Shadow of Power

by Steve Martini

  He took the other papers and settled into one of the large club chairs opposite the big television screen and started reading about the details from last night’s mini-riot. When he finished, he turned to his notes.

  He had briefing notes from two talent agents in New York and L.A., people with celebrity clients who’d made recent appearances on Leno, filled with information on everything from what to expect in the green-room to how to sit, and where, on the couch. Ten minutes passed, and there was a knock at the door. Breakfast was here. He was in the middle of a backgrounder on Leno. First rule in any game: Know who you’re playing.

  Still reading, paper in one hand, he got out of the chair and headed for the door. Without taking his eyes off the words on the page, in one smooth movement he reached for the knob, pulled the door open, turned back toward his chair, and said, “Come on in. Put it on the table. Leave the check, and I’ll sign it later.” In less than four seconds, he was back in the deep slouch, surrounded by the crushed-leather pillows of the club chair. His eyes continued to devour the words on the page.

  A slight breeze from out in the hall fanned the small hairs at the back of his neck from the open door behind him. There was an instant glimpse, a reflection of movement in the dark screen of the television. Before he could turn his head, a bright flash pulsed through his brain, jagged and vivid as fireworks. The roiling pain from his torn scalp and punctured skull registered but for a brief instant as he bridged the gulf between consciousness and the lightless pit of eternity.

  1

  I open the envelope and start to paw through the photographs, the stuff sent to me in response to our discovery motion two weeks earlier. There are color glossies of the murder weapon, a common claw hammer with a fiberglass handle covered by a molded-rubber hand grip. In the photo it is lying on a tiled surface in a pool of blood. A small ruler lies on the tile next to the hammer for scale.

  The next picture is a close-up of the claws themselves. A patch of bloody skin trailing several wisps of dark hair clings to the edge of one of the claws. The police photographer must have shot with a macro lens to get all the detail. No doubt they will want to use this one in front of the jury.

  The next photo shows an elongated skid mark, apparently made by a shoe that slid in the blood and left a red comma coming to an end at the wall. The skid mark arcs out of the picture, making clear that its owner must have gone down when he hit the blood.

  The fourth photo is a particular problem for us. I show it to Harry, who is seated next to me at the small metal table in the jail.

  Harry Hinds and I have been law partners, “Madriani & Hinds,” since our days back in Capital City years ago. We handle many kinds of cases, but predominantly we do criminal defense. Harry is more than a partner. For years he has been like an uncle to my daughter, Sarah, who is now away at college. I am widowed. My wife, Nikki, has been dead for almost fifteen years. To look at him, Harry hasn’t seemed to have aged a day in the twenty years I’ve known him. He takes the evidence photo in his hand and looks at it closely.

  It shows a palm print in blood and three very distinct fingerprints: the first, second, and third fingers of the right hand superimposed in rusted red on the clear white tile of the entry hall’s floor.

  “And they’re a match?” he asks.

  “According to the cops,” I tell him.

  “How did this happen?” says Harry. “How did you get your fingerprints not only in the blood on the floor but on the murder weapon itself?” This, Harry puts to the young man sitting on the other side of the table across from us.

  Carl Arnsberg is twenty-three. He has a light criminal record-one conviction for assault and battery, another for refusing to comply with the lawful orders of a police officer and obstruction of justice during a demonstration in L.A. two years ago.

  He looks at Harry from under straight locks of dark hair parted on the left. The way it is combed and cut, long, it covers one eye. He snaps his head back and flips the hair out of his face, revealing high cheekbones and a kind of permanent pout. Then he rests his chin on the palm of his left hand, elbow on the table holding it up.

  The pose is enough to piss Harry off.

  There is a small swastika planted on the inside of Arnsberg’s forearm, discreet and neat. It has all the sharp lines of something recent, none of the blurring that comes as flesh sags and stretches with age. His other arm is a piece of art. The words OUR RACE IS OUR NATION wrap his right forearm. This is followed by a number of pagan symbols in ink.

  Arnsberg’s pale blue eyes project contempt for the system that placed him here. It is an expression sufficiently broad to embrace Harry and me. I’m sure Arnsberg sees both of us as part of the process that keeps him here, in the lockup of the county jail.

  “I asked you a question,” says Harry.

  “I told you what happened. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “Until I’m satisfied that I’ve heard the truth,” says Harry.

  “You think I’m lying.”

  “Trust me, son, you don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”

  “Fine! I brought him his lunch to the room,” says Arnsberg.

  “Thought you said it was breakfast?” says Harry.

  “Maybe it was. Maybe he slept late. I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “Go on.” Harry has his notebook open and is jotting a few items now and then.

  “I knocked on the door. Like I told you before, and like I told the cops, the door opened when I hit it with my hand. Not all the way, just a crack. I didn’t use a passkey. I guess whoever closed it last, it didn’t catch. That would probably be your killer,” he says. “That’s who you should be looking for.”

  “You didn’t see anybody pass you in the hall, between the elevator and the door?” I ask.

  “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Go on.”

  “So when the door opened, I just leaned toward the crack a little and hollered ‘Hello?’-like that. Nobody answered, so I pushed the door open a little more. I didn’t look in, I just yelled again. Nothing. I knew I had the right room, the big Presidential Suite on the top floor. I’d been there plenty of times, delivering meals and picking up trays. So I sorta backed in, pushing the door with my back and shoulder. I yelled again. Nobody answered. At the same time, I started to undo the tablecloth with one hand, let it sorta drop down in front of me.”

  “Why did you do that?” I ask.

  “You learn to do it so you can fling it out on the table and put the tray down on top. But I did it for another reason, too. To give myself some cover,” he says. “You hear stories-waiters who barged into a room and found the guest, maybe a woman who didn’t hear ’em knock, coming out of the shower in the buff. It’s happened.”

  “So you thought whoever was inside was probably in the shower?”

  “There or maybe in the bedroom. It’s a big suite.”

  “So you’re standing there inside the door with your back to the room, tablecloth in front of your face. How did you find your way around the room?” says Harry.

  “Like I say, I’ve been in that room enough times to know the layout. It never changes. I knew where the table was, the chairs, and I could see enough light and shadow through the cloth. So I just moved in the right direction with the tray up on my shoulder. Listen, I tol’ all this to the cops.”

  “We want to hear it from you,” says Harry. “Humor us.”

  “Fine. I couldn’t see exactly where I was going. Just enough to know I wasn’t gonna walk into any furniture. It wasn’t until I got to the carpet off the tile in the living room, when I noticed something was wrong. I felt the squishing, you know, under my feet. I thought somebody musta spilled water. My first thought was the bathtub overflowed.” With this his face comes up off his propped-up hand. From the look in his eyes, he’s starting to relive the moment.

  “I had to put the tray down before I could look. So I found the table.”

  “Y
ou didn’t look down to see what it was, the dampness in the carpet?” asks Harry.

  Arnsberg shakes his head. “I was juggling the tray. All I needed was to drop coffee and orange juice, on whatever else was there on the floor. And all the time I kept yelling, ‘Hello? Anybody here?’”

  “How far away was it, the distance to the table from where you were then, when you first felt the wetness in the carpet?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. It was just a small table. It was off to the right as you entered the living room, a few feet. Maybe a couple of steps.”

  “Go on.”

  “I could sort of see the shadow of the table through the tablecloth.”

  “Do you remember whether the carpet was wet all the way to the table as you walked?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says. “No. No, it musta been, because of what I saw later.”

  “Go on,” I tell him.

  “So I spread the tablecloth, put the tray down, and turned around. That’s when I saw him, on the floor. His head was down. His butt was sorta crunched up against the chair. All that blood. I remember I looked down, and I was standing in it. And his head, I panicked. I started to run for the door. Musta got maybe two steps onto the tile when I went down. That’s what I remember. That’s how I got the blood on my pants. I figure that’s probably when I musta done it,” he says. “Touched the hammer, I mean.”

  The cops had found a single partial print on the murder weapon, one finger that seems to match the little finger, the pinkie, of Arnsberg’s right hand.

  “That’s the only way it could have happened,” says Arnsberg.

  “Not according to the cops,” says Harry.

  “Well, they’re wrong. All I remember is I got the hell outta there fast as I could. You would, too, you walked in on somethin’ like that.”

  “Have you ever seen this item?” Harry slides a photograph across the table. It’s a picture of one of those cheap clear-plastic raincoats, the kind you can fold up and slip into a pocket or a purse. Some of them come with their own tiny little bag for storage. This one doesn’t, but it is covered in the rust hue of dried blood.

  Arnsberg shakes his head. “No. Never seen it before.”

  “The police found it in a Dumpster behind the hotel, near one of the parking lots. But you’ve never seen it before?”

  “No.”

  The cops have confirmed that the blood on the raincoat belonged to Scarborough. They have scoured it inside out and subjected it in a chamber to the vapor of hot superglue, looking for any sign of fingerprints. They’ve found none.

  “After you found the body, why didn’t you tell somebody?” asks Harry.

  This was the clincher as far as the police were concerned, the fact that Arnsberg ran rather than reporting what he’d found. Though he didn’t run far. It took them just one day to track him down at his apartment before they could question him. By then they had enough to book him.

  “I don’t know. I panicked. You’d panic, too, if you had some dead guy’s blood on your pants, all over the bottom of your shoes.”

  “And that’s the only reason you ran? The blood on your clothes?” Harry pushes him.

  “Yeah. No. I don’t know. I guess I knew what people would think.”

  “And what was that?” says Harry.

  “Just what you’re thinking now. That I did it. That I might have a reason to kill him.”

  “Because of the artwork there on your arm?” Harry points with his pen at the tattoo.

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Or was it because of some of the friends you’re keeping these days?”

  He looks at Harry, the devil with all the questions. “That, too.”

  “Let’s talk about some of your friends,” I say. “Did any of them discuss with you the fact that Terry Scarborough was staying at the hotel where you worked? That you might actually see him, have access to him?”

  “I…don’t remember.”

  “Come on,” says Harry. “It’s a simple question. Did you talk to any of your buddies about Scarborough being in the hotel?”

  “I might have.”

  This is an angle the cops are working overtime trying to nail down, the question of whether there was a conspiracy to kill Scarborough.

  “You knew that some of your friends were seen protesting out in front of the hotel?” I ask. “The cops have them on videotape.”

  “Yeah. I knew they were there. I didn’t know about no videotape.”

  “Did you talk with them about Scarborough before he was killed?”

  “We might have.”

  “Did you or didn’t you?” I ask.

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t we? No law against talking.”

  “What did you talk about? What did you say?” Harry now bores in.

  “We…we talked about the fact he was an agitator, causin’ problems, stirrin’ up trouble.”

  “ Scarborough?”

  “Yeah. We got enough problems,” he says. “Mexicans crossin’ the border by the millions. Politicians sayin’ we can’t get ’ em out. Illegals marchin’ in the streets, carryin’ Mexican flags, tellin’ us they own the country. Then this guy comes outta nowhere, with this book, trying to get the blacks all riled up so he can start the Civil War over again. Only this time he wants to put us in chains.”

  “And who is ‘us’?” says Harry.

  “The white people,” says Arnsberg.

  “And this is what you talked about with your friends?” I ask.

  “Yeah. He was a troublemaker. You asked me, so I told ya. If you wanna know the truth, as far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”

  One thing is certain. Come trial, Arnsberg is not likely to be his own best witness.

  “So you talked about this with your friends when? How long before Scarborough was killed?” I ask.

  “I can’t remember exactly.”

  “How many times did you talk with other people about Scarborough?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Maybe a couple,” he says.

  “Twice?” says Harry.

  “I don’t know. Do you always know how many times you talked to somebody about something?”

  Harry wants a list of names, the people Arnsberg may have talked to in the days leading up to the murder, the places where they met, whether it was on the phone or in person, and how many witnesses were present.

  “So we talked about him. Doesn’t make me a killer.”

  “Ah, yes,” says Harry, “but there’s the rub. You don’t get to decide who the killer is. The jury does that. And I can guarantee you that they will be positively riveted by any information concerning things you might have said about Mr. Scarborough to others, especially in the period right before he was killed. They’re funny about that. Juries, I mean.”

  The kid doesn’t seem to like Harry’s sense of humor. I suppose it too much resembles lectures he’s gotten at school and in other places of authority.

  He turns to me. “The guy was stirring up crowds everywhere he went. You saw the news,” says Arnsberg. “Way he was going, sooner or later somebody was gonna nail him.”

  “There again you have a problem,” says Harry. “He wasn’t, as you say, ‘nailed’ somewhere else. This particular hammering took place in the hotel where you happened to work, and according to the cops all the evidence points to you being the last person in that room with him.”

  This from his own lawyer. The look on the kid’s face is a mix of anger and fear. “I thought you were here to help me,” he says.

  “We’re tryin’, son. But you have to give us the tools,” says Harry.

  “You got a cigarette?” Arnsberg looks at me.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Me neither,” Harry lies.

  People v. Arnsberg is the kind of case that is made up of hard circumstance, assorted pieces of physical evidence, and the fact that the defendant fits the expected profile of the killer like a fat man in stretch pants. Whether he did it or n
ot, he can be seen to possess the kind of insane motive that is easy to peddle to an inner-city jury-blind hatred based on race. In fact, the evidence came at them so fast that the cops fell over themselves in a blind rush to arrest the defendant.

  To listen to the media, Arnsberg didn’t kill a person of color. He did something worse. He killed their self-appointed messenger, in this case a lawyer, author, and celebrity, all the ingredients to whip up a hot story, except for sex, and they’re relying on innuendo for that one. The media mavens are now calling the case the “San Diego Slavery Slaying,” and they’re camped all over it, 24/7.

  “I talked to my dad. He says you can get me off.” This the kid directs at me.

  “We’ll do whatever we can. But there are no guarantees. We can’t do anything unless we know everything. That means everything you know. If you withhold information from us, even something you might not think is important…then you’re just wasting our time. You can bet the cops will find out about it-that is, if they don’t already know-and when they start dropping surprises on us in court, there will be nothing I or anyone else can do to help you. Understand?”

  He swallows, then nods, not something hip or cool, but vigorous, like someone who suddenly realizes that the threads of security, whatever it is that tethers him to this life, are far thinner than he ever realized. “Yeah. I told you everything I know. Really,” he says. “I didn’t do it. I swear.”

  “All right.” We lecture him on jailhouse etiquette, not to talk to anyone-guards, cellmates, even family-about events in the case. Anything told to them can be repeated in testimony on the stand. Even family members can be forced to testify against him. “You talk only to us, Harry or myself, that’s it.”

  “Somebody in the jail wants to talk about the weather, fine. Sports, feel free. But anything having to do with your case, with Scarborough, with race relations in general, you’re a mute,” says Harry. “If you have to, swallow your tongue. If we’re in trial and somebody asks how it went in court, you don’t know.”

  “I understand,” he says. “I talk to nobody. Only the two of you.”