Shadow of Power Free with Bonus Material

by Steve Martini

  “Someone would have had to have mentioned it somewhere.” I am talking about the mystery letter. “Check it out. Get somebody to do some research. If not here, in D.C. Try the Library of Congress.”

  “We can hire a research service, but it’s gonna cost,” says Harry. “We don’t have much to go on. No date. No author for the letter. All we know is that it dealt with slavery and cut some kind of deal. Research could take a while.”

  So far we have lined up a few experts to go over the lab reports on physical evidence found at the scene. We have investigators out talking to some of Arnsberg’s friends. Except for the letter mentioned by Bonguard and the fact that Scarborough seemed to fall back more than once on the same item in his speech, there is nothing else to go on.

  “I tried to call Bonguard to talk to him,” says Harry. “Left messages.”

  “And?”

  “He never called back.”

  “In your message did you tell him what it was about?”

  Harry nods. “Uh-huh. Which has me wondering if he’s willing to talk to us at all.”

  With Scarborough dead, the only one who can tell us about the mystery letter is Bonguard. This suddenly pushes him to the top of the curiosity list.

  “Do you want to try to call him?” says Harry.

  “What good would that do? If he’s not going to talk to you, why would he talk to me?”

  “Maybe you have better phone karma,” says Harry.

  Harry and I talk for a while. Over all of this, the mystery letter seems to hang there like a thread, daring us to pull on it.

  “You know what troubles me more than anything else?” says Harry.

  “What’s that?”

  “Scarborough. For all the fiery rhetoric—call it manipulation,” he says, “still, what he said about the language and slavery, the Constitution, it was accurate, all of it. I mean, he fudged around the edges a little.”

  “He did a bit more than fudge at the edges,” I say. “From my reading, slavery was the third rail of politics during the Constitutional Convention. Nobody wanted to touch it, neither pro-slave nor anti-slave. They all knew that any attempt to recognize it or abolish it would result in the new nation being stillborn. Move in either direction and half of the states would refuse to play, take their ball and go home.”

  “That may account for the covert language,” says Harry. “But there’s no denying that they recognized slavery. Like it or not, Scarborough had it right. It may have been the only deal possible, but that doesn’t dry-clean it or make it any less grimy. And the fact that the words are still there, visible to the entire world, is indisputable.”

  “Your point is?”

  “Since none of this is new—that language has been out there for what, going on two and a half centuries?—why now? What caused Scarborough to pounce on it at this moment and in this way, unless he was spurred on by someone or some thing.”

  “You’re thinking what I’m thinking—whatever it is, is in that letter.”

  He nods. “If Scarborough knew what was in it, and we have to assume that he did. If he’s not going to stretch the language of the Constitution to fit his convenient yen for a second American Revolution, why would he exaggerate the contents of this letter?”

  “So if that’s the case, whatever is in that letter must be pretty bad,” I say.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” says Harry. “And if this is true, the letter could be sitting in the middle of our case. The reason Scarborough wrote the book, the reason he was so far out on the limb of rhetoric, and just possibly the reason he was killed.”

  For several minutes we massage the question of what to do. But no matter how we come at the issue of the missing letter, we seem to arrive at the same conclusion.

  With Scarborough dead, the only one who may be able to tell us what is in the letter, and where it is, is Mr. Bonguard. Since he’s not returning phone calls and since, for the moment at least, we can’t make him come to us, all subpoenas being kept dry like gunpowder for the trial, we are left with only one alternative, and it is not one that we can put off.

  “Why do you have to represent him? Why can’t somebody else do it?”

  “Because his father asked me to, and his father is an old friend. You don’t always get to pick and choose your clients.”

  “There must be somebody else who can represent him? Why not the public defender? He can’t have much money. Not from what I’ve read and heard.”

  “Sarah, I told you, I’ve already taken the case.”

  “But it’s embarrassing, Dad. People at school are saying after what he did, he doesn’t deserve a trial.”

  “Then those people are living in the wrong country.”

  My daughter is home from college, doing a summer internship on break. She is indignant that I’m involved in representing Carl Arnsberg and wants me to withdraw.

  “Somebody who does something like that doesn’t deserve a trial.”

  “Sarah! How long have you watched me try cases? What has it been, fifteen, sixteen years?”

  “Dad, don’t lecture me.”

  “Why? Only your professors at school can do that? Lecturing you is one of the privileges of fatherhood,” I tell her.

  “Don’t start,” she says. When we have these bouts, which is not often, Sarah sounds so much like her mother that at times I can hear Nikki’s voice. Though Nikki has been dead now for nearly fifteen years, I can often see her eyes staring out at me from my daughter’s face when Sarah is angry. Sarah’s mother died of cancer when our daughter was small, and so my memories of the two of them together seem limited.

  “You’re assuming that he did it.” I’m standing in my bedroom over my open suitcase, which is laid out on my bed, half filled with the items I need for my trip to the East Coast. This is a large part of the reason that Sarah is upset. She was hoping that I might take some time off while she was home on break. She is standing in the open doorway to my room, one hand on her hip, looking angry and hurt.

  “Sarah, listen. The whole purpose of the trial is to determine whether he did it. And I don’t think he did. What if someone accused you of doing something like this? Wouldn’t you want me to defend you?”

  “Dad, that’s not fair. Everybody knows he did,” she says.

  “I’m not concerned with what everybody knows. I’m concerned with what a jury says, and then only after they’ve seen, heard, and studied all the evidence.”

  “For God’s sake, Dad, he’s a neo-Nazi. Even my political science prof says so.”

  “Then your political science professor can convict him of that, and on that charge I promise I won’t represent him.”

  “Dad!”

  “But on the charge of murdering Terry Scarborough, I am his lawyer, and on that charge he is entitled to a fair trial, just as you would be.”

  I return to packing, laying out shirts and underwear on the bed before loading them into my luggage.

  “My prof says that Professor Scarborough was the victim of a hate crime. He says that it was a political crime and should be punished that way.”

  I’m going to have to make a note to keep my daughter away from the prosecutors. She may give them ideas.

  She stands there for a moment collecting her thoughts, trying to come up with a different twist on her argument. I can smell mental rubber burning.

  “Fine! How long will you be away? Can you tell me that?” The edge goes out of Sarah’s voice. She realizes that she has lost this bout, though, knowing my daughter, I realize she is not giving up.

  “Three days, four at most. I have business in New York. I won’t be sure until I get there. I’ll call you every day and let you know when I’ll be home. And I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

  “It’s just that I thought we could spend some time together,” says Sarah. “I was hoping that maybe we could go down to Mexico for a while, maybe Puerto Vallarta, one of the beach resorts.”

  “I will make it up to you. I promise. You’ll
be home again in a few months, and we can go somewhere. You can pick the spot.”

  “You’ll be in trial,” she says. “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.” She turns and walks away down the hall.

  I stop my packing, one of my folded shirts still hanging in the air. “Tell you what!” I holler after her down the empty hall.

  “What?” She is already halfway down the stairs.

  “How would you like to do some shopping in New York?”

  There is a nanosecond of silence, and she appears like magic back in the doorway. “You mean it?”

  “Call the office, tell them to get another ticket on the flight, and book one more room at the hotel—adjoining, if they can manage it. Then get in gear and pack. We don’t have much time.”

  “Sure! Won’t take me a minute.”

  THREE

  Seven hours in the air allow me to make up for lost time with my daughter. We talk about life on Coronado Island, how the city has changed in the time we’ve lived there. We talk about Harry. Sarah spends a good bit of the flight laughing as only young girls can. Her memories of Harry are of an aging and somewhat hapless uncle, even though she and my partner are not related by blood, marriage, or anything else. They have always been close.

  We dredge up old memories, some of them painful: the early years when she was a small child in Capital City, when Nikki was alive and we were a family. To my surprise, Sarah has more vivid recollections of this period than I might have credited. It is one of those imponderables, the snippets of life that engrave themselves on the mind of a small child.

  Somewhere high over the flatlands of the Midwest, above the constant drone of jet engines, our conversation turns from distant memories to what she is doing at school, and finally to my practice. Sarah has always had a knack for getting me to talk, so much so that I may have to put her on the law office’s payroll when I return home in order to maintain attorney-client confidence with Arnsberg. Sarah picks my brain on aspects of the case I should not discuss.

  Strangely, the question that seems to perplex my daughter the most is how, after its repeal following the Civil War, it is possible that the old language of slavery can still be visible in the Constitution today. It is this very fact that Scarborough pounced on and exploited in his book.

  Sarah is reading from a Newsweek article, a story on the author’s murder and the impending trial.

  “It says here that according to Scarborough this language in the Constitution represents ‘an ongoing and perpetual stigmatizing of the African soul.’ That’s a quote from his book,” she says. Then she reads on. “‘While slavery was repealed in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment, the offending words that legalized the so-called peculiar institution at the origin of the nation remain in black and white as a visible legacy of America’s principal document of state to this very day.’

  “I don’t understand. How can that be?” she says. “If they were repealed, why are they still there?”

  I try to explain it to her. “What Scarborough discovered was a seam in the way in which the Constitution is published. Its system of publication is unique to that document.”

  Fortunately for Scarborough and unfortunately for the country, removing the language of slavery from the Constitution is not something that can easily be done.

  I explain to her that “this is likely to require a separate constitutional amendment altering the style of the amending process. Scarborough knew this. So he knew he wasn’t wasting his time publishing Perpetual Slaves. The book would have a long shelf life, because Congress couldn’t wave its magic wand and pass a bill to fix the problem and the president couldn’t do it by executive order.

  “There is no simple procedural mechanism for this,” I tell Sarah. “The process and style for amending language in the Constitution have remained the same for more than two hundred years. It’s not like a statute or bill passed by Congress. There, the language that is repealed or amended is stricken from the codebooks and no longer appears in print after a short time following its amendment. On the other hand, words repealed from the Constitution will always remain in print as part of the document, even though they may no longer be enforced and are dead-letter law.”

  Sarah thinks about this for a moment, then starts to read again.

  “According to the story, it says here, ‘Now, with a spotlight cast on them for all to see, the offending words of slavery fester like some open wound, threatening to give rise to race riots unseen in the nation since the 1960s.’”

  She looks at me. “Do you really think that could happen?”

  “I hope not, but there’s already been violence. Mr. Scarborough and his book stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

  “But wasn’t that the purpose of his book? Social justice?” she says. “According to political theory, what I’m reading now, violence is sometimes the price that has to be paid. Jefferson said—”

  “I know. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’”

  “You read that?” she says.

  “Many years ago.”

  As it turns out, her interest is sufficiently piqued that when I set forth the following morning headed for Richard Bonguard’s office, Sarah is with me. She says she will not utter a word. She will sit in the corner like a mouse.

  Sarah and I are in the back of a taxi stopped dead in traffic, the remnants of rush hour and the parking lot that is midtown Manhattan.

  I warn her that Bonguard may not be friendly. He is, potentially at least, a hostile witness.

  “Gee, you think, Dad?” Sarah looks at me, one eyebrow arched. “Your client did kill his cash cow.”

  “Is accused of killing,” I correct her.

  She ignores me. “Besides, I’ve never seen a literary agent before, so this is a first. Who knows, I may want to write a book someday. What was he like on the phone?”

  “Businesslike and guarded,” I tell her. Bonguard agreed to talk with me as much out of curiosity as anything else. From our brief conversation on the phone, it was clear. He is seeking a mutual exchange of information. “I suspect he wants to know whatever it is that I know.”

  “Like what?” asks Sarah.

  “Mostly he wanted to know about Arnsberg—what he’s like, his background. And of course the big enchilada—why he might want to kill Scarborough.”

  “Maybe he’s planning on writing a book,” says Sarah.

  “Nothing would surprise me. Let’s hope that’s all it is.”

  “You worry too much,” she says.

  “I get paid to worry.”

  What has me worried in this case is that Bonguard, a close acquaintance of the victim, would normally be high on the list of possible prosecution witnesses. The cops would be all over him, urging him not to talk to the defense and, if he does, to pump us for as much information as possible. Talking with him could be tantamount to a conference call with the cops.

  “He’s probably just curious,” says Sarah.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “So what are you going to tell him?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “What about this letter?” As it has with Harry’s and mine, the mystery letter mentioned by Bonguard on Leno has captured Sarah’s interest.

  “All I know is what he said on television.”

  “But the police must have checked it out?” she says. “They must know something.”

  “If they do, they aren’t sharing it with us. Besides, there’s a certain dynamic to a case like this, once the cops start to focus on a suspect. And they arrested ours—”

  “Yours,” she says.

  “Mine.” I smile at her. “They arrested Arnsberg very early on. In that kind of a situation, where they focus early on one suspect, unless there’s an alibi—the suspect was somewhere else at the time of the killing and can prove it—or some other hard evidence that points away from their suspect, the cops can be very myopic. Shortsighted,” I say.


  “Dad, I know what ‘myopic’ means.”

  “Sorry. I keep forgetting you’re not a kid anymore.”

  The taxi takes a right, and we head down one of the less-congested cross streets toward the East River. Here we are surrounded on both sides by well-manicured multistoried brownstones. The cab pulls up in front of one of these and stops. We step out, and I pay the driver.

  I check the address against the note I’d taken during my telephone conversation with Bonguard. “This is it.” I had been expecting a commercial high-rise.

  There are baskets of colorful hanging flowers adorning the wrought-iron trellis that arches over the doorway at the top of the stairs. The small-paned windows are framed by neatly painted green wooden shutters, the paint glossy and fresh. Sarah and I head up the steps. On the door a small brass plate announces:

  BONGUARD & ASSOCIATES

  Talent and Literary Agents

  I ring the bell, and an instant later a buzzer unlocks the door, so I push it open, and we enter. Inside is a large vestibule, polished hardwood floors, and solid millwork, a heavy beamed ceiling. Dark mahogany banisters flank a curved stairway leading to the upper floors in what was once an impressive private home.

  Set back and off to one side is a small Louis XV desk, dark enamel and gold leaf. Seated behind it, a pretty young woman is talking on the phone.

  “I’ll give him the message. I’m sure he will get back to you as soon as he can.” She hangs up, makes a quick note, and then looks up at us. “Can I help you?”

  “We have an appointment with Mr. Bonguard. Paul Madriani.” I hand her a business card. She takes the card and glances down at a calendar in front of her.

  “Just a moment.” She picks up the telephone receiver and pushes two buttons on the desk set, waits a couple of seconds, and then, to a voice on the other end, says, “A Mr. Madriani here to see you. Your ten o’clock. Yes.” She hangs up. “Someone will be right with you. Please have a seat.” She points toward a Louis XV sofa that is fitted into the curving wall supporting the staircase. The couch is one of those antiques with fluffed-up pillows the air from which will dissipate the moment you look at it.