I found the answer in an obscure footnote to his working papers, an item not written by Angelo, but printed in small type on a form used in such tests. The projections of probability regarding Jack’s paternity were valid, wholly consistent with the results of the DNA probes, but they were premised on a single erroneous assumption — that there were no other males having shared genetic characteristics with Jack. The DNA testing had failed to consider the possibilities of Danny.
It is one of those conversations that people have, lawyer to client. Laurel has asked for assurances of privilege several times before talking, nervous, though I have told her that my lips are sealed, by law if not by blood.
And so she fills in the details that I have only guessed at until this moment.
It was not Laurel who had been at Jack’s house that night, who Mrs. Miller had seen in the hooded sweatshirt, but her likeness in all ways including looks. It was Danny.
He had come to talk, and perhaps to actually carry out the desperate and dramatic act of a teenager, not to murder Melanie, but to kill himself.
Danny had known for nearly two months that his stepmother carried his child, a dark secret only he and Melanie knew. It is why she pushed so hard through Jack for custody, a mix of fear and desire. Melanie knew that unless she could keep Danny close at hand, under her wing, in time the boy would crack. He would tell someone, if not authorities, then his mother. Their lives had become a daily act of desperation.
According to Laurel, it is perhaps the ultimate irony that the last act in Melanie’s sorry life was one of virtue.
He had found her in the bath when he arrived. I can only imagine the thoughts racing through Melanie’s mind in those final moments as Danny, in a state of hysteria, placed the silenced muzzle first in his mouth, then at his temple. Finally, she stood in the tub and pleaded with him to put the gun down. When he refused, she took one step over the side, onto the bath mat, and made a wild swing for the weapon. She grabbed the barrel and they struggled, Melanie half in and half out of the tub. It was a horrified Danny who gently lowered the body of his stepmother, his seducer, back down into the water.
The contested carpet, covered with Melanie’s blood and Danny’s bloody footprint, was in fact in Jack’s house that night — the vagaries of marital settlement agreements, in which every nut and bolt is divided on paper and left to the parties to enforce.
There may be many explanations for what happened that night so long ago, but in the end it all comes down to a single thing, a case of beauty and guile over youth and innocence, a case of Melanie’s undue influence over Danny.
‘Where did he get the gun?’ I ask.
‘Where else?’ she says. ‘The source of every vice for the young, a locker at school. A friend of his told Danny some gang members kept the weapon in a shared locker with this kid. So Danny took it.’
‘I think I met these people,’ I tell her. The gang-bangers who came to my house that night, the ones Dana chased off with her cellular call to the cops. They had not wanted Danny so much as their gun back. Though they might very well have used it on him had they put the two together.
The weapon had not been in Simmons’ van that night, as Laurel had told the police. Instead it was on Danny’s Vespa, where it had remained since the night of Melanie’s death, the little motor scooter that had been parked in my own garage for months, that Sarah had sat upon and played with, its varnished wooden box padlocked on the back. It was the point of deep conversation between Laurel and Danny that night when I emerged from Fulton’s onto the street.
Laurel had had her back to me. Danny had just given her the weapon, which she had placed in her purse, to dispose of in some way, a task she had originally intended to carry out on her trip to Reno months before. In the chaos following Melanie’s violent death, Laurel had thrown a few things into a bag for her trip to draw cover for Danny and told the boy to put the rug in a plastic bag along with the gun and place them in the trunk of her car.
The fact that the gun never made it into the bag, Laurel now tells me, was the result of panic and confusion by a teenager.
I think that there was perhaps more design than disorder to this, at least in Danny’s mind. The boy had begun to think about what would happen if his mother were caught and charged with the murder. It is true that he sat by anxiously and watched her trial, but in Danny’s mind he held the trump card. Until the end, he possessed the murder weapon, and in Danny’s limited understanding of the wheels of justice, had his mother been convicted, it would have been a simple thing to come forward, confess the crime, and produce the evidence. I doubt seriously whether police would have bought this.
I can image the alarm that raced through Laurel’s mind when she stood near the spillway of the Boca Dam, as she now tells me she did that night on her way to Reno, and discovered that the gun was not there. She had intended to load the plastic bag with rocks and dump both the carpet and weapon into the lake. Without the pistol, she knew there was a good chance police could link Danny to the crime. It was for this reason that she kept the rug, washed the blood from it, and made sure that police found it when they arrested her. The rug was intended to keep the cops from looking further for a suspect. She knew Jack would identify it, and she would simply stonewall. Without blood or trace evidence, which she had eliminated by washing it in solvents, the carpet became something, in her mind, only marginally incriminating. It would be her word against Jack’s as to ownership. She had never banked on the property settlement agreement, which became the added straw.
As for Jack, it seems the vaunted legislator has taken flight. He is now a fugitive. In a long and rambling letter received by the federal district judge and mailed from another city, Vega said that his sense of survival was more acute than his respect for the courts, or ‘your supposed system of justice.’ In the letter Jack vented his spleen against the government for the cover-up surrounding his wife’s murder, and wallowed in a sea of self-pity, finally saying that he felt betrayed by the untimely disclosure of his plea-bargain during the trial. He claimed that he had to undergo necessary medical treatment, no doubt plastic surgery to prevent identification while on the lam.
I suspect that he had for some time before this been diverting some of the sludge that we call campaign contributions into a numbered account someplace in a far-off land. The irony in this is that because he bolted before his sentencing, Jack is not technically a convicted felon, at least for purposes of his legislative retirement, which would have been forfeit had he gone to prison.
Checks are being drawn to his next-of-kin, to Laurel’s children, of whom she now has custody, and for the first time in years she has an adequate income.
In the end it is Dana who no doubt will take the biggest fall in all of this. Her dreams of a federal judgeship are now cinders, and she has been suspended from office pending completion of an investigation. There has never been a question in my mind but that she was following orders from above. But they are all now clamoring to prevent this thing, the stain of Melanie’s death, from climbing higher up the food chain.
Dana did, after all, make every effort to acquit Laurel, to the point of attempting to suborn perjury, not because she was evil, but because she knew Laurel was innocent. In fact she knew nothing. I will probably testify on her behalf when it comes to that.
Loyalties die hard.