Steve Martini - Compelling Evidence

He rises from the bench.

“Good to see you again, Paul. Yours?” He nods toward Sarah.

“Yes.”

Her condition by now is hopeless. She has smeared the mud on her upper legs with her hands.

“How old?” he asks.

“Three.”

“And a half,” Sarah chimes in, holding up three fingers.

Jennings laughs. He stoops low to look her in the eyes. “I once had little girls just about your age.”

Sarah is all round eyes. “What happened to them?”

“They grew up.”

I’ve missed this man greatly since leaving his fold and joining Potter, Skarpellos. I have on more than one occasion since my ouster from the firm considered calling him, but have thought better of delivering my problems to the doorstep of a sick man. When he called to ask me to attend Danley’s execution in his place, I knew how ill he really was. Sam isn’t the kind to ask people to do something he’s unwilling to do himself.

His skin has the pallor of paraffin. Radiation and the ravages of chemistry have taken their toll. I tower over this man who was once my equal in physical stature. He is stooped and withered like straw following a rainstorm. A condition, I suspect, rendered not so much by the cancer that invades his body as by the clinical horrors that pass for a cure. It is, by all appearances, a losing battle.

Our eyes follow Sarah, whose attention has been caught by a gray squirrel making for one of the trees. Her condition is hopeless. I let her go. I will simply have to absorb Nikki’s tongue-lashing later.

Sam Jennings is, by nature, an affable man. His countenance has all the appearances of a face well stamped from birth with an abiding smile. But there are those who learned too late that this is an aspect of his character that belies an acquired predatory sense. For in his thirty years as chief prosecutor for this county and in the early decades of his tenure, Samuel Jennings, for crimes well deserved, sent a half-dozen men to their final peace in the state’s gas chamber.

“See any of the old crowd?” I ask.

“I suppose that’s one of the benefits of leaving voluntarily instead of getting your ass kicked in an election. You can stop by the office every once in a while. Even so,” he says, “Nelson doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Who knows. Maybe he thinks my being there is going to crimp his management style. Hell, look at me. What’s he think, I’m gonna run against him?”

“Maybe he thinks you might plant the idea elsewhere,” I say. “Maybe with one of his deputies.”

“Who, me?” he says. There’s a lot of feigned innocence here. I can tell that this scenario is not original with me, unless I’ve misread the twinkle in his eye. He’s probably been solicited for an endorsement. I wonder who in the office it is, who will be fingered to step out on the ledge with Nelson on election day, to try to nudge him off. Nelson was appointed to fill the vacancy left when Sam retired. Now he has to earn his spurs in the next election.

“How’s it going with you? The solo practice and all?”

I make a face. “Enjoying it enough. Now ask me if I’m making any money.”

“Money’s not everything.” He smiles.

“This from a man with a fat county pension.”

“You could’ve stayed there. Didn’t have to go chasing the rainbow,” he says.

“Hmm. Not a very happy place right now. Not from what I hear.”

“Maybe a little more political than when I was there.”

“Now who’s minimizing things?” I say.

He laughs. “No worse than some firms I could mention.”

There’s an instant of uncomfortable silence as he eyes me, looking for some sign, a hint of willingness to talk, some revelation as to the causes for my departure from the firm. He comes up empty.

“One of life’s true tragedies,” says Jennings. “Ben Potter. Guy had a veritable flair for success. Would’ve put this town on the national map, his appointment to the court.”

“I suppose.” National life goes on. The papers had it that morning. The President had made another nomination to the court. The administration’s playing it coy, refusing to confirm that it had ever offered the position to Ben.

I try to kill the subject with silence. Jennings has never blessed my move to the firm. Like Plato, he defines ultimate justice as each man’s finding his proper niche in life. And from the beginning, he never believed that I would fit in with Potter, Skarpellos.

“It’s hard to figure,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“Why anybody would want to kill him.”

I look at Sam Jennings, this paragon of sober intelligence, in stony silence. I know his words are not the product of some wit that has missed its mark.

“What are you talking about?”

“People in Nelson’s shop tell me they’re getting vibes, something strange about the whole thing from the cops. Not the usual stuff following a suicide.”

“Like what?”

“Seems Potter’s office and an elevator down the hall have been taped off for more than a week now. Forensics has been camped there.”

“Probably just being careful,” I say. “The feds are involved.”

“You think that’s it, a little bureaucratic rivalry?”

I make a face, like “Who knows?”

“I don’t think so,” he says. Jennings has a shit-eating grin. The kind that says he has inside information.

“The service elevator on Potter’s floor.” He looks at me to make sure I’m following his drift. “It’s been sealed by the cops and out of commission for almost a week. The janitors and delivery people are raising hell, I’m told. I think the cops are reading more than tea leaves or the entrails of a goat.”

I make another face. I’m waiting for the punch line. It wouldn’t be the first time Capitol City’s finest have wasted taxpayers’ dollars shadow-boxing with illusions.

“If Potter killed himself in his office, I can understand combing his desk, vacuuming his carpet. But why the elevator?”

I give him my best you-tell-me expression.

“Conventional wisdom has it,” he says, “he didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t die in the office.”

“That’s where they found the body.” I bite my tongue, on the verge of disclosing part of my conversation with George Cooper outside of the Emerald Tower that night.

“Word is,” he says, “cops found traces of blood and hair in that service elevator. It appears that if he shot himself, somebody took the time to move the body after the event.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Not from Duane Nelson,” he says. His smile is all teeth. Jennings is not revealing his source. Clearly this is a matter of someone’s survival. Leaks from a prosecutor’s office in a case like this are sure career killers.

To find George Cooper on this Monday morning I have to crawl like a mole under the dismal seven-story county jail. Built to house a thousand trusties and inmates, it now overflows with 2,500, the best of whom are furloughed during the day on work-release programs and pressed like dehydrated fruit back into overcrowded cells at night. The metal monolith is a monument to the bankruptcy of modern government. The building’s facade presents the incongruous appearance of cheerful orange metal panels more appropriate to a day-care center. The roof is enclosed behind Cyclone fencing topped by razor-sharp rolls of concertina wire, sealing off the sky-high exercise yard and preventing possible escape.

Given the office’s low status on the law enforcement pecking order, it’s the best the county coroner can do. Stiffs don’t rate high as a voting constituency with the county supes at budget time. So in a cavern originally designed for parking under the jail, Cooper and his seven companions toil beneath the ground in the blistering heat of summer and through the dank oppression of winter’s tule fog.