Undue Influence (17 page)

“We had to send him back,” she says. “I mean, it was terrible. He mealymouthed his way back into some guy’s office and told him he forgot what they’d discussed ten minutes before, about the contribution, wink, wink, and what piece of legislation was the quid pro quo. Can you believe?” she says. “Like talk into my tie clip.”

“And I’ll bet the guy repeated it all.”

“Oh, yeah.” Dana is all big eyes. A face filled with expression.

Incredulous. “These people believe in trust,” she says. Why not? I think. They’re talking to Jack Vega, the patron saint of political corruption. Who was dirtier than Jack? “It was impossible for Vega to have a secret from us. Even things we didn’t want to know.”

“So he suspected that his wife was having an affair? He said this?”

“At least twice,” she says. “Once to one of the young aides in the office. A woman. It was pretty bad,” she says. “He was producing a pity play for sympathy, complete with sound and cameras. Crying on a soft shoulder. The gal was in her early twenties, didn’t know what to do.

This slobbering guy all over her, arms around her neck. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or if it was just a pitch to get into her pants,” she says. Knowing Jack, I can form my own conclusion. He always operated on a double standard. If it moved, Jack would fuck it. But let Melanie step out with some other man, and you can imagine Jack capable of almost anything. “And there was one other time,” she says, “on the phone to somebody. We don’t know who. It was all very cryptic.”

“Do you know what they talked about?”

She shakes her head.

“You have the tapes?”

“At one time,” she says. “I don’t know if we kept them. Policy is to get rid of anything not relevant.”

“Could you check?”

“Is it important?”

“Could be,” I tell her.

She’s looking at me, intense. Wheels turning inside of wheels, then they click, and lock, coming up all bars and bells. The dawning of light.

“You’re thinking he killed his wife,” she says.

“I’m considering the possibilities.”

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. Voila. 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-her 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 briefoases 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 her 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 brought 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.