Prime Witness by Steve Martini Page B

murder. Because if you don’t dump him, I intend to kill the sonofabitch. He’s running through secretaries like some snotty kid uses up Kleenex.”
    It is true. In the last year three seasoned stenos have left the office, something already brought to my attention by the other deputies.
    I try to give Goya a few positive strokes. “You hold the office together,” I tell her. “Mario, Mr. Feretti, spoke very highly of you.”
    She smiles a little at this. “Mario was a prince. I will miss him,” she says. “We will all miss him.” It seems that her bitterness toward her situation did not extend to Feretti. There is something in her expression that tells me there was genuine affection here, that Mario’s death has suddenly left some vast professional void in her life.
    “He had a great deal of confidence in your abilities.” I am shameless. I play upon this.
    She smiles. “He had so much confidence that he asked you to take his place when he got sick.”
    “He knew that you couldn’t handle his job and the felony calendar, too,” I tell her. “Mario trusted you to get the job done.”
    “Mario had no choice,” she says. “He had a full plate and the county gave him nothing but kids out of law school for help—because they work cheap,” she says.
    I remind her that Overroy is no kid out of law school. That he has been here for almost thirty years. But that even with his seniority it is she who is assigned the heavier cases.
    “Spare me,” she says. “Come back in thirty more and he’ll still be here. You know as well as I do that around here ‘relief’ is not spelled R-O-L-A-N-D.”
    On the issue of Roland Overroy I have hit a raw nerve.
    “I’ve been here seven years. I’ve been passed over for promotion twice. They say it’s because they have no money.”
    More likely it’s because Roland won’t retire. But I cannot say this to Goya. If word got out that this subject passed the lips of management, or if any move is made to seek his retirement, he could sue the county in the flash of an eye for age discrimination. For Roland this would be departing county service on a high note, something to augment his six-figure retirement check each year. It is little wonder that this state is going broke.
    I encourage Goya to hang in there a little longer, to stick it out, that I will do what I can.
    “Sure,” she says. “But when a big case comes along, something making headlines across the state. Well . . .” Her voice trails off. Her facial expression tells me how this sentence will end.
    The notoriety surrounding this case is eating on her. A few quiet conversations with neighbors in the building, and reporters had their story, and Iganovich’s name. His picture was spread all over the front page of this morning’s Times . She knows that success in a high-profile prosecution like this is the stuff of which legendary legal careers are made.
    “What hurts,” she says, “is that they didn’t even talk to me.”
    I look at her, questioning this comment.
    “When they filled behind Mario, the county supervisors didn’t even come and talk to me. They just went to somebody on the outside.” She thumps the desk as if to make the point, steel in her eyes. “I suppose that should tell me something.” She’s shaking her head now. “You know, I tried to leave last year. Gave Mario my resignation. He talked me out of it. I made a mistake,” she says. “A big mistake.”
    I had not heard this. Like a lot of things Mario never told me.
    Then quickly she pulls herself together. She turns an agreeable smile my way, fighting back the bile. “Then again,” she says, “maybe it’s just been a bad week.”
    “It’s only Monday,” I say.
    “See what I mean?”
    We both laugh a little, put a face on it. I see a lot of frustration here, masked by a quick wit. I sense no personal enmity, and I wonder if I would be so generous if the shoe were on the other foot.
    “I will see what I can do,” I