Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  “That’s not it at all. They’re not out to get me. Not in the way you think. The fact is, I happen to be convenient. In the right place at the wrong time, so to speak. What they want is this thing with Chapman to go away and with as little fuss as possible. A quick conviction and a closed case, and right now I’m what you might call handy. Like a Kleenex. It’s nothing personal. Just another interchangeable unit to be used by people in high places.” He lets the ankle chains drop down over the tops of his canvas slip-on sneakers again and looks up at me to see if I’m following.

  “You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for a long time, watching people get killed and killing people.”

  “You what?” says Harry.

  “In the military,” he says. “It’s called combat.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “I didn’t kill Chapman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never do anything like that. I know it’s hard for some people to believe. They think somebody’s trained to kill and it’s like a switch they can’t turn off. They get out of the military and they have to satisfy some itch to kill. It’s not like that at all. Most soldiers I know could live very contented and happy lives if they never saw another drop of blood as long as they lived. But it’s a funny thing: You pull a trigger in combat and they give you a medal. Do it in civilian life and they put you behind bars, or worse. But in this one it wasn’t me on their radar screen; it was her.”

  “Who?”

  “The victim. The murderee. Who else? Madelyn. Excuse me—Miss Chapman. It won’t do for me to be too familiar with the victim, her being dead and all, and me being the one supposed to have killed her.” He suddenly stops and looks at me. “She is still dead?”

  “Oh, she’s dead all right,” I tell him.

  “You had me going there for a moment. Thought maybe the people at Spook Central had come up with a new program to raise the dead. At least they haven’t changed that part of the script.” He takes a drag and exhales some smoke. “Of course they start swapping out bodies on us, no tellin’ where we’ll end up. Get me for doin’ JFK from the grassy knoll before they’re done. The fact I wasn’t born till years after the deed is only a minor setback for these people. Blink and they’ll change reality for you.”

  “You’re telling us the government had a hand in this?” I ask.

  “Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

  “How well did you know the victim?” says Harry.

  “Not well enough. Otherwise I’d probably have a better idea who killed her. As for the list of her boy toys, if you want that, you’re gonna want to call in a stenographer to keep from getting writer’s cramp.”

  “Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” I say.

  “We had our moments. I provided security. She provided the surprises. There was a fleeting period she fit me into her schedule between her morning massage and her eleven-o’clock staff meeting. She liked to be on top. In control. That was Madelyn, always on top and always in control. She’d be up there, jumping up and down like she was breaking some bronco, gripping the hair on my chest with one hand while she waved her little digital dictator in the air with the other. In between groans of ecstasy and elation, she’d lift the pause button and spout a quick memo on some new project or government contract so her secretary could type it up between bouts.”

  “So you did have an affair with her?” There was some brief testimony at the preliminary regarding allegations, but since the defense never put on a case in this regard, it was unclear from the transcript what the line to be taken at trial would be.

  “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it an affair,” says Ruiz. “Fact is, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except they have it on tape.”

  “Let me get this straight,” says Harry. “You had a sexual relationship with the victim and the prosecution has a videotape of this?”

  Ruiz makes a face, weighing and evaluating the terms used in the question, then shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. It was one of those little cameras: you know, the kind about the size of an eraser on a pencil. Apparently one of our own people installed the thing in her office without checking. Caught the whole thing on tape. Unfortunately for me, the cops now have the tape.”

  I can already tell what Harry is thinking. If the judge allows the DA to play that tape in front of the jury, moving pictures in living color of the defendant—who is now charged with murder—screwing the victim—who is now dead—chances of the state getting a conviction will go up about a thousand percent. And it won’t really matter who was on top.

  “I take it this wasn’t part of the security contract,” says Harry.

  Ruiz laughs. “No. It just sort of happened. Call it an after-hours thing. Off the books, you might say. Fact of the matter is, as I remember it, I was on my back, counting ceiling tiles, before I knew what she was doing.”

  “She raped you,” Harry says. “There we go. We have a defense. The murder was a crime of revenge.” Harry looks at me and smiles.

  “You’ll have to excuse my partner. He believes if you can’t defend a good murder case and have some fun in the process, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

  “I see his point. The fact of the matter is, while I don’t exactly remember how it happened, I don’t remember saying no as I was laying there, either. And it’s not a case of repressed memory.” He says it before Harry can say anything.

  “Oh, well,” says Harry.

  “Not that it bothered me much. Consenting adults and all.”

  “Still, you have to assume your employer might take a dim view,” I tell him.

  “You, I suspect, must have a knack for business”—Ruiz points at me with the smoking cigarette, holding it between two fingers—“because that’s exactly the point Madelyn made when she came back for seconds a few days later and I said no.”

  “She threatened you?”

  “Not in so many words. She just wondered out loud what the people at Karr, Rufus would say if they heard I wasn’t servicing the contract to her satisfaction.”

  “She said that to you?”

  “In so many words, yes.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “We both laughed, and then she got on top.”

  “I had an uncle was a night watchman,” says Harry. “He was always complaining it was such a boring job.”

  “He didn’t work executive protection at Isotenics,” says Ruiz.

  “So the prosecution is going to say that you had an affair with her and probably try to build on it from there.”

  “How is that?” he asks.

  “The usual scenario,” I say. “She tried to break it off. You refused. The jilted lover. A woman with lots of money. Fill in the blanks.”

  “It was nothing like that.”

  “Well, we’ll have our chance to tell the jury. But that’s likely to be their theory. That is, unless they have some other motive that’s better. Is there any other reason you might have wanted to kill her?”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “That’s not the point. The question is, did you have a motive?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I liked her. Why would I want to kill her?”

  “We could try a stipulation,” says Harry. “Admit that they had sexual relations. Specify the number of times this occurred. Try to sanitize it. Make it sound like an accountant’s audit report and hope we can glaze over the eyes of the jury. Try to keep the tape out of evidence.”

  “I haven’t seen the tape, but I can’t imagine it’s all that bad,” says Ruiz.

  “Fancy yourself a porn star, do you?” Harry quips.

  “No, no. It’s nothing like that. I guarantee you, there’s nothing kinky on the tape unless somebody dubbed it in.”

  “You’re thinking the federal government again?” Harry asks. “Do they have a federal office that does that kind of thing?”

  “Come on, gimme a break,” says Ruiz. “We had a fling. A romp in the
hay. I didn’t love her. She didn’t love me. Two adults, we enjoyed the moment. She went her way, I went mine. That’s all there was to it.”

  “The problem is, she’s dead,” I say, “and somebody killed her.”

  “But I didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, well, put that aside for the moment,” says Harry. “The more immediate problem is that videotape no doubt captures only a brief period in time when, as you say, the two of you were enjoying the moment. When passion was at its height, shall we say. That’s what the jury is going to see, and what they’re going to remember, not the rational attitude of two sober and mature adults after all the hedonism was over.” Harry pauses. “That leaves a lot of room for imagination. And therein lies a lot of room for mischief on the part of the wily prosecutor. Ordinarily I’d say they might not get the tape in, being as it’s so prejudicial. But in this case,” Harry reasons, “I might make an exception, because it may be the best evidence. In fact it may be the only evidence to substantiate their theory that you had an affair with the victim.”

  “Ordinarily I’d say you’d be right,” Ruiz says, “but in this case …”

  “What?” Harry sits up straight. “You’re not gonna tell us you had an audience!”

  “Not in so many words. But somebody did see us.”

  “Who?”

  “Chapman’s executive assistant. Gal by the name of Karen. I suspect that’s how the cops got the tape. I don’t know, but I suspect she probably gave it to them after the murder. She might have thought I had something to do with it.”

  “Can’t imagine that,” says Harry. “Your gun being used, your holding over in the house with her, doing security.”

  “You don’t think it’s looking too good,” says Ruiz.

  “Let’s just put it this way: I don’t think anybody would have to threaten me to get me to drop out of the case.”

  “You think Kendal took a hike because he didn’t believe he could win?”

  Harry gives him a look that concedes the point.

  Ruiz takes a deep breath and sighs.

  “Let’s change gears for a moment. What is your marital status?” I ask.

  “Why?”

  “Are you married?” In the eyes of many jurors, cheating on his wife would compound the problem.

  “Divorced,” he says.

  “How long?”

  “Almost six years.”

  “Children?”

  “Two. A boy and girl. My son is twelve, my daughter is seven. I don’t want them involved in this.”

  “Children sitting in the courtroom can be a big plus,” says Harry. “They don’t have to be there every day.”

  “You heard me: the answer is no. Besides, their mother is not gonna let you or anybody else put them through that.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Ex-wife. Tracy is remarried. She was young when we got hitched. Military life did us in. I was always gone. Not that she wasn’t faithful, but you know how it is: she got lonely. I was away from home for months at a time. After a while it seemed like we didn’t even know each other anymore. She’s not gonna come sit in a courtroom, I can tell you that. And she’s not gonna let the kids do it. It’ll be hard enough what they see on television. If I know Tracy, she’ll be pulling the plug on the set and canceling the newspaper subscription to keep them from seeing it.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t have any ties at the time keeping you away from Chapman,” says Harry. “That’s something.” Harry makes the best of little favors.

  “I have to admit, Madelyn wasn’t what you would call discreet,” says Ruiz. “I mean, she didn’t tell the world or wear a sandwich board with pictures. But she didn’t lock her office door, either. I guess her attitude was she owned the place, so if people didn’t like it they could quit.

  “The secretary walked in on us.” Ruiz is talking about Chapman’s executive assistant. “What can I say? We both moved pretty quickly to cover up, but the secretary has to have seen what was happening. She walked in, looked, turned, and walked out. She seemed to look right through me like I was part of the furniture. Maybe she was just stunned. I don’t know.”

  “So it was the secretary who must have told the cops about the tape?” I say.

  “I don’t know,” says Ruiz. “My guess is word would have gotten around pretty fast. I didn’t know the camera was there. If it was being monitored we had a live audience. If not, somebody would probably have seen it sooner or later. Like I say, it was only the two times. The first time she came on strong and I backed away. Nothing really happened. Not that anyone is going to believe me. Then the tape. Then her personal security detail was canceled, my assignment changed, and the problem went away. Or at least I thought it did.”

  “Why did she cancel security?” I ask.

  “Beats the hell out of me. Maybe she was frustrated.”

  “As far as you know, did she have affairs with anyone else?”

  “She had guys over, if that’s what you mean. I mean, she wasn’t trying to hide the fact. Whether they were friends, business acquaintances, whatever. Don’t know their names. But several times they spent the night bouncing off the walls down the hall. I heard ‘em. So did the guy on the detail with me.”

  “Problem is, that cuts both ways,” says Harry. “If he knew she was having affairs with other men, it could have fueled jealousy. It feeds right into their theory.”

  Harry is right. But it also provides other suspects, other men who might have had a reason to kill her if they saw something they wanted bad enough slipping away.

  “A couple of times she had us escort her to parties. You know, business things. On the way home she’d want to stop at this club downtown. We’d sit at one table, she’d sit at another. Guys would come up and talk to her. If she wasn’t interested she’d nod toward us and tell the guy that the bulge under our armpits wasn’t swollen lymph nodes and the fucker would vanish like vapor. When she got the one she wanted we’d all head home, my partner or I driving while she and her new friend did warm-ups in the backseat.”

  “Sounds like the security detail didn’t cramp her sense of privacy,” I say.

  Ruiz laughs. “The fact she had an audience probably added a whole new dimension as far as Madelyn was concerned.”

  “And, of course, you didn’t mind?” I ask. “I mean, you didn’t feel in any way jilted?”

  “What? That I wasn’t being used like a mechanical bull anymore? No. I grant you she was a good-looking woman, but as far as emotions were concerned, anything with Madelyn had all the depth of a kiddie pool. She could have gotten the same thing from a mannequin.”

  We change the subject. “What do you know about the Information for Security program?” I ask.

  “You know I signed a piece of paper when I went to work at Isotenics. It was given to me by my supervisor at Karr, Rufus. It said I wouldn’t discuss any what they call ‘proprietary information’ that I might have overheard when I was on duty. So I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you.”

  “They fired your ass and you’re facing a murder charge,” Harry points out. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “So what did you hear?” says Harry.

  “About IFS? That’s all they talked about. Information for Security. From what I gather, it was huge. Biggest project they had. Every time something broke in the press, some committee in Congress started cryin’ over privacy rights and people at Isotenics would all start filling sandbags and barricading the doors. They were busy stiffing two congressional investigating committees. I mean, you could hear them talking about it on the phones.”

  “So you knew they were writing the software?”

  He nods. “Sure. You hear things. Little bits here and there. You’re driving a car and they’re in the back on the cell phone, you can’t help but hear.”

  “Do you know what the software is, how it works?”

  He shakes his head. “Seen the stuff in th
e newspaper, that’s all. I’d read the stories ‘cuz I knew there was a connection. But other than that, when it comes to computers, I’m a man from Mars.”

  “Did you ever meet any of the people involved in the program from the government side?” I ask.

  “It’s possible. They had us pick up people at the airport from time to time. A few times we went out to the base at Miramar and picked up some uniforms coming in on military flights. Drove them out to Software City for meetings. But all you got was a name. They never told us what they were working on. There was one guy, though. I do remember him and his name did pop up on the program you’re talking about.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Retired general. Name of Gerald Satz. I’d seen his name in the papers. According to the articles, he was in charge of this IFS thing. From what I read he was hired as a civilian consultant. Thought it was sort of a strange selection myself. You know who the guy is?”

  I nod. Gerald Satz, aka “Poster Boy for Perjury,” according to liberals in Congress; a stand-up warrior and top-notch soldier, according to his fans.

  “I knew the name,” says Ruiz, “‘cuz I remembered hearing about him when I was in the Army and reading about it in the paper. According to what I heard, he had a long history working with spooks, intel agencies, black-bag shit. Satz had contacts buried in the bowels of governments on every continent. A man knows where the bodies are buried because he put half of them there. And he knows how to dig them up whenever it serves his purposes, or maybe the purposes of his prince. Satz is what some people might call a true believer.

  “Some years back—I was a kid, so I don’t know the details—Congress got caught screwing with Satz’s constitutional rights,” Ruiz continues. “A committee took his testimony under oath. When they couldn’t get him on perjury, they tried to use his own testimony to indict him. The courts said they couldn’t do it.”

  “It’s called use immunity,” I tell him. “You looked this up and read about it?”

  He nods. “When one of our people was assigned to go pick him up at the airport. The man was coming to a meeting at Isotenics. I got curious and checked his history online. Sounds like maybe he beat the charges on technical grounds.”