Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘No. She said she wanted to “kill the bitch.” ’ As Jack says this he looks at Laurel and me, fire in his eyes. He has been suppressing this venom for months. Now it spills like some oozing toxic gel over the witness box.

They embellish this around the edges, a few more pithy quotes all attributed to Laurel, who by now, if you could defame the dead, would be standing trial for slander. Jack should be writing headlines for the tabloids. Then Cassidy has him identify the rug from the evidence cart. Jack is adamant that this scrap of carpet was located in the master bath of his home the night Melanie was murdered. The only way Laurel could have gotten it, according to Jack, is if she had been present in the home that night.

Morgan then takes him on a blistering cruise of several conversations, most of which I suspect never took place. These are supposedly private encounters between him and Laurel during periods of visitation when she would come by the house to deliver or pick up the kids. To listen to Jack, these were angry tirades issued by Laurel, none of which were provoked by either him or Melanie.

Through most of this, tight-lipped and tense, Laurel is restraining herself, protesting only quietly in my ear. Then at one point she says, ‘He’s a fucking liar.’ Almost loud enough for Woodruff to hear.

When I look over she is not smiling.

During one of these encounters, according to Jack, there was a particularly ugly conversation during which Laurel said she wished the two of them, he and Melanie, were dead.

‘I suppose half a loaf is better than none,’ she whispers through a cupped hand in my ear.

Cassidy, I think, hears it, though the jury does not.

When I look at Laurel there is a willful gleam in her eye. It is the reason I worry about putting her on the stand.

‘Laurel was always jealous and angry, particularly at Melanie,’ says Jack. ‘She couldn’t deal with younger women,’ he says.

‘Maybe if you’d screwed fewer of them during our marriage my outlook would have been different.’

Several of the women on the jury giggle.

Woodruff slams the gavel on this and points it at Laurel. ‘Madam — you can be bound and gagged in that chair,’ he says. ‘Counsel, control your client,’ he tells me.

I apologize for her conduct. I’m telling her to cool it, in tones that the court can hear.

‘Go on,’ says the judge.

Cassidy saves the emotional blast for last, the story of how Jack came home and found his young wife dead, shot through the head in the bath. Jack relates all of this in morbid detail, and actually produces a tear, a single lonely bead running down one cheek for the jury to see.

All the while Laurel has one hand on top of the table, rubbing two fingers together in an obvious gesture, the world’s tiniest violin.

I move as quickly as I can to cover her hand, but Cassidy sees this and complains.

‘A nervous tic,’ says Laurel.

‘Your honor, she’s sending signals to the jury,’ says Cassidy. ‘Commenting on the evidence.’

‘I can’t help it,’ says Laurel. ‘It’s a nervous condition I have whenever the sonofabitch lies.’

‘That’s it,’ says Woodruff. ‘Counsel to the bench. And you, madam. You shut your mouth. Do you understand?’

We go up and Woodruff makes a show of fairness, but most of the hunks taken are out of my ass. He tells me if I cannot control her he will do it, and the picture for the jury will not be pleasant.

We go back out and Cassidy picks up again with Jack.

Vega tells the court that he lost not only a wife but a child.

‘Mr. Vega,’ says Cassidy, ‘can you tell the court when it was that you first learned that Melanie was pregnant?’

On this Jack weaves a yarn that it was Melanie who first told him, that they were looking forward to the new child, a melding of his existing family, the older children with the new. He tells the jury that they had taken no precautions, that Melanie was not on the pill.

I am incredulous. He says nothing about his own vasectomy. At this moment it hits me. Jack has told Morgan nothing about this. Vega, the ultimate deceiver, has laid her bare on the biggest element of our case, Jack’s jealousies, the motive for murder, that somebody else had fathered his wife’s child.

It is on this plateau of martyrdom that Morgan leaves Jack, turning him over to me on cross.

For a long moment, one of those watersheds, a dramatic pause at trial, Jack and I study each other with wary eyes as I approach the witness box. I make a face for the jury to see, like I accept only a small portion of his testimony as gospel. In dealing with Jack, the order of evidence is critical. My task is clear: to dismantle his character a stick at a time and then hammer on the joint themes of motive and opportunity.

‘Mr. Vega. We know each other, don’t we?’

He looks at me but does not answer, uncertain whether I am referring to kinship, or perhaps the fact that I know him by character.

‘I mean to say that we were once related by marriage. Is that not so?’

‘Yes,’ he says. He tells the court that he once considered me a friend. His use of the past tense is not lost on the jury.

I want to get this before them early so Jack cannot use it later, inferences that I bear personal animus toward him based solely on the sorry family experiences between him and Laurel. Jack would use this like a shield, as if I am beating on him in some personal vendetta.

Then I ease into it, reading one of his statements to the police the night of the murder, when he told them he never owned a gun. He insists that he does not. I remind him about the chrome-plated collector’s item, the nine-millimeter pistol given to him by some lobbyist to toughen his stance against a gun-control bill, years before.

Darting eyes in the box, he decides to tough this out, my word against his.

‘I, ah — I have no recollection of that,’ he says. It is classic Jack. No denial, just a weak memory.

The paper blizzard starts. I hand copies to Cassidy and the court clerk for use by the judge.

‘Mr. Vega, do you recognize this document?’ I hand him a copy. He pulls a pair of cheaters from his pocket and reads.

‘Looks familiar,’ he says.

‘It should,’ I say. ‘Is that your signature at the bottom of the last page?’

He looks. ‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Is this not the property-settlement agreement you signed with the defendant, Laurel Vega, at the time of your divorce?’

Then it dawns on him. ‘I remember now,’ he says. ‘There was a gun. Long time ago. I’d forgotten,’ he says.

‘Would you look at page twelve, item eighty-seven?’

‘I’ve already said I remember about the gun.’

‘Fine. Now look for the item.’

A lot of anger in his eyes, Jack flips through the pages and finds it.

‘Could you read that one item?’

‘Fine, for what it’s worth,’ he says. ‘To the Petitioner, one chrome-plated nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in walnut box,’ he says. ‘There. I already told you about it.’

‘But you didn’t tell the police about it the night of the murder. Why not?’

‘For the obvious reason that I forgot.’

‘What happened to the gun, Mr. Vega?’

‘I, ah … I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember.’

I am convinced that this is not the murder weapon. Jack may be a fool, but he is not demented. He would never use a gun that could be traced back to himself, not when it is so easy to get another weapon and somebody else to pull the trigger. What this does, however, is to set a pattern for the jury, of Vega’s convenient memory.

‘So it wasn’t true what you told the police the night of the murder,’ I say. ‘That you never owned a gun?’