Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You remember the girl, the blonde from homeroom our senior year, the one with the hooters like two dead cone-heads? Do you remember her name?’ he says. ‘Can’t find her on the mailing list.’

This, a girl’s form from twenty-five years ago, is something Clem would etch in his mind like the inscriptions of the Commandments in stone.

I tell him I can’t remember. I don’t puncture the illusion that nature has by now probably worked its will, and that gravity has no doubt taken its toll. I could tell him to look at his own love handles, which now sag like sodden saddlebags from his hips. But with Clem, memories of the past are always more valid than images of the present.

‘Listen, I got a favor to ask.’

‘If I can,’ he says.

‘Last night there was a shooting — a legislator’s wife out in the east area.’

He cannot have missed this. Melanie’s death, while too late to make the first-edition papers, has hit the a.m. news shows, both TV and radio, with all the cheery dignity of checkout-counter journalism. The video cameras panned the body all the way into the coroner’s van. The reporters with their mikes and plastered hair did everything but zip open the body bag to see if she was wearing her nightie.

‘I heard,’ he says.

‘If you can tell me,’ I say, ‘have there been any APBs? Anybody they’re looking for in connection, maybe for questioning?’

A long pause, like he knows but is not sure whether he should tell me.

‘Wouldn’t be you got a client?’ he says.

Clem is a friend, but he has never been close enough to climb my family tree. He has no sense of my kinship to Laurel, or for that matter her former relationship to the grieving legislator.

‘Not at this time.’ I won’t lie to him, but I shave the edges of truth a little.

‘I’d have to check the overnight dispatches,’ he says. ‘Can I call you back?’ Clem wants to make discreet inquiries to determine exactly how much he can tell me.

‘Sure thing. I’ll be here all morning.’ I give him the backline number so he can call direct, around my receptionist. On items like this Clem doesn’t like to talk through middlemen.

Harry’s into another incantation, with more gusto now that I am off the phone, still chanting from behind his curtain of newsprint.

‘Health-care reform by the same crowd who gave us tax simplification,’ says Harry. ‘Why don’t I believe it?’

I ignore him and hope it will go away.

‘You know they will exempt themselves,’ he says.

I don’t know who he’s talking about, and I don’t want to ask. But Harry volunteers.

‘Fuckers in Congress,’ he says. ‘They wanna be able to roll their asses over to Bethesda at the first sign of a sniffle, for the red carpet treatment. A private suite with hot and cold running Navy nurses,’ he says. ‘That’s so they can have a good grope and get saluted at the same time.’

Harry fans a page and looks for more grist for his mill.

‘So there’s no word on her?’ He says this in a different tone. This time I can’t mistake the subject of his inquiry. He’s talking about Laurel. Harry knows that I am in a family way on this thing. I called Harry early this morning. Got him out of bed and told him about my all-night stand at Vega’s house and the attempt at inquisition by Jimmy Lama.

‘No word,’ I say.

‘You can always hope,’ he says. ‘Who knows? Maybe they’ve given her up. Found another suspect.’

‘I might feel better if I knew what the the cops had.’

‘Maybe you wouldn’t,’ he says. ‘Maybe she did it.’ This is Harry, soothing you with his blarney one instant and honing the knife’s edge on your open wounds the next.

I give him a look, like thanks for the comforting thoughts.

‘Well, hey, it does happen,’ he says. ‘Crime of passion, the tangled triangle,’ says Harry. ‘Two women doing battle over the same man. Jealous ex and the beautiful younger wife.’ He gives me arched eyebrows over the press-cut edges of the morning paper.

‘Vega would love you for the thought,’ I tell him. ‘The women in his life ready to kill for Jack. It’s a premise to fatten his ego.’

The Capitol dome will float ten feet higher if this notion were to find public expression. But Harry is right. It’s a theory not likely to be lost on an eager prosecutor.

‘And where did she go?’ Harry’s talking about Laurel.

‘You think it’s just coincidence?’ he says. ‘She happens to vanish the night her ex’s latest squeeze buys it. Doesn’t tell the kids where she’s going. Just takes off for parts unknown.’ Harry’s playing kibitzer for the devil, musing behind the paper, foraging for something more to raise the level of his bile.

‘Irrespective of your feelings,’ he says, ‘I think you gotta admit, the cops might have good reason for suspicions.’

‘Joining the force, are you?’

‘My feet aren’t flat enough,’ he says.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ I tell him. ‘Lama must have thought he was having a wet dream the minute he found out Laurel and I were related. Blood, marriage, it wouldn’t matter. It’s any way to drive the sword with that one.’

‘I can imagine,’ says Harry. ‘How’s it feel?’ He wiggles his ass a little deeper into the chair, as if to reveal where Lama might have buried this thing in me.

‘From what I hear,’ he says, ‘whenever Jimmy is in pain, it is your name he takes in vain.’

I don’t answer him.

The phone rings on my desk.

‘Hello.’

‘Clem here.’

‘That didn’t take you long,’ I say.

‘Heyyyy, the Wolfman don’t disappoint.’ A voice like somebody sandblasted his vocal cords. ‘You must be clairbuoyant.’ Clem’s understanding of the language does not come from reading it.

‘Like you said, APB went out at oh-two-twenty today,’ he says. ‘Issued for one Laurel Jane Vega, age thirty-six, height…’

‘That’s all I need.’ I cut him off.

‘And a bad actor at that,’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Listed as possibly armed and dangerous.’

This means that Laurel, if she is found, would be taken at the point of a loaded pistol. Some foolish gesture, a wave of a loose hand through her hair, and I could be minus one more family member. More stark than this is the thought that Clem’s superiors have allowed this information to come my way. Whatever they have linking Laurel to murder, they see as solid.

Like clockwork I do the gym every Thursday at noon, the place Laurel used to work before she disappeared.

It’s a dozen blocks from my office to the Capital Gymnasium and Athletic Club. At twelve-fifteen I get an urgent message delivered on the squash court. I take my leave, to one of the white telephones lined in cloistered booths in the foyer.

‘Hello.’

‘Paul.’ She is breathless.

When I hear the voice I have a single question: ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘I don’t have much time. Where’s Julie and Danny?’ Laurel’s voice is strained and tired. What I would expect from someone who has been on the lam for nearly two days now.

‘Half the county is looking for you.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t do it.’

‘Then where are you? Why did you run?’

‘I can’t talk.’

‘Come in, give yourself up,’ I tell her. ‘They’re calling you armed and dangerous.’

She laughs at this. A nervous titter.

‘It’s no joke. Cops with an adrenaline rush have a habit of shooting,’ I tell her.

‘I’ll be okay. Do you have the kids?’ Laurel’s mind at this moment is a monorail, single track and rolling with her children on board.