Undue Influence (49 page)

“Wait a minute. What are you doing?” Harry is incensed, as if somehow there is a chemical equilibrium to this, some order to the stew of litter that I am upsetting. Halfway between an ancient issue of The New Republic and a molding jelly sandwich I find what I am looking for.

Saffron with age and brittle, it carries a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. I hand it to Harry and let him read. He barely has time to finish the first graph when it hits him.

“No,” he says. “You don’t think… ?”

“One way to find out,” I tell him. “Do you want to make the call or should I?” My opening statement to the jury is brief, and probably obscure. It is not the blistering assault on Jack that I have honed to a bristling point for the past month. “In a few moments,” I tell them, “you are going to hear testimony and see evidence that for some of you may cause considerable dismay. For others,” I say, “it will merely serve to confirm your darkest suspicions about the nature of man and his institutions of justice. This evidence,” I tell them, “has come into my possession only within the last thirty-six hours, and in many ways it comes as more of a shock to me than it may to all of you.”

Thirty seconds after I call her name, Dana Colby walks through the courtroom door and up the center aisle. She is calm, almost serene, in a dark blue suit, the kind a prosecutor would wear to court, and heels that click on the marble floor. She walks past me as if I am not here, not a look or whisper of recognition, her stone-cold gaze straight ahead up at the bench. Laurel is at the table with Harry, asking him questions, why I am putting Dana up. We have not had time to bring her current, and until this evidence is in, I have no idea as to its impact on the jury or the judge. There is a flurry of activity at Cassidy’s counsel table. Among other things, she and Lama are checking our witness list to ensure that Dana’s name appears. What was originally intended as chaff on our own list was I seen by them as just that. They had forgotten that Dana’s name was there. Now they are surprised when she actually appears and takes the stand. She is sworn and sits, her gaze fixed on the middle distance somewhere at the back of the courtroom. The only hint of any anxiety some mild thumping with two fingers of one hand on the arm of her chair. She refuses to make eye contact with me, as I have refused to take her calls or see her for two days now, since having her served with the subpoena to appear here. I think she knows, or has possibly guessed what we have. Dana tried to camp in my office this morning to catch me, a meeting I wished to avoid, so Harry and I stayed away, prepping for court at a coffee shop two blocks down the street until moments before we arrived here. “State your name for the record?” says the clerk.

“Danielle Elizabeth Colby.”

I had not known her first name was Danielle until this moment. Perhaps a measure of just how little I know about this woman. I move dead center in front of the witness box where she can no longer ignore me, and standing here, we finally confront each other. “Ms. Colby, would you tell the court what you do for a living?”

“I’m a Deputy United States Attorney.” There is a deadpan to her voice, emotionless, as if something has been drained from the woman I thought I knew. There is more than a little pain in this exercise for me. “Chief Deputy in your office for the Eastern District of this state, is that not so?” I say. “Yes.”

“In a word, you are a federal prosecutor, aren’t you?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I am leading her shamelessly, but all of this is harmless and Cassidy is anxious to have me get to the point. I think perhaps Morgan has not picked up on the friction between us, and believes that we are working in tandem to do a number on her case. “Ms. Colby, who were George and Kathy Merlow?”

With the mention of their names she stiffens, like someone has shot a mild jolt of electricity through her chair. “They were neighbors of the victim in this case, Melanie Vega,” she says. “They lived in the house directly next door.” This is not what I am looking for. Dana is adroit.

She manages to avoid the question, so I am left to use this to spin a little silk and crawl further out into the web. “And to your knowledge did they reside there, in that house next door, on the night that Melanie Vega was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“Before that night, did you ever have occasion to talk with George or Kathy Merlow for any reason?” Dana has beautiful eyes even when they are darting in discomfort as they are now. Her tongue searches for saliva.

“I might have,” she says.

I nod slowly. I am not enjoying this, and I think she knows it, so she embellishes a little to get me away from the nub of it. “We lived in the same neighborhood, you see a lot of people,” she says.

“I might have seen them someplace or other.” She makes this sound like some social accident, a rubbing of shoulders that cannot be recalled with .. precision. “I see. Might one of these places where you met George and Kathy Merlow have been your office downtown at the justice department?” Finally we arrive at the point, like a prime number, an issue that cannot be divided by half-truths. She looks up at the judge.

“Your honor, if we could have a moment in chambers,” she says. “There are matters of critical importance, life and death,” she says. Woodruff has heard a lot of things from the bench, but never a witness asking for a private conference in the middle of her testimony. “Is there something wrong with you physically?” he says. “Are you ill?”

“No, your honor.”

“Then you should answer the question,” he says. Dana’s moment of truth.

“I might have. I can’t remember.” Truth turns to evasion.

“Surely that is something you would remember, a meeting in your office?”

I say. I try to bring her to it gently, as little pain as possible, like a cyanide capsule cracked between the molars. “I meet with a lot of people,” she says. “I cannot remember them all.”

She writhes and squirms, a futile and agonizing effort to put off the inevitable. All the while I can see Laurel pumping Harry, a series of heated oneliners in his ear. She wants to know what I am doing. What Dana has to do with all of this. “Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Colby, that the night you met the Merlows outside in front of their house, the night Melanie Vega was murdered, that you were there not as some itinerant passerby but on business?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “Isn’t it a fact that you went to meet George and Kathy Merlow as a representative of the United States Department of Justice to assure them that they would be all right, that everything would be taken care of?” She looks at me like I’m smoking some bad weed.

“Who called you?” I say. “Was it your boss, because you lived closer than anyone else? Or did you have some special relationship with them, something like a caseworker?” I say. “Your honor, I think counsel is confused,” she says. “Someone has clearly given him misinformation.

Misled him,” she says, “for whatever reason.” In all of this there is a lot of protest, but it is not lost on Woodruff that there is neither a denial nor a reply to my question. “I’m waiting for an answer,” I say.

“Your honor.” She is still looking up at him, a plaintive appeal falling on deaf ears. He tells her to answer the question.

She takes it to a level of higher appeal. She turns to me.

“Can’t we talk? I thought you cared.” She mouths these words in a whisper so low that the court reporter asks her to repeat them. She has missed them for the record. Dana ignores this.

“At the moment,” I say, “what I care about is your answer to the question.”

“Fine,” she says. There is a transformation that takes place in this instant. It is measured in her eyes, a recognition that anything that might have been between us is gone, vaporized by deceptions now being dragged by the painful process of the law into the naked sunlight.

“You want to know about Kathy Merlow?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Kathy Merlow was part of what is known as the federal witness relocation program.”

“She was a federally protected witness?” I say.

“Yes.”

“What was her real name?”

“Carla Leopold,” she says.

“How did she come to live in Capital City?”

“She had testified in cases on the east coast, against certain organized crime figures. As a consequence there was a contract out on her life.

She was given a new identity along with her husband, and moved to this city in order to protect their lives. It was part of a plea-bargain.”

With this there is the low rumble of voices through the courtroom, a stirring in the press rows as a dozen heads come up. Pencils stop their little squiggles. A lot of wondering as to where this fits in our case.

“Your honor, what is the relevance of this?” Cassidy is out of her chairs watching all of this from the railing in front of the jury box.

She probably believes Dana and I have concocted this story to provide a defense in a faltering case. What she senses is that the jury is listening. The objection is designed to break my stride. “Your honor, if I could make an offer of proof, I think it will become abundantly clear that the information from this witness is highly relevant.”

“Make it quickly,” says Woodruff.

“Ms. Colby. Are the couple known as George and Kathy Merlow dead or alive?” Dana’s face at this moment is drained of all emotion, though this question seems to take her by surprise, that I of all people would ask it. “They no longer go by the name of Merlow,” she says.

“So they have a new identity?”

“Yes.” She admonishes that if I ask she will not tell me what it is. I don’t ask. “But they are alive?”

“Yes.”

It is what I’d suspected, ever since my conversation with Harry. His cynicism that the government can do only two things well: print money and provide new identities. It was the spark that fired all the little pieces that didn’t fit, Clem Olsen’s information about the fingerprint on the paint tube and the woman named Carla Leopold, the accountant employed by the Regal International Trading Consortium, a front for organized crime, her “death” nearly two years ago in a fiery auto accident on an east coast highway, and her seeming resurrection on a grassy churchyard knoll in Hana two months ago. It had worked once before, death and resurrection with a new identity, so why not simply do it again? There had been no murder in Hana, only the illusion, to stop me from looking. But there had been a killer. For this Dana apologizes openly on the stand. “We knew that he was still active because of the postal bombing,” she says. “It was his MO,” she says. Marcie Reed was murdered for a simple reason, to keep her from telling me what she knew that her friend Kathy Merlow was a relocated witness. Merlow had confided in the one friend she had found in Capital City, and it had cost that friend her life. The people who had come to see Marcie before Harry and I were not Lama and his troops as we had suspected, but contract killers, on the track of Merlow. When they discovered that I was dogging her as a witness in Laurel’s case they decided to follow along. What better than a lawyer armed with judicial process to force a witness to ground? One word from Marcie and I would have stopped looking. I would have had a defense much more stout than a mere eyewitness to the crime. I would have known what I now know. “We knew that he’d been commissioned to do the hit.” Dana’s talking about the contract killer, and that he was looking for the Merlows. “You were just a little too convenient,” she says. “So you used me as bait?” I say.

“I never thought you would be in any real danger. We tried to get him on the way out at the airport, at Maui. We missed,” she says. Much of this is going past the jury, so I regroup for their benefit.

“Let’s go back to the night of the murder. Who asked you to go and meet with the Merlows?”

“My boss,” she says.

This would be the United States Attorney for the Eastern District. A Presidential appointee. I am beginning to sense that this thing reaches much higher than I thought. Dana has been burning up the air between here and D.C. I had assumed these were related solely to her judicial aspirations. Now I suspect that even that has some more sinister origins. “And why did he ask you to go and meet with the Merlows?”

“To make certain that they were all right.”

“Because Melanie Vega had been murdered that night?”

“That’s right,” she says.

“Your honor, this is getting us nowhere.” Cassidy is tromping around in front of her table now. “I still don’t see any of this as relevant.

These people, the Merlows, did they see something or not? I mean, they’re either witnesses or they aren’t. If they’re witnesses, let’s put em on, if they’re not, let’s move on.” Cassidy is getting a lot of support from Lama, head nodding like “right on.” She still doesn’t get it. “If I could ask one more question, your honor, maybe I could clarify.”

He gives me a nod.

“Ms. Colby, why did the federal government move George and Kathy Merlow in the middle of the night, on the very evening that Melanie Vega was murdered?”

“Because we had reason to believe that Mrs. Vega had been murdered by mistake, that the intended victim was Kathy Merlow.” As Dana says this, it sweeps like a tornado over the press rows at the front of the courtroom. The pool camera at the back of the courtroom is whirring, it’s videotape capturing this. I can sense a transformation, from the local to the national angle as some of the gray heads in the press rows turn to each other and look, wide-eyed, wondering at the implications of all of this. Cassidy is protesting that we have injected elements of evidence that were beyond discovery. She actually moves to strike all of Dana’s testimony on grounds that it cannot be verified. “Records of federally protected witnesses are sealed,” she says. “What documentation do we have for any of this? How can the state possibly verify it?” The fact that Dana has torched her career by these admissions seems to offer little proof of veracity, as least to Morgan Cassidy. “I might be able to help with that,” I tell her. “Documentation,” I say. Cassidy’s mouth is a gaping hole, a cavern of silence as I offer this.

It is clearly not what she wanted. Before she can speak I’m back from the counsel table with a stapled sheaf of papers handed to me by Harry.