Undue Influence (37 page)

She’s younger than you, and she’s scared.”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Is there anything you need?” I ask him.

I have no idea what ruse I would employ to get it there without knowing the destination. My first thought is Harry, the doer of all things suspect. Harry would see this as a minor mission of mercy, and Jack’s lawyers would never ferret him out. Danny could call him direct. “No, we’re fine,” he says. “Is Sarah still there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to her?”

I put my daughter on the line.

“Danny, where are you?” she says.

I want to hum and plug both ears at the same time. I am hoping that Sarah won’t repeat some place-name in my presence. I’m using both hands to untie the knot in her shoe while she shows me a toothless grin, talking on the phone. “Where’s that?” she says.

“How far away?”

“What are you doing there?” My daughter is a litany of questions.

“Who is Maggie? Is she nice? Why can’t you come home?” she says.

There’s a moment of silence as he tries to explain in tones that a seven-year-old might understand. “You know,” she says, “everybody’s gone. Yeah,” she says. “First Mom.”

Sarah says this as if her mother is off on a trip, like she may be returning any day. There are times when I have wondered if Sarah has really dealt with the death of her mother or simply withdrawn into her own protected world of fantasy. “Then Auntie Laurel disappeared, and now you guys,” she says. “I want to know what’s going on. When are you coming back?” she says. She is actually angry, like give me a break, enough of these adult games. For the first time it strikes me what all of this has done to Sarah.

Every familiar point of contact in her world now gone. And though I am trying to reassemble a part of her life, getting her aunt out from under the cloud of murder even this makes me an absentee father who is either in court or locked in his office, mulling over papers until the wee hours. There is a lapse on the phone, Danny talking. She laughs a little, then listens some more. “There is a lady,” she tells Danny. “Her name is Dana. But I don’t like her.” With this I look at Sarah.

She’s studying me to see the effect. I suspect that this is intended more for me than Danny. “I didn’t say she was bad or anything.” Sarah getting defensive. “Just I don’t like her.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I tell her.

She makes a faces like the truth seldom is, her ear glued to the phone.

I have allowed Sarah to grieve for Nikki in her own way, and I see this, her attitude toward Dana, as a part of that normal mourning process. I would deal with it, except that I view it as both necessary and harmless. There is no real hostility here, but rather an undercurrent of suspicion on the part of my daughter toward anyone who might be seen as a surrogate for her mother. In this case the only apparent candidate is Dana, for we seem of late to have been thrown together. The circumstances of Laurel’s case have seen to that. For my own part it is not an unpleasant experience, this woman of mystical beauty and quick intellect. In the last week we have spent a couple of warm evenings by the fire at my house, after Sarah has gone down, sipping wine and tallcing until late. The hum of adult voices heard once more in my home.

The communion of two lonely souls. For the last two days she has been in Washington, D.C., business on the impending judgeship. While Sarah tugged at my sleeve with demands that I read to her, Dana and I have spoken each night by phone, long distance. We have discussed in general terms a possible vacation to tropic climes in the fall, the three of us.

Dana has suggested something like Club Med, where they have special programs for children. So we have started to collect literature. All of this, I suspect, has generated a kind of rivalry rippling just under the surface, little jealousies that a seven-year-old mind lacks the art to conceal. Suddenly Sarah is finished talking with Danny. In the abrupt way children end all conversations, she hands me the receiver and is off the bed and down the hall. “Danny?”

He’s still there. “Yeah.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” I tell him. “Call whenever you want.” I tell him I’ll leave word with my secretary at work to break in if he should call.

He has the number. “Is the Vespa okay?” he says.

“It’s fine. But I keep finding Sarah out there playing on it, pretending she’s taking you for a ride,” I tell him. “But she’s very careful.”

“That’s okay. Just don’t let her mess with the box on the back, all right? All my stuff’s in there.” The world coming apart and Danny is worried about “stuff” in the box on the back of his bike. “It’s locked, remember? I assume you have the key.”

“Yeah, well, just tell her to be careful.”

“I will,” I tell him.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” his last words to me on the phone. A boy, growing into a man, taking on the burdens of his mother. “It’s not your problem,” I tell him. “We’ll work it out. Try not to think about it,” I say. And we hang up. ,
CZAPTEU
Dr. Simon Angelo is the Capital County coroner hired two years ago from a state back east. He holds degrees from three universities and belongs to a score of professional societies. These litter his curriculum vitae, which Morgan Cassidy has just laid before me on the counsel table. Angelo is mid-forties, though by dress and appearance he looks older.

He has a fringe of graying hair that rings his head above the ears like clouds with their tops sheared in the jet stream. He is slight of build, with sharp features, a chin that finishes the face in a rounded point, and deep-set dark eyes that give the appearance of a mind engaged in perpetual deliberations. Simon Angelo is every man’s vision of intrigue at the Court of the Medici. In front of him this morning, balanced on the railing that forms the front of the witness stand, is a square box, something that in the last century might have contained a woman’s hat. I stipulate on his qualifications to testify as an expert, and Cassidy passes out copies of his resume to filter through the jury box. Under the framework of a dozen preliminary questions, Angelo recreates the death scene: Melanie Vega, lying at the bottom of a dry bathtub, her eyes open, pupils fixed and dilated. Time of death is the first evidentiary bridge he and Cassidy cross. It is a pivot point because of the argument between Laurel and Melanie on the front porch earlier in the evening. Cassidy would no doubt like to push the murder closer to that point in time. “Our original report placed it between eleven and eleven-thirty P.M,” he says. Alarms go off. “Revision on the way.”

“And do you still consider that to be an accurate estimate?”

He talks about postmortem lividity and loses the jury in a sea of scientific jargon halfway through. “Could time of death have been earlier?” says Cassidy.

“It’s possible,” he says. “Lividity can vary from case to case, and the information here was at best sketchy.” What he means is that it was based on observations by the
EMTS
(Emergency Medical Technicians) before Angelo arrived on the scene. “So fixing time of death is not an exact science?” she says.

Angelo gives her a benign smile, something well planned.

“Not at all,” he says.

They are laying the groundwork for some major wiggle room. Before our pretrial motions, when Cassidy had Mrs. Miller to identify Laurel at the house near the eleven-thirty benchmark that appeared in the coroner’s report, the state was more than willing to live with their estimate as to the time of death. Now they would like to fudge a bit. Jurors might wonder why, if Laurel was so intent on killing Melanie, would she argue and then wait for three hours to carry out the deed? “Is it possible that the death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty?” says Cassidy.

This is less than ten minutes after the two women argued on the porch, and three hours earlier than their original time estimate. Angelo is a million pained expressions on the stand, the revisionist at work. He tells the court there are factors in this case that are unusual. Whether the body was wet or dry at the time of the crime. This could affect the cooling rate which normally goes into the equation, the fact that fluids another measure of the time of death were damaged by the fatal bullet. By the time he finishes he has thoroughly discredited his own earlier estimate. “Upon reflection,” he says, “I suppose it is possible that death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty,” he tells her.

“Thank you, doctor.”

Indeed. It is why a court of law is not the place for unmasking truth.

The two of them have now rewritten the initial coroner’s report to conform more closely to the evidence on Cassidy’s plate after our pretrial motions. Laurel leans into my ear, sensing that momentum on an item of import
UNDUB
INFLUENCE
has shifted, asking me the significance. I wave her off. Things are moving too quickly. “Doctor, can you tell us the cause of death?”

“Death was caused by a single gunshot wound to the head.”

“Can you be more specific, describe the wound?” she says. “If I may, your honor?” Angelo is pointing to the square box in front of him on the railing. Woodruff nods.

Angelo lifts the lid and pulls a human skull from the box. There are a few gasps, and a lot of murmuring in the courtroom, shifting weight and conversation in the press rows behind us. Laurel grips my leg hard under the table. Then I realize what all the commotion is about. I lean into her ear. “It’s not real,” I tell her. “It’s only a model.”

Angelo has fashioned a plastic life-sized model of the human skull, into which he has drilled a hole approximating the path of the bullet, with parts of brain, bone, and other organs that can be removed. He offers this to me for examination before he testifies. I rise from the table and take it. It looks identical in every respect to the human form that inspired it. I take it and hold it in my hand, turning it upside down, peering into its cavities and crevices. There are structures inside, visible to the eye, soft tissue that has been recreated and fastened to bone, the tongue and palate with neat holes bored through each, shattered bone I can see, through one eye socket. I would bounce the thing like a basketball if I could, to demonstrate for the jury that there is nothing sacred in this. It is not real. We talk about what it is made of, resins and polymers.

“Is it identical in every respect to the skull of the deceased?” I ask. Angelo makes a face. “As close as I could make it without severing the head, removing all the tissue, and making a death-mask mold,” he says. Leave it to me to suggest this. I glance at the jury. They are not happy at this moment. A lot of grim looks in my direction, although three minutes ago I would venture that some of them actually thought this was the severed head of Melanie Vega. I pass on it for purposes of demonstration, and Angelo drifts into his narrative, explaining the fatal wound to the jury, holding the head like senor Wences in one hand and a pointer in the other. “The bullet entered the soft tissue under the angle of the mandible-that’s the lower part of the jawbone,” says Angelo. “Just to left of the midline. Here.” Angelo points to the hole clearly evident under the chin. “It then proceeded in an upward and posterior direction toward the rear of the skull, passing through the sublingual gland, which is just under the tongue, piercing the tongue and the posterior tip of the soft palate.” I can see several of the jurors swallowing hard, a sensation like ice cream glued to the roof of their mouth. “It then passed through the paranasal sinus cavities, impacted and fractured the sphenoid bone, which forms the floor of the brain pan. Here,” he says. “The bullet splintered bone fragments, some of which became embedded in several areas of the brain. The bullet finally came to rest in the left temporal lobe. Here.” He points one more time. “Doctor, can you describe the position whether Melanie Vega was sitting or standing at the time she was shot?”

“According to all of the evidence, we believe that at the time she was shot the victim was lying on her back, reclining on a slant of about forty-five degrees, against the back contour of the tub. Her head was tilted back, lying against the back edge of the tub.” He holds the back of the skull in the open palm of his hand, the empty eye sockets facing up, toward the ceiling. “About in this position,” he says. He rotates the skull in his hand until the crown of the head is facing the far end of the jury box, and the feet, if they were attached, would be off in the direction of our table. “The fatal bullet was fired from off in about that direction,” he says.

Angelo points with an outstretched arm directly at Laurel. Everything calculated for effect. “I would estimate the range of fire to be about four to six feet.”

The picture they are painting is clear, a cold and calculating shot while Melanie Vega lay resting in the tub a veritable execution. “The angle of fire would be roughly from this direction.” Angelo brings the steel rod in on a slow line of flight with one hand, toward the skull resting in the other, until it passes between the curving bone of the mandible forming the chin and engages the structures of tissue. He finds the hole pre-drilled in these, and forces the rod past a few obstructions. You can hear the braiding of plastic as the rough steel pushes its way in. A few grimaces in the jury box. He jams the rod into the head, six inches or more, until it becomes lodged, leaving several inches protruding from under the chin at the base of the skull, tracing the line of fire. I look, and all eyes are on him. The jurors are mesmerized by the clinical brutality of this, as if Angelo has just committed a second act of mayhem on the victim, retracing what the state says my client has done. One of the women, a divorcee I had fought to keep on the panel, is now looking at Laurel with eyes of wonder, how one woman could do this to another. It seems Laurel herself is looking a little green. “Could you tell us, doctor, did this wound cause instantaneous death?”

says Cassidy. “If not instantaneous, the victim died within a very short period of time. Minutes,” says Angelo. “There was massive brain damage,” he says. “Not only from the bullet but from numerous bone fragments that invaded the brain tissue.” He puts the plastic skull on the railing that forms the front of the jury box, where it rests like some wicked hologram, a head without a body. Cassidy takes Angelo through some pictures, stills taken at the scene.