He nods. ‘But I wanna know everything that’s happening,’ he says, ‘in Mom’s case.’

  ‘I don’t have time right now. I’ll call you. We can talk later,’ I tell him. ‘Dinner at my place tonight. You can get the Vespa then.’ This has been in my garage since Danny left Capital City.

  ‘I’ve already got it,’ he says. ‘Stopped by on the way over here. Hope you don’t mind?’ he says.

  ‘Why should I mind? Clean up and get some rest,’ I tell him. ‘You look tired.’ The boy has rings of unrequited sleep under his eyes.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. He turns to leave.

  ‘And Danny – don’t go near the jail.’ Like a seer I know what’s running through his mind – a visit to his mom. ‘They’ll nail you as soon as you sign in,’ I tell him. ‘You’ll be living with your dad again.’

  I see this register in his eyes, the admission that this is probably where he was headed. He nods, and like that he is gone.

  Cassidy cannot rest her case on the sour note that was Jack’s testimony and the hair-raising revelation of his criminal convictions.

  Today Dana is just outside the courtroom, waiting to see what happens. As a name I had placed on my witness list, chaff for Cassidy to mull over, she cannot enter. I think her proximity here is a bad idea and have told her so. On the way in Cassidy was giving her looks to kill. Morgan knows where the information to destroy Jack came from, and Dana by her mere presence here is now rubbing salt into the open wound. This is payback, I think, for Morgan’s earlier attempts to interfere in Dana’s judicial aspirations, Cassidy’s efforts to turn the Queen’s Bench against Dana, and Lama’s shot at shifting blame for the news leaks on the bombing to Dana and her people. All of these efforts have failed, but Dana is not one to forget.

  From the inception I have wondered how much of Dana’s help in our case has been inspired by her belief that Laurel is innocent, by her affection for me, and how much by her increasing enmity toward Cassidy.

  As for Jack, he is nowhere to be seen today. Vega is ducking the horde of media, which I am told are camped like vandals at his condo. I have visions of fiery torches dripping tallow in the night, their holders demanding that Jack come out and talk. Now that his conviction is public, sentencing in Jack’s case has been scheduled for a week from today. Harry is offering odds that he will do time. Federal judges, says Harry, do not like to be used, and Vega’s efforts at sympathy using Melanie’s murder has the odor of exploitation about it.

  While there is no question but that Jack’s testimony was originally intended to conclude the state’s case, this morning when court is called to order, Cassidy tells Woodruff that they are putting up one last witness.

  She asks leave of court to recall Simon Angelo, the county coroner.

  ‘Is there objection?’ says Woodruff. He looks at me.

  I confer with Harry, who gives me one of his patented shrugs. Harry is certain that they are back-filling, some window-dressing so they can give the illusion that they are ending on a high note. Angelo is a safe witness, somebody Morgan can control, who is not likely to do more damage to their case.

  I am nervous about this. If Cassidy wants something more from Angelo, there are only two possibilities: she forgot to cover some item with him originally or his testimony is intended to shore up some major hole we have ripped in their case.

  I put up an argument. ‘Your honor, if the state wants to recall the witness, it should do so on rebuttal after we’ve presented our own case.’

  Cassidy argues for some latitude, some equitable setoff for being sandbagged, the surprise on Jack’s conviction. This strikes a sympathetic chord with Woodruff. He asks her how long Angelo’s testimony will take.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she says.

  ‘I’m inclined to allow it,’ he tells me, and gestures toward Cassidy to call the witness.

  Angelo takes the stand and is reminded that he is still under oath.

  It is when Morgan begins anew the task of qualifying him as an expert that little shivers course up my spine. She does not do this in the broad field of forensic pathology, but instead in the narrower subspecialty of serology, the study of blood, and DNA. Bells begin to go off. It is becoming clear that there is some point to all of this, and despite Harry’s best guess, it is not cosmetic.

  ‘Dr. Angelo, could you tell the court, as part of your medical examination in the present case did you perform any
blood tests on the victims in this case, and in particular, the John Doe, the unborn fetus?’

  With the mention of the child, Laurel winces. There is a palpable shudder through her body, and I take one of her hands and hold it under the table. I have not told her about Danny’s visit to my office. She has enough to worry about for the moment. We will deal with that over the weekend, and if need be I will ship the boy back to where he came from until this is over.

  ‘We didn’t do blood,’ says Angelo, ‘but we did do DNA.’ He explains to the court that after his initial testimony, when questions of paternity were raised on cross-examination, he went back and conducted some tests, ‘expedited,’ as he says.

  ‘Could you tell the court what tests you performed and why?’

  ‘I carried out what are known as DNA probes to determine paternity,’ he says.

  ‘Your honor.’ I’m out of my chair. I’m complaining about the lack of notice on this.

  ‘We are not talking about exculpatory evidence here,’ says Cassidy.

  Constitutional law in this country requires public prosecutors not just to convict, but to act in the interests of justice. Cassidy is under a strict requirement to share with us at an early stage any evidence that she finds that might serve to exonerate my client. The fact that they did tests and did not disclose them until now can mean only one thing – that these tests do not advance our theory of the case that Melanie had a lover. It is my hope that maybe at best the tests were inconclusive.

  ‘Counsel made the issue relevant,’ says Cassidy, ‘when he excoriated Mr. Vega, suggesting, I might add improperly,’ she says, ‘that the victim was engaged in some lurid love affair. Now that he has raised this ugly specter, we must deal with it,’ she says. There is a look of rebuke from Cassidy, which on her face takes on a wicked aspect.

  ‘I’m going to allow it,’ says Woodruff. He motions me to sit down.

  As I do, I turn, and catch Dana out of the corner of one eye through the slot in the door. She is tracking on Angelo on the stand, and from her expression, she senses what I do. Cassidy would not be calling this witness unless he was going to do some major damage to our theory of the case.

  We are at a severe disadvantage here and Morgan knows it. The child and its mother had been buried before our case for the defense had sprouted a theory. It would have required an order to exhume the bodies for us to perform any similar DNA testing. Harry and I had discussed this option at an early stage. But considering the fact that Jack had his tubes cut and was presumably firing blanks from his cannon of conception, we saw no purpose. The child had to belong to someone else.

  Cassidy nibbles around the edges for a while, a few preliminary questions to Angelo and then pops the one we are all waiting for. Was he able as a result of these tests to exclude Jack Vega from the population of men who could have fathered this child?

  ‘No,’ says Angelo. ‘Not only could we not exclude him,’ he says, ‘but using a single-locus probe, in which specific shared genetic factors were analyzed between the dead fetus and Mr. Vega, I would say there is a very high probability that paternity does exist.’

  ‘How high?’ says Morgan.

  ‘Based on the probes, he cannot be excluded from the class of potential paternity, and in this case the likelihood of paternity based on multiple DNA probes is more than ninety-nine percent, to be specific ninety-nine point four percent.’

  I sit stunned at the table. What Angelo is telling the jury is that as a matter of scientific certainty, Jack is the father of this unborn child. The look of disbelief must register on my face, for when I glance over, several of the jurors are studying me as to effect, an ether of discontent sending over the panel. Several of the women are looking at me, wondering how, in the face of this evidence, I could scandalize a victim whose lips were sealed by death. There is an undercurrent of murmuring in the courtroom, and Woodruff slaps his gavel.

  There is no need to manufacture a high point in her case. Cassidy has gone for the underbelly of our own, and ripped it out.

  ‘Nothing more of this witness,’ she says.

  As I rise I feel like I am supported by limbs of jelly. I struggle to keep the stunned expression of anger off my face. But deep down I have the sense that this is manufactured evidence – something hatched at a midnight meeting, when at a weak moment Cassidy saw their case evaporating. It is scientific evidence we cannot test as to its accuracy or veracity.

  ‘Doctor, there’s no chance of error in your tests?’ I say. A feeble first strike.

  ‘No.’ No hesitation. Not ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ but an absolute, emphatic no from Angelo.

  His hairless dome shimmers under the bright glare of the courtroom lights. The look of enigma is in his eyes. We both know that unless I can shake him on this, the motive for my theory of defense is gone. On the eve of our case, I will be left with nothing to talk about, already committed to a scenario of the crime that Angelo, in ten minutes, has completely destroyed. Without some shadowy lover in Melanie’s bed, why would Jack murder the mother of his own child? Even the most cold-hearted would not commit multiple murder for the purpose of propping up sympathy on sentencing in another, lesser criminal case. Even Jack could calculate the odds on this and find it a loser.

  ‘Surely there must be some margin of error,’ I tell him, ‘as to the percentage or probability?’ I say.

  ‘This is not like some political survey,’ he tells me, ‘but science. There is no margin of error, plus or minus,’ he says. ‘The percentage of probability as to paternity turns on the fact that there are degrees of relatedness between individuals. This would range from no possibility, as where the subject is excluded by blood type, for example, to a very low probability, to a point of near or virtual certainty,’ he says.

  He smiles, waiting for me to ask, but I do not, where along this continuum our particular case falls. He would only gore me with his pike one more time.

  ‘It’s very interesting that you’ve reduced none of this to writing,’ I say. ‘Surely there must be working papers?’ I say. ‘Your notes?’

  He smiles a little concession. ‘I can produce my working notes,’ he says. ‘They’re not with me at the moment.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘I would like to see them.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll send them to your office.’

  I can examine these and call him again in my case-in-chief, but Angelo knows I am grasping at straws. Any working papers would be written in chicken scratches that only another physician could decipher, and would be crafted in such general and vague terms that the procedures used in testing could be fleshed out only by resort to Angelo’s own testimony. I could spend five grand on a scientific circle-jerk and end right back where I started.

  Of course we could run our own tests. Exhume the bodies and do our own DNA, but there is no time and Angelo knows this. Our case opens on Monday. DNA analysis at most labs takes a minimum of six weeks.

  I am getting angry. It is written in my eyes.

  ‘Dr. Angelo, are you familiar with the medical records pertaining to Mr. Vega’s vasectomy twelve years ago?’

  ‘I’ve read them,’ he says.

  ‘Well, then, perhaps you can enlighten the court on how it’s possible for a man who’s undergone a vasectomy for the express purpose of sterilization to father a child?’

  ‘It happens all the time,’ he says.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Obviously you’re not aware, but there’s a considerable potential for failure with regard to this procedure. Lawsuits filed all the time,’ he says, ‘by couples surprised at becoming new parents after the man has undergone a vasectomy.’

  ‘Now you’re going to tell us that ninety-nine-point-four percent of these procedures fail. Is that right, doctor?’

  ‘No, actually it’s about five percent.’

  ‘Pretty rare,’ I’d say. ‘Not exactly an odds-on bet,’ I tell him. ‘I suppose some witch doctor performed this procedure on Mr. Vega, using a d
ull stone scalpel?’

  ‘No. It’s called recanalization,’ he says. ‘The vas deferens, the excretory duct for sperm from the testicles, is normally severed as part of the vasectomy. The ends are tied off. Failure rates often depend on how much is removed and how the occlusion is performed, the tying-off,’ he says. ‘If the occlusion fails, the ends of the duct can grow back together and rejoin.’

  ‘Did you surgically examine Mr. Vega to determine that this is what occurred?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘But the techniques used by the physician in his case are no longer considered to be medically on the cutting edge. Please excuse the pun,’ he says.

  A few jurors actually smile at this. Angelo has made a joke. He is mocking me. Unless I can turn this around I should sit down now. But I have dug the hole deeper, damaged our case more by these specifics. The compulsion to fill in just a little, some concession from the witness, some seeming high ground that I can end it on, if only for the illusion that we have gained something by all of this. Like the compulsive gambler, I am driven to win back just a little of my losses, some equivocation that I can build on later, that I can argue to the jury on close.

  It is a high-stakes gambit, but I sense that even the most medically disinclined in this courtroom have a singular burning question at this moment. If I passed out a hundred cards for suggested queries, all would come back with this at the top of the list. I could leave it and sit down, but the jury will wonder why. Against this I balance the first rule of the courtroom: never ask unless you know. Still, I can hear it murmured in their collective minds. It is overpowering, a single interrogatory in the desperate hope that he says no.

  ‘Dr. Angelo, did you perform a sperm count on Mr. Vega?’

  I stand transfixed by the twinkle in his eye as he says, ‘Yes.’

  It is like the sensation of hot lead flowing into every orifice of my body, the shuddering realization that I have fallen into the fiery crucible prepared for me by Cassidy.

  I could turn and walk away, excuse the witness. But Morgan on redirect would drive this thing through me like a javelin.

  ‘And what did you find?’ I ask.