Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“Ms. Warren has stepped out,” he tells me. “With her daughter.”

“Where did they go?”

“I don’t know. They left several hours ago.”

“Have her call her husband when she gets back,” I tell him. I give him the number, and wonder where Nikki would go, left in a country village with no mall or shops, where they roll in the sidewalks at dusk.

Ihear tapping on the glass, my office door, a figure through the translucence on which Mario’s name is still stenciled in gold letters, reversed like an image in a mirror.

“Come in.”

A dense expression invades my face as I see who it is.

“You got a minute?” It’s Adrian Chambers, a wrinkled suit, collar button open, the knot on his tie four inches down.

I look at him, wonder what he’s doing here. I suppose he can read this thought on my face.

“Dusalt told me you might be here,” he says. “I ran into him in the parking lot at the PD, twenty minutes ago. Headin’ someplace.”

Claude’s running late for the airport. Denny in a cold sweat caught the afternoon flight. Dusalt should have picked him up, and his surly cargo, at the airport ten minutes ago.

“I’m working on jury instructions,” I tell him. What he should be doing. We have a meeting in an hour.

He rolls his eyes. “The sonofabitch is obsessive, isn’t he?” he says. He’s talking about Ingel and his penchant for early jury instructions.

“You got a couple of minutes?” he says. “I’d like to talk.”

I look at my watch. “Not much time,” I say. I’m trying to get rid of him.

I am glad that Claude is not bringing Coltrane back here. A chance meeting with Adrian and our case might suddenly take a turn for the worse, though this is hard to imagine. Chambers has the olfactory senses of a bloodhound. A meeting with someone, Coltrane, he’s not seen before, in the middle of our case, and he would smell weighty consequence all over the man.

“It’ll just take a second,” he says.

I give him a look of annoyance, as if to say “if we must.”

“Come in.”

He drops his briefcase, reaches in his pocket and comes out with a pack of cigarettes. He offers me one. I decline. Adrian looks tired and drawn. Out of practice for five years, and older, I think maybe he’s forgotten the sapping mental and physical strain that is a major felony trial. Those on the nether side of fifty tell me that you begin to see this as the work of the young, like thirty-year-olds dragging their haunches across Astroturf in the NFL.

I motion to one of the client chairs. He sits.

“What is it?”

“I’ve been hearing things,” he says. “Talk.” He lights up. There’s the flare of spent tobacco from the tip. He’s talking, choppy words, as he strips little pieces of the raw unburnt stuff, using his teeth and one finger, from the tip of his tongue.

“It’s a small town. The bar’s a tight group, whether here or in Capital City,” he says. There is no real direct eye contact here. Instead he is looking around the office, at the pictures on the wall, the windows, anything but me. He is a map of simmering indifference, Adrian’s image of cool.

“Word is, that you believe I took this case as some kind of vendetta, that it’s personal, between you and me,” he says. He is not smiling as he says this, not that I much care.

“I hear that you’ve been saying that I took this case for one reason, to break your back.” Now he looks at me, for the first time I get the force of full eye contact.

I have said this to a few people, Claude and Harry, one or two others, intimates whom I trusted to keep a confidence. Now I feel like a fool, betrayed by my own predilection to talk, not because my assumption is wrong, but because it is coming back to me in my own words.

I smile at him, nearly laugh. “Well, Adrian, you gotta admit, there’s no love lost,” I say.

“We’ve had our differences,” he says. That he can call five years without a license to practice law “a difference” is a measure of Adrian’s powers of reduction.

“So what do you want?” I say. I’m growing restive with this conversation.

“I thought it was time that we cleared the air,” he says. “I wanted you to know that for my part this is no vendetta. I did not take this case because you’re involved. You’re not that important to me. I am not that obsessive.”

“This sounds like a conversation you should be having with your analyst,” I tell him. For Adrian this is a major disrobing of the soul, an unnatural act for the lawyer as renegade.

“Fine,” he says, “you wanna keep the bad blood flowing, then it’s on you, not me. Don’t go telling people that I’m engaged in some crusade of vengeance, when it’s you who won’t let it go.”

This stops me in my tracks for a moment, this man whom I despise sitting before me analyzing my thoughts-not because he is doing it, but because he is so right. I will not let it go.

“I took no personal pleasure,” he says, “in what happened today.” He’s talking about the disemboweling of Dr. Tolar. “I did what I had to, advocated for my client. You forget I’ve been sandbagged myself.” Adrian is talking about his bout with perjury, the fable-as-evidence that got him disbarred.

Then it hits me, like a thunderbolt. He’s putting me in his own shoes. He thinks I knew Tolar would lie when I put him up. He talks, and it becomes clear that this is his basis for détente. In Adrian’s mind we now have something in common, his image of me as the fallen angel.

I look at him, about to toss him from the office.

“Ingel threatened to go to the bar, didn’t he? Fucking judges,” he says. “A robe and a pension for life and they forget what it is to scrape for a living.”

Before I can say anything he’s telling me how he found out about Tolar and his failure to perform the Scofield autopsies. Curiosity silences me, bottles my anger for the moment.

“A lotta luck,” he says. “Another client, a civil matter.” He’s smiling at his good fortune.

“The kid works as a lab tech over at the medical school. Word gets around,” he says. “Tolar’s a schmuck. A six-figure income and tenure, he figures the world owes him based on his IQ.”

Adrian looks. No ashtray. He taps the ash on the carpet and steps on it with his foot.

“Once I found out, the evidence was easy to get,” he says. “How often do you listen to tapes of an autopsy prepping for a case? What lawyer has time? But there were nuggets in there I did not expect.”

It is like Adrian, talking to my placid, painted smile, a discussion of worthless confidences, trading on secrets no longer of value, shopping for a little good will.

Then he says: “I will tell you, that the knife wounds, the fact that they died somewhere else came as a real surprise.”

Adrian’s talking about the Scofields. He must have thought an oracle had intervened to send him copies of the Scofield autopsy tapes. These no doubt filled in all the blanks. Cryptic references to “sharp-edged lacerations at the point of entry wounds,” these in the written reports, on tape became stab wounds caused by a knife before introduction of the metal stakes. Naked, unembellished observations in the written report about the limited volume of blood at the scene, on tape seemingly drew conclusions: that the Scofields were killed elsewhere and moved to the creek.

That we finessed some of these findings and conclusions to keep him in the dark is a nuance Adrian can appreciate. “All’s fair,” he says.

“Glad you feel that way. Now as I’ve said I’ve got some work to do.”

“That’s only part of what I came to talk to you about. I’m looking at things. The jury is not exactly what we would have hoped for. From our side, Ingel’s voir dire”-he’s talking about the judge’s questioning of prospective jurors-“left a lot to be desired. And you,” he says, “your case is flying like some wounded duck.”