Steve Martini - Undue Influence

I can see Lama’s beady little eyes outside in the hallway, through the window with its blinds. He has finally found a place where he is comfortable, in the company of other misfits, peering through a window on a private conversation. I close the blinds in his face.

Now we are quiet, enclosed and hopefully private.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

‘Where are the kids?’ she says. She’s back to first thoughts.

‘They’re all right.’

‘Do they know I’ve been arrested?’

‘Danny does,’ I say. I can only assume that by now someone has told Julie of her mother’s fate.

This is the Laurel I know. She looks off at the middle distance — a woman who moments ago was in cuffs and chains, charged with first-degree murder, and her headiest concern is sheltering her kids from the knowledge.

‘Have you talked to Gail Hemple? Will he get custody?’ She’s talking about Jack taking the kids.

‘We’ll have to talk about that later,’ I say.

‘No — now,’ she says. ‘Will he get custody?’

‘The kids have to live somewhere while you get through this mess,’ I tell her.

‘Not with Jack,’ she says. ‘You can take them,’ she tells me. ‘At least temporarily,’ she says.

Laurel’s looking over her shoulder now, paranoia like maybe somebody is listening. Here, in this place, this is a healthy attitude.

She puts a cupped hand to the side of her mouth. ‘Her name is Maggie Sand,’ she says. ‘Write it down.’

I have a glazed look. ‘Who’s Maggie Sand?’

‘My friend from college,’ she says. ‘I told you about her on the phone — lives in Michigan. It’s all arranged.’ She’s talking quickly, before the guard comes back to take her to her cell. ‘The airline tickets are purchased.’ She gives me the airline and flight number. ‘They’re in the last name of Sand,’ she says. ‘Danny and Julie Sand.’ This so that Jack or the cops won’t be able to trace them. ‘All you have to do is get them on the plane. Maggie will pick them up in Detroit.’

‘You’ve got bigger problems right now,’ I tell her.

She brings up her hands and buries her face for a moment in thought, no tears, just a few seconds of private contemplation as if she’s making one final stab at getting it together.

‘What happened to your hands?’ I ask her. The soft pale skin is turned a shade of red more vibrant than any sunburn in a warm shower.

‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell you about it later.

‘I hope I did the right thing?’ She changes the subject. ‘Deciding not to fight it.’

My heart skips a beat, images of some fatal admission.

‘You didn’t make a statement?’ I say.

‘About what?’ Her face is a puzzle. Then she gets it. I’m talking about a confession. Her expression turns to a mocking little smile, severe to the edges of her mouth.

‘You think I did it,’ she says. ‘You think I killed Melanie.’ Her face turns to the side. Tight lips as if she were about to talk to someone in the empty chair next to her.

‘Well, the fact is she deserved it,’ says Laurel. Her face whips to the front, eyes boring in on me. ‘But I didn’t do it.’ She gives herself a pained expression.

‘I hope you can believe that,’ she says, ‘because if you can’t I’m gonna need another lawyer.’

From the tone of her voice you might think I had arrested her. The look on Laurel’s face at this moment brings me down.

‘I was talking about the extradition,’ she tells me. ‘Giving up my right to a hearing. Was it a mistake?’

Like ships we have passed in the night. ‘Ahh.’ I shake my head. ‘No major mistake,’ I say.

At most a fight over extradition would have been a skirmish for delay across the state line, a battle that we would have ultimately lost and that the state might have used against us in a subsequent trial. I tell her this. We don’t have much time. The guards are shuffling in the corridor outside, anxious to get her upstairs to a cell. I had to pull every string to keep from having this conference delayed until tomorrow.

I give her quick instructions, the basics intended to get her through the night. Seeing Laurel’s exhausted condition, and knowing Lama, he will probably house her with some jailhouse snitch in hopes that my sister-in-law will unburden her soul to a friendly face in seemingly similar circumstances.

‘Can you get me out of here? Bail?’ she says.

Without seeing the evidence, I am assuming the worst, that they will charge Laurel with a capital offense, first-degree murder with special circumstances. A lawyer’s game of worst scenario. In a death case bail can be denied. I fudge. But there is no need to tell her this until I see the charges.

‘It could be tough,’ I say. ‘Your trip out-of-state. They will argue you’re a flight risk.’ She may sleep better without thoughts of execution.

‘We’ll see what we can do.’

‘You want to know why I went to Reno?’ she says.

‘A good explanation would help. But there’s time for that later.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ she says. ‘You have to trust me. Later,’ she says, ‘but not now.’

Wonderful. She would leave the DA free to fill in the blanks.

‘Yeah. Later,’ I tell her. ‘We can talk about it then.’

I suspect that Laurel is operating on less sleep than I, not a condition that is likely to lead to a lucid rendition of facts. A client’s story is always better told from a clear mind. I would like to avoid little slips, errors or omissions in detail, inconsistencies that might make me, or a jury, wonder later whether Laurel is telling the truth. It is always easier to put a defendant on the stand if her lawyer has confidence. And if Laurel is going to lie, I don’t want to know. I would prefer that it be a carefully thought-out and credible whopper.

‘What about your hands? Do you need something?’ I say.

‘Oh.’ Laurel looks at these sorry things, inflamed and irritated.

‘It’s just laundry solvent,’ she says. ‘She said they’d get the dispensary to give me something for it.’ She’s talking about the madam from the Gulags who is now standing outside our door jangling her keys.

I arch an eyebrow in question.

‘It’s from the rug I was washing,’ she says. ‘At the laundromat in Reno.’ There’s not a word as to what she was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home in the middle of the night, washing a rug. But from the look on her face, to Laurel, at this moment it seems a complete explanation.

If her story doesn’t get better than this, she may need a lot more time than I thought for creative contemplation.

‘They don’t have the gun, smoking in her hand or otherwise,’ he says. ‘Except for that, there isn’t much they’re missing.’ This is Harry’s way of telling me we are in trouble on the evidence.

Laurel is still behind bars. Arraigned ten days ago on a sealed indictment by the grand jury, she is charged in a single count of first-degree murder, alleging special circumstances. According to the indictment there is sufficient evidence of ‘lying in wait,’ that somehow Laurel entered Jack’s house and scoped out the victim before striking. If this can be proved, the state can ask for the death penalty.

A pitch for bail during the arraignment netted me a major ass-chewing by the prosecution and a quick gavel from the judge. Unless we can quash the indictment, or at least wash out the special circumstances in a pretrial motion, Laurel will spend the duration waiting for trial, behind bars. Though that may not be the worst of our worries.

This morning Harry starts with the little stuff, trashing what had been an early dream, some way to attack probable cause for the arrest and spring Laurel back to her kids. At best this would have been a temporary fix, assuming there was cause, until they reconvened the grand jury.