‘What the fuck did he do, shoot the Pope? Skip out on a legal fee?’
I ignore him. ‘And one more item.’ I pull a little plastic baggie from my coat pocket, the acrylic paint on the tube now hard as cement with the ridges and swirls of Kathy Merlow’s thumbprint.
‘Can you get the computer guys to run a check on this?’ I point to the print.
‘You don’t want much,’ he tells me.
‘It’s important,’ I tell him. ‘Do this and I’ll owe you big time.’
‘Fuckin’-a,’ he says. Clem knows that by doing this, sharing information off of CI amp; I, the state Justice computers, possible criminal-history data, he is putting his head on the block. Such items are confidential by state law, available only to law enforcement for specified purposes. Criminal sanctions would flow for a violation. His ass could be grass.
I’m running a gambit that Dana’s people may not have given her everything on the man known as Lyle Simmons. It never hurts to check another source. It could be something that came their way, something they didn’t think was significant. Clem may be many things, but on an errand like this he is above all else discreet.
‘No promises,’ he says, ‘but I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thanks,’ I tell him.
‘What’s a buddy for?’ he says. ‘Besides, you may need all the friends you can get.’
I give him a look.
‘Word is that Jimmy Lama’s got his sword out for you, sharpening it on a fine stone,’ says Clem. ‘That business over pretrial motions.’
Lama’s embarrassment, the fact that he was called on the carpet by Woodruff, is the talk of the cop shops in town.
Lama’s enmity is nothing new. I tell him this.
‘Yeah. Well, just don’t turn your back,’ he says.
We talk for a few moments, I grab my drinks and head back toward the table. Halfway there I notice that a guy has moved in next to Dana, the empty chair on the other side. He’s looking nervous, little glances to the side, wondering how to open conversation.
‘My old high-school special — double rum and Coke,’ I tell her. ‘What fueled my engine on Saturday nights.’ I put the drink in front of her.
The guy on the other side is crestfallen, the look of some wasted auto worker facing life on the line after missing super-lotto by one number.
Dana takes a sip, makes a face.
‘Like it?’
‘I’ve tasted better paint thinner,’ she says. ‘You must have been a real ace in school.’
We make talk for a few minutes and the guy on the other side does what could pass for a discreet exit. The other couples from the table are all on the floor, dancing, Dana and I alone.
‘Come on, let’s blow this place. I’ll mix something special back at the house.’
‘Can’t tonight,’ she says. ‘I’m going to have to go in just a few minutes. I’ve got to fly to D.C. in the morning.’
‘What, are these coronation bells I hear?’
‘For the moment just little tinkles,’ she says. ‘First in a series of interviews. Checking for any skeletons that might make an entrance come confirmation in the Senate,’ she tells me.
The first verification from Dana that this thing, her appointment to the bench, is in fact going to happen.
She reads concern in my face.
‘You were hoping for something more tonight,’ she says.
‘That too,’ I say.
‘Oh. It’s Jack’s case.’
I make a face, like I can read between the lines. If she leaves her positions, what assurance is there that I won’t have to do blitzkrieg with her office to get the dirt on Jack into evidence in my case?
‘Not to worry,’ she says. ‘I made a promise. I’ll keep it. Besides, I have something else.’
She takes another sip from the bitter cup and curls her tongue, like maybe she forgot.
‘Fit this into your puzzle and see if you get a picture,’ she says. ‘Yesterday afternoon I’m going over transcripts of the telephone tapes from Jack’s house.’
These are now a few months old, she tells me. Most of it is drivel. According to Dana, Jack kept most of the darker side of life away from the house.
‘But there was one conversation, on the eighteenth of August,’ she says. ‘A physician called — Melanie’s doctor. She wasn’t home, so Jack took the call. The doctor simply wanted to leave a message to have Melanie call him back. But Vega became very insistent. It was one of those calls where you read between the lines, that something wasn’t right. He wanted to know what it was. The doc tried to assure him that everything was fine. You know Jack,’ she says.
I can picture Jack; nervous Nelly threatening to have the state medical board revoke the guy’s license for maintaining a confidence.
‘The doc finally relented,’ she says. ‘Said it was against his better judgment, but under the circumstances they should be quite happy, being as they were about to become new parents.’
Dana’s painted eyebrows are doing heavy arches at this moment.
‘The message,’ she says, ‘the pregnancy test was positive.’
‘Holy shit,’ I say. ‘How did Jack take it?’
‘I don’t know who the telephone carrier was, but I’ll bet it’s true.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That you could hear a pin drop,’ she says.
Chapter 19
Laurel has had a friend, a woman from work, assemble these things, a few more outfits from her closet, and put them into a hanging valise for me.
Tonight, on the eve of trial, I deliver them to the county jail, where they will be stored in a wardrobe warehouse on the main level, a thousand automated hooks like a mechanical snake on the ceiling that moves with the press of a button to produce the exact outfit for the right inmate. One of the many assembly lines of justice.
It is all in the inane belief that the defendant, who has been locked in this hellhole for months, labeled with the scarlet letter of crime and told to scrap for her very existence among the castoffs of this world, will look like you and me when the guards drop the shackles and waltz her into court in the morning. One of the fictions of our system.
I drop the valise with a matron on the bottom floor. They rifle my briefcase and search me, pat-down and metal detector, hand me a clip-on badge, and lead me by the nose upstairs, all without a single word that could be called civil, to the pods, to see Laurel.
I wait in one of the little booths, behind glass. She has not yet arrived. I kill time tapping my fingers on the metal shelf in front of me. Pretrial jitters.
When I see her, it is on the floor down below, coming this way. A group of women heading for the day room. Laurel’s talking and milling, jousting in the body language of this place with another woman. Laurel seems to lose more weight each time I see her, replaced by muscle mass, hours on the treadmill and weight machine downstairs. She could author a book, Forced Fitness.
She exudes a lot of sexual energy, but in a package like a female gyrene. As I watch her climb the stairs, I wonder if in this place, Laurel has not in fact found her own element. Like so many locked away here, my sister-in-law is one of the scrappy underdogs of life.
I am reminded of something that Nikki once told me, when the two were girls in high school. They had attended a party out in one of the rural areas of the county. Nikki had wandered off with some guy, who under the influence of a few too many beers, wanted to force the issue. He’d managed to get her into a small gardening shed on the pretext of a walk in the moonlight, and was intent on having his way. She was struggling, fighting him off, hands all the way to her crotch, sprawled on some sacks of potting soil, when Laurel went looking and found them. Without a word, little sister picked up a lawn rake, a dozen sharp metal teeth, and spiked the kid’s ass in ways that no doubt he is still explaining to this day.
In a tight situation, most women I have known are talkers. They will, if allowed, rely on their wits to deal. Laurel is the exception. She is merciless in protecting her own, and to Laurel, Nikki was very much one of her own.