Undue Influence

Chapter 4

Like clockwork I do the gym every Thursday at noon, the place Laurel used to work before she disappeared.

It’s a dozen blocks from my office to the Capital Gymnasium and Athletic Club. At twelve-fifteen I get an urgent message delivered on the squash court. I take my leave, to one of the white telephones lined in cloistered booths in the foyer.

‘Hello.’

‘Paul.’ She is breathless.

When I hear the voice I have a single question: ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘I don’t have much time. Where’s Julie and Danny?’ Laurel’s voice is strained and tired. What I would expect from someone who has been on the lam for nearly two days now.

‘Half the county is looking for you.’

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

‘Then where are you? Why did you run?’

‘I can’t talk.’

‘Come in, give yourself up,’ I tell her. ‘They’re calling you armed and dangerous.’

She laughs at this. A nervous titter.

‘It’s no joke. Cops with an adrenaline rush have a habit of shooting,’ I tell her.

‘I’ll be okay. Do you have the kids?’ Laurel’s mind at this moment is a monorail, single track and rolling with her children on board.

‘I did until yesterday. Jack had ’em picked up from school by one of his AAs.’ These are gofers who do menial tasks for legislators — lackeys-in-waiting.

‘Damn it.’ Silence on the phone while she thinks. I can smell it like burning neoprene coming over the line, the machinations of panic on the run. Still, Laurel has not completely lost her mind. She has found me in the one place where Lama is not likely to be eavesdropping. With Jimmy you can’t take much comfort in the formalities of magistrates and judicially ordered wiretaps. I’ve suspected for days now that my phone has suddenly become a party line.

‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. Her kids.

‘Why?’

‘I want them out of there.’

I think her brain is scrambled. ‘You want them on the run with you?’

‘No. No. A friend,’ she says. ‘In Michigan.’

‘That’s not my biggest concern at this moment,’ I say.

‘Oh, shit,’ and she’s gone from the phone — a receding voice, sound vanishing like fog on a warming day.

‘Hello. Are you there?’ I get mental images — Laurel swinging around some corner, enough tension on the phone cord to break it. Then I hear her breathing closer again.

‘What happened?’

‘Police just swung by in the parking lot,’ she says. ‘It’s okay. They’re gone now. Probably just a coffee break,’ she tells me. ‘My picture is everywhere,’ she says. ‘Even up here.’

I could get a map and play with little pins, my twenty best guesses on where ‘up’ is.

‘Use your head,’ I tell her. ‘You’re no good to your kids dead or in prison. Come in and we’ll deal with it.’ I try to engage her in conversation. I ask her where she was the night of Melanie’s death, hoping for an alibi, something I can bootstrap into an argument for our side, to induce her in.

‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. She’s back to her children.

‘They’re fine. You’re the one in trouble,’ I tell her. ‘Come in, I’ll meet you, pick you up. I’ll make arrangements with the DA to surrender,’ I say. ‘It’ll go much better at trial. We’ll have a shot at bail,’ I tell her. I’ve got more closers than a used-car salesman. None of them working.

‘Not till the kids are gone,’ she says. ‘Out-of-town. Then I’ll surrender.

‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I have a friend in Michigan. Went to college together. She’s willing to take the kids, keep them there quietly until this is over.’

‘Your kids can handle it,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take care of them, keep them out of it.’

‘No.’ Her tone tells me she’s maybe half an inch from hanging up. I take another tack to keep her talking.

‘This friend,’ I say. ‘Does she know your situation?’

‘I told her. It makes no difference. Like I said, she’s a friend.’

The way Laurel says this it makes me think perhaps at this moment I am not qualifying for inclusion in this group.

‘I can’t talk,’ she says. ‘I gotta run. Gotta hang up now.’ All of a sudden frenetic noise on the line. ‘Call you later,’ she says.

‘Laurel. Hello. Hello.’ What I hear is a melodic noise, like scrape-and-thump, scrape-and-thump. I listen for several seconds until I sense what this is — the pendulum of the receiver on the other end, left to dangle against a wall by its cord as Laurel walked away.

When I return to my office, there’s a small pile of messages on my desk. I paw through them quickly. There is one from Gail Hemple, others are the usual, calls on cases, except for the one on the bottom which catches my eye. A pink slip with Jack Vega’s name and number on it.

I pick up the phone and dial Hemple first.

Gail warns me that Jack is on the warpath. He is demanding to know from his lawyer why he’s compelled to pay spousal support to Laurel, who is now, in his words, a fugitive. Whoever said that alimony is the ransom a happy man pays to the devil has never met Jack.

According to Gail he’s demanding that his lawyer go back to court, an order to show cause on changed circumstances, the fact that the kids are now abandoned, to seek temporary custody until the matter of their missing mother is resolved.

‘Vega has called me,’ I tell her. ‘Any idea what he wants?’

She has scuttlebutt from Jack’s lawyer. It seems the attorney-client relationship with my brother-in-law is not all the man could have hoped for.

‘Jack found out that Danny and Julie were at your place the night Melanie was killed,’ she says.

Playing the wounded father, Jack’s now busy trying to sever all links. He has left strict written instructions at his kids’ school that I am to have no contact.

Vega has an antiquated notion of teenagers and how to deal with them. In an age when kids are packing Mac-tens in the classroom and pistol-whipping teachers who look at them cross-eyed, Jack sees a note from home as something on the order of the Great Wall of China.

‘The man doesn’t miss a beat,’ she tells me. ‘We’re noticed for a hearing on temporary custody in five days. Got any ideas?’ she says.

Jack has found the soft underbelly. Laurel is not likely to show in court, and her lawyer, having already appeared on the custody matter, can’t avoid service. Jack will take a default on Laurel, grab the kids, and cut off support, all in one fell swoop. It is what you notice first about Jack, not his blinding intelligence, but his devotion to the rules of opportunity. Facing Melanie’s funeral, and a sea of grief I do not deny, he still finds time in a busy day to sort out the silver lining in his wife’s death.

As much as a lawyer can be, Hemple is depressed by all of this.

To Jack there was never anything sacred about taking care of his family. For a guy with a woman in every room, support payments were viewed as nothing but an exorbitant stud fee. I tell her this. But she doesn’t laugh. There is a dark cloud, something unstated, hanging over our conversation, the sense that Gail is waiting to unload something more on me. We tiptoe around it for several minutes, mostly lawyer’s small talk, adventures in divorceland, a ride on every theory, none of them with a cheerful ending. Then she punches my ticket.

‘I may as well tell you,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to be able to go on representing her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m filing a motion to withdraw as counsel,’ says Hemple.

A lawyer leaving a case unfinished conjures all the images of Fletcher Christian lowering the longboat to put you over the side — in this case, given my limited grasp of things domestic in the law, without benefit of compass or charts. At this moment there is a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach not unlike what you would get out on the rock-and-roll of the bounding main.

‘You can’t do it,’ I say.

She’s got a million reasons. A waste of Gail’s time and Laurel’s money, what it comes down to in the end.

She can hear me fuming on the other end, the silent thought that a lawyer should never cut and run. Though in this case, with Laurel on the lam, I must admit that it is an open question who has abandoned who.

‘Listen, if it’s a question of money …’

‘It isn’t the money. That ran out a month ago. Laurel passed me two bad checks since,’ she says. ‘Bounced and skipped like flat stones on a pond,’ she tells me. We are siblings under the skin, Gail and I. Like the criminal bar, it seems rubber is the stock-in-trade of divorce.

‘I kept going for the reason that a lawyer always keeps going,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know how to say no.’

I tell her to send me her rubber checks and I will give her cash.

‘You’d be putting good money after bad,’ she says. ‘It’s not just the money. It’s the case. There is no way,’ she says. ‘How do I tell the court that my client hasn’t abandoned her kids? “Your honor, she’s a fugitive from justice, the cops can’t find her, but she is a good mother. She cares for her children. She just does it long distance.” It isn’t gonna wash,’ she says.

I bite my tongue. I want to tell her about my conversation with Laurel, but disclosure has implications. As absurd as it might seem, at this moment Laurel could claim that she was just traveling, some urgent mission with a purpose, unaware that the cops were after her. I am the only one who knows from her own lips that this is not the case. For the moment I must keep it that way.

‘They haven’t charged her with anything,’ I say. ‘If she turns up, what then? There could be a logical explanation for her disappearance.’

Some pained breathing on the other end. Gail Hemple trying one more time to muster the sand to say no.

‘Vega’s getting ready to turn a paper blizzard,’ she says. ‘And right now he’s got a monopoly on all the wind machines. If she came back today maybe, with a good story, I’d have time to prepare. After that, anybody appearing on the merits is nothing but a punching bag. There would not even be a basis for the slightest compromise,’ she says. ‘In a way she might be better off unrepresented,’ says Hemple. ‘If she beats the criminal charges, or they don’t bring them, a court on review might be more sympathetic revisiting custody.’

I have no answer for this.

‘If you hear from her before five, and she has a good one’ — Gail means a story — ‘give me a call,’ she says and hangs up.

The State Capitol building is a showcase, historic rooms preserved on the main floor like museums and gilded elevators with live operators, at least when the Legislature is in session. The hundred and twenty men and women officed here live like rajas, with personal attendants to cater their every whim. There is no money for schools or hospitals, but austerity is not part of the decorative scheme here. As the boundless party-line goes, the dignity of the people demands that their elected leaders operate in opulence. The political class of this state are about as out of touch as the fops of yore whose heads rolled from the guillotine.

To get to Jack’s office I run the gauntlet of a rogues’ gallery, framed oil portraits the size of small houses, spaced along the walls leading to the rotunda. These are pictures of former governors, mostly robber barons from the last century who bought respectability with their public office. Mixed in with these are the feckless oily smiles of a few contemporaries, actors and the sons of political nobility, official portraits of men bearing expressions of constipation, straining to look like they belong to the ages.

What Jack wanted to talk about when I returned his call could not be discussed over the phone. I trek to his office in the Capitol, more from curiosity than anything else, the thought that any information, even that which Jack wants me to have, is better than none.

His receptionist offers me coffee and a chair to cool my heels while Jack holds forth behind the closed door of his office. I can hear the rumble of voices, men belly-laughing.

As a chairman of a standing committee, Vega rates a suitable office and a battalion of publicly paid minions, mostly young, each striving to look more important than the other, and all off on their own urgent mission to prop up the world.

Twenty minutes go by and the door to Vega’s office finally opens. I hear Jack’s voice, but it is lost in a well, behind a bull of a man who fills the doorway. The guy’s back is to me. There is nothing fat about him, just big, more cloth on his suitcoat than the Graf Zeppelin. The guy’s shaking Jack’s hand, talking the jargon of this place, something about legislation, a ‘juice bill,’ meaning there is money in it. The wonders of politics in the free-market world.

The man doesn’t see me sitting here, and Jack’s view is blocked by the hulk in front of him.

The guy tells Jack it’s time to go see the ‘guv, down in the corner office. Not the big place out front, the little office in the back, where the real deals are cut,’ he says.

Jack wishes him luck.

‘No need for luck when it’s wired,’ the man says. What every lobbyist would have you think, that his hand is up some elected official’s ass, making the mouth work.

Clinton Brady is one of the better-known members of the third house, the unofficial, but many would insist most powerful branch of government, the six hundred or so registered lobbyists in this town.

He pats Jack on the shoulder and turns to leave. In a blue serge suit with sleeves an inch too short, Brady looks like something that climbed down from the beanstalk. He straightens up, noticing that strangers are in earshot, and cants his head to one side in order to clear the transom over Jack’s door.

Brady represents insurance interests the way the Führer represented Germany, a lot of blitzkrieg and scorched earth to any who oppose him. With his contacts and high profile he has become more important than the interests he represents. He owns whole committees and sells his services to clients like the mob sells protection. He has by now learned that giving money to Jack and his ilk is like feeding fish to seals. Word has it for the last decade that Jack has been living in one of Brady’s pockets. At this moment the lacquered grin on Vega’s face would do little to dispel this thought.

‘Clint needs some copies. Clint needs to make a call. Clint needs this. Clint needs that.’ Jack is Clint’s own gofer, doing his own form of the soft-shoe between Clint and the secretary. He takes a pile of papers from Brady and hands it to his secretary to be copied. The woman moves with the flash of lightning, like her job depends on this. Brady’s then ushered down the hall to some subaltern’s office, a detour to make a few phone calls before heading off to see the ‘guv’ — no doubt a telephone request to his clients to wire more cash. Politicians in this state don’t accept reasoned argument, and they don’t take American Express.

Jack gives me a wag of his head and no greeting. I follow him into his office, where he closes the door behind us.

Though the consumption of alcohol in the Capitol is a misdemeanor, Jack maintains a rolling liquor cabinet in a walk-in closet, more jingling glass than the dime toss at a county fair.

‘A drink?’ he says.

I decline. He would probably have me arrested.

The office is hot, the product of an hour of deal-making behind a closed door. I take off my jacket, hold it in my lap as I sit in one of the chairs on this side of the desk.

Jack is sweating like a bull, but still wearing his coat. He compensates with a tumbler of iced scotch, and dances toward the business side of his desk, where he finally lands in cushioned leather and swivels to face me.

‘Been talking to my lawyers,’ he says. ‘They told me to stay away from you.’ Jack’s contempt for lawyers has him ignoring his own.

The wall behind him is covered with political mementos, plaques and resolutions of appreciation from business and civic leaders in his district. These are mostly people trying to get where Jack is, who figure that planting their nose up his ass can’t hurt. There are three large trophies centered on his credenza. Perhaps things other people let him win, little bronze men embedded on marble pedestals with a single arm outstretched. I can read Jack’s name engraved on the brass plate of one of these.

He holds up a few papers from the center of his desk, letter-sized, looking like receipts.

‘Dealing with the funeral home,’ he says. ‘Gonna have to be closed casket.’ He looks at me to see if I will ask why.

‘Her head,’ he finally says, shaking his own. ‘One shot to the head. The morticians couldn’t do much.’

The willfulness of this, a shot to the head, not some heedless act of instant provocation, has its effect on me.

‘I suspect there are a lot of things you don’t know,’ he says. ‘She was executed. There are pictures,’ he tells me.

I’m thinking coroner’s shots. Then he says: ‘Of Laurel, at the house.’

‘Shooting Melanie?’ I cannot resist.

He shakes his head. ‘May as well be. Videotape of her arguing with Melanie on the front steps. Neighbors heard it. Security camera filmed it all until Laurel smashed the lens with a flowerpot.’ The way he says this, Jack clearly imputes a little method to Laurel’s madness, a purpose in destroying the camera. Something I suspect he’s either picked up from the cops or planted in their minds.

‘Where were you?’

‘I had a meeting. Didn’t get home till late that night.’

It was Jack who found Melanie’s body in the master bath and called police. According to what he tells me, forensics figures that about three hours passed between the row on the porch and the murder.

‘They believe Laurel probably went to get a gun and had to think about it for a while before she worked up the nerve.’ The ‘they’ Jack is talking about I suspect is Jimmy Lama, who is busy trying to inspire thoughts of premeditation and deliberation to some wily prosecutor.

‘How do you know it was her?’

A pained expression, like give me a break.

‘I suppose you still don’t know where she is?’

‘I don’t,’ I tell him.

‘Not a word from her?’

‘And if I had, I would tell you?’ I smile.

‘Touché,’ he says.

Jack’s musing over his drink, talking about Melanie’s funeral, which is scheduled for tomorrow.

I had not expected to see him in the office, a period for grieving. I tell him this.

‘It’s easier to cope if I go about my day,’ he says. Jack’s talking like he’s had time to think. The immediate rush of anger so evident at his house that night has passed. This is not unlike Vega. Jack has always lacked the stamina to hold anger for long. He talks about the kids, what to do with their mother. It’s not easy. It’s not his decision, but he and his children will have to live with whatever happens to Laurel.

‘For their sake,’ he says, ‘I cannot see her sentenced to death.’ It’s starting to sound like Jack is coming to his senses.

There are little beads of sweat running down his nose. He puts the side of the iced tumbler to his forehead and catches the sweat with the sleeve of his coat.

‘They will find her,’ he says. He is dogged in this. ‘What I want to know is what you’re going to do,’ he says.

I look at him.

‘When they catch her. Are you going to represent her?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ I tell him.

He smiles. Bullshit is Jack’s native tongue. By nature he is not confrontational. Manipulation is his special gift. I get a lot of penetrating looks from across the desk as he sizes me for some pitch.

‘I suppose it would make sense if she were represented by someone who knew the family well. I mean the whole situation. It would be easier,’ he says, ‘for the kids, for all concerned if it was over quickly. And the evidence,’ he says, ‘is irrefutable.’ He goes on at length that there is a certain symmetry and sense to my representing Laurel. At least then I’d be in a position, in his words, ‘to make it easy on the family.’ Jack is taking me on his own sojourn of mercy. If he can’t keep me away from the case, Vega’s busy mining the circumstances for some silver lining. He would use me like a handy tool to have Laurel cop a quick plea.

‘It’ll keep her out of the deathhouse,’ he says. ‘And the kids. It’ll be easier on them.’ It’s like he’s talking to himself, thinking out loud. ‘Of course you’d have to know the circumstances. All the details. How she did it and why.’ He stops for a moment and looks at me as if perhaps I already know these and will share them with him now.

This is a conversation we shouldn’t be having. It is not only premature, it is ridiculous. I tell him that.

‘Just keep an open mind,’ he says.

‘You might do the same,’ I tell him.

‘I understand the kids were with you the night Melanie was murdered,’ he says. ‘Until this is over I’d like you to stay away from them. I think you can understand. I don’t want them in the middle.’ This from the man who had his two children on the discount rack at the custody mart.

‘Whatever you say, Jack.’

‘I knew you’d understand.’ It is all very civil, what you would expect from Jack once he’s had time to collect himself and find the direction of advantage. He will no doubt be trying to plan Laurel’s defense with me if she is arrested and charged. Anything that is short and sweet and leads to a long stretch will do.

He pushes forward and rises from his chair. The button of his coat catches on the edge of the desk. It tears the fabric and pops across the room like a rivet in an earthquake.

‘Damn,’ he says. A stupid smile, like look at me in my ruined thousand-dollar suit. With nothing to be done, he shrugs and reaches across the desk to shake my hand, leaving his jacket to flop open. In his mind I think Jack’s view is that we have buried some mythical hatchet. If he had a peace pipe at this moment he would offer me a smoke.

His is a big, affable smile.

‘Like I said the other day. We all have to do what we have to do.’ He ushers me to the door, one hand on my shoulder, renewing the vows of brotherhood.

He pats me on the shoulder one last time, bids farewell, and closes his door. I wander through the warren of offices like Moses after the promised land, any way to get out. With each step I weigh frantically every word spoken during our meeting against a single question in my mind.

Why was Jack Vega wearing a wire?

‘Guess who’s here?’ she says. Sarah has a big grin. She’s just answered the doorbell, and she knows I don’t have a clue.

‘Danny.’ She is jubilant.

‘Oh.’

My daughter dotes on her cousin. Everything that a seven-year-old girl can think about a teenager, the gamut from love to simple fascination. She looks up at him with oval eyes and a painted-on smile, stuttering as the words can’t come out fast enough.

She’s tugging on one of his hands, dragging him over to look at a picture she’s just finished in crayon, yammering about school and a book she is learning to read. She has plans to corral him on the couch while she struggles with the words.

‘Uncle Paul.’ Danny’s hat is in his hand. He’s wearing a black Raiders jacket that gives his body more bulk than it warrants.

I’m working over the stove, what passes for cooking in this house. I ask him if he’s hungry. Is the Pope Catholic? His eyes are looking in the pot as it steams. Nothing he recognizes, I’m sure, but then Danny is a risk-taker.

‘Does your dad know you’re here?’ I ask.

‘I’m out with Julie tonight,’ he says. ‘Took her to her boyfriend’s. Suppose to pick her up in an hour.’

I shudder. Plenty of time for the pointed little sperms to wiggle their way upstream. In his own evasive way, Danny has answered my question. His father doesn’t know he is here.

‘We had a talk today,’ I tell him. ‘Your dad thinks it’s best, for the time being, if we don’t see each other.’

‘’Cuz you’re helping Mom,’ he says. Just like that, the kid has put it all together. ‘I know. He told me,’ he says. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

Sarah is fuming, a bundle about to explode. Enough talk between grown-ups. She wants Danny in the other room, and she is not subtle. Sarah has him by a thumb and one finger, pulling with all her weight, about to commit an act of dislocation.

Sarah wants to ride around the block behind Danny on the little Vespa motor scooter, but I scotch this. She has no helmet, and besides it is beginning to get dark. He cons me with requests to stay just for a few minutes. Then looks at me doe-eyed.

‘I guess I could sit outside her friend’s house.’

I give a sigh and a look of concession. ‘For a few minutes,’ I say.

They head for the living room as I slice carrots into a pot.

Nikki left me a small binder of recipes, a part of her legacy of love. In her dying days she took hours penning these out in longhand, things that even I could prepare without burning the bottom out of some pan. I watched in amazement as she went about this, pulling together these handwritten pages, a nutritional map for survival. She did it without a thought, almost cavalier, in the same way that she would have once plunked TV dinners into the freezer for me before leaving for a week to visit her mother. My wife had a selfless penchant for the practical.

Sarah’s talking up a storm in the other room. Danny’s taken to the tube in defense, the disconnected jabber of some quick and dirty channel-surfing. He settles on something, a dull monotone I cannot make out.

More carrots, a little parsley, a spoon of butter, and stir. Something’s tugging at the back of my pants. I turn. It is Sarah. Her face is filled with agitation. A wagging finger, she has me bend low for some secret.

‘Danny is crying,’ she whispers.

I wipe my hands and head for the other room.

The kid is hunched in a corner of the couch, knees drawn up, as close to a fetal position as is possible for someone six feet tall. He’s staring at the screen, tears streaming down his face.

There on the television, in living color, pictures of Laurel, her hands cuffed behind her, being pulled toward a squad car — a black-and-white with a door shield I do not recognize. Laurel’s head is pushed down as she’s deposited in the backseat. I can see only the silhouette of her head through the rear window as the car pulls away from the curb. I reach for the controls and boost the sound just in time to hear: ‘This is Norm Kendal reporting from Reno.’

I stand in a daze, mesmerized by the stench of incinerated carrots and the thought that I finally know where ‘up here’ is.