Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Why do you think the DA-”

“I’m not talking about the DA. I said the government. There’s only one government counts in this country, and that’s the federal government, as in U.S.”

Harry dances his pupils in my direction, the kind of look he normally reserves for clients relegated to a padded cell.

“Yeah, I know. But if you want to analyze me, at least let me lay on the table.” Ruiz sniffs Harry’s judgment from the ether in the room without even looking up. “We’ll see how long it takes them to reach you.”

“What makes you think the federal government is on your case?” I ask.

“That’s not it at all. They’re not out to get me. Not in the way you think. The fact is, I happen to be convenient. In the right place at the wrong time, so to speak. What they want is this thing with Chapman to go away and with as little fuss as possible. A quick conviction and a closed case, and right now I’m what you might call handy. Like a Kleenex. It’s nothing personal. Just another interchangeable unit to be used by people in high places.” He lets the ankle chains drop down over the tops of his canvas slip-on sneakers again and looks up at me to see if I’m following.

“You have to understand, I’ve been doing this for a long time, watching people get killed and killing people.”

“You what ?” says Harry.

“In the military,” he says. “It’s called combat.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I didn’t kill Chapman, if that’s what you’re thinking. I would never do anything like that. I know it’s hard for some people to believe. They think somebody’s trained to kill and it’s like a switch they can’t turn off. They get out of the military and they have to satisfy some itch to kill. It’s not like that at all. Most soldiers I know could live very contented and happy lives if they never saw another drop of blood as long as they lived. But it’s a funny thing: You pull a trigger in combat and they give you a medal. Do it in civilian life and they put you behind bars, or worse. But in this one it wasn’t me on their radar screen; it was her.”

“Who?”

“The victim. The murderee. Who else? Madelyn. Excuse me-Miss Chapman. It won’t do for me to be too familiar with the victim, her being dead and all, and me being the one supposed to have killed her.” He suddenly stops and looks at me. “She is still dead?”

“Oh, she’s dead all right,” I tell him.

“You had me going there for a moment. Thought maybe the people at Spook Central had come up with a new program to raise the dead. At least they haven’t changed that part of the script.” He takes a drag and exhales some smoke. “Of course they start swapping out bodies on us, no tellin’ where we’ll end up. Get me for doin’ JFK from the grassy knoll before they’re done. The fact I wasn’t born till years after the deed is only a minor setback for these people. Blink and they’ll change reality for you.”

“You’re telling us the government had a hand in this?” I ask.

“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

“How well did you know the victim?” says Harry.

“Not well enough. Otherwise I’d probably have a better idea who killed her. As for the list of her boy toys, if you want that, you’re gonna want to call in a stenographer to keep from getting writer’s cramp.”

“Sounds like you knew her pretty well,” I say.

“We had our moments. I provided security. She provided the surprises. There was a fleeting period she fit me into her schedule between her morning massage and her eleven-o’clock staff meeting. She liked to be on top. In control. That was Madelyn, always on top and always in control. She’d be up there, jumping up and down like she was breaking some bronco, gripping the hair on my chest with one hand while she waved her little digital dictator in the air with the other. In between groans of ecstasy and elation, she’d lift the pause button and spout a quick memo on some new project or government contract so her secretary could type it up between bouts.”

“So you did have an affair with her?” There was some brief testimony at the preliminary regarding allegations, but since the defense never put on a case in this regard, it was unclear from the transcript what the line to be taken at trial would be.

“I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it an affair,” says Ruiz. “Fact is, I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it, except they have it on tape.”

“Let me get this straight,” says Harry. “You had a sexual relationship with the victim and the prosecution has a videotape of this?”

Ruiz makes a face, weighing and evaluating the terms used in the question, then shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. It was one of those little cameras: you know, the kind about the size of an eraser on a pencil. Apparently one of our own people installed the thing in her office without checking. Caught the whole thing on tape. Unfortunately for me, the cops now have the tape.”

I can already tell what Harry is thinking. If the judge allows the DA to play that tape in front of the jury, moving pictures in living color of the defendant-who is now charged with murder-screwing the victim-who is now dead-chances of the state getting a conviction will go up about a thousand percent. And it won’t really matter who was on top.

“I take it this wasn’t part of the security contract,” says Harry.

Ruiz laughs. “No. It just sort of happened. Call it an after-hours thing. Off the books, you might say. Fact of the matter is, as I remember it, I was on my back, counting ceiling tiles, before I knew what she was doing.”

“She raped you,” Harry says. “There we go. We have a defense. The murder was a crime of revenge.” Harry looks at me and smiles.

“You’ll have to excuse my partner. He believes if you can’t defend a good murder case and have some fun in the process, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

“I see his point. The fact of the matter is, while I don’t exactly remember how it happened, I don’t remember saying no as I was laying there, either. And it’s not a case of repressed memory.” He says it before Harry can say anything.

“Oh, well,” says Harry.

“Not that it bothered me much. Consenting adults and all.”

“Still, you have to assume your employer might take a dim view,” I tell him.

“You, I suspect, must have a knack for business”-Ruiz points at me with the smoking cigarette, holding it between two fingers-“because that’s exactly the point Madelyn made when she came back for seconds a few days later and I said no.”

“She threatened you?”

“Not in so many words. She just wondered out loud what the people at Karr, Rufus would say if they heard I wasn’t servicing the contract to her satisfaction.”

“She said that to you?”

“In so many words, yes.”

“And what did you do?”

“We both laughed, and then she got on top.”

“I had an uncle was a night watchman,” says Harry. “He was always complaining it was such a boring job.”

“He didn’t work executive protection at Isotenics,” says Ruiz.

“So the prosecution is going to say that you had an affair with her and probably try to build on it from there.”

“How is that?” he asks.

“The usual scenario,” I say. “She tried to break it off. You refused. The jilted lover. A woman with lots of money. Fill in the blanks.”

“It was nothing like that.”

“Well, we’ll have our chance to tell the jury. But that’s likely to be their theory. That is, unless they have some other motive that’s better. Is there any other reason you might have wanted to kill her?”

“I didn’t kill her.”