Steve Martini - Double Tap

There is no telling how many are here. I can’t see far enough into the crowd, but the camera crews are jostling each other for position. There are satellite trucks from as far north as L.A., all of the network affiliates, their dishes already arrayed and aimed skyward, generators running. They are parked at the curb in front of the entrance to the county jail, blocking the sidewalk so that we have to move around them to get there.

“Mr. Madriani”-some guy sticks his microphone in Harry’s face-“can you tell us, have you spoken to your client yet?”

With that, everybody jumps on Harry. He is awash in questions, everybody figuring the reporter must know him.

“When are you going to see Ruiz?”

“Why did the defendant fire Dale Kendal? Was he unhappy with Kendal’s representation?”

It is my chance to slip the crowd, but I don’t do it. “What about the preliminary hearing? If he’s innocent, how come the judge bound him over?”

“What does Ruiz know about the Information for Security program?”

“Was he working for the government?”

“Do you think Chapman was killed because of IFS? Has anybody in the administration talked to you?”

Harry keeps trudging forward, wading into them, briefcase up in front of his face; he finally looks over at me, half smiles, then says, “He’s Madriani, not me.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Like quills on a mad porcupine, a hundred microphones-some hoisted on six-foot booms-are suddenly pointed in my direction.

Even in the afternoon San Diego sun the camera lights are blinding, portable banks of them arrayed on bars held high on stanchions moving with the crowd as we approach the entrance to the jail in lockstep, half an inch at a time.

“We’ll have nothing to say right now. Maybe later, after I’ve spoken to Mr. Ruiz.”

This tentative offering doesn’t appease them. Some character sticks me in the ass from behind, trying to lift his microphone boom over my head. I make a mental note to find another way out of the jail.

Using his briefcase like a shield fending off swords, Harry pushes on into the crowd, Don Quixote tilting at mic booms and cameras. We run this gauntlet for half a block, the press mob now a wide circle of bodies around us, shutting down traffic as we cross the street. A photographer with a wide-angle lens tries to get a shot from down low. Somebody jostles him from behind, and by the time he snaps the shutter he is close enough to my face that I can read the f-stops off the barrel of his lens. “Extra! Extra! See hair up the lawyer’s nose!” And some people see this as glamorous.

The murder of a prominent socialite, one of the state’s leading software magnates-a major local employer and a woman who made it to 220 of the Fortune 500-is a good story, but nonetheless it is one that likely would have had only local legs. This morning a front-page piece in a Washington newspaper changed all that. The story, which has now been regurgitated coast-to-coast on all of the morning network news shows, has linked the victim, Madelyn Chapman, and her company to the controversial Information for Security program, known to the press and the public as IFS.

IFS has been leading news in the national press for weeks now, ever since it became the largest bone in a tug-of-war between the White House and Congress, the President saying he needs the program to safeguard national security and civil libertarians claiming it’s an invasion of privacy.

Until this morning Harry and I had agreed to become involved in a nice, quiet little murder trial, with perhaps a few local reporters invited. Now that Chapman has been linked to the IFS program, her murder has been ginned into national headlines, and Harry and I are up to our asses in a sea of questions.

Fifty yards away I can see a small band of uniformed guards. They have crowded up against the inside of the glass doors at the main entrance to the jail. Looking out and laughing, one of them has a cupped hand to his mouth and is talking. They seem to be enjoying the entertainment, two lawyers being engulfed and digested by the news amoeba out front. Want some publicity? Help yourself.

We grind to a halt, unable to move forward or back. I’m beginning to feel like Custer surrounded by the Indians. This kind of stuff can get out of hand. Somebody pokes Harry with his mic and gets a face full of leather with a handle attached. The guy starts to push back and I stop him before we have a news riot. If this continues, I know that my partner will be packing an anvil in the bottom of his briefcase the next time he comes for a jail visit.

“They’re taking their time,” says Harry.

We are cooling our heels in one of the concrete cubicles they call conference rooms at the jail. Harry is standing with a foot up on the steel bench to one side of the table, his left elbow resting on his knee, his hand propped up under his chin as he drums the metal tabletop with the fingers of his other hand.

Harry has had enough for one day. Courtrooms are one thing, crowds are another. Harry is a gentleman of the old school. He has a short temper when it comes to anarchy.

“Why didn’t Kendal want the case?” asks Harry.

“Said he was too busy.”

“Look at all the face time he could get on the tube,” says Harry. “He wants it back, my advice is give it to him. Life’s too short for this crap.”

Dale Kendal is one of the brand-name criminal defense lawyers in Southern California. He forages for cases in L.A., Orange, and San Diego counties. Kendal handled the preliminary hearing with the result that Emiliano Ruiz was bound over for trial in the Superior Court. Given the low threshold of evidence required, no one really expected Ruiz to beat the indictment. Still, after the prelim, Kendal made arrangements to withdraw from the case, and the court allowed him to do it.

Harry looks at his watch. “Suppose you can’t expect the jail to operate on the same commercial concept as fast food.”

He looks at me but I don’t bite.

“What, you don’t think it could happen-that a corporation could take this place over and run it right?”

“Did I say anything?”

“Think of the advantages. A private correctional facility. The county could save a zillion bucks a year in safety retirement with the sheriffs’ union alone.”

Harry glances over out of the corner of one eye. By now I’m a cipher, giving him nothing with which to argue.

“They could put a couple of kiosks around back,” he says. “You drive up and talk into the little speaker, you order a felony and two misdemeanors. Sort of supersize the order. Give ‘em the clients’ names. Oh, yeah, and order me up a deputy DA-you know, one of those new ones, fresh right outta law school. The one you gave me last week was kind of tough, an old bastard who knew what he was doing. You have them repeat it to make sure they got the order straight. After all,” says Harry, “you gotta remember, this is a private business now. And in a private business the customer is always right.”

He glances at me to make sure that he is getting my easy assent on all of this.

“If it’s a private business, what makes you the customer? Why not the inmates?” I ask.

“No. No,” says Harry. “They’re the commodity being bought and sold.”

“I thought justice was the commodity.”

“No, that’s just an occasional by-product,” says Harry.

“You’re the one with the golden arches.” I’m smiling. “So where do you go from there?”

“You pull around to the side of the building, reserved parking spaces facing this way. You roll down your window and you pick up the phone. A shade goes up on a window at the side of the building and your client’s sitting there with a phone in his hand on the other end just waiting to talk. None of this crap where you have to sit around and wait.” Harry checks his watch again. “Then a shade goes up on another window and you got the DA sitting there waiting on the other line.”