Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Enough to identify her?’

She thinks for a moment. The ultimate issue. ‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure it was the same woman you saw earlier in the evening? The one on the Vegas’ porch who was making all the noise?’

‘Oh, yes. We’ve established that,’ she says.

‘We?’ I say.

‘The police and I.’ Jimmy Lama’s conquest. Mrs. Miller’s views are no doubt now cast in stone.

‘Have you signed a statement?’ I ask this in clinical terms, like no big deal. You can change it at will.

‘Last week,’ she says.

‘And they taped their conversation with you.’

She looks at me like she’s not sure. But, knowing Lama, this is a certainty.

‘The first time this woman came to the house, did you see the car she was driving?’ Harry is now double-teaming her.

‘Yes. It was green, large. A Pontiac, I believe.’

The lady has a good feel for cars. Laurel has a late-model metallic-green Pontiac.

‘But you never saw this car later that night?’ Harry looking for a point.

She looks at him grudgingly. ‘She could have parked it around the corner,’ she says. In the roll of good cop, bad cop, it is clear who is going to get the confidence of Mrs. Miller.

‘Still, you didn’t see it?’ I ask.

‘True.’

‘Had you ever seen that car in the neighborhood before?’

‘No.’

‘Had you ever seen the woman before? The one you identified for the police?’ I say.

‘Not that I can recall.’

‘But the second time you saw the figure’ — Harry’s not conceding it was Laurel — ‘the second time there was no car.’

‘I said I didn’t see a car.’

Harry’s just checking. Hostility rating high.

‘Did you think this was strange? No vehicle.’

She makes a face. ‘Lots of people run,’ she says.

We probe for openings, any concession she might be willing to throw our way.

‘Did you actually see this person, the second figure — did you actually see this person enter the Vega house?’

‘No. And I told the police that.’ She’s nodding to us, like isn’t that fair?

‘Thank you,’ says Harry. Now if she will only retract her identification of Laurel on that second trip, Harry would kiss her behind.

‘How well did you know Melanie Vega?’ I ask.

‘Not at all. We had nothing in common.’ There is no equivocation here, abrupt, like the two women lived on different planets. I get the sense that there is something of disapproval lurking just under the surface, like Mrs. Miller is just egging me to ask. She sits on it like a pincushion.

‘You never saw her in the yard, over the fence, maybe gardening?’

‘I don’t think she would have known a rose if it stuck her,’ she says. A lot of imperious looks. ‘If we passed we didn’t talk. She kept to herself — and her few friends ,’ says Miller.

‘Friends?’

‘She had a few.’

‘Women in the neighborhood?’

‘They may have been from the neighborhood, but they weren’t women. At least not that I noticed.’

If we had tea and little sandwiches we’d be heading toward the lady’s dirt session.

She fumes about a little, searching for the words. Then she says: ‘Mrs. Vega had callers.’

I give her a look.

‘Mostly at night, when her husband was away.’ She looks at me, waiting to see if I will roll with her in this hay. But I am taking notes, the dispassionate clinician. She takes to the defense, like a gossip scorned.

‘Well, when men come at night they’re not usually selling vacuums. I told the police the same thing.’

She looks at Harry, who is smiling. I can tell his mind is back to Melanie and the thought that, in his words, ‘She was bobbing for apples.’

‘Well, I may be older, but I’ve been around.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ says Harry.

She’s not sure how to take this, but she lets it pass.

‘You told the police she had gentlemen callers?’ I say.

‘Absolutely. They wanted to know everything, so I told them.’ She gives me a solid nod, like done my duty.

A buzzer goes off somewhere, the clock on a kitchen stove.

‘Will this take much longer? I have some errands to run,’ she says.

‘A couple more questions,’ I tell her. I could ask her about the hood, how much of the woman’s face it covered. Just how well she could see that night. What the light on the street was like. A million questions to set up doubts. But if she is going to equivocate, I want it to be on the stand, in front of a jury. Probing these issues will only serve to prepare her, perhaps quicken images already planted in her mind by Lama and his minions. I want to keep her as much in the middle between our sides as possible, reinforce the view that the good witness does not belong to any camp. With Mrs. Miller it may be the best I can do, at least for the moment.

Harry grills her on a few more points, what she heard on the steps as the two women argued. Lama might have hoped for more on this. It seems all she got was a lot of shouting, with very few intelligible words, most of which she does not wish to repeat. ‘Foul language,’ she says. She could jail Laurel for this alone, I think.

‘Could we hurry this up?’ she says. ‘I have a phone call to make before I leave on my errands.’

I seize the opening, some time to prepare and another session.

‘If you’re in a hurry, maybe we could continue this at another time, more convenient.’

‘That would be better,’ she says. Like a patient out of the chair in some dental office, she is now all smiles.

‘When would be convenient?’ I ask.

‘Why don’t you call me?’ She gives us her number. Harry writes it down.

We head for the door. I can see large windows in the dining room. These look out directly onto Vega’s front porch. She would not need field glasses to see who was there.

‘One more question,’ says Harry. ‘That night, did you hear anything that might have sounded like a gunshot?’

She shakes her head, soberly, like she’s thought about it before, something on which she is adamant. The cops must have grilled her on this.

‘No gunshot?’ he says.

‘No.’

‘No popping sound?’

‘I know what a gun sounds like,’ she says.

Harry looks at me. We have already hit three of the five houses in the cul-de-sac. Mrs. Miller’s house is next door to the Vega residence. The Merlows live on the other side. Except for Kathy and George Merlow, who we will do next, and who I met that night, Miller is closer than any other house in the neighborhood. So far, the bathroom trashed, glass bottles thrown and smashed, a nine-millimeter round fired, and no one heard a sound that night.

‘You don’t suffer from any form of hearing impairment?’ Harry can’t resist.

She stops and looks at him. ‘No one has ever accused me of that.’ If we get her on the stand I will keep Harry outside.

I thank her, tell her I will call in the next day or so, and we are gone.

We’re down the steps, out on the sidewalk. Mrs. Miller’s front door nearly hit Harry in the ass on the way out.

‘Bad news for our side,’ he says. ‘We could have her eyes checked. Subpoena the records of her optician,’ he says. ‘A fucking jogging suit,’ he tells me. ‘She can see through a hood. Better eyes than Superman. Why the hell didn’t she just swallow the speeding bullet and save us all the trouble of a trial?’ Harry has a bad attitude with witnesses who are not helpful, particularly if he thinks they are embellishing what they saw for the benefit of the boys in blue.

This is clearly his thought with Mrs. Miller. ‘If it walks and it wears a badge,’ he says, ‘it’s right.’

Four down, one to go. We head for the Merlows’.