Compelling Evidence m-1

by Steve Martini

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  I nod.

  She smiles broadly and suddenly she closes the distance. Her arms are around my neck, her warm cheek pressed to mine.

  “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t know who else to trust.”

  There’s a warm wetness on my face, like blood-Talia’s tears. A feminine hand caresses the nape of my neck, long slender fingers. As she leans against me I can feel the point of her knee flexing, probing at my thighs, her body molded to my own.

  My arms are at my sides, loose, limp. She senses an uneasiness. It’s conveyed in my lack of response.

  She moves away from me now, a show of reserve, a little quick composure. “I don’t know how to thank you.” She’s retreating as if in defeat. Her back is to me now. She’s rummaging through her purse. She turns, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. For our relationship, this is a first, Talia at a loss about how to show her gratitude.

  ‘Tell me,” she says. “What do you really think? What are my chances?”

  “Ask me in a week, after I’ve seen the evidence.”

  “I know you’ll tell me the truth.” She’s applying a little makeup from the compact taken from her purse.

  “You can bank on it,” I say.

  She looks at me as if this assurance is a little harsh.

  I tell her that she will not get sugar coating, not from me, that this is serious business.

  It’s a stiff upper lip from Talia. “Absolutely,” she says. “That’s the way I want it.”

  “It’s the only way it’ll work.”

  She nods, a stoic demonstration of her assent. But her eyes are two tiny slits of resentment. Talia’s never seen this from me before. I have, for the first time since we’ve known each other, challenged her feminine wiles, her ability to fire my libido, to paralyze my reason with passion.

  “You’ll tell Mr. Cheetam,” she says, “that you’ve agreed to help?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  She starts for the door.

  “One more question,” I say.

  Talia turns.

  “I don’t understand. Why don’t you have free access to Ben’s estate?”

  “There’s a prenuptial agreement,” she says. “The executor won’t allow me to touch any of Ben’s holdings until all of this is cleared up.”

  Before I can say more she’s gone, like a wisp in the wind. There’s only the shadow of the closing door, and the knowledge that at least in reviewing the evidence against her, I will not have to search far for a motive.

  CHAPTER 13

  I’m rummaging through the house trying to pick up before Sarah’s birthday party. Nikki has graciously consented to have the festivities here at the house with all of my daughter’s little friends. I am dusting the sofa-back table and my gaze fixes on it, the picture of Nikki and me in happier days, before we were married.

  I think back to the first time I saw her, standing there next to the campus pool, a biology text under her arm, wearing a skimpy bikini that left little to the imagination. I knew I was in love. I listened to her animated conversation, watched the tilt of her head in the bright sun as she talked with friends, and felt a charge of hormones whenever she giggled.

  Then, her hair was light, streaked with gold from the sun, not the salt-and-pepper that came later, after years of marriage and a child. She wore it long and straight, flipped under at the ends, her fingers constantly sweeping it back behind one ear. She cut an image of unmistakable class. Nikki, tanned like a bronze goddess, just a few freckles on the cheeks like the dappled spots on a fawn.

  Word was out in the circle in which I ran that I was smitten. I would follow her to the library and jockey for a study carrel close so I could watch her. One evening I saw her return to the dorm after a date with another guy. He was tall and poised-and rich. I watched as he walked her from his gleaming Corvette to the door. Then I saw her peck him on the lips, a good-night kiss. I felt a great weight sagging in my chest, as if my heart were suddenly pumping lead.

  One evening, after weeks of watching in silent pain, I gathered my courage, marched to the library, to the inside bridge over the foyer, approached Nikki and asked, in a voice that cracked with indecision and the fear of failure, if anyone was occupying the lounge chair beside hers. She looked at me, confident, and said simply, “No.” Then, smiling, she patted the seat with her hand, offering me a place to sit as if somehow I was expected.

  That evening we walked back to the dorms together under a canopy of redwoods sprinkled with openings revealing stars and the night-sky haze of the Milky Way. We stopped at the coffee house by the bookstore. I gained more confidence as she laughed, seemingly amused by the innocuous little things I said. And as we left the place, odors of spice and espresso mingling with the fragrance of cedars and redwood, my hand found hers, waiting and warm.

  In the days that followed I sensed, in the titter of her female friends when we were together, that I’d been an item with this group of giddy girls before my campaign with Nikki in the library. In this thought there was pleasure, a satisfaction that my long-laboring fantasies of this golden girl had in fact been mutual.

  Not all of this mystery and desire is gone. Even now, Nikki is her most sensual when she’s angry, as she is this moment with me.

  “How can you do this? You’re a bastard, you know that?” Her hands are on her hips; her legs still slender and strong, she stands in front of me blocking the hall to the kitchen, her lower body molded in a pair of skin-tight jeans.

  I jockey to get around her. My hands are filled with paper plates of half-eaten birthday cake and dribbling ice cream.

  “She’s a client,” I tell her, my voice low so the others out in the living room won’t hear.

  “Spare me,” she says.

  My peace offering, it seems, has gone sour. My invitation to have Sarah’s birthday party here in the more spacious house which had been our home before Nikki left me is being wrecked by the news that I’m now representing Talia. It hit the papers that morning, and Nikki’s been on my case like a heat-seeking missile since she arrived.

  ‘Talia’s a client,” I say.

  “Is that what they call it these days? Coulda fooled me. I thought she was your concubine.” Nikki’s not so discreet, her voice at full volume. Her friends, mothers of little children back in the other room, are getting an earful. She backs into the kitchen, hands still on her hips.

  “The woman is charged with murder. The firm asked me to take a hand in her defense. That’s all there is to it.”

  “You don’t even bother to deny it, that you had an affair with her.” She’s blocking the way to the trash can, and ice cream is beginning to drip from the plates in my hands onto the floor.

  It’s a tactical blunder. My failure to deny Nikki’s charge that I consorted with Talia carries with it the seeds of an open admission. Mentally I bite my tongue.

  “What do you want me to say?” I tell her.

  “That you’re not going to represent her.”

  “I can’t do that. I’ve already agreed to take the case.”

  “Tell ’em you’ve changed your mind.”

  “This isn’t some shopping spree to the mall.”

  Her eyes are burning now, two pieces of white-hot coal. “Fuck you!”

  Profanity is something that Nikki reserves for those ultimate moments of excess fury in life. Here it is said with volume and intensity. I have visions of three-year-olds down the hall roosting on their mother’s knees and asking with innocent, upturned eyes,

  “What does ‘fuck’ mean, Mommie?”

  “Listen, can we talk about this later?”

  “No. We’ll talk about it now. Later I’m leaving-with Sarah.

  I want the truth. Did you have an affair with her?”

  I hesitate for a moment. But there’s no use lying. In her own mind Nikki’s already condemned me.

  “Yes, we went out.”

  “You what? You went out” she says. She laughs. My
wife has a special talent for mockery. “Call it what it is, you asshole.”

  There’s a good deal of fury tonight.

  “OK, we had an affair-but it was after you left me.” This somehow eases the blame for my infidelity, at least in my own mind.

  But not in Nikki’s. “So it doesn’t count, is that it?” she says.

  “Before we broke up, she was nothing. She’s nothing now. It’s over,” I tell her. “What’s between us now is business, the representation of a client charged with first-degree murder, nothing more.”

  “You bastard.” She repeats the charge, but now she’s crying. There’s an extra shot of acid in my stomach.

  “We need to talk,” I tell her.

  She’s huddled over the sink, crying and wiping her eyes with a wet dishrag. As much as she knew it, suspected it, the open admission of my affair with Talia crushes Nikki.

  “Listen to me.” I touch her shoulder. She pulls away.

  I tell her that she has to give me a chance, that she has to hear me out.

  “I have a party to get back to,” she says and leaves the room, sniffling away tears. I see her stopped in the dark hall, halfway down, composing herself. Then she plunges into the room. “Well, time to open presents.” Her voice is all cheer, but thick like a cold.

  And so we put a face on it for the women waiting in the other room and pretend that nothing has happened-until they leave.

  Nikki and I sit alone in the ebbing light of evening, in the living room which has been ravaged by a half-dozen partying children. Shreds of wrapping paper and ribbon litter the floor. Empty coffee cups in saucers sit on the sofa-side tables. Sarah is in her old bedroom, which is now barren of any furnishings, playing with her gifts, new toys.

  “Regardless of what you think about her,” I say, “she didn’t kill Ben.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  I nod confidently, like some prairie farmer predicting rain.

  “I see. Lover’s intuition.” Sarcasm has taken the place of Nikki’s tears.

  “Years of dealing cases,” I say. “Talia didn’t kill Ben Potter any more than you or I did.”

  “Even if you’re right, somebody else could defend her.”

  “Somebody else is defending her. Guy by the name of Cheetam. I’m there only as Keenan counsel, to assist him, that’s all.”

  “And he asked you?”

  “As a matter of fact he did. They were in a bind. The man’s from out of town. He needed somebody fast; Skarpellos recommended me.”

  I don’t tell her that Talia planted this seed. Nikki’s hostility, like a dying battery, is running down now. She has a difficult time staying angry. She has always had to work hard maintaining a constant pitch to her ire. Fury, it seems, always came too quickly, spending itself in an emotional weariness.

  “But you could get out of it if you wanted to.”

  I shake my head. “It’s too late.”

  I take the time to explain in soothing tones that I’ve already filed discovery motions in the case. This makes me counsel of record. To withdraw now would require a formal substitution of counsel, or the consent of the court. We’re too close to the preliminary hearing to get either.

  “If I’d known you felt this way, I wouldn’t have taken the case. But it’s too late.”

  “How did you think I’d feel? You’re rubbing my nose in your affair. Now you tell me it’s too late. Seems that your commitment to her is just a little more important than your concern for us.”

  “I didn’t think,” I say. I hope that this final confession will kill it.

  She sits demure at the other end of the couch, her behind on the edge, knees pressed together, hands folded tightly in her lap, as she drops the bomb.

  “Still, isn’t there some kind of conflict?” she says.

  I play stupid. “Whadda you mean?”

  There’s a little exasperation in her eyes. “I mean, it’s not normal for a lawyer to be fucking his client, is it?”

  “I told you it’s over.”

  “I see,” she says. “If it’s in the past tense-if the lawyer has fucked his client, it’s all right.”

  She leaves me with the ethical conundrum as she rises from the couch.

  “Listen. When this is over maybe we can get together, the three of us for a weekend over on the coast. Like we used to,” I say.

  “Fat chance,” she says.

  She lets me know that I’ve wasted my time changing the sheets on my bed, a hopeful preliminary to a night together after a happy birthday party. Nikki’s moving toward the back of the house, calling Sarah, getting ready to leave.

  “You won’t mind if I don’t stick around to help you clean up the mess.” She looks at me with a sobering expression. Like so much of what she says to me these days, her words carry some intended double meaning.

  “I can handle it.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “Where’s the eunuch?” asks Harry.

  In Cheetam’s absence Ron Brown is like a shadow. He produces no real work, but checks in on us like a miser looking for spun gold. He’s the first to deliver reports on all progress to Skarpellos and Cheetam. The man trucks heavily in the intellectual coin of all toadies.

  “Who cares, as long as he leaves us alone,” I say.

  “Whadda we tell him when we’re done? He’s gonna demand to know what’s here.”

  “We tell him as little as possible. I’ll talk to Cheetam alone, give him the bad news as soon as he graces us with his presence.”

  It’s one of those long spring afternoons. I’m falling asleep over reams of paper. The clock on the wall has been changed to daylight-savings time, confusing the internal ticker that manages my body. Since childhood I’ve harbored a special resentment toward those who mess with time.

  Tall, slender shadows are falling on the high rises across the canyon that is the Capitol Mall. I struggle to stay awake in the paper blizzard that Talia’s case is quickly becoming.

  Flush with a five-figure retainer, a loan from Skarpellos to Talia secured by her expected interest in the firm, I’ve hired Harry for a little help. We’re closeted in the conference room at Potter, Skarpellos, poring over the piles of documents, evidence reproduced by the DA’s copy machine, responses to a dozen discovery motions I’ve filed. Cheetam’s out of town. He’s juggling three major tort cases in other cities, a minor matter he neglected to disclose until after I’d agreed to participate in the defense. Lately, it seems, he shows up only for prime time, when there’s a gaggle of cameras or notebook-toting reporters with tiny pencils looking for a case of writer’s cramp.

  “You really think people buy this crap?” Harry’s wandered mentally from the task at hand. He’s looking at a copy of Lawyer’s Monthly, the slick state bar journal, left behind in the library. He’s reached the back of the edition, the glossy advertisements, a whole page of lawyer toys: golf balls and watches stamped with the scales of justice, a leather high-back executive chair with more buttons than the space shuttle, and an assortment of “spear-chuckers”-$300 Mont Blanc fountain pens, arranged like a log raft in the center of the page.

  “Ah. Before I forget,” he says. Harry slips a small yellow Post-it note from his pocket and slides it across the table. “Gal’s name is Peggie Conrad, independent paralegal.”

  There’s a phone number on the slip.

  “She does mostly probate,” he says.

  I look at him and raise an eyebrow in question.

  “Sharon Cooper’s probate file,” says Harry. “The lady’ll solve all your problems.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “Thought you needed a little help.”

  I look at the note and make a face. Like this is a brand I’ve never tried before. Hiring someone without a license to practice law. “Thanks,” I tell him. “But doesn’t the bar object?”

  He shrugs his shoulders. “All of her clients are lawyers. Seems you’re not the only one who doesn’t kno
w how to fill out the forms.”

  “Guess it can’t hurt to talk to her.” Sharon’s probate file is growing hair on my desk. I pocket the slip and return to the pile of paper in front of me. Harry and I have pieced together a good part of the evidence the police hold. From the pathology and forensic reports, we can tell the cops knew Ben’s death was no suicide within hours of removing his body from the office. Apart from the lack of any fingerprints, even smudged prints on the gun, the plastic shell cartridge still in the barrel was clean. Whoever loaded the gun was wearing gloves or used a rag to insert the cartridge. Gunshot residue tests on Ben’s hands came back negative. GSRs are chemical searches for nitrites and traces of lead, barium, and antimony-the stuff expelled with hot gases from any modern firearm. Even with a long gun of the kind used here, the residues of these elements would have planted themselves on the front and back of Ben’s nonfiring hand, the one used to steady the muzzle in his mouth while he supposedly fingered the trigger with the other. The conclusion is inescapable: Someone else fired the shot.

  “It’s a little baffling,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “How the murderer managed to get Ben to take it in the mouth. I mean, I can understand a head shot, up close. But a victim’s not likely to cooperate by sucking on the muzzle of an over-and-under. The immediate intention of the shooter’s too obvious.”

  “I suppose,” says Harry. “Maybe he was unconscious when they shot him.”

  “Medical examiner didn’t find any drugs in the body.”

  “Yeah, but that wound would’ve covered a lotta bumps on the head.”

  Harry’s got a point.

  The weapon itself-a twelve-gauge Italian make, Bernardelli Model 192, according to ballistics-featured a lot of tooling and a high price tag. It was registered to Ben. The second barrel was empty. Police reports said the gun was usually kept in a case in Potter’s study at his house, where Talia had easy access to it.

  Cheetam’s making a lot out of the gun. “A shotgun,” he says, “is not a woman’s weapon.” I’ve told him to save it for the jury. He says the case will never get there. The man has amazing confidence for one who has yet to look at the evidence.