Undue Influence

Chapter 10

Harry and I are on the way to the county jail, a meeting with Laurel. We’re doing the seven blocks on foot. It’s easier than trying to find a parking space.

‘You sure there’s not just a little family venom propelling this thing?’ he says. Harry’s talking about my ruminations that maybe Jack killed Melanie.

I’ve been beating this drum in my head all night, even in my sleep.

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to hang the fucker,’ he says. The fact that Vega is a politician is enough for Harry. The fact that he is dirty is to Harry merely part of the job description.

‘I admit I bear a little enmity,’ I say. ‘But there are things I haven’t told you.’

‘Like?’

‘Like the fact that Jack lied to the cops the night of the murder.’

I look over and Harry is a half stride behind. His interest piqued, he is now catching up.

‘He told them that he never owned a gun. That was a lie. A sloppy one. But then that’s Jack,’ I say. ‘The question and his answer were in the police report.’

‘He owns a gun?’

‘At least at one time he did. In his office, on the credenza, behind his desk, there are three trophies, a lot of marble and chrome,’ I say. ‘If you look, you’ll see they’re for target shooting. Pistols,’ I tell him. ‘One of those legislative tournaments where all the lobbyists and the people who hire them let the pols win.’

Jack was heavily into the gun culture. He took trips to the big national gun shows, paid for junkets, one in Dallas, another in Miami. Jack got trophies just for showing up. He also got a pistol, nickel plated in a walnut box, a lot of tooling and scrolling engraved on it. From one of the manufacturers. Tokens of appreciation for a vote against a gun control bill. He showed the thing all around the family a few years back, twirling it on one finger. ‘A semiautomatic,’ I tell Harry. ‘Nine millimeter.’

Harry whistles. ‘The cops went over the place with a tooth comb. They didn’t find it. You think he did it and got rid of the piece?’

It is a possible scenario, but I am reading other tea leaves.

‘What troubles me about the theory,’ I tell Harry, ‘is that I do not conceive Jack as a doer. Don’t get me wrong. I can see him, with enough motivation, planning a murder. But doing it is another thing. It is not Jack’s style. He is somebody who would brood over the justifications. Think about it for a while. Then go to some middleman, somebody he trusts, someone with connections in sleazoid circles to job it out.’

‘A crime of passion once removed,’ says Harry.

‘Passion? Maybe. Maybe it was more than that.’

‘But why would he lie about the gun? If he hired somebody, they wouldn’t have used Jack’s gun.’

‘I think that was Jack’s mistake. He probably panicked. When the cops asked him if he owned one, Jack thought they were zeroing in on him. Guilty knowledge makes people do stupid things. He lied for no reason. He wasn’t thinking. If he’d turned it over, my guess is they would have checked it and ballistics would come up negative. Now we’ve got him in a lie.’

‘It might look better for our side,’ he says, ‘if Jack can’t produce the gun.’ Harry likes it, then a point of concern: ‘Can we prove he knew she was having an affair?’

‘If I can get the tapes from Dana.’

‘Even if the feds destroyed them,’ says Harry, ‘we could subpoena the agent who monitored the conversations. Put him on the stand,’ he says.

‘And hope that he has a good memory for family dirt,’ I tell him.

‘A lot of hearsay,’ he says.

‘Perhaps with exceptions,’ I tell him.

‘State of mind?’

I nod. Statements made which reveal a person’s state of mind, what they believed to be true or untrue, are not considered hearsay when testified to by others. They are admissible in court.

‘What we don’t know,’ says Harry, ‘is if Vega knew she was pregnant. And if so, when he found out. That might have sent him over the top. A catalyst for murder would be a nice present to hand to the jury.’

‘Maybe,’ I say.

For me the trigger was Jack’s lack of passion when it was revealed that his wife was pregnant at death. I would have expected this to fuel his anger. But there was nothing. It was like he already knew about it.

‘Maybe Jack was more calculating,’ I tell Harry. ‘You have to remember he’d already taken the fall with the feds. Now he finds out his wife is unfaithful. He knows he’s headed for prison. What’s going through his mind?’ I say.

‘She ain’t gonna play the dutiful wife and wait for him.’ Harry finishes my thought.

‘Exactly. So Jack bides his time. Thinks through a plan. He makes a play for the kids, an end run for custody. Pisses off Laurel, gets her juices flowing, maybe does some things to direct Laurel’s venom toward Melanie. My young wife would like to play mommy for a while, so we’ll take your children. He sets the stage for a cat fight in court. Then he has Melanie popped and points the accusing finger at Laurel. She becomes the prime patsy. Jack gets custody of the kids and uses the tragedy of the murder to get the feds to reconsider his sentence. Voilà. He’s out on probation.’

‘Minus one wife,’ says Harry.

‘You got to admit he cuts his losses,’ I say.

‘You think the guy’s that devious?’

‘Knowing Jack?’ I give Harry a lot of arched eyebrows.

‘Still, it leaves some questions. Like what was Laurel doing up in Reno?’ he says. ‘And how did she come by the rug, the one from Jack’s house that she was doing in the laundry?’

‘Only one person can tell us that.’

From the outside it looks like some tony downtown hotel, eight stories of curving concrete — the Bastille Park Regency, Capital County’s newest addition, a sixteen-million-dollar jail.

Each of the seven floors above the main level is divided into sections by looming walls of acrylic, several inches thick and two stories high, floor to ceiling, a transparent matrix, set in a steel gridwork. These give the place the feeling of an aquarium without water. Behind the acrylic are the attractions, fifteen hundred inmates at any one time.

The jail was built three years ago and is already beyond capacity.

The people incarcerated here are not in cells as you would think of them. There are no bars. They sleep behind doors of solid steel, in a room six-by-ten, walls, floor, and ceiling made of concrete with air pumped in from ducts in the ceiling.

Those who reside here are the sand in the gears of society, charter members of the ‘five percent club,’ that minority who always seem to cause the majority of problems. Most are not archcriminals. They lack the intelligence, drive, or discipline to do anything well, least of all the commission of any gainful lawless act. Their lives are a mix of madness and mirth, sometimes in lethal proportions. Sad cases every one. The man who torched his business for the insurance and lit himself up like a roman candle, and who now hangs patches of synthetic skin like little yellow flags from the handles of the weight machine after showering; the guy they call the Phantom of the Opera, who tried to commit suicide with a shotgun and flinched; the Asian immigrant so disgraced by a drunk-driving arrest that he performed a fatal swan dive onto concrete from the second-tier balcony; the swimmer who sealed the crack at the bottom of his cell door with a towel and stopped up the toilet until things were deep enough to dog paddle; and the hapless guard who saw the little puddle outside the cell door and decided to open it. All are members of the cast who have walked the corridors of this place, our own local version of the cuckoo’s nest.

I wonder if there is hidden significance to the fact that Laurel, whose psyche is stretched more taut than piano wire, is now here.

We enter near the booking area, which has the efficiency of a cattle chute. We are in the age of stardust. Fingerprints are now taken on a glass strip and imaged on a computer screen where copies can be made and sent to state and federal agencies for cross-checking in other crimes. Inside this building everything is monitored by computer: meals the inmates eat, who is going to court on any given day, the time and department, who gets suits and who goes in jail togs, who’s in the detention of isolation and for how long. Drop out from the computer’s mighty RAM, and your sentence becomes eternity. The machine is God, a brazen idol whose gaze is a luminous blue screen. On the few occasions that it has gone down, this place has been its own version of administrative hell.

They have searched our briefcases and put Harry and me through the metal detector on the ground floor. Open your mouth to complain and the price of admission may become a cavity search.

The only defense attorneys who garner any trust in this place are the public defenders, who see less daylight than many of the prisoners. They are often on a first-name basis with the guards, something that does not engender much confidence among their clients.

This morning we are headed upstairs to what the guards in this place call the pods, one of the holding areas that resemble cargo bays from the starship Enterprise — sleek and foreboding. Being new, it is all very clean, surfaces that would require a diamond to scratch your initials.

The elevator has slick walls of stainless steel to which even spit will not adhere. Once inside you discover there are no buttons to select your floor. To get to your destination you have to talk, as Harry and I do, while looking at the camera mounted on the ceiling, twelve feet up in the corner of the car. I tell the guard in some unseen monitoring station: ‘Seventh floor.’

Seconds later the doors open, a temporary reprieve from the onset of claustrophobia. A guard waiting for us.

A few of the inmates, all females on this side of the tower, are exercising beyond the acrylic wall. Two more are playing Ping Pong, while others wander, read, or watch television in the ‘day room,’ a large open area on the level beneath us. Here they are monitored by guards watching video screens in a control room, cameras in every crevice. With all of this, it is a monument to the ingenuity of man that drugs and other contraband still make their way into this place.

Harry and I are like cattle with our ears punched, wearing tags that mark us as visitors. We are ushered to the lawyers’ conference room, a concrete closet on the tier above the day room. Laurel is waiting when we arrive. There is heavy plate glass between us, with a small mike embedded so we can hear each other.

She wears a hopeful expression, with the ‘B-word’ of passage for every prisoner on her lips before I can sit: ‘Any more word on bail?’ she says.

We have been up and down on this three times on separate motions to obtain bail in the last month.

She’s dressed in blue jeans and a blue work shirt. There’s a haggard look about the eyes that says she has not been sleeping well. Laurel is a person who fairly hums with physical and nervous energy, who finds it difficult to be still even for a moment, who always takes the stairs, never the elevator. Being locked in a six-by-ten cell with no windows must to Laurel be a living nightmare. The view from beyond the glass is of slowly crumbling human wreckage.

I have to dash her hopes. Our final attempt at bail has been denied, a hearing in which Morgan Cassidy played up the fact that Laurel was apprehended in another state. The court has bought into the concept that my client is a flight risk.

‘I could reopen the issue if I knew what you were doing in Reno,’ I tell her. This is a sore point, as Laurel has not been forthcoming.

‘That again,’ she says, ‘I can’t tell you.’ She’s looking at the ceiling, a pained expression. ‘Have you decided yet whether you will help me with Danny and Julie?’ she says.

This whole exercise is becoming circular. Somehow these things, her trip to Reno and the children, are wedded, but I haven’t yet figured out the connection.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ I say. ‘You’ve got to trust me. What is it you want?’

‘You know,’ she says. She makes a face but doesn’t want to say it out loud, wondering if others are listening over the microphone. It is a cryptic little dance we have done over two sessions now. She wants me to help her get the kids away from Jack, to usher them out-of-state, probably to her friend in Michigan, the one she told me about on the phone that day before her arrest when she called from Reno.

‘You know I can’t,’ I say.

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘We’ve been through this before. I’m an officer of the court,’ I tell her. ‘Jack has a temporary custody order. Do this,’ I say, ‘and the court will make it permanent.’

‘Help me and he’ll never find them.’ With all of her problems, lashing out at Jack — a preemptive strike involving the kids — still seems to be at the top of her agenda.

I shake my head in frustration. Dealing with Laurel is becoming a cross to bear.

‘The answer is no.’

‘Then I can’t tell you what I was doing in Reno.’ She turns her head away from me. This is her final answer. Unless I help her with the children, she is holding this information hostage.

‘You can’t do this. When we get to court, we have to be able to explain to the jury what you were doing there. That you weren’t on the run. That you weren’t fleeing from the crime. That your trip to Reno had nothing to do with Melanie’s murder.’

A long silence. Nothing from her.

‘It didn’t — did it?’

She looks at me, fire in her eyes. ‘No.’

But still she won’t tell me what she was doing there.

‘Let’s come back to that later. Let’s talk about the bathroom rug,’ I say. More ground we have been over.

‘Jack says it belongs to him. He says it was in the house, in the bathroom on the night of the murder.’

‘Jack’s a liar,’ she says. ‘He would say anything to make it look bad for me. The man is plainly vindictive.’ Coming from Laurel, this is like Typhoid Mary warning of a plague.

I have not told her about my theory that Jack himself may have had reason to murder Melanie.

‘Then where did the rug come from?’

‘I’ve told you,’ she says. ‘It was mine. It came from my apartment.’

‘What was it doing in Reno? Why were you washing it?’

‘We’ve gone over all of that.’

‘Let’s do it one more time.’

‘Fine,’ she says, like I’m wasting her time.

‘My cat slept on it. He used the rug as a bed. It was full of cat hair. It needed to be washed. How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘So you went to Reno to launder the rug? Is that what you want us to tell the jury?’ says Harry.

She gives him a face, a lot of sarcasm.

‘No. I went to Reno for other reasons. I figured while I was there I would wash the rug. I was killing time.’

‘Let’s hope that’s all you were killing,’ says Harry.

‘Screw you,’ she says. ‘Why don’t I just get the public defender?’ She’s up off the stool on her side, pacing as much as the space will allow.

‘Hot as a pistol,’ says Harry. ‘We gotta get her out of here. The place is having a bad effect,’ he says.

‘Fuck you,’ she says, ‘and the horse you rode in on.’

My sister-in-law is no wilting daisy. She is reaching the snapping point. If it weren’t for the glass I think she could tear out Harry’s throat. She has lost ten pounds since being jailed, weight she could not afford to give up. Still, she could take Harry two out of three falls.

‘Sit down,’ I tell her.

She looks at me, an expression I have seen on Sarah when she is certain not a soul in the world loves her.

‘Please,’ I say.

She sits and looks at me, a petulant child. It is the problem with Laurel, embattled, fighting wars on so many fronts she can no longer distinguish friend from foe. She is giving us a harder time than she gave the cops, forcing us to do the third degree.

‘You have to admit on its face it doesn’t make much sense. People don’t take dirty laundry on a trip.’

‘This person does.’ She says it matter-of-fact, like this is it, final answer on the subject.

Maybe it’s the problem with real life, but there are some things you just can’t tell to a jury — not and possess any credibility when you are finished. I tell her this.

‘Fine. Then make up some other explanation.’

‘Even if I were willing, my imagination isn’t that facile.’

‘Then the truth is the best answer.’ On this she has me.

For the moment we are dead on bail and no closer to a credible explanation of her conduct on the night of the murder.

We talk about something else. I want to know why she went after Melanie that day in the courthouse.

She looks at me. ‘I don’t know that I did,’ she says. ‘Did I hit her?’

‘Like she was a railroad spike and you were John Henry,’ says Harry. We have viewed the tape from the courthouse.

‘Well, I guess I didn’t like what she said on the stand.’

‘What in particular?’ I say.

‘What she said about drugs.’

‘But you said something that day. Something about Melanie staying away from your kids. What was that all about?’

She fumes, looks at the floor. ‘Oh, hell. I suppose it will all come out. Jack knows about it. He’s probably already told the cops.’

My chest starts to tighten. Like burnt toast, I smell some damaging admission on its way.

‘It happened the week before she died.’ This is Laurel’s characterization of Melanie’s passing, like some geriatric who slipped away in her sleep.

‘I was supposed to take Danny to a concert in the city.’

‘San Francisco?’ I ask.

She nods.

‘Pearl Jam was playing — ’

‘What’s a Pearl Jam?’ says Harry.

‘Rock group,’ she says.

A rolling nod like now he understands.

‘Except I couldn’t afford to buy the tickets. Jack was late with support payments as usual. I was short. It was either pay the rent or buy the tickets for the concert. I had to tell Danny. He was disappointed, but he took it well. Somehow, I don’t know how, whether Danny mentioned it to Jack, and Jack said something to her, but somehow she found out.’

‘Melanie?’

‘Right. The next thing I know she’s bought two tickets and they’re off to see Pearl Jam. She drove Danny to the city in the new Jag Jack bought her. It was the last straw.

‘I didn’t know about it. Julie told me in the corridor outside the courtroom. I just snapped,’ she says. ‘I just lost it. When I saw her standing there with you and Jack, talking like nothing had happened, I could have killed the bitch,’ she says.

I look at the microphone and pray that no other ears are listening.

She fades a little beyond the glass, her shoulders drooping like some wilted flower.

To Laurel her kids were everything. More than a soft place in the heart, they made the world go round. She would have left Jack years before, in the flash of an eye, but for Julie and Danny. She stayed, putting up with the man and his nights of wandering lust, because of the children. Now Jack had left her for a younger woman, a manipulator who at least in Laurel’s eyes was making moves to entice Laurel’s children away, buying them the things she could not, while Jack bludgeoned her over custody. Embattled and alone, fighting for everything she valued in life, to the reasoned mind Laurel’s flash of anger in the courthouse that day might seem perfectly plausible. But to a jury weighing charges of homicide, it could also provide the specter of a motive for murder.

Downstairs, Harry and I drop the visitor badges in a box at the front counter and head through the lobby of the jail. I’m five steps from the door when he walks through and almost into my arms. Baseball cap drawn to the ears, the only kid I know who wears the bill to the front, Danny Vega sees me and smiles.

‘Uncle Paul. Did you see Mom?’ he says.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visitors’ day,’ he says. ‘First time they would let me in.’

Looking at the tattooed crowd of tough faces, Danny is a little taken aback, but seems a bit relieved to have run into us.

‘Do you wanna come up with me?’

‘I’d love to, but I have a client waiting at the office.’

I introduce Harry, but Danny’s not looking. Instead he is studying the escalator to the mezzanine, the route taken by most visitors to see friends or relatives. He scans the ceiling, nearly three stories over his head, light fixtures like star bursts.

‘Whoa. What a place,’ he says.

To Danny, whose generation has lived out their school life in portable classrooms, that taxpayers would foot the bill for a structure on this scale is, I suppose, a novelty. He is lost in other thoughts, checking it out, I can tell by the look, fantasies of hang-gliding down from the ceiling dancing in his mind, or the raucous ride a skateboard could do down the escalator.

‘I haven’t been here before,’ he says.

I can tell.

‘How did you get here?’

‘Vespa’s across the street at the library,’ he tells me, ‘in the bike rack.’

‘Does your father know you’re here?’

He gives me a look, Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

Jack doesn’t have a clue. What’s worse, I know, is the only thing that would bother Vega is that the kid is here to see his mother. But for this, I suspect Jack couldn’t give a damn where Danny was.

‘How’s Mom?’

‘She’s fine. A little tired,’ I tell him. ‘Otherwise she’s okay.’

‘Are you gonna get her off?’ There is an urgency in his soulful eyes. This is Danny. Cut to the quick, bottom line, why mess around?

‘We’re going to try.’

‘How does it look?’

‘We’re still collecting evidence,’ I tell him. ‘It’s going to be a tough case.’

‘It looks that bad?’

‘Not to worry,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll deal. We’ll cope. Your mother is a tough lady.’ A lot of brave talk without an answer to his question.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘But she didn’t do it.’

‘I know,’ I tell him. ‘We’re gonna do everything we can.’

‘Can’t you talk to the judge?’ he says. To Danny the elements of justice are simple.

‘It’s not that easy,’ I tell him.

‘I know,’ he says. The boy’s hands are suddenly everywhere, nervous gestures like he doesn’t know what to do with them. Finally he reaches out to Harry. Shakes his hand.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he says. ‘I gotta go.’ He nods to me, a big smile, the same one I remember as being toothless when he was seven. He turns and saunters toward the line leading to the escalator.

I watch for a moment as Danny walks through the metal detector. Beepers go off and they send him back. A guard passes a hand-held magnetometer over the boy’s jeans. Danny empties his pockets, a handful of loose keys and a folding knife that they take in return for a claim check.

As I watch him disappear up the escalator, I want to spit at the self-indulgence of my generation. My guilt as a father simmering deep inside, vapors of shame. We are a society that sheds spouses and takes on new lovers faster than a raja can work through his harem. We dissolve entire families on a whimsy of lust. We pursue bald ambition as if it were the true religion, leaving our children to come home to empty houses, to fix their own meals, to cope with the crippling insecurities of adolescence, while we engage in an endless chase after the grail of possessions. And we have the audacity to wonder who killed the innocence of childhood.