Undue Influence (12 page)

“Not at all. We had nothing in common.” There is no equivocation here, abrupt, like the two women lived on different planets. I get the sense that there is something of disapproval lurking just under the surface, like Mrs. Miller is just egging me to ask. She sits on it like a pincushion. “You never saw her in the yard, over the fence, maybe gardening?”

“I don’t think she would have known a rose if it stuck her,” she says.

A lot of imperious looks. “If we passed we didn’t talk. She kept to herself and her few friends,” says Miller. “Friends?”

“She had a few.”

“Women in the neighborhood?”

“They may have been from the neighborhood, but they weren’t women. At least not that I noticed.” If we had tea and little sandwiches we’d be heading toward the lady’s dirt session. She fumes about a little, searching for the words. Then she says: “Mrs. Vega had callers.” I give her a look.

“Mostly at night, when her husband was away.” She looks at me, waiting to see if I will roll with her in this hay. But I am taking notes, the dispassionate clinician. She takes to the defense, like a gossip scorned. “Well, when men come at night they’re not usually selling vacuums. I told the police the same thing.” She looks at Harry, who is smiling. I can tell his mind is back to Melanie and the thought that, in his words, “She was bobbing for apples.”

“Well, I may be older, but I’ve been around.”

“Oh, indeed,” says Harry.

She’s not sure how to take this, but she lets it pass.

“You told the police she had gentlemen callers?” I say.

“Absolutely. They wanted to know everything, so I told them.” She gives me a solid nod, like done my duty. A buzzer goes off somewhere, the clock on a kitchen stove.

“Will this take much longer? I have some errands to run,” she says.

“A couple more questions,” I tell her. I could ask her about the hood, how much of the woman’s face it covered. Just how well she could see that night. What the light on the street was like. A million questions to set up doubts. But if she is going to equivocate, I want it to be on the stand, in front of a jury. Probing these issues will only serve to prepare her, perhaps quicken images already planted in her mind by Lama and his minions. I want to keep her as much in the middle between our sides as possible, reinforce the view that the good witness does not belong to any camp. With Mrs. Miller it may be the best I can do, at least for the moment. Harry grills her on a few more points, what she heard on the steps as the two women argued. Lama might have hoped for more on this. It seems all she got was a lot of shouting, with very few intelligible words, most of which she does not wish to repeat. “Foul language,” she says. She could jail Laurel for this alone, I think.

“Could we hurry this up?” she says. “I have a phone call to make before I leave on my errands.” I seize the opening, some time to prepare and another session.

“If you’re in a hurry, maybe we could continue this at another time, more convenient.”

“That would be better,” she says. Like a patient out of the chair in some dental office, she is now all smiles. “When would be convenient?” I ask.

“Why don’t you call me?” She gives us her number. Harry writes it down.

We head for the door. I can see large windows in the dining room. These look out directly onto Vega’s front porch. She would not need field glasses to see who was there. “One more question,” says Harry. “That night, did you hear anything that might have sounded like a gunshot?”

She shakes her head, soberly, like she’s thought about it before, something on which she is adamant. The cops must have grilled her on this.

“No gunshot?” he says.

“No.”

“No popping sound?”

“I know what a gun sounds like,” she says.

Harry looks at me. We have already hit three of the five houses in the cul-de-sac. Mrs. Miller’s house is next door to the Vega residence. The Merlows live on the other side. Except for Kathy and George Merlow, who we will do next, and who I met that night, Miller is closer than any other house in the neighborhood. So far, the bathroom trashed, glass bottles thrown and smashed, a nine-millimeter round fired, and no one heard a sound that night. “You don’t suffer from any form of hearing impairment?” Harry can’t resist. She stops and looks at him. “No one has ever accused me of that.” If we get her on the stand I will keep Harry outside. I thank her, tell her I will call in the next day or so, and we are gone. We’re down the steps, out on the sidewalk. Mrs. Miller’s front door nearly hit Harry in the ass on the way out. “Bad news for our side,” he says. “We could have her eyes checked.

Subpoena the records of her optician,” he says. “A fucking jogging suit,” he tells me. “She can see through a hood. Better eyes than Superman. Why the hell didn’t she just swallow the speeding bullet and save us all the trouble of a trial?” Harry has a bad attitude with witnesses who are not helpful, particularly if he thinks they are embellishing what they saw for the benefit of the boys in blue. This is clearly his thought with Mrs. Miller. “If it walks and it wears a badge,” he says, “it’s right.’ Four down, one to go. We head for the Merlows’.

Their house has a deep setback, forty yards of grass and dying shrubs.

George Merlow lacks inclinations toward a green thumb. Or else his gardener’s been deported. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in a month. It’s covered by a carpet of leaves, and weeds sprout in the planter beds like tulips in Holland. We head up the walkway through the front garden. The double front door is one of those arched affairs, something that looks like it belongs under a steeple, in a church. Except that stuck in the crack between the two doors is a single sheet of colored paper, a handbill that is weathered and brittle. An advertisement for a Halloween sale that ended three weeks ago. There’s a newspaper, still wrapped in its rubber band. It’s been watered by the automatic sprinklers or the morning dew and left to dry in the sun. I have seen parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls in better shape. I roll the rubber band down and open it to the front page. The lead story is about Melanie Vega:
LAWMAKER’S
WIFE
bltjrdered IN
EAST
AREA
. It has been here, forgotten under some bush, since the day after the murder. I climb the steps and look through the glass on the door. It is leaded and beveled, a view like a kaleidoscope, glittering light with more angles than one of Harry’s clients. I pick a facet and look. Clear carpet as far as I can see. No furniture. Nothing on the walls. I ring the bell. We wait patiently for the sound of footfalls. The only thing that arrives is a cat, calico and hungry. It bounds down from the railing on the porch and begins to make love to my leg. “Nobody home,” says Harry. We ring again. Same result. It isn’t until I turn that I see it. At the far end of the porch, propped against a windowsill, a sign “For Sale” a realtor’s logo emblazoned across the background. I walk the distance and look at it. Some agent’s name and number, home and office, dangle from a separate metal placard below the main sign. I take these down on the back of a business card and slip it in my pocket. “Moved,” says Harry.

“Looks like it,” I say.

As I turn I can see directly into one of the windows that looks in from the porch. A bedroom, empty space. If you hollered it would echo. The only thing remaining is the curtain on one side of the window, like maybe whoever left did so in haste. I head down the porch and around to the side of the house, Harry on my heels. “Maybe you were mistaken.

Maybe they went into another house. Lot of confusion that night,” says Harry. “No mistake,” I tell him. “I watched them walk all the way down this driveway and disappear into the backyard.” Some confusion. Harry tramps to the sidewalk and checks the street number painted on the curb against his copy of the voter rolls, the Merlows’ address. They don’t show up. “Good citizens,” he says. Given Harry’s attitude toward government, I might question his criteria for demerit points in civics. He pulls out a little cellular phone and flips open the mouthpiece.

Harry and the electronic age. Some fool in a company has given him this thing to use for six months, part of a promotion. Harry has already dropped spaghetti sauce on the dialing pad, which he bitches is too small for his lumpy fingers. Phone directory has no listing for the Merlows, new or old. He’s talking to himself as I head through the gate toward the backyard. “Nosy neighbors may call the cops.” Harry’s worried.

“We’re house shopping,” I tell him.

I don’t have to worry about running into Jack. Since the murder he and the kids have moved into a condominium downtown, closer to the Capitol.

Word is that Julie and Danny were spooked by the house. Danny would not stay here after he saw cops tramping through with questions, brushing fibers off the carpet of his dad’s bedroom. The condominium was a concession, part of the deal for temporary custody, to lure the kids back into Jack’s nest pending Laurel’s trial. “What are you looking for?” says Harry. “I don’t know. Just something about them that night.”

Maybe it was Kathy Merlow, her wide-eyed preoccupation with the remains, wanting to know when the coroner would bring out the body. Perhaps it was her fragile condition, not so much physically ravaged as psychicly stressed. Whatever Kathy Merlow had a look that night, an aspect that in twenty years of criminal law practice I have seen enough times to recognize. She wore it in her eyes, the stamp of someone who was witless with fear. Not some idle vague anxiety, but more specific, some reason to be afraid. Harry humors me as we survey the yard.

The Merlows’ house, or what used to be, is one of those modern Victorians, a lot of gingerbread sold as style half a million dollars of house on a million-dollar lot. Like Harry said when he saw the neighborhood, “Area is everything.”

In the back there’s a pool and sport court, fenced in black chain-link, surrounded by faux gaslights like a London street, in the motif, so that in a fog you might have visions of Jack the Ripper. “These people live nice,” says Harry. He’d like to know what George Merlow does for a living. “That may be our best chance to find him,” I say. “His work.”

Though I don’t have a clue what it is. I try to remember the tenor of our conversation that night. But it wasn’t a meeting where small talk predominated. Kathy Merlow was too busy looking for bodies. On the far side at the back of the house there’s a low deck. This leads to a small dining area off the kitchen. Harry tries the sliding door. It’s locked.

I look at him, raised eyebrows.

“I just want to look,” he says.

Upstairs there’s a balcony, turned spindles, and glossy white handrailings, what every little girl would like on her dollhouse. This runs the entire width of the house, to the second-story turret, where the balcony becomes a descending staircase, spiral and wrought-iron to the ground. 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. 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 briefoase 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 sharpei 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.