Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“I’m buying you batteries,” I tell her.

She gives me that look of mock exasperation, something of her mother’s to remember her by.

“Can I see it? I won’t break it. I promise,” she says. Reluctantly I hand it over.

“Hey, this little button on top. It’s the cell phone.”

“I know. Don’t touch it.”

“Relax,” she says. The same thing Nick told me before they shot him. “Why can’t we just turn it on? See if it works.”

“Because it may drain the batteries.” I don’t tell her that the cops have probably landed on Nick’s cell phone account by now. If so, the service provider will have a trap on the line so they can isolate the cell by location if any signals go out from the phone, even if it’s just looking to go online.

“If there’s a site on the Internet, do you think you could find it?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I could look.”

It takes her less than five minutes. Sarah works her nimble fingers over the keyboard and rolls the mouse, using Yahoo! to check sites. On the fourth one she hits pay dirt, a logo that matches the one on the device, two curved crossed slashes with a dot between them at the bottom, Handspring. com.

We scan the page for half a minute or so.

“I don’t see anything that looks like directions. Do you?” she says.

“No. So what do we do?”

“Gimme a second.” She punches the button on the page for customer support. An e-mail message screen pops up.

Sarah types out a message, telling them that we’ve lost the directions and need to know how to change the batteries. And asks whether we’ll lose any stored data.

Ten minutes later there’s a reply. Attached are a set of instructions for operation. The e-mail message itself advises us to sync the device to a desktop computer and then change the batteries. It tells us that if we can’t do this, we have only one minute once we start removing the old batteries to replace them with new ones. After that the device will crash and we will lose any data inside.

“Looks like there’s no memory inside,” she says, “unless there’s batteries.”

Without the hot-sync cradle to attach to the computer and the software to run it, we can’t back up the device by syncing it to the desktop.

“You want to do it or do you want me to?” Sarah’s talking about changing the batteries.

“I’ll do it.”

Armed with the two new batteries and the printout from the Internet, I lift the battery cover off the back once more with my fingernail. My hands are shaking as if I’m defusing a bomb. I pull one battery and quickly slide a fresh one into the slot. I pull the second. I pop the other one in, then realize I’ve gotten it in backward. I almost drop the device on the floor. Sarah grabs it before it can hit the carpet. She holds it while I turn the battery around and slip it in the right way. Then I look at her. “You think we got it?”

“I don’t know. Turn it on.”

I snap the battery cover back in place, flip the device over in my hand, and hit the green button on the bottom. When the screen pops up, the battery indicator hasn’t moved. It’s still where it was before, near empty. Oh, shit. An instant later it flickers. The shaded area suddenly slides across the image of the battery, all the way to the right. It is now fully charged. I let out a sigh.

“Gee, Dad, you really ought to calm down. This stuff really gets you uptight. It’s just a little computer,” she says.

“Yeah. Right.”

“Here, let me see it.”

I hand it over and try to catch my breath.

Sarah starts tapping the screen with the stylus. “You can do graffiti on it too,” she says. “Do you want me to show you?”

“No. No graffiti,” I tell her.

“Dad, it’s not the kind of graffiti you think. Look,” she says. “You can write letters on this section of the screen to call things up. See?” She orders up Nick’s address book and makes the letter “c” in a small window at the bottom of the screen. Suddenly the book jumps to the section with names starting with “C.”

“Got it,” I tell her.

She shows me how to call up the calendar, the To Do List. “This one even has e-mail, but you have to turn the phone on,” she says. “Why don’t we do it? The batteries are fresh.”

“Not right now.”

“Oh, gee,” like I ruin all her fun. “This is really cool. The kids at school would go nuts.”

I’ll bet. Calling people in London and leaving messages for Joe, then calling them back and telling them it’s Joe and asking if there’s any messages.

“Can I take it to school tomorrow?”

“No. And do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody about it.”

“Why not?”

“For the moment it’s our secret.”

She looks at me like “why would I want to do this?” Something this cool and she can’t tell anybody about it. Then she shrugs and says “Sure,” and hands it back to me. She returns to her homework, settles into the chair with her book and the Star Trek reruns, the endless generations.

“Sarah.”

“What?” She looks up at me.

“Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

She fights it, but finally there’s a beaming smile that slips out. “Anytime,” she says.

I settle back into the sofa and look at the small device. I’m wondering if Nick had software and a cradle and whether he downloaded it onto his desktop at the office or home. If he did, the cops have it. They have seized his computers at both locations; with the firm I’m sure going toe-to-toe with them over client information that may be stored on the hard disks. If he didn’t sync it, the only copy of whatever the device holds is in my hand.

I put my feet up on the coffee table and start to surf using the stylus.

It takes several minutes to scan the address book. There are forty-three names and phone numbers, not nearly as many as I would have thought, knowing Nick and the contacts he had. Most of these are just names, without any addresses or other information.

Some of the area codes are San Diego. I recognize the 415 as San Francisco. The phone book tells me that the only other two area codes for names in the address book are for Manhattan and Washington, D.C.

I recognize a few of the names as lawyers at RDD in San Diego. Nick has made entries under “Title” for some of the people in the other cities. Most of these involve one-word entries: “Litigation,” “Licensing,” “M amp;A,” “Govnt. Affairs.” I don’t recognize any of the names attached to these.

Except for an entry made by the vendor who sold the device to register the warranty, there is nothing on the To Do List.

But the Memo Pad has what appear to be street addresses, three of them, followed by letters, SF, NY, and DC. Three of the four cities listed in the address book. There is also an entry under a separate note, something called Antiquities Bibliotecha, with what look like a series of numbers following it, what could be an overseas or international phone number. I make a note.

By midnight, Sarah is long since in bed, and part of the mystery is solved when I call a few of the numbers and confirm my suspicion, all the numbers ring at Rocker, Dusha offices in the cities listed.

What is puzzling is why the device doesn’t contain more numbers. Nick knew a thousand people in San Diego alone. None of them are in the address book. There is nothing for the courts in any of the four cities, no addresses, phone numbers, and no court appearances in the date section, just meetings with some of the lawyers in the firm’s various offices.

The first of these shows up in early April in San Francisco. There are several meetings, in New York and Washington in the early summer. These continued through the summer. The last meeting was in San Francisco nine days before Nick was killed.