Undue Influence (48 page)

I can examine these and call him again in my case-in-chief, but Angelo knows I am grasping at straws. Any working papers would be written in chicken scratches that only another physician could decipher, and would be crafted in such general and vague terms that the procedures used in testing could be fleshed out only by resort to Angelo’s own testimony. I could spend five grand on a scientific circlejerk and end right back where I started. Of course we could run our own tests. Exhume the bodies and do our own
DNA
, but there is no time and Angelo knows this. Our case opens on Monday.
DNA
analysis at most labs takes a minimum of six weeks.

I am getting angry. It is written in my eyes.

“Dr. Angelo, are you familiar with the medical records pertaining to Mr. Vega’s vasectomy twelve years ago?”

“I’ve read them,” he says.

“Well, then, perhaps you can enlighten the court on how it’s possible for a man who’s undergone a vasectomy for the express purpose of sterilization to father a child?”

“It happens all the time,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“Obviously you’re not aware, but there’s a considerable potential for failure with regard to this procedure. Lawsuits filed all the time,” he says, “by couples surprised at becoming new parents after the man has undergone a vasectomy.”

“Now you’re going to tell us that ninety-nine-point-four percent of these procedures fail. Is that right, doctor?”

“No, actually it’s about five percent.”

“Pretty rare,” I’d say. “Not exactly an odds-on bet,” I tell him. “I suppose some witch doctor performed this procedure on Mr. Vega, using a dull stone scalpel?”

“No. It’s called recanalization,” he says. “The vas deferens, the excretory duct for sperm from the testicles, is normally severed as part of the vasectomy. The ends are tied off. Failure rates often depend on how much is removed and how the occlusion is performed, the tying-off,” he says. “If the occlusion fails, the ends of the duct can grow back together and rejoin.”

“Did you surgically examine Mr. Vega to determine that this is what occurred?”

“No,” he says. “But the techniques used by the physician in his case are no longer considered to be medically on the cutting edge. Please excuse the pun,” he says. A few jurors actually smile at this. Angelo has made a joke. He is mocking me.

Unless I can turn this around I should sit down now. But I have dug the hole deeper, damaged our case more by these specifics. The compulsion to fill in just a little, some concession from the witness, some seeming high ground that I can end it on, if only for the illusion that we have gained something by all of this. Like the compulsive gambler, I am driven to win back just a little of my losses, some equivocation that I can build on later, that I can argue to the jury on close. It is a high-stakes gambit, but I sense that even the most medically disinclined in this courtroom have a singular burning question at this moment. If I passed out a hundred cards for suggested queries, all would come back with this at the top of the list. I could leave it and sit down, but the jury will wonder why. Against this I balance the first rule of the courtroom: never ask unless you know. Still, I can hear it murmured in their collective minds. It is overpowering, a single interrogatory in the desperate hope that he says no. “Dr. Angelo, did you perform a sperm count on Mr. Vega?”

I stand transfixed by the twinkle in his eye as he says, “Yes.”

It is like the sensation of hot lead flowing into every orifice of my body, the shuddering realization that I have fallen into the fiery crucible prepared for me by Cassidy. I could turn and walk away, excuse the witness. But Morgan on redirect would drive this thing through me like a javelin. “And what did you find?” I ask.

“We found that while Mr. Vega had apparently suffered some scar tissue as a result of the vasectomy, he was able to project a sufficient number of sperm to conceive a child.” He delivers this death blow with a smile, the coup-de-grace. I stand leaden before him, the shambles of my case arrayed around me.

Even the skull of Melanie Vega, skewered by its metal stake on the evidence cart, seems to mock me in its stark silence. Except for pictures of them copulating Jack and Melanie Angelo has slammed the door on any doubts concerning Vega’s fatherhood of the dead child. In a single sitting he has done more damage than all of their witnesses combined. It is why Cassidy didn’t touch this, the vasectomy or any of its tangents, in her original examination of Angelo. She wanted to wait until I was too far along the path of my defense to change course, until after I had called Jack a killer in front of the jury. It was the trap she constructed for me, and I fell into it like a lamb to the shearing.

I had been warned about her, the cunning, relentless style. Her case in seeming disarray, with two judges and the referee giving the bout to the challenger, Cassidy has gone for the knockout punch and connected.

By the time Angelo finishes I am gutted like some bottom fish on a factory ship, filleted in front of the witness box. It is nearly noon, and Cassidy tells Woodruff that the state now rests its case. As Angelo steps down from the stand, there is a palpable atmosphere in the courtroom, a mood swing of dynamic proportion, that would have oddsmakers offering book that Laurel will never leave this place a free woman. The apprehension in her eyes as she studies me, unsteady in front of the witness box, tells me that she is not oblivious to this change. At one point I find it necessary to actually grip the railing at the edge of the bench in order to steady myself as I negotiate the ten feet back to our counsel table. It is Friday afternoon, and Woodruff tells me to be prepared to open my case for the defense first thing Monday morning. I think he is taking pity on me. When I answer him I hear all of this, even my own reply, through a pulsing auditory drone, like the rumbling of an engine in the bowels of a ship. It is the pounding of blood through carotid arteries, caused by the panic now coursing through my brain. The judge slaps the gavel and the court is adjourned, the jury led out. The matron is moving on Laurel, whose eyes have not left me. I arrive just in time to take her hand and exchange a few words. “We’ll have to talk,” I tell her. “This afternoon.” My voice has an ominous quality, the forbidding tones of a surgeon who has spent some time with his fingers inside of a loved one, looking for cancer, and now must deliver the news. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says.

Laurel actually manages a smile before she is led away. A fatalist at heart, it is as if she never expected a different ending. “Ten-to-one the fucker’s lying,” says Harry. He’s talking, almost to himself, about Angelo, his face flushed, the only one I know who hates losing more than I do. Only in this case the stakes for me are much greater. “Real convenient,” he says. “Eleventh hour they come up with this shit, nothing in the report, bodies all buried.” He’s throwing papers pell-mell into the evidence box, grousing under his breath. “There’s something we’ve missed,” I tell him.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something doesn’t square.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ve missed,” he says. “That bitch with the bumper of my car.” He’s leering at Cassidy, hissing under his breath as she loads her things into her briefcase. Lama slides a chair out of her way, opening the passage for Morgan to get between our tables to the swinging gate in the railing. “Have a good weekend,” she says.

“Morgan. You got a minute?”

She stops and turns.

“I may have to talk to you this weekend.” I swallow a lot of bile as I say this. “After I talk to my client,” I tell her. She knows what I am broaching, some deal to save Laurel’s life.

“I don’t know if my client will go for ”

“Don’t concern yourself about your client,” she says. “Your only worry should be here. Whether I can be persuaded to budge, which at the moment does not look promising,” she says. She proceeds to give me a lecture in full view of several reporters taking notes, comments on Laurel’s ethics as well as my own. “She’s a bad actor,” says Cassidy, “and we both know it. And your antics with her husband, the sealed indictments. You and the judicial wannabe over there.” She gestures toward Dana, who is fighting the tide of bodies trying to get inside the courtroom. Cassidy makes little noises like tisk-tisk. “Is there a chance ”

“You can leave a message on my service,” she says. “If I don’t go anywhere, I’ll get back to you.” With this she turns and they start to walk away, Lama intoning in a voice that can be heard through the courtroom. “Can you believe the gall?” It is clear that they intend to make me grovel. They merge with the crowd heading for the door. I can actually hear Harry growl. Then he utters a couple of expletives.

“They’re lying,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t be naive,” he tells me.

“They made it up out of whole cloth.

They know we can’t check it.” Harry is of that school of social thought that believes most victories in criminal courts are fashioned from the preponderance of perjury. You spin yours and they do theirs, and in the end the side that is most adept at invention wins, the thought that throughout history truth has withered and died of loneliness in most courtrooms. It is with this deep thought that I feel the hot whisper of breath on the back of my neck. When I turn I am staring into Dana’s eyes. “I heard what happened,” she says. She’s white as a sheet.

She puts one hand on the nape of my neck and comes up close with her lips, and for an instant I think she is going to kiss me on the cheek.

Instead she puts her mouth close to my ear, and in the faintest tones whispers, “Not to worry. I can get you the witness.” I pull away and look into her eyes. She is talking about the man who saw Jack with the killer Lyle Simmons, at the bar across the river. She ignores the fact that this does not supply motive. Why would Jack kill his wife? “Where is he?” I say.

“That’s not something you need to worry about,” says Dana. “All you have to know is that he will be here, in court, on Monday morning, ready to tell you what he saw.”

“When did you find him? Why didn’t you tell me?”

I ask.

As she pulls away, there is an aspect to her eyes, something that tells me not to tread there, that this is forbidden ground. “You’re out of your mind,” says Harry. “Don’t ask questions,” he says. “She’s right, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. All you know is what this guy says.

Pure and simple. Real easy,” says Harry. “It’s simple. I’m not so sure it’s pure,” I tell him. I have concerns about this, the fear that this witness is suborned, perjured testimony. It is all too convenient. It was on her tongue, as well as in her eyes. “I can get you the witness,” not “We have found him.” Like Detroit makes cars, I have the sick feeling that this guy, and what he has to say, are manufactured. What I can’t figure is why Dana would do this, a woman with a judgeship looming. Why take the risk? She can’t hate Cassidy that much. “And besides,” I tell Harry, “we have problems because the witness is not on our list. He could be excluded on those grounds alone.” The state has an absolute right to check him out, to ensure that he’s not a ringer, someone with a criminal record, maybe a penchant for lying on the stand, to make certain that he was not on ice, doing time in some human warehouse when he claims to have seen these revelations across the river. Harry says this is no problem. “They complain, we offer them time to check the guy out? In the meantime we tap-dance with a few other witnesses. Continue to beat out the theme that Jack did it.”

“Why?” I say.

“Who knows? Fucker’s crazy,” he says. “Not the first time some pol went round the bend.”

“You forget,” I tell him, “that the witness is probably lying. That he probably never saw Jack with anybody in a bar. You don’t think Cassidy’s going to figure this out?”

“You forget,” says Harry, “who is offering this guy up to us. The fucking federal government,” he says. The glee in Harry’s eyes as he says this is something to behold.

“Stop and think for a minute,” he says. “You don’t actually believe they’re stupid enough to produce somebody who isn’t absolutely bulletproof? If the feds do it, Lama could check the guy seven ways to Sunday and come up empty. They’ll probably make him an archbishop or something,” says Harry. He talks as if the government operates a referral service for such things, like a nurses’ registry, perjured testimony with references. “Take my word,” says Harry. “There are two things the federal government does well: print money and make up false identities,” he says.

His words freeze me in place like a naked Eskimo in an arctic blast. My eyes at this moment are two big round O’s. “What is it?” he says.

“Something we didn’t see. Something you just said.”

“What?” I “Identities,” I say. “What are you talking about?”

“The Merlows. We’ve been asking ourselves from the beginning, what was it that George or Kathy Merlow saw that night?”

“So they caught a glimpse,” says Harry.

“Somebody doing Melanie. Unless you think we can get Chuckles to let us conduct a seance in open court, they’re beyond the pale,” he tells me.

“Let’s concentrate on the other figment,” says Harry, “the one that breathes when he lies.” He’s talking about Dana’s witness. “How can we be so sure they saw something?” I tell him. “What if they didn’t see anything?”

“Then somebody went to a lot of trouble to kill them for nothing.”

Harry’s not tracking. “Maybe it’s not what they saw,” I tell him, “but who, or more precisely, what they are.” He’s giving me a lot of dense looks.

Before Harry can move, I’m out of my chair and down the hall, in the direction of his office, Harry like a shadow. “Where are you going?”

As I open the door, it is clear that Harry’s office is a place waiting for a fire. There are piles of yellowing newsprint on the floor, clipped-up papers, and leftover scraps, mixed in with briefs and research notes for cases Harry is working on. There are snippets of news stories, articles nailed to the walls with a million pushpins. These range from cartoons to banner headlines, all the stuff that fuels Harry’s engine of political paranoia. I start pitching paper.