Shadow of Power (11 page)

“We’d just had a few drinks together, after work. You know. We’d shoot the shit.” This according to Carl.

“And you drove all the way out into the desert for that?” says Harry. “What’s the matter? No bars in town that suit your taste?”

Arnsberg looks up at him through one eye but doesn’t answer.

“Carl, you may as well tell us. It’s going to come out during trial. Were you a member of the Aryan Posse?”

“No. You keep askin’ me, and I keep tellin’ ya. No, I never joined. Just went to a couple of their meetings out there. That’s all.”

“You were on their telephone list. They called you for events,” I tell him.

“Lot of people got called to go to events. Doesn’t mean they’re members. You go to a meeting, they get your cell number.”

“Did you talk to anybody at any of these meetings about Scarborough?” I ask.

“No. Not me. Never. I mean, there was a lot of talk about him. They had pictures of him.”

“Of Scarborough?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did they get these pictures?”

“I don’t know. Maybe off his book.”

“You mean off the book jacket?” says Harry.

“I don’t know. But they shot it all up.”

“His picture?”

“Yeah. They made it into, like, a target. His face in the bull’s-eye. Put it out on the range and shot it all to hell.” He laughs.

Carl thinks this is cool. He won’t be nearly so cavalier if the prosecutor gets wind and paints the image for the jury.

“Did you shoot at it?” I ask. This would have devastating consequences if prosecutors can get testimony of Arnsberg shooting at images of the victim days before he was killed.

“No. I shot a few rounds. But not at the target. Some empty beer cans. At their range. Somebody handed me a gun. It looked like fun, so I shot a few. But I don’t remember shootin’ at anything that looked like Scarborough.”

“You don’t remember,” says Harry.

“No.”

“Wonderful. Now we have a good mental image to go along with the words, verbal musings over how easy it might be to abduct the man. D.A.’s gonna have a field day,” says Harry.

“Hell, it was all over the papers, on the news,” says Arnsberg. “Guy was stirring up trouble. He was a shit disturber. Fucking agitator. You want to know the truth, he got what he deserved.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that we may not be able to put our client on the stand. One statement like this before the jury and they will erect a scaffold in the jury box and hang him there on the spot out of sheer principle.

“Tell us exactly how the issue of kidnapping came up,” I say. “When
you were talking to your friends? By the way, was anybody else present, besides the three of you?”

“No.” He thinks for a second. “No. Just us three.”

“Go on. How did it start?”

“Lemme think,” he says. This time it takes him a couple of seconds. “I’m pretty sure it was the other guy, that guy Walt. He said there was a lot of talk out on the reserve. That’s what they called the place the Posse met. He said there was people talking about gettin’ this guy.”

“Scarborough?”

“Right. He said something like ‘their blood was up.’”

“Walt said this?” says Harry. “What did he mean by that?”

“They was mad. You know. Then he said I was lucky, cuz I was workin’ in the hotel, and according to the newspapers he was gonna be staying right there where I worked. So at least I could see him up close, like that.”

“Walt said this?” I ask.

“Walt, or it mighta been Charlie. I’m not sure. One of ’em said it. That’s how it got started.”

Harry’s following all this as he pages through the witness statement.

“Who suggested kidnapping?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I mighta said something. That it would be easy to do. Ya know, it was cool. Just talking with guys. I had a few beers. I was never gonna do it,” he says. “Just talk.”

“What did they say then? Walt and Charlie?” I ask.

“They said, ‘Yeah. Cool, man. Right on.’”

“Yeah, they wanted to do it, or yeah, it would be easy?”

“I think they meant it would be easy. I’m not sure,” he says.

“Well, let me read to you,” says Harry. “Maybe it’ll refresh your memory.” He flips a couple of pages. These are stapled together at the top left-hand corner. He finds his place, then lowers the spectacles a little on the bridge of his nose so that he can look over the top of them at Arnsberg.

“‘Walter Henoch: You’d do that?

“‘Carl Arnsberg: Yeah.

“‘Walter Henoch: Kidnap him?

“‘Carl Arnsberg: Yeah. I’d do it. I might need some help, but I’d do it.

“‘The three of us did high fives at the table. I ordered another round of beers.’ This is Henoch speaking,” says Harry.

Harry flips a page, scans down it, then another. “Here,” he says.

“‘Carl Arnsberg: It would be easy. Rap him up the side of the head, throw his ass in a laundry cart, and take him down the service elevator. Hell, we could have his ass out in the desert tied to a post in front of a firing squad before he knew what hit him. Skin his ass before we shoot him.’

“Did you say that?” Harry looks at him.

“No. No, no. I don’t think so. Like I say, it was a while ago. But I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Maybe all those beers, you forgot?” says Harry.

“No. No. I never said that.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah I’m sure.” His words are emphatic. The look in his eyes is anything but. Like a kid caught pissing against the side of the schoolhouse by the principal.

“You’re sure?” Harry asks him again.

This time all he gets is a shrug from Arnsberg. “I think so. If I said it, I didn’t mean it.”

“So you might have said it?”

“Hey, I don’t think so. I know I didn’t talk about killing him.” The gravity of all this is beginning to settle on Carl Arnsberg, like stone weights used to crush a man. Up to this point, the case has been circumstantial, physical evidence at the scene that tied Arnsberg to the location of the crime and the time it was committed. Apart from his associations and his potential motive of hate, he also had a business reason for being in the room that morning. He was delivering breakfast, by all rights an innocent act. This, however, is something else: witnesses who can put words in Arnsberg’s mouth in the period immediately prior to the murder, especially when those words cut close to the events of the actual crime. This could give the state a case with legs. It is not something complex and hard to comprehend, like DNA with its infinite mathematical probabilities, something the defense could flip on its head and play with. If the jury believes the witness statements, they become a
pipeline to the defendant’s innermost thoughts, a statement of intentions.

Worse is the part that Harry and I are not telling him. These particular witness statements are not in the usual form, a loose narrative of paraphrased remembrances jotted down from recall days or weeks after the event.

These witness statements are in the form of a transcript, chapter and verse, with quotation marks at the beginning and end of each passage, direct quotations. There is only one way that such a transcript is normally made—that is, if one of the participants to the conversation is wearing a wire.

Our best guess is that this particular gathering of neo-Nazis popped up on some law-enforcement radar screen. If the cops rolled one of the members, perhaps nailing him on drugs or some other charge, and then cut a deal, getting him to wear a wire whenever he talked to his friends, this would explain how Carl was caught on tape. He may not have attended many meetings, but he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, shooting off his mouth.

Sit down at a street-side café with an intimate friend to have a confidential conversation and your words along with pictures may show up on YouTube and the World Wide Web. If Harry had to guess, his candidate for wearer of the wire would be Walter Henoch, the newest man on the scene, the one Arnsberg didn’t know that well, the man who got him talking.

U
pstairs, the walls of the main courthouse are decorated with pictures of the local worthies, mostly judges, some of them dating back to just this side of the California gold rush. Here the noise and commotion, the jostling of bodies, is different from in the lobby downstairs. Most of the lawyers, clerks, and courthouse staff seem to have some goal and direction, even if the cases they’re working do not.

There are two separate courthouses in this town, one civil and the other criminal, connected by a bridge that spans the street between them. And for all intents and purposes, it is the
only
thing that connects them.

It is just my view, but on the civil side it would require a peculiar wit to call it a justice system. Buried in mud over the axles twenty years ago, lawmakers threw up their hands and pushed everything on the civil side out of the courthouse door and into arbitration. This became the tollbooth you had to pass through to get back into the courthouse.

Once there, however, any claim, no matter how frivolous, often results in the defendant’s ponying up money rather than being bankrupted by years of litigation or facing the prospect of death by old age in a courtroom full of busy lawyers flinging pieces of paper around.

On any matter that even hints of the complex, it can take years to get through trial, followed by decades on appeal. On anything that is in
fact complex, a lawyer can spend his entire career on that single case, and many have done so.

Businesses and corporations that make up the economic backbone of the state long ago opted out of the state’s civil court system, using instead mediation, binding arbitration, and in many cases private judges working for local firms to preside over the case and render a judgment—the businessman’s express toll highway to a quick and final decision. Just as with health care and medicine, no one can afford the high cost of government-administered justice any longer.

That is, except for the scions of the criminal courts. A private judge cannot send your client off to prison for a few lifetimes or direct others to stick a needle in his arm, transporting him out of this world. When they figure that one out, we’ll all be in trouble.

A female clerk sashays down the corridor past me, clicking heels on the hard floor, all to the accompaniment of the plastic badges she flashes on her chest. Living in the age of security as we do, badges are everywhere. Ubiquitous clip-ons for temporary visitors behind the scenes, a requirement if they wish to enter the inner sanctum of a judge’s chambers. There are more permanent hard laminated ones hanging from chains around the neck for seasoned staff. Some of these are worn two and three together or from multiple chains, emblems of status, an outward display of who can enter the sanctum sanctorum. If you can’t get a bump in salary, you can at least have another badge and, if you’re real good, a shiny new chain to go with it, something to dazzle friends and impress the public on cafeteria coffee breaks.

With plenty of time, I saunter down the hall past Departments 11 and 12. Off to the right, I see the sign over my destination’s door,
DEPARTMENT 13
, and wonder whether our assignment to this court portends something ominous.

The purpose of this morning’s gathering is an off-the-record meeting, under the guise of a pretrial conference, this so that the judge can lay down the law. Not the statutes printed in the codebooks or the case law handed down by the appellate courts, but the law from on high, the holy writ according to the Honorable Plato Quinn, whom we have drawn as trial judge in
People v. Carl Arnsberg.

Of course, all of this is off calendar, away from the prying eyes of
the press or notice to the public. If a trial is theater, you can consider these to be notes on stage direction: where you will stand and how you will comport yourself, how the judge’s word is final on everything, from what evidence will come before the jury to when you can empty your bladder and by how much.

The last two weeks, I have wheeled and dealed and burned a few bridges. In periodic gatherings with the presiding judge of the superior court and the county’s public defender, what gentlemen might call meetings to those of us present became a desperate game of financial chicken.

I have known from the beginning that Sam Arnsberg’s savings, plus what he earns selling insurance, would never come close to covering the fees, let alone the monstrous costs, in this case.

His son, Carl, qualifies as an indigent, public-defender bait. The problem was to convince the public defender that he didn’t want the case and that there were at least arguable legal grounds for him and his office to bug out. The bigger problem was to convince the court to go along with this, to officially declare Arnsberg an indigent and to appoint me to represent him at public expense.

The public defender already had enough cases stacked up against the walls in his office to make convincing him he didn’t need this particular circus twirling on top of his desk not all that hard.

It is a rule carved in granite that for reasons of conflict of interest, lawyers in the same law firm cannot represent more than one criminal defendant charged in the same case. The catch here was that there was only one defendant charged in this case, our client, Carl Arnsberg. But there was at least the glimmer of other miscreants looming just over the horizon, the other branded bozos that Carl ran with, the people he talked to, the state’s star witnesses. True, they weren’t charged, but they could be, they might be, and since nobody knew exactly what they might say at some point in the future if pressed, the case could end up in a conspiracy involving the entire Third Reich.

At first the judge wasn’t buying. As far as he was concerned, multiple defendants meant just that, real people actually charged. But as time went by, as the trial loomed closer, as the public defender and I slipped his head into a vise and turned the handle, he began to see the light.
Gentle hints that if forced to the wall I might have to withdraw, along with estimates by the public defender that he would need at least two more full-time lawyers and six months to come up to speed on the case—these finally turned the tide.

This morning I called Sam Arnsberg and gave him the news. The county will be funding not only the prosecution but the defense, including our experts and investigators. What I didn’t tell him is that my fee will be a fraction of my usual hourly rate. No doubt my statement of hours along with Harry’s will be chiseled down further by the presiding judge, who will review, approving or modifying, our billings for each month, part of the deal. But it gets us over the hump.

I pull open one of the heavy wooden doors at Department 13, pass through the darkened airlock between the two sets of double doors and into the courtroom. The place is empty except for a lone figure sitting in the front row. I could have anticipated this. Bent and a little stooped, wearing a tweed suit with the look and cut of something from another decade, is a withered form. His hands are pocked by age marks, and his arthritic fingers claw a sharpened pencil in one hand, a reporter’s notepad in the other.

Harvey Smidt must be seventy if he’s a day, the oldest salt in the courthouse press corps. Harv shuns pack journalism. He works alone, often in silence like a Trappist monk, and rejects technology. He won’t use a computer. Smidt still knocks out daily copy on an old Underwood manual typewriter, not even electric. It is the perennial courthouse mystery where he acquires his store of typewriter ribbons. He has an assistant who keys his stories in for him online when he is done and sends them to the pressroom, which in Harvey’s case is up in Los Angeles. His paper tolerates this because Harv does his work the old-fashioned way. He uses shoe leather. Two years ago he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on the trial of the Santee Seven, a Mexican gang implicated in killings that ranged across four southwestern states and involved trafficking in enough drugs to swamp a Colombian cartel.

Nothing happens in the courthouse that Harvey isn’t aware of. He is the one person who doesn’t need a badge. His face is known to every bailiff, sheriff’s deputy, and clerk. It is rumored that he has his own set of keys to most of the out-of-bounds areas where courthouse files are
kept. Smidt has been around since before the cornerstone was laid for the building. I’m not surprised that today he is sitting here alone. When it comes to a story, Harvey keeps his own counsel.

He is tall and slender, bent in the upper back from years of leaning into filing cabinets pilfering legal dirt, his neck calcified by decades of journalistic warfare, so that when he turns to look at me, he moves his whole body on the hard wooden bench.

“Mr. Madriani.” As he says this, his eyes have not quite caught up with me, as if he’s detected me by his keen sense of smell, like an animal of prey.

“Harv. How are you?”

“Good. Good. Do you have a minute?” He stands up. His smile is sly and personable, and he shows me his notebook, already open and ready. “What’s happening here today? This wasn’t on the calendar,” he says.

I might ask him how he found out about it, but he would never tell me.

“I’ll know when you know,” I say. “I’ll read about it in the morning paper.”

He smiles only a little. “What does the judge want to see you about? Hmm? Come on, off the record,” he says.

I keep walking.

“I saw Mr. Tuchio go in a few minutes ago.”

“Did you ask him?”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“Said he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure.”

“There you go,” I tell him.

“Can we talk when you come out?” he asks.

“Harvey.” I shake my head. “There’s a gag order.”

He smiles. “Not for me.”

I try to get past him. For a man as frail as he is, he manages to block my way with practiced ease. “Something’s happening. What’s going on?”

“You’ve been around long enough, Harv. Probably just ground rules,” I tell him.

“You sure that’s all? Come on. You help me out and I’ll make sure
they give you the luxury cell if the judge puts you in for contempt.” He gives me his most comely smile.

We both laugh.

I finally get past him through the railing at the bar, headed for the little hallway and the judge’s chambers in back.

“Any truth,” he says, “to the rumor that the prosecution’s got witnesses who will testify that your man only wanted to kidnap Scarborough?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m under a gag order there,” he says.

I don’t answer. To Harvey this is a yes.

“If so, it could be manslaughter,” he says.

“Maybe my client should have hired you,” I tell him. Arnsberg could do worse. Harvey is a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks Law School. He has sat through enough trials that he could do a credible job defending a multiple ax murderer.

I keep walking, though now there is a steady drip of adrenaline on my heart. Harvey has been talking to the prosecutors or the cops. You can build a gag order, but you can never fill all the little crevices that leak. Trying to undo the damage later is like bailing a flood from a broken levy with a bucket. If Harvey reports the kidnap rumor and the fact that the state has witnesses, it will be all over the media by tomorrow morning. Talking heads will be using it as a teaser to keep viewers tuned in between the commercials. Even with the jury impaneled and the judge having instructed them not to read or watch news concerning the case, this information, blaring from every cable network and sliding past on the electronic ticker tape running under the pictures, is a virtual certainty to reach them. If they believe that Arnsberg had any plan for Scarborough, whether kidnapping or killing, they’ll be leaning so far toward conviction that they’ll topple like dominoes the first time they climb into the jury box.

“See you on the way out,” says Harvey.

Smidt can be relentless. I will ask the judge to let me out through the back corridor and hope the prosecutor takes the same route. I turn past the bench and down the hall. In the distance, ten feet away, I can see the judge’s clerk, Rudalgo Ruiz, sitting at his desk just inside the door to the judge’s anteroom.

Ruiz is known to courthouse staff as R2. Not because of the two
R
’s in his name. Instead this is short for R2-D2. Ruiz is short, built like a barrel, and bald. The only things missing are the wheels and the discordant bleeping tones for communication. Though in some sense it would be preferable to what he has to say to me this morning. It is blunt and to the point. “They’re waiting for you,” he says. This from under black, furrowed brows, the only wisps of hair he has on his head. “I called you three times. Dun you have a secretary?”

I look at my watch—9:48. “My calendar said ten o’clock.”

“Judge bumped it up this morning.” Ruiz says this with adamancy. “Nine-thirty.” He taps the crystal on his wristwatch like maybe the judge can issue an order to make time go in reverse.

“On the second day, God shortened the hour,” I tell him.

He shakes his head at this blasphemy, then smiles, but only a little. “You better get your ass in there.” He nods toward chambers, where the door is open just a crack. I can hear voices inside, some muffled laughter.

I tap on the door.

“Come on in.” A booming voice.

I swing the door open and am greeted by the raised eyebrows of his eminence Judge Plato Quinn. Quinn has been on the superior court for more than two decades. A graduate of the D.A.’s office, he spent the first ten years of his legal career prosecuting major felonies and is not particularly beloved among the defense bar, though this is not all bad. Quinn is a man highly sensitive of his reputation. At times he will bend over backward to dispel any hint that he might carry water for the prosecution.

“I take it you don’t have a clock?” he says.

“Your clerk says I need a new secretary,” I tell him.

“Anything to bring you into the modern age.” The judge glances under the edge of my suit coat, looking for the telltale pouch on my belt.

I lift my coat a little, making it easier for him to visually frisk me.