Compelling Evidence

by Steve Martini

  In quick, efficient motions, three of the officers strap him into the metal chair. Two-inch web straps, two around each arm, two around the chest and abdomen, hold him erect and still. The other guard straps his legs tightly to the chair. They are finished in less than a minute. Three of the guards leave. The last hooks up the stethoscope, then gives Danley a quick pat on the knee and says something to him. I can’t hear the words, but I read his lips. “When you hear the gas, breathe deeply.”

  Now Danley is terror-stricken, beyond comprehension, his head whipping wildly from side to side. His moan is constant, a low groan from the tiny room, a tortured mantra.

  The last guard ducks backward out of the chamber, and the door is closed and sealed from the outside. The cries of agony inside are now muted. He turns his head and looks back at us. “Somebody …” His words trail off and I can’t make out the rest. But this is some form of plea. He’s begging for someone to intervene.

  At two minutes past the hour, the condemned is alone in the sealed chamber.

  Suddenly his head slumps forward, and I think that perhaps it’s begun. Then he slowly lifts his eyes and I can see that he’s breathing without distress, looking about himself at the windows of the chamber. He casts a glance to his right at the woman he calls Bampa. She’s turned away, grief giving over to resignation. One of the clergymen gives Danley an encouraging nod. In his miasma of fear Danley finds a fleeting instant of sanity, for I think that he returns this kindness with a slight motion of his head and the flickering of heavy lids over haunted eyes, almost imperceptible. His lips are parched, his tongue constantly at them, trying to impart what little moisture he can summon in these, his final seconds of life.

  Now there are noises from beyond the blinds at the other side of the chamber, and Danley’s head darts to look. Fluid is running into the vats under the chair.

  “No, no, no.” Like he’s stuttering. His voice rises an octave. “Not yet.” He braces himself as if he’s about to be propelled along with the chair into space.

  The roar of a loud fan drowns out the last sounds from within the chamber. Powerful, like the rumbling of a ship’s engine, it rattles the metal floor of the chamber, vibrates through the concrete beneath our feet as it gains speed. Somewhere from the other side, a guard closes the air vent under the chamber. Danley turns his head toward us. His eyes are filled with terror—bulging. It is as if no one has told him what to expect. The fan has created a two-pound vacuum inside the chamber. It’s beginning to suck the air from his lungs, creating a void to be filled by new and unexpected horror. We hear nothing but the drone of the fan. Suddenly the twin arms holding their deadly cargo under the chairs drop. The two balls of cyanide disappear. Bubbling caldrons produce invisible gas that displaces the air sucked by the vacuum.

  It takes a second, maybe two. Danley’s chest is racked by violent spasms, writhing convulsions. These produce a series of massive dry heaves. His head is thrown back and then forward in a futile effort to escape the unseen vapors that wash up from beneath the chair.

  Then his motions slow, as if a sudden calm has come over him. He turns his head slightly in our direction. I can see his eyes. They are white blanks. His pupils have rolled up behind the lids under his forehead like the wheels on a slot machine.

  Now there are only pained puffs of breath from his mouth, like dry coughs, a series of these. They are autonomic, I think, for I do not believe that with the dose of gas, he can in any way be termed conscious. His fingers are rigid, like white steel. They form intractable claws on the metal arms of the chair. It’s approaching a minute by my watch when his head finally slumps forward, motionless, long locks of straight black hair hanging in disarray about his face. At a minute and fifteen seconds mere is one final effort to roll his head to the side, unknowing, a muscle spasm, I’m certain. The form in the chamber is now utterly still, chin centered on his chest, from which there is no rise of respiration. I was prepared for the cherry red of carbon monoxide or the cyanotic blue of a coronary. Instead his skin has the pallor of ashen gray. This is fused in my mind, a visual corollary to the taste of bitter almond, the manifestation of cyanide.

  Several seconds pass in stillness. A viscous fluid runs through the constellation of holes in the metal seat of the chair. This last coming from Danley. Some of this mixes with the deadly broth in the vat. I avert my eyes, having seen all that duty requires me to see. I can, with certainty, attest to the death of this man. I can fix my signature to the return of the death warrant as required by law.

  It’s been called a ‘formalized minuet—a ritual of death’ by one writer who’s observed what I have now seen. There is, in this cold, clinical exercise of the state, a calculated revulsion that, to be sure, breeds at least a spark of pity in any rational soul. It is, I think, a severe irony that I should feel this, as I consider what the future might have held for Sally Ryan and Linda Maldinado.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE call came in the early afternoon. Ben Potter asked me to meet him at Wong’s this evening. It was the first time we had spoken in nearly a year, since the day I left the firm. There’s something that he wants to discuss, but won’t talk about it on the phone. I haven’t slept in two nights, since the Danley execution. At the prison, a shrink warned us of this. Now Ben wants to talk. While I dread this, I am unable to find a way to say no.

  Harry’s craning his neck like some four-year-old, gawking up at the cavernous ceiling while he turns in a slow spiral approaching the maître d’ station. Wong’s is definitely a cut above his usual nightiy haunts. Harry Hinds has come with me this evening for a little moral support. He has become my shadow of late. The aging voice of wisdom, Harry is a generation older than I, another lawyer eternally on the make for a good case. To Harry a good case is any fee-paying client. He has the little office down the hall from my own. In recent months, it seems, Harry Hinds and I have become soulmates. To look at Harry and his career, where he has been and where he is going, this does not bode well for me.

  “Mr. Madriani, it’s good to see you again.” Jay Wong’s voice carries, even in the din from the crowded bar.

  He nods politely, hesitates for a moment, then reaches around me for Harry. He taps him lightly on the shoulder and Harry turns.

  “Sir, there’s no smoking in the restaurant.” Wong points to a neatly stenciled sign on the rostrum where reservations are taken. “City ordinance,” he says.

  Harry’s dangling a half-spent cigarette from his lips. A thin dusting of ash covers the lapels of his dark blue suit coat.

  “Oh, sure.” He takes the butt from his lips and for an instant looks absently down at the deep pile carpet. Wong produces an ashtray before he can act, and Harry dutifully crushes the thing in the dish as it disappears behind the rostrum.

  Wong turns to me again.

  “We haven’t seen you for some time,” he says.

  “A few months.” I lie. I’ve not been in the place since leaving P&S. I’d been a regular at Wong’s for lunch at least twice a week for the three years I was with the firm—authorized to sign the Potter, Skarpellos tab when entertaining clients. I can believe that Jay Wong has missed me.

  I look good, he says. I’ve lost some weight, he notes. Then a raw nerve. “How’s your lovely wife?”

  I’d forgotten. Nikki and I dined at Wong’s on one occasion, in celebration, the night I was invited to join Potter’s firm. I’m amazed that, with the procession of traffic through these doors, Wong can remember her. But then that is his special talent.

  “Oh she’s fine—fine.” I say it with conviction, omitting the details—that we are no longer living together, and that I have, for several months, and despite my efforts to restore my wrecked marriage, been anticipating the service of divorce papers.

  Then I see him moving from a table in the dining room toward the bar. Ben Potter. Tall, well over six feet, though I doubt he’s ever been accurately measured. He has one of those frames, the shoulders rounded and hunched forwar
d a little, the gait just slightly lumbering. He wears his usual dark vested sweater under his suit coat. Together with his bearing, this wrinkled bulk projects the image of some mighty bear aimlessly foraging for meat tied in a tree. He has managed to exploit this awkward posture, coin it as his own, so that a generation of law students who have studied under him in the evenings at the university now mimic this style when addressing juries. It’s an attitude that on Ben is not tired or aging, but stately, deliberative.

  He stops at a table to chat with friends like some frumpish pope passing out dispensations. I hear hearty laughter from across the room. Then a quiet retort by Ben. They laugh again.

  Wong says something, but I’ve missed it.

  “Hmm?’ I look back at him. He’s tracked on my line of sight like radar.

  “How about that Ben Potter,” he says. ‘Word is, he’s on his way to Washington, uh?’

  From Wong, such rumors take on credence.

  I’ve been considering this subject for days, anticipating phone calls from the press. Ben Potter now heads a dwindling list of candidates to fill a vacancy on the nation’s high court, a position to which he has aspired his entire professional life. It’s now within his grasp, the result of careful political alliances he’s cultivated for two decades, and the considerate if sudden death of one of the “brethren.” The FBI’s already hit me for a background check, digging for dirt. For the first couple of minutes with two agents planted in my office, I thought they’d gotten scuttlebutt about Talia and me. I was satisfied by the time they left that they had nothing on that score.

  “Can I get you gentlemen a table?’ Wong is back to us.

  “Just gonna have a drink at the bar for now.” With Harry I’ve decided it’s best to take it slow. If we’re careful, he can avoid the social bends. He’s a good lawyer, but when it comes to entertainment his comfort zone is limited to wide spots on country roads, where red neon buzzes “Miller” or “Bud.” Like his practice, Harry’s learned to dodge challenges in the afterhours.

  We negotiate the maze of small cocktail tables near the bar. I’m followed closely by Harry, like Bwana on safari. I scan the bar for any vacant stools, an open space to park our bodies, to recede from public view until I can find a quiet corner to talk alone with Ben.

  The bartender, clad in starched white linen to the cuffs, cruises up and slips a cocktail napkin on the bar before me, all efficiency.

  I look to Harry. He orders a beer.

  “Scotch over with a twist.”

  “Quite a place,” he says. But I can tell he’s uncomfortable.

  “Lotta deals cut here,” I say.

  “I’ll bet. Looks like they all have fleas.”

  I look at him, a question mark.

  “Lotsa back-scratchin’ goin’ down.” This is not the kind of commerce Harry’s used to. I can tell from his tone that he prefers the straightforward pitch of honest crime.

  The starched bartender returns with Harry’s beer and my scotch. I leave an open tab. To pay by the drink isn’t done; that’s the sign of a tourist out for a look at the high rollers.

  The place is peopled with the usual crowd of political hustlers, mostly lobbyists plying their trade. Few lawyers except for the upper-crust corporate set venture here. The freight is too steep.

  The heating trays are being readied for hors d’oeuvres—oyster beef. It was one of the inducements for Harry. “Oysters put lead in your pencil,” he says.

  I take a sip of scotch, turn my head—and I see her. She is dark, a tawny perpetual tan, lustrous in blue silk with pearl earrings and necklace. Talia is thirty yards away at a table with a group, Ben’s empty chair beside her. Conversation floats about her like an ether. She is oblivious. She sits silent, detached, a serene cameo surrounded by animation at the table.

  There’s another, younger man, all dapper in an expensive suit, dark hair slicked down in me style of a Madison Avenue ad, just a hint of five-o’clock shadow gracing sallow cheeks. He sits across from Talia, his cool matching hers. The guy turns his face slightly toward me. I can’t believe it. It’s as if the great giver of all genes had landed one dead-center with a meat cleaver on his chin, the cleft of distinction. Talia’s eyes fall on him. They smile, and for an instant I wonder.

  “Water under the bridge,” says Harry.

  “Hmm?’

  He nods toward the table. Harry knows about Talia; he’s the only person I’ve told.

  “More like my career over the falls,” I say.

  “What’s that I smell?’ He sniffs the air. ‘Is it the aroma of regret?’

  “You bet. Like burnt toast. What can I say? I was stupid.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.” He’s making a careful physical appraisal of Talia, taking it all in—the meets and bounds.

  “She is spectacular,” he says.

  “I’m so glad she meets with your approval.” Talia Potter’s good looks are undeniable, like the theorems and postulates of geometry. Her beauty is the kind that causes both men and women to stop and stare. Along with this, she exudes a sexual magnetism that can’t be ignored. This she has learned how to use to full advantage.

  “Won’t argue with your analysis, though. There is,” he says, ‘a certain degree of dementia involved in shtuppin’ the boss’s wife.” He delivers this in a heavy German accent, a little Freud in his analysis.

  That’s Harry. No sugar coating.

  “But you’ll be happy to know it’s not terminal.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Oh yes. Eight out of ten doctors will tell you it’s just a passing condition. Comes and goes with the cycles of the moon. Sure,” he says. “People in the Middle Ages knew it as Unicorn’s Disease.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Today, the scientific literature refers to it as severe distended horniness. But there’s one problem.” He touches the side of his nose with a finger, about to deliver the final prognosis. “I believe it may be contagious.”

  As we talk, he’s been eyeing Talia’s table. He gestures with his head in her direction. Harry’s intercepted one of her ‘come hither’ looks wafted across the table like mustard gas.

  “The guy with the chipped chin, one of the firm’s associates?’ he asks.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “Well, me poor man’s suffering from chronic, dissociative, dysfunctional dangling-dick syndrome. She’ll no doubt cure him shortly. Then he’ll be looking for a new job. I think we’re witnessing the outbreak of an epidemic.”

  Harry doesn’t have a high opinion of Talia. To him my fall from the firm was a simple case of seduction. For me it was much more complex. She is, at least from my perspective, not the harlot he supposes.

  “Aside from humping your patron’s wife, what did you do at the firm?’ he asks.

  “That’s delicate.”

  “You want delicate, you talk to your priest. You come to a friend, you get candor. Tell me about the cases.”

  “A smorgasbord. Mostly business stuff, some crimes, a little contracts work—sometimes the two were the same.”

  He looks quizzically at me over his shoulder.,

  “In business all the perpetrators wear business suits and suspenders. They steal from investors with convoluted option clauses and murky definitions of net profit.”

  “Ah.” He says it with relish, as if he’s finally found someone in the world of corporate law he recognizes.

  I tell Harry about Potter’s formative years. Ben had cut his teem as U.S. attorney in the early sixties. He prosecuted some primitive early white-collar scams—a crude Ponzi scheme that ended in bankruptcy. When political fortunes found him out of office he turned to the defense and started the firm. Now the clients are more sophisticated and well-heeled, the business machinations more complicated, some of them even legitimate.

  “Bet it pays well,” says Harry.

  “In a heavy case, defending a corporation or its officers, it’s common that you get a six-figure retainer.”r />
  Harry whistles.

  “It’s what the polite criminal defense bar calls ‘business law,’ ” I say. ‘And there’s no stigma. If you work it right, it tucks neatly into the folds between the firm’s other more respectable clients.”

  Harry has some difficulty comprehending this. In the last decade the criminal defense bar has taken it politically on the chin in this state. They are painted with the same brush as the clients they defend, passed over for judicial appointments, and generally excluded from polite society and its upper-crust functions.

  Harry catches the bartender going by and orders another drink. ‘V.O. and water,” he says. “A double.” He’s getting serious now.

  Ben always had a saying—“In corrupt commerce confusion is king.” It was the first rule of white-collar defense. If the jury can’t understand it, it can’t convict. The art of defending a confidence scheme was usually projected from a kaleidoscope of confusion, all masking the only common ingredient present in every case. Errors of accounting, the mistakes in payment were never in the other guy’s favor. One of the immutable laws of white-collar gravity. The chips always fall on your client’s side of the table.

  “Tell me,” says Harry, “how does one break into this field—business law?”

  “By being reputable.” He looks at me. We both laugh.

  “Now tell me the truth,” he says. “Did Potter fire ya?”

  “If you mean did he say it, not in so many words. But between his hurt pride and my own guilt there was a gulf large enough to float the Love Boat. He knew Talia was playing around.”

  For a moment I think to myself. It plays like a silent reel in my brain. Ben had talked to me one day over lunch—confided to me as a friend that his wife was having an affair with another man. He was sick to death about it, looking for advice, the counsel of someone he trusted. I sat silent and listened, commiserating, making the right noises, asking the delicate questions. Satisfying myself that he had no details, that he was in the dark concerning the identity of this other man. To my eternal discredit I could not muster the courage to reveal that I was Talia’s lover.