Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘I guess I could sit outside her friend’s house.’

I give a sigh and a look of concession. ‘For a few minutes,’ I say.

They head for the living room as I slice carrots into a pot.

Nikki left me a small binder of recipes, a part of her legacy of love. In her dying days she took hours penning these out in longhand, things that even I could prepare without burning the bottom out of some pan. I watched in amazement as she went about this, pulling together these handwritten pages, a nutritional map for survival. She did it without a thought, almost cavalier, in the same way that she would have once plunked TV dinners into the freezer for me before leaving for a week to visit her mother. My wife had a selfless penchant for the practical.

Sarah’s talking up a storm in the other room. Danny’s taken to the tube in defense, the disconnected jabber of some quick and dirty channel-surfing. He settles on something, a dull monotone I cannot make out.

More carrots, a little parsley, a spoon of butter, and stir. Something’s tugging at the back of my pants. I turn. It is Sarah. Her face is filled with agitation. A wagging finger, she has me bend low for some secret.

‘Danny is crying,’ she whispers.

I wipe my hands and head for the other room.

The kid is hunched in a corner of the couch, knees drawn up, as close to a fetal position as is possible for someone six feet tall. He’s staring at the screen, tears streaming down his face.

There on the television, in living color, pictures of Laurel, her hands cuffed behind her, being pulled toward a squad car — a black-and-white with a door shield I do not recognize. Laurel’s head is pushed down as she’s deposited in the backseat. I can see only the silhouette of her head through the rear window as the car pulls away from the curb. I reach for the controls and boost the sound just in time to hear: ‘This is Norm Kendal reporting from Reno.’

I stand in a daze, mesmerized by the stench of incinerated carrots and the thought that I finally know where ‘up here’ is.

It is just after noon, and the customary crowd of the tattered and vagrant wander in front of the Capital County jail, waiting for friends or relations to be turned out on bail.

Laurel has waived extradition from Nevada. Lama and his crew have wasted no time in bringing her back to Capital City.

I wait in a small interrogation room on the ground floor of the jail. Apart from minor children I am the nearest relative. So I have retained myself to represent her, something that has raised eyebrows among the jailers, unsure whether they should admit me.

In the hallway outside I can see Laurel through a window as she is led in. One of the female deputies has her by the arm. Laurel is wearing no makeup. Her face is drawn and tired. She has aged ten years in the last two.

I remember her in those halcyon years of my own marriage. She was happy and seemed always to move at single speed, in corksoled sandals. She wore waistless dresses with a backpack, the latter filled with Danny in diapers, the former beginning to show the bulge of his sister.

This was the late seventies. My generation was busy slithering through the corporate jungle, trying to shed its social conscience. The Mercedes hood ornament had replaced the peace symbol as the icon of the moment.

It is said that timing in life is everything. Laurel, it seems, foundered under a bad star, having missed the Age of Aquarius. She was a natural hippy.

When she first met Jack, she was a year out of Berkeley. He was older. Sporting hair halfway to his ass, he talked a dialect of liberal gibberish that tickled the cockles of altruism. Jack, who was then working in the Capitol, one of the lackeys-in-waiting, was honing the skills that would make him a politician. He was telling Laurel what he thought she wanted to hear, the prelude to a marriage made in hell.

Whenever we discussed the weighty topics of our time, my impression was always of Laurel searching her soul, agonizing for some ultimate truth while Jack paid lip service, what some speech writer had crafted in ten minutes at a typewriter. He was too busy enjoying the perks to examine the policy. At home and abroad, Jack was always a ship sailing under false colors. My guess is that from the start, he had been schlepping his mast into other ports. It took Laurel a time to figure this out, and a little while longer to immerse the problem in a bottle.

Through all of this the only constant in her life, it seems, has been the instinct to protect her children. In this she has the maternal impulses of a cheetah with its young, extended claws longer than the spiked heels on the shoes some women wear.

The door opens. Laurel is cuffed. The glint of metal, a chain encircling her waist, runs down between her knees to the locked shackles on her ankles, so that when she moves she sounds like something from the yule season. There are little steps here like a Chinese peasant with bound feet.

She wears an orange jail jumper three sizes too big, and canvas shoes, an indication that she has already undergone the indignities of admission to this place — cavity searches in places only your physician should see, and a shower with antiseptic soap so astringent it could lift paint from metal.

She clears the door, and the first thing I see are Laurel’s hands as she holds them out to me. They are a vibrant shade of red, like someone may have cooked them over an open flame.

‘What happened to her?’ I look accusingly at the guard.

‘Ask your client,’ she says.

‘It’s all right,’ says Laurel.

The guard gives me her best cop’s smirk.

‘You can take those off,’ I tell her. I’m talking about the cuffs and shackles.

‘In your dreams,’ she says.

‘You want, we can call your boss to discuss it,’ I tell her. ‘My client has a right to confer with her lawyer without a ton of metal on her feet and hands.’

‘Not down here on the main floor,’ she says. Testing the water. How far can she push? Too lazy to work the keys.

I look her in the eye, and she blinks. I start to move to the door, toward a higher level of appeal.

‘Your party,’ she says. If looks could spit. She works with her keys, more locks than a chastity belt. Then, dragging six yards of chain, she stations herself, her back leaning up against the wall five feet away.

‘Outside, if you don’t mind,’ I tell her.

Coming to the county jail to talk to a client is like being dropped into a sandbox filled with snarling pit bulls. The guards who can’t bite will at least try to piss on you. Generally these are deputies who higher authority won’t put on the street for fear of causing a riot among rational citizens. So they are left here to develop their public personas like Quasimodo. She moseys out the door, dragging metal behind her.

They have just booked Laurel, a charge of first-degree murder. She is slated for arraignment tomorrow morning, the reading of formal charges, and an appearance to set a date for entry of a plea. I think Harry was right. It would appear I can take little comfort in the state’s case, though I have yet to see any part of it. Harry is busy preparing a motion for discovery. Apparently the cops believe they’ve got a dead-bang winner based on the evidence already in hand. I have heard rumors of a witness. Perhaps it is something they would like us to believe.

Laurel sits in the chair across the table from me. She is stone-faced, but there are no tears, no frazzled hysteria.

Other women I know would recoil in horror at this place, beefy guards and other inmates with an attitude on the hardness scale of a diamond. But it is the thing about Laurel. She is one of those people who always seem to find a second wind in adversity.