Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  A minute later Claude and I are outside the large double doors to Department Four. The courtroom is pitch dark, but through the tall slots in these doors, bulletproof acrylic, I can see lights on in the back, at the clerk’s station near the judge’s chambers. I listen for voices, but with three inches of oak and steel between me and the inner room, I can hear nothing.

  I reach up and tug on the heavy handle of the door, just a little. It opens an inch. Still no sound.

  “They probably have the door to the judge’s office closed,” I tell him.

  “Probably,” says Claude. He is fishing at the bottom of his pant leg for something wrapped around his ankle. He hands this to me. It’s a small semiautomatic pistol, something he carries for backup.

  “The safety’s here,” he says. He whispers.

  I shake my head, hand it back to him.

  “I’d shoot myself.”

  He makes a face, like he doesn’t believe this.

  “Or somebody else,” I say.

  “That’s the idea,” he says.

  “No. You keep it. Besides we don’t even know if there’s anything wrong in there.”

  Claude looks at me, something he reserves for the foolish.

  “Listen, they’re expecting me. The phone call. Why don’t I just do the lawyerly thing. Go inside and take a look. You can watch from the door. If I hear voices talking back there, when I get up past the bench, I’ll give you the high sign. You come inside and wait in the hall back there.” I point to a place lost in shadows just below the bench.

  “Then what?” he says.

  “I’ll go into the chambers and listen. Believe me,” I say, “you can hear what’s going on back there without going inside. I’ve done it.”

  “Yeah.” He’s waiting for the rest of the plan.

  “If they’re talking about jury instructions, I’ll waltz in, give the judge some happy horseshit. Tell him that fire trucks are downstairs, that there’s smoke coming out of the basement and they want everybody out of the building. When they’re filing out, you take Chambers,” I say.

  He looks at me, an Old World expression, sagging wrinkles around the nose, like this sounds as good as anything.

  He drops the little pistol in his jacket pocket and comes up with something bigger from under his coat. A blue steel thing with a muzzle like field artillery.

  Crouching outside, I reach up and pull the door handle again. I rise to full height and step inside, into the dark little foyer, a four-by-four section that opens onto the courtroom itself. I check the door behind me to make sure that it has not somehow locked on me. I look into the courtroom. The bench at the far end is completely lost in shadows. Only vague outlines and the brass tips on the flags can be seen. There’s not a sign of movement. A steady shaft of bright light comes from the hall off to the left of the bench, leading to the clerk’s station in the back. Still no sound of voices, only the constant hum of central air, little grids in the high ceiling.

  I move silently down the center aisle toward the railing in the bar. When I get to this I use two fingers like flesh forceps to open one side of the swinging gate, step through and quietly close it behind me.

  I turn and look. I can see Claude watching me through the slot in the door, the glint of lights, in the hall outside, off the barrel of his gun. Someone else has joined him, a hulking figure several feet behind, hovering over his shoulder. Denny no doubt, catching up.

  I’ve now made my way along the side of the bench, to the steps leading to the judge’s chair. In the dim light I can see the two spear-tipped flags and the judge’s chair, which at this moment has its high back swung around facing me. I try to focus my eyes in the darkness.

  There is something bizarre about the chair, a curious deformity like some tumor growing on its back side. The leather in the center, up high, has taken on a large distorted bulge.

  I have seen enough to know that it is time for Claude to join me, here in this room. I turn to the door, to the twin slots at the rear of the room. I look. Claude is gone. There’s no one there. I watch for a moment to see if maybe he’s just moved away, perhaps shifted position. Nothing.

  My eyes are back on the chair, high on the bench. I look. No shadows of movement, no voices from backstage. Quietly I slip off my loafers and in stocking feet climb the wooden steps of the bench. At the top, I reach out with one hand toward the back of the chair and give it a gentle push.

  Like a carousel it spins slowly on its axis, until, in the half light from behind I make out the form of a man, his features distorted, propped in the chair. His eyes are wide ovals, jaw hanging, mouth open. Amid the black robes, the river of blood merges with dark cloth and disappears into the folds. Imbedded in his chest is one of the sharpened metal stakes taken from the evidence cart down in the courtroom. Derek Ingel isn’t going on vacation.

  I am frozen in place, my feet seemingly cemented to the floor. I cannot move. For several seconds I remain, my gaze glued on the Prussian’s dead face.

  Then a noise. I’m drawn from this reverie of horror by the slightest of sounds, a metallic click at the back of the room. I look. No one. Claude is still not there. Then it settles on me. The noise. Someone has pushed the button that locks the doors from the inside.

  Department Four is the criminal court in this building. It has the highest level of security of any courtroom, bulletproof doors that can be electronically locked from two points: the bailiff’s station below the bench, and backstage, another switch near the clerk’s desk. Once locked, these doors can only be opened with the bailiff’s key inserted in the lock on the door.

  I am now sealed in this room, with death. My mind turns to Lenore, somewhere in the back. I am pining for Claude’s little pistol, outside in the hall. Where the hell is he?

  In the darkness off the bench, with blood dripping down the steps, I have the presence of mind, or perhaps just the foolishness of habit, to find my shoes.

  I make my way to the evidence cart a few feet away. I look. Of the metal stakes, pointed pieces of angle-iron fourteen inches long used in the student murders, four had been ground to a razor-sharp tip before being driven through the bodies of the victims. Only two now remain on the cart. Another is accounted for in Ingel. I grab one that remains.

  Hugging the wall I move down the corridor toward the private offices in the back. Here the light is bright, the full intensity, a ceiling of fluorescence. At the door to the clerk’s station, I edge one eye around the frame and peek in. The room is empty. On the desk I see a ring of keys, large like something a jailer might use. There are four keys on this. My guess is that one of these will open the security locks on the front door. So carefully laid are these, in the center of the desk, I look, and wonder, if this is not bait.

  To the left is the door to the judge’s chambers, it is half open, the lights inside are on. But from this angle I cannot see in. I would have to move inside, beyond the clerk’s desk, for a clear line of sight.

  To my right, and a little behind me, is another door, closed this time. This leads to the private corridor that links the back of each courtroom on this floor. Out of bounds to the general public, this corridor is for use by the judges and their staffs, to communicate and pass papers. It is sealed by steel doors at each end of the building where the corridor would otherwise join the public hallways outside. The judges only, I am told, know the little button combination that allows them to enter this sanctum, the private corridor, beyond the steel doors.

  I study the clerk’s station, places where Adrian could conceal himself if he is waiting for me. There are few. My guess is he is in the judge’s chambers.

  I make my way around the door, the metal stake in my right hand, pointed up and out should I need it.

  Now I can see through the doorway into Ingel’s office, the desk and the chair behind it.

  Then
I see her, in the distance, Lenore lying on the couch, against the far wall of the office, her back to me. She appears to be bound hand and foot, white cord. Adrian has made good use of our evidence cart. Everything he needed.

  As I pass the clerk’s desk my peripheral vision goes wide, taking in both sides of the room, low behind the desk, in the corner beyond the filing cabinet, anywhere Adrian could hide. I grab the keys off the desk. Despite my efforts these jingle a bit as I pick them up.

  I edge my way toward Ingel’s office. I check the opening, the crack by the hinges. There’s no one behind the door. As I do this, I hold the stake poised in one hand in case he should rush. By now Adrian surely knows I am here. I would think he might have made his way out the back door, a clean escape, except for the click of the lock out front. Someone had to do that.

  He is here, and I know it. To say this is anything but personal is, at this point, to ignore reality. I was right about one thing. His words this afternoon in my office, his final futile attempt at settlement, was indeed a conversation more appropriate to Adrian’s analyst.

  Through the door I can see Lenore more clearly now. I cannot tell from this distance whether there is the rise of respiration from her body. I look for blood. Then I see it. A mass, congealed hues of brown, on the white of her blouse, near her neck. I stand still, staring at this. With the volume of blood I can see, she cannot be alive. I stand there stunned, angry, feeling the rise of hormones that drove me to rip Coltrane from his chair in the little room at the jail. I can feel it in my fists, out to the tips of my ears, like molten lead driving rage to the top of my head. I stare at the motionless body of Lenore Goya coiled on the couch, her knees drawn up, her arms twisted and tied behind her.

  If Adrian Chambers is in this room, only one of us will come out alive.

  I push the door slowly, allowing it to swing open. As it makes its slow arc toward the wall, I step across the threshold.

  Nothing.

  The room is empty. I look. The leg-well to the desk. It is the only place anyone could hide. The door hits the stop on the wall with a gentle thud, and suddenly there’s movement. On the couch, Lenore has struggled to turn her head. Quickly I move toward the couch, reach her body and feel the warmth of her arm, the confirmation that she is still alive. Then I see it. The cloth with dried blood. Chambers has used the bloody towel from the evidence cart, the one found in the Russian’s van, as a gag on Lenore. I untie this from the back of her head.

  “Where is he?” I say.

  Breathless. “I don’t know,” she gasps. “He went off behind me somewhere and I lost him, the sound of his footsteps out the door.”

  I fight with the cord on her wrists. It takes several seconds to undo. She rolls over and sits up. Together we work on the piece around her ankles. This is heavily knotted. Finally I use the scissors from the desk to cut it. So much for evidence.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.” I pull her to her feet and we head out the door, past the clerk’s station and into the corridor leading to the courtroom. My eyes have trouble with the darkness, adjusting from the bright light.

  I hear noise. Someone is pulling on the doors out front, jiggling the lock. Then I see him, through the tall slits in the front door, Denny Henderson, and another cop dressed in black garb, an automatic rifle in his hand. They are both pulling on the door, rattling, as much as you can, a three-hundred-pound door in its frame.

  Denny is waving at me, pounding on the door, motioning, trying to yell, to say something through the door. I cup a hand to my ear and shrug, a sign that I cannot make this out.

  I take one step, and in my left shoulder, a searing pain, heat like sheet lightning spreads through my upper body. I am dazed, look down and there, protruding from my suit coat is three inches of cold steel, angle-iron honed to a fine point. My knees buckle, as nausea racks my body. With my gaze still on it I watch this point disappear, backed out through my body like a boat leaving its berth.

  I turn and lash blindly behind me. I miss. But I see Chambers, his dark silhouette backlit in the corridor behind us.

  “Run,” I tell Lenore. I am between her and Adrian. But he pushes me aside, and Lenore isn’t fast enough. He grabs her by one arm, raises the stake.

  Before he can bring it down, I lash at his face with my own steel, tearing the flesh in a jagged arc on his cheek. I hear him cry out. Instead of stabbing Lenore he punches her square in the jaw with his fist, sending her reeling backward against the bench.

  He turns on me, strikes out and punches a hole in the wall near my head. He pulls it out and brings the metal down on my head like a club, sending me to the floor. I lie there in a heap, crawling, clawing at the wall to get up, the feel of warm liquid oozing from my body, my feet sliding in my own blood.

  Adrian turns on Lenore. She is back up, climbing the stairs to the bench, her only avenue of escape. She is to the top step when he grabs her ankle, rips the spiked heel from her foot and sends her careening into the flag. She kicks him with her other foot, and Adrian is driven backward within range. Getting dizzy, going dark, I lash out at his leg, ripping through his pants, driving the point feebly into one thigh. It is not deep, but it gets his attention.

  Chambers turns on me. Rising up over me, a hulking, brooding figure, his eyes glazed like some rabid dog. The blue serge of his suit coat lifting with the rise of his shoulders, he brings the metal stake, gripped in both hands, arms extended over his head, the vision of a high priest doing sacrifice to the gods. And suddenly through the seam of his shirt, like the shaft of an arrow, the razor-sharp tip of a spear comes six inches through the wall of Adrian’s chest. He is suspended in air, frozen in place by the shock. In an instant there is the gurgling sound of blood as it rushes to fill his lungs, an expression almost quizzical, as if somehow he has seen beyond the veil. Then Adrian Chambers collapses in a heap on the floor. The partially furled flag, wrapped around its stanchion, protrudes from his back.

  Beyond him, her feet spread for leverage, blood on her chin, Lenore stands, looking down at the lifeless body on the floor. In the white of her eyes, the cut of her jaw, is not the slightest hint of pity or remorse. The vision burned in my mind as my eyes go dark, is of fire and wind, sparks on the air, the burnished image of some ancient goddess of war.

  Epilogue

  It has now been five months. The Russian’s case has ended in a mistrial, poisoned by the devious plotting and double-dealing of his lawyer.

  Today my shoulder is a brooding ache. I have learned with this thing there are good days and bad, a lasting memento from Adrian Chambers. The doctors tell me that in time and with therapy I will fully recover.

  Through all of this, the last months of pain, Nikki has been good to me, putting aside the danger that I had unwittingly exposed us all to. It seems the reason I could not reach her by phone that afternoon up at the inn in Coloma was that Nikki had carted Sarah off to a movie in Placerville. She had hired a cab for the twenty-mile drive there and back. I now have the bill to prove it.

  In the weeks after I came home from the hospital, Nikki spent time nursing me, draining my wound and packing it. We have talked long hours, about life, and the value of love. In the end, I have learned that among all of her qualities Nikki is, first and foremost, forgiving. Today she waits for me in the car outside.

  As I pass through the reception area Jane Rhodes greets me with a smile. The mood in this place seems lighter. I suspect that this is in part a reflection of my own delight in passing the torch to another. I am no longer district attorney of Davenport County.

  As I head for the door a man in white overalls is busy scraping gold letters from the mottled glass, the final vestige of Mario falling in chips to the floor.

  I will need some help packing boxes to the car. For this a couple of the people from the office have offered.

  Bits and pieces of the story are stil
l coming out. I was three days in the hospital before I discovered what happened to Claude outside in the hall that night. He ended up with a massive concussion, and was out on leave for nearly a month. The impression left on his head matched precisely a heavy marble gavel, a paperweight from Ingel’s desk. It seems the image I saw in the shadows that night crouching behind Claude was not Denny Henderson at all, but Adrian.

  The police have traced his steps from the few items dropped in his travels. After killing Ingel, and tying Lenore on the couch, Chambers exited the courtroom by way of the locked corridor in the rear. By propping open a door that led to the main hall, he was able to come up on Claude from behind and return to the courtroom by the same route. The rest is history.

  It seems that Adrian had managed to place himself heavily in debt, real estate deals gone sour in his time before reinstatement to the practice of law. This was the result of declining land values and Adrian’s high living. I have now seen the offices of “A.C. Associates” in a high-rise across the river in Capital City, more tony than the pope’s private john and with nearly as much art. He had spawned a considerable Ponzi scheme to keep himself afloat, stealing money from later investors to pay off early claims. The bean counters, a small army of accountants, are now trying to determine the full extent of these losses and the ensuing fraud. My own count stopped when they reached twelve million dollars. I am told that figure may well double before they are finished.

  Adrian was under the gun. With time running out, he had a deal from developers on the Putah Creek property, a sale with the potential to pull himself even. And then came the birds.

  The peregrine falcons first came to Adrian’s attention when a farmer in the area noticed them killing his pigeons. The man complained to Chambers, this according to the man’s wife who is now a grieving widow. A month after talking to Chambers the farmer died in an accident, mysteriously crushed under the tires of his tractor and cut to ribbons by the sharp metal discs it was pulling through a field. The cops are now looking into this accident. We will probably never know whether Adrian had a hand in this.