Undue Influence by Steve Martini

arrested her. The look on Laurel’s face at this moment brings me down. “I was talking about the extradition,” she tells me.
    “Giving up my right to a hearing. Was it a mistake?” Like ships we have passed in the night. “Ahh.” I shake my head. “No major mistake,” I say.
    At most a fight over extradition would have been a skirmish for delay across the state line, a battle that we would have ultimately lost and that the state might have used against us in a subsequent trial. I tell her this. We don’t have much time. The guards are shuffling in the corridor outside, anxious to get her upstairs to a cell. I had to pull every string to keep from having this conference delayed until tomorrow.
    I give her quick instructions, the basics intended to get her through the night. Seeing Laurel’s exhausted condition, and knowing Lama, he will probably house her with some jailhouse snitch in hopes that my sister-in-law will unburden her soul to a friendly face in seemingly similar circumstances. “Can you get me out of here? Bail?” she says.
    Without seeing the evidence, I am assuming the worst, that they will charge Laurel with a capital offense, first-degree murder with special circumstances. A lawyer’s game of worst scenario. In a death case bail can be denied. I fudge. But there is no need to tell her this until I see the charges. “It could be tough,” I say. “Your trip out-of-state.
    They will argue you’re a flight risk.” She may sleep better without thoughts of execution. “We’ll see what we can do.”
    “You want to know why I went to Reno?” she says.
    “A good explanation would help. But there’s time for that later.”
    “I can’t tell you,” she says. “You have to trust me. Later,” she says, “but not now.” Wonderful. She would leave the DA free to fill in the blanks.
    “Yeah. Later,” I tell her. “We can talk about it then.”
    I suspect that Laurel is operating on less sleep than I, not a condition that is likely to lead to a lucid rendition of facts. A client’s story is always extracted from a clear mind. I would like to avoid little slips, errors or omissions in detail, inconsistencies that might make me, or a jury, wonder later whether Laurel is telling the truth. It is always easier to put a defendant on the stand if her lawyer has confidence. And if Laurel is going to lie, I don’t want to know. I would prefer that it be a carefully thought out and credible whopper.
    “What about your hands? Do you need something?” I say. “Oh.” Laurel looks at these sorry things, inflamed and irritated. “It’s just laundry solvent,” she says. “She said they’d get the dispensary to give me something for it.” She’s talking about the madam from the Gulags who is now standing outside our door jangling her keys. I arch an eyebrow in question.
    “It’s from the rug I was washing,” she says. “At the laundromat in Reno.” There’s not a word as to what she was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home in the middle of the night, washing a rug. But from the look on her face, to Laurel, at this moment it seems a complete explanation. If her story doesn’t get better than this, she may need a lot more time than I thought for creative contemplation. “They don’t have the gun, smoking in her hand or otherwise,” he says. “Except for that, there isn’t much they’re missing.” This is Harry’s way of telling me we are in trouble on the evidence. Laurel is still behind bars.
    Arraigned ten days ago on a sealed indictment by the grand jury, she is charged in a single count of first-degree murder, alleging special circumstances. According to the indictment there is sufficient evidence of “lying in wait,” that somehow Laurel entered Jack’s house and scoped out the victim before striking. If this can be proved, the state can ask for the death penalty. A pitch for bail during the arraignment netted me a major ass-chewing by the prosecution and a quick gavel