Undue Influence (32 page)

Not to your kids. I’d have an awfully large audience waiting for explanations if you go down hard,” I say. “Not least of all myself.”

“You’ve done everything you can,” she says. “I got myself into this mess.”

“Circumstances got you into this mess,” I say. “And at this point the only sure way out with your life,” I tell her, “might be a deal with the prosecutors.” She mulls this behind the shield of glass. Downcast eyes, for what seems like an eternity. The decision of a lifetime. “How long would I get?” she says.

“It depends on what they’re willing to offer. If I can get them down to second degree, it’s fifteen years to life. You might get out in ten.”

“What happens to my kids?” she says.

“What happens to them if you’re executed?”

“I mean, would Jack take custody?” she says.

We’re back to this. My guess is that Jack might end up doing his own stretch in the slammer, once I finish with him here and feds get a glimmer of the way he was trying to play them for sympathy. But I don’t tell Laurel this. There’s no sense lighting up her day. “He could,” I say. “What difference?”

“I don’t want him to raise my children. Besides, ten years is a long time.” Suddenly, to Laurel, it’s an eternity. “Your kids would still be around.”

“They’d be grown.”

“So you’d have grandchildren.”

“You really want me to do this?” she says. “Enter a plea?”

“No,” I tell her. “What I want is for us to make the right decision.”

What I really want, but I don’t tell her, is for someone else to make the decision, to take this cup from my lips, to lift the trial from my shoulders. “You sound like you’re afraid to try the case,” she says. “Is it that bad?”

“Not if you were anybody else.” As the words leave my lips I see this for what it is: the ultimate admission of a wrung-out lawyer.

For more than a decade I’ve taken the money of a thousand strangers and thrown the dice, always wondering, always worrying, but never looking back. I have dodged my share of bullets. No client has ever died in the little green room. I have known lawyers who have suffered this fate, quivering wrecks, some of whom have spent years seeking absolution in the bottom of a bottle. Harry in a past life. “It’s not the trial that I’m afraid of,” I tell her. “It’s the result.”

“Then I will make the decision for both of us. I want my life back. I want my children back. I don’t want any deals. I don’t want any plea bargains,” she says. “I want to go to trial. I want to plead my case. My decision,” she says. “I will live or die with the consequences.” For the moment we are both silent, not running over each other’s lines.

Then Laurel fills the void. “She put an awful lot on you,” she says.

“Who?”

“Nikki. I know you’re doing this for Nikki.”

“I’m doing it for all of us.”

She makes a face like it’s nice of me to say this.

She sits and looks for a long second in silence, then gives me the universal gesture of affection for all those who sit on that side, the flat palm of her hand pressed against the glass that separates us. I match it like we are touching fingers, on my side. And without another word Laurel stands, turns, and is gone. This morning Harry and I take the courthouse elevator up to four. When the door opens, it’s a mob scene. But the lights and microphones are not in our faces. Today the press is doing double duty. Laurel’s trial competes for attention with a circus across the hall, the trial of Louis Cousins, a twenty-seven-year-old wiz-kid, graduate of Stanford and cousin of a wealthy family who is accused of sodomizing and slitting the throats of two teenage girls out in one of the suburbs three years ago. Cousins has straight blond hair that spends a lot of time covering half of his face, images of Adolf, and eyes that reek of unmitigated evil. His features, while fine, look as if they have been chiseled in arctic ice, so hard is his demeanor, a face that for its expression could carve the heart out of a passing nun and not look back. Cousins’ trial has become a farm club for shrinks who want to break into the big time of courtroom testimony. This is all paid for by Louis’s father, who is leading a sort of psychic safari into his son’s past. Each therapist and clinician has a more entertaining notion of Louis’s debased and brutal childhood, all of which of course occurred behind the walls of private estates and the tinted windows of chauffeured limos. After hours of examination, and tests that some might equate to the stirring of entrails in a dish, the high priests of the human mind seem no longer to be in doubt as to what happened, only who did it. This was quickly resolved after a brief consideration of Old Man Cousins’ net worth, the source of their fees.

It has now been determined that it was one of Louis’s nannies who must have debased the boy during his formative years. At least this is what Louis has fished from his repressed memory during hours of psychic hand-holding and graphic descriptions by his lawyers of death in the gas chamber. His attorneys are now hell-bent for retirement peddling this theory to the jury. Harry is deeply moved by the compassion of those who heal the human mind. Lately he has asked more than once why Laurel can’t come up with her own horrific tales of childhood trauma. Like Harry says, “she could at least sit on the commode for a while and try.” Harry is playing Keenan counsel. In cases involving the death penalty in this state the defendant is entitled to two lawyers: one to handle guilt or innocence my role and the other to do what is called the penalty phase, whether if convicted, Laurel should be put to death or be sentenced to life in prison. Harry is therefore on a perpetual search for mitigation, anything that might jerk a tear from the eye of an empaneled juror. This morning Laurel is brought in without shackles, followed by a matron and another guard, who melt into the background as soon as she is seated at the table with us. This is done each day of the trial, before the jury is allowed into the box, to avoid any implications of guilt that might attach if jurors were to see her constantly in custody, attended by guards. She is wearing a flowing brown skirt, pleated from the waist, and a white double-breasted blouse, cotton broadcloth with long sleeves, all very plain except for the collar, which is nonexistent and a little severe. I comment on this.

“A touch from Mary Queen of Scots,” she tells me.

Harry, the resident historian, gets into it, that in fact they wore big ruffled collars back then. “Not when they cut off her head,” says Laurel.

Harry considers this for a moment, then concedes the point.

Laurel, it seems, has a refined and sharpened sense of gallows humor.

Still, her dress is tasteful. I have known clients who left to their own devices on the first day of trial would show up looking like the heroine in some potboiling bodice-ripper, blouse tattered by a cat-o’-nine-tails, and tied to a stake like Joan of Arc. We go over the lineup of probable witnesses for the day.

“First up is Lama,” I tell her. “Unless they changed the order.”

Cassidy is at work, assembling the bits and pieces of their case.

Word is that Jimmy is particularly angry with me. My treatment of him during pretrial motions. As if this, being the subject of Lama’s enmity, is a new experience for me. I am hearing rumors that Jimmy has stumbled over dirt from the post office bombing, physical evidence involving fingerprints, my own, that federal investigators turned up at the scene.

Knowing him as I do, Lama is no doubt puzzled by the fact that the feds are not all over me at this moment like some cheap blanket in a rainstorm. Seeing only a part of the picture, Lama wouldn’t know that they’ve already taken my statement, that in fact they know what I was doing there. I am not anxious to have Jimmy know this, as it would give up a part of our theory surrounding Jack and the Merlows. “Lieutenant Lama, can you tell the court how the body was discovered?” Cassidy has him on direct. Lama’s on the stand, pursed lips as if the question takes some consideration before responding. I think Jimmy’s disappointed.

There’s only a smattering of press in the front rows. We are not likely to get the full contingent until the Cousins trial is over. Woodruff has allowed the spectacle to be piped outside the courtroom to the cable channel that specializes in notorious trials. But it seems that Jimmy has even lost out on this. While it’s true they are taping it, there will be no live broadcast. Without some heavy precedent, some wild advance in the law of severed penises or other legal novelty to boost ratings, Jimmy’s testimony is likely to fill the dead air in the middle of the night. “The victim was found by her husband,” he says, “lying in the bathtub of the couple’s master bedroom.”

“By the victim’s husband, you’re referring to Mr. Jack Vega?”

“That’s correct.”

“And about what time was this called in to the police?”

Jimmy looks at his notes. “According to our log sheet at the station, the call was received at exactly zero-forty-three hours.”

“And in civilian time?”

“Twelve forty-three in the morning,” he says.

“Just before one A.M.?”

“Yes.”

“And were you the first officer on the scene?”

“No. A patrol car with two officers was the first to arrive. They were followed by the
EMTS
”

“The emergency medical technicians?”

“Yeah. That’s right. I got there about ” He reviews his notes.

“One-thirty.”

A.M., says Cassidy. “Correct.” Cassidy is slow and meticulous, like a mason with bricks, skillful with the mortar, knowing that to build her case everything on these lower courses must be true and level. “And what did you find when you arrived?”

“The body. The victim was lying on her back in a large bathtub in the master bath. There was some blood in the tub, no evidence of any struggle.” He pushes this, a lot of facial ticks and misplaced emphasis.

But it’s a big point. The state is trying to shut the door on any last-minute ploy for manslaughter, inferences of a battle for the gun, and an accident. They have been moving in this direction from the inception of their case. “There appeared to be a single gunshot wound under the chin here.” Lama points with a forefinger like a cocked pistol up under the jaw, to one side, a little to the right, close to the throat, showing the path of the bullet up into the head. “Was the body clothed?”

“No. She was, ahh ” He motions with his hands, groping like he’s not sure how to say it. In the buff. Bareass. Jimmy, who no doubt clawed his way out of the womb spitting profanities about darkness and water, is now busy doing the sensitive detective. “She was in the altogether,” he finally says.

“She was naked?” Cassidy looking at him.

Fine. There a woman has said it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Naked.”

“Like maybe she was getting ready for a bath?”

“Objection. Leading.” I shoot at it while seated, with the eraser end of a pencil. “Sustained.”

Cassidy regroups.

“Did you have any way of determining what the victim was doing just before she was shot?”

“It looked like she was getting ready to take a bath,” says Lama.

Oh, good. He got it.

“There was a folded towel on the floor near the bath, and some bath oils on the side.”

“You indicated earlier that you found no evidence of a struggle. How did you determine this?”

“A number of things,” he says.

“It’s true that there was a couple of broken bottles on the floor across the room, but quite a distance from where the body was found,” he says.

“There was no obvious tattooing around the bullet wound.” Lama’s all over the place, mind starting to wander.

“You mean powder burns from the gun?” Cassidy clarifies.

“Yeah. Powder burns. There was none of those. So we figured the range of fire was some distance, maybe ten, twelve feet, probably while the victim was lying prone in the tub. We believe the bottles were broken when the killer panicked and brushed into them, knocked them off a shelf after the murder.”

“Objection. At this point we have only a dead body no evidence of murder.”

“Sustained. The reporter will strike the last part of the witness’s answer.”

“Lieutenant, could you rephrase your last response?”

“We think the bottles were busted when the perpetrator panicked.” He spits the p’s of each word at me. “Besides,” he says, “the bath towel was on the floor nice and neat, not disturbed or anything like it would have been if there’d been a fight.” He looks at me like that’ll teach you to object. A cold and calculated shot from a distance is better for their case. It offers the jury some hint of premeditation and deliberation. “And there was no evidence that the body was moved after the shooting?” Shameless leading, but I let it go. Lama might put the shooter in another building with a scoped-sight if I push it. “That’s right. From what we could see, she was shot while lying in the tub.”

“Did you find any fingerprints?”

“No. That was real curious,” he says.

“Why do you say curious’?”

” Cuz we dusted real good. And there were places you would expect to find some prints, especially for the victim.”

“And you didn’t?”

He shakes his head, lips turned down, an expression from the Old World.

“We didn’t even find prints for the victim on the door to the bathroom or on the front of the tub. You’d expect porcelain would hold good prints,” he says. “And how’s the lady going to get down into the tub without at least touching the outside edge?” Jimmy looks at Cassidy like this is a riddle, playing it like high drama. “And what did you conclude from this?”

“That the perpetrator.” He looks at me. “That the perpetrator wiped the surfaces clean after he or she,” he says, “shot the victim.”

“To avoid detection?” she says.

“Sure. Why else?”

“In your search of the scene did you find the murder weapon?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“No gun.”

“Did you search the entire house?”

“We did.”

“And the area outside?”

“Everything. Real thorough.”

“And you found no murder weapon?”

“No.”

“Did you have occasion to talk to the victim’s husband, Mr. Vega, at the scene?”