Compelling Evidence m-1 Read online

  Compelling Evidence

  ( Madriani - 1 )

  Steve Martini

  Steve Martini

  Compelling Evidence

  This is the first of punishments, that no guilty man is acquitted if judged by himself.

  — JUVENAL, ROMAN POET AND SATIRIST

  CHAPTER 1

  From somewhere behind the scenes the lights in the chamber are turned on.

  Dreyers nudges me. ‘Looks like the $64,00 °Challenge,” he says. This is low, directed to me, but others hear it. A little comic relief. There’s a titter of laughter from behind us, up on the risers. Johnston and the other guard don’t laugh.

  Dreyers whispers, lower now, under his breath, to me only. “Pretty soon they’ll pop the question.”

  I look at him.

  “For $64,000-how long can you hold your breath?’ He gives me a little sideways wink. I can hear some giggling on the other side of Dreyers. Another cop, one of his buddies.

  Bad taste, I think. But as I study the scene, he’s right. Now this room with its cupola-like top, lit on the inside like some Macy’s store window, does not resemble anything so much as one of the glittering, cheesy booths from a sixties TV quiz show.

  A lone guard enters the room through a door on the other side of the chamber. Muffled cries, intonations of a desperate low moan are clearly audible as the door is closed.

  Now each calculated procedure is a step closer to death for the man waiting on the other side of that door. In quick, measured movements the guard lowers two sets of green venetian blinds, covering windows on the other side of the chamber. These will mask the execution team as they open the valves and throw the lever to release the lethal gas.

  Then I see them, the size of two softballs. Granules of sodium cyanide, like fine baking powder, a pound each, have been tied and molded into a round form. They are held in two pieces of cheesecloth and fastened to a device over the vat under each chair. These deadly chemical balls hang tenuously by wire from two curved metal arms. When the lever is thrown these arms will drop, the cyanide falling into the pots of sulfuric acid and water. For safety the two vats are now empty.

  Sally Ryan’s father is here, a decade older, grayer, the lines of his face more deeply etched than I remember. He stands apart from the rest of us, as if he’s on a different mission, some ancient and sacred vendetta bred of human instinct. The memory of a defiled and murdered child is long.

  I asked Ryan about the parents of the other girl, Linda Maldinado. “Divorced,” he said, as if this explained their absence. What he meant was, destroyed-ravaged by a grieving they could not conclude while this thing remained open, incomplete. It’s the first I’ve seen of either family since the trial, when Ryan and the more aggressive Mrs. Maldinado hovered with me in hallways, demanding assurance that justice wouldn’t be stillborn. Ryan eyes me now with a cynicism that is palpable, an abiding bitterness that the journey has taken this long.

  My own presence here is as a favor to Sam Jennings, the DA now out of office with whom I prosecuted Danley. Jennings is sick, too ill to make this appointment, perhaps too close to death himself to stare it squarely in the eye.

  Gale Haight is here. I nodded to him as we boarded the van. He didn’t return the gesture. A normally affable man two years my senior in law school, Haight cannot bring himself to even a grudging greeting on this day. He carries a heavy burden, having defended Danley at trial.

  There are a few cops here, represented because the law says they must be. The others, ten men and two women, I suspect are political favorites of the governor or the director of corrections, official guests for this grim task.

  I stand next to Jim Dreyers, now retired from the sheriff’s department. Dreyers had tracked Brian Danley to a girlfriend’s apartment after the killings. Backed up by the SWAT team, he’d made the arrest and led Danley, with hands cuffed behind his back, to a squad car. The suspect spat at cameras all the way there; a large green lugi caught in mid-flight centered the frame of one of the shots. It made the cover of Newsweek, a special crime edition.

  Since the conviction, Danley’s been handled by skilled appellate attorneys, people who’ve delayed this date six times in seven years. Whenever cameras are made available now, Danley is the picture of polite reserve. A bleeding-heart piece in the bar association’s house organ a year ago pictured him the circumspect image of justice denied. He is, if the story is to be believed, the pitiable victim of fetal-alcohol syndrome. An army of shrinks is now assembled to attest to this malady. It’s the latest in an endless series of social ills raised to excuse his crime, or at a minimum to avoid its punishment. These news articles are well placed for maximum effect. They don’t play in the magazines “for inquiring minds.” Instead Danley’s lawyers shoot for a more lofty readership, fed into publications an appellate judge might read in an idle hour.

  The chamber door, something from a vintage submarine, is open facing the other side.

  Three people were already in the room when we arrived, an older woman and two clergymen. One of them comforts the woman, an arm around her shoulder. She, I assume, is family.

  Confronting him daily through four months of trial seven years ago, I wonder whether Danley will show the same sand now. Then, he’d been hard. Unremitting.

  He was his own lawyer’s worst nightmare. Through weeks of trial endless versions of a smug expression occupied his face. He smiled through half-a-day of horrors-testimony by the medical examiner that caused one juror to lose her breakfast. Against the advice of his own attorney he took the stand, denying all association with the crime, this in utter contradiction to a sea of physical evidence that included his own fingerprints at the scene. Danley was at some loss to explain how they’d become superimposed in the blood of his two victims.

  After conviction, in the penalty phase, to an astonished jury which was only a little less dazed than his own lawyer, Danley admitted that he’d done it. His version of throwing himself on the mercy of the jury, it seems, was a public survey of the crimes in mind-wrenching detail.

  I remember the vivid photos of Sally Ryan and the Maldinado girl after they had been raped and sodomized. These shots were dominated by the grotesque rust hues of congealed blood-their throats sliced with the precision of a scalpel. Danley used the razor-sharp hooked blade of a linoleum knife. “A tool of the trade,” he called it. This particular knife hadn’t seen linoleum in years. He kept it for special occasions. It was once used to carve a deep letter “A,” to the bone, in his wife’s right cheek. Danley, after a little too much to drink, found himself fantasizing about marital infidelities on the part of his common-law wife, a woman he hadn’t seen in a year. Some bar-babbling luminary, it seems, had given him a more lurid than literal review of The Scarlet Letter. I steel myself with the thought that Brian Danley is a creature the world is well rid of.

  I check my watch. It’s now one minute past the appointed hour. There are noises on the other side of the chamber. The agonized wailing of a man, his words, except for one, unintelligible. The repetition of a single syllable grows louder: “No-o-o-o…”

  Two stone-faced guards enter from the other side. Behind them, struggling feebly, Brian Trevor Danley is unrecognizable to me. Forty pounds lighter than at any time during the trial, he is a ghost. The swagger and bravado are gone. His knees are bent, feet dragging. He’s carried under each arm by two guards, bulls who could snap him like a twig should he resist. Danley’s hands are manacled in front. His eyes are wild, haunted, searching as if to devour every image left to them in the seconds that remain. He searches the faces beyond the glass without apparent recognition as his stockinged feet are dragged over the threshold into the chamber. As he’s turned and pushed down into the cha
ir, he sees her. His eyes light up.

  “Bampa. Bampa.”

  He’s imploring the woman with the two clergymen. Her arms are extended, as if she could reach out and grab him.

  I nudge Dreyers and motion with my head toward the woman.

  “His aunt. Bampa’s the name he gave her as a kid.” Dreyers shrugs his shoulders as if to say “Don’t blame me.”

  Danley’s wearing a pressed blue work shirt, the kind made here by inmates, open at the neck, and prison denim pants. The fact that he’s shoeless says reams about this journey. From the front of his shirt protrudes a small black tube. This is part of the stethoscope which will be connected to a device in the wall. From this a physician will determine the instant of death.

  In quick, efficient motions, three of the officers strap him into the metal chair. Two-inch web straps, two around each arm, two around the chest and abdomen, hold him erect and still. The other guard straps his legs tightly to the chair. They are finished in less than a minute. Three of the guards leave. The last hooks up the stethoscope, then gives Danley a quick pat on the knee and says something to him. I can’t hear the words, but I read his lips. “When you hear the gas, breathe deeply.”

  Now Danley is terror-stricken, beyond comprehension, his head whipping wildly from side to side. His moan is constant, a low groan from the tiny room, a tortured mantra.

  The last guard ducks backward out of the chamber, and the door is closed and sealed from the outside. The cries of agony inside are now muted. He turns his head and looks back at us. “Somebody …” His words trail off and I can’t make out the rest. But this is some form of plea. He’s begging for someone to intervene.

  At two minutes past the hour, the condemned is alone in the sealed chamber.

  Suddenly his head slumps forward, and I think that perhaps it’s begun. Then he slowly lifts his eyes and I can see that he’s breathing without distress, looking about himself at the windows of the chamber. He casts a glance to his right at the woman he calls Bampa. She’s turned away, grief giving over to resignation. One of the clergymen gives Danley an encouraging nod. In his miasma of fear Danley finds a fleeting instant of sanity, for I think that he returns this kindness with a slight motion of his head and the flickering of heavy lids over haunted eyes, almost imperceptible. His lips are parched, his tongue constantly at them, trying to impart what little moisture he can summon in these, his final seconds of life.

  Now there are noises from beyond the blinds at the other side of the chamber, and Danley’s head darts to look. Fluid is running into the vats under the chair.

  “No, no, no.” Like he’s stuttering. His voice rises an octave. “Not yet.” He braces himself as if he’s about to be propelled along with the chair into space.

  The roar of a loud fan drowns out the last sounds from within the chamber. Powerful, like the rumbling of a ship’s engine, it rattles the metal floor of the chamber, vibrates through the concrete beneath our feet as it gains speed. Somewhere from the other side, a guard closes the air vent under the chamber. Danley turns his head toward us. His eyes are filled with terror-bulging. It is as if no one has told him what to expect. The fan has created a two-pound vacuum inside the chamber. It’s beginning to suck the air from his lungs, creating a void to be filled by new and unexpected horror. We hear nothing but the drone of the fan. Suddenly the twin arms holding their deadly cargo under the chairs drop. The two balls of cyanide disappear. Bubbling caldrons produce invisible gas that displaces the air sucked by the vacuum.

  It takes a second, maybe two. Danley’s chest is racked by violent spasms, writhing convulsions. These produce a series of massive dry heaves. His head is thrown back and then forward in a futile effort to escape the unseen vapors that wash up from beneath the chair.

  Then his motions slow, as if a sudden calm has come over him. He turns his head slightly in our direction. I can see his eyes. They are white blanks. His pupils have rolled up behind the lids under his forehead like the wheels on a slot machine.

  Now there are only pained puffs of breath from his mouth, like dry coughs, a series of these. They are autonomic, I think, for I do not believe that with the dose of gas, he can in any way be termed conscious. His fingers are rigid, like white steel. They form intractable claws on the metal arms of the chair. It’s approaching a minute by my watch when his head finally slumps forward, motionless, long locks of straight black hair hanging in disarray about his face. At a minute and fifteen seconds mere is one final effort to roll his head to the side, unknowing, a muscle spasm, I’m certain. The form in the chamber is now utterly still, chin centered on his chest, from which there is no rise of respiration. I was prepared for the cherry red of carbon monoxide or the cyanotic blue of a coronary. Instead his skin has the pallor of ashen gray. This is fused in my mind, a visual corollary to the taste of bitter almond, the manifestation of cyanide.

  Several seconds pass in stillness. A viscous fluid runs through the constellation of holes in the metal seat of the chair. This last coming from Danley. Some of this mixes with the deadly broth in the vat. I avert my eyes, having seen all that duty requires me to see. I can, with certainty, attest to the death of this man. I can fix my signature to the return of the death warrant as required by law.

  It’s been called a ‘formalized minuet-a ritual of death’ by one writer who’s observed what I have now seen. There is, in this cold, clinical exercise of the state, a calculated revulsion that, to be sure, breeds at least a spark of pity in any rational soul. It is, I think, a severe irony that I should feel this, as I consider what the future might have held for Sally Ryan and Linda Maldinado.

  CHAPTER 2

  The call came in the early afternoon. Ben Potter asked me to meet him at Wong’s this evening. It was the first time we had spoken in nearly a year, since the day I left the firm. There’s something that he wants to discuss, but won’t talk about it on the phone. I haven’t slept in two nights, since the Danley execution. At the prison, a shrink warned us of this. Now Ben wants to talk. While I dread this, I am unable to find a way to say no.

  Harry’s craning his neck like some four-year-old, gawking up at the cavernous ceiling while he turns in a slow spiral approaching the maitre d’ station. Wong’s is definitely a cut above his usual nightiy haunts. Harry Hinds has come with me this evening for a little moral support. He has become my shadow of late. The aging voice of wisdom, Harry is a generation older than I, another lawyer eternally on the make for a good case. To Harry a good case is any fee-paying client. He has the little office down the hall from my own. In recent months, it seems, Harry Hinds and I have become soulmates. To look at Harry and his career, where he has been and where he is going, this does not bode well for me.

  “Mr. Madriani, it’s good to see you again.” Jay Wong’s voice carries, even in the din from the crowded bar.

  He nods politely, hesitates for a moment, then reaches around me for Harry. He taps him lightly on the shoulder and Harry turns.

  “Sir, there’s no smoking in the restaurant.” Wong points to a neatly stenciled sign on the rostrum where reservations are taken. “City ordinance,” he says.

  Harry’s dangling a half-spent cigarette from his lips. A thin dusting of ash covers the lapels of his dark blue suit coat.

  “Oh, sure.” He takes the butt from his lips and for an instant looks absently down at the deep pile carpet. Wong produces an ashtray before he can act, and Harry dutifully crushes the thing in the dish as it disappears behind the rostrum.

  Wong turns to me again.

  “We haven’t seen you for some time,” he says.

  “A few months.” I lie. I’ve not been in the place since leaving P amp;S. I’d been a regular at Wong’s for lunch at least twice a week for the three years I was with the firm-authorized to sign the Potter, Skarpellos tab when entertaining clients. I can believe that Jay Wong has missed me.

  I look good, he says. I’ve lost some weight, he notes. Then a raw nerve. “How’s your lovely wife?”
>
  I’d forgotten. Nikki and I dined at Wong’s on one occasion, in celebration, the night I was invited to join Potter’s firm. I’m amazed that, with the procession of traffic through these doors, Wong can remember her. But then that is his special talent.

  “Oh she’s fine-fine.” I say it with conviction, omitting the details-that we are no longer living together, and that I have, for several months, and despite my efforts to restore my wrecked marriage, been anticipating the service of divorce papers.

  Then I see him moving from a table in the dining room toward the bar. Ben Potter. Tall, well over six feet, though I doubt he’s ever been accurately measured. He has one of those frames, the shoulders rounded and hunched forward a little, the gait just slightly lumbering. He wears his usual dark vested sweater under his suit coat. Together with his bearing, this wrinkled bulk projects the image of some mighty bear aimlessly foraging for meat tied in a tree. He has managed to exploit this awkward posture, coin it as his own, so that a generation of law students who have studied under him in the evenings at the university now mimic this style when addressing juries. It’s an attitude that on Ben is not tired or aging, but stately, deliberative.

  He stops at a table to chat with friends like some frumpish pope passing out dispensations. I hear hearty laughter from across the room. Then a quiet retort by Ben. They laugh again.

  Wong says something, but I’ve missed it.

  “Hmm?’ I look back at him. He’s tracked on my line of sight like radar.

  “How about that Ben Potter,” he says. ‘Word is, he’s on his way to Washington, uh?’

  From Wong, such rumors take on credence.

  I’ve been considering this subject for days, anticipating phone calls from the press. Ben Potter now heads a dwindling list of candidates to fill a vacancy on the nation’s high court, a position to which he has aspired his entire professional life. It’s now within his grasp, the result of careful political alliances he’s cultivated for two decades, and the considerate if sudden death of one of the “brethren.” The FBI’s already hit me for a background check, digging for dirt. For the first couple of minutes with two agents planted in my office, I thought they’d gotten scuttlebutt about Talia and me. I was satisfied by the time they left that they had nothing on that score.