Prime Witness (36 page)

“Fine. I’m gonna change. Be out in a minute,” I tell her.

I drop my briefcase in the den on my way down the hall and find my casual clothes hanging on the hook in the closet where I left them last weekend. Lately I have been getting home so late in the evening that changing into something comfortable is a waste of time and energy.

I’m into a light sweater and a pair of Dockers when I hear something smash on the kitchen floor, a bowl or dish. Sounds like a million pieces. No swearing or commotion after this. Nikki must be in a good mood, I think.

A minute later I’m buckling my belt as I walk down the hall toward the kitchen. Nikki is seated at the table, a single light on over her head. The rest of the kitchen is in shadows. I look at the microwave. It’s off. No steaks on the countertop. The broken dish, shattered in splinters, is on the floor. It is a hand-painted soup tureen, porcelain ladle and top, a gift from her parents that she has guarded with her life for ten years.

“Aw jeez. I’m sorry.” I’m looking at the bowl, little pieces all over the floor.

Nikki is not. Her head is bent low, over the table, resting in her hands, elbows propped. For a moment I thinks she’s crying. But when she looks up at me, it is not tears I see, but the abject face of fear, sheer and undisguised. This is something utterly alien to my wife’s expression, a look I have not seen more than twice in our marriage, the first time when we were told that Sarah might have juvenile diabetes, a blood test the results of which had been misread.

“What is it?” I say.

She is speechless, motioning with her hands. There spread before her on the table is an envelope, a single sheet of letter paper and a glossy photo. She says nothing, unable to speak, like her jaw is wired shut, but pushes these toward me. I pick up the page and read.

Before I can make out the first word, I know that I should not have touched this paper. The cops will want to dust it for prints. The words, some letters, have each been individually pasted on the page, neatly clipped from newsprint, magazines and newspapers. The prose has all the elegance of a Western Union telegram.

You FuCKing IVan LOVER

Charge THE russian OR Else

The note itself would be almost comic if it were not for the accompanying photograph. Someone has gone to considerable trouble to produce this. It is not the garden variety snapshot developed at your neighborhood Kodak dealer. This is a large glossy, five-by-seven inch, black-and-white, the kind not even processed by many commercial labs any longer. It has an artsy quality about it, shot against a darkening gray sky that I suspect is early morning, with a familiar backdrop.

It’s the playground at the Westchester—Sarah’s school. There in the foreground with two other little children I can see Sarah playing on the bars. It is hard to tell how far away she is from the camera. If the photographer has not used a telephoto lens, I would guess no more than ten feet.

I call Sarah. She’s watching television in the front room. She comes into the kitchen. I show her the picture. Nikki’s still sitting, looking at me, silent, at the table.

“Sarah. Do you see this picture?”

A big nod. She knows something is wrong from the tone of my voice.

I stand her up on a chair so that she can see the photo lying on the table, without anyone touching it.

“Do you remember someone taking your picture at school? Here while you were playing on the bars?”

She looks at me with an expression reserved for those times when she has been in trouble. Large round eyes, she shakes her head resolutely, like she is not responsible for this. She sees her mother, the face of fear. Now my daughter has joined my wife in wordless silence, intimidated by my interrogation, looking at me, wondering, I think, what is happening to her sheltered world.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“
W
hy didn’t you tell us about the phone call?” Claude is more than a little perturbed with me, my failure to inform him about the earlier telephone threat.

He tells me this in muted tones, over salad and soup at the Lettuce Patch, a luncheon spot near the courthouse for secretaries and other watchers of weight. Dusalt is on a diet, though I’m at a loss to understand why.

“I thought it was just a crank,” I tell him. “Nikki took the call, so I didn’t hear the words myself.” This is a point of some regret with me now, my initial reaction that perhaps Nikki had made more of the phone call that night than was warranted. I make a little bluster about prosecutors and threats. “More common than rain in April, and mostly idle,” I say.

“You think this is idle?” Claude’s examining the letter and the photograph, each of which I have encased in clear Ziploc bags, and delivered to him here over lunch.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to scare the hell out of my family. Whoever did it has my full attention. In a word, even if it’s a prank, I’d like to have their ass.” I must admit that my “dago is up,” the flare of the Italian temper.

He smiles. “You take this very personally,” he says.

“You bet.”

“A little advice?” He’s offering.

I listen.

“You are now personally involved. You should leave this to me.”

“That’s why we’re talking,” I say. “Still, I don’t like people jerking my family around.”

Claude passes a single hand over the table, as if to calm troubled waters.

“You are right to take this seriously.” He reminds me that in this state threats against law enforcement officers and prosecutors are considered crimes, prosecutable even without overt moves to carry them out.

“How does your wife feel about all this?” he says.

Nikki is now a basket case. She will not let go of Sarah, even to have her go so far as to her room. I put a face on it, tell him simply that she is “upset.”

He nods like he understands.

“Where is she, and your daughter? You didn’t leave them home alone?”

“Not today. They’re with friends, a guy who works nights, retired cop, and his wife. They live across town, in Capital City,” I say.

“Good.” He says it like at least on this point I have thought clearly. “Give me the address and phone number,” he says.

I write down the information on a napkin and Claude excuses himself from the table, leaves me sitting there chewing on greens. He is gone for five minutes and when he returns I’ve hardly touched lunch, a measure of how tightly strung I am after the events of last evening, and a sleepless night.

“I’ve made a phone call, across the river. Capital City Police,” he says. “There’s an unmarked unit on its way. They’ll park outside the house and keep an eye,” he says, “until we can make more permanent arrangements.”

“What kind of arrangements?”

“I would suggest,” he says, “that you move your family out of town until the trial is over. To another location where they cannot be traced,” he says, “just till then. To be safe.”

Great. Something that will only serve to heighten Nikki’s already intense level of paranoia.

“Is that necessary?”

He looks at me.

“I mean my daughter has school. My wife has a job.”

“Somebody will have to talk to the school, and with your wife’s employer, and hope they’ll understand,” says Claude.

“How do I tell my wife?”

“Talk to her, explain,” he says. He doesn’t know Nikki, or understand the tenuous nature of my marriage at this moment. But what is clear is that Claude sees this episode as more serious than I, something beyond a harmless and nutty asshole with scissors and glue.

I ask him if he does this every time a deputy DA gets a threatening piece of mail. If so, he would have little time for anything else.

He makes a face. “We take precautions. They vary with the case.” He looks at the envelope through its plastic bag.

“This sender’s not shy,” he says.

“You wouldn’t expect some shrinking violet to do this?” I say. “I mean take pictures of my daughter and send us thinly veiled death threats.”

“You miss my point,” he says. “I mean, the fact that it has no stamp, that the envelope was hand-delivered to your mailbox.”

“Oh.”

Claude’s talking about the boldness of the act, coming nearly to our front door. I’d not considered this point of near invasion until now. It is becoming clear to me that I am rattled, no longer focusing on significant details. It’s what happens when you become personally involved. Like a lawyer representing himself, you tend to lose your edge.

He holds up the letter. “And a nice touch,” he says.

“Emm?”

“The little hint of bigotry,” he says. Claude’s referring to the description of Iganovich as “Ivan.”

He smiles at this, like he’s amused. He and I have never discussed social issues and I wonder whether this appeals to some darker side in Claude. Then I realize again I have missed his meaning.

“Makes it sound like the writer has a thing for immigrants,” he says. “Maybe. But I think it’s a lot of smoke.”

“What do you mean?”

“You really think Joe-six-pack reads enough to care how many counts are in an indictment? I mean Iganovich is already charged with four capital murders. After all, how many times can you execute a man?”

Claude thinks we either have the world’s most scrupulous redneck here, or whoever delivered the letter and photo is pumping sunshine up our skirts.

“Then you think maybe this isn’t serious?” I say.

“Oh no. I think it’s very serious.” He says this with meaning. “I think it’s possible that whoever sent this,” he’s tapping the plastic bags on the table, “perhaps has killed, twice already.” He looks directly at me, engaging eyes. “If so,” he says, “they would not hesitate to do so again.”

The mind of the cop, always thinking motivation, studying the act for its calculated effect. Who would have a greater stake in seeing Iganovich charged with the Scofield murders than the person who actually killed them? I am beginning to think that Claude may be right. I want Nikki and Sarah out of town today.

“My turn,” he says. Claude picks up the check and drops a tip. We wend our way through the tables, past the booths, toward the register at the front door. Halfway there Claude slows a little, leans back into my ear and whispers.

“Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall?” he says. He’s gesturing with a hand, subtle, keeping the movement below his waist, as we walk, motioning toward one of the corner booths off in the distance. I’m in no mood for gossip. My mind is on other things, missing sleep. But I look. There at the table is Adrian Chambers, fitted out in a three-piece suit, his face illuminated under the chin by candle light, the visage of some evil genie. Next to him with his back to me is a head of silver-gray, nodding in animated conversation. As I focus, this has me doing a double take, uncertain whether my eyes have deceived. But as I look again, first impressions are confirmed. Sitting at the table with Adrian, indulging himself in boisterous conversation, is Roland Overroy, the two men laughing, in synchronous harmony, no doubt, I suspect, at my expense.

Chapter Twenty-nine

“
I
‘ll can him,” I say. “Fire the sonofabitch on the spot.” I’m talking about Overroy. I am back in the office, after lunch, storming around my desk, unable to sit and talk coherently, so palpable is the undirected energy driving my anger.

In light of the subject matter, the calming voice comes from an unexpected quarter. Lenore Goya is telling me to cool down. To think before I act. She’s in one of the client chairs that I am now dancing behind.

“After all,” she says, “they were only having lunch.”

“If you believe that,” I say, “I’ll leave a tooth under my pillow tonight.”

She smiles, gives me a look.

“So maybe they weren’t just having lunch,” she says. “How do you prove it?”

“It answers one question,” I say.

“What’s that?”

“How all those little details got into the Johnson letter, Chambers’s missive to the grand jury,” I tell her. I’m talking about the tire tracks on the dirt road, near where the Scofields were found. There is only one way Chambers could have known about that. If someone with information, on the inside of our investigation, told him. On the short list of available candidates, people in positions of trust who might kick dirt on our case, leak information to the other side, Roland now has my vote.

“You think he would do that?” she says.

Does Howdy Doody have wooden balls? I think this, but do not say it.

Still, she reminds me that this is not a private law firm where I can fire an associate on mere suspicion, though in Overroy’s case Lenore would clearly like to make an exception.

“In civil service,” she says, “you get a hearing, and the burden is on the employer to produce evidence of cause to terminate. Take a shot and miss, and he will sue you on a dozen different theories of discrimination.”

She is, of course, right.

“So what am I supposed to do, look the other way?”

“Seal him off from the case,” she says, “like a Chinese Wall, so that he cannot do us more harm.”

In a small office, where everybody talks, this would be difficult.

Lenore is of the school that believes all is possible “if you give him enough rope.” She would live with the hope that eventually Roland will do himself in, that the brass coating his balls and between his ears will in time end his career.

I am not so patient.

Before I can say more, Lenore drops some pages on my desk, three pieces stapled at the top.

“I don’t want to add to your woe,” she says, “but it ain’t good.”

I read. It’s a minute order from Judge Fisher, the results of our points and authorities on the Kellett case. This does not come as any great surprise. The court has ruled that unless we charge Iganovich with the Scofield murders before the jury retires to deliberate its verdict, that prevailing law would bar us from any further prosecution of the Russian for these crimes at a later date.

“He doesn’t mince words,” I say.

Lenore shakes her head. “Chambers has put us in a box,” she says, “with no way out.”