Shadow of Power

1

I open the envelope and start to paw through the photographs, the stuff sent to me in response to our discovery motion two weeks earlier. There are color glossies of the murder weapon, a common claw hammer with a fiberglass handle covered by a molded-rubber hand grip. In the photo it is lying on a tiled surface in a pool of blood. A small ruler lies on the tile next to the hammer for scale.

The next picture is a close-up of the claws themselves. A patch of bloody skin trailing several wisps of dark hair clings to the edge of one of the claws. The police photographer must have shot with a macro lens to get all the detail. No doubt they will want to use this one in front of the jury.

The next photo shows an elongated skid mark, apparently made by a shoe that slid in the blood and left a red comma coming to an end at the wall. The skid mark arcs out of the picture, making clear that its owner must have gone down when he hit the blood.

The fourth photo is a particular problem for us. I show it to Harry, who is seated next to me at the small metal table in the jail.

Harry Hinds and I have been law partners, “Madriani & Hinds,” since our days back in Capital City years ago. We handle many kinds of cases, but predominantly we do criminal defense. Harry is more than a partner. For years he has been like an uncle to my daughter, Sarah, who is now away at college. I am widowed. My wife, Nikki, has been dead for almost fifteen years. To look at him, Harry hasn’t seemed to have aged a day in the twenty years I’ve known him. He takes the evidence photo in his hand and looks at it closely.

It shows a palm print in blood and three very distinct fingerprints: the first, second, and third fingers of the right hand superimposed in rusted red on the clear white tile of the entry hall’s floor.

“And they’re a match?” he asks.

“According to the cops,” I tell him.

“How did this happen?” says Harry. “How did you get your fingerprints not only in the blood on the floor but on the murder weapon itself?” This, Harry puts to the young man sitting on the other side of the table across from us.

Carl Arnsberg is twenty-three. He has a light criminal record-one conviction for assault and battery, another for refusing to comply with the lawful orders of a police officer and obstruction of justice during a demonstration in L.A. two years ago.

He looks at Harry from under straight locks of dark hair parted on the left. The way it is combed and cut, long, it covers one eye. He snaps his head back and flips the hair out of his face, revealing high cheekbones and a kind of permanent pout. Then he rests his chin on the palm of his left hand, elbow on the table holding it up.

The pose is enough to piss Harry off.

There is a small swastika planted on the inside of Arnsberg’s forearm, discreet and neat. It has all the sharp lines of something recent, none of the blurring that comes as flesh sags and stretches with age. His other arm is a piece of art. The words OUR RACE IS OUR NATION wrap his right forearm. This is followed by a number of pagan symbols in ink.

Arnsberg’s pale blue eyes project contempt for the system that placed him here. It is an expression sufficiently broad to embrace Harry and me. I’m sure Arnsberg sees both of us as part of the process that keeps him here, in the lockup of the county jail.

“I asked you a question,” says Harry.

“I told you what happened. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Until I’m satisfied that I’ve heard the truth,” says Harry.

“You think I’m lying.”

“Trust me, son, you don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”

“Fine! I brought him his lunch to the room,” says Arnsberg.

“Thought you said it was breakfast?” says Harry.

“Maybe it was. Maybe he slept late. I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“Go on.” Harry has his notebook open and is jotting a few items now and then.

“I knocked on the door. Like I told you before, and like I told the cops, the door opened when I hit it with my hand. Not all the way, just a crack. I didn’t use a passkey. I guess whoever closed it last, it didn’t catch. That would probably be your killer,” he says. “That’s who you should be looking for.”

“You didn’t see anybody pass you in the hall, between the elevator and the door?” I ask.

“No. Not that I remember.”

“Go on.”

“So when the door opened, I just leaned toward the crack a little and hollered ‘Hello?’-like that. Nobody answered, so I pushed the door open a little more. I didn’t look in, I just yelled again. Nothing. I knew I had the right room, the big Presidential Suite on the top floor. I’d been there plenty of times, delivering meals and picking up trays. So I sorta backed in, pushing the door with my back and shoulder. I yelled again. Nobody answered. At the same time, I started to undo the tablecloth with one hand, let it sorta drop down in front of me.”

“Why did you do that?” I ask.

“You learn to do it so you can fling it out on the table and put the tray down on top. But I did it for another reason, too. To give myself some cover,” he says. “You hear stories-waiters who barged into a room and found the guest, maybe a woman who didn’t hear ’em knock, coming out of the shower in the buff. It’s happened.”

“So you thought whoever was inside was probably in the shower?”

“There or maybe in the bedroom. It’s a big suite.”

“So you’re standing there inside the door with your back to the room, tablecloth in front of your face. How did you find your way around the room?” says Harry.

“Like I say, I’ve been in that room enough times to know the layout. It never changes. I knew where the table was, the chairs, and I could see enough light and shadow through the cloth. So I just moved in the right direction with the tray up on my shoulder. Listen, I tol’ all this to the cops.”

“We want to hear it from you,” says Harry. “Humor us.”

“Fine. I couldn’t see exactly where I was going. Just enough to know I wasn’t gonna walk into any furniture. It wasn’t until I got to the carpet off the tile in the living room, when I noticed something was wrong. I felt the squishing, you know, under my feet. I thought somebody musta spilled water. My first thought was the bathtub overflowed.” With this his face comes up off his propped-up hand. From the look in his eyes, he’s starting to relive the moment.

“I had to put the tray down before I could look. So I found the table.”

“You didn’t look down to see what it was, the dampness in the carpet?” asks Harry.

Arnsberg shakes his head. “I was juggling the tray. All I needed was to drop coffee and orange juice, on whatever else was there on the floor. And all the time I kept yelling, ‘Hello? Anybody here?’”

“How far away was it, the distance to the table from where you were then, when you first felt the wetness in the carpet?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It was just a small table. It was off to the right as you entered the living room, a few feet. Maybe a couple of steps.”

“Go on.”

“I could sort of see the shadow of the table through the tablecloth.”

“Do you remember whether the carpet was wet all the way to the table as you walked?”

“I don’t remember,” he says. “No. No, it musta been, because of what I saw later.”

“Go on,” I tell him.

“So I spread the tablecloth, put the tray down, and turned around. That’s when I saw him, on the floor. His head was down. His butt was sorta crunched up against the chair. All that blood. I remember I looked down, and I was standing in it. And his head, I panicked. I started to run for the door. Musta got maybe two steps onto the tile when I went down. That’s what I remember. That’s how I got the blood on my pants. I figure that’s probably when I musta done it,” he says. “Touched the hammer, I mean.”

The cops had found a single partial print on the murder weapon, one finger that seems to match the little finger, the pinkie, of Arnsberg’s right hand.

“That’s the only way it could have happened,” says Arnsberg.

“Not according to the cops,” says Harry.

“Well, they’re wrong. All I remember is I got the hell outta there fast as I could. You would, too, you walked in on somethin’ like that.”

“Have you ever seen this item?” Harry slides a photograph across the table. It’s a picture of one of those cheap clear-plastic raincoats, the kind you can fold up and slip into a pocket or a purse. Some of them come with their own tiny little bag for storage. This one doesn’t, but it is covered in the rust hue of dried blood.

Arnsberg shakes his head. “No. Never seen it before.”

“The police found it in a Dumpster behind the hotel, near one of the parking lots. But you’ve never seen it before?”

“No.”

The cops have confirmed that the blood on the raincoat belonged to Scarborough. They have scoured it inside out and subjected it in a chamber to the vapor of hot superglue, looking for any sign of fingerprints. They’ve found none.

“After you found the body, why didn’t you tell somebody?” asks Harry.

This was the clincher as far as the police were concerned, the fact that Arnsberg ran rather than reporting what he’d found. Though he didn’t run far. It took them just one day to track him down at his apartment before they could question him. By then they had enough to book him.

“I don’t know. I panicked. You’d panic, too, if you had some dead guy’s blood on your pants, all over the bottom of your shoes.”

“And that’s the only reason you ran? The blood on your clothes?” Harry pushes him.

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I guess I knew what people would think.”

“And what was that?” says Harry.

“Just what you’re thinking now. That I did it. That I might have a reason to kill him.”

“Because of the artwork there on your arm?” Harry points with his pen at the tattoo.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Or was it because of some of the friends you’re keeping these days?”

He looks at Harry, the devil with all the questions. “That, too.”

“Let’s talk about some of your friends,” I say. “Did any of them discuss with you the fact that Terry Scarborough was staying at the hotel where you worked? That you might actually see him, have access to him?”

“I…don’t remember.”

“Come on,” says Harry. “It’s a simple question. Did you talk to any of your buddies about Scarborough being in the hotel?”

“I might have.”

This is an angle the cops are working overtime trying to nail down, the question of whether there was a conspiracy to kill Scarborough.

“You knew that some of your friends were seen protesting out in front of the hotel?” I ask. “The cops have them on videotape.”

“Yeah. I knew they were there. I didn’t know about no videotape.”

“Did you talk with them about Scarborough before he was killed?”

“We might have.”

“Did you or didn’t you?” I ask.

“Sure. Why shouldn’t we? No law against talking.”

“What did you talk about? What did you say?” Harry now bores in.

“We…we talked about the fact he was an agitator, causin’ problems, stirrin’ up trouble.”

“ Scarborough?”

“Yeah. We got enough problems,” he says. “Mexicans crossin’ the border by the millions. Politicians sayin’ we can’t get ’ em out. Illegals marchin’ in the streets, carryin’ Mexican flags, tellin’ us they own the country. Then this guy comes outta nowhere, with this book, trying to get the blacks all riled up so he can start the Civil War over again. Only this time he wants to put us in chains.”

“And who is ‘us’?” says Harry.

“The white people,” says Arnsberg.

“And this is what you talked about with your friends?” I ask.

“Yeah. He was a troublemaker. You asked me, so I told ya. If you wanna know the truth, as far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”

One thing is certain. Come trial, Arnsberg is not likely to be his own best witness.

“So you talked about this with your friends when? How long before Scarborough was killed?” I ask.

“I can’t remember exactly.”

“How many times did you talk with other people about Scarborough?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. Maybe a couple,” he says.

“Twice?” says Harry.

“I don’t know. Do you always know how many times you talked to somebody about something?”

Harry wants a list of names, the people Arnsberg may have talked to in the days leading up to the murder, the places where they met, whether it was on the phone or in person, and how many witnesses were present.

“So we talked about him. Doesn’t make me a killer.”

“Ah, yes,” says Harry, “but there’s the rub. You don’t get to decide who the killer is. The jury does that. And I can guarantee you that they will be positively riveted by any information concerning things you might have said about Mr. Scarborough to others, especially in the period right before he was killed. They’re funny about that. Juries, I mean.”

The kid doesn’t seem to like Harry’s sense of humor. I suppose it too much resembles lectures he’s gotten at school and in other places of authority.

He turns to me. “The guy was stirring up crowds everywhere he went. You saw the news,” says Arnsberg. “Way he was going, sooner or later somebody was gonna nail him.”

“There again you have a problem,” says Harry. “He wasn’t, as you say, ‘nailed’ somewhere else. This particular hammering took place in the hotel where you happened to work, and according to the cops all the evidence points to you being the last person in that room with him.”

This from his own lawyer. The look on the kid’s face is a mix of anger and fear. “I thought you were here to help me,” he says.

“We’re tryin’, son. But you have to give us the tools,” says Harry.

“You got a cigarette?” Arnsberg looks at me.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Me neither,” Harry lies.

People v. Arnsberg is the kind of case that is made up of hard circumstance, assorted pieces of physical evidence, and the fact that the defendant fits the expected profile of the killer like a fat man in stretch pants. Whether he did it or not, he can be seen to possess the kind of insane motive that is easy to peddle to an inner-city jury-blind hatred based on race. In fact, the evidence came at them so fast that the cops fell over themselves in a blind rush to arrest the defendant.

To listen to the media, Arnsberg didn’t kill a person of color. He did something worse. He killed their self-appointed messenger, in this case a lawyer, author, and celebrity, all the ingredients to whip up a hot story, except for sex, and they’re relying on innuendo for that one. The media mavens are now calling the case the “San Diego Slavery Slaying,” and they’re camped all over it, 24/7.

“I talked to my dad. He says you can get me off.” This the kid directs at me.

“We’ll do whatever we can. But there are no guarantees. We can’t do anything unless we know everything. That means everything you know. If you withhold information from us, even something you might not think is important…then you’re just wasting our time. You can bet the cops will find out about it-that is, if they don’t already know-and when they start dropping surprises on us in court, there will be nothing I or anyone else can do to help you. Understand?”

He swallows, then nods, not something hip or cool, but vigorous, like someone who suddenly realizes that the threads of security, whatever it is that tethers him to this life, are far thinner than he ever realized. “Yeah. I told you everything I know. Really,” he says. “I didn’t do it. I swear.”

“All right.” We lecture him on jailhouse etiquette, not to talk to anyone-guards, cellmates, even family-about events in the case. Anything told to them can be repeated in testimony on the stand. Even family members can be forced to testify against him. “You talk only to us, Harry or myself, that’s it.”

“Somebody in the jail wants to talk about the weather, fine. Sports, feel free. But anything having to do with your case, with Scarborough, with race relations in general, you’re a mute,” says Harry. “If you have to, swallow your tongue. If we’re in trial and somebody asks how it went in court, you don’t know.”

“I understand,” he says. “I talk to nobody. Only the two of you.”

“And your buddies, the ones you may have talked to before the event, don’t talk to them at all,” says Harry. “As far as you’re concerned, they don’t exist. If they come visiting during hours, you don’t want to see them, and you don’t want to be seen talking to them.”

“What do I tell them?”

“You don’t tell them anything. If they call the jail and want to talk to you, you don’t take the call. If they show up in the visiting room and you see them, you don’t sit down. You turn and you walk. Anything you tell them can be used against you. It can be twisted for whatever reason and end up being your word against theirs as to what was said. Worse than that,” says Harry, “the cops may be listening in. Friends have been known to wear wires. Just figure that if any of these old friends show up to give you moral support, and you talk to them, you may as well have a heart-to-heart with the D.A., because you probably are.”

He nods nervously, in the stark realization that he is alone, a dying man in a desert, with only me and Harry to toss him the occasional drop of water.

Harry and I start collecting our papers and notes, the photos go back into my briefcase.

“I need to know one thing,” says Arnsberg.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“They aren’t serious? They don’t really wanna…well, you know…”

I stop with the briefcase and look at him. “No, I don’t.”

“I mean, they’re not gonna really execute me?” he says. “They’re sayin’ that just to put pressure. Right? They’re thinking squeeze hard enough and I’ll do a deal. That’s it, isn’t it? Sure. That’s gotta be it. Scare me and they figure I’ll confess, tell ’em I did something I didn’t do. I can understand that. I mean, I won’t do it. I mean, confess to something I didn’t do. But I understand it. It makes sense.” In half a second, his eyes flash from me to Harry and back again.

At this moment I wish his father were not my friend, that instead I was dealing with the child of a stranger, where my only psychic connection to the outcome would be just the blood that ordinarily oozes from my pores whenever I stand with a client to hear a verdict.

“Carl. I can call you Carl?”

He nods.

“Carl, I want you to understand this because you’ll save yourself a lot of pain if you get it into your head and come to grips with it now. The police, the D.A., the State of California are not testing the water here. They’re not playing Let’s Make a Deal. Given the case, the media hype, and racial politics, unless something major breaks our way, I can’t see that they would ever accept a deal, though if things get bad, we may have to go there before we’re finished. They’re doing this because they believe they have the evidence to convict you, send you to the death house at San Quentin, and inject enough lethal drugs into your body to kill you. I wish I could tell you it wasn’t true, but if they have their way, that is exactly what they intend to do.”

It’s hard to tell whether he even hears all this. His face looking up at me is that flushed. A second later the breath seems to leave his body as his shoulders slump and he sags in the chair. His head is down. The nightmare is real. He begins to tear up, then sucks it all back in a boyish effort to keep his nose from running. He wipes his eyes with the back of his forearm, the one decorated with the swastika. Carl Arnsberg may be twenty-three and halfway to becoming a hard-baked race case, but at this moment I would gauge his social age to be no more than ten, with the hardness quotient of his heart somewhere in the neighborhood of hot Jell-O.

“I don’t know what happened. I guess it’s my fault. Somehow I lost touch with him. You know how hard it is to raise kids.”

Sam Arnsberg is a friend of long standing. We went to college together, belonged to the same fraternity, dated some of the same girls.

Today, seated in one of the client chairs across from my desk, Sam doesn’t even look like the same person I once knew. But for certain aspects of terminal cancer, there is nothing I can think of in life that will destroy a person faster than the perils of dealing with the American judicial system. Even mired in the middle of it as I am, I cannot imagine what Sam is going through, a child facing a possible death sentence.

“Maybe you should find someone else to do this,” I tell him.

“No! I trust you. I have faith in you.” He says it as if he were reaching out to grasp one of those life rings they toss from a passing ship to a man who is drowning.

“Maybe a little too much faith,” I tell him. “I never knew your son as a child. And you and I may be a little too close. Sometimes it can cloud judgment,” I tell him.

Over the years since college, Sam and I stayed in contact, first by phone and letters and later with e-mail. We exchanged stories of family life. When Nikki died, Sam came out to California and spent almost a week helping me to pick up the pieces of my life. During later years he became an important voice on the phone, one of the few people with whom I could share intimate thoughts.

“I know it’s bad,” he says.

“I would be lying if I told you it wasn’t. There’s a lot of evidence. Almost none of it, as far as I can see, is going to be good for Carl.”

“Let me guess what’s bothering you. You’re afraid that if you lose, if Carl dies, I’ll blame you, that we won’t be able to look each other in the eye again. Won’t happen,” he says.

“What? I won’t lose?”

“No. If Carl dies, there is only one person to blame, and that’s my boy. Will you do it? Will you take the case?”

Sam has been to two other lawyers already, both of them major criminal-defense hotshots, people to whom I referred him when he first came to me. Whether it was the evidence in the case or the racial hot wires attached to it, neither of them would touch it.

Sam could step away. His son is an indigent, eligible for the services of the public defender. But he doesn’t want to do that.

“All right. Let me talk to my partner, but I’m sure he’ll go along.” I know Harry well enough to know that he will, though he will chew my ass raw and reserve the right to do so again the first minute the case goes sour.

Sam smiles as a tear runs down his face from out of the corner of his eye. Like father, like son.

“Why did he run?” asks Sam. “Did he tell you?”

“I suppose because he was afraid.”

“Did he say-”

“Stop!”

He looks at me.

“You’re his dad. You and I are friends. It’s going to be hard, but there are going to be things that I will not be able to share with you. Most of the things that Carl tells me, lawyer-client, I cannot tell anyone else, including you.”

“I understand. But I have to know. One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“From what you know, did he do it? Did he kill that man?”

“If you mean did he confess, did he make any admission, the answer is no. He maintains his innocence.”

“Thank God,” he says, heaving a long sigh as he looks up at the ceiling. “You know, I don’t know what got into him. All this stuff. The tattoos, his friends. Where did he get all that? We didn’t raise him to be that way.”

I shake my head.

“We used to play baseball together. I coached his Little League team. Babe Ruth when he was older. We played catch. He used to pitch to me.” He looks down at the desk, his eyes tearing up again as he thinks back. “When he was small, he thought he might play in the big leagues someday. The dreams kids have,” says Sam. “Then I looked up, and he was gone. Now this.”

At seventeen, after an argument with his father, Carl dropped out of school, moved out of the house, and began to drift. It was the last real contact his family had with him.

Sandra is Sam’s wife of nearly thirty years. They have two older children, a daughter, Susan, who is in grad school and a son, James, who is married with children and works with his dad in the family business, a small insurance agency.

“Susan’s talking about dropping out of school,” he says. “She’s enrolled at Columbia. It’s gonna be tough. Tough.” I know he’s talking about finances. “She’s a smart kid.”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard. It’s on the news, twenty-four hours a day. Her brother’s name, his picture, lawyers and judges-they call them experts-all speculating on things they don’t know. Susie has friends at school, but she’s having a hard time. She says she’ll just drop out for a while and go back later. But I don’t want her to. It’s enough that it destroys Sandy and me. I don’t want it to affect the other kids. They have their own lives. Besides, it’s not like she can hide at home. These people are camped outside our house,” he says, “trucks with satellite dishes, people with cameras, microphones, lights. The middle of the night, they light up your bedroom. They chased Sandy down the driveway of her own home. Her own home,” he says.

“I saw it on TV,” I tell him, half a minute of tape showing his wife rolling out the trash, fending off questions and dodging boom mikes. Film of this from different angles tumbled through the news cycle on each of the cable networks every fifteen minutes for two days. “Breaking news” is now anything on videotape that can be used to punctuate the ever-rising flood of ads. Every story, no matter what or where, is now national in scope. Johnny has a fight with Jimmy in the third grade, and the whole country is told about it by breathless “reporters” hanging from news choppers hovering over the school. Park a police car by a building and call in a rumor, and whatever you say will be broadcast around the world twice before you can hang up. Unless you knew better, you might swear that Chicken Little has taken over the newsroom and bolted the door. Hyping hysteria and peddling panic around the clock is now an enterprise listed on the Dow Jones ticker. And everybody watches, anxiety junkies cruising for another hit, just in case there’s some real news. After all, another 9/11 could happen, and we might miss it.

“Anything else you need from me?” Sam asks, then slaps his head. “Of course there is. Let me write you a check.”

“Listen, we’ll talk about it later,” I tell him. “I’ve got another meeting, and I’m running late.”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking up so much of your time.”

“If not you, then who?” I walk him to the door.

He turns, squeezes my arm at the shoulder. “Thanks.”

“Try not to worry.”

He nods and is out the door. Gone.

I close the door behind him. I have no appointment. But I couldn’t think of any graceful way to stop Sam from talking about money. The fees and costs in a case like this will bankrupt even an upper-income family. Welcome to the justice system.