Steve Martini - Undue Influence

Rattled, and now unsure of what is happening, thinking that perhaps she has done something wrong, Mrs. Miller is filled with equivocations, not certain of her recollections. It’s been a long time; it was dark that night; the woman wore a hood — enough backstroking for an Olympic medal. Try as she will, Cassidy can’t get the witness to hurdle the fence back to the land of certainty.

Finally she puts an end to a painful process.

‘Your honor, we would argue that any error is harmless.’ She makes a final stab. But no gold ring.

‘The motion is granted,’ says Woodruff. ‘The identification of the defendant by this witness is excluded.’

‘Is there anything else?’ he says. Woodruff is looking at Cassidy. He is clearly angry, a sense that he has been badly used by Lama. What a judge feels when he knows he’s been lied to. If jeopardy had attached, and I had some plausible grounds for dismissal, I would lay them before the court at this moment.

A pained expression on Jimmy’s face. Woodruff wants to see him in chambers after lunch. Lama had better hope that the judge takes his from a bottle and that Woodruff is a happy drunk.

‘Hey, baby.’ Clem Olsen is speaking to me while he is ogling Dana with lupine looks and yammering in a gravely dialect.

‘Long time no see. Got a shake for the Wolfman?’ he says.

All the while his eyes are eating up Dana.

We’ve both come here in separate cars, directly from other engagements, me from the office, Dana from some political soirée across town. She has accepted my invitation, but says she can’t stay long.

‘Gonna introduce me?’ Clem wants to know. His hands are doing a quick routine of a shake in moves I cannot follow, all variations on a common theme, aping that half of the social order Clem feels is cooler than himself.

I do the honors, introducing Dana. She gets an embrace and one of Clem’s sloppy specialties on the cheek, which she rubs off with the back of her gloved hand as soon as he turns away.

Clem has formed a one-man reception line at the door tonight, greeting everything that moves, looking down the front of a lot of dresses, and copping a few good feels under the aegis of kisses and hugs whenever he can.

Some things never change. Clem is one of them.

McClesky High’s Twenty-fifth Reunion, and we are gathered in the main ballroom of the Regency, downtown, across from the Capitol. Olsen is decked out in ruffles and formal wear. What little hair he has left on his head is slicked back and thinning, a younger version of Mel Ferrer. He is tall and slender, but with a cop’s gut. From the bulge under his coat I know that he is packing. Cummerbund or not, without a hunk of case-hardened steel wedged in his armpit, Clem would have a terminal identity crisis.

There are people in stretch limos pulling up outside, women in furs so toxic with moth repellant that these could only have come from some rental warehouse, men with beer bellies and callused hands in alien suits and ties, craning and twisting their necks like cheap imitations of Rodney Dangerfield. Some of these bear faces recognizable from adolescence under unfamiliar domes of balding heads. People putting on the dog, covering the warts of their lives from others they haven’t seen in years, and won’t see again for many more, still hustling the peer groups that eluded them in youth; others striving to recapture the popularity they haven’t known since.

A slap on the arm. ‘Later on, buddy. I’ll catch you for a drink.’ Clem gives me a wink and a wave. He has already moved on to the next group coming through the door, rationing the charm. I see one of his hands has slipped low on the silk-encased rump of a woman, one of the pom-pom girls of yore.

‘How about if we find a table?’

‘Great,’ says Dana.

She takes my arm and we walk, heading toward the back so we can leave early. I steer her past the punch bowl and the no-host bar, spouses of alumni who don’t know anybody, all jockeying in an effort to put themselves into an early alcoholic buzz, their port in this social storm. Anything to get through the evening.

Some guy sticks his hand in my gut, stops me in midst ride.

‘Mike Wagner, city fireman,’ he says.

Vague recollections of football, some animal of intimidation from my youth who at fourteen had a beard, and a body like Attila, who towered over me, but who hasn’t grown a millimeter in a quarter century. I now have twenty pounds and three inches on him.

I shake his hand. ‘Paul Madriani, lawyer,’ I say.

No conversation, but he introduces his wife, brunette and twenty-eight if she’s a day, dressed in a slinky black outfit, chewing gum and shifting weight from one thigh to another like some taxi dancer with her meter running. I have vague recollections of his first wife, a high school sweetheart who, if she is here, is no doubt throwing daggers from across the room with her eyes at this moment. I move out of target range.

Dana and I take seats at a round table, like Arthur’s knights. I shake hands, and we extend a few greetings with three other couples already there, none of whom I recognize from school, a place where we can talk, uninterrupted.

My only reason for being here this evening is the price of a favor from Olsen, though I haven’t told Dana this.

Lately she has taken a few hits from Morgan Cassidy for her presence in the courtroom during motions. I have heard tales of some quiet backstabbing, palace intrigues in the darker corners of the fairer kingdom, Cassidy moving in the shadows to get the Queen’s Bench to pull its judicial endorsement from Dana. Morgan no doubt views her presence on our side of the aisle as a mortal breach of fealty in the guild of cops and prosecutors. Though Cassidy’s efforts would appear to be in vain. From all accounts, when it comes to the appointment, Dana seems to have already pulled this sword from the stone. According to reports, her name alone is headed for Washington.

Tonight she is shimmering in a black evening dress, hair up, spiked high heels of patent leather. The ever-enigmatic smile on her lips. Two of the other women at our table are looking at her as if they might like to corral their husbands’ eyes to keep them from roving.

We exchange a little small talk, people settle back into their chairs, and Dana looks over.

‘How did the jury go?’ she asks. Dressed to kill, and she’s into shop talk. It seems lately that we are either in the sack or talking trials, hers or mine. We have yet to find that middle ground of intimacy, though there is enough growth to the relationship that we are both still looking, chopping our own paths through the jungle of lust.

I have finished eight days of jury selection in Laurel’s trial. Eight women and four men, with another guy and three more women as alternates. I am happy with the gender gap. I tell Dana this.

With a victim and a defendant who are women, men on the panel are an enigma. A bad marriage and they could hate their ex, taking it out on Laurel. And guys in a stable marriage would not feel threatened by Melanie as a sexual predator in the same way as women.

The fairer sex will either love Laurel or hate her, see her as the avenging angel in a bad marriage or as a vengeful shrew, depending on their own life situation. The jurors I have gone for are in their late thirties and older. Three are divorced, like Laurel, raising families alone, people who know there’s a ragged edge to real life, who will form a chain of empathy with my client.

Pitching a theory at trial is not unlike the pursuit of marketing leads in the world of commerce. You pick your pigeon and fling your seeds. My particular bag of popcorn has Jack as a man with an ego, familiar with the exercise of power and the perks of privilege. If he’s on his way out, maybe looking at a term in the joint made more modest by his cooperation with Dana and her friends, his psyche would be stretched to the limit. You have to wonder what a man like this would do under these circumstances if, apart from his other travails, he suddenly discovered that his younger wife had another lover.