Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Mr. Vega, do you remember receiving a telephone call on October tenth from a Dr. John Phillips, your wife’s obstetrician, when she was out of the house?’

It is a thick look I get from him, a flicker of eyelids questioning how could I know that.

‘Do you remember being told at that time by Dr. Phillips that Melanie was pregnant?’ As I say this I am holding telephone records in my hand, the familiar forms by the local carrier in this area with red lettering across the top that I am perusing. Jack cannot miss this. What he doesn’t know is that these are mine from my house, not his or the physician’s.

He considers for a moment. Wipes a bead of sweat off his upper lip. ‘I might have,’ he says.

‘You might have talked to Dr. Phillips?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he told you about the pregnancy, didn’t he?’ Telephone records might show a call was made. They wouldn’t tell me the content of the conversation. For this, either the doctor has talked, or I have information from the tap on his phone. Jack knew the feds had tapped. Either way there are risks in lying.

‘You’ve been prying into a lot of personal things,’ he says.

‘Your honor, I would ask that the witness be instructed to answer the question.’

Before Woodruff can speak. ‘He might have,’ says Jack.

‘The doctor told you about the pregnancy, did he not?’

‘The doctor, Melanie. What difference?’ he says.

Jack still doesn’t see where I’m coming from.

‘I’m going to ask you one more time. What did the doctor tell you?’

‘Something about a test,’ he says.

‘A pregnancy test?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about it?’

‘That the test was positive,’ he says.

‘Meaning?’

‘That Melanie was pregnant.’

‘So this was on October tenth?’

‘If you say so,’ he says. ‘I don’t know the date.’

‘Would you like to look at the medical records?’ I ask.

‘The doctor made a notation of the conversation,’ I turn to the table to get them. These we have subpoenaed from the physician.

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he says.

‘Well, then, I ask you, how could Melanie have told you that she was pregnant as early as August or September if she wasn’t tested until October and the results delivered on October tenth?’

A lot of faces from Jack, mostly pained expressions. He could have a million answers for this, that women know these things before they are tested, that she wasn’t tested until later in the pregnancy, that he was wrong about when Melanie told him. But he doesn’t come up with any of these. Instead he backpedals and trips over his own lie.

‘I thought it was Melanie who first told me. Maybe I was wrong,’ he says. ‘Maybe I heard it from the doctor first. I don’t know what difference it makes.’

The problem here is that Jack can’t be sure what the physician has told me, if anything. Vega can’t recall whether he made admissions at the time of the telephone conversation that this was the first he was hearing of the pregnancy. I could show him the transcript of his tapped phone to assure him that, while as Dana said, ‘you could hear a pin drop,’ Jack did not actually say anything. But it’s too late. It is the problem that when you litter the landscape with too many lies you forget where the truth is.

Vega simply attributes this once more to a faulty memory. Only this time the jury is looking with more than a few arched eyebrows.

‘So from what you can remember now you did not hear about the baby for the first time from Melanie, but from the physician, and this was roughly three weeks before your wife’s death?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jack’s ultimate refuge when cornered.

‘Did you ever talk to your wife about the pregnancy?’

‘Sure we talked about it. What the hell,’ he says. ‘What? You think we wouldn’t discuss something like this?’

‘I don’t know. Did you?’

‘Absolutely,’ he says.

‘When? Where?’

‘Several times,’ he says. ‘Lots of places. We were very happy about the child.’

‘You wanted this baby?’

‘Absolutely.’ Jack is absolute about everything except the details.

‘Quite a feat, wasn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘Your child must have been one of the miracles of modern medicine.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Isn’t it true, Mr. Vega, that twelve years ago you underwent minor surgery, a procedure carried out in your doctor’s office, a vasectomy?’

Jack suddenly swallows his Adam’s apple, three or four heaving bobs. ‘Whatya-’

‘As a result of this procedure is it not a fact that you were incapable of fathering a child during your marriage to the victim, Melanie Vega?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Vega, that the unborn child who died in your wife’s womb was fathered by someone else?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s not true.’

‘Should I get your medical records? I have them right here.’

‘No. I had the vasectomy,’ he says. ‘But the child was mine.’

‘How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But sometimes things happen. I just figured it didn’t take.’

‘You figured it didn’t take?’

It is the key to our case, the crowning blow, the fact that the child is not Jack’s, that he has known this from the inception and now lies about it bold-faced before the jury, the motive for murder.

‘Mr. Vega, isn’t it a fact that you didn’t discuss this child at all with your wife? That she kept the pregnancy a secret? That she went to her death believing you knew nothing about it? Isn’t it a fact that she tried to conceal it from you because she was having an affair with another man, and that you found out about this?’

‘That’s not true,’ he says.

‘She didn’t know about the call from her physician, did she? The one you intercepted.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t tell her though, did you?’

‘No. I forgot.’ The same old saw.

‘Isn’t it a fact that your wife had another lover?’

He sits staring at me in the box, wordless.

‘Isn’t it true that she had another lover and that you found out? Who was it, Mr. Vega? Who was it that got your wife pregnant? Who?’ I say. ‘Who…?’

‘Enough .’ When the word comes it is screamed at me from behind, a female voice, anguished and broken. I turn, and it is Laurel. Standing at the counsel table, tears lining her face.

‘Enough,’ she says.

Harry has a hand on her arm, trying to get her to sit, a stunned expression on his face like she erupted without warning.

Even Woodruff is dumbfounded, palming the handle of his gavel but not striking the bench.

A matron moves in behind, putting two hands on Laurel’s shoulders, a signal for her to sit, evidence in the eyes of the jury that she is not free to move about as she wishes.

‘Enough about the child,’ Laurel says, and with that she slumps back into her chair.

I look, and the jury is mesmerized. All eyes on Laurel.

Almost in a daze I say: ‘Your honor, could we take a brief recess?’

We regroup back near the holding cells, and I tell her that this is not good. Her conduct has injected a whole new element into our case. What the jury thinks of this I have no way of knowing.

I cannot read them as to Laurel’s emotive appeal, whether they might see this as an admission that she had something to do with the murder, or was merely taking pity on Jack.

What she tells me is that she could no longer deal with the matter of the child, my picking away further at questions regarding this dead infant and its origins.

‘Everybody is talking about it like it was a thing. An event and nothing more,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t. It was a living breathing human being. A baby,’ she says. ‘A little baby. Its life snuffed out before it had a chance.’ Laurel, the good mother. It is the most troubling aspect of the case to her, that an innocent child has been killed.