Undue Influence Read online

  The young cop, the uniform who hauled me off the street, introduces me like I don’t know Lama.

  ‘So it’s lieutenant again,’ I say. ‘That explains the noise,’ I tell him, ‘that old familiar sound.’

  ‘What’s that?’ says Lama.

  ‘The scraping of the barrel downtown,’ I say.

  Mean little slits for eyes. He utters some profanity, something that ends with his ass, and commands me to pucker. He says this low under his breath so that Hemple and the other cops can’t hear it. Maybe it is true that one mellows with age. Jimmy Lama has learned a little restraint. Ten years ago my words would have earned a change in the contour of my head, conforming to the ripples in the handle of his flashlight.

  Lama’s sitting, sprawled in a leather club chair by the fireplace. He’s nibbling on a toothpick, a pacifier since he gave up smoking a few years ago.

  Gail Hemple has come with me inside Jack’s house, though she wasn’t summoned. I think Hemple is planning on playing lawyer-client games with Lama, privileges and immunities, trying to draw fire away from me. I could do the same thing, but it would take Lama only an hour and a couple of phone calls to find out that I never made an appearance in court as counsel on behalf of Laurel. Then he would be all over my ass like hot tar under feathers.

  ‘Where’s the lady?’ he says. This is directed to me.

  ‘Lose somebody?’ I say.

  ‘Your sister-in-law, jackass.’ He shakes his head, grins around the toothpick. ‘Make it easy and tell us where she is?’

  ‘You might try her apartment. That’s where she lives.’

  ‘Nobody home,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’

  Lama’s chewing the toothpick to a dull point.

  Jack’s now joined us in the living room. On my way in, the coroner and an assistant were wheeling the body down the curved staircase, Jack following along behind. He gave me only a sideways glance, a look of vengeance.

  When he sees me now his eyes flame. Vega’s appearance tells me this is more than grief. He’s been seeking solace in a bottle. He’s looking for more. He heads for the liquor cart in the corner. Halfway there he stops, a thought he can’t suppress.

  ‘You son of a bitch,’ he says. ‘I told you. I warned you.’ His finger’s shaking in my face. ‘Laurel was over the line and you knew it,’ he says. He talks like all the facts are in, the deed done, case closed. All he needs now is to catch Laurel.

  It’s an awkward moment, wrestling with the spouse. I look at Lama.

  He smiles. No relief here.

  Finally I offer Jack my sympathies, tell him I’m sorry for whatever has happened, but that he’s making a lot of assumptions, jumping to conclusions.

  ‘Bullshit.’ Vega jumps me verbally. I have given him what he wanted – a target of defense for Laurel.

  ‘The bitch killed Melanie,’ he says. ‘She’s got a loose screw. You saw her in court,’ he tells me. ‘Threats and violence. Went after Melanie in the hallway like an animal.’ He’s trying to persuade now.

  ‘She was emotional,’ I say. ‘An argument, that’s all.’

  ‘An argument!’ says Jack. His eyes are glazed over with anger. ‘What do you want, Kodachrome?’ he says. ‘You want it in living color? Laurel pulling the trigger on videotape?

  ‘Oh, you’d love that,’ he says. ‘Like all the rest of the lawyers, you’d chop it up into suey. A lotta freeze-frames and lies,’ he says. ‘So you could charge Melanie with impeding the flight of a bullet. Well, it ain’t gonna happen here,’ he says. ‘Laurel’s going down,’ he tells me. ‘If I have to pull every fucking lever in the state.’ He stands there for several seconds, waiting to see if I want to offer another line of reasoning.

  I want to ask him where he was tonight, whether he saw anything, whether in fact there is a videotape or if all of this is merely the wrath – filled ravings of Jack’s imagination. But discretion overtakes advocacy. I stand silent.

  There’s some mumbling under Vega’s breath, finally a victory in a bad day. He passes behind me. The next thing I hear is the tinkling of ice cubes in a tumbler, bourbon splashing on rocks. I would ask him for a drink, but I’m afraid he’d throw the bottle.

  Lama’s waiting to see if Jack can spray any more bile on me. One of Jimmy’s joys in life, spreading pain. He senses that it’s over.

  ‘You got pictures?’ I turn this on Lama.

  ‘You’re here to answer the questions,’ he says. ‘I’ll ask them.’

  ‘We’ve got nothing to say.’ Hemple chimes in.

  ‘Who invited you?’ he says.

  ‘I’m Laurel Vega’s lawyer.’ Hemple pulls a business card from her jacket pocket. Hands it to Lama. He looks at it, smiles, then begins to pick his teeth with one of the card’s sharp little corners.

  ‘Oh, good,’ he says. ‘Then you can tell us where your client is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘Write that down,’ says Lama. ‘Her lawyer has no idea where the suspect is.’ Another detective across the room scribbles in a little notebook.

  ‘Maybe you know where she was earlier this evening about eleven-thirty?’ says Lama.

  Silence from Hemple.

  ‘Seems she doesn’t. Write it down,’ says Lama. ‘Got anything else you want to tell us?’ he says. A shit-eating grin on Lama’s face.

  Hemple doesn’t respond.

  ‘Gee, thanks for coming.’ He smiles, Mr. Duplicity, then motions to one of the uniformed cops, who escorts Hemple to the door.

  Lama turns his venom back on me. ‘And where were you at eleven-thirty tonight?’

  ‘Gee, Jimmy, do I need a lawyer?’

  ‘Not unless you know something we don’t.’

  ‘Could you write that down,’ I say this to the dick across the room, who offers up a little hiccup of a laugh.

  ‘Always the smart-ass,’ says Lama. ‘I understand you been playin’ guardian angel for your sister-in-law. Guess you kinda blew it tonight,’ he says.

  I don’t give him a response.

  ‘Guess you’d know her better than most people?’

  A concession from my look.

  ‘Then you’d probably know if she has a gun?’

  I give him bright eyes like maybe he’s hit something.

  ‘What kind?’ I say.

  ‘Nine millimeter, semiautomatic.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have a clue,’ I tell him.

  Lama gives me a sneer. Now he’s given up information with nothing in return. My guess is they don’t have the gun. If they did, Lama would have made a make and model. I assume they have loose cartridge casings and whatever ballistics survive when lead meets tissue or bounces off bone.

  ‘When’s the last time you saw her?’ he says. Now he’s pissed.

  ‘Who?’ I ask.

  He gives me a look, ‘like don’t fuck with me,’ snaps the toothpick in half, and spits the broken piece on the floor.

  I make a face, think a couple of seconds like maybe it’s a strain to consider back that far. ‘This afternoon – the courthouse.’

  ‘And you haven’t seen her since?’

  I shake my head.

  The cop with the little book is making notes.

  ‘Then you wouldn’t have any idea where the kids are?’

  ‘I assume with their mother.’ God’s own gift, I think. Two walking, breathing little alibis, for whatever they’re worth.

  ‘Goddamn,’ says Jack. He’s shaking, hand with the glass outstretched, booze all over the rug. ‘She’s murdered my wife, now she running with my children. What the hell are you guys waiting for?’ It was one thing when Jack was chewing on my ass, now he’s getting on Lama’s case.

  A head signal from Jimmy and suddenly Vega is being quietly hustled from the room. Condolences from the cop, but he’s got to go, official business being done here.

  Vega turns to look at me on the way out. ‘She’d better let ’em go,’ he says. He’s talking about the kids. Jack has visions of Laurel i
n Rio. I know better. She has no money.

  ‘You hear me,’ he says. ‘I’ll leave no stone unturned.’ He says this like he honestly believes I can deliver a message. Then he’s history, out the door, straining to get a last look at me over the cop’s shoulder.

  Lama smiles, puts another toothpick in. ‘Angry man,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t want him mad at me.’

  ‘One of life’s battles,’ I tell him.

  ‘Yeah. Talkin’ about battles. I understand you broke up a good fight in the courthouse this afternoon?’ says Lama.

  ‘Me?’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. Laurel Vega attacked the victim – the deceased?’ He says this with all the emphasis on the ‘d’ word.

  ‘Like I said, a minor disagreement. Custody matter. A difficult situation. She got a little emotional. I wouldn’t call it an attack.’

  ‘Geeze – I heard she nailed the woman with her fucking purse?’ says Lama. He snaps his fingers a couple a times, and his colleague with the notebook is fanning pages. The guy finds what he’s looking for.

  ‘ “Laurel Vega said she wished it was a sledgehammer,” ’ the cop reads from his notes.

  ‘Maybe she found something better than a hammer,’ says Lama.

  ‘Nice thought,’ I say, ‘but if that’s all you’ve got, I think maybe you should get up off your honkers and start looking for whoever actually killed Melanie Vega.’

  ‘Oh, I think we are,’ he says. He chews on what is left of the little stick in his teeth, then gives a wicked smile.

  ‘Are we finished?’

  ‘For the moment,’ he says. He gets out of his chair like he’s going to escort me personally to the door. He touches me at the elbow. I nearly recoil from the contact. Lama looks at me. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was offended.

  ‘Now, you will tell us if you see her – won’t you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘You bet.’

  I know that I won’t have to. Vega will have me tailed by his minions.

  ‘We appreciate the cooperation,’ he says. He’s almost giggling to himself. I can sense the joy building inside of him, the knowledge that I am now tangled in this mess.

  We get to the door. He sees me out onto the portico. Lama steps off the welcome mat and into some dirt, potting soil, and broken shards of clay. He’s wearing black boots with low heels – what they call Wellingtons – with little zippers on the side. I have seen these on the CHP and a few drill sergeants, his heroes. He scrapes the dirt off the bottoms on the mat.

  ‘Looks like somebody made a mess,’ he says.

  There’s a spray of black dirt on the siding by the front door.

  Lama looks up. My eyes follow.

  ‘Geeze – somebody really nailed it,’ he says.

  There, under the ceiling of the portico, ten feet up, is a single security camera, aimed down at the entrance, its lens caked with dirt, its plastic outer case cracked like an egg.

  He smiles. Jimmy Lama’s giving me a message – that a picture is worth a ream of words.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Uncle Paul.’

  Danny Vega is waiting for me at my house, a hangdog expression under the bill of a Giants cap. He is all elbows on knees, the architecture of youth, good for propping up chins when sitting, as he is now on my front porch.

  It is nearly four in the morning, and he is about the last person I would expect to see.

  ‘Danny?’ I say.

  He can read the question in my voice.

  ‘Baby-sitter said we could come over. I put my junk and the scooter in the garage,’ he says. He looks up at me, brown oval eyes. ‘It’s okay, isn’t it?’ He says this like maybe I’m going to throw him out into the street.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. I give him a smile, perhaps the only soft look he’s had from an adult in days.

  I can see the little Vespa by my workbench, Danny’s way in the single-parent world. Next to it is a red helmet and a small daypack.

  Laurel and I had given him the little motor scooter as a gift on his last birthday. Danny made a small wooden box that fits neatly on the back where, under hasp and lock, he keeps the mystical items that capture the fancy of a fifteen-year-old.

  ‘Where’s your mother? Why didn’t she drive you?’

  He humps his shoulders and shakes his head, as much as forearms will allow.

  ‘Thought she might be with you,’ he says. Danny hasn’t got a clue where Laurel is.

  Chills course through my body, a combination of sleep deprivation and thoughts of where Laurel might be at this hour.

  None of this seems to concern Danny. He is glum in the way teenagers often are. Little would excite him short of nuclear attack, and that only because of its brilliant flashes. Despite a desperate home situation, his expression is a map of feckless innocence.

  He often seems to be transmitting on a different frequency. In his moments of deepest musing you could lose your ass wagering on what was coursing through that mind. In any conversation it can take half a day to figure what he is talking about, and if you took ten guesses you would no doubt be wrong in nine. The kid is in an adolescent daze, trapped somewhere between puberty and the twilight zone.

  Danny looks nothing like Jack. Coloring and eyes, around the mouth, he is his mother’s boy. While Danny has noticed, he has yet to undertake any serious forays beyond the gender gulf. He has no serious friends of the fairer persuasion, though I have seen a few girls bat their eyes his way, lashes like Venus fly-traps. In his own way, while not effeminate, Danny was prettier than they were. The gyrations of MTV seem to hold no apparent allure. I have never seen him out-of-doors without a baseball cap, worn to the ears in the image of idols on trading cards from the fifties. By all appearances he has avoided the social disorder of American youth, the affliction of ‘cool.’ But he has paid a price. Danny suffers the immutable pain of not being one of the guys. His single attempt at socialization, a ride in a boosted buggy with the boys, was powered by peer pressures more combustible than anything in an engine block. And it ended with a sputtering backfire, in the glare of a flashing light bar and the harsh words of a father who for much of Danny’s life was absent. All things considered, I think Danny Vega would have been happier had he been born on a farm in a verdant field – sometime in the last century.

  ‘She said you went over to Dad’s, that something happened.’ The ‘she’ he is talking about I assume is Mrs. Bailey, who’s been fielding my phone. Danny is a lexicon of disjointed thoughts.

  ‘Julie’s inside.’ He offers this up without my asking.

  ‘I think she’s asleep,’ he says.

  He doesn’t ask what happened at his father’s. Instead he’s off again on another wavelength, something about wax and a model he has to make, a project for school, he says.

  I do a double take at four in the morning. Wax.

  ‘Your aunt used to use some for canning. I think there might be some in the garage,’ I say. ‘Can it wait till morning?’ I give him a large yawn.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘When did you see your mom last?’

  He makes a face, thinking back. ‘Three – or so. Maybe it was four.’

  To Danny time is a fungible commodity. Like grain or pork bellies, any hour of the day can be traded for any other. He doesn’t own a watch.

  ‘She went out, said she’d be back.’

  I give him a look, like – ‘And?’

  ‘She never showed up.’

  This is not a usual occurrence, the reason the boy is here.

  Laurel may be many things, but she is not a dilettante mother. Her few wayward evenings turned into early dawn, like the escapade with her confessor, I can count almost on the hairs of my palm. These infrequent lapses have occurred only when the kids were safely elsewhere. Laurel is not one to subject her children to the odious intrusion of quick alcoholic lovers or fortnight Lotharios.

  I ask Danny if he’s eaten.

  ‘Some Froot Loops and a banana.’

  ‘You hungry?’ I a
sk

  ‘Sure.’

  I wave him on into the house and forage in the cupboards of the kitchen for some crackers and a can of soup. These days I am not exactly a dietitian’s wet dream.

  Mrs. Bailey has fallen asleep on my front room couch. I can see her through the open door of the kitchen, and feel the rattle of her snoring on the floorboards.

  ‘Where were you tonight? I called the house earlier, nobody answered.’ I put the can in the opener. It twirls like a carousel until the lid collapses.

  He rolls his eyes, gives me a kind of dumb-kid smile.

  ‘Julie asked me to go over to a friend’s. She uses me,’ he says, ‘like for wheels. It’s not that I mind,’ he says. But I can tell he’s embarrassed, performing shuttle duties for his sister, who is two years younger, to her boyfriend’s house. Unlike her brother, Julie’s social plane is pressurized, and designed to fly in the stratosphere. She dates boys older than Danny, guys who think nothing of calling her at ten to have her over at eleven.

  Julie is a honey-blonde, with blue eyes, good bones, and a feminine form that is ripening faster than her ability to reason. She is learning all too quickly that good looks, rather than good works, can often get you what you want.

  The downsides, the temptations of excess and the price to be paid, still elude the telemetry of her radar. At thirteen she is the sexual equivalent of a toddler with a nuclear warhead. Were I Julie’s father, I would have my broker investing heavily in a nunnery.

  I put the soup in front of Danny, no ladle, just a bowl, microwave hot. I draw up a chair across from him at the table.

  ‘There’s something I have to talk to you about.’

  He’s spooning it down, looking up at me with doelike eyes. His cap is politely off, on the table next to his dish with crackers.

  ‘There was an accident tonight at your dad’s house. A bad accident. A shooting,’ I say.

  He takes the spoon away from his mouth, and still holding it, rests forearm and utensil on the table. The spoon is shaking at its tip.

  ‘Is my dad all right?’ He’s looking at me wide-eyed.