Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“Tell me about it,” he says. From his tone I can tell that Claude now thinks he has a stake in this thing.

“You’ve got to understand Chambers,” I tell him. “The man is obsessive, to the point of self-destruction. Maybe it’s what gives him an edge on the rest of the world, his willingness to go to excess in pursuit of a cause.”

Claude looks at the middle distance, like he doesn’t understand this.

“There’s a story,” I say. “I don’t know if it’s true. But years ago, when Chambers was starting out, he represented some leather-vested bikers. People heavily into drugs, running the stuff from Mexico in the hollow tubes of their Harleys. It was early in his career, before the pricier clients sought him out. Anyway, Chambers represented them in a drug bust, took a small retainer and went to work.

“It’s a classic equation in hard-core criminal defense,” I tell Claude, “that if you lose, your client figures he could have done as well himself, and if you win it’s because he was innocent. Either way it is easy for them to justify the non-payment of an outstanding fee. In the case of the bikers, Chambers beat the charges in an early motion to suppress evidence. He sent them a bill for fees, and they ignored it. He sent them another. It was like he didn’t exist. As the story goes, he managed to entice these guys to his office, all three bikers, and I am told that there, he collected his fee.”

Claude looks at me. “How?”

I make a face. “According to those who claim to know, he held two pistols, one semiautomatic, fully loaded to keep them at bay, and another revolver with a single round. He lined them up against the wall and proceeded to play Russian Roulette with their collective heads until they came up with the money.”

Claude swallows hard. “It beats arbitration to get your fee,” he says. “How much did they owe him?”

“Four hundred dollars I’m told.”

He looks at me wide-eyed.

“It was the principle of the thing.”

“And he got away with this, this collection of his fee?”

“The clients were not the kind to go running to the state bar, or the law.”

“With those kinds of clients you don’t have to worry about the law,” says Claude.

“You’re wondering why they didn’t kill him?”

He arches an eyebrow, like this was more than a passing possibility.

“In Chambers I think what they saw was a lot of rage, a man dancing on the edge of lunacy, like maybe the next time they showed up he might be holding a flame-thrower. It’s why the early Indians didn’t kill crazy people,” I say. “They saw them as somehow closer to the gods. I think maybe the bikers looked into the eyes of Adrian Chambers that night, and saw their own mortality. It came down to the basics. Screwing with this guy simply wasn’t worth the four hundred dollars.

“After that, Chambers packed a loaded nine-millimeter everywhere he went,” I say. “He got a permit from the sheriff, and let the world know it. Five months later, these same three guys showed up at his front door again. Like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, they’d been trucking white powder all over the highway between Barstow and Bakersfield. Afflicted by the galloping dumbs, they’d been nailed again, and they were looking at doing some hard time. But when they arrived at Chambers’s office this time they were packing a bankroll to choke a horse. They gave it, all of it, to Chambers up front.”

“Sounds like an American success story,” says Claude. “How did you manage to get this Horatio Alger all over your ass?”

“Ten years ago he was a rising star in legal circles in Capital City. By then he’d cornered a good part of the upper crust criminal defense practice in town. Lawmakers in trouble with overzealous prosecutors, the lobbying set, a lot of politicians and their hangers-on. He made a lot of money. He also made a lot of enemies, mostly cops who were tired of taking his abuse in court.

“As is often the case in life, Chambers lost his focus in the details,” I say. “One of his clients was Walter Henley, a bookkeeper and by some accounts principal bagman for a group of lobbyists currying favor in the capital.”

With this sign of high-level dirt, Claude is all ears.

“The DA’s office, where I was at the time, had Henley and two prominent lobbyists in its sights, hard evidence of bribery and extortion. We wanted to get Henley to roll over on the lobbyists.

“Chambers’s theory of defense was not new, or original,” I tell him. “He figured he could keep the lobbyists and Henley all back-to-back, inside under a common umbrella of defense, pissing out into the wind instead of all over each other. He had visions of holding out forever.

“I offered Henley immunity and subpoenaed him to testify before the grand jury. He could no longer take the Fifth. He had to tell us what happened or go to jail.”

“So much for honor among thieves,” says Claude.

“Chambers fell into the net when he approached Henley with a vast sum of money, cash from the other clients, to spin some yarn before the grand jury. What he didn’t know was that Henley was wired for sound. The cops had set Chambers up. A little payback for all the grief he had caused over the years.”

“Chambers took your part in all this very personally?” says Claude.

“He had good reason. I tried for a five-year stretch on sentencing. He got nine months. And disbarment, which he ultimately got reduced to five years’ actual suspension from the practice of law.”

“A slap on the wrist,” says Claude.

“He doesn’t see it that way,” I say.

Claude is quiet for the moment, lost in contemplation as if he’s fitting together the pieces of some puzzle.

“Sonofabitch,” he says. “We’re supposed to be a team. Then I open the paper and find out you’re keeping things from me.”

I’m in Emil’s office with Claude. Johnson’s holding a folded newspaper that he slaps on the desk in front of me.

“It makes me look like a fool when I have to read stuff like this in the newspaper. Reporters call me and I don’t know what the hell they’re talkin’ about.”

There on the front page of this morning’s Times is a sidebar to the story about Iganovich’s arrest in Canada, a two-column headline:

AUTHORITIES SEARCH FOR

SECOND COPYCAT KILLER

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I didn’t learn about it myself until an hour before I flew to Canada, two days ago,” I tell him.

“Still, you coulda called me,” he says. “There are telephones between here and Canada, or hadn’t they told you?”

I read the first graph of the story while Emil’s chewing on my ass.

DAVENPORT-Sources close to the investigation of the Putah Creek killings disclosed today that they are now operating on the theory that a second killer, a copycat, is now at large and may be responsible for the murders of Abbott Scofield and his estranged wife, Karen. Scofield, a professor at the State University, was found murdered along with his former wife early last week. Their nude bodies were discovered by two teenagers hunting along the Putah Creek, the scene of four earlier killings involving university students. According to highly placed sources, police are now pursuing theories of a second killer due to discrepancies in the physical evidence found at the scene.

Fortunately for us these “highly placed sources” have drawn the line at divulging the specific evidence in question. As I read I cannot believe that Kay Sellig has had anything to do with this. I wonder who else in her shop may have known about our conversation. Then I think. True to her word, Sellig had faxed a copy of her report to my office while I was away in Canada. It had lain faceup on my desk with a pile of other papers for two days in my absence. Any of a dozen people could have seen it lying there, could have read its contents.