Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

Nothing happens in the courthouse that Harvey isn’t aware of. He is the one person who doesn’t need a badge. His face is known to every bailiff, sheriff’s deputy, and clerk. It is rumored that he has his own set of keys to most of the out-of-bounds areas where courthouse files are kept. Smidt has been around since before the cornerstone was laid for the building. I’m not surprised that today he is sitting here alone. When it comes to a story, Harvey keeps his own counsel.

He is tall and slender, bent in the upper back from years of leaning into filing cabinets pilfering legal dirt, his neck calcified by decades of journalistic warfare, so that when he turns to look at me, he moves his whole body on the hard wooden bench.

“Mr. Madriani.” As he says this, his eyes have not quite caught up with me, as if he’s detected me by his keen sense of smell, like an animal of prey.

“Harv. How are you?”

“Good. Good. Do you have a minute?” He stands up. His smile is sly and personable, and he shows me his notebook, already open and ready. “What’s happening here today? This wasn’t on the calendar,” he says.

I might ask him how he found out about it, but he would never tell me.

“I’ll know when you know,” I say. “I’ll read about it in the morning paper.”

He smiles only a little. “What does the judge want to see you about? Hmm? Come on, off the record,” he says.

I keep walking.

“I saw Mr. Tuchio go in a few minutes ago.”

“Did you ask him?”

“I did.”

“And what did he say?”

“Said he didn’t know. Wasn’t sure.”

“There you go,” I tell him.

“Can we talk when you come out?” he asks.

“Harvey.” I shake my head. “There’s a gag order.”

He smiles. “Not for me.”

I try to get past him. For a man as frail as he is, he manages to block my way with practiced ease. “Something’s happening. What’s going on?”

“You’ve been around long enough, Harv. Probably just ground rules,” I tell him.

“You sure that’s all? Come on. You help me out and I’ll make sure they give you the luxury cell if the judge puts you in for contempt.” He gives me his most comely smile.

We both laugh.

I finally get past him through the railing at the bar, headed for the little hallway and the judge’s chambers in back.

“Any truth,” he says, “to the rumor that the prosecution’s got witnesses who will testify that your man only wanted to kidnap Scarborough?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m under a gag order there,” he says.

I don’t answer. To Harvey this is a yes.

“If so, it could be manslaughter,” he says.

“Maybe my client should have hired you,” I tell him. Arnsberg could do worse. Harvey is a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks Law School. He has sat through enough trials that he could do a credible job defending a multiple ax murderer.

I keep walking, though now there is a steady drip of adrenaline on my heart. Harvey has been talking to the prosecutors or the cops. You can build a gag order, but you can never fill all the little crevices that leak. Trying to undo the damage later is like bailing a flood from a broken levy with a bucket. If Harvey reports the kidnap rumor and the fact that the state has witnesses, it will be all over the media by tomorrow morning. Talking heads will be using it as a teaser to keep viewers tuned in between the commercials. Even with the jury impaneled and the judge having instructed them not to read or watch news concerning the case, this information, blaring from every cable network and sliding past on the electronic ticker tape running under the pictures, is a virtual certainty to reach them. If they believe that Arnsberg had any plan for Scarborough, whether kidnapping or killing, they’ll be leaning so far toward conviction that they’ll topple like dominoes the first time they climb into the jury box.

“See you on the way out,” says Harvey.

Smidt can be relentless. I will ask the judge to let me out through the back corridor and hope the prosecutor takes the same route. I turn past the bench and down the hall. In the distance, ten feet away, I can see the judge’s clerk, Rudalgo Ruiz, sitting at his desk just inside the door to the judge’s anteroom.

Ruiz is known to courthouse staff as R2. Not because of the two R’s in his name. Instead this is short for R2-D2. Ruiz is short, built like a barrel, and bald. The only things missing are the wheels and the discordant bleeping tones for communication. Though in some sense it would be preferable to what he has to say to me this morning. It is blunt and to the point. “They’re waiting for you,” he says. This from under black, furrowed brows, the only wisps of hair he has on his head. “I called you three times. Dun you have a secretary?”

I look at my watch-9:48. “My calendar said ten o’clock.”

“Judge bumped it up this morning.” Ruiz says this with adamancy. “Nine-thirty.” He taps the crystal on his wristwatch like maybe the judge can issue an order to make time go in reverse.

“On the second day, God shortened the hour,” I tell him.

He shakes his head at this blasphemy, then smiles, but only a little. “You better get your ass in there.” He nods toward chambers, where the door is open just a crack. I can hear voices inside, some muffled laughter.

I tap on the door.

“Come on in.” A booming voice.

I swing the door open and am greeted by the raised eyebrows of his eminence Judge Plato Quinn. Quinn has been on the superior court for more than two decades. A graduate of the D.A.’s office, he spent the first ten years of his legal career prosecuting major felonies and is not particularly beloved among the defense bar, though this is not all bad. Quinn is a man highly sensitive of his reputation. At times he will bend over backward to dispel any hint that he might carry water for the prosecution.

“I take it you don’t have a clock?” he says.

“Your clerk says I need a new secretary,” I tell him.

“Anything to bring you into the modern age.” The judge glances under the edge of my suit coat, looking for the telltale pouch on my belt.

I lift my coat a little, making it easier for him to visually frisk me.

“Only lawyer I know doesn’t own a cell phone,” he says.

At the moment my cell phone is in my briefcase.

“My having lost three of them going through security downstairs, the phone company wants my daughter as collateral to get another,” I tell him. “They tell me the last one I lost is still making phone calls long-distance from Beirut.”

As I close the door, I see the D.A., Bob Tuchio, seated on the couch, as if he were playing hide-and-seek behind the swinging door. “Your cell carrier should cut off services,” he says.

“It’s a two-year plan. They don’t like to lose the business,” I tell him.

He smiles, a dark eminence. Tuchio has eyes like two black olives, and a five o’clock shadow an hour after he shaves. His complexion is something from the heel of the boot in Italy. He is intense in court, but not emotional, at least not so that the unschooled eye would notice.

“Okay, so we wasted twenty minutes,” says Quinn. “I’ll take it out of your opening statement.” He looks at me and winks. “I gather that the two of you know each other?”

“We’ve never been formally introduced,” says Tuchio, “but I know Mr. Madriani by reputation.”

“Then it looks like you’re in trouble.” The judge regards me and smiles.

Tuchio rises from the couch and in a single smooth gesture closes the center button on his suit coat and offers me his hand. We shake.

Tuchio is a shade under six feet, slender, a cipher by way of demeanor. Power suits, this morning a dark blue worsted, flatter his lean frame. The chief deputy district attorney of this county for more than a decade, it is rumored that he is “D.A.-in-waiting,” until his boss retires, which is supposed to be next year. Tuchio’s only weakness may be what he can’t see. He is known unaffectionately behind his back by much of the defense bar as “Bob the Tush,” not so much because of the size of his behind as for its motion when the man gets wound up in court. He has acquired a kind of circular gyration as he speaks, this to offset the movement of his hands. If you cuffed his wrists, it would transform him to a mute. It is said, though I have not seen this, that when he gets up to speed, he can rattle his ass like a washing machine on spin cycle with the load out of balance. Unfortunately for many who have witnessed this, there may be a kind of mesmerizing effect to it, for it usually comes on closing argument just before the opposing counsel’s client goes down for the count. Tuchio has a conviction rate of better than 96 percent. He hasn’t lost a case in more than five years, though as chief deputy he can pick and choose his shots.