Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Did you talk to him?’ I ask.

Vega looks at me, dense. I’ve lost him with the question.

‘Danny?’ I say. ‘After he was arrested, did you talk to him?’

‘Sure. I chewed his ass.’

‘But did you talk with him?’

‘What’s to talk about? The kid needs some discipline,’ he says.

‘That’s something only his father can give a boy.’ Melanie gives me a quick up-and-down with her head like this is holy writ direct from the source.

‘The kids are getting older,’ says Jack, ‘and she can’t control them.’ Then he brings up the issue of Laurel’s drinking.

Now I’m getting it, both barrels from the two of them.

‘She drank,’ I say. ‘Past tense. She hasn’t touched a drop since this started, even with all the crap laid on by your witnesses.’

‘Yeah. Until the next time,’ says Melanie.

‘It’s been nice.’ I start to go laterally to get around the two of them. Our conversation has become too loud, too obvious. Laurel is making overt moves to break away from her lawyer and Julie.

‘Yeah? Well, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse,’ says Melanie, ‘unless she’s willing to talk reason.’

Prancing in place, shifting his weight, Jack gives her a look that could kill.

Their case is over, all their evidence, their witnesses presented. I wonder what Melanie is talking about. I linger for a moment, an invitation for her to open her mouth, maybe put her foot in it.

But Jack has her by the hand, squeezing her fingers till the ends are white.

‘Talk to her,’ says Jack. ‘Tell her to be reasonable.’ They start to move off. Suddenly behind them I see Laurel, coming on like a locomotive at a crossing, her eyes ablaze, two white-hot coals. She swings it over one shoulder with both hands like a misaimed hammer throw in the Olympics, and three pounds of purse crash across Jack’s shoulder. The purse misses Melanie’s head by an inch and instead catches Melanie’s own little bag, a beaded thing carried under one arm, sending it careening to the floor with Laurel’s.

There’s lipstick, compacts, and wallets everywhere, slapping and sliding on hard terrazzo, the objects women carry scattered for the world to see. A plastic brush caroms across the floor where it ricochets off the polished shoe of a bailiff outside Department 14.

Before I can move, Laurel’s into it with the broken strap of her purse, gripping this strip of leather as a handy garrote and seizing Melanie’s throat. For some reason this venom is not unleashed on Jack but Melanie Vega.

I grab one arm before she can move.

Jack is caught in the middle between the two women. He has both hands and forearms to his head now, covering up like a prize-fighter backed into a corner. He’s wearing a woman’s hanky near the crotch of his pants. A lacy black thing like a doily, it clings to the wool nap of his suit.

The bailiff’s moving toward us.

I grab Laurel by an arm and put myself in front of her, blocking her way. She has an athletic vitality, a sensuous muscularity. As I lean against her I am amazed by the mass of rippled muscle in her arms, and her legs of coiled spring.

‘What’s going on?’ he says. The bailiff’s best command voice.

The guy recognizes me and nods.

‘Just a disagreement,’ I tell him.

‘Disagreement, my ass.’ Jack’s coming out of his crouch. ‘Bitch tried to nail my wife with her purse,’ he says. Not an ounce of fat on her body, thin narrow hips, feeling Laurel’s upper arms, Jack’s fortunate she didn’t take a swing and come up short. He’d be on his ass, cold-cocked on the floor.

‘You can use the lawyers’ conference room.’ The bailiff seems interested in avoiding problems, ducking a formal charge that will mean a lot of paperwork.

Melanie with two fingers picks the woman’s hanky off her husband’s pants and lets it float to the floor. She gives the bailiff an imperious look like he should do something more.

He does. He picks up the handkerchief and hands it to Melanie. ‘Belong to you?’ he says.

It is the closest thing to spit I have seen from a woman. Hemple’s picked up Laurel’s purse. I take the handkerchief from the cop and stuff it inside. People are picking up objects from the floor.

‘You bitch. You stay away from my kids.’ Laurel is pumping up the venom again, a second wind. ‘I wish it was a goddamned sledgehammer.’ She’s holding up the purse by a piece of its broken strap.

I’m pushing her away now. The bailiff is giving us one of those dubious law-enforcement looks, perhaps second thoughts as to whether he should ask the victim if she wants to press charges.

‘Ask her what she did.’ Laurel’s in my face now as I block her with my chest and move her toward the conference room.

‘And you,’ she says. Laurel turns it on Jack now. ‘You don’t give a damn if she destroys your own children.’ She calls Melanie a liar, among other assorted and more odious epithets.

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but lawyer’s instinct tells me it has no place here in a public corridor.

Hemple’s now joined us. She’s coaxing Laurel along from behind like a tugboat at the stern.

Melanie’s talking to the bailiff, all hands and facial gestures, like maybe she can convince him to get out his handcuffs. He gives her a face, lots of sympathy and equivocation. All the while he’s backstepping toward the courtroom, picking up things, offering them to Melanie for her purse, no doubt wishing he’d been looking the other way when this started.

Inside, behind louvered blinds and enclosed glass, Hemple gives me the news.

Laurel is still too angry to talk.

‘It’s Julie’s school,’ says the lawyer. ‘They caught another girl with drugs. The kid claims she got them from Julie.’

To the extent that anything involving adolescents can surprise me, I am startled by this. From every appearance my niece’s only narcotic to date is the adulation of her peers. To this she is heavily addicted. I wonder if it has led to heavier things.

‘Crack cocaine,’ says Hemple, ‘The other girl, her friend, had enough for personal use, not dealing.’

Thank God for little favors. ‘Are they bringing charges?’ I ask.

Hemple makes a face likes she’s not sure. ‘They caught the kid three days ago. They’re still investigating.’

‘How did Jack find out so fast?’

‘What I’m wondering,’ says Hemple, like maybe there’s some artful device going down here, Jack and Melanie engaged in creative self-help. A kid caught on charges might be willing to fabricate a story, implicate some innocent for a price. The rules of commerce. Jack is not above seeing the social problems of his children’s school as an ocean of opportunity, a place with more substances of abuse than the average pharmacist’s shelf.

‘It gets worse,’ says Hemple.

‘It’s a lie,’ says Laurel. She looks at me stone cold, an edge to the expression in her eyes. We have reached bottom, like the thump of an elevator in the basement. To Laurel this is now something fundamental, a tenet I must believe.

Still, denials are the small talk of the lawyer’s venue, more common than discussions of the weather, and Hemple ignores her.

‘According to the kid,’ she says, ‘Julie made admissions.’

‘What kind of admissions?’

‘The kid says Julie told her the stuff came from home, a stash her mother kept in the house. What’s worse, Melanie has confirmed this. She says Julie also told her the same thing, that her mother used drugs.’

‘It’s not true,’ says Laurel. ‘She’s a lying bitch.’

I might expect her to fold, to be fighting back tears, driven to the edges of the glass enclosure by the charge. Instead she is standing, head erect, shoulders squared, shaking her head, and in clear unassailable language telling us that this is crap.