Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  After kicking my ass the judge adjourned early. I can imagine the phone call he is having with Coconut across the river. Between the two of them, they no doubt are planning my future.

  Lenore and I have a meeting with Ingel and Chambers at four, to go over jury instructions. This is a little premature, but Ingel has made it clear that nothing at the end of this trial is going to delay his vacation. Once the jury gets the case they’d better move quickly, or they’re in for a trip. I have visions of the panel, flowered leis around their necks, cracking coconuts and fingering poi during deliberations.

  Claude is in my office. We are on the speaker phone. Denny has managed to find his way to this place, the Wild Animal Park in San Diego. He has spent the entire morning dogging the bird show, talking to the staff, the trainers at work, before he keyed on one guy. He is now at the San Diego PD.

  “He doesn’t work there anymore,” he says. “Used to. His name is Cleo Coltrane,” he tells us. “They canned him last year. Wanna know why?”

  “Tell us,” says Claude. Dusalt is in no mood for twenty questions. He sees his case twirling down the tubes.

  “He’s got a record, two federal convictions,” says Denny. He reads us a section number from the U.S. Codes which he says comes off a rap sheet on the man Coltrane.

  “What the hell’s that?” says Claude.

  “Violations of the Endangered Species Act,” says Henderson.

  “He worked at the park part-time, until the first conviction,” says Denny.

  “He killed birds?” I say.

  “No. In the two cases they nailed him on, he was caught taking rare birds from the wild, trapping them alive.”

  Close enough, I think. All the pieces are falling into place. Scofield had somehow gotten a lead on this guy, and traced him back to San Diego and his place of employment. It is probably not a large fraternity, the people who deal in endangered species.

  “Do they know where he is?” I say.

  “Sure. Right now he’s sitting in a cell down the hall.” Denny sounds cocky as hell. I can picture him with his feet on somebody’s desk drinking coffee from a borrowed mug.

  “You arrested him?”

  This concerns me. We have no legal authority to hold this man. It would take a subpoena issued by a superior court judge coupled with some unwillingness on the part of the witness to comply before we could lawfully take him into custody, even as a material witness, for his own protection.

  “Didn’t have to,” says Denny. “This guy was made to order,” he says. “Seems there was an outstanding warrant on a traffic violation. The cops down here are real nice, real cooperative.” What he means is any excuse to roust a necessary witness.

  “Have you questioned him?” I ask.

  “That’s the bad part. He denies knowing anything. The guy’d make a good mason,” says Denny. “He builds a real solid stone wall. Can’t get him to budge.”

  I can imagine that with two prior federal convictions, Mr. Coltrane is not anxious to volunteer information about more. What he was doing in the blind that night could probably get him accommodations at one of the federal country clubs for at least a few years.

  But right now I’m more interested in how I’m going to get him transported north, where Claude and I can maybe work our magic on him, a subtle psychic rubber hose.

  I tell Denny to stay put, that I will call him back. I place a call to the district attorney in San Diego. He is out but I draw his chief deputy. I introduce myself. There’s some bowing and scraping here, the deputy extending professional courtesy unaware that I’m not really elected in this county. I let him live with illusions. I am on my hands and knees over the phone, the desperate suppliant. In five minutes I have walked him through our dilemma. He agrees to help, to serve a witness subpoena on our behalf. He will do it immediately if I can fax him a captioned copy along with a copy of the complaint in our case. I hang up, tell one of the secretaries what to do, and I call Denny back.

  “Where’s your guy?” I ask him.

  “Still cooling his heels down the hall.”

  “Can you bring him in there so I can talk to him?”

  “Sure.”

  There’s a lot of noise on the other end, shuffling of feet, doors being opened and closed. Three minutes later the speaker phone is back on and I’m introduced to Cleo Coltrane.

  “Mr. Coltrane?”

  Some dead air, like maybe the guy doesn’t recognize his own name.

  “Yeah.” A surly voice, standard fare in this trade.

  “My name is Paul Madriani, Mr. Coltrane. I’m the district attorney of Davenport County. At the present time a witness subpoena is being received down there in San Diego to be served on you.”

  Silence from the other end, some coughing in the background.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Umm umm.” I can visualize tight lips, like perhaps I have said the words that will give this man quick amnesia.

  “We have reason to believe, Mr. Coltrane, that your life may be in danger, because of what you saw along the Putah Creek up here that night. You don’t have to answer any questions,” I say. “But I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  Nothing but dead air on the line.

  He is not likely to say things on the phone to me, which he would not reveal to Denny and others who are there, whom he can see, offering warm smiles and empty promises. This is just as good. Without specific confirmation that this is our prime witness, I need not comply as yet with Judge Fisher’s discovery order, to disclose the identity of this witness to Adrian and company. At this point Coltrane is merely a lead, though I can feel in my bones that he is more.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yeah.” More wary this time.

  “I understand that you are being held on an outstanding traffic warrant. That’s not a serious charge, as you know,” I say. “Still it would cost you some money, maybe some jail time. I’m in a position to help you.” The prosecutor as Good Samaritan.

  “I would be willing to talk to the district attorney down there to request that those charges be dropped, dismissed, if you will voluntarily travel north with my officer, under the subpoena to talk to me. Now I can’t guarantee that the DA down there will do this, but I think he will. I can get a firm commitment before you leave. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now you don’t have to say anything when you get here, just listen,” I say. “I think you should be aware of what physical danger you face. You are not under arrest. I want to make that clear. We simply want to talk to you. Are you willing to do this?”

  “Ah. Let me ask ya a question,” he says. “You gonna put me in jail up there?”

  He should worry more about bright lights and sleep deprivation.

  “No. We will fly you up here at our expense, a round-trip ticket, and put you up in a hotel.” I don’t tell him that he may be batching with Denny and a dozen other cops down the hall. Right now I have only one goal, to get him in my physical clutches. He can watch Jekyll turn to Hyde after he gets here.

  “All I want to do is talk to you,” I say, like the spider to the fly.

  Silence. He is weighing his options.

  “If you don’t come voluntarily, we will simply wait until after your current problems down there are over and then we will have to serve our subpoena. Then if you don’t come, we’ll have to arrest you,” I tell him. I don’t explain that by that time the ship will have sailed, my case against Andre Iganovich will be history.

  “Sounds like I have no choice,” he says.

  “You do,” I say. “You can either come the easy way or the hard way.”

  “I guess,” he says, “I’ll come up there.”

  “Good,” I say. “They’re gonna put you back in the c
ell now, just for a few minutes while we make all the arrangements. I look forward to meeting with you.”

  “Sure,” he says, his tone dripping with cynicism.

  I let him go and Denny is back on the line. I hear the door close, probably behind Coltrane on his way to the cell. Denny’s snickering, a high-pitched giggle. “You should sell shoes,” he says, “suede loafers.” A lot of cackling from the other cops.

  I give Denny a few quick final instructions. There’s one final afternoon flight from San Diego to Capital City. Denny’s not sure he can make it. If he doesn’t, he says it will be tomorrow morning before he can get Coltrane up here for questioning. I tell him to do the best he can, to keep us posted, and then I hang up.

  “You think it’s him?” says Claude.

  “Don’t you?”

  He nods. “Doesn’t even ask why somebody would want to kill him. Isn’t that the first thing you’d ask if somebody told you your life was in danger and you didn’t know why?”

  “You caught that, too,” I say. “When he gets up here we can test him. There are a few things to play with. Details only the man in the blind would know.”

  Claude heads out to make travel arrangements for Henderson and get some sleep. It is sure to be a long night.

  As the door closes to my office I am left alone for the first time since arriving at the office this morning, left to consider the options available to me, my back to the wall.

  With Tolar imploding on the stand this morning, I have no choice but to play the long odds. I can no longer sit back and finesse the issue of the copycat killer. I must know before I go further whether Andre Iganovich is the Scofield murderer. Cleo Coltrane is my last chance to salvage this case, my reputation and perhaps my career.

  It is a hunch, the longest of shots, but one based on the dissolute nature of Adrian Chambers, that the Russian’s Canadian alibi, Adrian’s coveted ace which to date he has managed to conceal from us, is cooked up.

  I start to believe that I have been wrong from the inception, that there is no copycat, that for whatever reason Iganovich used a knife on the Scofields, killed them someplace else and brought them to the river. When I know the truth, I will know the reason. If Cleo Coltrane can identify Iganovich as the killer on the creek that night, then this prime witness will be my poison pill, something I can use to put down Chambers’s case, his theory of defense, like a rabid dog.

  I pick up the phone to call Nikki at the bed and breakfast. The man at the front desk answers.

  “Laura Warren,” I say. It is the name we have registered Nikki under.

  “Ms. Warren has stepped out,” he tells me. “With her daughter.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know. They left several hours ago.”

  “Have her call her husband when she gets back,” I tell him. I give him the number, and wonder where Nikki would go, left in a country village with no mall or shops, where they roll in the sidewalks at dusk.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I hear tapping on the glass, my office door, a figure through the translucence on which Mario’s name is still stenciled in gold letters, reversed like an image in a mirror.

  “Come in.”

  A dense expression invades my face as I see who it is.

  “You got a minute?” It’s Adrian Chambers, a wrinkled suit, collar button open, the knot on his tie four inches down.

  I look at him, wonder what he’s doing here. I suppose he can read this thought on my face.

  “Dusalt told me you might be here,” he says. “I ran into him in the parking lot at the PD, twenty minutes ago. Headin’ someplace.”

  Claude’s running late for the airport. Denny in a cold sweat caught the afternoon flight. Dusalt should have picked him up, and his surly cargo, at the airport ten minutes ago.

  “I’m working on jury instructions,” I tell him. What he should be doing. We have a meeting in an hour.

  He rolls his eyes. “The sonofabitch is obsessive, isn’t he?” he says. He’s talking about Ingel and his penchant for early jury instructions.

  “You got a couple of minutes?” he says. “I’d like to talk.”

  I look at my watch. “Not much time,” I say. I’m trying to get rid of him.

  I am glad that Claude is not bringing Coltrane back here. A chance meeting with Adrian and our case might suddenly take a turn for the worse, though this is hard to imagine. Chambers has the olfactory senses of a bloodhound. A meeting with someone, Coltrane, he’s not seen before, in the middle of our case, and he would smell weighty consequence all over the man.

  “It’ll just take a second,” he says.

  I give him a look of annoyance, as if to say “if we must.”

  “Come in.”

  He drops his briefcase, reaches in his pocket and comes out with a pack of cigarettes. He offers me one. I decline. Adrian looks tired and drawn. Out of practice for five years, and older, I think maybe he’s forgotten the sapping mental and physical strain that is a major felony trial. Those on the nether side of fifty tell me that you begin to see this as the work of the young, like thirty-year-olds dragging their haunches across Astroturf in the NFL.

  I motion to one of the client chairs. He sits.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve been hearing things,” he says. “Talk.” He lights up. There’s the flare of spent tobacco from the tip. He’s talking, choppy words, as he strips little pieces of the raw unburnt stuff, using his teeth and one finger, from the tip of his tongue.

  “It’s a small town. The bar’s a tight group, whether here or in Capital City,” he says. There is no real direct eye contact here. Instead he is looking around the office, at the pictures on the wall, the windows, anything but me. He is a map of simmering indifference, Adrian’s image of cool.

  “Word is, that you believe I took this case as some kind of vendetta, that it’s personal, between you and me,” he says. He is not smiling as he says this, not that I much care.

  “I hear that you’ve been saying that I took this case for one reason, to break your back.” Now he looks at me, for the first time I get the force of full eye contact.

  I have said this to a few people, Claude and Harry, one or two others, intimates whom I trusted to keep a confidence. Now I feel like a fool, betrayed by my own predilection to talk, not because my assumption is wrong, but because it is coming back to me in my own words.

  I smile at him, nearly laugh. “Well, Adrian, you gotta admit, there’s no love lost,” I say.

  “We’ve had our differences,” he says. That he can call five years without a license to practice law “a difference” is a measure of Adrian’s powers of reduction.

  “So what do you want?” I say. I’m growing restive with this conversation.

  “I thought it was time that we cleared the air,” he says. “I wanted you to know that for my part this is no vendetta. I did not take this case because you’re involved. You’re not that important to me. I am not that obsessive.”

  “This sounds like a conversation you should be having with your analyst,” I tell him. For Adrian this is a major disrobing of the soul, an unnatural act for the lawyer as renegade.

  “Fine,” he says, “you wanna keep the bad blood flowing, then it’s on you, not me. Don’t go telling people that I’m engaged in some crusade of vengeance, when it’s you who won’t let it go.”

  This stops me in my tracks for a moment, this man whom I despise sitting before me analyzing my thoughts—not because he is doing it, but because he is so right. I will not let it go.

  “I took no personal pleasure,” he says, “in what happened today.” He’s talking about the disemboweling of Dr. Tolar. “I did what I had to, advocated for my client. You forget I’ve been sandbagged myself.” Adrian is talking about his bout with per
jury, the fable-as-evidence that got him disbarred.

  Then it hits me, like a thunderbolt. He’s putting me in his own shoes. He thinks I knew Tolar would lie when I put him up. He talks, and it becomes clear that this is his basis for détente. In Adrian’s mind we now have something in common, his image of me as the fallen angel.

  I look at him, about to toss him from the office.

  “Ingel threatened to go to the bar, didn’t he? Fucking judges,” he says. “A robe and a pension for life and they forget what it is to scrape for a living.”

  Before I can say anything he’s telling me how he found out about Tolar and his failure to perform the Scofield autopsies. Curiosity silences me, bottles my anger for the moment.

  “A lotta luck,” he says. “Another client, a civil matter.” He’s smiling at his good fortune.

  “The kid works as a lab tech over at the medical school. Word gets around,” he says. “Tolar’s a schmuck. A six-figure income and tenure, he figures the world owes him based on his IQ.”

  Adrian looks. No ashtray. He taps the ash on the carpet and steps on it with his foot.

  “Once I found out, the evidence was easy to get,” he says. “How often do you listen to tapes of an autopsy prepping for a case? What lawyer has time? But there were nuggets in there I did not expect.”

  It is like Adrian, talking to my placid, painted smile, a discussion of worthless confidences, trading on secrets no longer of value, shopping for a little good will.

  Then he says: “I will tell you, that the knife wounds, the fact that they died somewhere else came as a real surprise.”

  Adrian’s talking about the Scofields. He must have thought an oracle had intervened to send him copies of the Scofield autopsy tapes. These no doubt filled in all the blanks. Cryptic references to “sharp-edged lacerations at the point of entry wounds,” these in the written reports, on tape became stab wounds caused by a knife before introduction of the metal stakes. Naked, unembellished observations in the written report about the limited volume of blood at the scene, on tape seemingly drew conclusions: that the Scofields were killed elsewhere and moved to the creek.