Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  Asani looked at Madelyn, who appeared to be in a trance as she studied the object. The shop owner smiled, wondering whether his calculator possessed enough digits to cipher the sale and its consequent tax.

  Madelyn came to, just long enough to ask a question: “Does it have a name?”

  “Ahh, yes. The original owner, the man who commissioned it—he and the artist agreed that it would be called Orb at the Edge.”

  He escorted her to the inner sanctum at the rear of the gallery, a small office where he opened negotiations for the purchase. After haggling over the price for several minutes, Asani tried to excuse himself from the room for a moment. A call of nature, he told her. Madelyn looked at her watch and told him she was late for an appointment and would have to leave. While she had a dinner engagement at eight, there was nothing pressing, neither was she left behind the door when the brains were dispensed. If Asani left the room at that point, her offer would be withdrawn and she would walk. Madelyn had no intention of getting into a bidding war via long distance with some acquisitions director for a museum her company was probably sustaining through its program of corporate contribution to the arts.

  Finally they agreed on a price and Madelyn cut a check. Asani wanted to deliver it personally the next day, but Madelyn would have none of it. The shop owner and his son went to work packaging the piece.

  Madelyn was much more content with the boxed blue sphere on the seat next to her as she maneuvered through traffic. It occupied her attention sufficiently that she missed the change when the traffic light went green. The driver in the car behind her tapped his horn. She could see him gesticulating in her rearview mirror: Rich bitch in the Formula One can’t drive.

  “Relax.” Madelyn looked at him through narrow little slits from behind her dark glasses. “Keep your shirt on.” She touched the gas with her foot and the Ferrari inched forward, slowly gaining speed. For the first time since getting the car, she regretted not having automatic transmission. That way she would have had one hand free to protect the box if it lurched forward at a stop. Instead she kept one eye on the cardboard container, the other on the road, her right hand alternating between the shift lever and the box on the seat next to her.

  The sleek racer never got past thirty or out of second gear. Finally she turned into her driveway and pressed the button on the remote. The double iron gates began to swing open.

  A few seconds later she was in the garage, the overhead door closed behind her. She left the briefcase with her laptop along with a stack of important mail from the office in the car. Then, with the strap of her purse over one shoulder, she wrestled the large box through the passenger-side door. She slammed the door closed with one hip to get it out of the way and caught the strap of her purse in the crook of her arm as it slid off her shoulder. In four-inch heels she maneuvered around the Ferrari. The box containing Orb at the Edge wasn’t as heavy as it was awkward, too big for her to get her arms around. Another woman might have waited for help, but not Madelyn. Ever since she was a kid she resented women who employed their feminine wiles to get some man to do what they should be able to do for themselves. Given the tools and a book of directions, she would be as good at repairing cars as she was at crafting software.

  She made it to a small potting table at the end of the garage near the door to the backyard. She carefully set the box on the table, then slid the purse off her shoulder, dropping it on the floor. She hiked the waistband of her skirt up a couple of inches. It had slipped down as she was grappling with the box.

  Madelyn was puffing a bit, studying the door leading to the kitchen twenty feet away. She looked around for something she could use.

  Six minutes later she stood in the kitchen, in the middle of a small sea of litter, packing tape, and bubble wrap strewn across the floor and over the countertop. A smile formed on her lips, the joy of owning such beauty, as she took in the Orb at the Edge. Gingerly she picked it up and walked through the kitchen and down the hall. Madelyn made her way to the large oval ebony table in the entryway. The moment she had seen the piece in Asani’s gallery, she had known where she wanted to put it. It would be the first thing anyone saw when entering the grand hall.

  She set it in the center of the table, shimmering glass over the gloss of ebony. She looked at it, then stepped back a few feet to gain perspective. As she moved backward her heel caught on something. She nearly tripped. Recovering just enough to catch herself, she turned and looked down.

  Who the hell would leave a pair of running shoes lying on the floor in her entry hall? They weren’t hers. They were too big. The maid, she thought. What was she going to have to do to find good help?

  Before she could utter a word in anger, her attention was drawn back to the glass sphere on the table by a beam of reflected light. The Orb was now emitting a streak of red from the cobalt blue. The color was so intense as it left the glass and entered her eyes that the pain was severe. She closed her eyes, turned her head, and brought one hand up toward her face.

  Before the neural path into her brain could be traversed, the kinetic force translated into the violent snap of her neck. Her raised arm dropped, propelled downward by forces greater than gravity as the discharge of energy exploded through her head to her hand. Instantly the pain in the optic nerve vanished, replaced by a brief burning sensation in one finger, and then nothing. Her head dropped onto one shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face. The second impact buckled her knees and Madelyn’s body flooded to the floor like a boneless sack of flesh.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had an uncle named Evo. he was a big man, nearly six-foot-four, and though he carried a paunch above his belt and a spare tire over each hip, I never thought of him as fat. From my recollection he filled the frame of every doorway he passed through, from top to bottom and both sides, shoulders like a stevedore and an angular head like a bronze bust, bald and shiny as polished stone. The only hair you would have noticed were the unkempt bushes over his brows and several days’ layer of stubble on his face. For most of my life, as a child and later, my uncle in physical appearance was the spitting image of Luca Brasi, the notorious assassin of Godfather fame.

  Evo’s enduring expression was a kind of passive, simpering smile, what you might take for the face of a wiseass until he opened his mouth to talk, which he seldom did. Then you would have noticed the missing teeth up front like broken pickets in a fence and the childish thoughts and worries that spilled from his mind.

  Caught up in events, just a few years out of high school, I was told that Evo had always been a happy kid, full of life, smiles, and laughter. But as Christmas 1950 approached he found himself perched behind the sights of an M1 Garand on a snow-covered slope, peering out at what must have looked like the edge of the earth. His Army unit had pushed out into the mountains north of the Marine battalion encamped along the western side of a reservoir, an ominous place of ice-covered rivers and barren mountains.

  The North Korean forces had evaporated under the massive air assault and pounding from UN artillery. U.S. forces, Army units, and Marines, along with their allies, had driven the North Koreans up the peninsula to within a few miles of the Chinese border. MacArthur had broken their backs at Inchon. Victory was at hand. By Christmas the troops would be home. It was late November and temperatures at night dipped to sixty below, driven by icy winds off the steppes of Manchuria, temperatures so cold that at times it froze the actions on machine guns so that they would often fire only a single shot and had to be cycled by hand. Having outflanked the North Koreans by landing far behind enemy lines, the UN forces had moved north so fast that most units had been issued little or no winter weather gear.

  Though he didn’t know it at the time, from all accounts Evo’s unit and those on the line with him had gone as far north as any UN forces would ever get. As Thanksgiving approached, these troops were just a few ridgelines south of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

  Much of what I know o
f these events I have garnered over the years from books and articles and from conversations with my father, who was Evo’s older brother. My uncle seldom talked of his experiences in the war. In fact, in the decades after his return to civilian life, I can recall him having only a few conversations, and most of those with my father.

  Even with all of this, what drew my attention to him as a child were the gravitational black holes where my uncle’s eyes should have been. I often wondered what was going on beyond the vacant depths of those twin dark pits. According to the shrinks at the VA hospital, it was most likely visions of hell.

  It is possible that these childhood memories of my uncle have softened my brain and impaired my judgment sufficiently that last week I returned a phone call from a complete stranger, one Colonel James Safford, U.S. Army retired. Colonel Safford, who in civilian life is a lawyer in Idaho specializing in estate planning, wills, trusts, and the like, in his spare time volunteers his services as part of a small veterans’ advocacy group known as the GI Defense Fund. The organization was formed in the 1970s in the waning days of the Vietnam War when a growing number of returning veterans found themselves in trouble with the law, oftentimes the result of seemingly senseless and unprovoked acts of horrific violence; this from men who had no prior criminal history or problems with the law before their military service.

  Safford had been given my name, along with the names of several other local lawyers, from the office of the base commander at North Island Naval Air Station on Coronado Island in San Diego. It seems the Navy keeps in touch with a handful of local lawyer-veterans who from time to time have drawn attention to themselves by defending members of the armed services who have gotten sideways with civilian legal authorities. These attorneys have on more than one occasion given up on collecting their fees. Some might call this pro bono work. But as a practical matter it is difficult to collect from soldiers and sailors whose spouses and children sometimes have to line up at the county welfare office for food stamps just so that they can eat through the end of the month.

  What Safford was looking for was some help with a case. It seemed that a retired Army sergeant had gone a little beyond the usual military brush with the law, your typical bar brawl or flashing incident involving a general mooning of society brought on by unbridled hostility, a domestic dispute, or a few too many beers.

  It’s the reason we are here today, my partner Harry Hinds and I, heading for the elevator at the county jail to interview a prospective client. His name is Emiliano Ruiz. We have never met.

  He is thirty-eight years old and until two and a half years ago was an Army staff sergeant, what some would call a lifer. He spent twenty years in uniform. And according to what little I know of him, he saw action in Panama and the first Gulf War. He retired and took a job with a security firm in San Diego about two years ago, one of those companies that offer high-end protective services for corporate executives here and abroad. For the last four months Sergeant Ruiz has been behind bars on a charge of first-degree murder with special circumstances. If he is convicted, considering the profile of the case—involving a victim of prominence in this community—and the cold and calculating nature of the crime, Ruiz is a likely candidate for San Quentin’s death row.

  As Harry and I turn the corner for our two o’clock conference somebody over by one of the satellite trucks hollers, “There they are,” and within a few seconds they are on us like locusts.

  We are engulfed in a sea of bodies hoisting microphones and pushing camera lenses in our faces. Bright lights and a million questions, most of them unintelligible, are drowned out by more shouted questions from behind.

  There is no telling how many are here. I can’t see far enough into the crowd, but the camera crews are jostling each other for position. There are satellite trucks from as far north as L.A., all of the network affiliates, their dishes already arrayed and aimed skyward, generators running. They are parked at the curb in front of the entrance to the county jail, blocking the sidewalk so that we have to move around them to get there.

  “Mr. Madriani”—some guy sticks his microphone in Harry’s face—“can you tell us, have you spoken to your client yet?”

  With that, everybody jumps on Harry. He is awash in questions, everybody figuring the reporter must know him.

  “When are you going to see Ruiz?”

  “Why did the defendant fire Dale Kendal? Was he unhappy with Kendal’s representation?”

  It is my chance to slip the crowd, but I don’t do it. “What about the preliminary hearing? If he’s innocent, how come the judge bound him over?”

  “What does Ruiz know about the Information for Security program?”

  “Was he working for the government?”

  “Do you think Chapman was killed because of IFS? Has anybody in the administration talked to you?”

  Harry keeps trudging forward, wading into them, briefcase up in front of his face; he finally looks over at me, half smiles, then says, “He’s Madriani, not me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Like quills on a mad porcupine, a hundred microphones—some hoisted on six-foot booms—are suddenly pointed in my direction.

  Even in the afternoon San Diego sun the camera lights are blinding, portable banks of them arrayed on bars held high on stanchions moving with the crowd as we approach the entrance to the jail in lockstep, half an inch at a time.

  “We’ll have nothing to say right now. Maybe later, after I’ve spoken to Mr. Ruiz.”

  This tentative offering doesn’t appease them. Some character sticks me in the ass from behind, trying to lift his microphone boom over my head. I make a mental note to find another way out of the jail.

  Using his briefcase like a shield fending off swords, Harry pushes on into the crowd, Don Quixote tilting at mic booms and cameras. We run this gauntlet for half a block, the press mob now a wide circle of bodies around us, shutting down traffic as we cross the street. A photographer with a wide-angle lens tries to get a shot from down low. Somebody jostles him from behind, and by the time he snaps the shutter he is close enough to my face that I can read the f-stops off the barrel of his lens. “Extra! Extra! See hair up the lawyer’s nose!” And some people see this as glamorous.

  The murder of a prominent socialite, one of the state’s leading software magnates—a major local employer and a woman who made it to 220 of the Fortune 500—is a good story, but nonetheless it is one that likely would have had only local legs. This morning a front-page piece in a Washington newspaper changed all that. The story, which has now been regurgitated coast-to-coast on all of the morning network news shows, has linked the victim, Madelyn Chapman, and her company to the controversial Information for Security program, known to the press and the public as IFS.

  IFS has been leading news in the national press for weeks now, ever since it became the largest bone in a tug-of-war between the White House and Congress, the President saying he needs the program to safeguard national security and civil libertarians claiming it’s an invasion of privacy.

  Until this morning Harry and I had agreed to become involved in a nice, quiet little murder trial, with perhaps a few local reporters invited. Now that Chapman has been linked to the IFS program, her murder has been ginned into national headlines, and Harry and I are up to our asses in a sea of questions.

  Fifty yards away I can see a small band of uniformed guards. They have crowded up against the inside of the glass doors at the main entrance to the jail. Looking out and laughing, one of them has a cupped hand to his mouth and is talking. They seem to be enjoying the entertainment, two lawyers being engulfed and digested by the news amoeba out front. Want some publicity? Help yourself.

  We grind to a halt, unable to move forward or back. I’m beginning to feel like Custer surrounded by the Indians. This kind of stuff can get out of hand. Somebody pokes Harry with his mic and gets a face full of leather with a handle attached. The guy starts to push back and I stop him before w
e have a news riot. If this continues, I know that my partner will be packing an anvil in the bottom of his briefcase the next time he comes for a jail visit.

  “They’re taking their time,” says Harry.

  We are cooling our heels in one of the concrete cubicles they call conference rooms at the jail. Harry is standing with a foot up on the steel bench to one side of the table, his left elbow resting on his knee, his hand propped up under his chin as he drums the metal tabletop with the fingers of his other hand.

  Harry has had enough for one day. Courtrooms are one thing, crowds are another. Harry is a gentleman of the old school. He has a short temper when it comes to anarchy.

  “Why didn’t Kendal want the case?” asks Harry.

  “Said he was too busy.”

  “Look at all the face time he could get on the tube,” says Harry. “He wants it back, my advice is give it to him. Life’s too short for this crap.”

  Dale Kendal is one of the brand-name criminal defense lawyers in Southern California. He forages for cases in L.A., Orange, and San Diego counties. Kendal handled the preliminary hearing with the result that Emiliano Ruiz was bound over for trial in the Superior Court. Given the low threshold of evidence required, no one really expected Ruiz to beat the indictment. Still, after the prelim, Kendal made arrangements to withdraw from the case, and the court allowed him to do it.

  Harry looks at his watch. “Suppose you can’t expect the jail to operate on the same commercial concept as fast food.”

  He looks at me but I don’t bite.