Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  To Nikki and me, Sarah is a litany of little offerings, crushed petals and broken stems, the gatherings of the garden, scraps of paper colored and punched, certificates of devotion folded and rolled in every hue made by Crayola. Tonight, for Sarah, it is not so much her performance that matters, but that she offers this achievement, as a gift to us. At five, children it seems have no concept of parents’ unconditional love. In Sarah’s limited view, I think, she feels the need to make some partial payment in the coin of acceptance, some compensation for our continued affections. She does not realize that she is compensation enough.

  The phone rings in the kitchen. Nikki answers it.

  “Just a moment,” she says.

  “It’s for you.” She looks at me, an expression that says “this better not be what I think it is.” She hands me the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Madriani. It’s Claude Dusalt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry to call you at home at this hour,” he says, “but it was important. We have a break in the case. Out near the university. Some evidence in a van. A lead on the Putah Creek killer. We need a warrant, tonight,” he says. “Can you meet me at your office in half an hour?”

  I swallow hard and look at Nikki. She is watching me through the practiced eyes of cynicism. On my face, in the cast of my expression, she reads the message of still another disappointment.

  “I understand,” I say. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” I tell him.

  Dusalt hangs up.

  “I have to go,” I tell her. “It’s a major break in the case. They need a warrant.”

  “What else?” she says, shrugging her shoulders.

  She’s already moving, grabbing her coat and purse.

  With my wife I have learned over the years that it is not so much her words as her actions that convey true emotions. There is little hostility detected in her tone, more an expression of resignation. But Nikki is going about the routine of departure in stiff, measured movements, the sign of a deep, brooding fury.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “These things happen.”

  “Sure,” she says. She gathers up Sarah and heads for the door. “You’d better hurry. It wouldn’t do to be late,” she tells me.

  “Daddy’s not coming?” My daughter is looking at her mother with big oval eyes.

  “Daddy has other, more important things,” says Nikki.

  Sarah’s little saucers are now aimed at me.

  I smile a little pained expression. I bend down to give her a hug to tell her that I am sorry.

  Before I can, Nikki ushers her toward the car in the garage like some shepherded lamb. They are late, and in a hurry. My wife’s words are the last thing I hear as the door slams closed behind them.

  “Daddy has work to do tonight,” she says.

  Another debit in the parental account of a father’s love.

  Chapter Six

  “I want the van left where it is,” I say, “under surveillance for now, until I can work up a warrant. Nobody’s to touch it further without my approval. Understood?”

  Claude has Denny Henderson taking notes as the three of us move at a quickstep across the commons and up the stairs of the county administration building. The lights out front have come on, though it is not yet completely dark.

  “And I will need a good stenographer, somebody who can take dictation and who knows how to do a warrant.” I look at Henderson. “Do we have anybody?” He looks at Claude, who nods his assurance.

  “Sheila Aikens,” he says, “the older gal in your office. Feretti used her, said she was pretty good.”

  “Find her. Get her here now. I want the van watched around the clock. And get the owner registration.”

  “We’ve already got it,” says Claude, “the vehicle registration.”

  We push our way through the main door to the office.

  Dusalt pulls a little notebook from his pocket. “It’s a 1973 GMC. Guy’s name is Andre Iganovich,” he says. He rattles off an address on the west side of town. “We’ve had the apartment under surveillance for a couple of hours. DMV is sending us a photo from his driver’s license for identification. Should we pick him up if he shows?”

  “No. First we line up the legal ducks,” I say, “a search warrant for the van. Then assuming what we’ve seen inside is golden, we get another warrant for the apartment. If he hasn’t flown the coop, we can detain him during the search. We’ll take him down after we get an arrest warrant, based on the evidence,” I say.

  “What if he shows up at the van?” says Claude.

  This is more perplexing. We can’t let him drive off with the van and its contents. “Detain him,” I say. “Hold him for questioning. But no arrest.” I am adamant. I will not have some judge on review limiting our evidence, throwing out our case because we acted rashly.

  Claude looks at Henderson. “Pass the word,” he says. And like a shadow on a cloudy day, Henderson disappears into one of the empty offices to use a phone.

  From down the hall I see a head, spindles of long dark hair backlit by office light, and a pair of eyes peering around the jamb of one of the office doors. As I had guessed, it is Lenore Goya. Just as quickly as it appeared, the head vanishes back into its solitary sanctum.

  Claude and I are now huddled in Feretti’s old office.

  He has not seen this side of me before. Up to now I have been passive, waiting in the wings to help only if called upon. But with Ingel and Acosta now kneeling on my throat, I am becoming, in the jargon of our time, more proactive.

  I had noticed as we entered that Claude had assembled an entourage in the outer office, another cop in a uniform I don’t recognize and a second man, heavyset, a gut like Babe Ruth, in a blue pin-striped work shirt. These are the percipient witnesses, the people who found the van and its grisly contents.

  “We will need Sellig,” I say. “Have Henderson call DOJ and get her out here.” I am taking no chances with one of the county crime techs. If the case against the Putah Creek killer starts here, I am determined that it will stand on a solid footing, evidence hard as concrete, nothing some slick defense attorney can suppress in a pretrial motion months from now.

  “Now tell me what happened,” I say.

  Claude’s looking at his notebook again.

  “Our guy,” he says, “Iganovich appears to be a Russian immigrant, in the country four or five years now. We ran a rap sheet on him, came up clean, only thing we found is a license from the state, last October. Licensed security guard,” he says. “No firearm permit.”

  Claude’s shaking his head. “Can you beat it?” he says. “Guy’s probably not even in the country legally and he’s working security.”

  “We can worry about his immigration status later. How did you find this thing, the van?” I ask. I start looking for potential problems, the lawyer’s mind at work.

  “It’s all real clean,” says Claude.

  “Humor me.”

  “Officer Dandrich, outside, is with the university police,” he says.

  It’s the uniform I didn’t recognize.

  “Two days ago he sees this van parked in one of the university lots. It’s two A.M., the lot’s reserved for day use only, the place is empty. He thinks maybe whoever owns it is working late. So he doesn’t think anything about it. He looks at the rear tire, it’s been chalked by the meter maid. Yesterday he comes back on shift and the van’s still there. There’s a ticket on the windshield. He looks at the tires again, the vehicle hasn’t been moved. Traffic code for the university gives the guy twenty-four hours, then it’s towed. So he calls the tow truck company, a vendor downtown.”

  According to Claude this is a commercial garage under contract to the university.

  I am following this unfolding drama, my feet propped on
the leaf of the desk which I have pulled out for this purpose.

  “That’s where this guy Harold comes in,” he says. “Mr. Goodwrench?” He’s referring to grease and pinstripes, outside in the hail.

  “Mr. Harold,” he says, “is real careful. He’s been sued before by the angry tow toads, so he makes it standard operating procedure whenever he takes a car from the university to inventory the personal property inside. He insists on doing this in front of one of the campus cops.”

  “Trusting guy,” I say.

  “Anyway,” he says, “Harold and the campus cop”—he looks at his notes—“Dandrich, they give the van a closer look. One of ’em discovers that the window, on the passenger side over the rear door, has been smashed in.”

  “The cop didn’t see this the day before?” I ask.

  Claude shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders. “I asked him. He says it was parked next to one of those cement columns in the garage. You couldn’t see it unless you went around the column.”

  “So we don’t know when the window was broken?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, Dandrich and Harold, when they see this thing, the glass gone, they’re real curious. They reach inside, unlock it and pop the doors.”

  “The van was still locked?”

  He nods. “What do you think they found?” Claude’s looking at me, a little pregnant pause.

  I shake my head, like search me.

  “A towel on the passenger seat, covered in what looks like dried blood. That’s not all,” he says. “In the back, in plain view . . .” He adds this latter with his hands outstretched, like he’s protesting no foul. “They find a pile of metal tent stakes, the little shiny ones L-shaped—and bingo—coiled up on the floor next to them, nice plastic clothesline cord, thirty feet of the stuff.”

  I arch an eyebrow, like maybe we’ve hit pay dirt. “Where are the stakes and the rope now?”

  “Didn’t touch a thing,” he says. “Left them right where we found ’em.”

  “Good. Get Sellig immediately. Tell her what you found and how you found it, all the details. I don’t want anybody else to touch that van, understood? Tell her I’ll need a report, a comparison to the rope and stakes found at the other murder scenes. And I would like it as fast as possible. Tell her we need it for a warrant to pick this guy up.” If we are to search the Russian’s apartment, Sellig’s report will be the lodestone in any application for a search warrant, and ultimately for his arrest.

  Claude’s fishing in his pockets. His hand comes out with a little vial of pills, some medication, then he’s off down the hall toward the water cooler. Several minutes pass. I get up, stretch my legs and wander out into the hall. Claude is forty feet away at the cooler. He apparently has downed his pills, but now he’s not alone. Lenore Goya is talking to him, the picture of animation. I can tell that Claude is having a tough time getting in a word. She sees me and stops. Two seconds later she disappears back into her office, and closes the door, hard.

  Claude pockets the little vial of pills and heads back toward me.

  “What was that all about?”

  Dusalt makes a face and shrugs a little, like perhaps he’d rather not say. I persist.

  “Just curious. She wants to know about Putah Creek. What’s going on.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Maybe I should invite her to join us?”

  “I don’t know.” Claude is a mask of indecision. I sense there was more hostility than inquisitiveness in their conversation.

  “A little hurt pride,” he says.

  “The fact that I was appointed to fill the gap?”

  He nods. “Sure. Feretti gets sick and the first thing they do is bring in an outsider. They don’t even talk to her. She carried the load in the office even when Mario was here.”

  I raise an eyebrow at this.

  “He’d been going downhill for a long time,” says Claude. “Goya covered for him. She paid some dues. She feels more than a little betrayed.”

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I say.

  It’s opened by a woman, ringlets of straggly brown hair. It’s a familiar face. I think maybe the cleaning woman, lots of wrinkles, and bags bigger than Gucci’s under each eye. Her dress is something from the Goodwill. She is the defining element of frump.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You Madriani?” she says. A cigarette dangles from between painted lips as she talks.

  “I am.”

  “They called me at the rest home,” she says.

  I take another look at her and think maybe she belongs there.

  “I was visiting my mother.”

  “And you are?”

  “Sheila Aikens,” she says. “They said you wanted me. You want me in here or outside?” Under one arm she has a large file folder, three inches thick, the kind that expands like an accordion, and a purse over the other shoulder. In her free hand is a coffee cup soiled by lipstick.

  I look at Claude as if to ask “is this the best we can do?” He smiles at me, a little sheepish.

  “You can set up outside,” I tell her. “I’ll find you when I’m ready.”

  She’s dripping ash all over the carpet as she stands there.

  “Yeah. Sure.” The grating tone of her voice has all the charm of a wood rasp dragged across a splintered board. Her lack of inflection says “sure—hurry up and wait.”

  She closes the door.

  “Where the hell did she come from?” I look at Claude.

  He makes a face, something from the Old World. “You’d have to ask Feretti.”

  “It’s a little late,” I say.

  Dusalt gives me the shrug, like such matters are clearly outside of his realm.

  Though it’s not good to think ill of the dead, given Roland Overroy’s sorry work ethic, and now the vision of Sheila Aikens lingering in my doorway like the odor of Pepe LePew, I am gaining a whole new perspective on Mario’s management style.

  “Where were we?” I say.

  “Clothesline cord and metal stakes.”

  “Yes.”

  I probe around the edges inquiring as to exactly where these things were inside the van when first observed.

  “We didn’t touch a thing,” says Claude. “It was all right there in plain view, in the back of the van.” On this Claude is a little defensive.

  “The vehicle was abandoned,” he says. “The guy has no reasonable expectation of privacy. We didn’t need a warrant to look inside.”

  I look at him and smile. “Two days in a pay lot?”

  Claude blanches a little.

  I don’t want to have to shop for a sympathetic judge, someone who might buy this thin argument, only to be slapped down later on appeal. In the judicial community, judges who issue warrants are like the rabbis of the ancient Talmud, each with his own relative reputation. Pick one who is not highly regarded, and you will pay the price later, in spades.

  “Have you talked personally to Mr. Harold about the procedures he uses to inventory vehicles?”

  Claude nods.

  “Does he inventory personal property inside the vehicle every time he takes one in tow?”

  “Like clockwork.”

  I make a face. “Without exception?” I trust Claude, but I have seen too many cases in which the cops will fudge their facts to make them fit.

  “Always. Invariably,” he says.

  Claude knows what I’m asking, whether he feels confident in this information, whether he can sign an affidavit affirming these facts under penalty of perjury, for review by a superior court judge.

  “Harold’s outside,” he says. “You wanna talk to him yourself?” Claude is testing me. Seeing w
hether I trust him, this hotshot defense lawyer turned prosecutor.

  “No.” I don’t bite. “We go on what you have.” A little investment in trust.

  “We’re OK, at least for the moment,” I tell him. “A properly impounded vehicle subject to a routine inventory. Whatever we find should be fair game.”

  It is one of the exceptions carved out by the law. A search warrant will not be required for the towel, rope and tent stakes found in the van. Assuming our judge knows the law, Sellig should be free to do her magic on them.

  Claude smiles with this thought. The fickle gods of criminal process have blessed him.

  “We still need to do hair and fibers on the van,” I tell him, “and for that we’ll need a warrant.”

  He nods. So far so good.

  We are getting hourly reports from Henderson and the group staking out Iganovich’s apartment. He has not shown, either there or at the van. Claude is taking bets that the man is in Mexico drinking margaritas.

  “The heat’s on,” he says. “Would you stick around?”

  “No.” But it’s a truism in the law that those who violate it, more often than not, do dumb things.

  I’m busy composing in my head, dictating to Aikens, who is bent over an old IBM Selectric that’s covered by more ash than Mt. Vesuvius. The woman is smoking like a chimney, keying out the affidavit for Claude’s signature. Dusalt has firmed up his facts with the two witnesses and sent them home.

  I have a single objective in mind: to convince an impartial magistrate that there is a reasonable probability that evidence of a crime is located in the Russian’s van. With this a warrant will be issued. We can then take prints and fibers, vacuum it for hair, check the tires for impressions, and hope that in all of this we will find some connection with the Putah Creek killings.

  I am now dictating from hand-written notes, thoughts I have taken during Claude’s earlier briefing, from his follow-up with the witnesses.

  As I talk to her, I have one eye on the paper moving through Aikens’s typewriter and the other on Claude, to ensure that I’m not departing from the straight and narrow as related by the university cop and Mr. Harold.