Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  After the trial in the Potter case and our earlier separation, Nikki and I sparred over the revelation of my affair with Talia while we were apart. We spent long months talking about our marriage, a succession of trips to a counselor. In his presence we negotiated a contract, more wheeling and dealing than a leveraged buyout.

  For her part Nikki agreed that she would no longer keep her frustrations bottled up inside, expecting me to develop the prophetic skills of a seer, her idealized version of male sensitivity.

  I promised that I would make strides to confine my practice, compartmentalize my life so as to stake out more time for Nikki and Sarah.

  For a while this even worked. We took a few weekend trips, spent four days in the mountains camping. It was a new life. The stress melted from me like snow on a summer day. This lasted nearly three months. Then the lawyer inside my soul, like the genie in the magician’s lamp, escaped—two back-to-back trials. My best intentions went to hell.

  This was followed by Feretti’s phone call. I found myself in material breach of our contract.

  Nikki followed through on her part, gnawing on my ass at every opportunity. What angered her most was my failure to discuss the Davenport business with her before making my commitments with Mario. It is a point well taken.

  Since then her ire has been steadily escalating. I tried to mollify her with assurances that my role was only temporary, until Feretti was back on his feet. Ninety days at most. I used Mario’s line.

  But Nikki can see through bullshit like a sniper through a starlight scope. She asked me if I’d gotten this prognosis from Feretti’s doctor. I had to admit that I hadn’t talked to Mario’s physician. We were back into it, Nikki shouting, stomping around the house, pretending like she was straightening up, picking up Sarah’s toys, throwing them haplessly in my direction.

  Then Mario died. Since then life has been hell. We are no longer sleeping in the same room.

  She is dishing up dinner, only three plates on the dining room table, a heaping one for Harry. He eyeballs me. Maybe it is true, that I am fasting tonight. Then Nikki tells us that Sarah has already eaten, watching a tape of Mr. Rogers on the tube.

  We pull up chairs. I open the wine.

  “Are you going through with this thing?” says Harry.

  He’s talking about the temporary assignment as prosecutor in Davenport County.

  “Right now I’m on the hook,” I say. The fact is, I have signed a contract with an indefinite term on the assumption that Feretti would soon be back.

  I make a face. “Circumstances have now changed,” I tell Harry. “I’m hoping that the county will understand. I’ve got a meeting with Judge Ingel tomorrow morning, to talk about it.” Derek Ingel is presiding judge of the Davenport County Superior Court. To those who know him, and behind his back, he is called “the Prussian.” But I have not as yet figured out why. Right now he holds the balance of my practice in his hands.

  Nikki gives me a look, a quick flash of anger. “He’s hoping they will understand?” says Nikki. “I like that,” she says. “How about telling them your wife doesn’t understand? How about telling them to go away and leave us alone? I love it,” she says, “my husband the lawyer. He has balls the size of brass doorknobs when it comes to pitching the cause of some sleaze-ball client. But for his family, when it comes to his ability to earn a living, well,” she says, “then he’s all meekness, hat in hand, kiss the ass of the judge. Your honor this, your honor that . . .” Nikki is up from the table getting something from the kitchen, her indignant mantra trailing behind her like some billowing train of wrath as she walks from the dining room.

  Harry looks at me from under wrinkled eyebrows, like maybe I should take Nikki along to do the talking. We can hear her in the other room grumbling to herself now.

  I explain to him the difficulties, the fact that the board of supervisors who will ultimately fill Feretti’s job by appointment is deadlocked on a long list of candidates. Each supervisor is now backing his own horse. Naming a prosecutor in a rural county is, it seems, its own form of king-making.

  “Why not just tell him that you aren’t going to do it?” Nikki’s back. “That it was a favor for a friend. The friend is now dead, and that it’s over.” She tosses the dish towel on the table, like maybe I could take this thing with me and drop it in the middle of Ingel’s desk.

  I laugh a little, like such an approach would be ridiculous. This makes her more angry.

  “We’ve been over this,” I say. “The court signed off on the appointment,” I say. “And I applied for the assignment.”

  “At Feretti’s request,” she reminds me.

  “I will talk to Ingel tomorrow,” I say. “I will do everything I can to get out.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  Harry I think senses blood about to be spilled. From Nikki’s look, I think he suspects it may be mine. He steps in. “The sheriff, what’s his name?”

  “Emil Johnson,” I say.

  “He seemed like a decent sort—for a cop,” says Harry. From Hinds, this is a ringing endorsement. “Maybe he’d help you get out from under. Talk to his friends on the board, maybe some of the judges. After all, he’s an elected official.”

  “I don’t think he would help,” I say.

  “There you go,” says Nikki. “He won’t even try.” She throws her napkin on the table, gets up and walks out again.

  Harry had met Emil at Feretti’s funeral. He came with me for a little moral support. Nikki was too angry with Mario for dying.

  There at the funeral, hovering over the casket with friends and family, I’d felt a sharp slap on the back. I turned, and it was Emil Johnson. Johnson is a fifth-degree redneck in this rural county, and has the beer gut and broad beam to prove it. Voters have returned him to office five terms running. This undoubtedly says more about the place than it does about Emil. He has been warding off growing opposition from more liberal elements at the university for years. If he is lucky he will retire in another term, unless alcohol takes him out sooner.

  “Sad day, counselor.” He’d looked at me with soulful eyes, a face like a heavy-set basset hound. “A man with young children.” Emil shook his head at the unfairness of it all.

  I introduced Harry, who at the sound of the word “sheriff” wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand before giving it to Emil in a firm shake. Johnson didn’t seem to notice.

  “Makes one feel one’s own mortality.” Emil was waxing eloquent, looking at the casket, patting his gut which hung over a brass buckle as big as a gladiator’s shield, the letters “Winchester” tooled across it. “Mary-o was a good man,” he said. “He’ll be missed.”

  For all of five minutes by the politicians of Davenport County, I thought. I hadn’t noticed Emil throwing his own political weight, which is considerable, behind Feretti when Mario was hospitalized. Instead the good sheriff waited in the weeds to see if the supervisors would devour Mario, if they would seek to replace Feretti with one of their own hand-picked cronies.

  “You got a problem,” says Harry, still eating. “This is not a good thing.”

  I think he means my crossing over to the prosecution.

  Then he motions toward the kitchen. “It isn’t worth it,” he says. What Harry means is this case is jeopardizing my marriage, threatening my family.

  “What can I do?” I say.

  He makes a face, like he has no answers.

  From the beginning Harry has made no secret of his view. He has not wanted me to get involved in this thing in Davenport.

  When I first told him that I was only caretaking, he looked at me wistfully. “That’s what Adam told the snake,” he said.

  It is as if by crossing over to the other side, even on a short-term appointment, only for purposes of the investigation, I have—at least in Harry’s eyes—violated some
sacred part of the defender’s credo and placed some curse on my family life.

  Chapter Three

  Two years ago Derek Ingel was working in the bowels of the attorney general’s office, shagging criminal appeals for the state. He found the fountain of political patronage in a GOP club with people who believe that only good Republicans speak in tongues, and who foster the social ideals of Beaver Cleaver.

  Since then Ingel has ascended to the judicial heavens faster than Elijah and his fiery chariot. He now sits as the legal pooh bah in this county, in the PJ’s chambers of the superior court. These are not opulent, and I am offered a hard wooden chair on the other side of Ingel’s desk for this audience.

  He tells me how busy he is. This to let me know my time here is short. He is down one judge, a vacancy on the court, he says.

  Talk among local lawyers is that Ingel is now pulling strings to put one of his cronies from the AG’s office in this spot. He has made statements in private, which he now denies, that only former deputy AG’s are qualified to be judges in this state. Such are his views of social and professional diversity. If narrow-mindedness is a virtue, Derek Ingel is its patron saint.

  We quickly run out of pleasant things to say to each other.

  He leans back in his chair.

  “So what is it that you want?” he says. The man has the animation of Calvin Coolidge, a human droid whose maker forgot to program a smile. I am beginning to understand how Derek Ingel earned his moniker—“the Prussian.”

  “It’s the nature of our arrangement,” I say. “My agreement with the county.”

  He gives me a long slow nod, takes off his wristwatch and sets it on the desk faceup like he’s timing some event. I am wondering if the floor will open up and swallow me at some point.

  “Feretti’s death,” I tell him, “circumstances that none of us anticipated.”

  “Ahh, yes,” he says. “Tragic.” Then nothing more. He makes some noises, like he’s not sure exactly how this affects me. Stuck in the morass of Mario’s job, one foot in private practice and the other here, forty miles away, and I have to get out my crayons and draw the man a picture.

  But Ingel is not as dense as he makes out. What he really wants, I think, is for me to grovel. From his satisfied expression I think this is the part he likes best about his job. Attorneys in three-piece suits, on their hands and knees.

  I start making a case, the lawyer at work, the fact that circumstances were different when I signed the contract with the county. That the parties all understood that I was merely filling in for Mario, who is now dead. How long can it take to name a successor?

  He sits listening to all of this, a few facial calisthenics to show that judgment is at work.

  “It would be good,” I tell him, “if we could settle the matter of my temporary assignment.” I put a lot of emphasis on the “T” word. “Put some closing time frame on it.

  “The county would be ill-served by a change of prosecutors in the middle of some high-profile case,” I say. I would wink at him and add “like the Putah Creek stuff,” but I think he gets it. Still he says nothing, a lot of dead in the eyes. Ingel is a torpid sponge. I’m beginning to wonder why I have bothered, when I could have stayed home and talked to myself.

  After several minutes working up calluses on my tongue, he finally cuts me off.

  “What’s the bottom line?” he says. “What is it specifically you want?”

  “I thought I made that clear. A closing time frame on my duties here.”

  He looks at me, like be real.

  I climb back in the saddle. “With a vacancy in the office, it would serve us all well if a permanent replacement is found quickly,” I tell him.

  He makes a face, seesawing his head like maybe this is so and maybe it isn’t. Then he swivels in his chair a quarter turn so that he is now looking at the degrees and honors hanging on his wall.

  “You put me in a difficult position,” he says.

  “How’s that?”

  He turns to me, square on again. “I’m going to be honest with you,” he says. “You were not my pick for this job.”

  Great, so let me go, I think.

  “Nonetheless,” he says, “you signed a contract with the county. This contract, I believe, is open-ended.”

  He means that it has no specific term of months or years at which time it will expire.

  “That’s true. But at the time it was signed, the circumstances were clear,” I say. “It was understood by both parties that I was merely filling in for Mr. Feretti. During what was believed to be his period of recuperation. After surgery,” I say.

  “But the contract didn’t say this?” he says.

  “Not expressly.”

  “Don’t hedge with me,” he snaps. “It either did or it didn’t.”

  “It didn’t,” I say.

  “Fine.” He rolls back in his chair a little, looks at the ceiling. “And so now you want out?”

  I could say yes, but from his tone and manner I opt for a fallback.

  “I would like a reasonable time frame for the county to find a permanent replacement. Support from the court for this position. Something to motivate the supervisors to move quickly instead of taking their time.”

  “And what do you consider a reasonable time frame?”

  “A month, six weeks.” I make it sound generous, like the Creator built the universe in six days.

  “And that’s it?”

  Maybe I’m getting somewhere.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “Is there something,” he says, “that makes you think the county’s not proceeding in a timely manner? To replace Feretti, that is?”

  I make a face, like I’m not sure we should get into this.

  “Oh, go ahead,” he says. The first smile I’ve seen this afternoon. Now I am wary.

  “You can be candid here,” he says. “In the confines of this office,” he says, “confidences are sacred.”

  I could test this by telling him I do abortions on the side. Instead I hedge.

  “I hear rumors,” I say, “scuttlebutt that there are budgetary considerations.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  He looks at me like maybe he doesn’t believe this.

  The fact is I know more. The county is drawing down a block grant from the state for a large share of my salary, a condition that will end when they appoint a permanent DA. Local funding being what it is, the county grandees intend to nuzzle up and suckle at the tit of the state as long as possible.

  “It couldn’t have anything to do with the Putah Creek things?” he says.

  “I won’t deny that I’ve considered those cases.” I make a face, the obvious.

  “A prosecution would involve protracted criminal litigation,” I tell him. “It could go on for a year. Longer. The county would be smart to get a permanent prosecutor on board before anything is too far along.”

  “Maybe you don’t think you’re up to the task?” A little simper on his lips, imperious. Maybe he is wondering if I have the sand for the job. Or more likely he is questioning my commitment, a switch-hitting lawyer who has been prosecutor and defense attorney and now is back on the side of the angels. For a judge, he packs a lot of prosecutorial baggage to the bench. I think Ingel is one of those judges who believes in putting a beveled edge on justice for the criminally accused.

  “No. That’s not it. I’m up to the task,” I say. “But I have other commitments.” I wonder if this sounds as bad as I think, a lawyer on the dodge.

  “Sure,” he says. Then a look that is a naked attempt to work over my pride, little jabs around the belt in the clinch.

  I swallow hard. A piece of my dignity goes down with the saliva. But I think maybe he
’s about to let me go.

  “I have a private practice,” I say. “My arrangement was intended to be short-term. A few months. I would not have taken the position otherwise.”

  He doesn’t say anything. He knows as well as I that, once started, the Putah Creek cases will be like an Asian land war, much easier to get in than to get out.

  “Some people have told me you’re a good lawyer,” he says.

  I make a face, like compliments are nice.

  “In coming here your reputation precedes you,” he says.

  Now he’s sugarcoating it. From Hyde to Jekyll in a heartbeat. The man is mercurial, more faces to his character than Lon Chaney.

  “But I for one don’t think much of lawyers who bed their clients,” he says.

  Like the wind’s been knocked out of me, a sucker punch. My face goes cold. He talks about dirt in my past, allusions to my earlier affair with Talia Potter, before her case, when Nikki and I were separated, ancient history. This is not news, I think. It was in all the local papers, my cross to bear during the Potter trial. And I’d thought it was over, killed by the heat and bright lights of public exposure. Now Ingel is dredging it all up.

  I say nothing, but sit there and take his shellacking.

  “As a courtesy, Judge Acosta called from Capital City,” he says, “when he read that you’d been appointed as special prosecutor here. You will learn,” he says, “that judges talk.”

  Apparently like fishmongers. Ingel’s been holding forth with the Coconut, Armando Acosta, Mexico’s answer to the Lord of the Flies. I should have seen it coming.

  Acosta presided over the trial of Talia Potter, whom I defended in Capital City on charges of murdering her husband. This was seven months ago. Before that, during a period that I was separated from my wife, Nikki, and long before the Potter trial, Talia and I had had an affair. This was to my eternal discredit, because Talia’s husband, Ben Potter, had been a friend and benefactor. I had not disclosed my earlier relationship with the defendant to the court when I took the case. By that time the affair was long over. It was ancient history. But to my chagrin, the papers and the Coconut found out, during the trial. Acosta had threatened to draw and quarter me during the case. And to this day he has not forgiven me for this deception.