Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  “It’s not been overruled, or limited. In fact,” she tells me, “Kellett was cited in a case last year, that if Chambers finds, he will argue is on all fours with the facts of our own—separate charges of first-degree murder.” She hands me computer printout sheets still joined at the perforated tops and bottoms, four pages.

  “Read it and weep,” she says.

  This is bad news. I had hoped for some crack through which we might slip.

  “There’s nothing we can use?” I ask her. We are obligated to provide points and authorities to an unhappy judge tomorrow.

  She makes a face, like every good lawyer can always argue something—even if it’s only the direction of the grain in the wood on the table in front of him.

  “Chambers overstepped himself, just a little,” she says. What she means is that he has stretched the legal authority of Kellett to the snapping point. I am not surprised with Adrian. On matters of law, he has always been famous for this.

  “There’s no authority,” she says, “for the court to order us to charge Iganovich with the Scofield killings. That’s purely a matter of prosecutorial discretion. On that you call the shot alone,” she tells me. “There are some cases on point in there.” She taps the computer sheets in my hand.

  “At least we can nail his feet to the floor on that,” I say.

  “The downside is, the case slams the door on your fingers, if you fail to charge the Russian with the Scofield murders.”

  What this means is that I must either charge Iganovich in Scofield or give him a free ride for life, irrespective of any evidence we may later discover linking him to those crimes, a lifetime pass for double murder. The city fathers will love it.

  While Kay Sellig and my better judgment tell me that Iganovich did not do Abbott and Karen Scofield, the Kellett case forces me to fish or cut bait.

  “Did you see this?” says Lenore. She’s holding a copy of the morning Times, the only paper so far to get the story right. They’ve used a law grad as a reporter to cover this trial. This morning it’s paid off. After research they have come to the same legal conclusions as Goya.

  The rest of the pack have gotten it all wrong. They are reporting that the court is about to order me to charge Iganovich with these crimes, but that I am resisting. They leave it to the reader to decide whether it is simple incompetence or corruption that is my motivating force.

  As I turn into my driveway this evening coming home from work, I see Nikki at the mailbox. Dressed up, with her purse in hand, apparently she’s just beaten me home from some errand or other.

  Sarah’s outside the front door, waiting for her mother to come and open it with her key, when she sees me.

  Before I can turn off the headlights, my daughter’s at my car door clutching at the handle to open it. “Daddy, daddy.” The unbridled enthusiasm of little children happy to see a parent, one of the only true touchstones of life.

  I pick her up and listen as she tells me about her day, where they’ve been. Something about a puppet show and friends. At the age of five, for children of moderate affluence, life is nearly always good, it seems. Nikki and I have talked about this, whether we are spoiling Sarah.

  Nikki has made her way back up the driveway. A peck on her cheek. “How was your day?” I say.

  “OK. And yours?”

  “Fine,” I tell her. I don’t get into it, the mess over Adrian’s latest motion, the points and authorities, my continuing travails in the press. Nikki would not be sympathetic.

  Lenore believes Chambers is pursuing his grand strategy in all this. Before I left the office we discussed it, his full-court press to get me to charge his client with two more murders. If we succumb, Lenore believes Adrian will drop his alibi on us at trial, solid witnesses or irrefutable documents which can place Iganovich already in Canada on the day the Scofields died. This would raise the specter of a shoddy investigation. So far we have not managed to come up with any solid information retracing the Russian’s steps on his trip up north.

  This leaves me with a large dilemma, whether to charge him in Scofield or not. If I do, and there is another killer, for all intents I may give him a free pass. Except for conspirators and co-defendants acting in conceit, juries don’t like cases in which others have previously been charged with the same crime. It makes the system look too chancy.

  “Home a little early tonight,” says Nikki. I look at my watch. She’s right. It’s only a little after eight. Darkness is coming earlier with each day now that we are edging toward autumn.

  Nikki’s picking through the mail, separating hers and mine. Along with all the household chores, Nikki has now taken to paying the bills, another job that I no longer have time for. More of the load for Nikki to shoulder. The only thing she hands me is an envelope marked “occupant.”

  “I’m not sure you qualify,” she says. Only the slightest smile. We both know there is a broad band of truth here.

  She keeps for herself a letter addressed to the two of us, no return address or stamp. This apparently has been put in our mailbox by a neighbor, or some business trying to beat the government out of postage.

  There’s another envelope. She looks at the return address.

  “Jim and Mary,” she says. Suddenly a little lightness coming into her voice.

  Jim and Mary Blaycock are former neighbors who moved back east last year, a job transfer. We have been missing them greatly, one of those relationships beginning to blossom when it was cut short. They have a little girl, Sarah’s age, and a son a little older. The chemistry of the children at play was something special that cemented the two families’ close kinship.

  Nikki peels the envelope and reads as I open the door and turn on the lights in the entry hall.

  I get the news in the letter line by line from her. The kids have started back to school, Jim has been promoted, Mary’s still looking for a job.

  “They’ve invited us to go back for Christmas. Oh, that would be great,” says Nikki. “Snow for the holidays. Good friends.”

  I can hear in my mind the unstated: Something to look forward to besides this empty existence.

  She starts to package the letter up again, like so much for dreams.

  “We’ll look at it,” I say.

  She looks at me. “Really?”

  “I can try to clear my calendar. I think we can probably do it.”

  Suddenly her face is more animated than I have seen it in months. She grabs me by both shoulders, letter crinkled in one hand, and plants a deep, passionate kiss on my lips, molding her body to mine. It is the first show of real affection I can recall since my decision to help Mario Feretti.

  “I said we’d look at it.” I’m trying to temper this now, prevent too many rising expectations.

  “Sure,” she says. “Sarah. How would you like to go see Tim and Susie for Christmas?” Sarah’s all smiles. “Oh yes.” Little “yippee’s,” while she jumps around the table in the dining room.

  “Aren’t you gonna open yours?” Nikki’s looking at the letter marked “occupant” in my hand.

  “I think I’ll save it for later,” I tell her. “Something to balance the good news. What’s for dinner?”

  Sarah’s already eaten, she tells me.

  “How about I get a couple of steaks from the freezer, nuke ’em to thaw in the microwave and I’ll broil them? Baked potatoes and a salad to round it out,” she says.

  “A little wine to celebrate.” She holds up the letter like our trip is now an accomplished fact. My wife can be good at manipulation.

  “Fine. I’m gonna change. Be out in a minute,” I tell her.

  I drop my briefcase in the den on my way down the hall and find my casual clothes hanging on the hook in the closet where I left them last weekend. Lately I have been getting home so late in the evening that changing into someth
ing comfortable is a waste of time and energy.

  I’m into a light sweater and a pair of Dockers when I hear something smash on the kitchen floor, a bowl or dish. Sounds like a million pieces. No swearing or commotion after this. Nikki must be in a good mood, I think.

  A minute later I’m buckling my belt as I walk down the hall toward the kitchen. Nikki is seated at the table, a single light on over her head. The rest of the kitchen is in shadows. I look at the microwave. It’s off. No steaks on the countertop. The broken dish, shattered in splinters, is on the floor. It is a hand-painted soup tureen, porcelain ladle and top, a gift from her parents that she has guarded with her life for ten years.

  “Aw jeez. I’m sorry.” I’m looking at the bowl, little pieces all over the floor.

  Nikki is not. Her head is bent low, over the table, resting in her hands, elbows propped. For a moment I thinks she’s crying. But when she looks up at me, it is not tears I see, but the abject face of fear, sheer and undisguised. This is something utterly alien to my wife’s expression, a look I have not seen more than twice in our marriage, the first time when we were told that Sarah might have juvenile diabetes, a blood test the results of which had been misread.

  “What is it?” I say.

  She is speechless, motioning with her hands. There spread before her on the table is an envelope, a single sheet of letter paper and a glossy photo. She says nothing, unable to speak, like her jaw is wired shut, but pushes these toward me. I pick up the page and read.

  Before I can make out the first word, I know that I should not have touched this paper. The cops will want to dust it for prints. The words, some letters, have each been individually pasted on the page, neatly clipped from newsprint, magazines and newspapers. The prose has all the elegance of a Western Union telegram.

  You FuCKing IVan LOVER

  Charge THE russian OR Else

  The note itself would be almost comic if it were not for the accompanying photograph. Someone has gone to considerable trouble to produce this. It is not the garden variety snapshot developed at your neighborhood Kodak dealer. This is a large glossy, five-by-seven inch, black-and-white, the kind not even processed by many commercial labs any longer. It has an artsy quality about it, shot against a darkening gray sky that I suspect is early morning, with a familiar backdrop.

  It’s the playground at the Westchester—Sarah’s school. There in the foreground with two other little children I can see Sarah playing on the bars. It is hard to tell how far away she is from the camera. If the photographer has not used a telephoto lens, I would guess no more than ten feet.

  I call Sarah. She’s watching television in the front room. She comes into the kitchen. I show her the picture. Nikki’s still sitting, looking at me, silent, at the table.

  “Sarah. Do you see this picture?”

  A big nod. She knows something is wrong from the tone of my voice.

  I stand her up on a chair so that she can see the photo lying on the table, without anyone touching it.

  “Do you remember someone taking your picture at school? Here while you were playing on the bars?”

  She looks at me with an expression reserved for those times when she has been in trouble. Large round eyes, she shakes her head resolutely, like she is not responsible for this. She sees her mother, the face of fear. Now my daughter has joined my wife in wordless silence, intimidated by my interrogation, looking at me, wondering, I think, what is happening to her sheltered world.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Why didn’t you tell us about the phone call?” Claude is more than a little perturbed with me, my failure to inform him about the earlier telephone threat.

  He tells me this in muted tones, over salad and soup at the Lettuce Patch, a luncheon spot near the courthouse for secretaries and other watchers of weight. Dusalt is on a diet, though I’m at a loss to understand why.

  “I thought it was just a crank,” I tell him. “Nikki took the call, so I didn’t hear the words myself.” This is a point of some regret with me now, my initial reaction that perhaps Nikki had made more of the phone call that night than was warranted. I make a little bluster about prosecutors and threats. “More common than rain in April, and mostly idle,” I say.

  “You think this is idle?” Claude’s examining the letter and the photograph, each of which I have encased in clear Ziploc bags, and delivered to him here over lunch.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to scare the hell out of my family. Whoever did it has my full attention. In a word, even if it’s a prank, I’d like to have their ass.” I must admit that my “dago is up,” the flare of the Italian temper.

  He smiles. “You take this very personally,” he says.

  “You bet.”

  “A little advice?” He’s offering.

  I listen.

  “You are now personally involved. You should leave this to me.”

  “That’s why we’re talking,” I say. “Still, I don’t like people jerking my family around.”

  Claude passes a single hand over the table, as if to calm troubled waters.

  “You are right to take this seriously.” He reminds me that in this state threats against law enforcement officers and prosecutors are considered crimes, prosecutable even without overt moves to carry them out.

  “How does your wife feel about all this?” he says.

  Nikki is now a basket case. She will not let go of Sarah, even to have her go so far as to her room. I put a face on it, tell him simply that she is “upset.”

  He nods like he understands.

  “Where is she, and your daughter? You didn’t leave them home alone?”

  “Not today. They’re with friends, a guy who works nights, retired cop, and his wife. They live across town, in Capital City,” I say.

  “Good.” He says it like at least on this point I have thought clearly. “Give me the address and phone number,” he says.

  I write down the information on a napkin and Claude excuses himself from the table, leaves me sitting there chewing on greens. He is gone for five minutes and when he returns I’ve hardly touched lunch, a measure of how tightly strung I am after the events of last evening, and a sleepless night.

  “I’ve made a phone call, across the river. Capital City Police,” he says. “There’s an unmarked unit on its way. They’ll park outside the house and keep an eye,” he says, “until we can make more permanent arrangements.”

  “What kind of arrangements?”

  “I would suggest,” he says, “that you move your family out of town until the trial is over. To another location where they cannot be traced,” he says, “just till then. To be safe.”

  Great. Something that will only serve to heighten Nikki’s already intense level of paranoia.

  “Is that necessary?”

  He looks at me.

  “I mean my daughter has school. My wife has a job.”

  “Somebody will have to talk to the school, and with your wife’s employer, and hope they’ll understand,” says Claude.

  “How do I tell my wife?”

  “Talk to her, explain,” he says. He doesn’t know Nikki, or understand the tenuous nature of my marriage at this moment. But what is clear is that Claude sees this episode as more serious than I, something beyond a harmless and nutty asshole with scissors and glue.

  I ask him if he does this every time a deputy DA gets a threatening piece of mail. If so, he would have little time for anything else.

  He makes a face. “We take precautions. They vary with the case.” He looks at the envelope through its plastic bag.

  “This sender’s not shy,” he says.

  “You wouldn’t expect some shrinking violet to do this?” I say. “I mean take pictures of my daughter and send us thinly veiled death thre
ats.”

  “You miss my point,” he says. “I mean, the fact that it has no stamp, that the envelope was hand-delivered to your mailbox.”

  “Oh.”

  Claude’s talking about the boldness of the act, coming nearly to our front door. I’d not considered this point of near invasion until now. It is becoming clear to me that I am rattled, no longer focusing on significant details. It’s what happens when you become personally involved. Like a lawyer representing himself, you tend to lose your edge.

  He holds up the letter. “And a nice touch,” he says.

  “Emm?”

  “The little hint of bigotry,” he says. Claude’s referring to the description of Iganovich as “Ivan.”

  He smiles at this, like he’s amused. He and I have never discussed social issues and I wonder whether this appeals to some darker side in Claude. Then I realize again I have missed his meaning.

  “Makes it sound like the writer has a thing for immigrants,” he says. “Maybe. But I think it’s a lot of smoke.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You really think Joe-six-pack reads enough to care how many counts are in an indictment? I mean Iganovich is already charged with four capital murders. After all, how many times can you execute a man?”

  Claude thinks we either have the world’s most scrupulous redneck here, or whoever delivered the letter and photo is pumping sunshine up our skirts.

  “Then you think maybe this isn’t serious?” I say.

  “Oh no. I think it’s very serious.” He says this with meaning. “I think it’s possible that whoever sent this,” he’s tapping the plastic bags on the table, “perhaps has killed, twice already.” He looks directly at me, engaging eyes. “If so,” he says, “they would not hesitate to do so again.”

  The mind of the cop, always thinking motivation, studying the act for its calculated effect. Who would have a greater stake in seeing Iganovich charged with the Scofield murders than the person who actually killed them? I am beginning to think that Claude may be right. I want Nikki and Sarah out of town today.

  “My turn,” he says. Claude picks up the check and drops a tip. We wend our way through the tables, past the booths, toward the register at the front door. Halfway there Claude slows a little, leans back into my ear and whispers.