Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  Ruiz shrugs, shakes his head. He doesn’t know. “There was one other thing.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “I thought she mentioned a name… . No, it can’t be.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I think I must have misunderstood her.”

  I give him a look, a stern question mark.

  “It’s just she was talking so fast, and I wasn’t taking notes. She was excited, said she didn’t have much time, had to get back to the office. I thought she said something about Walt Eagan. But that can’t be right.”

  “Who’s Walt Eagan?” says Harry.

  “He was one of her assistants. Eagan headed up R & D for Isotenics. He’d been with Madelyn from the beginning. Sort of her man Friday. Her first hire when she started out. From what I gather, the guy was a software wizard. Real heavyset, wore jeans to work, didn’t quite fit into the corporate culture at the place. But Chapman kept him on ‘cuz she trusted him. Any important jobs got handed off to Walt. And he reported directly to her. But I think I must have just gotten confused, heard something that I didn’t.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because by the time of the conversation with Madelyn at the restaurant in San Diego, Eagan was already dead.”

  I look at Harry. “How did he die?” I ask.

  “Nothing sinister,” says Ruiz. “He died of cancer, a little over a year after I went to work there. I remember because Madelyn took it hard. She was also up to her ass trying to handle everything on his desk and find a replacement. I don’t think she ever did. But whatever it was that scared her, I don’t see how it could have had anything to do with Eagan. Like I say, the man was dead at least six months by the time she called me to meet her at the restaurant.”

  “You said Madelyn had a bad temper,” says Harry. “Did she ever get angry with you?”

  Ruiz looks at him. “What is this about?”

  “The cops are operating on the theory that you killed her following a lover’s quarrel,” says Harry. “Would be good to test out their theory before we get to trial.”

  “We weren’t lovers—not in the way you’re suggesting. And I didn’t kill her. And no, she never displayed any anger toward me.”

  “But according to you, she had a temper and she could get physical.”

  “Yeah. At times.”

  We probe his employment with Karr, Rufus. Ruiz said he had worked for the security firm just a shade under two years. The executive protection assignment at Isotenics was one of his first jobs. He’d been on board with Chapman for about sixteen months when she pulled the plug and told her board she didn’t need security any longer.

  “And during this period you would be what, twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off?”

  “Usually. Sometimes more. Sometimes less, depending on whether we were traveling or at home. I made arrangements for all travel to and from, screened her calendar for any threats or risks. I’d escort her to and from vehicles, travel with her on the corporate jets whenever she went off on business. If we were away for any length of time, there would usually be two or three of us assigned. And of course at the house I always tried to have another guy there. For reasons that sometimes had less to do with security.”

  “But you would be in charge of the detail?”

  “I was the lead on the assignment, yeah.”

  “And when Ms. Chapman was at home, where would you be?”

  “If I was on duty I would be there, at her house.”

  “You had a room there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Upstairs, second floor.”

  “Where was her room?”

  “Same floor. Just down the hall.”

  “Anybody else live there with her on a regular basis?”

  “No. Except for my backup, as I said. She had a maid, a live-in, but it didn’t last. Woman quit. Walked out one day and never came back.”

  “The security contract. What else did it call for besides executive protection?” I ask.

  “Oh, everything: training for drivers, corporate espionage, uniformed armed security for the corporate headquarters. I suppose you’ve seen their facilities out by the university.”

  “You mean Software City?”

  Ruiz nods. “Most of the property out there belongs to Chapman’s company.”

  “So it was a sizable contract. How did Karr, Rufus land it?”

  “You’d have to ask them that.”

  “What about Karr, Rufus? Tell us a little bit about the firm.”

  “What’s to say? They’re an employer of opportunity for retired military like myself. They have contracts all over the world, some with our own government, some with other governments, private corporations. That sort of thing. Company’s headquarters are here in San Diego. Offices in five other cities, but this is where they do most of their hiring. They draw from Pendleton, the Marine base, and the naval base out on Coronado, North Island. Mostly retired military personnel. Once in a while a law-enforcement type, but not often.”

  “But you were in the Army,” says Harry.

  “Yeah, I heard they were looking for new hires so I came out and applied. They offered me a job. It pays well, or did until they canned me.”

  “I take it you had a boss, a supervisor you reported to.”

  “Jerry Comers. Nice guy. Easy to get on with. He was former Navy. Better than some of the sups they had there. A couple of former Marine staff sergeants. You know the type: tight-ass jarheads. Humorless. So I guess I lucked out.”

  “Was it Comers who interviewed you for the job? Assigned you to provide security for Madelyn Chapman?”

  “He gave me the assignment. But I suspect it came from higher up. As for hiring, only one man does that: Max Rufus, managing partner. You go through a series of screening interviews, panels, like a promotion board in the military for officers. But everybody has to pass muster with Rufus, sit for an interview with the man and pass it before you’re hired. Blow that and you can forget it. He personally passes on all the company’s employees, has as long as the company’s been around.”

  “I take it Isotenics, Chapman’s company, was one of their larger clients?”

  “As private companies go, it would have been a big contract. I’m not sure if it was the largest. You’d have to ask them.”

  “Before your job with the firm, what did you do?”

  “I was active duty Army.”

  “Where?”

  “Lotta places. Mostly Georgia. Fort Benning. Fort Bragg in the Carolinas. That was my last duty station.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “What is this, twenty questions?”

  “What was your MOS?” I ask.

  “Ground pounder. Infantry. Did some training assignments.”

  “What, like a drill sergeant?”

  “Not exactly. Training in special weapons, tactics, that sort of thing.”

  “You weren’t by any chance in one of the Army’s elite units?”

  “I did some time in the Rangers.”

  “How many years?”

  “I don’t know. Twelve. Maybe a little more.”

  “Jump school?”

  He nods. This is like pulling teeth. There is something Ruiz isn’t telling me. I begin to suspect that perhaps he has done time, either in the brig or maybe at Leavenworth. Still, it doesn’t make sense: soldiers who do hard time for serious crimes face a dishonorable discharge, and Ruiz has an honorable discharge and full retirement benefits. I make a mental note to check it out.

  “So Karr, Rufus couldn’t have been too happy when one of their own was arrested for killing the CEO of a major client.” Harry’s tact could use a little polishing, but his statement is to the point.

  “They fired me the day after the prelim as soon as the judge bound me over for trial. I suppose they had to keep me on the books until then. According to Kendal, anything else would have sounded too much like an admission.”
/>
  On this score Kendal was probably right. Over the last two weeks there have been stories in the press that Chapman’s company has been consulting its own lawyer as to whether it might have a civil claim for money damages against Karr, Rufus, depending on what they knew and when they knew it regarding Ruiz’s background. Isotenics will be watching our case closely, as will lawyers for Karr, Rufus, who will be anxious to have their client sidestep anything messy that might splash their way. They will want to know whether Ruiz should have been considered a risky employee when he was hired, whether he’d had scrapes with the law previously, perhaps in the military. All of this becomes grist for the mill.

  Harry starts to home in on one of the critical questions. He wants to know whether there was a specific reason the corporation hired executive protection for Chapman. “Any names you can give us, people who may have threatened the victim? There must have been a reason you were hired.”

  A good lawyer given just one such candidate can take a shot at crafting the honored “SODDI” defense: some other dude did it. There are silver-tongued artists who, given this opening, wouldn’t even have to point a finger, would just nod in the general direction while broadcasting seeds of doubt like a tuberculosis victim coughing on the jury. Feed and cultivate this with care for a few days and it’s anybody’s guess what noxious weed might spring up out of the jury box to strangle the state’s case.

  “Threats came with the turf,” says Ruiz. “I mean, people with Madelyn’s kind of money and social status aren’t likely to be loved.”

  “So there were threats?” Harry asks, a note of surprise in his voice.

  “Sure. It ran the gamut,” says Ruiz. “Nutcases, most of ‘em. People who claimed she stole their software. Former employees who took their job termination personally. Then you get the people at Christmastime whose lights aren’t all blinking, see her picture on the society page, and send her season’s greetings with a P.S.: ‘Wish you were dead.”’

  “These were in writing?” Harry is making notes.

  “Some of them. Some were called in, some by e-mail and fax. A couple of times they were hand delivered to the front counter in envelopes addressed to Madelyn Chapman, President and CEO, Isotenics Corporation and marked Personal or Confidential like she was gonna open them herself. I guess they figured that way whoever delivered them would have time to get away before they were opened upstairs. We were able to nail one of them from pictures on the videotape at the public counter.”

  “And the letters: any of them threaten to kill her?”

  Ruiz makes a face and nods as if to say this would be in the natural order of things. “Sure.”

  “And the company has these?”

  “In their files, I suppose. We always advised them to keep this kind of mail. That was the procedure so we could track past correspondence if anything happened.”

  “Good advice.” Harry can’t believe his good luck. He wants the name of the custodian or clerk in charge of filing and maintaining executive death threats at Isotenics so he can serve the guy with a subpoena.

  “There was one event that pushed ‘em to hire security for her,” says Ruiz.

  “And what was that?” I ask.

  “Some nut nailed her with a cream pie at a shareholders’ meeting a couple of years ago. That’s what got the company’s attention. The board of directors finally woke up and realized it could’ve just as easily been somebody with a gun. It was shortly after that they called us in and we got the nod to go to work.” Ruiz starts to see the implications for his case. When you’re charged with murder it never hurts to have a victim who wasn’t loved. Besides the specter of a victimless crime, it increases the universe of possible perpetrators, hopefully to the point of confusion for the jury.

  “Hell, if I had a dollar for every one of those letters came in, I could’ve quit and clipped coupons from a hammock on the beach two years ago,” says Ruiz. He is smiling now, warming to the idea that he is not alone in the universe of possible suspects.

  Still, it leaves us to deal with one of the overarching ironies of the state’s case against him. A corporation hires executive protection that, according to the cops, ends up murdering the company CEO. It’s the kind of paradox that can lead jurors astray, causing them to disregard issues of reasonable doubt and focus instead on just how hard they might want to jump on the scales of justice to compensate for life’s inequities.

  “Let’s talk about the firearm, the gun used to kill her.” I shift to another subject.

  With this the smile evaporates from Ruiz’s face.

  I look at him. “I understand it was traced to you.”

  “Yeah.” Ruiz expels a deep breath as if to say sooner or later he knew we would get around to this. “What can I say? It was mine.”

  “Not according to the federal government,” says Harry.

  “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  The only evidence that came in on the firearm during the preliminary hearing came from the police. They were able to trace the handgun, an exotic .45 automatic, back to its last owner, the United States government, more specifically, the Army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The problem for Ruiz is that government records show the firearm by serial number as having been issued to one E. Ruiz, his signature and military ID number on a form nine years before the murder. After that there is nothing, no record to show that he ever turned it in or surrendered it upon his discharge from the military.

  “Tell us about the gun,” I say. “How did you get it?”

  Ruiz cocks his head a little to one side, shrugs a shoulder. “I kept it when I left the Army. No big thing,” he says. “It’s not that unusual. A lot of times they don’t even check. Hell, half the people I know retired from the Army kept their sidearms. Besides, a piece like that, it’s accurized. You know, I mean for your own touch and feel. It’s like a pair of boots: once you break ‘em in, who else is going to wear them? I spent maybe a hundred hours working on it, stripping it down, changing out bushings, shot out I don’t remember how many barrels and replaced them, reworked the action, adjusted the pull on the trigger for my finger. I lived with the thing. By the time I was finished with it, there probably weren’t two parts in that firearm that were the same as when it was issued. The action, that’s it.”

  “Yes, but unfortunately for you, one of them was the frame with the serial number,” Harry counters.

  The expression on Ruiz’s face concedes the point.

  “All of that aside,” Harry continues, “let’s be up front. You stole it, right?”

  There is a lot of grousing, grudging expressions from Ruiz on this before he finally says: “Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”

  “You can be sure that’s what the cops are going to say when they get on the stand in your trial,” says Harry. “It’s a major point for them, and while it doesn’t go to the murder itself, it goes to the murder weapon, the tracing of the firearm. We probably can’t keep it out.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I say.

  “What?” Harry turns to me. “Like a jury isn’t going to make inferences that a man who steals a gun might use it in a crime? Let’s be realistic.”

  “Actually, that might be a point for our side,” I tell him. “After all, Mr. Ruiz had to know that the firearm was registered in his name on military records. You did know that, didn’t you?” I look at Ruiz.

  He nods.

  “So if he knew the weapon was going to be traced back to him, why would he use it to kill Madelyn Chapman? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Lovers’ quarrel, crime of passion. People don’t take time to think under those circumstances,” Harry points out. “Besides, it’s the fact the gun was stolen that puts him in a bad light. You have to admit, it’s not something that helps the case.”

  “That may depend on whether Mr. Ruiz takes the stand. Right now all they can say is that the firearm once owned by the federal government, according to their records,
was last known to be in the possession of our client. That was six years ago. Without Mr. Ruiz’s admission on the stand, they can’t say whether it was stolen by him or lost somewhere along the way. Fact is, they don’t know what happened to it.”

  Harry looks at me a little cross-eyed, like I’m crazy. Any rational jury can connect the dots. “What are you saying? That we can sell the jury on the theory that somebody else managed to get ahold of a firearm that was once issued to the defendant? That they held it for God knows how many years and they used it to kill Madelyn Chapman so they could frame him? Why?”

  I give him a look like Who knows? “I’d be willing to bet that military records regarding issuance of firearms and ammunition aren’t that orderly or neat. You can bet they make mistakes and that somewhere there’s a written report or a government audit showing the frequency of such errors: lost or stolen firearms, military weapons used in crimes. It’s the one thing you can count on in any government bureaucracy: they keep records on everything, including their own mistakes. All I’m saying is that we can shower a good deal of doubt on who had this gun last.”

  “Yeah, but here the defendant kn—” I put up a hand and stop him before Harry can finish the thought: that it’s too much of a coincidence that Ruiz knew the victim, had stayed overnight in her house, and that his firearm was used to kill her.

  I look at Ruiz. “Let me ask you: Do you have any sense as to how often the Army might make mistakes in this area? Say somebody checks a gun back in and fails to sign off, or they lose a piece of paper. There are people in the military, I assume, who would know this, if in fact it’s a problem. We could put them on the stand.”

  What I am telling Ruiz is that there may be a way to put an evidentiary wedge, a slice of reasonable doubt, however slender, between him and the murder weapon, deceptive as this may be.

  I stop talking and all eyes are on him. Ruiz looks to Harry, then back at me. Finally he shakes his head. “I don’t get it. What’s the point?” he says. “The gun is mine.”

  It’s the thing about desperate defendants, especially those laboring under a psychic load of guilty knowledge with no one to share the burden. In such cases it’s the rare soul who won’t grab any straw in an effort to weave some gold. And I’ve never known one yet to ask questions about ethics in the process.