Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“I want everything you’ve got on him, every arrest file, as soon as you can get it over here. Then I want you to go by the courthouse and get the depositions, the court files on the charges.”

“They won’t let me take the originals,” says Henderson.

“Then copy them.”

He counts up the arrests. “It’ll take all day,” he says.

“You got something better to do?” I tell him he can draw straws with Claude as to who gets this duty. He gives me a groan knowing already that he will come up short in this contest. Claude is in court. I hear a lot of grousing, like he’s about to hang up.

“And Denny.”

“Yeah.”

“Run a current rap sheet on the guy. See if he has any felony convictions anywhere else.” We hang up.

“It would be nice,” I tell Lenore, “if we could hang him out on a felony conviction.” This would be something with which to impeach his credibility before the jury. Convicted felons carry the scar for life.

“Then you know who it is?” says Lenore. “Chambers’s witness.”

“If I know Adrian,” I say.

“But how did he find the guy when we couldn’t?”

“You’re assuming,” I say, “that he did.”

She gives me a look.

“Adrian’s famous for producing witnesses of convenience,” I tell her, “better at curing the blind spots in his case than a faith healer.”

Watching Adrian in court over the years I have learned that the margin of victory is too often measured by the preponderance of perjury emitted by his witnesses, a stench like a good dose of mustard gas from the stand.

She looks at me wide-eyed, that any lawyer, an officer of the court, would do this knowingly, as a matter of course. For all of her street-smarts and barrio background, if you scratch the hard surface of Lenore, underneath you will find a romantic.

“If Adrian Chambers ate nails,” I tell her, “he would pass corkscrews. He does not simply torture the truth, he is more devious.”

Because I have seen it before, I can predict Adrian’s tactic with some confidence.

“When we put Claude on the stand,” I tell her, “to lay the foundation for the evidence of our investigation, Adrian will ask him about our theories on the vandal who broke the window, our futile efforts to find this witness. Thanks to Roland,” I say, “he will build his defense by fulfilling our own prophesies, and modifying the message. In his version, the witness broke the window, but can attest that none of the evidence was inside. It is Adrian’s ethic, any means to defeat the perfidious powers of the state.”

There’s a knock on my door.

“Come in.”

It’s Claude. He’s got a number of files under his arm, folders containing police reports and other business documents compiled during the course of our investigations. He will use these on the stand to refresh his memory in case any details are hazy.

“Ready to do it?” I say.

He makes a face, like no big deal.

“Something for you,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper pulled from one of the files under his arm, a lab report from the State Department of Justice.

“Present from Kay Sellig,” he says.

I read, but it means nothing to me.

“Her people analyzed the paper and clippings that made up the note delivered to your house.” Claude’s talking about the threat delivered with the photo of Sarah.

“Whoever did it got a little sloppy,” he tells us. “One of the word groups clipped out and pasted to the note contained a trademark symbol and a small piece of a logo in one corner. Microscopic,” he says. “But we got lucky. A lab assistant recognized the snippet of logo.”

I look at him, like how was this possible?

“The guy has seen the publication a lot,” he says. “It’s off the title page, the cover sheet to a publication produced for law enforcement agencies. The state Criminal Law Reporter ,” says Claude.

I know this publication. Cop shops around the state use it to keep abreast of the latest court decisions in the areas of arrest, and the search and seizure of evidence. I am a subscriber myself, as are a growing legion of lawyers practicing in the field.

“Any ideas?” I say.

Claude wrinkles an eyebrow, like he has his own theories. “We might want to check to see if the Davenport Police subscribe to this thing,” he says. I know what he is thinking: Jess Amara.

“Do it.”

We change gears for the moment, as we are running out of time. I warn him about Adrian’s likely tactic on cross, that he will fish for details on our theory that a vandal may have broken the window of the van, that thanks to the loose tongue of Roland, this now plays a part in the defense case.

He uses a few expletives to describe Overroy. But then he tells me that Roland may have problems of his own. One of the investigators Claude has assigned to Sellig to help her search for the missing piece of cord has talked to the photographer who was processing the stuff the day it disappeared.

“The guy tells us there was somebody hanging around in your library the day they were doing the job, shooting the cord. He was interested in cameras, taking up a hobby, fingering all of their lenses. They got to talkin’,” says Claude.

“Then this guy leaves and an hour later when they go to close up shop they notice that the cord is gone.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Roland.”

“Suddenly he’s a regular shutterbug,” says Dusalt.

This would not surprise me. Embittered by my rejection of his brokered settlement offer, it would be like Roland to take a half measure, not the cord that links all of the murders to the Russian, just some of them. Spread a little pain, sit back and watch.

We will probably find the missing cord the day before the close of our case when I will have to crawl on my knees to Ingel pleading.

Claude looks at Goya. “Did you tell him?” he says.

“Not yet.”

I look at them. “What now?”

It is what Lenore has been waiting to talk to me about. She and Claude have been paring down Adrian’s witness list for two days now, searching for the anticipated alibi, the person or persons who could testify to place Iganovich in Canada at the time of the Scofield murders. If we amend to charge his client, he will want this witness available. Even if we don’t charge he may use the witness, pour water on our case to erode the factual discrepancies between the murders, and then show that his client was out of town for the last one.

“There’s nobody that fits the bill,” she tells me.

We go over the list. Lenore is operating on the theory that any likely witness would be a resident of Canada, someone who saw him up there and who could testify as to the date. The list contains not a single Canadian address.

“What about ticketing agents in this country? Could be a local name who sold him the ticket and would remember him.”

She shakes her head. “We checked that. And something more,” she says. “Some weeks ago Claude checked with the airlines. They just got back to him yesterday. The flights out of Capital City to Canada, there’re four each day. One of the flight attendants on an Air Canada flight thinks she remembers seeing somebody who looked like Iganovich. From a picture,” she says.

“Well then that’s it,” I say.

“The problem is,” says Claude, “when the lady checked her flight schedule, the particular flight in question left Capital City the day after the Scofield murders. She’d been off on maternity leave until that date.”

This sets like molten lead in my veins. A moment of dazed silence. We have been operating from the beginning on the belief that Iganovich could produce an absolute alibi for his whereabouts on the day the Scofields were killed, that he was a thousand miles away. Now on the opening day of trial, Claude and Lenore are telling me that this assumption may be wrong. Our theory in Scofield is beginning to settle in deep squish, grounded on the touchy-feely surmises of the shrinks, their prognostications and profiles for the serial mind. The fact that the Russian was available in town at the time of the murders is, in my book, worth more than a thousand Rorschach tests and psych-evals.