Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  There are a raft of evil deeds people can commit and remain under the radar of public attention. Killing the rich in America in the age of cable is not one of them.

  As Harry and I cross the street two blocks to the north, I can see a sixty-foot white dual-axle box trailer parked on the street along the side of the courthouse. Block letters printed on the side of it read MPV. This is the production mother ship leased by the cable stations and the networks in hopes that the judge will allow them to broadcast the trial directly from the courtroom. This has become the portable studio for the media until Ruiz’s trial is over. On days of heavy court activity, after the trial starts in earnest, a small fleet of satellite trucks with their antenna arrays and microwave dishes will nose in and try to dock near the trailer in order to pick up the feed from inside the courthouse.

  This morning a small army of photographers, camera crews, and reporters, who stand out in their colored blazers, are huddled around the van, its side doors open. Like members of a wagon train waiting to be attacked by Indians, the news crews are all looking the other way, toward Broadway, as Harry and I cross the street behind them.

  For more than a month now the press has become a growing problem, haunting our office, slipping through the gate and hanging out at Miguel’s, using the tables in the cantina as if they were paying customers. They sit there and organize their notes, load their cameras with film, waiting to catch Harry and me coming and going from the office. We are beginning to appreciate why some celebrities have taken to punching out the paparazzi and spray-painting their camera lenses.

  Harry and I have had to lease a hotel suite in one of the downtown high-rises to schedule meetings with witnesses so that the press will not pick up their trail and hound them. My worst nightmare is that this horde finds out where I live. Twice they have tried to follow me on motorcycles until I stopped and called the cops on my cell phone. Both times a patrol car appeared and held the motorcycle and its two riders until I left and was well away. All of the lawyers in the case are now under a court-issued gag order, prohibited from talking to the media about anything involving the trial.

  I am beginning to think that Harry is right, that one day some Renaissance scholar is going to discover that Dante’s Inferno includes a tenth circle of hell and that it is filled to overflowing with pricks who once carried microphones and cameras.

  “Sooner or later they’re gonna figure it out,” says Harry. What he means is the fact that we bought a janitor’s pass to the back door. Harry has slipped one of the custodians fifty bucks. He calls the man on his cell phone when we are a block away and the guy comes down and plays doorman at the rear service entrance near the loading dock. Courthouse security would frown on the practice, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

  “What do you think happened to the laser sight?” says Harry. This has been bothering him for two days, ever since our last meeting with Ruiz.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say the killer probably dropped it off the rocks into the surf.”

  “Behind the house?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then why didn’t he toss the whole package, pistol and silencer too? Why just get rid of the sight?” Harry is huffing and puffing, hauling his brief box full of documents and case authorities as he trudges along a half step behind. He carries this like a Roman soldier carries a shield and spear. The brief box must weigh fifty pounds. This morning before we left he added an old laptop computer to the load. This is an ancient clunker that he never takes out, and if he did, it probably wouldn’t work. When it comes to writing and research, Harry is low tech. If he could get copies of documents from monks laboring in a scriptorium with quills, he would abandon the copying machine.

  “I mean, if you’re gonna do it, why not get rid of the whole enchilada?” Harry is talking about the gun, Ruiz’s .45 auto that belonged to the government.

  “Unless I miss my bet, the cops will argue that he tried to get rid of it and failed.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Think about it. The killer shoots Chapman, then leaves the house the same way he came in, out the back. He’s disassembling the gun as he goes, unthreading the silencer, sliding off the sight. In the yard he tosses everything toward the ocean. He’s probably rattled. Maybe something distracts him: a neighbor, voices on the beach. The lighter parts make it over the wall. The laser sight, if there was one, goes into the water; the silencer lands on the rocks. But the gun itself, maybe it hits the wall or maybe he just didn’t throw it hard enough. It lands in the flower bed on his side.”

  According to the police report, the cops found the .45 in the bushes just this side of the wall near one of the rear gates leading to the sandstone bluffs behind the house.

  “Why didn’t he go and get it, throw it again?” Harry asks.

  “Maybe he didn’t see where it landed. Maybe he was afraid some neighbor would see him skulking around in the yard. Maybe he didn’t have time. At least, that’s what the prosecutor is going to argue.”

  “So the cops find the gun in the yard,” says Harry.

  “Right. And the silencer out on the rocks.”

  “And no laser sight,” says Harry.

  “It’s all very convenient.”

  “In what way?”

  “Think about it. If the gun had been left in plain view, we could argue that Ruiz, being linked by ownership to the murder weapon, wouldn’t do such a thing. He’d have to be a fool. The very fact that the gun was so obviously left for the cops to find would point to someone else. This way the evidence makes it appear that the killer tried to dispose of the weapon but failed. The fact that the sight is missing prevents us from making a case that almost anybody, except perhaps the blind, could have made the shots that killed her.”

  “So you think somebody’s trying to set him up?” says Harry.

  “It entered my mind.”

  “And of course the cops wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for the laser sight in the water,” Harry notes.

  “Why go looking when it doesn’t help your case?”

  “So what do we do, put Ruiz on the stand to verify what was in the bag? The accoutrements that came with the murder weapon?”

  “Accoutrements?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I smile. “Accoutrements.”

  “Gimme a break.”

  “I don’t know. Putting Ruiz on to ID the gun or its parts would not be my first choice.”

  We hustle up the stairs to the loading dock. The janitor is waiting for us at the door. He uses a mop that he holds up for a second or two in front of the lens of the security camera that is aimed at the door. He blinds it momentarily as Harry and I scurry through and into the stairwell a few feet away.

  We head up to the criminal court department. On four we hit the gauntlet, the print press and the electronic set who have gained access by leaving most of their equipment outside. Hobbled like this, they can only act as megaphones for what we say, repeating it and describing what they saw for the cameras when they get outside.

  “Mr. Madriani, will you oppose the motion for cameras in the courtroom? What is your position on the people’s right to know?”

  “Let ‘em buy a ticket and take a seat,” says Harry.

  “Is that your position? Does that mean you’ll oppose the motion?” They close in around us. One of them pushes a notebook in Harry’s face, making like he’s taking notes, trying to herd Harry in another direction. This is a mistake.

  “Mr. Hinds. Could y—” In mid-syllable the guy groans. He turns a shade of scarlet, something close to the color of a cardinal’s cap. Then he disappears, bent over, lost somewhere in the crowd.

  While the brief box contains useful points and authorities, it’s the sharp corners on the container that Harry appreciates. In tight clinches he can deliver these with the underhanded subtlety of a pitcher throwing a high-speed softball. No one would notice except the victim. Dropping the old eight-pound laptop into the box
was, for Harry, like loading lead shot in a leather sap.

  A couple of the reporters, two of the women, are now distracted, trying to help their colleague, who is doubled over, notebook and pen to his crotch.

  “Are you okay?” One of the women is slapping the guy on the back like maybe something is caught in his throat.

  This has created an opening. Harry slips through and is behind me again, up close in my ear. “The man seems to be at a loss for words.” He pushes me from behind. “Maybe I should get in front.”

  “No.” Visions of writhing bodies covering the corridor outside the courtroom, film at five.

  We continue to push our way through toward the courtroom. It has been open warfare with most of the press since Harry and I issued subpoenas for certain items, reporters’ notes of interviews with the cops and some videotape taken outside of Chapman’s house the night of the murder and the following day as crime-scene techs processed the place. The public may have a right to know, but as far as most of the reporters are concerned, the squiggles in their notebooks and the raw file footage captured by their film crews is inviolate. We have noticed that in their coverage they have started taking it out on Ruiz: graphic stories of the murder and reports of rumors as to an affair between the victim and the defendant that may have resulted in stalking.

  Harry and I push our way along, doing our best to ignore the questions.

  One of the bailiffs outside the courtroom door wades in from the other side. “Come on, out of the way. Let ‘em through. Come on, folks, you’re just making it hard on everybody. Keep it up, the judge is gonna chase you out of the courthouse. I’m telling you.” He finally parts the waters, enough for Harry and me to squeeze through. We clear the door and the bailiff closes it behind us.

  Inside is hushed silence. The courtroom lights are on but the bench is empty. The clerk is back at her desk in the anteroom just outside the judge’s chambers. I can hear her talking, then a deeper, male voice. This is followed by a lot of laughter.

  We make our way through the railing at the bar and toward the sound of the voices. Halfway there, a figure breaks the light in the doorway at the end of the hall. I recognize the profile, the bald head and the bow tie, the perpetual smile and the laughter, as he bounces past the opening like a ball. Peripheral vision being what it is, he notices our movement and an instant later comes back into the doorway for a better look.

  “Speak of the devil. Mention Madriani’s name and he appears like smoke. Genie out of a bottle,” he says.

  “That can’t be Larry Templeton!”

  “Who else do you know who can substitute for a doorstop?” he asks me.

  Bald as a cue ball but sporting a goatee, Templeton’s facial features and appearance, if pressed into service, could easily provide a good facsimile of a death mask of Lenin. This would be striking in and of itself if it weren’t for his height, which tips the ruler at four-feet-six inches. He suffers from a condition known as hypochondroplasia, a form of short-limb dwarfism.

  My partner is into it with him before he gets to the door. “Larry, you shouldn’t belittle yourself like that.”

  “Is that you, Hinds? What did you say?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you said. What you mean is that I should allow some needy defense lawyer to belittle me.”

  “Well, now that you mention it …” says Harry. We get to the door and they both laugh.

  Millie, the judge’s clerk, is sitting behind her desk, smiling at the road show. The judge’s door is closed.

  “Are we late?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “Where’s Harrigan?”

  “Mr. Templeton was just telling me,” she says.

  Curt Harrigan is the deputy prosecutor who has drawn Ruiz’s case file. To this point he has been accommodating, hiding only half of the cards in the deck up his sleeve.

  “So you haven’t heard?” says Templeton.

  “Heard what?”

  Larry is always at his best when he has something you don’t. This morning he savors it.

  “Alas, fair Harrigan is no more. He has been removed from the realm of the living. Lifted into the heavens on the arms of nymphs and the wings of angels.”

  “He’s dead?” says Harry.

  “Not dead but deified, like Caesar’s horse. It seems the Governor appointed him to the Superior Court at ten o’clock this morning. He no longer wishes to be seen with mere mortals, fearful that this might taint his appearance of neutrality.”

  “Neutrality?” says Harry.

  “I said appearance.” Templeton is quick.

  “Why not just arm him with a needle so he can do lethal injections from the bench?” Harry is no longer kidding: his blood is getting up.

  “It’s a thought,” says Templeton. “We’ll work on it.”

  “Or, better yet, they could sell tickets and let Harrigan cut out the defendant’s heart with a stone knife. Right from the bench, like an Aztec priest,” says Harry.

  “Can I put that in the suggestion box?” Templeton winks at him.

  “Why bother?” says Harry. “The DA’s Association probably already has it drafted as an initiative for the next election.”

  “Down, Harry.” Templeton gestures as if cracking a mythical whip to keep him at bay.

  “Screw you,” says Harry. “Your office is taking over the courts.”

  “Who’s counting?” says Templeton.

  “I am,” says Harry.

  “And I understand completely. I would be upset too.” Templeton’s hands, small as a child’s, are now joined, fingers threaded together, eyes downcast as if in remorse. Because of his size and disproportions, large head, short legs, and a torso that seems to fit neither, his every movement seems exaggerated like the choreography in an old silent movie.

  “Yeah, right,” says Harry.

  “Still, as black as this funnel cloud may be,” says Templeton, “there is a little sliver of silver in its slipstream. Even for you.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Back at the office,” says Templeton. “The Governor’s press release is still smoking, burning a hole through the top of Snider’s desk.”

  Grudging as it might be, an expression—not quite a smile, but something more like the vacant look on the face of an infant at the instant of relief from passing gas—crosses Harry’s face.

  Roy Snider is the chief deputy district attorney and Templeton’s immediate supervisor. He is not loved, either by those in his own office or others outside of it. For that reason he has been lighting incense and praying daily for more than a year that the Governor might give him a reprieve from the hell of the workaday world by naming him to one of two vacancies on the Superior Court. With Harrigan’s appointment, the last of those slots is now filled.

  Somehow this seems to tickle Larry Templeton. He stands in the middle of the room, thumbs of both hands tucked into the belt of his suit pants, the wrinkled legs of which look like sharply tapered Bermuda shorts with cuffs. Along with his red bow tie he wears a starched white shirt and a brown herringbone tweed suit, what has become a virtual uniform. I have never seen him in anything other than brown tweed. His chest comes just to the top of Millie’s desk.

  Lawrence K. Templeton is a Stanford Law graduate. Editor of the Law Review, he graduated second in his class. Based on his academic record, he was recruited by half of the silk-stocking law firms in the country. In each case he ran into a buzz saw as soon as they realized that he carried a large pillow in order to sit up high enough to make it to the conference table at the interview.

  He tried a solo practice for a short time, but it didn’t take. Clients shied away. Then ten years ago someone told him that the district attorney in San Diego was hiring. Templeton filed an application. Given his academic pedigree and the fact that the prosecutor’s office was an equal opportunity employer, they had no choice but to make him an offer. It was either that or face a discrimination suit they couldn�
��t win in federal court.

  At first Templeton was a novelty. All of the secretaries thought he was cute. The local paper did a feature piece on “The Littlest Law Enforcer in Town.” Templeton got his picture on the front page of section two, just above the fold.

  But in a world where convictions are like notches on the handle of the fastest gun, he didn’t get what he wanted most: an opportunity to show what he could do, and respect. The people who mattered, the other prosecutors in the office, figured that Templeton would shuffle misdemeanor files until he got bored and quit. Maybe they could send him over to Juvenile, where he could connect with troubled kids, someone their own size to talk to. But it didn’t happen. Fate intervened.

  Five months after he was hired, one of the worst flu epidemics in decades swept through Southern California. It ravaged the DA’s office like the plague, laying low more than half of the felony prosecutors, decimating their senior staff. Supervisors were forced to pull people from every division just to meet trial dates. Hires out of law school, kids whose bar results might still smear if you ran your thumb over the print, were trying homicide cases. With blood in the water, defense attorneys refused to waive time. Deal brokers who specialized in plea bargains, lawyers who had never been in front of a jury in their lives, were falling over one another to demand speedy trials for their clients.

  When the DA handed a case file to the last man in line, he found Templeton standing behind him. He looked at Templeton, thought about it, and figured, why not dump a dog?

  For almost a year the office had been getting hammered in the matter of People v. Bernard Russell Chester. The defendant was a prominent philanthropist, a self-made industrialist accused of killing his wife. Represented by one of the cardinal criminal-defense firms in L.A. and backstopped by an army of experts in forensics, Chester’s lawyers had been picking the DA’s office to pieces with motions and demands for discovery. Filed chiefly because the defendant was rich and the newspapers would have castigated the DA if he’d given Chester a pass, the state’s case was circumstantial: its knees had been broken and, like most of the people in the office, it was now coughing up a lung. In short, it was a loser, no matter who tried it. Templeton drew the file.