Steve Martini - Undue Influence

Their house has a deep setback, forty yards of grass and dying shrubs.

George Merlow lacks inclinations toward a green thumb. Or else his gardener’s been deported. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in a month. It’s covered by a carpet of leaves, and weeds sprout in the planter beds like tulips in Holland.

We head up the walkway through the front garden. The double front door is one of those arched affairs, something that looks like it belongs under a steeple, in a church. Except that stuck in the crack between the two doors is a single sheet of colored paper, a handbill that is weathered and brittle. An advertisement for a Halloween sale that ended three weeks ago.

There’s a newspaper, still wrapped in its rubber band. It’s been watered by the automatic sprinklers or the morning dew and left to dry in the sun. I have seen parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls in better shape. I roll the rubber band down and open it to the front page.

The lead story is about Melanie Vega:

LAWMAKER’S WIFE MURDERED IN EAST AREA

It has been here, forgotten under some bush, since the day after the murder.

I climb the steps and look through the glass on the door. It is leaded and beveled, a view like a kaleidoscope, glittering light with more angles than one of Harry’s clients. I pick a facet and look. Clear carpet as far as I can see. No furniture. Nothing on the walls.

I ring the bell. We wait patiently for the sound of footfalls. The only thing that arrives is a cat, calico and hungry. It bounds down from the railing on the porch and begins to make love to my leg.

‘Nobody home,’ says Harry.

We ring again. Same result.

It isn’t until I turn that I see it. At the far end of the porch, propped against a windowsill, a sign — ‘For Sale’ — a realtor’s logo emblazoned across the background. I walk the distance and look at it. Some agent’s name and number, home and office, dangle from a separate metal placard below the main sign. I take these down on the back of a business card and slip it in my pocket.

‘Moved,’ says Harry.

‘Looks like it,’ I say.

As I turn I can see directly into one of the windows that looks in from the porch. A bedroom, empty space. If you hollered it would echo. The only thing remaining is the curtain on one side of the window, like maybe whoever left did so in haste.

I head down the porch and around to the side of the house, Harry on my heels.

‘Maybe you were mistaken. Maybe they went into another house. Lot of confusion that night,’ says Harry.

‘No mistake,’ I tell him. ‘I watched them walk all the way down this driveway and disappear into the backyard.’

Some confusion. Harry tramps to the sidewalk and checks the street number painted on the curb against his copy of the voter rolls, the Merlows’ address. They don’t show up.

‘Good citizens,’ he says. Given Harry’s attitude toward government, I might question his criteria for demerit points in civics.

He pulls out a little cellular phone and flips open the mouthpiece. Harry and the electronic age. Some fool in a company has given him this thing to use for six months, part of a promotion. Harry has already dropped spaghetti sauce on the dialing pad, which he bitches is too small for his lumpy fingers.

Phone directory has no listing for the Merlows, new or old. He’s talking to himself as I head through the gate toward the backyard.

‘Nosy neighbors may call the cops.’ Harry’s worried.

‘We’re house shopping,’ I tell him.

I don’t have to worry about running into Jack. Since the murder he and the kids have moved into a condominium downtown, closer to the Capitol. Word is that Julie and Danny were spooked by the house. Danny would not stay here after he saw cops tramping through with questions, brushing fibers off the carpet of his dad’s bedroom. The condominium was a concession, part of the deal for temporary custody, to lure the kids back into Jack’s nest pending Laurel’s trial.

‘What are you looking for?’ says Harry.

‘I don’t know. Just something about them that night.’

Maybe it was Kathy Merlow, her wide-eyed preoccupation with the remains, wanting to know when the coroner would bring out the body. Perhaps it was her fragile condition, not so much physically ravaged as psychicly stressed. Whatever — Kathy Merlow had a look that night, an aspect that in twenty years of criminal law practice I have seen enough times to recognize. She wore it in her eyes, the stamp of someone who was witless with fear. Not some idle vague anxiety, but more specific, some reason to be afraid.

Harry humors me as we survey the yard.

The Merlows’ house, or what used to be, is one of those modern Victorians, a lot of gingerbread sold as style — half a million dollars of house on a million-dollar lot.

Like Harry said when he saw the neighborhood, ‘Area is everything.’

In the back there’s a pool and sport court, fenced in black chain-link, surrounded by faux gaslights like a London street, in the motif, so that in a fog you might have visions of Jack the Ripper.

‘These people live nice,’ says Harry. He’d like to know what George Merlow does for a living.

‘That may be our best chance to find him,’ I say. ‘His work.’ Though I don’t have a clue what it is. I try to remember the tenor of our conversation that night. But it wasn’t a meeting where small talk predominated. Kathy Merlow was too busy looking for bodies.

On the far side at the back of the house there’s a low deck. This leads to a small dining area off the kitchen. Harry tries the sliding door. It’s locked.

I look at him, raised eyebrows.

‘I just want to look,’ he says.

Upstairs there’s a balcony, turned spindles, and glossy white handrailings, what every little girl would like on her dollhouse. This runs the entire width of the house, to the second-story turret, where the balcony becomes a descending staircase, spiral and wrought-iron to the ground.

Harry and I climb. On the balcony, the slider between the large bay window and the stairs is locked. Harry has checked this. He’s now wiping little smudges from his fingers off the glass with the bottom of his coat.

I peer through a small window by the stairs. As vacant as below, a bedroom. My guess is the master. I can see a large adjoining bath.

The bay on the other side, closest to the Vega house, is a small den. A man’s room. A wet bar, brown wallpaper with ships. There’s a built-in entertainment center on the far wall, a cabinet with one door not closed. There’s a built-in desk in the bay of the window. Depressions in the carpet tell me that furniture was placed in front of this. My guess is a swivel desk chair, something to take advantage of the views from the window over the desk, that could be turned to the TV.

‘Nothing here,’ says Harry. ‘We can run ’em down from postal records.’ He’s thinking change of address.

I’m thinking three strikes and you’re out. Something in my bones tells me that George and Kathy Merlow will not be that easy to find.

We turn to leave, and I stop, dead in my tracks. Harry’s halfway to the stairs before he realizes I’m not behind him.

I’m looking from the balcony, the view from the bay window, Merlow’s study. Like a seat in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium, it looks down, over the fence, and directly into a large window in Jack Vega’s house. This is not just any window. It is one of those greenhouse affairs that could house a small family — a glass wall curving from roof to foundation, bigger than the bubble on a B-29.

Set in the window is a massive bathtub, Jacuzzi heaven, white porcelain on a platform of tile. Strands of yellow police tape bar the door to the bathroom. Something left in Jack’s wake of departure.