Steve Martini - Undue Influence

In the chess match that is a trial, Morgan Cassidy has traded a knight for one of our pawns. In return for some veiled and foggy threats of death, she has now lost one of two pieces of hard physical evidence purporting to link Laurel to the scene of the crime: Melanie’s gold compact. The other, the bathroom rug, relies solely on Jack’s testimony for its proof — his word against Laurel’s that the rug was in Melanie’s bathroom the night of the murder.

Cassidy’s case begins to look more problematic with each passing day, and a few things become clear. Jimmy Lama’s early investigation is what is steering their theory, and I am beginning to get the feeling that Lama is taking Morgan for a ride. I think Jimmy’s chronic myopia has settled like the black Plague over them. It is a matter of Lama immersed in a vendetta.

It takes all my faculty for fantasy to imagine Lama’s passion to nail Laurel once he found out that I was related. For Jimmy this could only have fallen under the category of a magnificent obsession. As a cop assessing evidence, it has glazed his powers of perception. Once Lama knew of the relation between Laurel and me, there was only one suspect, one theory. Cassidy is now faced with hard facts which do not square with their early assumptions. All the ways a theory can go sour on you.

I would pay for status as a fly on their wall to hear the dressing-down Cassidy will give him for failing to review the courthouse tape to its end. If there is anything to aversion therapy, Lama will never leave a theater again before the credits finish rolling and the screen goes dark.

The dice cup is being slammed on the bar, a bang and the roar of voices as one of them is stuck with a round of drinks. As I look up I see Clem coming through the door. He swings between some tables, shakes a few hands, a couple of cops off the day shift. I hear the Wolfman, gravel in his throat, then bits and pieces of some off-color joke in a Mexican dialect, followed by a lot of laughter. This is Clem the politician. Next week he may be working Community Relations and telling these same guys that positive racial attitudes all start at home with an open mind and a clear conscience. Clem is the only man I know who could sit through five days of sexual sensitivity training and cop a feel from the female instructor as his graduation prize.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he says. ‘Hope you haven’t been here long.’

I wave this off, and gesture to the seat on the other side of the table.

I don’t get the Wolfman routine this afternoon. Instead Clem is looking over his shoulder, worried what his friends might think if they see him consorting with the enemy in the midst of trial. He tells me I am too hot at the moment for the normal social chitchat of this place. Lama, he says, wants a pound of flesh, and while merchants in Venice might settle for my heart, according to Clem, Jimmy wants to start at the soft underside of my genitals.

‘What did you do to get him so pissed off?’ he asks. ‘Ranting and raving all over the office,’ he tells me. ‘Jimmy has trouble deciding whose name to take in vain, yours, or as he puts it, “that cunt” they forced him to work with.’

Clem looks at me. ‘Who’s trying the case?’ he says.

‘Morgan Cassidy,’ I tell him.

‘Oh.’ Nothing more, like maybe Clem concurs in Lama’s initial assessment.

Clem wants to go for one of the back booths, where we can talk in private. Not be disturbed, as he says.

We do it. The waitress comes up. Clem orders a boilermaker. I do grapefruit juice.

‘On the wagon?’ he says.

I have to pick up Sarah from the baby-sitter’s in a few minutes. I tell him this and he nods like he understands. Since Nikki’s death I have a heightened sense of responsibility for my daughter, and a whole new appreciation for single parents. I have often wondered about the things that stick in a kid’s mind as they grow older and realize that there is a darker seam to life, that the smell that always seemed to float about Dad’s head like an ether was not Aqua Velva after all.

‘Did you hear about Louis Cousins?’ he says.

Cousins, the kid on trial across the hall from us, was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder a week ago.

I shake my head.

‘Jury came back an hour ago.’ Clem extends his arm straight out in a fist, then turns it over and does a thumbs-down gesture like Caesar. ‘Death,’ he says.

I cannot say that I am surprised by this. Psychological defenses rooted in allegations of childhood abuses have been trotted out all too often of late, and overexposed in the press. Like knock-off Colonials in a housing tract, they are losing their impact.

The implication for us, however, is that the press will now be free. We will be garnering a larger share of the attention, which I could just as well do without.

Clem’s in no hurry. I think he figures I’m good for a dozen drinks. I will buy him a gift certificate at the bar and let him carouse with his friends.

‘What did you find out?’ I ask him.

‘Nothing on the picture,’ he says. ‘Struck out on all counts.’ Clem is talking about the photo given to me by Dana of the man known as Lyle Simmons, who if she is right was the triggerman seen with Jack in the bar across the river — the courier who delivered the bomb to the post office — and the guy who took out the Merlows. I would have figured, being that busy, he would have had a record to rival Capone.

‘We checked all the aliases,’ he says. ‘Without prints…’ He makes a face like dream on. ‘Which brings us to the other matter.’

He’s talking about the fingerprint of Kathy Merlow from the tube of paint I palmed off the grass during our encounter in Hawaii.

‘Took almost an hour on the computer.’ This doesn’t sound like much, but on the high-speed automated system of scanning an hour is a lifetime. ‘We got a hit,’ he says.

Clem pulls a slip of paper from his pocket. ‘One Carla Leopold, born Paterson, New Jersey, August twenty-six, nineteen and-’

‘Save the background, let’s cut to the chase,’ I tell him.

‘This is the good part,’ he says. ‘Honors graduate, Columbia, degree in accountancy.’

‘You sure we’re talking about the same woman?’

He gives me a big grin. ‘Employed by one of the large accounting firms in New York City, five years’ experience. Next employer Regal International Trading Consortium, corporate accountant and bookkeeper. Employed two years.’

‘Where is this leading us?’ I ask him.

‘Bear with me,’ he says. ‘Regal is one of the new line of trading and investment houses. They make their money the new and improved way.’

‘How’s that?’

‘They launder it,’ says Clem.

He sits looking at me, big round eyes across the table, like how’s them apples?

The waitress arrives with our drinks. Clem starts slurping the foam off his iced mug. I give the woman payment and a tip and she leaves us.

‘Word is you got narco-dollars, Regal International will buy you a piece of the rock,’ says Clem. ‘They do Rumpelstiltskin and his straw routine one better. They turn white shit that goes up somebody else’s nose into tax-free-no-load muni bonds. Or at least they did until two years ago.’

‘What happened?’

He takes a drink of draft, knowing he has my attention now.

‘IRS and Justice came down around their ears. Full-court press. Indicted all the principals. Tried to get them to roll over on their clients. On the theory that you always follow the money, they called in your girl Carla.’

I’m giving him funny faces, not exactly tracking on where he’s headed.

‘Seems with the heat on, her former employers had funny notions about downsizing. Layoffs were done off a barge, after a cement facial, somewhere up the Hudson. Two of her cohorts, other bean counters, went the way of the disappeared,’ he says. ‘Ms. Leopold suddenly realized her career options were being limited. She agreed to testify in return for some kind of a deal. She copped a plea, mail fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering, multiple counts. That’s how her prints showed up in the computer,’ he says. ‘In return she was supposed to get sanctuary.’