Undue Influence (42 page)

“And you didn’t bring any charges against either woman as a the events you witnessed in the corridor, did you, officer?”

“Well… no.”

“Why not?”

“It was a judgment call,” he says.

“It was over as quickly as it started? Nobody was hurt?” I say.

“That’s right.”

I leave it alone. Push some more and he may tell me that in fact it was a mistake in judgment, that on reflection he should have taken Laurel into custody. The subtle suggestion will not be lost on the jury that if he had, a murder might have been prevented. “Fine. Let’s talk about what happened after this altercation was over.

Do you remember what you said to me at the scene?” Ranklin makes a face.

Looks at me. “Can’t say that I do.”

“Do you remember suggesting something to me?”

He thinks for a moment. Draws a blank. “No.” result of On cross I can lead. I make the most of it and end up testifying. “Don’t you remember telling me that I might want to take my client to the lawyers’ conference area so that she could compose herself?” Cassidy’s about to rise and object.

“Oh, yeah. I remember that.”

“Before we left, before I took the defendant and left the corridor, do you recall what happened?”

“It’s been a long time,” he says.

Not so long, however, that he doesn’t remember a death threat that never took place. “Do you remember picking up a woman’s purse from the floor?

People helping to gather the items that had fallen and been kicked around on the floor?”

“Oh, that,” he says. “I remember a handkerchief. I tried to give it to one of them, but she said it didn’t belong to her.”

“That’s right,” I say. “Maybe we could take a second look at the tape, officer.” I ask Woodruff’s bailiff to roll out the monitor and hit the lights.

Ranklin comes off the stand so he can see better. The judge comes down from the bench. The bailiff starts to rewind the tape, and I stop him.

“Pick it up from right there,” I tell him.

“But the altercation’s back further,” he says.

“That’s all right. Run it from there.”

Woodruff’s bailiff makes a face, like it’s your show. When the picture comes up, we are all gathered in a tight cluster in the center of the courthouse corridor, Laurel and Melanie, Jack between them, and myself tugging on Laurel’s arm. Ranklin is holding the hanky that Melanie has just rejected. Somebody hands him the purse with the broken strap, and he puts the handkerchief in it. “There’s the handkerchief,” he says.

“I see it.”

People are passing items to Ranklin. He’s not looking, but taking them in his hands, talking to me, eyeing Laurel and dropping the items into the purse. A couple of seconds later he hands this to Laurel and we turn and walk away. “Could you rewind it and then play it back in slow motion?”

“Whatever.” The bailiff punches buttons on the remote. He starts to play forward. Melanie brushing the handkerchief off Jack’s pants. Ranklin picking it up. Somebody handing him the purse. “Go slow.”

“There I think she just called her a bitch.” Ranklin’s trying to read lips. “Can’t make out the rest,” he says. “Stop. Right there. Back it up a few frames,” I tell the bailiff.

He plays it back and puts it in freeze-frame.

“Officer Ranklin what is that in your right hand?”

He strains to look. “Something somebody handed me off the floor,” he says. “From one of the purses.”

“Can you tell me what it is?” I ask.

Only Ranklin would not comprehend the significance of this, because he’s been sequestered outside of the courtroom, as a witness, told not to read any accounts of the trial. “It looks like a woman’s gold compact,” he says.

The expression on Jimmy Lama’s face is worth a year’s income. It is the sick image of defeat pumped from the stomach of victory. Lama’s eyes are wide with denial, his palms upturned, offering gestures of bewilderment to Cassidy. On the screen is an image worth a thousand explanations and lame accountings the bailiff handing Laurel her purse, and in it, Melanie Vega’s gold compact. : ... This afternoon it is nearly five when I get back to the office. There are messages, a pile of pink slips littering my desk. I do telephone triage, and a phone message from Clem Olsen comes up on top. I dial and I get the Wolfman.

He has some information, the print from Kathy Merlow’s tube of paint which I gave him at the reunion. But as usual Clem doesn’t want to talk on the phone. The Brass Ring is one of those haunts of cops and lawyers, a block from the courthouse. It is to the legal profession what Geneva is to the U.N. a place where warring sides can sit and talk. When I arrive there are maybe a dozen people inside, a few cops, a small cluster of deputy D.A.’s at the bar, with a couple of public defenders exchanging stories of courthouse comedy and lore, slapping a dice cup for drinks. Little snippets of the points I scored this afternoon in Laurel’s case have filtered here among those who follow such things. One of the P.D.’s reaches out and slaps my back as I walk by, offers a good word, and encouragement to stick my pike further into the belly of the beast tomorrow. In the chess match that is a trial, Morgan Cassidy has traded a knight for one of our pawns. In return for some veiled and foggy threats of death, she has now lost one of two pieces of hard physical evidence purporting to link Laurel to the scene of the crime:

Melanie’s gold compact. The other, the bathroom rug, relies solely on Jack’s testimony for its proof his word against Laurel’s that the rug was in Melanie’s bathroom the night of the murder. Cassidy’s case begins to look more problematic with each passing day, and a few things become clear. Jimmy Lama’s early investigation is what is steering their theory, and I am beginning to get the feeling that Lama is taking Morgan for a ride. I think Jimmy’s chronic myopia has settled like the Black Plague over them. It is a matter of Lama immersed in a vendetta. It takes all my faculty for fantasy to imagine Lama’s passion to nail Laurel once he found out that I was related. For Jimmy this could only have fallen under the category of a magnificent obsession. As a cop assessing evidence, it has glazed his powers of perception. Once Lama knew of the relation between Laurel and me, there was only one suspect, one theory. Cassidy is now faced with hard facts which do not square with their early assumptions. All the ways a theory can go sour on you.

I would pay for status as a fly on their wall to hear the dressing-down Cassidy will give him for failing to review the courthouse tape to its end. If there is anything to aversion therapy, Lama will never leave a theater again before the credits finish rolling and the screen goes dark. The dice cup is being slammed on the bar, a bang and the roar of voices as one of them is stuck with a round of drinks. As I look up I see Clem coming through the door. He swings between some tables, shakes a few hands, a couple of cops off the day shift. I hear the Wolfman, gravel in his throat, then bits and pieces of some off-color joke in a Mexican dialect, followed by a lot of laughter. This is Clem the politician. Next week he may be working Community Relations and telling these same guys that positive racial attitudes all start at home with an open mind and a clear conscience. Clem is the only man I know who could sit through five days of sexual sensitivity training and cop a feel from the female instructor as his graduation prize. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he says. “Hope you haven’t been here long.” I wave this off, and gesture to the seat on the other side of the table. I don’t get the Wolfman routine this afternoon. Instead Clem is looking over his shoulder, worried what his friends might think if they see him consorting with the enemy in the midst of trial. He tells me I am too hot at the moment for the normal social chitchat of this place. Lama, he says, wants a pound of flesh, and while merchants in Venice might settle for my heart, according to Clem, Jimmy wants to start at the soft underside of my genitals. “What did you do to get him so pissed off?” he asks. “Ranting and raving all over the office,” he tells me. “Jimmy has trouble deciding whose name to take in vain, yours, or as he puts it, that cunt’ they forced him to work with.” Clem looks at me. “Who’s trying the case?” he says.

“Morgan Cassidy,” I tell him.

“Oh.” Nothing more, like maybe Clem concurs in Lama’s initial assessment.

Clem wants to go for one of the back booths, where we can talk in private. Not be disturbed, as he says. We do it. The waitress comes up.

Clem orders a boilermaker. I do grapefruit juice. “On the wagon?” he says.

I have to pick up Sarah from the baby-sitter’s in a few minutes. I tell him this and he nods like he understands. Since Nikki’s death I have a heightened sense of responsibility for my daughter, and a whole new appreciation for single parents. I have often wondered about the things that stick in a kid’s mind as they grow older and realize that there is a darker seam to life, that the smell that always seemed to float about Dad’s head like an ether was not Aqua Velva after all. “Did you hear about Louis Cousins?” he says.

Cousins, the kid on trial across the hall from us, was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder a week ago. I shake my head.

“Jury came back an hour ago.” Clem extends his arm straight out in a fist, then turns it over and does a thumbs-down gesture like Caesar.

“Death,” he says. I cannot say that I am surprised by this.

Psychological defenses rooted in allegations of childhood abuses have been trotted out all too often of late, and overexposed in the press.

Like knock-off Colonials in a housing tract, they are losing their impact. The implication for us, however, is that the press will now be free. We will be garnering a larger share of the attention, which I could just as well do without. Clem’s in no hurry. I think he figures I’m good for a dozen drinks. I will buy him a gift certificate at the bar and let him carouse with his friends. “What did you find out?” I ask him.

“Nothing on the picture,” he says. “Struck out on all counts.” Clem is talking about the photo given to me by Dana of the man known as Lyle Simmons, who if she is right was the triggerman seen with Jack in the bar across the river the courier who delivered the bomb to the post office and the guy who took out the Merlows. I would have figured, being that busy, he would have had a record to rival Capone. “We checked all the aliases,” he says. “Without prints… ” He makes a face like dream on. “Which brings us to the other matter.” He’s talking about the fingerprint of Kathy Merlow from the tube of paint I palmed off the grass during our encounter in Hawaii. “Took almost an hour on the computer.” This doesn’t sound like much, but on the high-speed automated system of scanning an hour is a lifetime. “We got a hit,” he says. Clem pulls a slip of paper from his pocket. “One Carla Leopold, born Paterson, New Jersey, August twenty-six, nineteen and ”

“Save the background, let’s cut to the chase,” I tell him.

“This is the good part,” he says. “Honors graduate, Columbia, degree in accountancy.”

“You sure we’re talking about the same woman?”

He gives me a big grin. “Employed by one of the large accounting firms in New York City, five years’ experience. Next employer Regal International Trading Consortium, corporate accountant and bookkeeper.

Employed two years.”

“Where is this leading us?” I ask him.

“Bear with me,” he says. “Regal is one of the new line of trading and investment houses. They make their money the new and improved way.”

“How’s that?”

“They launder it,” says Clem.

He sits looking at me, big round eyes across the table, like how’s them apples? The waitress arrives with our drinks. Clem starts slurping the foam off his iced mug. I give the woman payment and a tip and she leaves us. “Word is you got narco-dollars, Regal International will buy you a piece of the rock,” says Clem. “They do Rumpelstiltskin and his straw routine one better. They turn white shit that goes up somebody else’s nose into tax-free no-load muni bonds. Or at least they did until two years ago.”

“What happened?”

He takes a drink of draft, knowing he has my attention now.

“
IRS
and Justice came down around their ears. Full-court press. Indicted all the principals. Tried to get them to roll over on their clients. On the theory that you always follow the money, they called in your girl Carla.” I’m giving him funny faces, not exactly tracking on where he’s headed. “Seems with the heat on, her former employers had funny notions about downsizing. Layoffs were done off a barge, after a cement facial, somewhere up the Hudson. Two of her cohorts, other bean-counters, went the way of the disappeared,” he says. “Ms. Leopold suddenly realized her career options were being limited. She agreed to testify in return for some kind of a deal. She copped a plea, mail fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering, multiple counts. That’s how her prints showed up in the computer,” he says. “In return she was supposed to get sanctuary.”

“Supposed to?” I say.

“She never got the benefit of the bargain.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she’d be thirty-three if she was still alive.”

Clem knows about her death. I am wondering how.

“An auto accident on the Jersey Turnpike in the middle of a blizzard,” says Clem. “A year ago last November.” With this I am sitting bolt upright. I nearly choke on grapefruit juice as the acid singes my throat. “Body burned beyond recognition. Car went up like a fucking buzzbomb.

Word is, it may have been an o.c. hit.” Clem’s jargon for the underbelly of life organized crime. He is asking me where I got the fingerprint on the paint tube.

According to Clem, the guy who ran the check on the computer for him at State Justice is now curious. I dodge this with a lot of verbal feints and weaves, and finally distract him with a question. “Are you sure about the print, couldn’t be a mistake?” I say.

“No way. Positive make,” he tells me. “Matches on more than a dozen points of comparison. Little ridges that don’t lie.” Clem’s still waiting for an answer about where I got the print. He may have to wait until hell freezes. At this moment I am certain that my face is a mask of glazed expressions as I conjure the enigma that was Kathy Merlow, and a whole new universe of unanswered questions. I see apparitions, the chalked and powdery complexion of death, visions of Nikki as I saw her alone on that last day to press the wedding band on her finger for the final time, alone among the tubes and tanks and other instruments of horror in the back rooms of the funeral parlor. Visions of Nikki laid out in white satin. It is an image I relive with regularity, though now it is invaded by other, more disturbing pictures. The synapses of the brain trying to sort sense from confusion. Another face, images of fiery death, and Kathy Merlow. Somehow these two, Nikki and Merlow, have become snarled in my mind, as I am restrained, caught up, lathered in sweat. Flames, and a tangle of twisted metal on some unrecognized roadway. Blood on matted bedsheets, the palm trees of Hana, and a pitched ringing, relentless, insistent in my ears. Images give way to sound, Nikki and Kathy Merlow, faces fade as my brain finally sorts fact from phantasm. I roll over, untangle myself from the sheets of my bed, and pull the receiver from the phone. The ringing stops. Nightmares that pass for slumber. I swing my legs and sit up in soaked bedsheets.