Undue Influence (7 page)

These particular computers contain confidential information, the names and addresses of hundreds of federally protected witnesses, carted away for their own safety, information which a government technician has failed to adequately erase before selling the computers. Questions of political theory land in the dustbin as Harry sees a wedge of opportunity. “Can you imagine all the puckered assholes?” He says this with a wicked gleam in his eye, like a schoolboy who’s discovered a treasure map. “You know,” he says, “we should hang this on the bulletin board in the county jail. Your government at work for you. A snitch’s worst nightmare.” Then he giggles in the pitch of a cheap tenor. This is the Harry I know. He can go every direction at once, with the only true course change coming on the winds of opportunity. The notion of some prosecutor whose case would be creamed because his ace witness suddenly grew legs and walked, or suffered a bout of terminal laryngitis on the eve of trial, these are thoughts destined to catch Harry’s fancy. After all things are said, Harry is a defender, dyed-in-the-wool, sworn to the cause of the underdog. He views any commitment to the objective processes of the law as its own form of treason. In trial before the bar, Harry takes no prisoners. He will seize and hold tenaciously any edge that is offered by circumstance. It is just that Harry’s idea of happy circumstance can at times be a little skewed. For the moment I leave Harry in his negative nirvana, uttering the party mantra over the sacred scrolls. I pick up the phone to call Clem Olsen, a friend at police dispatch.

Clem and I went to high school together. He has always been a straight shooter. When he can he will talk, little musings like the oracle on Delphi he will tell me what is wafting on the airwaves of the police band. I get him after two rings.

“Clem,” I say. “Paul Madriani here.” Light-voiced, I make it sound like a social call. “Hey, baby.” Clem has called everyone he knows “baby” since the tenth grade. I have heard him on tapes do homicide calls like the Wolfman, while frantic citizens scream hysterical gibberish about blood and bullets on the nine-eleven number. Clem never made it to college, instead he did the woodshop routine and left school without a clue, until the Army got ahold of him in the Vietnam draft. They taught him how to kill, and later radios. From these Clem found his own way to the police department. “You gonna make the reunion?” he says. This affair, it seems, occurs every five years now, where Clem, for one shining night, rises to the level of some higher aspiration as class MC.

“Gonna try,” I say.

“Hey,” he says. “You remember the girl, the blonde from homeroom our senior year, the one with the hooters like two dead cone-heads? Do you remember her name?” he says. “Can’t find her on the mailing list.” This, a girl’s form from twenty-five years ago, is something Clem would etch in his mind like the inscriptions of the Commandments in stone. I tell him I can’t remember. I don’t puncture the illusion that nature has by now probably worked its will, and that gravity has no doubt taken its toll. I could tell him to look at his own love handles, which now sag like sodden saddlebags from his hips. But with Clem, memories of the past are always more valid than images of the present. “Listen, I got a favor to ask.”

“If I can,” he says.

“Last night there was a shooting a legislator’s wife out in the east area.” He cannot have missed this. Melanie’s death, while too late to make the first-edition papers, has hit the a.m. news shows, both TV and radio, with all the cheery dignity of checkout-counter journalism. The video cameras i panned the body all the way into the coroner’s van. The reporters with their mikes and plastered hair did everything but zip open the body bag to see if she was wearing her nightie. “I heard,” he says. “If you can tell me,” I say, “have there been any APBS? Anybody they’re looking for in connection, maybe for questioning?” A long pause, like he knows but is not sure whether he should tell me.

“Wouldn’t be you got a client?” he says.

Clem is a friend, but he has never been close enough to climb my family tree. He has no sense of my kinship to Laurel, or for that matter her former relationship to the grieving legislator. “Not at this time.” I won’t lie to him, but I shave the edges of truth a little. “I’d have to check the overnight dispatches,” he says. “Can I call you back?” Clem wants to make discreet inquiries to determine exactly how much he can tell me. “Sure thing. I’ll be here all morning.” I give him the backline number so he can call direct, around my receptionist. On items like this Clem doesn’t like to talk through middlemen. Harry’s into another incantation, with more gusto now that I am off the phone, still chanting from behind his curtain of newsprint. “Health-care reform by the same crowd who gave us tax simplification,” says Harry. “Why don’t I believe it?” I ignore him and hope it will go away.

“You know they will exempt themselves,” he says.

I don’t know who he’s talking about, and I don’t want to ask. But Harry volunteers. “Fuckers in Congress,” he says. “They wanna be able to roll their asses over to Bethesda at the first sign of a sniffle, for the red carpet treatment. A private suite with hot and cold running Navy nurses,” he says. “That’s so they can have a good grope and get saluted at the same time.” Harry fans a page and looks for more grist for his mill.

“So there’s no word on her?” He says this in a different tone. This time I can’t mistake the subject of his inquiry. He’s talking about Laurel.

Harry knows that I am in a family way on this thing. I called Harry early this morning. Got him out of bed and told him about my all-night stand at Vega’s house and the attempt at inquisition by Jimmy Lama. “No word,” I say.

“You can always hope,” he says. “Who knows? Maybe they’ve given her up.

Found another suspect.”

“I might feel better if I knew what the cops had.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t,” he says. “Maybe she did it.” This is Harry, soothing you with his blarney one instant and honing the knife’s edge on your open wounds the next. I give him a look, like thanks for the comforting thoughts.

“Well, hey, it does happen,” he says. “Crime of passion, the tangled triangle,” says Harry. “Two women doing battle over the same man.

Jealous ex and the beautiful younger wife.” He gives me arched eyebrows over the press-cut edges of the morning paper. “Vega would love you for the thought,” I tell him. “The women in his life ready to kill for Jack.

It’s a premise to fatten his ego.” The Capitol dome will float ten feet higher if this notion were to find public expression. But Harry is right. It’s a theory not likely to be lost on an eager prosecutor. “And where did she go?” Harry’s talking about Laurel. “You think it’s just coincidence?” he says. “She happens to vanish the night her ex’s latest squeeze buys it. Doesn’t tell the kids where she’s going. Just takes off for parts unknown.” Harry’s playing kibitzer for the devil, musing behind the paper, foraging for something more to raise the level of his bile. “Irrespective of your feelings,” he says, “I think you gotta admit, the cops might have good reason for suspicions.”

“Joining the force, are you?”

“My feet aren’t flat enough,” he says.

“One thing’s for sure,” I tell him. “Lama must have thought he was having a wet dream the minute he found out Laurel and I were related.

Blood, marriage, it wouldn’t matter. It’s any way to drive the sword with that one.”

“I can imagine,” says Harry. “How’s it feel?” He wiggles his ass a little deeper into the chair, as if to reveal where Lama might have buried this thing in me. “From what I hear,” he says, “whenever Jimmy is in pain, it is your name he takes in vain.” I don’t answer him.

The phone rings on my desk.

“Hello.”

“Clem here.”

“That didn’t take you long,” I say.

“Heyyyy, the Wolfman don’t disappoint.” A voice like somebody sandblasted his vocal cords. “You must be clair-buoyant.” Clem’s understanding of the language does not come from reading it. “Like you said,
APB
went out at oh-two-twenty today,” he says. “Issued for one Laurel Jane Vega, age thirty-six, height… ”

“That’s all I need.” I cut him off. “And a bad actor at that,” he says. “What do you mean?”

“Listed as possibly armed and dangerous.” This means that Laurel, if she is found, would be taken at the point of a loaded pistol. Some foolish gesture, a wave of a loose hand through her hair, and I could be minus one more family member. More stark than this is the thought that Clem’s superiors have allowed this information to come my way. Whatever they have linking Laurel to murder, they see as solid. Like clockwork I do the gym every Thursday at noon, the place Laurel used to work before she disappeared. It’s a dozen blocks from my office to the Capital Gymnasium and Athletic Club. At twelve-fifteen I get an urgent message delivered on the squash court. I take my leave, to one of the white telephones lined in cloistered booths in the foyer. “Hello.”

“Paul.” She is breathless.

When I hear the voice I have a single question: “Where the hell are you?”

“I don’t have much time. Where’s Julie and Danny?” Laurel’s voice is strained and tired. What I would expect from someone who has been on the lam for nearly two days now. “Half the county is looking for you.”

“I know,” she says. “But I didn’t do it.”

“Then where are you? Why did you run?”

“I can’t talk.”

“Come in, give yourself up,” I tell her. “They’re calling you armed and dangerous.” She laughs at this. A nervous titter.

“It’s no joke. Cops with an adrenaline rush have a habit of shooting,” I tell her. “I’ll be okay. Do you have the kids?” Laurel’s mind at this moment is a monorail, single track and rolling with her children on board. “I did until yesterday. Jack had ‘em picked up from school by one of his AA’s.” These are gofers who do menial tasks for legislators lackeys-in-waiting. “Damn it.” Silence on the phone while she thinks. I can smell it like burning neoprene coming over the line, the machinations of panic on the run. Still, Laurel has not completely lost her mind. She has found me in the one place where Lama is not likely to be eavesdropping. With Jimmy you can’t take much comfort in the formalities of magistrates and judicially ordered wiretaps. I’ve suspected for days now that my phone has suddenly become a party line.

“Can you get a message to them?” she says. Her kids.

“Why?”

“I want them out of there.”

I think her brain is scrambled. “You want them on the run with you?”

“No. No. A friend,” she says. “In Michigan.”

“That’s not my biggest concern at this moment,” I say.

“Oh, shit,” and she’s gone from the phone a receding voice, sound vanishing like fog on a warming day. “Hello. Are you there?” I get mental images Laurel swinging around some corner, enough tension on the phone cord to break it. Then I hear her breathing closer again. “What happened?”

“Police just swung by in the parking lot,” she says. “It’s okay.

They’re gone now. Probably just a coffee break,” she tells me. “My picture is everywhere,” she says. “Even up here.” I could get a map and play with little pins, my twenty best guesses on where “up” is. “Use your head,” I tell her. “You’re no good to your kids dead or in prison.

Come in and we’ll deal with it.” I try to engage her in conversation. I ask her where she was the night of Melanie’s death, hoping for an alibi, something I can bootstrap into an argument for our side, to induce her in. “Can you get a message to them?” she says. She’s back to her children.

“They’re fine. You’re the one in trouble,” I tell her. “Come in, I’ll meet you, pick you up. I’ll make arrangements with the DA to surrender,” I say. “It’ll go much better at trial. We’ll have a shot at bail,” I tell her. I’ve got more closers than a used-car salesman. None of them working. “Not till the kids are gone,” she says. “Out-of-town. Then I’ll surrender. “Listen,” she says. “I have a friend in Michigan. Went to college together. She’s willing to take the kids, keep them there quietly until this is over.”

“Your kids can handle it,” I tell her.

“I’ll take care of them, keep them out of it.”

“No.” Her tone tells me she’s maybe half an inch from hanging up. I take another tack to keep her talking. “This friend,” I say. “Does she know your situation?”

“I told her. It makes no difference. Like I said, she’s a friend.”

The way Laurel says this it makes me think perhaps at this moment I am not qualifying for inclusion in this group. “I can’t talk,” she says. “I gotta run. Gotta hang up now.” All of a sudden frenetic noise on the line. “Call you later,” she says. “Laurel. Hello. Hello.” What I hear is a melodic noise, like scrape-and thump, scrape-and-thump. I listen for several seconds until I sense what this is the pendulum of the receiver on the other end, left to dangle against a wall by its cord as Laurel walked away. When I return to my office, there’s a small pile of messages on my desk. I paw through them quickly. There is one from Gail Hemple, others are the usual, calls on cases, except for the one on the bottom which catches my eye. A pink slip with Jack Vega’s name and number on it. I pick up the phone and dial Hemple first. Gail warns me that Jack is on the warpath. He is demanding to know from his lawyer why he’s compelled to pay spousal support to Laurel, who is now, in his words, a fugitive. Whoever said that alimony is the ransom a happy man pays to the devil has never met Jack. According to Gail he’s demanding that his lawyer go back to court, an order to show cause on changed circumstances, the fact that the kids are now abandoned, to seek temporary custody until the matter of their missing mother is resolved.

“Vega has called me,” I tell her. “Any idea what he wants?”

She has scuttlebutt from Jack’s lawyer. It seems the attorney-client relationship with my brother-in-law is not all the man could have hoped for. “Jack found out that Danny and Julie were at your place the night Melanie was killed,” she says. Playing the wounded father, Jack’s now busy trying to sever all links.

He has left strict written instructions at his kids’ school that I am to have no contact. Vega has an antiquated notion of teenagers and how to deal with them.