Steve Martini - Undue Influence

Harry’s finally joined me back at the railing, tracking on the view.

‘It’s still preserved,’ he says. ‘We oughta get a court order for Jack’s house.’ Harry wants a look at where it happened. Leaning against the railing, he looks over his shoulder at the gaping glass of what we must assume was George Merlow’s study.

‘And we need to find your friend George Merlow,’ he says.

The fourth floor of the county courthouse accommodates the probation department, the cafeteria, and the master calendar of the municipal court. Muni court in this state does small-dollar civil cases, misdemeanor trials, and gets most of its publicity by serving as the clearinghouse for arraignments on major felonies.

A further arraignment is why I am here this morning, facing a bank of lights and running with my briefcase under one arm through the loading chute of pack journalism, trying to avoid being roped and branded.

There are a dozen questions shouted my way. The cameras hold back, a lot of long shots with the strobes, file film they can use on another day, when some notorious event occurs, when your client has been drawn and quartered in legal fashion, and you are seen on the tube grinning and cavorting like it’s all in a day’s work.

Some asshole sticks a mike in my face and asks if my client did it.

Criminal confessions — film at five.

From the tenor of his question I’m not sure the guy has a clue as to specifically what it is, other than one of the usual infamous acts certain to nourish an inquiring mind. Otherwise why would his producer have sent him? The information highway, all the shimmering depth of quicksilver.

I passed Jack Vega on the steps on my way in. He seemed more hostile than usual. Perhaps he was just skulking, trying to find his own way in around the press and cameras.

I get inside the courtroom door and shut out the din of the unwashed. It is quieter here, more subdued, muted tones, a humming undercurrent of courthouse gossip. Some of these are the legal groupies. What used to be all guys, and now some women, regulars who live in the court’s bullpen, the pressroom downstairs. They have more access to the judges than any lawyer. Some of them have their own keys to the clerk’s office so they can burn the midnight oil.

They’ll do a filler on page ten from a probate case one day, some Daddy Warbucks who left ten million in trust to his pooch, a shar-pei with a face like somebody’s other end. They’ll do a big-bucks tort the next. But give them a choice, and murder among the tony set will always hit the top on their charts. Rumpled reporters who know how to rifle a clerk’s file. The people you gotta watch. Turn your back, a loose word in the wrong ear, and you become news, not the kind you want to read about.

I hear my name, the topic of banter. Somebody breaking from one of the cabals in the front row.

When I turn I am staring Glen Dicks in the face.

‘Glen,’ I say.

‘How you doin’, Paul?’ Everything is first-name here, but we don’t shake hands. These are secondary relationships. Not ugly, just business.

Dicks writes for the Herald . One of two papers in this city. He has the edge on the out-of-towners who have come to see because of the political fallout of the case. A legislator’s naked wife found shot has potential.

Dicks is gray curling hair to the lobes of his ears, and a mustache to sweep your porch with. He wears a sport coat with more things sticking out of pockets than a porcupine’s ass, and bears a gut like a Victorian bustle, which has opened and jettisoned a button on the belly of his shirt.

He gives me the old saw about a lawyer defending himself. Then he asks me: ‘Is that anything like defending a relative?’

‘I don’t know. You should ask my sister-in-law if she feels like a fool,’ I tell him.

He laughs a little. Dicks is shrewd enough, a goer to events, the watcher of a thousand courtroom brawls, to know there is a tactical downside to my representation of family. Played to the jury in the right tone, a backhanded compliment by a prosecutor, it could sound as if I don’t believe in her case so much as feel an obligation.

Glen inserts a few delicate probes, looking for anything to get a pencil into. The time frame for trial. Whether it’s likely the defendant will take the stand. Ideas on the number of defense witnesses. He gets quotes he can print, but no information.

‘What’s happening here today?’ he says.

‘You should ask the DA.’

‘Amended indictment,’ he says. ‘They didn’t tell you anything?’

I pass it off as minor stuff. ‘I assume it’s mostly technical. T’s and I’s,’ I tell him. ‘Crossing and dotting.’

‘Emm.’ He is writing this down.

‘Any theory of a defense?’ he says.

‘Sure. And I’d like to share it with you, just as soon as I have confirmation that the DA is deaf, blind, and doesn’t read Braille.’

A nervous grin. A look like he had to try.

‘How is she taking it?’ He’s talking about Laurel. If he can’t get a real story he’ll go for the human interest angle.

‘Except for the bars and the ladies who do the screaming meemies at night, she tells me it’s just like home.’

He would laugh, but Glen is sensitive enough to get the picture. He’s nodding like he understands, so I give him something he can write.

‘She’s facing serious charges,’ I say.

Little squiggles in his book.

‘She doesn’t have a clue as to what happened. And like any mother, she misses her kids.’

‘The children, they’re with their father,’ he says. Not a question so much as seeking confirmation.

I nod. ‘They’re not orphans yet. They have their dad.’

‘At least for the moment,’ he says.

A look like maybe I should depose him. My turn for information. He misses only a beat.

‘Well, you hear things,’ he says. ‘Courthouse bureau talks to the Capitol bureau. Things like that,’ he says.

‘Things like what?’

‘Stuff on the assemblyman.’ He tells me this, and then, like speak of the devil, his note pad is up to the corner of his mouth, shading it from any lip-reading, a nervous eye to the door.

Jack Vega has just entered the courtroom.

Dicks screws up his face a little, like maybe he’s not sure whether I’ve undone this particular family knot. Maybe Jack and I split poker pots on Thursday nights.

I let him know, in a few words under my breath, that there is no love lost.

‘What are you hearing?’ I say.

‘That he’s coming under some intense scrutiny — of the federal variety.’ He gives me a face like some Frenchmen judging a foreign wine. ‘FBI, and the U.S. Attorney,’ he says.

There has been talk of a hot federal probe for months, a lot of smoke but no fire. Everybody figured the air was clear when a state senator, the acknowledged subject of the inquiry, was given a clean bill of health. It came in a bland statement by the Justice Department, like a medical press briefing on the condition of the legislature — the patient has cancer coming out its ass, but we can’t find it on the X rays.

Still, maybe Jack’s power party is about to end. He has been doing business with an ardent passion lately, shaking the givers out of the political money tree. With his term ending, Jack’s running out of time, trying to sell his ass before it sinks to the value of Confederate currency.

‘What are they looking at, the feds?’ I ask him.

‘If we knew that, we’d be doing a story,’ he says. ‘But word is he’s under investigation,’ says Dicks. ‘We hear rumors, no sufficient confirmation yet, just rumors, of another federal grand jury.’

I would not want to shatter Dicks’ illusions, but if Jack is wearing a wire, he is no longer the one under investigation. Suddenly Vega’s electronic connections are beginning to make sense. It had nothing to do with Melanie’s murder. My guess is that Jack is aboard the good ship justice, chained and manacled, and in the brig. With a full federal court press, the squeeze on, if they got him on film taking a bribe, some hotshot agent looking for an Oscar, Vega would whittle in his pants on show night.