Undue Influence (4 page)

“What kind of admissions?”

“The kid says Julie told her the stuff came from home, a stash her mother kept in the house. What’s worse, Melanie has confirmed this. She says Julie also told her the same thing, that her mother used drugs.”

“It’s not true,” says Laurel. “She’s a lying bitch.”

I might expect her to fold, to be fighting back tears, driven to the edges of the glass enclosure by the charge. Instead she is standing, head erect, shoulders squared, shaking her head, and in clear unassailable language telling us that this is crap. Laurel came to the divorce with a schoolgirl’s faith in the justice of courts. It has been rocked by the slow recognition that money speaks here as clearly as anywhere in life. If I believe her, and I do, she is now getting a cynic’s first taste of how the scales can tip with the preponderance of perjury. As I stand and study her, at the opposite end of the small conference table, standing in the glare of fluorescence, there is a cold recognition, like a dark cloud, that passes across her face. “I’m gonna lose the kids,” she says. “Aren’t I?”

“Wake up, kiddo.” I whisper softly into my daughter’s ear, not enough to rouse her. The TV has gone white with snow, a local station that signs off the cable at the witching hour. Sarah is dressed like some fairy princess a Halloween party earlier in the evening with some kids from her school. I’m sprawled in the recliner in the family room, my feet up on the pop-up footrest.

We’ve fallen asleep, Sarah in my lap. We have done this now three nights running. Without Nikki to impose a regimen on our lives, it seems we are adrift, anchorless, without the hale habits of life. I shift in the chair and Sarah clings to me, her little fingers digging into my shirt like the claws of a kitten. As I move she gives off a feckless moan, then little mewings. I look at the clock. It is after one in the morning. There is no chance of waking her. I lift her, dead weight in my arms, and carry her off to her bedroom. She will sleep in the chiffon of pretend royalty tonight. She can change in the morning, before school.

These days I worry what her teacher, or some of the mothers must think, when they see my daughter. Her clothes are clean but not pressed.

Perhaps it is merciful that Sarah, who was born a clothes horse, has with her mother’s passing lost the fascination for things feminine. The dresses she used to wear, frilly things of pride to Nikki, now hang like listless ghosts in Sarah’s closet. My faculty for color coordination has never embraced my own tie rack. It is painful to the senses when applied to a little girl’s colored tights and tops. The braids and fine ponytails that seemed to take Nikki five minutes defy my thick fingers, so that most mornings Sarah’s bountiful hair now looks like hay in a Kansas windstorm. When we play games together these days it is not jump rope or jacks, but baseball, or tossing hoops in the yard, where I hold her up near the rim so she can do her own version of slam-dunk.

When she trudges off to school each day, backpack slumping across her scrawny shoulders, I wonder if by yoking her affections to her widowed father’s wagon my daughter has doomed herself to life as a tomboy. I pull off her socks, cover her, a peck on the cheek, then flip on her night-light. Down the hall in my room I can hear her breathing in the child monitor on my nightstand. I rummaged through a dozen boxes in the garage to find this. Nikki had packed it away when Sarah turned three, when the worries of
SIDS
and other parental paranoia had passed. But in the weeks after Nikki’s death, Sarah suffered bouts of crying that tore at my soul. I would go to her in her room and hold her, cradled in my arms, while she asked questions I could not answer. Why her father, who could do all things, could not bring Mommy back? Where had she gone?

Would we ever see her again? Staring down in her round baleful olive eyes, I soothed her with a litany of faith that her mother was with God, that she was happy, that from the clouds in heaven she watched over her little girl and that one day we would all be together again, forever.

And in my soul of souls I hoped beyond all that I knew that this was true. Then Sarah would sleep, secure in the promise of a father’s wishes. In a daze I step into the shower tub. Cold water laps my legs to midcalf. I’d forgotten drawing Sarah a bath, hours ago now. As I pull the plug I hear the phone ringing on the bedside table. I run, wrapping a towel around my waist for fear the phone may wake Sarah. Who the hell can be calling at this hour? It cannot be good news. “Mr. Madriani.”

“Yes.”

“Gail Hemple here.”

“What is it?”

“I’m at Jack Vega’s house,” she says. “You’d better get over here as fast as you can.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The police are here,” she says. “I got a call an hour ago from Vega’s lawyer.” It hits me like an iced dagger in the cynical center of my lawyer’s brain Laurel and her temper. She has done some foolish act of harassment, broken a window, smashed a windshield, inscribed her initials with a key in the satin finish of Jack’s state-leased $80,000 Lexus. After the allegations of drugs in court, I knew I should have had her here in the house, overnight. I spent two hours before dinner grilling Julie and her mother on the charges. Each in her turn denied them roundly. “What did she do?” I say.

There’s a stutter on the phone as Hemple regroups. She knows who I’m talking about. Clearly her client has done something. “I can’t talk now,” she says. “Don’t say anything more. I’m in my car, on the cellular. Just answer one question. Is she with you now?”

“Laurel?” I ask.

“Just yes or no,” she says.

“No. She’s probably home.”

“She’s not,” says Hemple.

“Where are the kids?” I ask. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Can’t talk. Get over here,” she says, “now.”

“Sarah’s sleeping,” I say. “I’ll have to get someone to watch her.”

“Do it,” she says, and hangs up.

Mrs. Bailey, the next-door neighbor, may never forgive me a phone call in the middle of the night, another urgent request for help. She is every family’s grandmother, sixty-two, strait-laced, and alone. A churchgoing lady of conservative habits, she lives for the welfare of little children and her weekly Bible classes, in that order. I’m afraid I’ve taken advantage of her weakness for kids. She’s been my perpetual crutch, baby-sitting in every pinch since Nikki died. She will not take money for this, so I wait for her back fence to blow down in a windstorm, or her car to conk out some morning, any way to reciprocate for her kindness by the performance of some manly duty. To date, everything she owns is upright and working, more than I can say for myself at this moment. I’m wiping sleep from my eyes, gripping the steering wheel with both hands as I drive. Jack and Melanie Vega live on a cul-de-sac off of Forty-second Avenue, in a large colonial gambrel, white pillars on a setback of manicured lawn larger than some city parks. Two blocks from their house and there is an ethereal glow to the night sky, fogged by the vapors of early autumn, the ghostly colors flashing blue, amber, and red. Two patrol cars have the intersection leading to Jack’s house blocked off, the only way in or out. I Lie to one of the cops at the intersection, tell him I am a relative, present tense. He passes me through, directs me to park on the other side of the street. A fire truck is at the curb directly in front of Jack’s house, its diesel engine droning a dull monotone. I wonder for a moment. I have never thought of Laurel as any kind of firebug, then dismiss the thought. These days if your kid samples snail bait they dispatch a hook-and-ladder, the vehicle of choice in any emergency. There’s a growing crowd at the curb, a few drive-by rubbemeckers and neighbors on my side of the street. Some bold souls are across on the other side, closer to the house, pressing one of the cops and the firemen for information. I look for Gail Hemple, but see no sign. I park the car and walk, milling with the neighbors, most of whom are in bathrobes and slippers, a guy in pants, his jacket zipped to the throat, and sockless loafers. His collar is muffled up against the cold. He’s plying an older woman for the latest rumors wafting through the crowd, what she saw or heard. A lot of shrugging shoulders from the old lady. “One of the policemen said something about a victim inside,” she says.

Suddenly there’s a knot in my stomach, cold sweat on my forehead.

Hemple’s voice on the phone, her tone, was not the siren of concern over some mild monkeyshine cast as vendetta. The driveway, the only break in a six-foot wrought-iron fence that seals off the front of the house, is barred with yellow police tape. Guys in plain clothes are wandering back and forth between the house and parked cars, the little satchels of forensics in their hands. The portico of Jack’s house is a miniature of the executive mansion, everything but an honor guard and the Secret Service. Impressing the world is what Jack lives for. I have a clear view of the entry, wide open, lit like a Christmas tree, Corinthian columns all around. There is a message conveyed by all of this a victim without the urgent care of racing ambulances. The thought, the limited possibilities, leave me with a chill. I tried four times to call Laurel at her apartment on the cellular on my way over here. There was no answer. I figure the kids must be with her. “Mr. Madriani.” I hear a soft voice behind me and Turn. It’s Gail Hemple. She’s standing with a small group twenty feet away, another woman and a couple near some bushes in the driveway of a house. The woman with Hemple looks vaguely familiar, a face I recognize to which I cannot put a name, someone from a past life. The couple, man and woman, young and shivering in the cold, stir no embers of recognition. I move toward them and Hemple meets me halfway, a little huddle out of earshot. “What’s going on?” I say.

Long sigh from her. “Bad news,” she whispers. “There’s been a shooting.”

She can tell from my look that this does not surprise me, having wallowed in the sea of rumors getting here. I wait for the bottom line.

She reads my mind. “Melanie Vega’s dead,” she says.

This takes my breath. My mind racing.

“Where’s Laurel?”

“You tell me,” she says.

“What about Jack?”

She makes a face, a question mark.

This takes a while for me to absorb, all the implications. “Maybe a burglary?” I say this hopefully. Hemple shakes her head. She has no idea. “The cops aren’t talking,” she tells me. But from the look on her face I can tell she is considering another scenario. “I called Laurel’s house as soon as Vega’s lawyer called me,” she says, with the same resignation as “The kids?”

Palms up, shrugging shoulders. She has no idea.

“Wonderful.”

While we are talking the woman with the familiar face, the one Gail had been talking to, comes up behind her. Good-looking, auburn hair, dressed in a jogging suit, the look of something grabbed from the closet at the sound of sirens. I think maybe she wants to talk to Hemple. Then she looks straight at me, smiles, and says, “Paul. It’s good to see you again. Sorry it’s under such circumstances.” She is now feasting on my blank stare, poorly masked by a witless smile. I give her a nod, something that conveys I haven’t got a clue. She laughs. “Dana Colby,” she says. “Law School.” A little lilting uplift in her voice. “It’s been a long time. I was a year behind you,” she says. “Ah, yes. I remember,” I say. But my voice is filled with the distrust of my own memory. The game of names and faces has never been my strong suit. As we stand and talk, recall sets in like the chills before a flu, vague recollections of this woman kicking my ass somewhere in a courtroom. It’s been some years since I’ve seen her. One of a dozen at the university back before the female rush. If I remember right, she was the one whose bones we all dreamed of jumping. Five-foot-ten, auburn hair, eyes like shimmering amethyst, a face like an angel, with a body that only God could have made. She has not changed. In the genes department she is what every woman thinks of when told that life is unfair. Right now all I want is to get Hemple alone where we can talk. The couple that seems to be with Colby have moved up a notch, a young man and woman, mid-thirties. They seem to be attached to Colby like the stitched-on shadow of the great Pan. Dana Colby looks at me, hesitates for a moment as if in doubt. “I’d introduce you,” she says to them, “but I’m afraid I don’t know your names.”

“George Merlow my wife, Kathy.” The guy nods at Colby and smiles. I shake his hand. “We live on the block,” he says. “This is very disturbing. Just moved in,” he tells us. Kathy Merlow has a long and sallow face, dirty-blond hair, and a bedded look like maybe she’s been sick. She is a small woman, her hand is twined around her husband’s arm and lost within the deep pocket of his wool overcoat, a tweed affair, its collar turned up around a five o’clock shadow and dark stringy hair.

As he turns and stoops to whisper in his wife’s ear, I can see George Merlow’s thinning locks, arranged in a short ponytail. He has the grungy look of celebrity on vacation. There is a slight accent to his voice, something east of Omaha, maybe Massachusetts or New York, but not hard or fixed, like maybe the guy is rootless, that he’s moved around a lot.

As I look at him there’s a lot of agitation in the eyes, nervous posturing. Standing in the street, waiting for the coroner’s wagon, I attribute this anxiety to the events of the evening. Our little group is of a mind. “It’s just awful.” Kathy Merlow’s first words. “Shootings on the news every night since we arrived. A violent town,” she says. It sounds like Capital City has not made a good impression. I think maybe these people are from Mayberry, visions of whistling kids with fishing poles. “You walk on the street, you become bullet bait,” says the guy.

“Like any other big city.” Colby’s chorus to the couple. “Still, we could have hoped for a better welcome wagon.” Colby’s looking at the coroner’s van, which has just pulled in to the driveway of Jack’s house.

Two cops ease the tape barricade back in place. Hemple gives me a look, like let’s hope the cops are having the same thoughts about random violence. I’m praying that maybe Laurel has an alibi after Midnight Mass with the Sisters of Mercy. With Laurel, since the divorce, you never know. One night she showed up at our house with a Catholic priest.