Steve Martini - Undue Influence

In all of this there is a lot of protest, but it is not lost on Woodruff that there is neither a denial nor a reply to my question.

‘I’m waiting for an answer,’ I say.

‘Your honor.’ She is still looking up at him, a plaintive appeal falling on deaf ears.

He tells her to answer the question.

She takes it to a level of higher appeal. She turns to me.

‘Can’t we talk? I thought you cared.’ She mouths these words in a whisper so low that the court reporter asks her to repeat them. She has missed them for the record.

Dana ignores this.

‘At the moment,’ I say, ‘what I care about is your answer to the question.’

‘Fine,’ she says. There is a transformation that takes place in this instant. It is measured in her eyes, a recognition that anything that might have been between us is gone, vaporized by deceptions now being dragged by the painful process of the law into the naked sunlight.

‘You want to know about Kathy Merlow?’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘Fine. I’ll tell you. Kathy Merlow was part of what is known as the federal witness relocation program.’

‘She was a federally protected witness?’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘What was her real name?’

‘Carla Leopold,’ she says.

‘How did she come to live in Capital City?’

‘She had testified in cases on the east coast, against certain organized crime figures. As a consequence there was a contract out on her life. She was given a new identity along with her husband, and moved to this city in order to protect their lives. It was part of a plea-bargain.’

With this there is the low rumble of voices through the courtroom, a stirring in the press rows as a dozen heads come up. Pencils stop their little squiggles. A lot of wondering as to where this fits in our case.

‘Your honor, what is the relevance of this?’ Cassidy is out of her chair, watching all of this from the railing in front of the jury box. She probably believes Dana and I have concocted this story to provide a defense in a faltering case. What she senses is that the jury is listening. The objection is designed to break my stride.

‘Your honor, if I could make an offer of proof. I think it will become abundantly clear that the information from this witness is highly relevant.’

‘Make it quickly,’ says Woodruff.

‘Ms. Colby. Are the couple known as George and Kathy Merlow dead or alive?’

Dana’s face at this moment is drained of all emotion, though this question seems to take her by surprise, that I of all people would ask it.

‘They no longer go by the name of Merlow,’ she says.

‘So they have a new identity?’

‘Yes.’ She admonishes that if I ask she will not tell me what it is. I don’t ask.

‘But they are alive?’

‘Yes.’

It is what I’d suspected, ever since my conversation with Harry. His cynicism that the government can do only two things well: print money and provide new identities. It was the spark that fired all the little pieces that didn’t fit; Clem Olsen’s information about the fingerprint on the paint tube and the woman named Carla Leopold, the accountant employed by the Regal International Trading Consortium, a front for organized crime; her ‘death’ nearly two years ago in a fiery auto accident on an east coast highway; and her seeming resurrection on a grassy churchyard knoll in Hana two months ago. It had worked once before, death and resurrection with a new identity, so why not simply do it again? There had been no murder in Hana, only the illusion, to stop me from looking.

But there had been a killer. For this Dana apologizes openly on the stand.

‘We knew that he was still active because of the postal bombing,’ she says. ‘It was his MO,’ she says.

Marcie Reed was murdered for a simple reason, to keep her from telling me what she knew — that her friend Kathy Merlow was a relocated witness. Merlow had confided in the one friend she had found in Capital City, and it had cost that friend her life. The people who had come to see Marcie before Harry and I were not Lama and his troops as we had suspected, but contract killers, on the track of Merlow. When they discovered that I was dogging her as a witness in Laurel’s case they decided to follow along. What better than a lawyer armed with judicial process to force a witness to ground? One word from Marcie and I would have stopped looking. I would have had a defense much more stout than a mere eyewitness to the crime. I would have known what I now know.

‘We knew that he’d been commissioned to do the hit.’ Dana’s talking about the contract killer, and that he was looking for the Merlows. ‘You were just a little too convenient,’ she says.

‘So you used me as bait?’ I say.

‘I never thought you would be in any real danger. We tried to get him on the way out at the airport, at Maui. We missed,’ she says.

Much of this is going past the jury, so I regroup for their benefit.

‘Let’s go back to the night of the murder. Who asked you to go and meet with the Merlows?’

‘My boss,’ she says.

This would be the United State’s Attorney for the Eastern District. A Presidential appointee. I am beginning to sense that this thing reaches much higher than I thought. Dana has been burning up the air between here and D.C. I had assumed these were related solely to her judicial aspirations. Now I suspect that even that has some more sinister origins.

‘And why did he ask you to go and meet with the Merlows?’

‘To make certain that they were all right.’

‘Because Melanie Vega had been murdered that night?’

‘That’s right,’ she says.

‘Your honor, this is getting us nowhere.’ Cassidy is tromping around in front of her table now. ‘I still don’t see any of this as relevant. These people, the Merlows, did they see something or not? I mean, they’re either witnesses or they aren’t. If they’re witnesses, let’s put ’em on; if they’re not, let’s move on.’

Cassidy is getting a lot of support from Lama, head nodding like ‘right on.’ She still doesn’t get it.

‘If I could ask one more question, your honor, maybe I could clarify.’

He gives me a nod.

‘Ms. Colby, why did the federal government move George and Kathy Merlow in the middle of the night, on the very evening that Melanie Vega was murdered?’

‘Because we had reason to believe that Mrs. Vega had been murdered by mistake, that the intended victim was Kathy Merlow.’

As Dana says this, it sweeps like a tornado over the press rows at the front of the courtroom.

The pool camera at the back of the courtroom is whirring, its videotape capturing this. I can sense a transformation, from the local to the national angle as some of the gray heads in the press rows turn to each other and look, wide-eyed, wondering at the implications of all of this.

Cassidy is protesting that we have injected elements of evidence that were beyond discovery. She actually moves to strike all of Dana’s testimony on grounds that it cannot be verified.

‘Records of federally protected witnesses are sealed,’ she says. ‘What documentation do we have for any of this? How can the state possibly verify it?’

The fact that Dana has torched her career by these admissions seems to offer little proof of veracity, as least to Morgan Cassidy.

‘I might be able to help with that,’ I tell her. ‘Documentation,’ I say.

Cassidy’s mouth is a gaping hole, a cavern of silence as I offer this. It is clearly not what she wanted. Before she can speak I’m back from the counsel table with a stapled sheaf of papers handed to me by Harry. He’s passing out copies, one set to the clerk and another to Lama at the counsel table, where he is joined by Cassidy.