Undue Influence

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 defendant 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.

‘Even if we succeeded, she fled the jurisdiction on the night of the murder. Laurel was due in court the next day on the custody case. She’s given the authorities no explanation for this trip. They claim this is highly suspicious,’ says Harry.

He is right. They could hold her on this alone.

What is more troubling is that Laurel has given no better accounting to us. She insists that she did not kill Melanie, but refuses to tell me what she was doing in Reno the night of the murder. She says she had a bona fide reason for the trip. Presumably she will share it with us sometime before she is convicted.

‘Maybe she’ll have an explanation ready for us in the morning,’ I tell Harry. This is when I am scheduled to see her again at the jail.

‘Sure.’ He cackles, always the artful dodger. Harry has seen clients like this before. People who wonder if they should tell their own lawyer and instead end up doing it for the first time on the stand. I shiver and put it out of my mind.

I’ve told Harry about Vega and the fact that Jack was wired for sound in his office. He thinks Lama was trying to set me up, some compromising statement that perhaps I had knowledge of Laurel’s whereabouts. This could make me an accessory after the fact, or at very least cause the bar to launch a probe like a photon torpedo into my practice. Either way Jimmy Lama would have a psychic orgasm.

Harry’s fanning through pages on his desk, materials copied by the police and given to him under our application for discovery. At this point, with an ongoing investigation they have supplied everything except the names and addresses of any witnesses, people who may have seen things outside the house that night. These they will hold back until their investigation is complete. Lama would not want us talking to these people until he can cast their stories in concrete. He will tape their words and take signed statements so that they cannot later have some altered recollection.

‘There is the rug,’ says Harry. ‘The one she was cleaning when they took her down.’

I question him with a look.

‘Heard me right,’ he says. ‘She was not in the casinos pulling handles when they got her.’ Harry punctures what he knows was my best hope to explain Laurel’s trip. There are people who consider travel, blurry-eyed and at the speed of light over the mountains, as a quick fix for the gambling disease.

‘She was in a laundromat doing the spin cycle when she was rudely interrupted,’ he says. ‘She was washing a bathroom throw rug,’ says Harry. He gives me a look like this is some crazy lady. What makes this worse for our side, as he explains, is that this particular rug has been identified by Jack Vega as belonging to him, part of the spoils of divorce. Jack has told the cops that it was in the house on the night of the murder, somewhere on the floor near the bath where Melanie was found dead. What Laurel was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home washing a rug is not clear. Harry shrugs his shoulders on this one.

‘Did the cops find anything on the rug? Blood?’ I say.

He shakes his head. ‘Clean as a whistle. She washed it in one of those chemical machines, the industrial ones with solvent.’

‘They’ll argue she cleaned it to destroy evidence,’ I tell him.

‘They already are, in a roundabout way,’ says Harry. ‘Powder residue tests on her hands. Came up negative. She’d dipped them into the solvent.’

Visions of Laurel’s inflamed hands. Powder-residue tests are used to determine if a suspect has recently fired a gun. The discharge of trace elements, chemicals, can be detected on the hands, and in the case of a long gun other parts of the body.

I sit, taking in air, like being sucker-punched. There is little that will ignite righteous indignation in a jury faster than inferences of evidence being destroyed.

‘Even assuming she did it, why would she take the rug? If it had blood on it, why not just leave it there?’

‘It’s one way to clean her hands and have an excuse for it.’ Harry’s tracking on what will surely be the state’s line of reasoning.

‘Next,’ he says. ‘One gold compact, with the initials MLH. This was found in Laurel’s purse at the time of the arrest.’

This means nothing to me.

‘MLH,’ he says. ‘Melanie Lee Hannan. The victim’s maiden name.’

‘Oh.’

Harry can tell by the look on my face that this is daunting, Lama’s case against Laurel beginning to stack up.

He gives me an expression, a tilt of the head, like who knows? ‘Never circle the wagons in defense too early,’ says Harry.

We’re both beginning to wonder if Jack was not right. That perhaps we should maybe have some early conference with the DA before the tides of temper run high.

‘Then we have videotapes,’ he says.

‘More than one?’

He nods.

The most damaging, he tells me, is the security video from the porch of the house, the night of the murder. It has the time and date imposed at the bottom left corner.

‘I haven’t seen it,’ says Harry. ‘We’ll have a copy in a few days. But the description isn’t good,’ he says. He reads from a page prepared by one of the evidence techs. They have pictures but no sound, what is described as a lot of angry and threatening gestures by Laurel toward the victim followed by the destruction of the camera by Laurel after the door was slammed in her face. According to the report, at one point Melanie, in the doorway, threatened to call the police if Laurel didn’t leave.

‘How do they know that with no sound?’ I ask.

‘Lip-readers,’ says Harry. He’s talking about experts who can read lips with field glasses a mile away. These people can take the art of sounding out words from a tape to whole new levels.

‘Do they know what Laurel was saying?’

‘If they do, it’s not in the report,’ he says.

‘What time was the tape?’

‘Twenty-seventeen hours,’ he says. Seventeen minutes after eight, the evening of the murder.

‘Time of death?’ I’m making notes on a pad, the critical elements.

‘Ah.’ He’s looking. ‘Eleven-thirty.’ This is as close an estimate as the medical examiner can make.

A little over three hours between the two events. ‘You said there were two tapes?’

‘Yeah. The courthouse earlier that day,’ he says. ‘There was a security camera in the ceiling when Laurel went after her.’

‘All we needed,’ I say. It was bad enough that there were a dozen witnesses. On film this attack will take on a whole new meaning. A skillful prosecutor can splice these pictures together with forceful argument. The image for our case is not a pleasant one. A brooding Laurel languishing over thoughts of vengeance for hours before presumably carrying out the deed. Their case is beginning to take form, handed to them on a platter, a blood feud between the two women, with one of them now dead.

‘The toughest part of their case,’ he says, ‘are the special circumstances.’ Harry does not believe that the DA can produce hard evidence that the killer, whoever he or she was, actually lay in wait for the victim.

‘No lurking in the corners on this one,’ says Harry. ‘Whoever did her came straight at her,’ he says. ‘And they fought. The evidence in the bathroom shows a scuffle. They’re playing it down,’ he says. ‘But the evidence is there. There was a perfume bottle shattered on the floor, like maybe she tried to throw it at the killer. A lot of stuff was knocked off the vanity. The scene was more consistent with evidence of a rash act of violence than somebody lurking in the shadows to do the victim quietly,’ says Harry.

It would be our first break in what is an otherwise seamless case for the state. Perhaps I can tell Danny and Julie Vega that at very least their mother is not facing death if convicted.

Tonight we will be burning the oil, a first cut on a pretrial motion to attack the indictment, to scuttle the special circumstances. For the first time in a week some of the knots in my stomach begin to unwind.

‘What else have they got?’ I ask him.

‘Bits and pieces,’ he says. ‘Very little blood in the tub, where they found the body. What was there is typed to the victim.

‘Melanie was shot near the tub in the master bath. She appears to have been unclothed. Probably getting ready for a bath. The cops are thinking she fell in when she was shot or else the killer picked her up and put her in the tub afterward. They’re still choreographing,’ says Harry.

‘Any powder burns?’ This could give a clue.

‘Pathology,’ he says. ‘Not in yet.’ We have a new medical examiner in this county. He is notoriously slow.

‘They did find some semen.’

‘Where?’

‘The sheets on the bed,’ he tells me. ‘Dried. No biggy. Police lab checked it. A secretor,’ says Harry.

About sixty percent of the general population are what are known as secretors. These are people who carry in their bloodstream a specific substance that makes it possible to determine their blood group from other body fluids — tears, perspiration, saliva, and in this case semen.

‘Blood type matches the husband,’ says Harry. He’s talking about Jack Vega.

‘Still, I’d like to check it,’ I tell him.

It is a problem most often in cases of disputed parentage, fudging on blood in a serology report. It is one of the areas I always check. Move a decimal point a few digits in one direction and the probability that blood belongs to one person or another, to the exclusion of all others, can go from one in a thousand to one in ten million.

I have known some good-time Charlies, working stiffs with a roving eye for the ladies, who are now on an eighteen-year cycle of support payments — paternity cases involving promiscuous mothers with more lovers than a rock band and children who look like the random sampling of a gene pool. It is what can happen in a lab when the candidate is itinerant and Welfare gives a little nudge. They figure the law of probabilities. If he didn’t do this one, he surely did another.

Though rarely is it a problem in a murder case, still I ask Harry to check the blood and semen, an independent analysis. Harry has the name of a good lab. I want to know if Melanie was bedding another lover, maybe passion gone astray as a motive for murder.

‘You think she was bobbing for apples with somebody else?’

I give him a face, like who knows? Harry makes a note to take care of it.

‘Any prints?’

‘Nothing they’ve disclosed,’ he says.

Fingerprints in a case like this can be a blade that cuts both ways. The absence of any prints tying Laurel to the crime, on its face, might lead to the inexorable conclusion that she was not there. On the other hand, if they can show by independent means that Laurel was inside the Vega home on the night of the murder — hair or fibers, a witness, any faint moves on the Ouija board of identification that a jury might buy — then the failure to find her prints in the house might lead to quiet conjecture, the kind you can’t counter, that she wore gloves. It is only a short hop from there to thoughts of premeditation.

Harry fanning more pages in his pile of papers.

‘All we have left is ballistics,’ he says. ‘Single nine-millimeter slug,’ says Harry. ‘Thin copper jacket. Badly deformed from the head shot. One copper casing, nine-millimeter Luger, with multiple toolmarks.’

‘How do they account for that?’ I ask. I’m thinking dry fire. I have known shooters, mostly hobbyists, hunters, and marksmen, who will work the slide on a semiautomatic by hand with live rounds to ensure that the gun will not jam when fired. This would leave extra marks on the cartridges where the tiny metal teeth grip the rim for ejection.

‘They’re saying the casing had been previously fired. Expanded and resized,’ he says.

‘A reload?’

‘That’s what they seem to be indicating.’

‘Where the hell would Laurel buy reloaded ammunition?’ Their theory starts to have holes.

Harry gives me a look like take your best guess. ‘You can buy the stuff at some ranges. Gun shows,’ he says. Harry plugging the leaks in their case. It might float, but these — gun shows and firing ranges — are not places I would ever expect to see Laurel.

‘Anything on the gun itself?’

He shakes his head. ‘They’re still looking for it. Lands and grooves on the bullet are a right-hand twist. Could be any of a dozen models sold. But here’s the interesting stuff,’ he says. ‘Their lab found some striations not quite as deep as the grooves. Four of them at the edges of the bullet,’ he says. ‘Each one about the width of a piece of coarse thread.’

‘Do they hazard a guess?’ I ask.

‘Without another bullet fired from the same piece to compare, it’s tough,’ says Harry. ‘But they think it’s a defect in the barrel of the gun.’

‘It’ll make the murder weapon easier to identify than dental plates if they find it,’ I say.

‘Let’s hope they don’t find it in Laurel’s apartment,’ says Harry.