Steve Martini - Undue Influence

‘Where are you going?’

As I open the door, it is clear that Harry’s office is a place waiting for a fire.

There are piles of yellowing newsprint on the floor, clipped-up papers, and leftover scraps, mixed in with briefs and research notes for cases Harry is working on. There are snippets of news stories, articles nailed to the walls with a million pushpins. These range from cartoons to banner headlines, all the stuff that fuels Harry’s engine of political paranoia.

I start pitching paper.

‘Wait a minute. What are you doing?’ Harry is incensed, as if somehow there is a chemical equilibrium to this, some order to the stew of litter that I am upsetting.

Halfway between an ancient issue of The New Republic and a molding jelly sandwich I find what I am looking for. Saffron with age and brittle, it carries a dateline from Lexington, Kentucky. I hand it to Harry and let him read.

He barely has time to finish the first graph when it hits him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t think …?’

‘One way to find out,’ I tell him. ‘Do you want to make the call or should I?’

My opening statement to the jury is brief, and probably obscure. It is not the blistering assault on Jack that I have honed to a bristling point for the past month.

‘In a few moments,’ I tell them, ‘you are going to hear testimony and see evidence that for some of you may cause considerable dismay. For others,’ I say, ‘it will merely serve to confirm your darkest suspicions about the nature of man and his institutions of justice. This evidence,’ I tell them, ‘has come into my possession only within the last thirty-six hours, and in many ways it comes as more of a shock to me than it may to all of you.’

Thirty seconds after I call her name, Dana Colby walks through the courtroom door and up the center aisle. She is calm, almost serene, in a dark blue suit, the kind a prosecutor would wear to court, and heels that click on the marble floor.

She walks past me as if I am not here, not a look or whisper of recognition, her stone-cold gaze straight ahead up at the bench.

Laurel is at the table with Harry, asking him questions, why I am putting Dana up. We have not had time to bring her current, and until this evidence is in, I have no idea as to its impact on the jury or the judge.

There is a flurry of activity at Cassidy’s counsel table. Among other things, she and Lama are checking our witness list to ensure that Dana’s name appears. What was originally intended as chaff on our own list was seen by them as just that. They had forgotten that Dana’s name was there. Now they are surprised when she actually appears and takes the stand.

She is sworn and sits, her gaze fixed on the middle distance somewhere at the back of the courtroom. The only hint of any anxiety some mild thumping with two fingers of one hand on the arm of her chair.

She refuses to make eye contact with me, as I have refused to take her calls or see her for two days now, since having her served with the subpoena to appear here. I think she knows, or has possibly guessed what we have.

Dana tried to camp in my office this morning to catch me, a meeting I wished to avoid, so Harry and I stayed away, prepping for court at a coffee shop two blocks down the street until moments before we arrived here.

‘State your name for the record?’ says the clerk.

‘Danielle Elizabeth Colby.’

I had not known her first name was Danielle until this moment. Perhaps a measure of just how little I know about this woman.

I move dead center in front of the witness box where she can no longer ignore me, and standing here, we finally confront each other.

‘Ms. Colby, would you tell the court what you do for a living?’

‘I’m a Deputy United States Attorney.’ There is a deadpan to her voice, emotionless, as if something has been drained from the woman I thought I knew. There is more than a little pain in this exercise for me.

‘Chief Deputy in your office for the Eastern District of this state, is that not so?’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘In a word, you are a federal prosecutor, aren’t you?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

I am leading her shamelessly, but all of this is harmless and Cassidy is anxious to have me get to the point. I think perhaps Morgan has not picked up on the friction between us, and believes that we are working in tandem to do a number on her case.

‘Ms. Colby, who were George and Kathy Merlow?’

With the mention of their names she stiffens, like someone has shot a mild jolt of electricity through her chair.

‘They were neighbors of the victim in this case, Melanie Vega,’ she says. ‘They lived in the house directly next door.’

This is not what I am looking for. Dana is adroit. She manages to avoid the question, so I am left to use this to spin a little silk and crawl further out into the web.

‘And to your knowledge did they reside there, in that house next door, on the night that Melanie Vega was murdered?’

‘Yes.’

‘Before that night, did you ever have occasion to talk with George or Kathy Merlow for any reason?’

Dana has beautiful eyes even when they are darting in discomfort as they are now. Her tongue searches for saliva.

‘I might have,’ she says.

I nod slowly. I am not enjoying this, and I think she knows it, so she embellishes a little to get me away from the nub of it.

‘We lived in the same neighborhood, you see a lot of people,’ she says. ‘I might have seen them someplace or other.’ She makes this sound like some social accident, a rubbing of shoulders that cannot be recalled with precision.

‘I see. Might one of these places where you met George and Kathy Merlow have been your office downtown at the justice department?’

Finally we arrive at the point, like a prime number, an issue that cannot be divided by half-truths.

She looks up at the judge. ‘Your honor, if we could have a moment in chambers,’ she says. ‘There are matters of critical importance, life and death,’ she says.

Woodruff has heard a lot of things from the bench, but never a witness asking for a private conference in the middle of her testimony.

‘Is there something wrong with you physically?’ he says. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, your honor.’

‘Then you should answer the question,’ he says. Dana’s moment of truth.

‘I might have. I can’t remember.’ Truth turns to evasion.

‘Surely that is something you would remember, a meeting in your office?’ I say. I try to bring her to it gently, as little pain as possible, like a cyanide capsule cracked between the molars.

‘I meet with a lot of people,’ she says. ‘I cannot remember them all.’ She writhes and squirms, a futile and agonizing effort to put off the inevitable.

All the while I can see Laurel pumping Harry, a series of heated one-liners in his ear. She wants to know what I am doing. What Dana has to do with all of this.

‘Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Colby, that the night you met the Merlows outside in front of their house, the night Melanie Vega was murdered, that you were there not as some itinerant passerby but on business?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says.

‘Isn’t it a fact that you went to meet George and Kathy Merlow as a representative of the United States Department of Justice to assure them that they would be all right, that everything would be taken care of?’

She looks at me like I’m smoking some bad weed.

‘Who called you?’ I say. ‘Was it your boss, because you lived closer than anyone else? Or did you have some special relationship with them, something like a caseworker?’ I say.

‘Your honor, I think counsel is confused,’ she says. ‘Someone has clearly given him misinformation. Misled him,’ she says, ‘for whatever reason.’