Steve Martini - Undue Influence

He starts to eat again.

‘But Melanie is dead,’ I say.

He stops for a moment and looks at me, swallows hard. There was no love lost with Melanie, the usual friction of kids with a stepparent. But still I can tell that he is rattled by this news. To the young, life is an infinite, never-ending party. Even for kids like Danny, who live outside the loop of their peers, death is a vagrant who wanders another street. I had watched him at Nikki’s funeral. To Danny it was something surreal to have known someone, to have talked to and touched someone who was no longer with us.

‘How’d it happen?’ he asks.

‘They don’t know for sure. The police are still investigating.’

‘The cops?’ he says.

‘They investigate any cause of death that is not natural,’ I tell him.

‘Oh — I guess so,’ he says.

He’s back to the spoon. But I can tell things are rattling around upstairs under that mop of hair.

‘I guess Dad’s pretty shook up.’

‘You could say that.’

I don’t tell him that the police are looking to question his mother. He will find out soon enough. I can hope that in the interim, circumstances might conspire to put her in the clear. Little sense in worrying the kid until I know more.

‘Are you okay?’ I say. I’m eyeing him as this news goes down with the soup to be digested.

‘The wax,’ he says, ‘is it white, pretty clear?’

‘Emm?’

‘For the model,’ he says.

‘Ah. Yeah. In a block,’ I say. ‘A white block, as I remember.’

‘Will you help me find it first thing?’ he says.

‘Sure. Eat and get some sleep.’ Earth to Danny. The kid is off on a frequency of his own. What is left of my family is coming apart, and Danny Vega is worried about wax.

This morning I am running on adrenaline and something that looks like the discharge from the Exxon Valdez. I take a sip and my tongue curls like a slug in death throes. An hour’s sleep in a night can do funny things to your eyes. I wonder if maybe the sign over the little drive-in stall read ‘Esso’ instead of’ ‘Espresso.’

When I arrive, Harry Hinds is in my office, borrowing my morning paper. Harry has an office down the hall. We share a library and reception services and have talked about a partnership. It’s one of those things, we talk, but neither of us is willing to make the first move. Like Harry says, ‘Why ruin a good friendship with marriage?’

Hinds is almost twenty years my senior, a fixture in the legal community of this city. A balding head and a nose like Karl Malden’s, he has done some heavy-duty criminal work in his day, and now talks a lot about retirement. Those who know him well tell me that Harry has been talking about retirement since he passed the bar forty years ago. I have no doubt that when the end comes they will have to pry Harry’s dead fingers from his briefcase, which he packs like a portable office. For Harry there are too many psychic battles ahead to pitch it in. He now feeds on referrals from my practice along with a steady diet of his own clients and acts as my number two in heavier cases.

This morning Harry’s on a roll, newspaper in hand, feet propped on the edge of my wastebasket, uttering suppressed profanities, little whispered vulgarities mixed with what for Harry when talking politics passes for reason. Harry hates all things official, with a special fetish for politicians and their hangers-on. He is not a Republican or Democrat. Harry is of his own affiliation, a party conceived under the tree of distrust for government and fueled by a zealot’s devotion to a creed. He is what I would call a ‘social contrarian.’ Harry is largely against everything.

Lately he’s gone into the clipping services, taping articles from the morning papers to various areas on my desk. It is his effort to enlist the apathetic. Each day I find a new batch of these, his musings penned on square-inch Post-It notes, the travails of the world, all the things Harry can do nothing about but bitch.

His interests are eclectic — world trade; the national debt, which is too big, and the nation’s defenses, which are too small; the environment, which is overly protected, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it seems the polar hole in the ozone has its effect on Harry. On those days he joins the Greens. Never let it be said that Harry is bewitched by the forces of consistency. And always there is a side to him floating just above the waterline of humor, when you never know if Harry is truly on the level.

Without even saying hello, Harry is reading to me, a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. It seems the federal government has sold two truckloads of used computer equipment for forty-five dollars. Harry bitches about the price, the dousing of taxpayers, until he discovers further on that the government wants the equipment back. In an instant, less time than it would take to squeeze a trigger, Harry has chained himself to the bulwarks of free enterprise, shouting the battle cry: ‘fucking Indian givers.’

Another paragraph and Harry discovers why the government is reneging. These particular computers contain confidential information, the names and addresses of hundreds of federally protected witnesses, carted away for their own safety, information which a government technician has failed to adequately erase before selling the computers. Questions of political theory land in the dustbin as Harry sees a wedge of opportunity.

‘Can you imagine all the puckered assholes?’ He says this with a wicked gleam in his eye, like a schoolboy who’s discovered a treasure map.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘we should hang this on the bulletin board in the county jail. Your government at work for you. A snitch’s worst nightmare.’ Then he giggles in the pitch of a cheap tenor.

This is the Harry I know. He can go every direction at once, with the only true course change coming on the winds of opportunity. The notion of some prosecutor whose case would be creamed because his ace witness suddenly grew legs and walked, or suffered a bout of terminal laryngitis on the eve of trial, these are thoughts destined to catch Harry’s fancy.

After all things are said, Harry is a defender, dyed-in-the-wool, sworn to the cause of the underdog. He views any commitment to the objective processes of the law as its own form of treason. In trial before the bar, Harry takes no prisoners. He will seize and hold tenaciously any edge that is offered by circumstance. It is just that Harry’s idea of happy circumstance can at times be a little skewed.

For the moment I leave Harry in his negative nirvana, uttering the party mantra over the sacred scrolls.

I pick up the phone to call Clem Olsen, a friend at police dispatch. Clem and I went to high school together. He has always been a straight shooter. When he can he will talk, little musings like the oracle on Delphi — he will tell me what is wafting on the airwaves of the police band.

I get him after two rings.

‘Clem,’ I say. ‘Paul Madriani here.’ Light-voiced, I make it sound like a social call.

‘Hey, baby.’ Clem has called everyone he knows ‘baby’ since the tenth grade. I have heard him on tapes do homicide calls like the Wolfman, while frantic citizens scream hysterical gibberish about blood and bullets on the nine-eleven number.

Clem never made it to college, instead he did the woodshop routine and left school without a clue, until the Army got ahold of him in the Vietnam draft. They taught him how to kill, and later radios. From these Clem found his own way to the police department.

‘You gonna make the reunion?’ he says. This affair, it seems, occurs every five years now, where Clem, for one shining night, rises to the level of some higher aspiration as class MC.

‘Gonna try,’ I say.