Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Jump school?”

He nods. This is like pulling teeth. There is something Ruiz isn’t telling me. I begin to suspect that perhaps he has done time, either in the brig or maybe at Leavenworth. Still, it doesn’t make sense: soldiers who do hard time for serious crimes face a dishonorable discharge, and Ruiz has an honorable discharge and full retirement benefits. I make a mental note to check it out.

“So Karr, Rufus couldn’t have been too happy when one of their own was arrested for killing the CEO of a major client.” Harry’s tact could use a little polishing, but his statement is to the point.

“They fired me the day after the prelim as soon as the judge bound me over for trial. I suppose they had to keep me on the books until then. According to Kendal, anything else would have sounded too much like an admission.”

On this score Kendal was probably right. Over the last two weeks there have been stories in the press that Chapman’s company has been consulting its own lawyer as to whether it might have a civil claim for money damages against Karr, Rufus, depending on what they knew and when they knew it regarding Ruiz’s background. Isotenics will be watching our case closely, as will lawyers for Karr, Rufus, who will be anxious to have their client sidestep anything messy that might splash their way. They will want to know whether Ruiz should have been considered a risky employee when he was hired, whether he’d had scrapes with the law previously, perhaps in the military. All of this becomes grist for the mill.

Harry starts to home in on one of the critical questions. He wants to know whether there was a specific reason the corporation hired executive protection for Chapman. “Any names you can give us, people who may have threatened the victim? There must have been a reason you were hired.”

A good lawyer given just one such candidate can take a shot at crafting the honored “SODDI” defense: some other dude did it. There are silver-tongued artists who, given this opening, wouldn’t even have to point a finger, would just nod in the general direction while broadcasting seeds of doubt like a tuberculosis victim coughing on the jury. Feed and cultivate this with care for a few days and it’s anybody’s guess what noxious weed might spring up out of the jury box to strangle the state’s case.

“Threats came with the turf,” says Ruiz. “I mean, people with Madelyn’s kind of money and social status aren’t likely to be loved.”

“So there were threats?” Harry asks, a note of surprise in his voice.

“Sure. It ran the gamut,” says Ruiz. “Nutcases, most of ‘em. People who claimed she stole their software. Former employees who took their job termination personally. Then you get the people at Christmastime whose lights aren’t all blinking, see her picture on the society page, and send her season’s greetings with a P.S.: ‘Wish you were dead.”’

“These were in writing?” Harry is making notes.

“Some of them. Some were called in, some by e-mail and fax. A couple of times they were hand delivered to the front counter in envelopes addressed to Madelyn Chapman, President and CEO, Isotenics Corporation and marked Personal or Confidential like she was gonna open them herself. I guess they figured that way whoever delivered them would have time to get away before they were opened upstairs. We were able to nail one of them from pictures on the videotape at the public counter.”

“And the letters: any of them threaten to kill her?”

Ruiz makes a face and nods as if to say this would be in the natural order of things. “Sure.”

“And the company has these?”

“In their files, I suppose. We always advised them to keep this kind of mail. That was the procedure so we could track past correspondence if anything happened.”

“Good advice.” Harry can’t believe his good luck. He wants the name of the custodian or clerk in charge of filing and maintaining executive death threats at Isotenics so he can serve the guy with a subpoena.

“There was one event that pushed ‘em to hire security for her,” says Ruiz.

“And what was that?” I ask.

“Some nut nailed her with a cream pie at a shareholders’ meeting a couple of years ago. That’s what got the company’s attention. The board of directors finally woke up and realized it could’ve just as easily been somebody with a gun. It was shortly after that they called us in and we got the nod to go to work.” Ruiz starts to see the implications for his case. When you’re charged with murder it never hurts to have a victim who wasn’t loved. Besides the specter of a victimless crime, it increases the universe of possible perpetrators, hopefully to the point of confusion for the jury.

“Hell, if I had a dollar for every one of those letters came in, I could’ve quit and clipped coupons from a hammock on the beach two years ago,” says Ruiz. He is smiling now, warming to the idea that he is not alone in the universe of possible suspects.

Still, it leaves us to deal with one of the overarching ironies of the state’s case against him. A corporation hires executive protection that, according to the cops, ends up murdering the company CEO. It’s the kind of paradox that can lead jurors astray, causing them to disregard issues of reasonable doubt and focus instead on just how hard they might want to jump on the scales of justice to compensate for life’s inequities.

“Let’s talk about the firearm, the gun used to kill her.” I shift to another subject.

With this the smile evaporates from Ruiz’s face.

I look at him. “I understand it was traced to you.”

“Yeah.” Ruiz expels a deep breath as if to say sooner or later he knew we would get around to this. “What can I say? It was mine.”

“Not according to the federal government,” says Harry.

“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

The only evidence that came in on the firearm during the preliminary hearing came from the police. They were able to trace the handgun, an exotic.45 automatic, back to its last owner, the United States government, more specifically, the Army base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The problem for Ruiz is that government records show the firearm by serial number as having been issued to one E. Ruiz, his signature and military ID number on a form nine years before the murder. After that there is nothing, no record to show that he ever turned it in or surrendered it upon his discharge from the military.

“Tell us about the gun,” I say. “How did you get it?”

Ruiz cocks his head a little to one side, shrugs a shoulder. “I kept it when I left the Army. No big thing,” he says. “It’s not that unusual. A lot of times they don’t even check. Hell, half the people I know retired from the Army kept their sidearms. Besides, a piece like that, it’s accurized. You know, I mean for your own touch and feel. It’s like a pair of boots: once you break ‘em in, who else is going to wear them? I spent maybe a hundred hours working on it, stripping it down, changing out bushings, shot out I don’t remember how many barrels and replaced them, reworked the action, adjusted the pull on the trigger for my finger. I lived with the thing. By the time I was finished with it, there probably weren’t two parts in that firearm that were the same as when it was issued. The action, that’s it.”

“Yes, but unfortunately for you, one of them was the frame with the serial number,” Harry counters.

The expression on Ruiz’s face concedes the point.

“All of that aside,” Harry continues, “let’s be up front. You stole it, right?”

There is a lot of grousing, grudging expressions from Ruiz on this before he finally says: “Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”