Undue Influence (31 page)

“Hey those are mine!”

I turn and it’s Clem, a hand on my shoulder.

“Put em on my ticket,” he says.

The kid makes a note on a napkin.

Leave it to Clem to open a ticket at a no-host bar. He turns for a second and is busy making introductions with the other hand, two guys who want to meet the woman in black. As if by royal command, night of nights, he reaches out, sticks his own hook into a loop of crochet. Got an itch and wanna scratch, Clem as facilitator. Just as quickly he is back to me.

“Great night, uh? Good crowd.” Clem pats his stomach through the cummerbund, a satisfied smile, while he looks around taking in all that is his, like he invented the species. “Havin’ a good time?”

The way he says this makes me think that if I say no, Clem would add another day to the creation, one devoted entirely to the making of merriment. “Wonderful,” I tell him.

“Good to see the old crowd, isn’t it?” he says.

“Yeah. Couldn’t wait,” I tell him.

“Nice threads,” he says. “He’s feeling the lapel of my suitcoat. Musta set you back.”

“Thanks.” I don’t tell him that I’m on my way from work and haven’t changed. The drinks are on the bar.

“I know you’re busy,” I say, “but I got a couple of favors.”

“Heyyy, anything for a pal.” He’s looking around. I think he’s wondering who I want to hit on, and, given the dazzling looks of Dana, why.

I reach into my inside coat pocket and take out an envelope, open it, and remove the little picture, the
DMV
shot of the courier from the post office that Dana had given to me the other night. “I need you to run a make,” I tell him. “On this guy.”

A look on Clem’s face. “If I didn’t know you better I’d think ulterior motives,” he says. “Hey you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

“I hope this can wait,” he says.

“Well, you don’t have to do it right now.”

“That’s good of you,” he says. “I thought I was going to have to get my cape and find a phone booth.”

“You can wait till Monday,” I tell him.

“Wonderful. And this is all you got, I suppose?” He’s looking at the picture. “That and a name. Try Lyle Simmons, alias Frank Jordan, aka James Hays.

There may be others. I don’t know. The guy’s got more faces than Eve,” I tell him. “What about a birth date, social security number?”

“Try
DMV
,” I tell him. “That’s where the picture came from.”

“What is it ya wanna know?” He’s making microscopic notes with a ballpoint pen, light ink-squiggles on the back of the picture. “Any addresses. Whether the guy did time, either here or in another state, when and where. Anything you can tell me about his background, military, civilian. Whether he’s got any family.”

“What the fuck did he do, shoot the Pope? Skip out on a legal fee?”

I ignore him. “And one more item.” I pull a little plastic baggie from my coat pocket, the acrylic paint on the tube now hard as cement with the ridges and swirls of Kathy Merlow’s thumbprint. “Can you get the computer guys to run a check on this?” I point to the print. “You don’t want much,” he tells me.

“It’s important,” I tell him. “Do this and I’ll owe you big time.”

“Fuckin’-a,” he says. Clem knows that by doing this, sharing information off of CI & I, the state Justice computers, possible criminal-history data, he is putting his head on the block. Such items are confidential by state law, available only to law enforcement for specified purposes.

Criminal sanctions would flow for a violation. His ass could be grass.

I’m running a gambit that Dana’s people may not have given her everything on the man known as Lyle Simmons. It never hurts to check another source. It could be something that came their way, something they didn’t think was significant. Clem may be many things, but on an errand like this he is above all else discreet. “No promises,” he says, “but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks,” I tell him.

“What’s a buddy for?” he says. “Besides, you may need all the friends you can get.” I give him a look.

“Word is that Jimmy Lama’s got his sword out for you, sharpening it on a fine stone,” says Clem. “That business over pretrial motions.” Lama’s embarrassment, the fact that he was called on the carpet by Woodruff, is the talk of the cop shops in town. Lama’s enmity is nothing new. I tell him this.

“Yeah. Well, just don’t turn your back,” he says.

We talk for a few moments, I grab my drinks and head back toward the table. Halfway there I notice that a guy has moved in next to Dana, the empty chair on the other side. He’s looking nervous, little glances to the side, wondering how to open conversation. “My old highschool special double rum and Coke,” I tell her. “What fueled my engine on Saturday nights.” I put the drink in front of her. The guy on the other side is crestfallen, the look of some wasted auto worker facing life on the line after missing super-lotto by one number. Dana takes a sip, makes a face.

“Like it?”

“I’ve tasted better paint thinner,” she says. “You must of been a real ace in school.” We make talk for a few minutes and the guy on the other side does what could pass for a discreet exit. The other couples from the table are all on the floor, dancing, Dana and I alone. “Come on, let’s blow this place. I’ll mix something special back at the house.”

“Can’t tonight,” she says. “I’m going to have to go in just a few minutes. I’ve got to fly to D.C. in the morning.”

“What, are these coronation bells I hear?”

“For the moment just little tinkles,” she says. “First in a series of interviews. Checking for any skeletons that might make an entrance come confirmation in the Senate,” she tells me. The first verification from Dana that this thing, her appointment to the bench, is in fact going to happen. She reads concern in my face.

“You were hoping for something more tonight,” she says.

“That too,” I say.

“Oh. It’s Jack’s case.”

I make a face, like I can read between the lines. If she leaves her positions, what assurance is there that I won’t have to do blitzkrieg with her office to get the dirt on Jack into evidence in my case? “Not to worry,” she says. “I made a promise. I’ll keep it. Besides, I have something else.” She takes another sip from the bitter cup and curls her tongue, like maybe she forgot. “Fit this into your puzzle and see if you get a picture,” she says. “Yesterday afternoon I’m going over transcripts of the telephone tapes from Jack’s house.” These are now a few months old, she tells me. Most of it is drivel.

According to Dana, Jack kept most of the darker side of life away from the house. “But there was one conversation, on the eighteenth of August,” she says. “A physician called Melanie’s doctor. She wasn’t home, so Jack took the call. The doctor simply wanted to leave a message to have Melanie call him back. But Vega became very insistent. It was one of those calls where you read between the lines, that something wasn’t right. He wanted to know what it was. The doc tried to assure him that everything was fine. You know Jack,” she says. I can picture Jack, nervous Nelly threatening to have the state medical board revoke the guy’s license for maintaining a confidence. “The doc finally relented,” she says. “Said it was against his better judgment, but under the circumstances they should be quite happy, being as they were about to become new parents.” Dana’s painted eyebrows are doing heavy arches at this moment.

“The message,” she says, “the pregnancy test was positive.”

“Holy shit,” I say. “How did Jack take it?”

“I don’t know who the telephone carrier was, but I’ll bet it’s true.”

“What’s that?”

“That you could hear a pin drop,” she says. rharter Laurel has had a friend, a woman from work, assemble these things, a few more outfits from her closet, and put them into a hanging valise for me. Tonight, on the eve of trial, I deliver them to the county jail, where they will be stored in a wardrobe warehouse on the main level, a thousand automated hooks like a mechanical snake on the ceiling that moves with the press of a button to produce the exact outfit for the right inmate. One of the many assembly lines of justice. It is all in the inane belief that the defendant, who has been locked in this hellhole for months, labeled with the scarlet letter of crime and told to scrap for her very existence among the castoffs of this world, will look like you and me when the guards drop the shackles and waltz her into court in the morning. One of the fictions of our system. I drop the valise with a matron on the bottom floor. They rifle my briefcase and search me, pat-down and metal detector, hand me a clip-on badge, and lead me by the nose upstairs, all without a single word that could be called civil, to the pods, to see Laurel. I wait in one of the little booths, behind glass. She has not yet arrived. I kill time tapping my fingers on the metal shelf in front of me. Pretrial jitters. When I see her, it is on the floor down below, coming this way. A group of women heading for the day room. Laurel’s talking and milling, jousting in the body language of this place with another woman. Laurel seems to lose more weight each time I see her, replaced by muscle mass, hours on the treadmill and weight machine downstairs. She could author a book, Forced Fitness. She exudes a lot of sexual energy, but in a package like a female gyrene. As I watch her climb the stairs, I wonder if in this place, Laurel has not in fact found her own element. Like so many locked away here, my sister-in-law is one of the scrappy underdogs of life. I am reminded of something that Nikki once told me, when the two were girls in high school. They had attended a party out in one of the rural areas of the county. Nikki had wandered off with some guy, who under the
INFLUENCE
of a few too many beers, wanted to force the issue. He’d managed to get her into a small gardening shed on the pretext of a walk in the moonlight, and was intent on having his way. She was struggling, fighting him off, hands all the way to her crotch, sprawled on some sacks of potting soil, when Laurel went looking and found them. Without a word, little sister picked up a lawn rake, a dozen sharp metal teeth, and spiked the kid’s ass in ways that no doubt he is still explaining to this day. In a tight situation, most women I have known are talkers. They will, if allowed, rely on their wits to deal. Laurel is the exception. She is merciless in protecting her own, and to Laurel, Nikki was very much one of her own.

For this reason I was taken aback when Nikki asked me to look after her.

Through all the years that I have known her, Laurel never seemed like one who needed much looking after, much protection, except perhaps from herself. She is one of those people who through force of character you take for granted, that you think you know. Lately I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time wondering just how well I really do know her.

Through the door, she looks at me and smiles.

“If you ever need any referrals,” she says, “I’ve got a lot of friends with hard-luck stories,” she tells me. No doubt most of these are dealing with the public defender. Laurel is a client of status in this hotel, private counsel, and the subject of more than a few news stories.

“They said you wanted to talk to me. More instructions for tomorrow?”

she says. I shake my head. She has weathered Cassidy’s opening statement well.

Laurel did not blanch or break contact, but stared Morgan in the eye, going toe-to-toe when Cassidy pointed and called her a killer. No glimmer of guilt, no psychic confessions from this woman. “We need to talk,” I tell her. Ominous eyes. “What’s wrong?” It is something I do with most clients on the eve of trial, one last shakedown cruise to explore all the available courses and headings before sailing into heavy seas. “Tomorrow we go toe-to-toe,” I tell her. “Where possible we try to tear up their witnesses, shred their evidence. In a capital case there is no choice but to get nasty.” The women who do what I do for a living are uniformly called bitches by the men who try cases against them. This is not only a measure of the double standard in life, it is solid barometer of the air of animus that blows through most criminal courts.

In the inferno of a trial, egos get attached to arguments in the same way that patriotism and national pride are fired in warfare. A few angry exchanges, and compromise becomes a four-letter word. “I need to know if you’re comfortable with our case,” I tell her.

This sets her back on her stool. “Brother, I don’t know if you mean to, but you’re scaring the hell out of me,” she says. “That’s not my objective. But we need to explore the options.”

“The option I’d like to explore is the one where we nail Jack’s ass to the wall.”

“It may not be that easy,” I tell her.

“Day of reckoning,” she says.

I give her a nod. A theory is just that. Proving it is something else.

“What are my chances?” she says.

To this point we have never discussed this. We have dealt with the details, the bits and pieces of evidence, the calculations on credibility as to each witness, including Laurel. So far the high point was the coup de grace delivered to Mrs. Miller in pretrial motions. That evening when I carried the news, Laurel was for an instant, the flicker of an eye, almost giddy. The first time, I think, since she was jailed, that Laurel has entertained seriously the thought that she might actually beat this thing. From the dark pit that is her cell, her kids gone, her life a shambles, it is hard to see any solid ray of hope.

“They’ve got physical evidence that links you, Jack’s testimony, a solid motive in a domestic vendetta, endless circumstances that appear to paint you in the colors of incrimination, your trip to Reno, your visit to the house earlier that night. You want it straight, no sugar?” I ask.

She nods.

“Something less than fifty-fifty. “Right now they’re wounded,” I say.

“Smarting a little with the loss of Mrs. Miller. An eyewitness who put you at the scene near the time of the murder. That would have been a lock,” I tell her. “Still, they’re licking their wounds. Not a bad time if we wanl to talk a deal.”

“Is that what you’re recommending?”

The lawyer’s toughest call. What you can’t always say with words. A pregnant pause. “No. I don’t think so. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are no guarantees.” At this moment I am a big sigh. “And you’re not just any client,” I tell her. “Not to me. Not to Sarah.