Steve Martini - Undue Influence

Simmons chokes off Danny’s plea with the grip of his hand on the boy’s throat.

‘He dies on the count of ten,’ he says. ‘One…Two…’

I look at his eyes, the sign that means what he says. I start to run, retracing my steps, along the gallery, over a small lake of broken glass, in naked feet.

‘Three…Four…’

Headlong for the stairs, one flight, then the other. In the stairwell I cannot hear his voice. I emerge at the bottom. Running through the roundhouse.

‘Eight…Nine…’

‘I’m here! ’ I’m yelling at the top of my lungs, bidding for time.

I haven’t rounded the area by the end of the postal car, so he cannot see me or hear my naked feet, my shoes dropped on the floor above. In this instant I expect to hear the sickening sound of suppressed gunfire.

As I make the turn I see him shielded behind Danny, the long reach of the silencer pressed against the kid’s head.

‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘On your knees. Now.’ He’s moving quickly, knowing he doesn’t have much time.

I drop to my knees and he tells me to crawl forward, into the light cast by mirrored glass under the locomotive, his hand continually on Danny’s throat pressing until he is gasping, coughing for air. Then he flings the boy to the floor and tells him to kneel.

‘Hands behind your head,’ he says. ‘Lock the fingers.’

We do it.

All the while he is moving behind us until I can no longer see him, our backs to the blown-out window.

Danny tries to look and catches the side of the pistol against the flat of his cheek. I can hear steel as it smacks bone. The boy lurches as if he will fall forward.

‘Eyes straight ahead.’

He is behind Danny. I see the boy’s face go forward as the pistol is pressed against the back of his head. He’s going to kill the boy first.

I tense my body and with hands clasped I throw my shoulder back, crash into Simmons’ knee just as I hear the rapid double cough of two fired rounds. A body slumping sideways onto me, the back of its head, hair matted by blood, a stream pulsing from the wounds. He slides across me onto the floor — and as he rolls onto his back, I see the upturned lifeless eyes of Lyle Simmons.

I look back. There in the shadows framed by the moonlit sky, through the wall of broken glass stands Laurel, a pistol and its smoking silencer in her hand.

In the van abandoned by Lyle Simmons in front of Fulton’s, police found a small arsenal of firearms, guns for every occasion, as well as loading equipment for ammunition, and the makings for explosive devices — everything someone in the business of killing might be expected to possess.

It was here, in this van, that Laurel told police she first looked when she finally returned from the darkness of the railyard, to find her son’s motor scooter dumped in the street and Danny gone. It was in the van that she told police she found the weapon that ultimately saved our lives, the pistol she used to shoot Lyle Simmons.

Danny had panicked. He never made the phone call to nine-one-one, and instead, a half block under the freeway overpass, he turned around and returned for his mother, who by that time was gone. He nosed around for a while, and then, seeing the blood and thinking she might have gone inside the museum, he followed.

Police have now tested both guns, and ballistics reveal that the pistol used by Laurel to kill Simmons matches the bullet found in Melanie Vega. For authorities it is the final evidence required for closure, the last dotting of i ’s and crossing of t ’s in Melanie’s case.

There are already calls for a Congressional inquiry into the Federal Witness Protection program and the special hazards it presents for unsuspecting citizens into whose midst targets such as Kathy Merlow are dropped. The program has implications for us all, not least of which is the question of how well any of us truly know our neighbors.

There have been news conferences at Justice in Washington where those in power claim no knowledge of any of this — the cover-up that ensued following Melanie’s death.

We live in a time where increasingly our national leaders act more like the dons of crime than statesmen, where notions of plausible deniability replace the truth, and claims that politicians never knew of the evil done in their own names by others are commonplace. It is the age of unbridled arrogance and video showmanship, where the challenge ‘prove what I knew and when I knew it’ has now become a national motto.

Through all of this, Laurel has shown herself to be both resilient and resourceful, a face of calm in a sea of crisis. When she entered the museum that night it was with a fierce determination to save Danny, no matter the odds. That she was able to save my own life in the process was not lost on Laurel, though she was first and foremost the mother of her son. And, like serendipity, Laurel found an opportunity she never actually considered when she walked through the doors that evening. It was the chance to finally get rid of the gun that had been used to kill Melanie Vega.

The fact is that while Lyle Simmons had been contracted to kill Kathy Merlow, we will never know whether he would have actually struck the right house or not, because he never got the chance. As fate would have it, circumstances intervened and Simmons arrived on the scene a little too late.

As Laurel sits across the desk from me this morning, nearly a month has passed since that night. We are alone in the office. It is Saturday morning, and Laurel has asked that we talk here. Danny and Julie are with Sarah. They have taken her to a show, one of the new cartoon classics with a lot of music and high animation.

On my desk is the final piece of evidence promised to be delivered by Morgan Cassidy at trial. With the case over, it is a moot point, and not one I am sure Morgan has dwelt on. The police have their killer in a coffin.

But on my desk are the working papers of the medical examiner, Simon Angelo, regarding the DNA and the genetic link between the unborn child and Jack Vega. I had never really bought into the concept of Jack as father in the case, and had wondered whether Angelo has simply reached into his bag of science and pulled a last-minute rabbit from the hat to save Cassidy’s case.

I found the answer in an obscure footnote to his working papers, an item not written by Angelo, but printed in small type on a form used in such tests. The projections of probability regarding Jack’s paternity were valid, wholly consistent with the results of the DNA probes, but they were premised on a single erroneous assumption — that there were no other males having shared genetic characteristics with Jack. The DNA testing had failed to consider the possibilities of Danny.

It is one of those conversations that people have, lawyer to client. Laurel has asked for assurances of privilege several times before talking, nervous, though I have told her that my lips are sealed, by law if not by blood.

And so she fills in the details that I have only guessed at until this moment.

It was not Laurel who had been at Jack’s house that night, who Mrs. Miller had seen in the hooded sweatshirt, but her likeness in all ways including looks. It was Danny.

He had come to talk, and perhaps to actually carry out the desperate and dramatic act of a teenager, not to murder Melanie, but to kill himself.

Danny had known for nearly two months that his stepmother carried his child, a dark secret only he and Melanie knew. It is why she pushed so hard through Jack for custody, a mix of fear and desire. Melanie knew that unless she could keep Danny close at hand, under her wing, in time the boy would crack. He would tell someone, if not authorities, then his mother. Their lives had become a daily act of desperation.