Undue Influence

Chapter 32

In the van abandoned by Lyle Simmons in front of Fulton’s, police found a small arsenal of firearms, guns for every occasion, as well as loading equipment for ammunition, and the makings for explosive devices — everything someone in the business of killing might be expected to possess.

It was here, in this van, that Laurel told police she first looked when she finally returned from the darkness of the railyard, to find her son’s motor scooter dumped in the street and Danny gone. It was in the van that she told police she found the weapon that ultimately saved our lives, the pistol she used to shoot Lyle Simmons.

Danny had panicked. He never made the phone call to nine-one-one, and instead, a half block under the freeway overpass, he turned around and returned for his mother, who by that time was gone. He nosed around for a while, and then, seeing the blood and thinking she might have gone inside the museum, he followed.

Police have now tested both guns, and ballistics reveal that the pistol used by Laurel to kill Simmons matches the bullet found in Melanie Vega. For authorities it is the final evidence required for closure, the last dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s in Melanie’s case.

There are already calls for a Congressional inquiry into the Federal Witness Protection program and the special hazards it presents for unsuspecting citizens into whose midst targets such as Kathy Merlow are dropped. The program has implications for us all, not least of which is the question of how well any of us truly know our neighbors.

There have been news conferences at Justice in Washington where those in power claim no knowledge of any of this — the cover-up that ensued following Melanie’s death.

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders act more like the dons of crime than statesmen, where notions of plausible deniability replace the truth, and claims that politicians never knew of the evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge ‘prove what I knew and when I knew it’ has now become a national motto.

Through all of this, Laurel has shown herself to be both resilient and resourceful, a face of calm in a sea of crisis. When she entered the museum that night it was with a fierce determination to save Danny, no matter the odds. That she was able to save my own life in the process was not lost on Laurel, though she was first and foremost the mother of her son. And, like serendipity, Laurel found an opportunity she never actually considered when she walked through the doors that evening. It was the chance to finally get rid of the gun that had been used to kill Melanie Vega.

The fact is that while Lyle Simmons had been contracted to kill Kathy Merlow, we will never know whether he would have actually struck the right house or not, because he never got the chance. As fate would have it, circumstances intervened and Simmons arrived on the scene a little too late.

As Laurel sits across the desk from me this morning, nearly a month has passed since that night. We are alone in the office. It is Saturday morning, and Laurel has asked that we talk here. Danny and Julie are with Sarah. They have taken her to a show, one of the new cartoon classics with a lot of music and high animation.

On my desk is the final piece of evidence promised to be delivered by Morgan Cassidy at trial. With the case over, it is a moot point, and not one I am sure Morgan has dwelt on. The police have their killer in a coffin.

But on my desk are the working papers of the medical examiner, Simon Angelo, regarding the DNA and the genetic link between the unborn child and Jack Vega. I had never really bought into the concept of Jack as father in the case, and had wondered whether Angelo has simply reached into his bag of science and pulled a last-minute rabbit from the hat to save Cassidy’s case.

I found the answer in an obscure footnote to his working papers, an item not written by Angelo, but printed in small type on a form used in such tests. The projections of probability regarding Jack’s paternity were valid, wholly consistent with the results of the DNA probes, but they were premised on a single erroneous assumption — that there were no other males having shared genetic characteristics with Jack. The DNA testing had failed to consider the possibilities of Danny.

It is one of those conversations that people have, lawyer to client. Laurel has asked for assurances of privilege several times before talking, nervous, though I have told her that my lips are sealed, by law if not by blood.

And so she fills in the details that I have only guessed at until this moment.

It was not Laurel who had been at Jack’s house that night, who Mrs. Miller had seen in the hooded sweatshirt, but her likeness in all ways including looks. It was Danny.

He had come to talk, and perhaps to actually carry out the desperate and dramatic act of a teenager, not to murder Melanie, but to kill himself.

Danny had known for nearly two months that his stepmother carried his child, a dark secret only he and Melanie knew. It is why she pushed so hard through Jack for custody, a mix of fear and desire. Melanie knew that unless she could keep Danny close at hand, under her wing, in time the boy would crack. He would tell someone, if not authorities, then his mother. Their lives had become a daily act of desperation.

According to Laurel, it is perhaps the ultimate irony that the last act in Melanie’s sorry life was one of virtue.

He had found her in the bath when he arrived. I can only imagine the thoughts racing through Melanie’s mind in those final moments as Danny, in a state of hysteria, placed the silenced muzzle first in his mouth, then at his temple. Finally, she stood in the tub and pleaded with him to put the gun down. When he refused, she took one step over the side, onto the bath mat, and made a wild swing for the weapon. She grabbed the barrel and they struggled, Melanie half in and half out of the tub. It was a horrified Danny who gently lowered the body of his stepmother, his seducer, back down into the water.

The contested carpet, covered with Melanie’s blood and Danny’s bloody footprint, was in fact in Jack’s house that night — the vagaries of marital settlement agreements, in which every nut and bolt is divided on paper and left to the parties to enforce.

There may be many explanations for what happened that night so long ago, but in the end it all comes down to a single thing, a case of beauty and guile over youth and innocence, a case of Melanie’s undue influence over Danny.

‘Where did he get the gun?’ I ask.

‘Where else?’ she says. ‘The source of every vice for the young, a locker at school. A friend of his told Danny some gang members kept the weapon in a shared locker with this kid. So Danny took it.’

‘I think I met these people,’ I tell her. The gang-bangers who came to my house that night, the ones Dana chased off with her cellular call to the cops. They had not wanted Danny so much as their gun back. Though they might very well have used it on him had they put the two together.

The weapon had not been in Simmons’ van that night, as Laurel had told the police. Instead it was on Danny’s Vespa, where it had remained since the night of Melanie’s death, the little motor scooter that had been parked in my own garage for months, that Sarah had sat upon and played with, its varnished wooden box padlocked on the back. It was the point of deep conversation between Laurel and Danny that night when I emerged from Fulton’s onto the street.

Laurel had had her back to me. Danny had just given her the weapon, which she had placed in her purse, to dispose of in some way, a task she had originally intended to carry out on her trip to Reno months before. In the chaos following Melanie’s violent death, Laurel had thrown a few things into a bag for her trip to draw cover for Danny and told the boy to put the rug in a plastic bag along with the gun and place them in the trunk of her car.

The fact that the gun never made it into the bag, Laurel now tells me, was the result of panic and confusion by a teenager.

I think that there was perhaps more design than disorder to this, at least in Danny’s mind. The boy had begun to think about what would happen if his mother were caught and charged with the murder. It is true that he sat by anxiously and watched her trial, but in Danny’s mind he held the trump card. Until the end, he possessed the murder weapon, and in Danny’s limited understanding of the wheels of justice, had his mother been convicted, it would have been a simple thing to come forward, confess the crime, and produce the evidence. I doubt seriously whether police would have bought this.

I can image the alarm that raced through Laurel’s mind when she stood near the spillway of the Boca Dam, as she now tells me she did that night on her way to Reno, and discovered that the gun was not there. She had intended to load the plastic bag with rocks and dump both the carpet and weapon into the lake. Without the pistol, she knew there was a good chance police could link Danny to the crime. It was for this reason that she kept the rug, washed the blood from it, and made sure that police found it when they arrested her. The rug was intended to keep the cops from looking further for a suspect. She knew Jack would identify it, and she would simply stonewall. Without blood or trace evidence, which she had eliminated by washing it in solvents, the carpet became something, in her mind, only marginally incriminating. It would be her word against Jack’s as to ownership. She had never banked on the property settlement agreement, which became the added straw.

As for Jack, it seems the vaunted legislator has taken flight. He is now a fugitive. In a long and rambling letter received by the federal district judge and mailed from another city, Vega said that his sense of survival was more acute than his respect for the courts, or ‘your supposed system of justice.’ In the letter Jack vented his spleen against the government for the cover-up surrounding his wife’s murder, and wallowed in a sea of self-pity, finally saying that he felt betrayed by the untimely disclosure of his plea-bargain during the trial. He claimed that he had to undergo necessary medical treatment, no doubt plastic surgery to prevent identification while on the lam.

I suspect that he had for some time before this been diverting some of the sludge that we call campaign contributions into a numbered account someplace in a far-off land. The irony in this is that because he bolted before his sentencing, Jack is not technically a convicted felon, at least for purposes of his legislative retirement, which would have been forfeit had he gone to prison.

Checks are being drawn to his next-of-kin, to Laurel’s children, of whom she now has custody, and for the first time in years she has an adequate income.

In the end it is Dana who no doubt will take the biggest fall in all of this. Her dreams of a federal judgeship are now cinders, and she has been suspended from office pending completion of an investigation. There has never been a question in my mind but that she was following orders from above. But they are all now clamoring to prevent this thing, the stain of Melanie’s death, from climbing higher up the food chain.

Dana did, after all, make every effort to acquit Laurel, to the point of attempting to suborn perjury, not because she was evil, but because she knew Laurel was innocent. In fact she knew nothing. I will probably testify on her behalf when it comes to that.

Loyalties die hard.