Double Tap

by Steve Martini

  “I remember.”

  “Under the circumstances it pains me to say I got lucky. Did you ever meet Troy Olders, the congressman who passed away?”

  “I don’t think I ever did.”

  “He was a very nice guy. Died of Hodgkin’s. It was a long illness.” The way Nathan says it, I get the sense maybe it was a little too long. “He was a friend. He told me when he was dying that if he could pick anybody to succeed him in Congress, it would be me. I cried. Can you believe it?”

  With Nathan I can believe it. For a man steeped in the cynical world of politics, who has come a long way from a hard-scrabble beginning, his emotions run to the sentimental side. Before law school he had been a cop for a few years on the Capital City force. This was after a stint in the Army. Nathan is a man with a million former lives. I am told he dug deep into his pockets on more than one occasion to help people in trouble. To Nathan, old-world liberalism is real, a kind of religion: Christian charity imposed through the ballot box. The product of an Asian father and an Irish mother, he is a man with dreams that, for the most part, he has realized—though if I had to guess, based on the card in my hand, he is not quite finished whipping that horse.

  “I really didn’t mean to interrupt, but it may be the last chance I have to get down here for a long time—my last trip south before I resign from the State Senate—so I wanted to stop by. I have something for you.” He has a big grin on his face.

  I glance at Janice. This is why she interrupted to bring me his card.

  Nathan turns around and reaches under the newspaper on the couch behind him. He comes out with a package. It is gift-wrapped in striped foil with a wide red ribbon tied in a bow. He hands it to me.

  It is flat and heavy. I’m guessing maybe a coffee-table book.

  “Open it,” he says.

  I peel the ribbon off of one corner and let it drop, then tear the foil paper. Janice and the receptionist are looking on, smiling, trying to get a glimpse.

  “What is it?” With Nathan I can never be sure. Whatever it is, it’s boxed in cardboard under the paper. I split the cellophane tape holding the fold closed on one end of the box.

  “Be careful.” Nathan puts a hand down to make sure it doesn’t slide out onto the floor. Heavy wood and glass, the picture frame is upside down as I flip the empty box onto the couch. When I turn it over, I am startled to see myself under glass, a younger face and twenty pounds lighter. In the photo I am standing in the kitchen of our old home in Capital City. Standing next to me behind the center island is Nikki, my wife who has been dead nearly ten years now. She is holding our daughter, Sarah, in her arms.

  “Sarah was only eighteen months old when I took that,” he says. “I remember because you told me. You were a proud papa,” he says.

  I have a lump in my throat. My eyes are watering. It is perhaps the best picture of the three of us I have ever seen, and one of the few I have left from that period of my life.

  “Remember the old Olympus thirty-five millimeter? I used to carry it in my pocket. That’s what I shot it with. Look at the detail. That was a good camera. Wish I still had it,” he says.

  “I remember,” I tell him. “You used to take pictures of everything in sight.”

  “That’s my Asian half,” he says.

  I do the only thing I can think to do at this moment: I reach out and hug him, holding the picture tight in one hand as we stand in the center of my reception area, two guys, arms around each other, choking back sniffles. Nathan pats my back with one hand and holds the coffee cup away with the other so that it doesn’t slosh on my shirt.

  “Tell me it doesn’t bring back memories,” he says.

  “It brings back memories. Good ones,” I tell him.

  “The best,” he says. “I found the print in an old album. I had a negative made. I thought you’d want it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I tell him. “And to think you came all the way down here to deliver it personally.” We let go of each other. I’m wiping my eyes.

  “I’d like to say that was it, but the fact is, I was tying up loose ends on committee business out at Isotenics.” He can tell by my look that I perk up with the mention of the company name. “Do you have time for lunch? For old times’ sake,” he says.

  I look at my watch: eleven-twenty. “It’s a little early, but what the hell.” I hand the framed photo to Janice for safekeeping. “Would you tell Harry we’ll pick it up again this afternoon? I should be back by one.”

  We slip out of the courtyard through a service entrance in Miguel’s Cantina, skirting the handful of reporters out on Orange Grove in front of the office. Nathan and I dodge a few cars and hoof it across the street to the Del Coronado. Within minutes we are cloistered in one of the corner booths in the restaurant on the hotel’s main floor, out of sight, nursing drinks.

  “You never told me what brings you down here.”

  “Oh, that,” he says. “That’s nothing. Senate Committee on, Redistricting.” He touches the side of his nose with his finger. “A lotta BS. I’ll be glad to be rid of it. Pain in the butt, all the members constantly crying on my shoulder about their districts and where they want the lines drawn for the next election so they can do in all the competition.” Nathan talks as if he’s never done this himself.

  Politics is its own form of insanity. In California, beds in this asylum are assigned in the state legislature and Congress every ten years, with district boundary lines redrawn based on the last federal census. Ever since term limits were imposed on the legislature by voters, political panic on the order of a hotel fire has raged through the state capitol, with members of both parties eating their own in an effort to survive. The hallowed ground is Congress, where term limits don’t apply.

  “You remember. I used to tell you about the games played. Somebody running their district boundaries thirty miles along a railroad track so they could circle a university or capture some ethnic ghetto while they registered all the hobos along the way.”

  “You must have done that one and forgot to tell me about it.”

  “Well, those were the good old days. Back when Machiavelli was writing the legislative ethics rules. When every vote cast in an election had an actual voter behind it.”

  To listen to Nathan, the state legislature is now the third ring of hell. He can’t wait to get out.

  “But that’s not the reason I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been following the trial in the papers,” he says. “Your Ruiz case. I don’t know the details, but I heard something you should know. I was out at Isotenics. They crunch numbers for us, do the district maps. And I heard some comments about this IFS thing. It came up in connection with the trial. IFS has been in the papers.” Nathan tells me this as if I’m from Mars. “I know some members,” he says, “people in Congress who are very upset about it. As they should be. I don’t know how you feel about personal privacy. You know that I’ve always felt very strongly about it. Computers. High tech. It’s eroding any sense of civil liberties. Pretty soon corporations and the government are going to know more about us than we know about ourselves.”

  Nathan is now cutting to the chase. I can smell him trying to get a jump start to some committee in the House of Representatives. He is probably telling them that he has an inside track with the lawyer trying the case and that if they can pump enough heat and fire up my skirt, they can use the illumination to expose the White House. It’s what you love about Nathan: he never quits.

  “Check out the nurse over there. I think I need more medicine,” he says. Nathan’s talking about the cocktail waitress.

  “When did this meeting occur?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Out at Isotenics?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Couple of days ago. We were meeting with these two execs out there. One of them was midlevel type. I’ve been dealing with this guy for a couple of years. You know the kind: makes the company go. Jack lives in the corporate synapse, between executive decisions and action, if you know what I
mean. Kinda fella who puts the spark in the gap that usually makes things happen.” He pauses. “Good idea man, and he usually knows what’s going on. The other guy I didn’t know. Never met him before. Jack’s boss.”

  I nod knowingly as I listen. Nathan has a way of making a short story long.

  “Anyway, there were several of us at the meeting: two members of the assembly, myself, and some congressional staff sent out to cover their interests. The two executives knew I’d just been elected to the House. They were overflowing with congratulations. Isotenics can use all the friends they can get in Washington right now, as I’m sure you’re aware. If there was a fire hose long enough, they’d be pumping water from the Pacific to try and reduce the heat on themselves.”

  I nod again and take a sip from my glass.

  “I suppose they were trying to impress me, so you can probably take it with a grain of salt, for what it’s worth,” he says. “But one of them, the boss, gets a phone call during the meeting. We were in a rush to finish up since the assemblymen had to catch a plane.

  “So this guy decides to take the call on the extension in the conference room where we’re gathered. All I can hear is half the conversation, but he’s talking about the case. Ruiz’s name comes up, so of course I’m all ears. Something about when the case is over they can ramp up again, but not until, he says. He’s talking under his breath and I guess whoever’s on the other end can’t hear him, because this guy keeps saying he can’t talk any louder, he’s in a meeting. Fortunately I had my back to him, sitting right in front of the side table where he was talking. If I’d leaned back any further I’d have been on the phone with him,” says Nathan.

  “Then he says—the guy on our end—he says something… .” Nathan’s reaching with the fingers of one hand as if he’s trying to pluck the precise words from the air over our table. “He says something: they’re understaffed, that DOD is all pissed off, something to that effect. That if she had left it alone, everything would have been fine. But now that she’s dead somebody’s going to have to go pick up the pieces because she wouldn’t leave it alone.” He looks at me to see if this is producing any revelations. “I don’t know if you’re thinking what I’m thinking, but if you are, I’m thinking the dead person they’re talking about has to be Madelyn Chapman, and the project DOD is involved in has to be IFS. Does it make any sense to you?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  “It sounded to me like maybe they are caught in a whirlpool of shit at the moment and they can’t get out of it until your case is over. That when that happens they’re back in business. Doing something. God knows what,” he says. “I may stick around and watch the trial. I have nothing going on up in Capital City. And it sounds like all the fireworks may be happening down here.”

  “Do you have names? The two executives at your meeting?”

  “Yeah. Jack Hansen is the guy I’ve been meeting with for years. The other guy, the guy on the phone, I’d never met him before. His name was Harold Klepp. Head of research and development.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This morning when I arrive, the hallway outside the courtroom is jammed, standing room only. I’m pushing my way through when I run face-to-face into Nathan.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He’s drinking a Diet Coke from a can and laughing at me. “You got more press here than the White House,” he says. “I figure I’m resigning from the state senate next week, so I may as well be where the action is. I got nothing to do up in Capital City.”

  This is Nathan, the ultimate groupie. By next week he’ll be trading secrets in Washington, the inside dirt on the trial, what it really means for IFS.

  “I thought I’d come and see how you do. Besides, I haven’t been in a courtroom in years. Thank God,” he says, and takes another swig from the can of Coke.

  Several reporters, notepads in hand, cruise in my direction through the crowd.

  “We’ll have to continue this later,” I tell him.

  Inside, the courtroom is already filling up. By the time we convene, every seat will be taken. There is a line downstairs in front of the main door to the courthouse. I would estimate more than two hundred people are waiting to get in, hoping someone will leave and offer up their seat. Two bailiffs, one upstairs and one down, communicate by walkie-talkie, allowing one person into the courthouse at a time as seats are surrendered. It is a test for concrete kidneys and iron bowels. Get up to go to the john and you lose your seat.

  The crowd is here to listen to Larry Templeton deliver his opening statement in the trial of People v. Ruiz.

  For nearly two weeks now the cable news stations have been playing this up, leading hourly with speculation and hype as to the way the prosecutor will build his case. So many lawyers have now offered their televised guesses as to precisely how Templeton will play it and what kind of magic will be necessary for the defense to counter the state’s evidence that it hardly seems necessary to try the case before the jury. Vicarious courtroom thrills have replaced the soap opera on daytime television. Without scripts or actors, production costs are cheap, since every lawyer in America for an hour of face time in the form of free advertising will offer their guesses and commentary for nothing, which is generally what they are worth.

  I have heard my last name mispronounced at least five times on three different stations in the last two days. As I head down the aisle toward the swinging gate in the railing, I hear it whispered in a few places floating on the ether in the courtroom, and notice fingers pointing and a few heads turning. The Middle Ages may have been dark, but if having your every word explored and your image and each gesture exploited on the nightly news is the ultimate reward for life in the age of celebrity, society might do well if we were to regress to more primitive forms of communication. One wonders if the media cynics aren’t right, whether the term free society has become nothing but an excuse for profiteers to transform life into a dissolute electronic flshbowl.

  Halfway toward the front of the courtroom I see a head of gray hair as she turns. I am surprised to see Jean Kaprosky seated on the aisle about six rows back. I tap her on the shoulder from behind. She looks up and sees me. “Oh, hi,” Jean says. She grabs my hand and smiles. “I was hoping I might have a chance to talk to you. At least say hello.”

  “Where is Jim?” I ask.

  “He’s not feeling well. He’s been in and out of the hospital the last several weeks,” she explains.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t want anybody to know. His health has been slipping lately.” The tone of her voice has a certain finality to it. “He has a hard time getting out and about. I take him to the doctor and that’s pretty much it. My sister is staying with us for a while, so she’s at home with him right now. He wanted me to come and see what was happening here and report back. I told him that I was sure that your case had nothing to do with what happened to us,” she says. “But in Jim’s mind, it’s all connected. You understand.” She gives me an expression as if to say the mind is slipping along with the body. “I don’t know what to say to him anymore, so here I am.”

  “Tell him … well, tell him for me that I hope he’s feeling better soon.”

  “I’ll tell him, but I know what he’d like more than that: he’d love to see you, talk to you one more time. Here. Let me give you our address.” Before I can shake loose, she takes a scrap of paper and a pen from her purse and starts to scribble as she talks.

  I have known for months that I could not use James Kaprosky as my computer software expert at trial. He was both conflicted in terms of his interests in the case and too ill. If we come to that—if Harry and I are able to get to the evidence surrounding Satz and Chapman, what was going on with the Primis software and whether it could have been a motive for murder—I have already retained another expert.

  “Jim told me that he enjoyed the meeting at your office so much,” she says. “He’s mentioned it several times. He said that
you and Mr. Hinds were the first two people in years to take him seriously, to listen to the details of what happened. I hope you can read this.” She is scribbling her address, her hands a little palsied. “Jim has lived with all of the misery regarding the litigation for so long it seems the only thing he can still relate to. He still gets phone calls from one of his lawyers every once in a while, but they all sort of drifted away. I think they felt so bad because of the result. And I suppose because we had such hope. The meeting in your office, while it dredged up a lot of bad stuff, was in its own way therapy for him. I suppose you could call it closure,” she adds.

  “I wish there was something more I could do. It’s an awful situation. The loss of your business, his health.”

  “No. No. Don’t feel bad. Come and see him.” She presses the note with their home address into my hand. “I’ll tell him that we talked, that I saw you.”

  I wish her well. “Say hello to him for me.” Then I head toward the counsel table.

  Harry is already there waiting for me. At the table next to him is a young intern we have hired to operate the laptop, the computer that will be connected to the overhead visualizer aimed at a large projection screen for presentation of evidence to the jury as the case progresses. Jamie Carson is a UC law graduate waiting for his bar results, and is a possible addition to the firm. Harry has been working with him for months to gin up the computer, scanning in copies of police reports, crime-scene photographs, all of the documentary details that are likely to come in by way of evidence.

  As I swing through the gate, past the railing, I notice that Harry’s earlier fears have been realized. Two custom-made boxes, the one at this end with a step leading up to it, are spanned by wooden planks, each twelve feet long and two inches thick, arranged on top of them. In the center there is a third box to keep the spans from bouncing like a diving board. This entire affair has been set out in front of the jury box in preparation for Templeton’s opening statement.