Undue Influence Read online

  His is a big, affable smile.

  ‘Like I said the other day. We all have to do what we have to do.’ He ushers me to the door, one hand on my shoulder, renewing the vows of brotherhood.

  He pats me on the shoulder one last time, bids farewell, and closes his door. I wander through the warren of offices like Moses after the promised land, any way to get out. With each step I weigh frantically every word spoken during our meeting against a single question in my mind.

  Why was Jack Vega wearing a wire?

  ‘Guess who’s here?’ she says. Sarah has a big grin. She’s just answered the doorbell, and she knows I don’t have a clue.

  ‘Danny.’ She is jubilant.

  ‘Oh.’

  My daughter dotes on her cousin. Everything that a seven-year-old girl can think about a teenager, the gamut from love to simple fascination. She looks up at him with oval eyes and a painted-on smile, stuttering as the words can’t come out fast enough.

  She’s tugging on one of his hands, dragging him over to look at a picture she’s just finished in crayon, yammering about school and a book she is learning to read. She has plans to corral him on the couch while she struggles with the words.

  ‘Uncle Paul.’ Danny’s hat is in his hand. He’s wearing a black Raiders jacket that gives his body more bulk than it warrants.

  I’m working over the stove, what passes for cooking in this house. I ask him if he’s hungry. Is the Pope Catholic? His eyes are looking in the pot as it steams. Nothing he recognizes, I’m sure, but then Danny is a risk-taker.

  ‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m out with Julie tonight,’ he says. ‘Took her to her boyfriend’s. Suppose to pick her up in an hour.’

  I shudder. Plenty of time for the pointed little sperms to wiggle their way upstream. In his own evasive way, Danny has answered my question. His father doesn’t know he is here.

  ‘We had a talk today,’ I tell him. ‘Your dad thinks it’s best, for the time being, if we don’t see each other.’

  ‘’Cuz you’re helping Mom,’ he says. Just like that, the kid has put it all together. ‘I know. He told me,’ he says. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  Sarah is fuming, a bundle about to explode. Enough talk between grown-ups. She wants Danny in the other room, and she is not subtle. Sarah has him by a thumb and one finger, pulling with all her weight, about to commit an act of dislocation.

  Sarah wants to ride around the block behind Danny on the little Vespa motor scooter, but I scotch this. She has no helmet, and besides it is beginning to get dark. He cons me with requests to stay just for a few minutes. Then looks at me doe-eyed.

  ‘I guess I could sit outside her friend’s house.’

  I give a sigh and a look of concession. ‘For a few minutes,’ I say.

  They head for the living room as I slice carrots into a pot.

  Nikki left me a small binder of recipes, a part of her legacy of love. In her dying days she took hours penning these out in longhand, things that even I could prepare without burning the bottom out of some pan. I watched in amazement as she went about this, pulling together these handwritten pages, a nutritional map for survival. She did it without a thought, almost cavalier, in the same way that she would have once plunked TV dinners into the freezer for me before leaving for a week to visit her mother. My wife had a selfless penchant for the practical.

  Sarah’s talking up a storm in the other room. Danny’s taken to the tube in defense, the disconnected jabber of some quick and dirty channel-surfing. He settles on something, a dull monotone I cannot make out.

  More carrots, a little parsley, a spoon of butter, and stir. Something’s tugging at the back of my pants. I turn. It is Sarah. Her face is filled with agitation. A wagging finger, she has me bend low for some secret.

  ‘Danny is crying,’ she whispers.

  I wipe my hands and head for the other room.

  The kid is hunched in a corner of the couch, knees drawn up, as close to a fetal position as is possible for someone six feet tall. He’s staring at the screen, tears streaming down his face.

  There on the television, in living color, pictures of Laurel, her hands cuffed behind her, being pulled toward a squad car – a black-and-white with a door shield I do not recognize. Laurel’s head is pushed down as she’s deposited in the backseat. I can see only the silhouette of her head through the rear window as the car pulls away from the curb. I reach for the controls and boost the sound just in time to hear: ‘This is Norm Kendal reporting from Reno.’

  I stand in a daze, mesmerized by the stench of incinerated carrots and the thought that I finally know where ‘up here’ is.

  Chapter 5

  It is just after noon, and the customary crowd of the tattered and vagrant wander in front of the Capital County jail, waiting for friends or relations to be turned out on bail.

  Laurel has waived extradition from Nevada. Lama and his crew have wasted no time in bringing her back to Capital City.

  I wait in a small interrogation room on the ground floor of the jail. Apart from minor children I am the nearest relative. So I have retained myself to represent her, something that has raised eyebrows among the jailers, unsure whether they should admit me.

  In the hallway outside I can see Laurel through a window as she is led in. One of the female deputies has her by the arm. Laurel is wearing no makeup. Her face is drawn and tired. She has aged ten years in the last two.

  I remember her in those halcyon years of my own marriage. She was happy and seemed always to move at single speed, in corksoled sandals. She wore waistless dresses with a backpack, the latter filled with Danny in diapers, the former beginning to show the bulge of his sister.

  This was the late seventies. My generation was busy slithering through the corporate jungle, trying to shed its social conscience. The Mercedes hood ornament had replaced the peace symbol as the icon of the moment.

  It is said that timing in life is everything. Laurel, it seems, foundered under a bad star, having missed the Age of Aquarius. She was a natural hippy.

  When she first met Jack, she was a year out of Berkeley. He was older. Sporting hair halfway to his ass, he talked a dialect of liberal gibberish that tickled the cockles of altruism. Jack, who was then working in the Capitol, one of the lackeys-in-waiting, was honing the skills that would make him a politician. He was telling Laurel what he thought she wanted to hear, the prelude to a marriage made in hell.

  Whenever we discussed the weighty topics of our time, my impression was always of Laurel searching her soul, agonizing for some ultimate truth while Jack paid lip service, what some speech writer had crafted in ten minutes at a typewriter. He was too busy enjoying the perks to examine the policy. At home and abroad, Jack was always a ship sailing under false colors. My guess is that from the start, he had been schlepping his mast into other ports. It took Laurel a time to figure this out, and a little while longer to immerse the problem in a bottle.

  Through all of this the only constant in her life, it seems, has been the instinct to protect her children. In this she has the maternal impulses of a cheetah with its young, extended claws longer than the spiked heels on the shoes some women wear.

  The door opens. Laurel is cuffed. The glint of metal, a chain encircling her waist, runs down between her knees to the locked shackles on her ankles, so that when she moves she sounds like something from the yule season. There are little steps here like a Chinese peasant with bound feet.

  She wears an orange jail jumper three sizes too big, and canvas shoes, an indication that she has already undergone the indignities of admission to this place – cavity searches in places only your physician should see, and a shower with antiseptic soap so astringent it could lift paint from metal.

  She clears the door, and the first thing I see are Laurel’s hands as she holds them out to me. They are a vibrant shade of red, like someone may have cooked them over an open flame.

  �
�What happened to her?’ I look accusingly at the guard.

  ‘Ask your client,’ she says.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Laurel.

  The guard gives me her best cop’s smirk.

  ‘You can take those off,’ I tell her. I’m talking about the cuffs and shackles.

  ‘In your dreams,’ she says.

  ‘You want, we can call your boss to discuss it,’ I tell her. ‘My client has a right to confer with her lawyer without a ton of metal on her feet and hands.’

  ‘Not down here on the main floor,’ she says. Testing the water. How far can she push? Too lazy to work the keys.

  I look her in the eye, and she blinks. I start to move to the door, toward a higher level of appeal.

  ‘Your party,’ she says. If looks could spit. She works with her keys, more locks than a chastity belt. Then, dragging six yards of chain, she stations herself, her back leaning up against the wall five feet away.

  ‘Outside, if you don’t mind,’ I tell her.

  Coming to the county jail to talk to a client is like being dropped into a sandbox filled with snarling pit bulls. The guards who can’t bite will at least try to piss on you. Generally these are deputies who higher authority won’t put on the street for fear of causing a riot among rational citizens. So they are left here to develop their public personas like Quasimodo. She moseys out the door, dragging metal behind her.

  They have just booked Laurel, a charge of first-degree murder. She is slated for arraignment tomorrow morning, the reading of formal charges, and an appearance to set a date for entry of a plea. I think Harry was right. It would appear I can take little comfort in the state’s case, though I have yet to see any part of it. Harry is busy preparing a motion for discovery. Apparently the cops believe they’ve got a dead-bang winner based on the evidence already in hand. I have heard rumors of a witness. Perhaps it is something they would like us to believe.

  Laurel sits in the chair across the table from me. She is stone-faced, but there are no tears, no frazzled hysteria.

  Other women I know would recoil in horror at this place, beefy guards and other inmates with an attitude on the hardness scale of a diamond. But it is the thing about Laurel. She is one of those people who always seem to find a second wind in adversity.

  I can see Lama’s beady little eyes outside in the hallway, through the window with its blinds. He has finally found a place where he is comfortable, in the company of other misfits, peering through a window on a private conversation. I close the blinds in his face.

  Now we are quiet, enclosed and hopefully private.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ she says. She’s back to first thoughts.

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘Do they know I’ve been arrested?’

  ‘Danny does,’ I say. I can only assume that by now someone has told Julie of her mother’s fate.

  This is the Laurel I know. She looks off at the middle distance – a woman who moments ago was in cuffs and chains, charged with first-degree murder, and her headiest concern is sheltering her kids from the knowledge.

  ‘Have you talked to Gail Hemple? Will he get custody?’ She’s talking about Jack taking the kids.

  ‘We’ll have to talk about that later,’ I say.

  ‘No – now,’ she says. ‘Will he get custody?’

  ‘The kids have to live somewhere while you get through this mess,’ I tell her.

  ‘Not with Jack,’ she says. ‘You can take them,’ she tells me. ‘At least temporarily,’ she says.

  Laurel’s looking over her shoulder now, paranoia like maybe somebody is listening. Here, in this place, this is a healthy attitude.

  She puts a cupped hand to the side of her mouth. ‘Her name is Maggie Sand,’ she says. ‘Write it down.’

  I have a glazed look. ‘Who’s Maggie Sand?’

  ‘My friend from college,’ she says. ‘I told you about her on the phone – lives in Michigan. It’s all arranged.’ She’s talking quickly, before the guard comes back to take her to her cell. ‘The airline tickets are purchased.’ She gives me the airline and flight number. ‘They’re in the last name of Sand,’ she says. ‘Danny and Julie Sand.’ This so that Jack or the cops won’t be able to trace them. ‘All you have to do is get them on the plane. Maggie will pick them up in Detroit.’

  ‘You’ve got bigger problems right now,’ I tell her.

  She brings up her hands and buries her face for a moment in thought, no tears, just a few seconds of private contemplation as if she’s making one final stab at getting it together.

  ‘What happened to your hands?’ I ask her. The soft pale skin is turned a shade of red more vibrant than any sunburn in a warm shower.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.

  ‘I hope I did the right thing?’ She changes the subject. ‘Deciding not to fight it.’

  My heart skips a beat, images of some fatal admission.

  ‘You didn’t make a statement?’ I say.

  ‘About what?’ Her face is a puzzle. Then she gets it. I’m talking about a confession. Her expression turns to a mocking little smile, severe to the edges of her mouth.

  ‘You think I did it,’ she says. ‘You think I killed Melanie.’ Her face turns to the side. Tight lips as if she were about to talk to someone in the empty chair next to her.

  ‘Well, the fact is she deserved it,’ says Laurel. Her face whips to the front, eyes boring in on me. ‘But I didn’t do it.’ She gives herself a pained expression.

  ‘I hope you can believe that,’ she says, ‘because if you can’t I’m gonna need another lawyer.’

  From the tone of her voice you might think I had arrested her. The look on Laurel’s face at this moment brings me down.

  ‘I was talking about the extradition,’ she tells me. ‘Giving up my right to a hearing. Was it a mistake?’

  Like ships we have passed in the night. ‘Ahh.’ I shake my head. ‘No major mistake,’ I say.

  At most a fight over extradition would have been a skirmish for delay across the state line, a battle that we would have ultimately lost and that the state might have used against us in a subsequent trial. I tell her this. We don’t have much time. The guards are shuffling in the corridor outside, anxious to get her upstairs to a cell. I had to pull every string to keep from having this conference delayed until tomorrow.

  I give her quick instructions, the basics intended to get her through the night. Seeing Laurel’s exhausted condition, and knowing Lama, he will probably house her with some jailhouse snitch in hopes that my sister-in-law will unburden her soul to a friendly face in seemingly similar circumstances.

  ‘Can you get me out of here? Bail?’ she says.

  Without seeing the evidence, I am assuming the worst, that they will charge Laurel with a capital offense, first-degree murder with special circumstances. A lawyer’s game of worst scenario. In a death case bail can be denied. I fudge. But there is no need to tell her this until I see the charges.

  ‘It could be tough,’ I say. ‘Your trip out-of-state. They will argue you’re a flight risk.’ She may sleep better without thoughts of execution.

  ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘You want to know why I went to Reno?’ she says.

  ‘A good explanation would help. But there’s time for that later.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says. ‘You have to trust me. Later,’ she says, ‘but not now.’

  Wonderful. She would leave the DA free to fill in the blanks.

  ‘Yeah. Later,’ I tell her. ‘We can talk about it then.’

  I suspect that Laurel is operating on less sleep than I, not a condition that is likely to lead to a lucid rendition of facts. A client’s story is always better told from a clear mind. I would like to avoid little slips, errors or omissions in detail, inconsistencies that might make me, or a jury, wonder later whether Laurel is telling the truth. It is always easier to put a de
fendant on the stand if her lawyer has confidence. And if Laurel is going to lie, I don’t want to know. I would prefer that it be a carefully thought-out and credible whopper.

  ‘What about your hands? Do you need something?’ I say.

  ‘Oh.’ Laurel looks at these sorry things, inflamed and irritated.

  ‘It’s just laundry solvent,’ she says. ‘She said they’d get the dispensary to give me something for it.’ She’s talking about the madam from the Gulags who is now standing outside our door jangling her keys.

  I arch an eyebrow in question.

  ‘It’s from the rug I was washing,’ she says. ‘At the laundromat in Reno.’ There’s not a word as to what she was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home in the middle of the night, washing a rug. But from the look on her face, to Laurel, at this moment it seems a complete explanation.

  If her story doesn’t get better than this, she may need a lot more time than I thought for creative contemplation.

  ‘They don’t have the gun, smoking in her hand or otherwise,’ he says. ‘Except for that, there isn’t much they’re missing.’ This is Harry’s way of telling me we are in trouble on the evidence.

  Laurel is still behind bars. Arraigned ten days ago on a sealed indictment by the grand jury, she is charged in a single count of first-degree murder, alleging special circumstances. According to the indictment there is sufficient evidence of ‘lying in wait,’ that somehow Laurel entered Jack’s house and scoped out the victim before striking. If this can be proved, the state can ask for the death penalty.

  A pitch for bail during the arraignment netted me a major ass-chewing by the prosecution and a quick gavel from the judge. Unless we can quash the indictment, or at least wash out the special circumstances in a pretrial motion, Laurel will spend the duration waiting for trial, behind bars. Though that may not be the worst of our worries.

  This morning Harry starts with the little stuff, trashing what had been an early dream, some way to attack probable cause for the arrest and spring Laurel back to her kids. At best this would have been a temporary fix, assuming there was cause, until they reconvened the grand jury.