Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he says.

‘You’re the expert,’ I tell him.

‘They don’t give out crystal balls at the FBI ballistics lab,’ he says. ‘You guys got the corner on those.’ Nico does a gesture with one hand to his crotch, grabbing, something from Michael Jackson. This is all down below the railing of the witness box, where the jury can’t see it. When pushed on the stand, Nico will show you his credentials — a charter member of the fuck-the-lawyers club.

‘So you think it was something that the bullet passed through on its way to the target that caused these metal fragments to be deposited in the wound?’

‘Been known to happen,’ he says.

‘These, the fragments, are described as microscopic threads of low-carbon steel?’

‘That’s what they say,’ says Perone.

‘Metallurgy?’

‘Yeah.’

I take a little walk in front of the witness stand — some posturing for effect.

‘As a ballistics expert, is it safe to say that you come into contact with a good many assorted items besides guns and bullets?’

‘Like what?’ he says.

‘Like explosive devices, silencers, Taser weapons that fire projectiles?’

‘We see some of those.’

‘So you have pretty broad expertise?’

‘You could say that,’ he says.

‘You can’t generally buy this stuff? I mean, a good time-delay bomb or something detonated by remote control?’ I say. ‘Still, some people make them, don’t they?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. ‘You can buy how-to books, get articles in the Soldier of Fortune press. If you’re good with your hands,’ he says, ‘and you don’t splatter yourself all over the ceiling, you might make a bomb that works.’

‘Your honor.’ Cassidy’s out of her chair. ‘Unless I’ve missed something, the victim wasn’t killed by a bomb.’

‘If you could bear with me, your honor.’

Woodruff motions with his hands, like hurry up.

‘So all this stuff — bombs and silencers — can be handmade if you have some skill and know what you’re doing?’

‘Sure.’

‘For example, if somebody came up to you and asked you how to make a silencer, what would you tell them?’

‘For starters that possession’s illegal,’ he says.

‘Of course. But just as an example, if you wanted to, you could tell them how to make one, couldn’t you.’

‘Sure.’

‘How?’

‘Right here?’ he says.

‘Why not? The information’s not illegal, is it?’

‘No.’

I motion for him to go on.

‘You get two pieces of metal tubing,’ he says. ‘One quite a bit larger in diameter than the other. You drill a lot of holes in the smaller tube, like Swiss cheese,’ he says. ‘Then you put the smaller tube inside of the bigger one. You gotta leave an air pocket between ’em. You find some way to fasten the two pieces of tube together, usually some kind of a flange. The inside tube has to be just a little bigger than the bore on the barrel of the firearm. You figure a way to fasten it to the end of the barrel. Usually threaded.’

‘That’s it?’

‘You’d want to pack some kind of material to deaden the sound. Put something into the air space between the two tubes,’ he says.

‘Like what?’

He makes a face. ‘Something that wouldn’t burn if it got hot. In the old days, the wise guys in New York and Chicago, some of ’em used little sheets of asbestos, rolled up,’ he says. ‘Guess if they did much business, their lungs went to shit.’ He laughs, all alone.

Nico gives Woodruff a nervous grin. ‘Sorry, your honor. My language. But I guess you could say poetic justice,’ he says.

‘So what do they use today? To deaden the sound?’ I ask him.

‘Whatever won’t burn. Steel woo-’ He stops before the words clear his lips.

‘Yes?’

‘Steel wool. Some people use steel wool,’ he says. The look in Perone’s eyes at this moment is perhaps the most I will receive by way of a fee in this case.

‘And when you pack that steel wool, pieces would work their way through the little holes of the inside tube, wouldn’t they?’

Nico’s nodding his head like he’s in a daze.

‘Wouldn’t they?’

‘They could,’ he says.

‘So that a bullet travelling down that tube might pick up tiny threads, small fragments of low-quality steel, steel wool,’ I say. ‘And the bullet might carry these, might deposit them in a wound. Isn’t that right?’ I say.

By now Perone is no longer responding to my questions. Instead he is looking at Cassidy, wondering what degree of wrath he will receive when she gets him outside of the courtroom. He has delivered to her doorstep, packaged and ticking, the one thing any good trial lawyer hates, surprise.

‘The steel wool of a silencer might leave little unexplained grooves and ridges in the lead of a soft, unjacketed bullet? Isn’t that right, Mr. Perone?’

He’s nodding — grudging concessions from the stand.

‘Answer the question,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s possible.’

‘A silencer would answer a lot of questions,’ I say. ‘Wouldn’t it? Like why there was no little soot or gunshot residue on the victim. Why there was no tattooing on the body.’

Much of this would have been filtered by the silencer, and Nico knows it.

‘It might,’ he says.

‘It would also explain why no one heard the shot that killed Melanie Vega, wouldn’t it?’

He looks at me, stone-cold eyes.

‘A possibility,’ he says.

‘That’s all I have for this witness.’

As I turn for the table it is with some sense of satisfaction. All of this leaves the prosecution to make a considerable reach if it is going to sell the theory that Laurel pulled the trigger. She must either run in circles of intrigue that rival James Bond or they must have the jury buy into notions that my sister-in-law is the modern merger of Henry Ford and Annie Oakley, a woman who not only loads her own ammunition, but is master of the tool and die, somebody capable of fashioning to tight tolerances a silencer for a semiautomatic handgun — the things that can stretch credulity in a trial.

This afternoon the courtroom is cloaked in the muted light of flickering images from a large television monitor, rolled out in front of the jury panel, the overhead lights turned low.

Harry and I, Cassidy and Lama, jockey for location at each end of the jury box to see the screen. Laurel has moved from the counsel table and is shadowed in the courtroom by a matron who hovers a few feet behind her with each step that she takes. The judge is off the bench, white hair, bushy eyebrows, and flowing robes, a phantom in one dark corner of the room.

On the screen are the florid images of Laurel captured on color videotape, charging across a crowded corridor in this same building, seven months ago, two floors below where we now stand, to lash out with her purse like a leaded sap. It crashes on Jack’s shoulder, skimming an inch past Melanie’s face, sending the purses of both women crashing to the floor, their contents scattered.

Cassidy asks that the tape be shown again. This time it is rewound further back. In her headlong charge, Laurel knocks down an old man who had the misfortune to wander into the path of fury. Laurel does not even break stride. The unmistakable explosion of her rage, tracking on Melanie like a heat-seeking missile. For lawyers attempting to make out a motive for murder, it is the pictorial equivalent of a million words.

Caught dead center on the screen, Laurel’s face is flushed, filled with fury, and while the video images afford no sound, angry words can be read on her lips, threats being spit like venom from a cobra.