Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘I did until yesterday. Jack had ’em picked up from school by one of his AAs.’ These are gofers who do menial tasks for legislators — lackeys-in-waiting.

‘Damn it.’ Silence on the phone while she thinks. I can smell it like burning neoprene coming over the line, the machinations of panic on the run. Still, Laurel has not completely lost her mind. She has found me in the one place where Lama is not likely to be eavesdropping. With Jimmy you can’t take much comfort in the formalities of magistrates and judicially ordered wiretaps. I’ve suspected for days now that my phone has suddenly become a party line.

‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. Her kids.

‘Why?’

‘I want them out of there.’

I think her brain is scrambled. ‘You want them on the run with you?’

‘No. No. A friend,’ she says. ‘In Michigan.’

‘That’s not my biggest concern at this moment,’ I say.

‘Oh, shit,’ and she’s gone from the phone — a receding voice, sound vanishing like fog on a warming day.

‘Hello. Are you there?’ I get mental images — Laurel swinging around some corner, enough tension on the phone cord to break it. Then I hear her breathing closer again.

‘What happened?’

‘Police just swung by in the parking lot,’ she says. ‘It’s okay. They’re gone now. Probably just a coffee break,’ she tells me. ‘My picture is everywhere,’ she says. ‘Even up here.’

I could get a map and play with little pins, my twenty best guesses on where ‘up’ is.

‘Use your head,’ I tell her. ‘You’re no good to your kids dead or in prison. Come in and we’ll deal with it.’ I try to engage her in conversation. I ask her where she was the night of Melanie’s death, hoping for an alibi, something I can bootstrap into an argument for our side, to induce her in.

‘Can you get a message to them?’ she says. She’s back to her children.

‘They’re fine. You’re the one in trouble,’ I tell her. ‘Come in, I’ll meet you, pick you up. I’ll make arrangements with the DA to surrender,’ I say. ‘It’ll go much better at trial. We’ll have a shot at bail,’ I tell her. I’ve got more closers than a used-car salesman. None of them working.

‘Not till the kids are gone,’ she says. ‘Out-of-town. Then I’ll surrender.

‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I have a friend in Michigan. Went to college together. She’s willing to take the kids, keep them there quietly until this is over.’

‘Your kids can handle it,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll take care of them, keep them out of it.’

‘No.’ Her tone tells me she’s maybe half an inch from hanging up. I take another tack to keep her talking.

‘This friend,’ I say. ‘Does she know your situation?’

‘I told her. It makes no difference. Like I said, she’s a friend.’

The way Laurel says this it makes me think perhaps at this moment I am not qualifying for inclusion in this group.

‘I can’t talk,’ she says. ‘I gotta run. Gotta hang up now.’ All of a sudden frenetic noise on the line. ‘Call you later,’ she says.

‘Laurel. Hello. Hello.’ What I hear is a melodic noise, like scrape-and-thump, scrape-and-thump. I listen for several seconds until I sense what this is — the pendulum of the receiver on the other end, left to dangle against a wall by its cord as Laurel walked away.

When I return to my office, there’s a small pile of messages on my desk. I paw through them quickly. There is one from Gail Hemple, others are the usual, calls on cases, except for the one on the bottom which catches my eye. A pink slip with Jack Vega’s name and number on it.

I pick up the phone and dial Hemple first.

Gail warns me that Jack is on the warpath. He is demanding to know from his lawyer why he’s compelled to pay spousal support to Laurel, who is now, in his words, a fugitive. Whoever said that alimony is the ransom a happy man pays to the devil has never met Jack.

According to Gail he’s demanding that his lawyer go back to court, an order to show cause on changed circumstances, the fact that the kids are now abandoned, to seek temporary custody until the matter of their missing mother is resolved.

‘Vega has called me,’ I tell her. ‘Any idea what he wants?’

She has scuttlebutt from Jack’s lawyer. It seems the attorney-client relationship with my brother-in-law is not all the man could have hoped for.

‘Jack found out that Danny and Julie were at your place the night Melanie was killed,’ she says.

Playing the wounded father, Jack’s now busy trying to sever all links. He has left strict written instructions at his kids’ school that I am to have no contact.

Vega has an antiquated notion of teenagers and how to deal with them. In an age when kids are packing Mac-tens in the classroom and pistol-whipping teachers who look at them cross-eyed, Jack sees a note from home as something on the order of the Great Wall of China.

‘The man doesn’t miss a beat,’ she tells me. ‘We’re noticed for a hearing on temporary custody in five days. Got any ideas?’ she says.

Jack has found the soft underbelly. Laurel is not likely to show in court, and her lawyer, having already appeared on the custody matter, can’t avoid service. Jack will take a default on Laurel, grab the kids, and cut off support, all in one fell swoop. It is what you notice first about Jack, not his blinding intelligence, but his devotion to the rules of opportunity. Facing Melanie’s funeral, and a sea of grief I do not deny, he still finds time in a busy day to sort out the silver lining in his wife’s death.

As much as a lawyer can be, Hemple is depressed by all of this.

To Jack there was never anything sacred about taking care of his family. For a guy with a woman in every room, support payments were viewed as nothing but an exorbitant stud fee. I tell her this. But she doesn’t laugh. There is a dark cloud, something unstated, hanging over our conversation, the sense that Gail is waiting to unload something more on me. We tiptoe around it for several minutes, mostly lawyer’s small talk, adventures in divorceland, a ride on every theory, none of them with a cheerful ending. Then she punches my ticket.

‘I may as well tell you,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to be able to go on representing her.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m filing a motion to withdraw as counsel,’ says Hemple.

A lawyer leaving a case unfinished conjures all the images of Fletcher Christian lowering the longboat to put you over the side — in this case, given my limited grasp of things domestic in the law, without benefit of compass or charts. At this moment there is a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach not unlike what you would get out on the rock-and-roll of the bounding main.

‘You can’t do it,’ I say.

She’s got a million reasons. A waste of Gail’s time and Laurel’s money, what it comes down to in the end.

She can hear me fuming on the other end, the silent thought that a lawyer should never cut and run. Though in this case, with Laurel on the lam, I must admit that it is an open question who has abandoned who.

‘Listen, if it’s a question of money …’

‘It isn’t the money. That ran out a month ago. Laurel passed me two bad checks since,’ she says. ‘Bounced and skipped like flat stones on a pond,’ she tells me. We are siblings under the skin, Gail and I. Like the criminal bar, it seems rubber is the stock-in-trade of divorce.

‘I kept going for the reason that a lawyer always keeps going,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know how to say no.’

I tell her to send me her rubber checks and I will give her cash.

‘You’d be putting good money after bad,’ she says. ‘It’s not just the money. It’s the case. There is no way,’ she says. ‘How do I tell the court that my client hasn’t abandoned her kids? “Your honor, she’s a fugitive from justice, the cops can’t find her, but she is a good mother. She cares for her children. She just does it long distance.” It isn’t gonna wash,’ she says.