Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Even if we succeeded, she fled the jurisdiction on the night of the murder. Laurel was due in court the next day on the custody case. She’s given the authorities no explanation for this trip. They claim this is highly suspicious,’ says Harry.

He is right. They could hold her on this alone.

What is more troubling is that Laurel has given no better accounting to us. She insists that she did not kill Melanie, but refuses to tell me what she was doing in Reno the night of the murder. She says she had a bona fide reason for the trip. Presumably she will share it with us sometime before she is convicted.

‘Maybe she’ll have an explanation ready for us in the morning,’ I tell Harry. This is when I am scheduled to see her again at the jail.

‘Sure.’ He cackles, always the artful dodger. Harry has seen clients like this before. People who wonder if they should tell their own lawyer and instead end up doing it for the first time on the stand. I shiver and put it out of my mind.

I’ve told Harry about Vega and the fact that Jack was wired for sound in his office. He thinks Lama was trying to set me up, some compromising statement that perhaps I had knowledge of Laurel’s whereabouts. This could make me an accessory after the fact, or at very least cause the bar to launch a probe like a photon torpedo into my practice. Either way Jimmy Lama would have a psychic orgasm.

Harry’s fanning through pages on his desk, materials copied by the police and given to him under our application for discovery. At this point, with an ongoing investigation they have supplied everything except the names and addresses of any witnesses, people who may have seen things outside the house that night. These they will hold back until their investigation is complete. Lama would not want us talking to these people until he can cast their stories in concrete. He will tape their words and take signed statements so that they cannot later have some altered recollection.

‘There is the rug,’ says Harry. ‘The one she was cleaning when they took her down.’

I question him with a look.

‘Heard me right,’ he says. ‘She was not in the casinos pulling handles when they got her.’ Harry punctures what he knows was my best hope to explain Laurel’s trip. There are people who consider travel, blurry-eyed and at the speed of light over the mountains, as a quick fix for the gambling disease.

‘She was in a laundromat doing the spin cycle when she was rudely interrupted,’ he says. ‘She was washing a bathroom throw rug,’ says Harry. He gives me a look like this is some crazy lady. What makes this worse for our side, as he explains, is that this particular rug has been identified by Jack Vega as belonging to him, part of the spoils of divorce. Jack has told the cops that it was in the house on the night of the murder, somewhere on the floor near the bath where Melanie was found dead. What Laurel was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home washing a rug is not clear. Harry shrugs his shoulders on this one.

‘Did the cops find anything on the rug? Blood?’ I say.

He shakes his head. ‘Clean as a whistle. She washed it in one of those chemical machines, the industrial ones with solvent.’

‘They’ll argue she cleaned it to destroy evidence,’ I tell him.

‘They already are, in a roundabout way,’ says Harry. ‘Powder residue tests on her hands. Came up negative. She’d dipped them into the solvent.’

Visions of Laurel’s inflamed hands. Powder-residue tests are used to determine if a suspect has recently fired a gun. The discharge of trace elements, chemicals, can be detected on the hands, and in the case of a long gun other parts of the body.

I sit, taking in air, like being sucker-punched. There is little that will ignite righteous indignation in a jury faster than inferences of evidence being destroyed.

‘Even assuming she did it, why would she take the rug? If it had blood on it, why not just leave it there?’

‘It’s one way to clean her hands and have an excuse for it.’ Harry’s tracking on what will surely be the state’s line of reasoning.

‘Next,’ he says. ‘One gold compact, with the initials MLH. This was found in Laurel’s purse at the time of the arrest.’

This means nothing to me.

‘MLH,’ he says. ‘Melanie Lee Hannan. The victim’s maiden name.’

‘Oh.’

Harry can tell by the look on my face that this is daunting, Lama’s case against Laurel beginning to stack up.

He gives me an expression, a tilt of the head, like who knows? ‘Never circle the wagons in defense too early,’ says Harry.

We’re both beginning to wonder if Jack was not right. That perhaps we should maybe have some early conference with the DA before the tides of temper run high.

‘Then we have videotapes,’ he says.

‘More than one?’

He nods.

The most damaging, he tells me, is the security video from the porch of the house, the night of the murder. It has the time and date imposed at the bottom left corner.

‘I haven’t seen it,’ says Harry. ‘We’ll have a copy in a few days. But the description isn’t good,’ he says. He reads from a page prepared by one of the evidence techs. They have pictures but no sound, what is described as a lot of angry and threatening gestures by Laurel toward the victim followed by the destruction of the camera by Laurel after the door was slammed in her face. According to the report, at one point Melanie, in the doorway, threatened to call the police if Laurel didn’t leave.

‘How do they know that with no sound?’ I ask.

‘Lip-readers,’ says Harry. He’s talking about experts who can read lips with field glasses a mile away. These people can take the art of sounding out words from a tape to whole new levels.

‘Do they know what Laurel was saying?’

‘If they do, it’s not in the report,’ he says.

‘What time was the tape?’

‘Twenty-seventeen hours,’ he says. Seventeen minutes after eight, the evening of the murder.

‘Time of death?’ I’m making notes on a pad, the critical elements.

‘Ah.’ He’s looking. ‘Eleven-thirty.’ This is as close an estimate as the medical examiner can make.

A little over three hours between the two events. ‘You said there were two tapes?’

‘Yeah. The courthouse earlier that day,’ he says. ‘There was a security camera in the ceiling when Laurel went after her.’

‘All we needed,’ I say. It was bad enough that there were a dozen witnesses. On film this attack will take on a whole new meaning. A skillful prosecutor can splice these pictures together with forceful argument. The image for our case is not a pleasant one. A brooding Laurel languishing over thoughts of vengeance for hours before presumably carrying out the deed. Their case is beginning to take form, handed to them on a platter, a blood feud between the two women, with one of them now dead.

‘The toughest part of their case,’ he says, ‘are the special circumstances.’ Harry does not believe that the DA can produce hard evidence that the killer, whoever he or she was, actually lay in wait for the victim.

‘No lurking in the corners on this one,’ says Harry. ‘Whoever did her came straight at her,’ he says. ‘And they fought. The evidence in the bathroom shows a scuffle. They’re playing it down,’ he says. ‘But the evidence is there. There was a perfume bottle shattered on the floor, like maybe she tried to throw it at the killer. A lot of stuff was knocked off the vanity. The scene was more consistent with evidence of a rash act of violence than somebody lurking in the shadows to do the victim quietly,’ says Harry.

It would be our first break in what is an otherwise seamless case for the state. Perhaps I can tell Danny and Julie Vega that at very least their mother is not facing death if convicted.