Steve Martini - Undue Influence

For the first time it strikes me what all of this has done to Sarah. Every familiar point of contact in her world is now gone. And though I am trying to reassemble a part of her life, getting her aunt out from under the cloud of murder, even this makes me an absentee father who is either in court or locked in his office, mulling over papers until the wee hours.

There is a lapse on the phone, Danny talking. She laughs a little, then listens some more.

‘There is a lady,’ she tells Danny. ‘Her name is Dana. But I don’t like her.’

With this I look at Sarah.

She’s studying me to see the effect. I suspect that this is intended more for me than Danny.

‘I didn’t say she was bad or anything.’ Sarah getting defensive. ‘Just I don’t like her.’

‘That’s not a nice thing to say,’ I tell her.

She makes a face, like the truth seldom is, her ear glued to the phone.

I have allowed Sarah to grieve for Nikki in her own way, and I see this, her attitude toward Dana, as a part of that normal mourning process. I would deal with it, except that I view it as both necessary and harmless. There is no real hostility here, but rather an undercurrent of suspicion on the part of my daughter toward anyone who might be seen as a surrogate for her mother. In this case the only apparent candidate is Dana, for we seem of late to have been thrown together. The circumstances of Laurel’s case have seen to that. For my own part it is not an unpleasant experience, this woman of mystical beauty and quick intellect. In the last week we have spent a couple of warm evenings by the fire at my house, after Sarah has gone to bed, sipping wine and talking until late. The hum of adult voices heard once more in my home. The communion of two lonely souls.

For the last two days she has been in Washington, D.C., business on the impending judgeship. While Sarah tugged at my sleeve with demands that I read to her, Dana and I have spoken each night by phone, long distance.

We have discussed in general terms a possible vacation to tropic climes in the fall, the three of us. Dana has suggested something like Club Med, where they have special programs for children. So we have started to collect literature.

All of this, I suspect, has generated a kind of rivalry rippling just under the surface, little jealousies that a seven-year-old mind lacks the art to conceal.

Suddenly Sarah is finished talking with Danny. In the abrupt way children end all conversations, she hands me the receiver and is off the bed and down the hall.

‘Danny?’

He’s still there. ‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t be a stranger,’ I tell him. ‘Call whenever you want.’ I tell him I’ll leave word with my secretary at work to break in if he should call. He has the number.

‘Is the Vespa okay?’ he says.

‘It’s fine. But I keep finding Sarah out there playing on it, pretending she’s taking you for a ride,’ I tell him. ‘But she’s very careful.’

‘That’s okay. Just don’t let her mess with the box on the back, all right? All my stuff’s in there.’ The world coming apart and Danny is worried about ‘stuff’ in the box on the back of his bike.

‘It’s locked, remember? I assume you have the key.’

‘Yeah, well, just tell her to be careful.’

‘I will,’ I tell him.

‘I’m sorry about all of this,’ his last words to me on the phone. A boy, growing into a man, taking on the burdens of his mother.

‘It’s not your problem,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll work it out. Try not to think about it,’ I say. And we hang up.

Dr. Simon Angelo is the Capital County coroner hired two years ago from a state back east. He holds degrees from three universities and belongs to a score of professional societies. These litter his curriculum vitae, which Morgan Cassidy has just laid before me on the counsel table.

Angelo is mid-forties, though by dress and appearance he looks older. He has a fringe of graying hair that rings his head above the ears like clouds with their tops sheared in the jet stream. He is slight of build, with sharp features, a chin that finishes the face in a rounded point, and deep-set dark eyes that give the appearance of a mind engaged in perpetual deliberations. Simon Angelo is every man’s vision of intrigue at the Court of the Medici.

In front of him this morning, balanced on the railing that forms the front of the witness stand, is a square box, something that in the last century might have contained a woman’s hat.

I stipulate on his qualifications to testify as an expert, and Cassidy passes out copies of his résumé to filter through the jury box.

Under the framework of a dozen preliminary questions, Angelo re-creates the death scene: Melanie Vega, lying at the bottom of a dry bathtub, her eyes open, pupils fixed and dilated.

Time of death is the first evidentiary bridge he and Cassidy cross. It is a pivot point because of the argument between Laurel and Melanie on the front porch earlier in the evening. Cassidy would no doubt like to push the murder closer to that point in time.

‘Our original report placed it between eleven and eleven-thirty P.M,’ he says.

Alarms go off. Revision on the way.

‘And do you still consider that to be an accurate estimate?’

He talks about postmortem lividity and loses the jury in a sea of scientific jargon halfway through.

‘Could time of death have been earlier?’ says Cassidy.

‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘Lividity can vary from case to case, and the information here was at best sketchy.’ What he means is that it was based on observations by the EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) before Angelo arrived on the scene.

‘So fixing time of death is not an exact science?’ she says.

Angelo gives her a benign smile, something well planned.

‘Not at all,’ he says.

They are laying the groundwork for some major wiggle room. Before our pretrial motions, when Cassidy had Mrs. Miller to identify Laurel at the house near the eleven-thirty benchmark that appeared in the coroner’s report, the state was more than willing to live with their estimate as to the time of death. Now they would like to fudge a bit. Jurors might wonder why, if Laurel was so intent on killing Melanie, would she argue and then wait for three hours to carry out the deed?

‘Is it possible that the death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty?’ says Cassidy.

This is less than ten minutes after the two women argued on the porch, and three hours earlier than their original time estimate.

Angelo is a million pained expressions on the stand, the revisionist at work. He tells the court there are factors in this case that are unusual. Whether the body was wet or dry at the time of the crime. This could affect the cooling rate which normally goes into the equation, the fact that eye fluids — another measure of the time of death — were damaged by the fatal bullet. By the time he finishes he has thoroughly discredited his own earlier estimate.

‘Upon reflection,’ he says, ‘I suppose it is possible that death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty,’ he tells her.

‘Thank you, doctor.’

Indeed. It is why a court of law is not the place for unmasking truth. The two of them have now rewritten the initial coroner’s report to conform more closely to the evidence on Cassidy’s plate after our pretial motions.

Laurel leans into my ear, sensing that momentum on an item of import has shifted, asking me the significance. I wave her off. Things are moving too quickly.

‘Doctor, can you tell us the cause of death?’

‘Death was caused by a single gunshot wound to the head.’

‘Can you be more specific, describe the wound?’ she says.