Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  There’s a moment of silence, mental telepathy as my thought waves settle on him like ether.

  “Wait a second,” he says. “No way. Not a chance. I’ve got my own practice. Uh-uh.” He says this with meaning.

  I give him a look, like what are friends for?

  “You’re incredible,” he says. “I’m shoveling shit against the tide trying to hold your practice together while you’re over here, and now you want me to join you in this fools’ paradise?” Harry is now overseeing two younger associates, lawyers he has brought in to handle some of my lighter cases.

  “It pays three thousand a month—for half-time work,” I tell him.

  I can see a look in his eye, the glint of money. But he hesitates for only an instant.

  “Not a chance,” he says.

  Though I tempt him like a demon, it is what I expected from Harry. He has an abiding distrust of all things governmental. To Harry, signing on with the state would be to deal with the devil. He leaves me no choice. I will go and grovel with Goya.

  I have no manhood left, but I have at least solved my problem. Two days have passed, and my knees still feel the psychic ache of having crawled on the hard linoleum of her office floor. Harry is back in my office, bringing papers for me to sign, some cases from my office that are being closed out.

  There’s a knock on my door.

  “Come in.”

  It’s Overroy, his head and shoulders through the jamb of my door.

  “Paul, you gotta come out here for a second,” he says. “There’s some screwup over at county general services.”

  It seems two guys are here with dollies to move furniture out of his office. He is all sunshine and smiles waiting for me to correct this little blunder. His office is palatial, bigger than my own. Feretti had not taken it from him when he struck Overroy’s title from the rolls as chief deputy.

  “No mistake, Roland, they’re here to move you.”

  He has the look of a letter delivered to the wrong address.

  “What?” he says. It’s a face unclouded by human thought, like a moose in the path of a high-speed train.

  I’ll say it slower this time. Read my lips, I think. “They’re here to move you,” I say.

  “Whataya talkin’ about?”

  “You’re going down the hall,” I tell him, “into Lenore’s office.” I smile at him, a grin that says welcome to brick walls and bundles of files, asshole! In a more equitable world, Roland would be in a sealed coat closet with a naked light bulb.

  “Aw-w-w-w.” He looks at me sideways like he smells a rat, like this is finally seeping in.

  “Wait just a second,” he says. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?”

  Harry looks at me. “Maybe I should leave,” he says.

  “No.” I motion for him to stay.

  “It’s just an office move,” I tell Overroy. “It happens all the time in corporate America.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” he says. “Tell me, what’s goin’ on?”

  “Like I said, just an office move.”

  “Sure,” he says. “You think I’m stupid?”

  I give him a look that puts this question up for grabs.

  Harry’s drifted off to the side, out of the line of fire.

  “What did I do to deserve this?” Softer now, Roland changes moods on me, the injured whelp, big brown eyes in my door.

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “This is not punitive.” I wrap this little package of insincerity with a bow and hand it to him.

  “I’ve been in that office for sixteen years.”

  “Then you should look forward to the change,” I say.

  “Why didn’t you come to me,” he says, “and talk to me about this before you called the movers? This is highly unprofessional.” Now he’s playing the injured bureaucrat.

  “It was a management decision, Roland. Not something that required consultation.”

  “Paul.” He is big and soulful. “This just ain’t right.” He’s wobbling around in the doorway, stepping all over his tongue. He’s working his way toward my office, trying to worm his way into my heart, the door half-open behind him, his hands on the edge of my desk, trying to reason with me.

  “You can’t do this. I’ve got seniority,” he says. He looks around behind him like somebody might be in earshot.

  “Listen,” he says, “you need another office, take Goya’s. No. No. Better yet, take Boudin’s, or Samuels’s. Yeah, that’s good. Take Samuels’s. She’s low on the seniority ladder.” His voice never gets above a hushed whisper, Roland still looking around, over his shoulder as if the two of us are locked in the refined art of the deal. This is the Roland we all love, bargaining with someone else’s possessions.

  “No. I don’t think so.” I mimic him, my reply in soothing low tones, as if it were the secret of the century. “I need yours,” I whisper.

  “Sonofabitch.” He’s bellowing at the top of his voice. His body jerks up off my desk. He’s stomping around the office. “Fuckin’ A. This is bullshit.” Roland is back in form.

  “Not at all.” I give him genuine assurances. “We need the space.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, I forgot. I guess you haven’t heard. Lenore’s not leaving.”

  He looks at me, dumbstruck.

  “Yes,” I say. “I thought you’d be happy. It’s true. She’s staying on with us. As soon as I can clear it with the board of supervisors, she’s gonna be our new chief deputy. She’ll be working with me on the Putah Creek cases. She’ll be taking your office.”

  This is a lot of body blows for Roland to take all at once. It’s a few seconds before he focuses. But then I see it, fire in Overroy’s eyes, unseen flames, like the super-heated vapor of an alcohol-fueled roadster. He looks at me. “This is bullshit,” he says.

  “One more thing,” I say. “The files in Lenore’s office. They belong to you now. You’ve got a nine o’clock court call Monday morning. Good luck. And don’t let anything slip through the cracks.”

  Harry stares at me, a mischievous look, the expression of opportunity, like maybe he could pick up one of the defendants on the Monday morning calendar and kick the other cheek of Roland Overroy.

  Kay Sellig deposits a small suitcase behind the door in my office. She has just taken a cab here from the airport. She looks tired and drawn.

  “How did it go in Ashland?” I say.

  “They were helpful. Now ask me what it all means.” She shrugs her shoulders. “A few more pieces to the puzzle,” she says, “but who knows where they fit?

  “First the blood,” she says. Sellig has spent the last two days in southern Oregon, talking to experts at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. They are working on the blood, bones and feathers found in the blind, high in the trees over the Scofield murder site.

  “Most of it was animal, specifically avian. Bird blood,” she tells me.

  “It’s not a domestic bird,” she says. “They’ve ruled that out.” This means it’s not a chicken, or other beast of flight in the commercial food chain.

  “That takes the edge off our theory that they might have been part of a ritual slaying,” she says. She’s talking about the murders of Abbott and Karen Scofield. “It’s possible,” she tells me, “but those who go in for such things usually use domestic animals, something easily obtained from a farm, or from somebody’s back yard. Wild animals are too hard to come by.

  “There’s also a wrinkle. Some of the blood, small traces, were human. Common type,” she says. “A. We think this belonged to Karen Scofield. Abbott was type O.”

  “Could it belong to the guy in the trees?”

  She shakes her head. “He was a secretor. Pretty rare, type B,” she says.

  “Don’t tell me,” I say. �
�He peed for you in a corner of the blind.” I am wondering how they got their secretions to type our suspect.

  “Close. He chewed tobacco. Spat the stuff in little black balls all over the platform. We were able to type the saliva,” she tells me.

  “Remind me not to commit a crime in your jurisdiction.”

  She smiles, a little satisfaction at this break. Sellig is unloading her briefcase on my desk, looking for her notes.

  “The bones are mostly small, immature birds,” she says. “Most of them still in the nest.” Besides the bones they have confirmed this from the preponderance of molting feathers sent to the lab. Mature feathers from the top and underwing, the kind that could have supported flight, were missing from the samples they observed.

  “So we have a baby bird killer,” I say.

  “Not just any bird,” she says. “Birds of prey.”

  I look at her.

  “They examined the feathers. There’s no question. These were peregrine falcons. Chicks maybe a month, possibly two, from flight. Endangered species,” she says. “Protected by the federal government.” She tells me that the lab now has their own stake in this thing, that they are interested in whoever might have been involved in the killing of these birds.

  “He could do some federal time if they catch him,” she says.

  “They’ll have to wait in line.”

  “You think he killed the Scofields?” she asks.

  “Do you?”

  “It’s possible. I suppose. They could have stumbled in on him. A federal crime. People have been known to kill for less.”

  “But you’ve got to admit he was fast on his feet, pretty well prepared,” I say.

  “The stakes and the rope?” she says.

  I nod. If whoever was in the trees killed the Scofields, he didn’t lose a beat staking them off on the ground in copycat fashion. It is more likely, I think, that whoever was in the trees was not the perpetrator, but a witness. For the moment there are too many unanswered questions.

  I’ve been stalled for almost a week now on the preparation of the documents needed to return Iganovich to the state. Under the law of extradition, I must decide whether to charge him with the Scofield killings. If I fail to do this and he is returned, I may not try him for these murders later. The rule is you must know what you’ve got before you extradite.

  “Maybe Iganovich did it after all,” I say.

  She shakes her head. On this she is adamant. “The discrepancies keep piling up,” she says. “We think we now know how he was able to subdue couples.”

  “How?”

  “A stun gun,” she says. “As an alien national, the law didn’t allow him to carry a firearm on the job. So his employer tells us he used a stun gun.”

  She sees my eyes go big and round. I’ve already told her about the stun gun taken from Iganovich by the Canadian authorities.

  “Exactly,” she says.

  I ask her if she’s received it yet.

  “It’s being shipped to us as soon as they finish processing it, up there.”

  The law in this state establishes only minimal requirements for the possession of an electronic stun gun. There is no licensing or permit required.

  “How did he get it on the plane?”

  “It only has a few metal parts. Detector probably didn’t pick it up,” she says.

  “Good to know we’re in safe hands in the air,” I say.

  “Anyway, the ME believes the victims were taken down with a stun gun.”

  “How effective is it?”

  She makes a face. “Localized cramping of muscle groups, some intense pain. They’d be on the ground, pretty much out of it, anywhere from three to fifteen minutes, depending on the duration of the jolt.”

  “Enough time to drag them into the van and tie them up.”

  Sellig agrees with this.

  “Would it make any noise?”

  “About what you’d hear from a garden variety bug zapper.”

  I mull this in my mind for a few seconds, then pop the question she knows I will ask. “Did the ME find similar marks on the Scofields?”

  She shakes her head. “Not a sign,” she says, another reason for her growing conviction that Andre Iganovich did not murder Abbott and Karen Scofield.

  “There’s no sense waiting any longer,” I tell her, “to bring the Russian back.” I will complete the extradition package on Iganovich based solely on the murder of the four college students.

  “I’ll have to tell Emil,” I say, “that we are no longer dealing with conjecture, that he’d better start looking for a second killer.” All hell will break loose.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Five weeks have passed since my sojourn to Canada. I’m finishing up a case at the Capital County courthouse, finalizing a plea bargain with the DA, one item Harry will not have to worry about. We finish and I head for the men’s room.

  Inside I wash my hands over the sink, looking at my image in the glass which is speckled by silver worn thin on the backside.

  I hear voices outside in the hallway. There is something familiar to one side of this conversation, an aversion I cannot place. They are coming this way. I pick up the pace, rush to dry my hands.

  The scarred wooden door behind me suddenly opens, and in the mirror I see a hulking kid in his twenties with pimples and spiked purple hair, more studs in his leather jacket than the average snow tire. As he moves through it, I notice that he is big enough to fill the entire frame of the door.

  Following closely behind him is Adrian Chambers. He sees me and stops dead in his tracks. His mustached-lip ripples into a thin smile. In the spotted glass of the mirror this takes on a transparent, ethereal quality, a vision from the lower regions.

  Chambers breaks off in mid-sentence the conversation with his client, and from the doorway studies the back of my head. I feel bristles of hair standing out straight at the nape of my neck.

  “Well, well, counselor, slumming are we? I’d have thought that with your pull, you’d be using the private johns backstage.” He means the ones with the gold fixtures and no graffiti on the walls, the lavatories used by the judges in the private corridors behind their chambers.

  He finally moves a little, just a quarter-turn toward pimples, who by now has made his way down the stalls.

  “Excuse my social gaffe,” says Chambers. “My client, Mr. James Sloan, meet Paul Madriani,” he says.

  I don’t bother to look at the kid. “Charmed,” I say. The spiked head is probably a pedophile caught hanging out in some grade school john. At this point in his career, Chambers is no doubt busy working his way back up the criminal food chain.

  “Mr. Madriani here’s the man,” he says. “The district attorney of Davenport County.”

  The kid is now leaning into one of the urinals down the line. I get a look from him, all dead in the eyes, then a little quiver, like a shiver. I can’t tell whether this has something to do with his bodily functions, or merely evidences an attitude toward the law. Chambers, I’m sure, would give this punk my home address and phone number if he had it.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” he says. “What’s this I hear that you’re not charging Iganovich with the last two murders, the professor and his wife?”

  It was in all the papers this morning. Emil and I agreed that for the moment we would put a face on it, no public confirmation about the new stories of another killer, just vague references to insufficient evidence, and an ongoing investigation.

  “Well, Adrian, what can I say? If you read it in the paper, it must be true.” My back is still to him as I wad the paper towel and toss it in the can.

  “What’s the matter?” he says. “Are we having a little trouble tying up all the loose ends? Or could it be that you’re holding back, in case
you botch the first ones, maybe you could fix it by charging him later with the last two?”

  I turn and look him straight in the eye. “Gee, Adrian, I wouldn’t want to invade your turf. Fixing things has always been your specialty.”

  Suddenly he’s no longer smiling. His face is no more than a foot from my own. We’re staring at each other, unwilling to blink, to look the other way.

  Finally he speaks. “Mr. Sloan. I should tell you. Our friend here is a real straight arrow. Mr. Ethics,” he says. He’s talking to his client but without looking. The kid is having trouble getting Willie back in the barn. A dozen zippers on his jacket, and he can’t work the one on his pants.

  “A real do-gooder,” says Chambers. Finally he looks down the row of urinals. He’s lost his audience. The kid’s gonna need a surgeon if he pulls up on the thing any harder.

  Chambers snaps his head back toward me trying to get away from the porcelain comedy at the other end of the room.

  He is a man who not only nurses a grudge. He fosters it, fertilizes it, cultivates it, and watches it grow, until it dominates his life as thoroughly as an untreated cancer.

  “You know,” he says. “You ought to be a little concerned. You’re bumping up against the statute for extradition. Getting a little close.”

  He’s talking about the sixty-day statute of limitations for an extradition hearing under the U.S.-Canadian treaty. By law if the hearing is not concluded within sixty days of Iganovich’s arrest in Canada, the suspect must be released by the court.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about us blowing by the statute,” I tell him.

  “Oh, I’m not worried.” He looks at me, an expression like he has something else with which to needle me.

  “Tell me,” he says. “Are you ready to dump the death penalty?”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  He pushes past me, on down the row of stalls. “Then it’s all academic,” he says. “You’ll never get him back down here to stand trial.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” I tell him.

  “Funny thing about the Canucks,” he says. “They’re real sensitive people. Proud,” he says, “and stubborn.”