Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

Right behind passion, money is always the easiest motive to peddle before a jury when it comes to murder.

“It’s possible. It’s also possible somebody didn’t want the letter to see the light of day, if, as they both claim, this letter is a smoking gun giving rise to slavery in the land of the free.”

“You think somebody would kill to keep from tarnishing a burnished image?” asks Harry.

“I don’t know, but I’m not closing off any avenues at the moment.”

Harry is jotting notes, a small pad on the table in front of him.

“You’d have to think that if this letter exists and if it’s that significant, there would be some reference to it in other documents,” I say.

There are voluminous treatises covering the correspondence between the framers. These include hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of footnotes, the Federalist Papers, followed by entire libraries of books written on the subject.

“Someone would have had to have mentioned it somewhere.” I am talking about the mystery letter. “Check it out. Get somebody to do some research. If not here, in D.C. Try the Library of Congress.”

“We can hire a research service, but it’s gonna cost,” says Harry. “We don’t have much to go on. No date. No author for the letter. All we know is that it dealt with slavery and cut some kind of deal. Research could take a while.”

So far we have lined up a few experts to go over the lab reports on physical evidence found at the scene. We have investigators out talking to some of Arnsberg’s friends. Except for the letter mentioned by Bonguard and the fact that Scarborough seemed to fall back more than once on the same item in his speech, there is nothing else to go on.

“I tried to call Bonguard to talk to him,” says Harry. “Left messages.”

“And?”

“He never called back.”

“In your message did you tell him what it was about?”

Harry nods. “Uh-huh. Which has me wondering if he’s willing to talk to us at all.”

With Scarborough dead, the only one who can tell us about the mystery letter is Bonguard. This suddenly pushes him to the top of the curiosity list.

“Do you want to try to call him?” says Harry.

“What good would that do? If he’s not going to talk to you, why would he talk to me?”

“Maybe you have better phone karma,” says Harry.

Harry and I talk for a while. Over all of this, the mystery letter seems to hang there like a thread, daring us to pull on it.

“You know what troubles me more than anything else?” says Harry.

“What’s that?”

“ Scarborough. For all the fiery rhetoric-call it manipulation,” he says, “still, what he said about the language and slavery, the Constitution, it was accurate, all of it. I mean, he fudged around the edges a little.”

“He did a bit more than fudge at the edges,” I say. “From my reading, slavery was the third rail of politics during the Constitutional Convention. Nobody wanted to touch it, neither pro-slave nor anti-slave. They all knew that any attempt to recognize it or abolish it would result in the new nation being stillborn. Move in either direction and half of the states would refuse to play, take their ball and go home.”

“That may account for the covert language,” says Harry. “But there’s no denying that they recognized slavery. Like it or not, Scarborough had it right. It may have been the only deal possible, but that doesn’t dry-clean it or make it any less grimy. And the fact that the words are still there, visible to the entire world, is indisputable.”

“Your point is?”

“Since none of this is new-that language has been out there for what, going on two and a half centuries?-why now? What caused Scarborough to pounce on it at this moment and in this way, unless he was spurred on by someone or some thing.”

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking-whatever it is, is in that letter.”

He nods. “If Scarborough knew what was in it, and we have to assume that he did. If he’s not going to stretch the language of the Constitution to fit his convenient yen for a second American Revolution, why would he exaggerate the contents of this letter?”

“So if that’s the case, whatever is in that letter must be pretty bad,” I say.

“That’s what I was thinking,” says Harry. “And if this is true, the letter could be sitting in the middle of our case. The reason Scarborough wrote the book, the reason he was so far out on the limb of rhetoric, and just possibly the reason he was killed.”

For several minutes we massage the question of what to do. But no matter how we come at the issue of the missing letter, we seem to arrive at the same conclusion.

With Scarborough dead, the only one who may be able to tell us what is in the letter, and where it is, is Mr. Bonguard. Since he’s not returning phone calls and since, for the moment at least, we can’t make him come to us, all subpoenas being kept dry like gunpowder for the trial, we are left with only one alternative, and it is not one that we can put off.

“Why do you have to represent him? Why can’t somebody else do it?”

“Because his father asked me to, and his father is an old friend. You don’t always get to pick and choose your clients.”

“There must be somebody else who can represent him? Why not the public defender? He can’t have much money. Not from what I’ve read and heard.”

“Sarah, I told you, I’ve already taken the case.”

“But it’s embarrassing, Dad. People at school are saying after what he did, he doesn’t deserve a trial.”

“Then those people are living in the wrong country.”

My daughter is home from college, doing a summer internship on break. She is indignant that I’m involved in representing Carl Arnsberg and wants me to withdraw.

“Somebody who does something like that doesn’t deserve a trial.”

“Sarah! How long have you watched me try cases? What has it been, fifteen, sixteen years?”

“Dad, don’t lecture me.”

“Why? Only your professors at school can do that? Lecturing you is one of the privileges of fatherhood,” I tell her.

“Don’t start,” she says. When we have these bouts, which is not often, Sarah sounds so much like her mother that at times I can hear Nikki’s voice. Though Nikki has been dead now for nearly fifteen years, I can often see her eyes staring out at me from my daughter’s face when Sarah is angry. Sarah’s mother died of cancer when our daughter was small, and so my memories of the two of them together seem limited.

“You’re assuming that he did it.” I’m standing in my bedroom over my open suitcase, which is laid out on my bed, half filled with the items I need for my trip to the East Coast. This is a large part of the reason that Sarah is upset. She was hoping that I might take some time off while she was home on break. She is standing in the open doorway to my room, one hand on her hip, looking angry and hurt.

“Sarah, listen. The whole purpose of the trial is to determine whether he did it. And I don’t think he did. What if someone accused you of doing something like this? Wouldn’t you want me to defend you?”

“Dad, that’s not fair. Everybody knows he did,” she says.

“I’m not concerned with what everybody knows. I’m concerned with what a jury says, and then only after they’ve seen, heard, and studied all the evidence.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, he’s a neo-Nazi. Even my political science prof says so.”

“Then your political science professor can convict him of that, and on that charge I promise I won’t represent him.”

“Dad!”

“But on the charge of murdering Terry Scarborough, I am his lawyer, and on that charge he is entitled to a fair trial, just as you would be.”