Steve Martini - Double Tap

“But you don’t know what it was that he was asking?” I persist.

Ruiz shakes his head.

“The last I heard, she was about to tell him she couldn’t do it. That was the last time I saw her.”

“When was that?”

“About two weeks before she was killed.” He looks at me as he says it, reading the expression on my face, which is one of surprise. This information is not in the file. Nor was it in any of Kendal’s notes that he passed to me. If Ruiz told any of his other lawyers about this, they knew better than to reduce it to writing.

Suddenly there’s a deafening sound, loud enough that it feels as if someone has driven a spike through my eardrums. Ruiz’s lips move but I can’t hear a word. I look at Harry and he has both hands over his ears. The Klaxon, a buzzer in a box high on the wall behind us, has erupted, drowning out everything else in the room.

The guard comes in waving his arms. He makes a motion, one finger across his throat. The interview is over.

Harry cups a hand over his mouth and then to my ear and, loud enough that I can just hear him, says: “Lockdown.”

Something has happened. Another guard comes into the room and we are quickly ushered toward the door. The last thing I see over my shoulder is Ruiz shaking his head, muffling his ears with his hands as the two guards pull them down and cuff them behind his back; he looks at me, wondering, I am sure, if and when he will see us again. Harry and I, my briefcase half open with papers sticking out, are hustled down the hall to the elevator.

“ Question is, how did the killer know where to find the gun?”

I’m looking at Harry over the conference table in our office. The contents of two cardboard file boxes, documents and photographs, evidence reports and copies of investigative notes obtained by a notice for discovery served on the cops, are spread out in front of us.

Our office has expanded so that we now occupy an entire wing of low-slung buildings under the jungle canopy of banana trees and palms in the courtyard behind Miguel’s Cantina just off of Orange Grove, across from the Del Coronado.

“It is possible,” says Harry, “the killer just stumbled onto the gun. Could happen.”

“I don’t think so. Look at the photos of the house, the floor plan produced by the cops.” We have several eight-by-tens, interior shots of the victim’s home as well as an overhead aerial shot probably taken from a police helicopter.

“The place is over seven thousand square feet. Nooks and crannies everywhere, drawers galore, to say nothing of all those display cases housing Chapman’s glass menagerie.”

“Your point is?” says Harry.

“My point is nothing else was touched. According to the police report nothing tossed, no open drawers except for the one where the gun was stored, nothing dropped on the floor, no latent prints, nothing. The place was cleaner than your average autoclave. Only the gun and this. . this one piece of art-what was it called?”

Harry thumbs through his notes.

We have each gone through the materials, Harry taking the time for notes. I have scanned the high points, leaving Harry to fill me in on details.

“Here it is: glass artwork, blue in color, called the Orb at the Edge . Got a picture out of a catalog here someplace.”

“It’s all right. I saw it going through the photos. It’s the only item known to be missing from the victim’s house. Is that right?”

“At least according to the cops,” says Harry. “Could be whoever did it just panicked. Think about it: You just get in the place, getting ready to do your burglary. She walks in. You freak out. You pop her. It’s happened before.”

“Hell of a shooter for a panicky burglar.” I am talking about the two shots to the head. “Less than an inch apart.”

“Could just be luck,” says Harry.

According to the state’s ballistics expert, all this fine shooting took place at a distance of at least thirty feet, standing on an interior balcony above the main entrance to the victim’s home.

“So maybe it cooks the theory of a teenage burglary gone awry,” says Harry.

“Unless she’s fifteen and her name is Annie Oakley. And it still doesn’t explain how the killer found the gun.”

Chapman’s house was large, with six bedrooms spread out on two floors, each one with its own adjoining bath.

“Unless you knew your way around, you would need a map,” I tell him.

“Yeah.” Harry is stumped.

“Do they say how the killer got in?”

“According to the cops, he popped a downstairs screen and came in through a window. One of the bedrooms on the bottom floor on the ocean side.”

“Makes sense. Nobody could see him. Was there a security system?”

“Oh, yeah. Top end. All the bells and whistles, window sensors, doors, motion detectors, glass-break sensors, twenty-four-seven monitoring, eye in the sky, cameras front and back, everything wired up the ass. Chapman paid sixty grand for the system. Only problem was she never turned it on. According to Chapman’s secretary, the hired help was always setting it off, the gardeners, the maid, the FedEx man, the hummingbird that ate out of the feeder on her front porch. Apparently during the first two weeks after they installed it, Chapman got called away from work four times, three of ‘em to bail her gardener out of the back of a squad car where they had him cuffed and once to vouch for the hummingbird, which they were unable to catch. Finally she said screw it and turned the system off.”

“You said there were cameras?”

“Front one scanned the entry door and picked up nothing. One in the back somebody took the tape out of it. Could have been the killer. Could have been Chapman or somebody else. Nobody seems to know. All they know is that there was no tape in the recorder on the day of the murder.”

“Great. A sixty-thousand-dollar security system whose only efficient application is to condition the owner not to turn it on.”

“About the size of it,” says Harry.

“Were there security stickers on the windows?” I ask.

Harry looks at me with a blank expression.

“You know, the little decals that say ‘This property is protected by Wile E. Coyote,’ whatever.”

“I don’t know.”

“Better find out. They don’t usually put a system in unless they sticker the strategic openings. If that’s the case it’s bad for us.”

What I am thinking is that the state’s going to say anybody who wasn’t familiar with the house wouldn’t take the chance that popping a screen and opening a downstairs window would set off the alarm and send a signal to some monitoring station somewhere.

Harry makes a note. Who besides Chapman’s own bodyguard would know that the security system was seldom, if ever, on?

“And of course the best candidate for the kind of shooting we’re talking about here is our own client,” says Harry.

“You mean his military background?”

“I wish that’s all it was. It turns out that among his other gifts, like jumping backwards out of handcuffs, is the fact that he qualified three years running for the U.S. Army Pistol Team,” says Harry.

“Wonderful.”

“Yeah, the cops went to great pains to provide us with all the details. Seems Ruiz and his teammates won two of the national shoots back at Fort Benning. Of course, this was a few years ago now, so he might be a little rusty.”

“Great, we can put him on the stand and have him perform a shooting exhibition with the murder weapon for the jury. Keep our fingers crossed he misses. That should be persuasive. Next you’re going to tell me that the pistol of choice he fired during competition was the same one used to kill Chapman.”