Compelling Evidence

by Steve Martini

  “How is she paying you?” she asks.

  “By the hour,” I say. “But I may put a cap on it.”

  “Generous,” she says.

  “OK, no cap.”

  “Do what you think is right.”

  “If I did that, I wouldn’t be here, asking you for this,” I say.

  She seems taken aback by this. Surprised, perhaps, that I should realize it.

  “I will hold the costs down,” I tell her. I’ve already dispensed with thoughts of an investigator, except for Bowman. Harry and I will do most of the gumshoe ourselves. In the months before the trial we will chase loose leads and go after the facts that Cheetam ran from.

  “Do you have an agreement with her on fees yet?”

  “We haven’t nailed it down.”

  “Were you waiting for my signature?” she asks. This is more rhetorical than real, but before I realize this I make a little face of concession.

  She’s laughing at me now, inside, behind the mask that is her expression. I can see it in the little wrinkles around her eyes. She figures Talia’s playing me for a fool. Maybe she wants to be there to laugh when it’s over. I don’t know. I am having a hard time reading this woman I lived with for eleven years, the mother of my child.

  Our dinner has come, braised rack of lamb. The waiter is removing our salad plates.

  “I’m famished,” I say, searching for something, anything other than Talia and her case, to talk about. “It looks delicious,” I tell her.

  Nikki is not even interested in her plate, but instead is staring at me, with searching eyes, an expression brimming with immense pain and a single tear on her cheek. I look away. The little foxes are now gone.

  “You’ve got a guest,” Harry tells me deadpan. “In your office.” He’s in the reception area leaning over the desk talking with Dee. She’s finally learned to use the computer, when it suits her. The two of them are doodling with a crossword puzzle, a computer game Dee’s boyfriend bought for her birthday. Harry’s giving her words to fill the blanks. “Irish Gaelic, four letters, starts with an E. Erse,” says Harry. He can afford this. He’s not paying her salary.

  I look at him from under arched eyebrows, scanning my telephone messages plucked from the holder on Dee’s desk.

  “Did you make contact with the money changers?” I’ve left Harry in charge of getting the paperwork rolling on Talia’s mortgage, cash for the premium on her bond.

  He nods. “Took the loan application over to the jail this morning. Could’ve saved myself the trip,” he says.

  “Why?”

  Harry reaches over with one hand, still distracted, looking over Dee’s shoulder, and swings the door to my office open, enough for me to look inside. There, in one of the client chairs across from my desk, she sits reading a magazine, Talia sans the bars and the wire mesh. She’s wearing a fresh print dress. Her hair, still lacking a fresh perm, is softer than the jail ringlets I had seen the day before, this no doubt the result of some pricey Ph-balanced shampoo and an hour soaking in the tub at her house.

  “That was quick,” I say. Her exodus from the county jail.

  She turns and looks at me, her fingers clutching a small handbag. “Couldn’t be fast enough for me.”

  I move into the room, now heading for my chair behind the desk.

  “How did you manage it?” I ask her.

  “Friends,” she says.

  “They posted your bond?”

  “I owe them a lot.”

  At least a hundred thousand—and some change, I think to myself.

  “Who was it?” I ask.

  “I can’t tell you that. They want to remain anonymous.”

  “From your own lawyer?”

  “I’m sorry, Paul. I promised them I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “I see.”

  Harry finally gives up the game and follows me into the office.

  He shuts the door, and we sit, ready to talk to Talia.

  “It’s one thing you two won’t have to worry about,” she says, “getting me out. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  I am wondering who, in Talia’s set, would have sufficient interest to post the hundred-thousand-dollar premium, and the personal guarantee required for a million-dollar bond. Regardless, it is good news.

  “It frees up your mortgage money,” I tell her. “We can use it for the defense. Let’s pursue the application anyway.”

  Harry nods.

  She smiles at this prospect of paying a little more of her own way.

  “Oh, before I forget,” she says. She is into the small handbag lying in her lap and pulls out a wrinkled brown paper bag, folded over itself a dozen times.

  ‘Tod found this at the house yesterday.” She’s undoing the bag and finally reaches in. When her hand comes out it’s holding a shiny semiautomatic, so small mat it is nearly lost in her palm.

  “Here,” she says. Talia reaches across the desk to hand it to me.

  “There,” I say, gesturing for her to put it on the desk, in the center of my paper-strewn blotter. I’m hissing under my breath. “I told you to call me if you found it. Not to touch it.” I’m looking at Harry, who’s rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

  “I guess you did. He was so excited when he found it that he must have forgotten.” She’s talking about Tod. “Me too,” she says, crumpling the paper bag and pushing it back into her handbag.

  “Great. I suppose his prints are all over it too.”

  She looks at me, a little whipped dog, and nods, like she assumes this is now the case. Without ballistics to match this weapon with or distinguish it from the jacket fragment found in Potter’s skull, the cops are free to draw inferences that this is the murder weapon, this little gun covered with the fingerprints of my client and her latest flame. Beyond this it is difficult for me to fathom the lack of basic prudence that should cause Talia, less than a day out of jail, to carry this thing concealed in her purse into my office.

  I study it closely. It is small, about five inches in length. The safety is engaged. There’s heavy tooling on the shiny chrome barrel, scrolling around the numerals and letters 25 ACP just under the ejection port, and the image of two cards engraved farther out near the end of the barrel, double deuces laid one over the other in a fanned hand.

  I’m anxious to know if it’s been fired, to pull the magazine and eject any round from the breech so I can look down the barrel for residue. But to do it I would either smudge prints or put my own next to Talia’s and Tod’s.

  What to do with the gun—this is a problem. Harry wants to take it to a lab, have it screened for prints, shot for ballistic comparisons. But then Nelson will hint that perhaps we have destroyed evidence. What will be left will be our own lab report, confirming at a minimum Talia’s prints on the gun.

  “No,” I say. “We’ll turn it over to Nelson. We’ll demand that we see a full print analysis and ballistics report as soon as they’re available. We give him the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of everybody we know who touched the gun, Talia, Tod, and probably Ben. We tell them that Tod found it and without thinking picked it up and handed it to Talia. They didn’t realize the significance of any prints. They brought it to me. That takes the sting out of their findings. Any other prints they find”—I wink at Harry—“only serve to exonerate.”

  It is almost too neat. Harry’s on board quickly, all nods. My first impression might be that much of this has sailed beyond Talia. But as I look at her she is smiling, like the cat who got the canary. She seems to have a greater facility with this scenario than I would have expected, and perhaps it is exactly what she would have done herself.

  They have left me alone in the office. Talia’s gone home to wash a little more hell out of her hair. Harry’s calling Nelson about the gun, confirming everything in writing. Then he will deliver the piece to one of the DA’s investigators. Against his better judgment, Harry has agreed to be my Keenan counsel for this case.

  I pick up the p
hone receiver and dial Judy Zumwalt. She is three hundred pounds of pleasure, with a voice that is halfway into a laugh when she answers, “County clerk’s office.”

  “Judy, Paul Madriani here. Wanted to ask you if you could do a little favor.”

  “You can ask,” she says, “but I’m already booked tonight.” Then she laughs, big and bawdy, with waves of rolling flesh that undulate through Ma Bell.

  “Bail was posted on a client this morning. I’d like to know who paid the premium. Also who signed as a guarantor for the balance.”

  “Sure,” she says. “It’ll take a couple of minutes.”

  I give her the file number on Talia’s case, and she vanishes from the other end of the line. Talia’s friends may cloak themselves in confidence, but those who post premium on a bond make their interest in the defendant a matter of public record. It is not something likely to go unnoticed by Nelson and his minions.

  Judy is back to the phone. She is whistling, a rush of air between spaced teeth. “Don’t see many this big,” she says of Talia’s bond. “Bad lady?” she asks.

  “Case of mistaken identity,” I tell her.

  “Oh.” She laughs again, like “Tell me another.”

  “Defendant posted the premium for her own bail,” she says.

  All this means is that Talia and her friends did a little private banking, probably a quick deposit, cashier’s check to ensure ready acceptance by her bank before Talia wrote the check and paid the premium.

  “And who guaranteed the balance?” I ask.

  “Let’s see,” she says, searching the file. “Here it is, guy by the name of Tod Hamilton.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  IT is a middle-class neighborhood, quiet tree-lined streets, a heavy canopy of leaves that nearly meet over the center of winding intersections. Two-thirty-nine Compton Court is an understated white brick colonial, with a little trim of wrought iron near the front door, and neatly edged ivy in place of a lawn. A quaint hand-painted sign near the door reads: THE CAMPANELUS, JO AND JIM.

  She still lives here, though Jim has been dead for two years. I ring the bell and wait. There is no sound from within. I punch it again. Then, from a distance, I can hear the increasing register of footsteps making their way toward the door. The click of a deadbolt and it is opened, but I can’t see the figure inside, shrouded in darkness beyond the mesh of the wire screen door.

  “Paul. How good to see you.” There is excitement, a little giddiness in this familiar voice, the signal that I am welcome.

  “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to say hello.”

  “Well, absolutely,” she says. She unlatches the screen door and throws it open wide for me. “It’s been such a long time. Please, come in,” she says. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Jo Ann Campanelli has one of those faces that has never looked good. Hair streaked with gray from an early age, she has eyes like a basset hound, long drooping bags under each. There are a few rollers in her hair, like coiled haystacks in a field. The net holding them in place is something from the Depression.

  In this case the sad face belongs to a warm spirit. If Potter, Skarpellos could ever have been said to have a soul, Jo Ann Campanelli was its embodiment.

  She ushers me toward the living room and turns on a floor lamp to give the place some light.

  “It has been a while,” I say. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to you at Ben’s funeral.” So here I stand, at the threshold of her front room, trawling for information. It has been a singular question that has eaten at me since I finished our survey of the state’s case against Talia. Why was there no statement from Jo Ann, Ben’s secretary?

  She’s leaning over the couch, reaching for the drawstring on the curtains, to let a little daylight into this cavern. She finds it and bathes us both in bright light.

  “Oh dear, that is better, isn’t it? I spend so much time in the back of the house, it seems I never use this room anymore. When you’re alone you don’t do much entertaining,” she says. “Not many people come by.

  “You were asking about the funeral,” she says, remembering where we were. “I went later, after it was over, to his grave, to be alone with him for a while.”

  “Ah.” I nod, like I can understand such sentiment.

  “Who wants to be subjected to a crying old woman?” she says. “How’s practice? You’re looking good.” She is uneasy with the topic of Ben’s death, anxious to move on to another.

  “It’s going well,” I tell her.

  “Yes, I see you on television,” she says. “That shameful thing with Talia, Mrs. Potter. They should have their heads examined. She could no more kill Ben than I could.”

  “I agree,” I say. “But circumstances make victims of us all at times. I’m afraid we’ve got our work cut out.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe it. They can’t have a case?”

  “I wish I could say no.” I tell her without getting into the details that the evidence against Talia is not a happy sight.

  “Then they’re wearing blinders,” she says.

  “I wish I could put you on the jury,” I tell her.

  She laughs. Then mirth fades from her face. “This whole thing makes no sense. The suicide.” She utters a fleeting profanity to herself under her breath, like this is utterly unbelievable.

  She shakes her head. “I’ll tell you,” she says, “if they’d talked to me, I’d have set them straight.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I say.

  “What?”

  “They never interviewed you?”

  “No.” She says it with some indignation. “How about a cup of coffee. I’ve got some already brewed.” It’s an invitation to exchange more dirt.

  “If it’s no trouble.”

  “No trouble at all. Do you mind the kitchen? It’s just so much more comfortable than out here.”

  “Lead the way.”

  It’s a cheery room, yellow wallpaper, little flowers on the diagonal above white, wood wainscot. A copper teapot on the stove, a dozen photographs of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews litter the walls along with a series of plaster-cast geese.

  “Regular or decaf?” she asks.

  “Regular—black.”

  “Good,” she says. “None of that sissy stuff for you.” She reaches for the carafe in the coffee maker, still piping hot. Jo Ann is a coffee hound. There were always three cups in various places in the office, half full, with her name on them.

  There’s a certain organized clutter in this room, the kind that neat people engage in. There is a sense that everything can be swept into an out-of-the-way cupboard or closet on a single sortie. The kitchen table is a tangle of heavy brown twine laid out in the loose weaving of a hanging macrame flower-pot holder, the knots not quite tight. An unfinished landscape with twisted tubes of acrylic paint sits on an easel in the corner, near the window. Jo Ann, by either choice or necessity, has become a woman of leisure.

  “Please sit down.” She pushes the twine toward one corner of the table. It disappears into a drawer that she slides closed underneath. I pull out a chair and sit.

  “It’s good to have company,” she says. “Breaks up the day a little. Here.” She puts a mug of steaming, dark mud in front of me. Now I remember her coffee from the firm. Ben wouldn’t touch it, said it was her way of telling him she didn’t do coffee—except for herself. She brings her own cup and takes a chair catercorner to mine.

  “So how’s retirement?” I ask.

  “Has its moments.”

  “But you miss the office?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  I make a face.

  “Well, I suppose it gave my life a certain structure, some purpose, especially after Jim passed away. Though I have to admit, it would never have been the same after Ben died.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I’ve seen the place.”

  “Don’t go back myself. I don’t think I’d be welcome.” She says this leaning back in
her chair smiling a little, like there’s a secret she’s ready to impart.

  “Why did you leave?”

  She laughs, not hearty, but cynical. “It wasn’t by choice. Had to hire a lawyer to get my retirement,” she says. “Skarpellos—the guy’s lower than the nipples on a snake.” She bites off the words. “Ben wasn’t cold yet. He called me in and told me to clean out my desk. Had a security guard stand over me while I did it. The kind of trust you get after twenty years on the job.” She says this with bitterness.

  I don’t say anything, but give her a look, like “Tell me more.” The aroma of the coffee is making its way to my senses. I haven’t tasted it, but the smell is a little like hydrochloric acid.

  “I forgot, you weren’t there,” she says. “Most of it happened after you left. The place was an armed camp.” Jo is describing the firm in the days before her departure. “Tony knew where my loyalties rested.”

  “He and Ben were at odds?” I say it matter-of-factly, for I saw these pitched battles between them.

  “An understatement,” she says. “The partnership was coming apart at the seams.”

  That surprises me. While they had a history of fighting, none of it ever lasted more than a day. They could scream at each other at the top of their voices and forget the reason by the next morning.

  “Jealousy,” she says. “Skarpellos was green. It was bad enough that Ben was leaving, but it set like a burr under Tony’s saddle that he was going to all that glitter in Washington. He’d been complaining for a year that Ben wasn’t carrying his share. All the partners told him it was gonna be a gold mine for the firm. A former partner on the U.S. Supreme Court. The prestige alone would bring in a dozen new clients. Tony at high tea with the Court. Can you see it?” This brings a little chuckle from both of us.

  She takes a sip of coffee and lets it flow like molten lead down her throat. The pack of cigarettes was on the table now.

  “Mind?” she says.

  I shake my head. I have become the standin for a thousand carping coffee breaks that Jo has missed since leaving the firm.