Harry and I climb. On the balcony, the slider between the large bay window and the stairs is locked. Harry has checked this. He’s now wiping little smudges from his fingers off the glass with the bottom of his coat.
I peer through a small window by the stairs. As vacant as below, a bedroom. My guess is the master. I can see a large adjoining bath.
The bay on the other side, closest to the Vega house, is a small den. A man’s room. A wet bar, brown wallpaper with ships. There’s a built-in entertainment center on the far wall, a cabinet with one door not closed. There’s a built-in desk in the bay of the window. Depressions in the carpet tell me that furniture was placed in front of this. My guess is a swivel desk chair, something to take advantage of the views from the window over the desk, that could be turned to the TV.
‘Nothing here,’ says Harry. ‘We can run ’em down from postal records.’ He’s thinking change of address.
I’m thinking three strikes and you’re out. Something in my bones tells me that George and Kathy Merlow will not be that easy to find.
We turn to leave, and I stop, dead in my tracks. Harry’s halfway to the stairs before he realizes I’m not behind him.
I’m looking from the balcony, the view from the bay window, Merlow’s study. Like a seat in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium, it looks down, over the fence, and directly into a large window in Jack Vega’s house. This is not just any window. It is one of those greenhouse affairs that could house a small family — a glass wall curving from roof to foundation, bigger than the bubble on a B-29.
Set in the window is a massive bathtub, Jacuzzi heaven, white porcelain on a platform of tile. Strands of yellow police tape bar the door to the bathroom. Something left in Jack’s wake of departure.
Harry’s finally joined me back at the railing, tracking on the view.
‘It’s still preserved,’ he says. ‘We oughta get a court order for Jack’s house.’ Harry wants a look at where it happened. Leaning against the railing, he looks over his shoulder at the gaping glass of what we must assume was George Merlow’s study.
‘And we need to find your friend George Merlow,’ he says.
Chapter 7
The fourth floor of the county courthouse accommodates the probation department, the cafeteria, and the master calendar of the municipal court. Muni court in this state does small-dollar civil cases, misdemeanor trials, and gets most of its publicity by serving as the clearinghouse for arraignments on major felonies.
A further arraignment is why I am here this morning, facing a bank of lights and running with my briefcase under one arm through the loading chute of pack journalism, trying to avoid being roped and branded.
There are a dozen questions shouted my way. The cameras hold back, a lot of long shots with the strobes, file film they can use on another day, when some notorious event occurs, when your client has been drawn and quartered in legal fashion, and you are seen on the tube grinning and cavorting like it’s all in a day’s work.
Some asshole sticks a mike in my face and asks if my client did it.
Criminal confessions — film at five.
From the tenor of his question I’m not sure the guy has a clue as to specifically what it is, other than one of the usual infamous acts certain to nourish an inquiring mind. Otherwise why would his producer have sent him? The information highway, all the shimmering depth of quicksilver.
I passed Jack Vega on the steps on my way in. He seemed more hostile than usual. Perhaps he was just skulking, trying to find his own way in around the press and cameras.
I get inside the courtroom door and shut out the din of the unwashed. It is quieter here, more subdued, muted tones, a humming undercurrent of courthouse gossip. Some of these are the legal groupies. What used to be all guys, and now some women, regulars who live in the court’s bullpen, the pressroom downstairs. They have more access to the judges than any lawyer. Some of them have their own keys to the clerk’s office so they can burn the midnight oil.
They’ll do a filler on page ten from a probate case one day, some Daddy Warbucks who left ten million in trust to his pooch, a shar-pei with a face like somebody’s other end. They’ll do a big-bucks tort the next. But give them a choice, and murder among the tony set will always hit the top on their charts. Rumpled reporters who know how to rifle a clerk’s file. The people you gotta watch. Turn your back, a loose word in the wrong ear, and you become news, not the kind you want to read about.
I hear my name, the topic of banter. Somebody breaking from one of the cabals in the front row.
When I turn I am staring Glen Dicks in the face.
‘Glen,’ I say.
‘How you doin’, Paul?’ Everything is first-name here, but we don’t shake hands. These are secondary relationships. Not ugly, just business.
Dicks writes for the Herald. One of two papers in this city. He has the edge on the out-of-towners who have come to see because of the political fallout of the case. A legislator’s naked wife found shot has potential.
Dicks is gray curling hair to the lobes of his ears, and a mustache to sweep your porch with. He wears a sport coat with more things sticking out of pockets than a porcupine’s ass, and bears a gut like a Victorian bustle, which has opened and jettisoned a button on the belly of his shirt.
He gives me the old saw about a lawyer defending himself. Then he asks me: ‘Is that anything like defending a relative?’
‘I don’t know. You should ask my sister-in-law if she feels like a fool,’ I tell him.
He laughs a little. Dicks is shrewd enough, a goer to events, the watcher of a thousand courtroom brawls, to know there is a tactical downside to my representation of family. Played to the jury in the right tone, a backhanded compliment by a prosecutor, it could sound as if I don’t believe in her case so much as feel an obligation.
Glen inserts a few delicate probes, looking for anything to get a pencil into. The time frame for trial. Whether it’s likely the defendant will take the stand. Ideas on the number of defense witnesses. He gets quotes he can print, but no information.
‘What’s happening here today?’ he says.
‘You should ask the DA.’
‘Amended indictment,’ he says. ‘They didn’t tell you anything?’
I pass it off as minor stuff. ‘I assume it’s mostly technical. T’s and I’s,’ I tell him. ‘Crossing and dotting.’
‘Emm.’ He is writing this down.
‘Any theory of a defense?’ he says.
‘Sure. And I’d like to share it with you, just as soon as I have confirmation that the DA is deaf, blind, and doesn’t read Braille.’
A nervous grin. A look like he had to try.
‘How is she taking it?’ He’s talking about Laurel. If he can’t get a real story he’ll go for the human interest angle.
‘Except for the bars and the ladies who do the screaming meemies at night, she tells me it’s just like home.’
He would laugh, but Glen is sensitive enough to get the picture. He’s nodding like he understands, so I give him something he can write.
‘She’s facing serious charges,’ I say.
Little squiggles in his book.
‘She doesn’t have a clue as to what happened. And like any mother, she misses her kids.’
‘The children, they’re with their father,’ he says. Not a question so much as seeking confirmation.
I nod. ‘They’re not orphans yet. They have their dad.’
‘At least for the moment,’ he says.
A look like maybe I should depose him. My turn for information. He misses only a beat.
‘Well, you hear things,’ he says. ‘Courthouse bureau talks to the Capitol bureau. Things like that,’ he says.