Undue Influence

Chapter 3

‘Uncle Paul.’

Danny Vega is waiting for me at my house, a hangdog expression under the bill of a Giants cap. He is all elbows on knees, the architecture of youth, good for propping up chins when sitting, as he is now on my front porch.

It is nearly four in the morning, and he is about the last person I would expect to see.

‘Danny?’ I say.

He can read the question in my voice.

‘Baby-sitter said we could come over. I put my junk and the scooter in the garage,’ he says. He looks up at me, brown oval eyes. ‘It’s okay, isn’t it?’ He says this like maybe I’m going to throw him out into the street.

‘Sure,’ I say. I give him a smile, perhaps the only soft look he’s had from an adult in days.

I can see the little Vespa by my workbench, Danny’s way in the single-parent world. Next to it is a red helmet and a small daypack.

Laurel and I had given him the little motor scooter as a gift on his last birthday. Danny made a small wooden box that fits neatly on the back where, under hasp and lock, he keeps the mystical items that capture the fancy of a fifteen-year-old.

‘Where’s your mother? Why didn’t she drive you?’

He humps his shoulders and shakes his head, as much as forearms will allow.

‘Thought she might be with you,’ he says. Danny hasn’t got a clue where Laurel is.

Chills course through my body, a combination of sleep deprivation and thoughts of where Laurel might be at this hour.

None of this seems to concern Danny. He is glum in the way teenagers often are. Little would excite him short of nuclear attack, and that only because of its brilliant flashes. Despite a desperate home situation, his expression is a map of feckless innocence.

He often seems to be transmitting on a different frequency. In his moments of deepest musing you could lose your ass wagering on what was coursing through that mind. In any conversation it can take half a day to figure what he is talking about, and if you took ten guesses you would no doubt be wrong in nine. The kid is in an adolescent daze, trapped somewhere between puberty and the twilight zone.

Danny looks nothing like Jack. Coloring and eyes, around the mouth, he is his mother’s boy. While Danny has noticed, he has yet to undertake any serious forays beyond the gender gulf. He has no serious friends of the fairer persuasion, though I have seen a few girls bat their eyes his way, lashes like Venus fly-traps. In his own way, while not effeminate, Danny was prettier than they were. The gyrations of MTV seem to hold no apparent allure. I have never seen him out-of-doors without a baseball cap, worn to the ears in the image of idols on trading cards from the fifties. By all appearances he has avoided the social disorder of American youth, the affliction of ‘cool.’ But he has paid a price. Danny suffers the immutable pain of not being one of the guys. His single attempt at socialization, a ride in a boosted buggy with the boys, was powered by peer pressures more combustible than anything in an engine block. And it ended with a sputtering backfire, in the glare of a flashing light bar and the harsh words of a father who for much of Danny’s life was absent. All things considered, I think Danny Vega would have been happier had he been born on a farm in a verdant field — sometime in the last century.

‘She said you went over to Dad’s, that something happened.’ The ‘she’ he is talking about I assume is Mrs. Bailey, who’s been fielding my phone. Danny is a lexicon of disjointed thoughts.

‘Julie’s inside.’ He offers this up without my asking.

‘I think she’s asleep,’ he says.

He doesn’t ask what happened at his father’s. Instead he’s off again on another wavelength, something about wax and a model he has to make, a project for school, he says.

I do a double take at four in the morning. Wax.

‘Your aunt used to use some for canning. I think there might be some in the garage,’ I say. ‘Can it wait till morning?’ I give him a large yawn.

‘Okay.’

‘When did you see your mom last?’

He makes a face, thinking back. ‘Three — or so. Maybe it was four.’

To Danny time is a fungible commodity. Like grain or pork bellies, any hour of the day can be traded for any other. He doesn’t own a watch.

‘She went out, said she’d be back.’

I give him a look, like — ‘And?’

‘She never showed up.’

This is not a usual occurrence, the reason the boy is here.

Laurel may be many things, but she is not a dilettante mother. Her few wayward evenings turned into early dawn, like the escapade with her confessor, I can count almost on the hairs of my palm. These infrequent lapses have occurred only when the kids were safely elsewhere. Laurel is not one to subject her children to the odious intrusion of quick alcoholic lovers or fortnight Lotharios.

I ask Danny if he’s eaten.

‘Some Froot Loops and a banana.’

‘You hungry?’ I ask

‘Sure.’

I wave him on into the house and forage in the cupboards of the kitchen for some crackers and a can of soup. These days I am not exactly a dietitian’s wet dream.

Mrs. Bailey has fallen asleep on my front room couch. I can see her through the open door of the kitchen, and feel the rattle of her snoring on the floorboards.

‘Where were you tonight? I called the house earlier, nobody answered.’ I put the can in the opener. It twirls like a carousel until the lid collapses.

He rolls his eyes, gives me a kind of dumb-kid smile.

‘Julie asked me to go over to a friend’s. She uses me,’ he says, ‘like for wheels. It’s not that I mind,’ he says. But I can tell he’s embarrassed, performing shuttle duties for his sister, who is two years younger, to her boyfriend’s house. Unlike her brother, Julie’s social plane is pressurized, and designed to fly in the stratosphere. She dates boys older than Danny, guys who think nothing of calling her at ten to have her over at eleven.

Julie is a honey-blonde, with blue eyes, good bones, and a feminine form that is ripening faster than her ability to reason. She is learning all too quickly that good looks, rather than good works, can often get you what you want.

The downsides, the temptations of excess and the price to be paid, still elude the telemetry of her radar. At thirteen she is the sexual equivalent of a toddler with a nuclear warhead. Were I Julie’s father, I would have my broker investing heavily in a nunnery.

I put the soup in front of Danny, no ladle, just a bowl, microwave hot. I draw up a chair across from him at the table.

‘There’s something I have to talk to you about.’

He’s spooning it down, looking up at me with doelike eyes. His cap is politely off, on the table next to his dish with crackers.

‘There was an accident tonight at your dad’s house. A bad accident. A shooting,’ I say.

He takes the spoon away from his mouth, and still holding it, rests forearm and utensil on the table. The spoon is shaking at its tip.

‘Is my dad all right?’ He’s looking at me wide-eyed.

With all the anguish of an open custody battle, and Jack’s short temper with the boy, Danny still cares about his father.

‘Your dad’s fine.’

He starts to eat again.

‘But Melanie is dead,’ I say.

He stops for a moment and looks at me, swallows hard. There was no love lost with Melanie, the usual friction of kids with a stepparent. But still I can tell that he is rattled by this news. To the young, life is an infinite, never-ending party. Even for kids like Danny, who live outside the loop of their peers, death is a vagrant who wanders another street. I had watched him at Nikki’s funeral. To Danny it was something surreal to have known someone, to have talked to and touched someone who was no longer with us.

‘How’d it happen?’ he asks.

‘They don’t know for sure. The police are still investigating.’

‘The cops?’ he says.

‘They investigate any cause of death that is not natural,’ I tell him.

‘Oh — I guess so,’ he says.

He’s back to the spoon. But I can tell things are rattling around upstairs under that mop of hair.

‘I guess Dad’s pretty shook up.’

‘You could say that.’

I don’t tell him that the police are looking to question his mother. He will find out soon enough. I can hope that in the interim, circumstances might conspire to put her in the clear. Little sense in worrying the kid until I know more.

‘Are you okay?’ I say. I’m eyeing him as this news goes down with the soup to be digested.

‘The wax,’ he says, ‘is it white, pretty clear?’

‘Emm?’

‘For the model,’ he says.

‘Ah. Yeah. In a block,’ I say. ‘A white block, as I remember.’

‘Will you help me find it first thing?’ he says.

‘Sure. Eat and get some sleep.’ Earth to Danny. The kid is off on a frequency of his own. What is left of my family is coming apart, and Danny Vega is worried about wax.

This morning I am running on adrenaline and something that looks like the discharge from the Exxon Valdez. I take a sip and my tongue curls like a slug in death throes. An hour’s sleep in a night can do funny things to your eyes. I wonder if maybe the sign over the little drive-in stall read ‘Esso’ instead of’ ‘Espresso.’

When I arrive, Harry Hinds is in my office, borrowing my morning paper. Harry has an office down the hall. We share a library and reception services and have talked about a partnership. It’s one of those things, we talk, but neither of us is willing to make the first move. Like Harry says, ‘Why ruin a good friendship with marriage?’

Hinds is almost twenty years my senior, a fixture in the legal community of this city. A balding head and a nose like Karl Malden’s, he has done some heavy-duty criminal work in his day, and now talks a lot about retirement. Those who know him well tell me that Harry has been talking about retirement since he passed the bar forty years ago. I have no doubt that when the end comes they will have to pry Harry’s dead fingers from his briefcase, which he packs like a portable office. For Harry there are too many psychic battles ahead to pitch it in. He now feeds on referrals from my practice along with a steady diet of his own clients and acts as my number two in heavier cases.

This morning Harry’s on a roll, newspaper in hand, feet propped on the edge of my wastebasket, uttering suppressed profanities, little whispered vulgarities mixed with what for Harry when talking politics passes for reason. Harry hates all things official, with a special fetish for politicians and their hangers-on. He is not a Republican or Democrat. Harry is of his own affiliation, a party conceived under the tree of distrust for government and fueled by a zealot’s devotion to a creed. He is what I would call a ‘social contrarian.’ Harry is largely against everything.

Lately he’s gone into the clipping services, taping articles from the morning papers to various areas on my desk. It is his effort to enlist the apathetic. Each day I find a new batch of these, his musings penned on square-inch Post-It notes, the travails of the world, all the things Harry can do nothing about but bitch.

His interests are eclectic — world trade; the national debt, which is too big, and the nation’s defenses, which are too small; the environment, which is overly protected, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it seems the polar hole in the ozone has its effect on Harry. On those days he joins the Greens. Never let it be said that Harry is bewitched by the forces of consistency. And always there is a side to him floating just above the waterline of humor, when you never know if Harry is truly on the level.

Without even saying hello, Harry is reading to me, a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. It seems the federal government has sold two truckloads of used computer equipment for forty-five dollars. Harry bitches about the price, the dousing of taxpayers, until he discovers further on that the government wants the equipment back. In an instant, less time than it would take to squeeze a trigger, Harry has chained himself to the bulwarks of free enterprise, shouting the battle cry: ‘fucking Indian givers.’

Another paragraph and Harry discovers why the government is reneging. These particular computers contain confidential information, the names and addresses of hundreds of federally protected witnesses, carted away for their own safety, information which a government technician has failed to adequately erase before selling the computers. Questions of political theory land in the dustbin as Harry sees a wedge of opportunity.

‘Can you imagine all the puckered assholes?’ He says this with a wicked gleam in his eye, like a schoolboy who’s discovered a treasure map.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘we should hang this on the bulletin board in the county jail. Your government at work for you. A snitch’s worst nightmare.’ Then he giggles in the pitch of a cheap tenor.

This is the Harry I know. He can go every direction at once, with the only true course change coming on the winds of opportunity. The notion of some prosecutor whose case would be creamed because his ace witness suddenly grew legs and walked, or suffered a bout of terminal laryngitis on the eve of trial, these are thoughts destined to catch Harry’s fancy.

After all things are said, Harry is a defender, dyed-in-the-wool, sworn to the cause of the underdog. He views any commitment to the objective processes of the law as its own form of treason. In trial before the bar, Harry takes no prisoners. He will seize and hold tenaciously any edge that is offered by circumstance. It is just that Harry’s idea of happy circumstance can at times be a little skewed.

For the moment I leave Harry in his negative nirvana, uttering the party mantra over the sacred scrolls.

I pick up the phone to call Clem Olsen, a friend at police dispatch. Clem and I went to high school together. He has always been a straight shooter. When he can he will talk, little musings like the oracle on Delphi — he will tell me what is wafting on the airwaves of the police band.

I get him after two rings.

‘Clem,’ I say. ‘Paul Madriani here.’ Light-voiced, I make it sound like a social call.

‘Hey, baby.’ Clem has called everyone he knows ‘baby’ since the tenth grade. I have heard him on tapes do homicide calls like the Wolfman, while frantic citizens scream hysterical gibberish about blood and bullets on the nine-eleven number.

Clem never made it to college, instead he did the woodshop routine and left school without a clue, until the Army got ahold of him in the Vietnam draft. They taught him how to kill, and later radios. From these Clem found his own way to the police department.

‘You gonna make the reunion?’ he says. This affair, it seems, occurs every five years now, where Clem, for one shining night, rises to the level of some higher aspiration as class MC.

‘Gonna try,’ I say.

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You remember the girl, the blonde from homeroom our senior year, the one with the hooters like two dead cone-heads? Do you remember her name?’ he says. ‘Can’t find her on the mailing list.’

This, a girl’s form from twenty-five years ago, is something Clem would etch in his mind like the inscriptions of the Commandments in stone.

I tell him I can’t remember. I don’t puncture the illusion that nature has by now probably worked its will, and that gravity has no doubt taken its toll. I could tell him to look at his own love handles, which now sag like sodden saddlebags from his hips. But with Clem, memories of the past are always more valid than images of the present.

‘Listen, I got a favor to ask.’

‘If I can,’ he says.

‘Last night there was a shooting — a legislator’s wife out in the east area.’

He cannot have missed this. Melanie’s death, while too late to make the first-edition papers, has hit the a.m. news shows, both TV and radio, with all the cheery dignity of checkout-counter journalism. The video cameras panned the body all the way into the coroner’s van. The reporters with their mikes and plastered hair did everything but zip open the body bag to see if she was wearing her nightie.

‘I heard,’ he says.

‘If you can tell me,’ I say, ‘have there been any APBs? Anybody they’re looking for in connection, maybe for questioning?’

A long pause, like he knows but is not sure whether he should tell me.

‘Wouldn’t be you got a client?’ he says.

Clem is a friend, but he has never been close enough to climb my family tree. He has no sense of my kinship to Laurel, or for that matter her former relationship to the grieving legislator.

‘Not at this time.’ I won’t lie to him, but I shave the edges of truth a little.

‘I’d have to check the overnight dispatches,’ he says. ‘Can I call you back?’ Clem wants to make discreet inquiries to determine exactly how much he can tell me.

‘Sure thing. I’ll be here all morning.’ I give him the backline number so he can call direct, around my receptionist. On items like this Clem doesn’t like to talk through middlemen.

Harry’s into another incantation, with more gusto now that I am off the phone, still chanting from behind his curtain of newsprint.

‘Health-care reform by the same crowd who gave us tax simplification,’ says Harry. ‘Why don’t I believe it?’

I ignore him and hope it will go away.

‘You know they will exempt themselves,’ he says.

I don’t know who he’s talking about, and I don’t want to ask. But Harry volunteers.

‘Fuckers in Congress,’ he says. ‘They wanna be able to roll their asses over to Bethesda at the first sign of a sniffle, for the red carpet treatment. A private suite with hot and cold running Navy nurses,’ he says. ‘That’s so they can have a good grope and get saluted at the same time.’

Harry fans a page and looks for more grist for his mill.

‘So there’s no word on her?’ He says this in a different tone. This time I can’t mistake the subject of his inquiry. He’s talking about Laurel. Harry knows that I am in a family way on this thing. I called Harry early this morning. Got him out of bed and told him about my all-night stand at Vega’s house and the attempt at inquisition by Jimmy Lama.

‘No word,’ I say.

‘You can always hope,’ he says. ‘Who knows? Maybe they’ve given her up. Found another suspect.’

‘I might feel better if I knew what the the cops had.’

‘Maybe you wouldn’t,’ he says. ‘Maybe she did it.’ This is Harry, soothing you with his blarney one instant and honing the knife’s edge on your open wounds the next.

I give him a look, like thanks for the comforting thoughts.

‘Well, hey, it does happen,’ he says. ‘Crime of passion, the tangled triangle,’ says Harry. ‘Two women doing battle over the same man. Jealous ex and the beautiful younger wife.’ He gives me arched eyebrows over the press-cut edges of the morning paper.

‘Vega would love you for the thought,’ I tell him. ‘The women in his life ready to kill for Jack. It’s a premise to fatten his ego.’

The Capitol dome will float ten feet higher if this notion were to find public expression. But Harry is right. It’s a theory not likely to be lost on an eager prosecutor.

‘And where did she go?’ Harry’s talking about Laurel.

‘You think it’s just coincidence?’ he says. ‘She happens to vanish the night her ex’s latest squeeze buys it. Doesn’t tell the kids where she’s going. Just takes off for parts unknown.’ Harry’s playing kibitzer for the devil, musing behind the paper, foraging for something more to raise the level of his bile.

‘Irrespective of your feelings,’ he says, ‘I think you gotta admit, the cops might have good reason for suspicions.’

‘Joining the force, are you?’

‘My feet aren’t flat enough,’ he says.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ I tell him. ‘Lama must have thought he was having a wet dream the minute he found out Laurel and I were related. Blood, marriage, it wouldn’t matter. It’s any way to drive the sword with that one.’

‘I can imagine,’ says Harry. ‘How’s it feel?’ He wiggles his ass a little deeper into the chair, as if to reveal where Lama might have buried this thing in me.

‘From what I hear,’ he says, ‘whenever Jimmy is in pain, it is your name he takes in vain.’

I don’t answer him.

The phone rings on my desk.

‘Hello.’

‘Clem here.’

‘That didn’t take you long,’ I say.

‘Heyyyy, the Wolfman don’t disappoint.’ A voice like somebody sandblasted his vocal cords. ‘You must be clairbuoyant.’ Clem’s understanding of the language does not come from reading it.

‘Like you said, APB went out at oh-two-twenty today,’ he says. ‘Issued for one Laurel Jane Vega, age thirty-six, height…’

‘That’s all I need.’ I cut him off.

‘And a bad actor at that,’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Listed as possibly armed and dangerous.’

This means that Laurel, if she is found, would be taken at the point of a loaded pistol. Some foolish gesture, a wave of a loose hand through her hair, and I could be minus one more family member. More stark than this is the thought that Clem’s superiors have allowed this information to come my way. Whatever they have linking Laurel to murder, they see as solid.