Steve Martini - Prime Witness

For her part Nikki agreed that she would no longer keep her frustrations bottled up inside, expecting me to develop the prophetic skills of a seer, her idealized version of male sensitivity.

I promised that I would make strides to confine my practice, compartmentalize my life so as to stake out more time for Nikki and Sarah.

For a while this even worked. We took a few weekend trips, spent four days in the mountains camping. It was a new life. The stress melted from me like snow on a summer day. This lasted nearly three months. Then the lawyer inside my soul, like the genie in the magician’s lamp, escaped-two back-to-back trials. My best intentions went to hell.

This was followed by Feretti’s phone call. I found myself in material breach of our contract.

Nikki followed through on her part, gnawing on my ass at every opportunity. What angered her most was my failure to discuss the Davenport business with her before making my commitments with Mario. It is a point well taken.

Since then her ire has been steadily escalating. I tried to mollify her with assurances that my role was only temporary, until Feretti was back on his feet. Ninety days at most. I used Mario’s line.

But Nikki can see through bullshit like a sniper through a starlight scope. She asked me if I’d gotten this prognosis from Feretti’s doctor. I had to admit that I hadn’t talked to Mario’s physician. We were back into it, Nikki shouting, stomping around the house, pretending like she was straightening up, picking up Sarah’s toys, throwing them haplessly in my direction.

Then Mario died. Since then life has been hell. We are no longer sleeping in the same room.

She is dishing up dinner, only three plates on the dining room table, a heaping one for Harry. He eyeballs me. Maybe it is true, that I am fasting tonight. Then Nikki tells us that Sarah has already eaten, watching a tape of Mr. Rogers on the tube.

We pull up chairs. I open the wine.

“Are you going through with this thing?” says Harry.

He’s talking about the temporary assignment as prosecutor in Davenport County.

“Right now I’m on the hook,” I say. The fact is, I have signed a contract with an indefinite term on the assumption that Feretti would soon be back.

I make a face. “Circumstances have now changed,” I tell Harry. “I’m hoping that the county will understand. I’ve got a meeting with Judge Ingel tomorrow morning, to talk about it.” Derek Ingel is presiding judge of the Davenport County Superior Court. To those who know him, and behind his back, he is called “the Prussian.” But I have not as yet figured out why. Right now he holds the balance of my practice in his hands.

Nikki gives me a look, a quick flash of anger. “He’s hoping they will understand?” says Nikki. “I like that,” she says. “How about telling them your wife doesn’t understand? How about telling them to go away and leave us alone? I love it,” she says, “my husband the lawyer. He has balls the size of brass doorknobs when it comes to pitching the cause of some sleaze-ball client. But for his family, when it comes to his ability to earn a living, well,” she says, “then he’s all meekness, hat in hand, kiss the ass of the judge. Your honor this, your honor that. .” Nikki is up from the table getting something from the kitchen, her indignant mantra trailing behind her like some billowing train of wrath as she walks from the dining room.

Harry looks at me from under wrinkled eyebrows, like maybe I should take Nikki along to do the talking. We can hear her in the other room grumbling to herself now.

I explain to him the difficulties, the fact that the board of supervisors who will ultimately fill Feretti’s job by appointment is deadlocked on a long list of candidates. Each supervisor is now backing his own horse. Naming a prosecutor in a rural county is, it seems, its own form of king-making.

“Why not just tell him that you aren’t going to do it?” Nikki’s back. “That it was a favor for a friend. The friend is now dead, and that it’s over.” She tosses the dish towel on the table, like maybe I could take this thing with me and drop it in the middle of Ingel’s desk.

I laugh a little, like such an approach would be ridiculous. This makes her more angry.

“We’ve been over this,” I say. “The court signed off on the appointment,” I say. “And I applied for the assignment.”

“At Feretti’s request,” she reminds me.

“I will talk to Ingel tomorrow,” I say. “I will do everything I can to get out.”

“Sure,” she says.

Harry I think senses blood about to be spilled. From Nikki’s look, I think he suspects it may be mine. He steps in. “The sheriff, what’s his name?”

“Emil Johnson,” I say.

“He seemed like a decent sort-for a cop,” says Harry. From Hinds, this is a ringing endorsement. “Maybe he’d help you get out from under. Talk to his friends on the board, maybe some of the judges. After all, he’s an elected official.”

“I don’t think he would help,” I say.

“There you go,” says Nikki. “He won’t even try.” She throws her napkin on the table, gets up and walks out again.

Harry had met Emil at Feretti’s funeral. He came with me for a little moral support. Nikki was too angry with Mario for dying.

There at the funeral, hovering over the casket with friends and family, I’d felt a sharp slap on the back. I turned, and it was Emil Johnson. Johnson is a fifth-degree redneck in this rural county, and has the beer gut and broad beam to prove it. Voters have returned him to office five terms running. This undoubtedly says more about the place than it does about Emil. He has been warding off growing opposition from more liberal elements at the university for years. If he is lucky he will retire in another term, unless alcohol takes him out sooner.

“Sad day, counselor.” He’d looked at me with soulful eyes, a face like a heavy-set basset hound. “A man with young children.” Emil shook his head at the unfairness of it all.

I introduced Harry, who at the sound of the word “sheriff” wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand before giving it to Emil in a firm shake. Johnson didn’t seem to notice.

“Makes one feel one’s own mortality.” Emil was waxing eloquent, looking at the casket, patting his gut which hung over a brass buckle as big as a gladiator’s shield, the letters “Winchester” tooled across it. “Mary-o was a good man,” he said. “He’ll be missed.”

For all of five minutes by the politicians of Davenport County, I thought. I hadn’t noticed Emil throwing his own political weight, which is considerable, behind Feretti when Mario was hospitalized. Instead the good sheriff waited in the weeds to see if the supervisors would devour Mario, if they would seek to replace Feretti with one of their own hand-picked cronies.

“You got a problem,” says Harry, still eating. “This is not a good thing.”

I think he means my crossing over to the prosecution.

Then he motions toward the kitchen. “It isn’t worth it,” he says. What Harry means is this case is jeopardizing my marriage, threatening my family.

“What can I do?” I say.

He makes a face, like he has no answers.

From the beginning Harry has made no secret of his view. He has not wanted me to get involved in this thing in Davenport.

When I first told him that I was only caretaking, he looked at me wistfully. “That’s what Adam told the snake,” he said.

It is as if by crossing over to the other side, even on a short-term appointment, only for purposes of the investigation, I have-at least in Harry’s eyes-violated some sacred part of the defender’s credo and placed some curse on my family life.