Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Well, I guess I’ll have to deal with that bridge if and when I come to it. But for now, company policy doesn’t permit me to get into personnel matters. I’m sure you understand.”

According to Ruiz, company policy is whatever Rufus says it is. For now, he is trying to tap-dance, to keep all his options open. I can’t say I blame him. If he can avoid having to testify on the issue of Ruiz’s prior military background during the murder trial, and he is later sued, his lawyers have more latitude to go back and fill in terms of what they knew and when they knew it. For my part, I was hoping that he might shed some light on what appears to be a seven-year hole in my client’s life, when, for all intents, Emiliano Ruiz seems to have vanished from the planet.

Unless we can produce the laser sight, we are going to have a tough time arguing that an average marksman could have made the double tap, what the media is now calling the two tightly grouped shots that killed Chapman. Without the sight, the best candidate for shooter of the year is Ruiz. The cops already have two large glossy photos of him posing with the Army Pistol Team, a trophy the size of a small car sitting on the ground in front of the group.

There are a raft of evil deeds people can commit and remain under the radar of public attention. Killing the rich in America in the age of cable is not one of them.

As Harry and I cross the street two blocks to the north, I can see a sixty-foot white dual-axle box trailer parked on the street along the side of the courthouse. Block letters printed on the side of it read MPV . This is the production mother ship leased by the cable stations and the networks in hopes that the judge will allow them to broadcast the trial directly from the courtroom. This has become the portable studio for the media until Ruiz’s trial is over. On days of heavy court activity, after the trial starts in earnest, a small fleet of satellite trucks with their antenna arrays and microwave dishes will nose in and try to dock near the trailer in order to pick up the feed from inside the courthouse.

This morning a small army of photographers, camera crews, and reporters, who stand out in their colored blazers, are huddled around the van, its side doors open. Like members of a wagon train waiting to be attacked by Indians, the news crews are all looking the other way, toward Broadway, as Harry and I cross the street behind them.

For more than a month now the press has become a growing problem, haunting our office, slipping through the gate and hanging out at Miguel’s, using the tables in the cantina as if they were paying customers. They sit there and organize their notes, load their cameras with film, waiting to catch Harry and me coming and going from the office. We are beginning to appreciate why some celebrities have taken to punching out the paparazzi and spray-painting their camera lenses.

Harry and I have had to lease a hotel suite in one of the downtown high-rises to schedule meetings with witnesses so that the press will not pick up their trail and hound them. My worst nightmare is that this horde finds out where I live. Twice they have tried to follow me on motorcycles until I stopped and called the cops on my cell phone. Both times a patrol car appeared and held the motorcycle and its two riders until I left and was well away. All of the lawyers in the case are now under a court-issued gag order, prohibited from talking to the media about anything involving the trial.

I am beginning to think that Harry is right, that one day some Renaissance scholar is going to discover that Dante’s Inferno includes a tenth circle of hell and that it is filled to overflowing with pricks who once carried microphones and cameras.

“Sooner or later they’re gonna figure it out,” says Harry. What he means is the fact that we bought a janitor’s pass to the back door. Harry has slipped one of the custodians fifty bucks. He calls the man on his cell phone when we are a block away and the guy comes down and plays doorman at the rear service entrance near the loading dock. Courthouse security would frown on the practice, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

“What do you think happened to the laser sight?” says Harry. This has been bothering him for two days, ever since our last meeting with Ruiz.

“If I had to guess, I’d say the killer probably dropped it off the rocks into the surf.”

“Behind the house?”

“Probably.”

“Then why didn’t he toss the whole package, pistol and silencer too? Why just get rid of the sight?” Harry is huffing and puffing, hauling his brief box full of documents and case authorities as he trudges along a half step behind. He carries this like a Roman soldier carries a shield and spear. The brief box must weigh fifty pounds. This morning before we left he added an old laptop computer to the load. This is an ancient clunker that he never takes out, and if he did, it probably wouldn’t work. When it comes to writing and research, Harry is low tech. If he could get copies of documents from monks laboring in a scriptorium with quills, he would abandon the copying machine.

“I mean, if you’re gonna do it, why not get rid of the whole enchilada?” Harry is talking about the gun, Ruiz’s.45 auto that belonged to the government.

“Unless I miss my bet, the cops will argue that he tried to get rid of it and failed.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Think about it. The killer shoots Chapman, then leaves the house the same way he came in, out the back. He’s disassembling the gun as he goes, unthreading the silencer, sliding off the sight. In the yard he tosses everything toward the ocean. He’s probably rattled. Maybe something distracts him: a neighbor, voices on the beach. The lighter parts make it over the wall. The laser sight, if there was one, goes into the water; the silencer lands on the rocks. But the gun itself, maybe it hits the wall or maybe he just didn’t throw it hard enough. It lands in the flower bed on his side.”

According to the police report, the cops found the.45 in the bushes just this side of the wall near one of the rear gates leading to the sandstone bluffs behind the house.

“Why didn’t he go and get it, throw it again?” Harry asks.

“Maybe he didn’t see where it landed. Maybe he was afraid some neighbor would see him skulking around in the yard. Maybe he didn’t have time. At least, that’s what the prosecutor is going to argue.”

“So the cops find the gun in the yard,” says Harry.

“Right. And the silencer out on the rocks.”

“And no laser sight,” says Harry.

“It’s all very convenient.”

“In what way?”

“Think about it. If the gun had been left in plain view, we could argue that Ruiz, being linked by ownership to the murder weapon, wouldn’t do such a thing. He’d have to be a fool. The very fact that the gun was so obviously left for the cops to find would point to someone else. This way the evidence makes it appear that the killer tried to dispose of the weapon but failed. The fact that the sight is missing prevents us from making a case that almost anybody, except perhaps the blind, could have made the shots that killed her.”

“So you think somebody’s trying to set him up?” says Harry.

“It entered my mind.”

“And of course the cops wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for the laser sight in the water,” Harry notes.

“Why go looking when it doesn’t help your case?”

“So what do we do, put Ruiz on the stand to verify what was in the bag? The accoutrements that came with the murder weapon?”

“Accoutrements?”

“You know what I mean.”

I smile. “Accoutrements.”