‘I think that was Jack’s mistake. He probably panicked. When the cops asked him if he owned one, Jack thought they were zeroing in on him. Guilty knowledge makes people do stupid things. He lied for no reason. He wasn’t thinking. If he’d turned it over, my guess is they would have checked it and ballistics would come up negative. Now we’ve got him in a lie.’
‘It might look better for our side,’ he says, ‘if Jack can’t produce the gun.’ Harry likes it, then a point of concern: ‘Can we prove he knew she was having an affair?’
‘If I can get the tapes from Dana.’
‘Even if the feds destroyed them,’ says Harry, ‘we could subpoena the agent who monitored the conversations. Put him on the stand,’ he says.
‘And hope that he has a good memory for family dirt,’ I tell him.
‘A lot of hearsay,’ he says.
‘Perhaps with exceptions,’ I tell him.
‘State of mind?’
I nod. Statements made which reveal a person’s state of mind, what they believed to be true or untrue, are not considered hearsay when testified to by others. They are admissible in court.
‘What we don’t know,’ says Harry, ‘is if Vega knew she was pregnant. And if so, when he found out. That might have sent him over the top. A catalyst for murder would be a nice present to hand to the jury.’
‘Maybe,’ I say.
For me the trigger was Jack’s lack of passion when it was revealed that his wife was pregnant at death. I would have expected this to fuel his anger. But there was nothing. It was like he already knew about it.
‘Maybe Jack was more calculating,’ I tell Harry. ‘You have to remember he’d already taken the fall with the feds. Now he finds out his wife is unfaithful. He knows he’s headed for prison. What’s going through his mind?’ I say.
‘She ain’t gonna play the dutiful wife and wait for him.’ Harry finishes my thought.
‘Exactly. So Jack bides his time. Thinks through a plan. He makes a play for the kids, an end run for custody. Pisses off Laurel, gets her juices flowing, maybe does some things to direct Laurel’s venom toward Melanie. My young wife would like to play mommy for a while, so we’ll take your children. He sets the stage for a cat fight in court. Then he has Melanie popped and points the accusing finger at Laurel. She becomes the prime patsy. Jack gets custody of the kids and uses the tragedy of the murder to get the feds to reconsider his sentence. Voilà. He’s out on probation.’
‘Minus one wife,’ says Harry.
‘You got to admit he cuts his losses,’ I say.
‘You think the guy’s that devious?’
‘Knowing Jack?’ I give Harry a lot of arched eyebrows.
‘Still, it leaves some questions. Like what was Laurel doing up in Reno?’ he says. ‘And how did she come by the rug, the one from Jack’s house that she was doing in the laundry?’
‘Only one person can tell us that.’
From the outside it looks like some tony downtown hotel, eight stories of curving concrete — the Bastille Park Regency, Capital County’s newest addition, a sixteen-million-dollar jail.
Each of the seven floors above the main level is divided into sections by looming walls of acrylic, several inches thick and two stories high, floor to ceiling, a transparent matrix, set in a steel gridwork. These give the place the feeling of an aquarium without water. Behind the acrylic are the attractions, fifteen hundred inmates at any one time.
The jail was built three years ago and is already beyond capacity.
The people incarcerated here are not in cells as you would think of them. There are no bars. They sleep behind doors of solid steel, in a room six-by-ten, walls, floor, and ceiling made of concrete with air pumped in from ducts in the ceiling.
Those who reside here are the sand in the gears of society, charter members of the ‘five percent club,’ that minority who always seem to cause the majority of problems. Most are not archcriminals. They lack the intelligence, drive, or discipline to do anything well, least of all the commission of any gainful lawless act. Their lives are a mix of madness and mirth, sometimes in lethal proportions. Sad cases every one. The man who torched his business for the insurance and lit himself up like a roman candle, and who now hangs patches of synthetic skin like little yellow flags from the handles of the weight machine after showering; the guy they call the Phantom of the Opera, who tried to commit suicide with a shotgun and flinched; the Asian immigrant so disgraced by a drunk-driving arrest that he performed a fatal swan dive onto concrete from the second-tier balcony; the swimmer who sealed the crack at the bottom of his cell door with a towel and stopped up the toilet until things were deep enough to dog paddle; and the hapless guard who saw the little puddle outside the cell door and decided to open it. All are members of the cast who have walked the corridors of this place, our own local version of the cuckoo’s nest.
I wonder if there is hidden significance to the fact that Laurel, whose psyche is stretched more taut than piano wire, is now here.
We enter near the booking area, which has the efficiency of a cattle chute. We are in the age of stardust. Fingerprints are now taken on a glass strip and imaged on a computer screen where copies can be made and sent to state and federal agencies for cross-checking in other crimes. Inside this building everything is monitored by computer: meals the inmates eat, who is going to court on any given day, the time and department, who gets suits and who goes in jail togs, who’s in the detention of isolation and for how long. Drop out from the computer’s mighty RAM, and your sentence becomes eternity. The machine is God, a brazen idol whose gaze is a luminous blue screen. On the few occasions that it has gone down, this place has been its own version of administrative hell.
They have searched our briefcases and put Harry and me through the metal detector on the ground floor. Open your mouth to complain and the price of admission may become a cavity search.
The only defense attorneys who garner any trust in this place are the public defenders, who see less daylight than many of the prisoners. They are often on a first-name basis with the guards, something that does not engender much confidence among their clients.
This morning we are headed upstairs to what the guards in this place call the pods, one of the holding areas that resemble cargo bays from the starship Enterprise — sleek and foreboding. Being new, it is all very clean, surfaces that would require a diamond to scratch your initials.
The elevator has slick walls of stainless steel to which even spit will not adhere. Once inside you discover there are no buttons to select your floor. To get to your destination you have to talk, as Harry and I do, while looking at the camera mounted on the ceiling, twelve feet up in the corner of the car. I tell the guard in some unseen monitoring station: ‘Seventh floor.’
Seconds later the doors open, a temporary reprieve from the onset of claustrophobia. A guard waiting for us.
A few of the inmates, all females on this side of the tower, are exercising beyond the acrylic wall. Two more are playing Ping Pong, while others wander, read, or watch television in the ‘day room,’ a large open area on the level beneath us. Here they are monitored by guards watching video screens in a control room, cameras in every crevice. With all of this, it is a monument to the ingenuity of man that drugs and other contraband still make their way into this place.
Harry and I are like cattle with our ears punched, wearing tags that mark us as visitors. We are ushered to the lawyers’ conference room, a concrete closet on the tier above the day room. Laurel is waiting when we arrive. There is heavy plate glass between us, with a small mike embedded so we can hear each other.
She wears a hopeful expression, with the ‘B-word’ of passage for every prisoner on her lips before I can sit: ‘Any more word on bail?’ she says.