Compelling Evidence - Hardcover

Martini, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399137122 ISBN 13: 9780399137129

Publisher: Putnam Pub Group, 1992

Synopsis

In a courtroom drama, Talia Potter, indicted for the murder of her judge husband, turns to her lover, Paul Madriani--her husband's ex-law partner--to defend her

About this title

About the Author:

Steve Martini, a former trial attorney, lives on the US West Coast with his wife and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF

STEVE MARTINI

......................................................

THE JUDGE

“A TENSE AND GRITTY COURTROOM DRAMA.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“RIVETING ... SUSPENSEFUL ... Legal thrillers don’t get much better than this.”

—Publishers Weekly

UNDUE INFLUENCE

“THE COURTROOM NOVEL OF THE YEAR ... virtually nonstop courtroom pyrotechnics ... a dazzling climax.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A COMPLEX, RIVETING TALE and nitty-gritty courtroom drama.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“THE ACTION BUILDS TO A ROUSING CLIMAX through a brilliant series of trial scenes with several surprises.”

—Publishers Weekly

“FILLED WITH SURPRISES AND TWISTS ... supremely readable.”

—Library Journal

“A FULL-SPEED-AHEAD READ.”

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“FANS OF COURTROOM DRAMA will love Martini’s protagonist ... and this complex tale of intrigue and murder.”

—USA Today

COMPELLING EVIDENCE

“SUPERB ... truly on a level with Presumed Innocent.”

—F. Lee Bailey

“PACKS A WALLOP!’

—Publishers Weekly

“BY FAR THE BEST of the genre that I’ve ever seen ... Absolutely thrilling.”

—Clifford Irving

“ALL THAT A COURTROOM DRAMA SHOULD BE ... seamless, suspenseful.”

—New York Daily News

“ENGROSSING!’

—Entertainment Weekly

“ONE OF THE BEST COURTROOM DRAMAS this reviewer has seen in years.”

—The Sacramento Bee

PRIME WITNESS

“RIVETING, YOU-ARE-THERE IMMEDIACY ... ingenious ... nail-biting ... fascinating ... first-rate ... Prime is indeed the word for this involving read!”

—Publishers Weekly

“THE TRIAL BEGINS and Martini rolls up his sleeves to do what he does best ... packs a satisfying punch.”

—Kirkus Reviews

THE SIMEON CHAMBER

“CHILLING ... PROVOCATIVE ... STUNNING.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A FINE FOOT-TO-THE-FLOOR THRILLER!’

—New York Daily News

“INTRIGUING TWISTS AND TURNS.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“THRILLING ... a winner ... Martini demonstrates a confident hand and deft control of literary suspense ... excellent, top-quality adventure.”

—The Sacramento Bee

Titles by Steve Martini

THE LIST

THE JUDGE

UNDUE INFLUENCE

PRIME WITNESS

COMPELLING EVIDENCE

THE SIMEON CHAMBER

Compelling
Evidence

Steve Martini

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as ‘unsold and destroyed’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this ‘stripped book.

This is a work of fiction. The characters and events described in this book are imaginary, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To Leah, whose love and inspiration guided the writing of this book

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the writing of this work, I received the assistance and encouragement of many, without whose support it would never have been possible. I owe much thanks and deep gratitude first to my wife, Leah, who during the long months of writing was ever at my side, listening with a critical ear and reading with a deft eye the story that became this novel.

To Marc Berg, a former prosecutor and skilled defense attorney in Auburn, California, for his keen lawyer’s eye and insight into the dynamics of criminal law.

To Robert E. Garbutt and Ken Mack, criminalists with the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Crime Lab, for their incisive advice and expertise in the labyrinth that is criminal forensics.

To Sergeant Kent Armbright, warden’s administrative assistant, San Quentin State Prison, for a chilling and up-close glimpse of the state’s death house, and his perceptive insights into the uncertain and confined cosmos of daily life in an overcrowded and understaffed prison.

To Providence, for the good fortune of placing me with a publisher of the quality and repute of Putnam.

To Phyllis Grann, my publisher, for her enthusiastic support and unflagging optimism.

To George Coleman, my editor, and one of the inveterate ‘rainmakers’ of the publishing world, for his encouragement during difficult times.

To John Hawkins, my agent, whose skill in negotiations and adroit sense of business guided me through perilous waters on repeated occasions.

To Jeff Marschner, a former California prosecutor, supervisor, and coworker as a state attorney, for his advice and encouragement.

To the state attorneys and staff in the legal office of the California Department of Consumer Affairs, for their interest and support in the progress of this story.

To Rita Martini, Betty Arnold, Keith and Jo Arnold, and Dave Krizman, for their critical eye and unvarnished honesty in the early reading of manuscripts.

To all of these and to others whom I may have omitted to mention here, I owe grateful thanks for advice and insights that have allowed me to craft a work of seeming truth. For any failings that a reader may find in this regard, I am solely responsible.

This is the first of punishments, that no guilty man is acquitted if judged by himself.

—JUVENAL, ROMAN POET

AND SATIRIST                

CHAPTER

1

FROM somewhere behind the scenes the lights in the chamber are turned on.

Dreyers nudges me. ‘Looks like the $64,000 Challenge,” he says. This is low, directed to me, but others hear it. A little comic relief. There’s a titter of laughter from behind us, up on the risers. Johnston and the other guard don’t laugh.

Dreyers whispers, lower now, under his breath, to me only. “Pretty soon they’ll pop the question.”

I look at him.

“For $64,000—how long can you hold your breath?’ He gives me a little sideways wink. I can hear some giggling on the other side of Dreyers. Another cop, one of his buddies.

Bad taste, I think. But as I study the scene, he’s right. Now this room with its cupola-like top, lit on the inside like some Macy’s store window, does not resemble anything so much as one of the glittering, cheesy booths from a sixties TV quiz show.

A lone guard enters the room through a door on the other side of the chamber. Muffled cries, intonations of a desperate low moan are clearly audible as the door is closed.

Now each calculated procedure is a step closer to death for the man waiting on the other side of that door. In quick, measured movements the guard lowers two sets of green venetian blinds, covering windows on the other side of the chamber. These will mask the execution team as they open the valves and throw the lever to release the lethal gas.

Then I see them, the size of two softballs. Granules of sodium cyanide, like fine baking powder, a pound each, have been tied and molded into a round form. They are held in two pieces of cheesecloth and fastened to a device over the vat under each chair. These deadly chemical balls hang tenuously by wire from two curved metal arms. When the lever is thrown these arms will drop, the cyanide falling into the pots of sulfuric acid and water. For safety the two vats are now empty.

Sally Ryan’s father is here, a decade older, grayer, the lines of his face more deeply etched than I remember. He stands apart from the rest of us, as if he’s on a different mission, some ancient and sacred vendetta bred of human instinct. The memory of a defiled and murdered child is long.

I asked Ryan about the parents of the other girl, Linda Maldinado. “Divorced,” he said, as if this explained their absence. What he meant was, destroyed—ravaged by a grieving they could not conclude while this thing remained open, incomplete. It’s the first I’ve seen of either family since the trial, when Ryan and the more aggressive Mrs. Maldinado hovered with me in hallways, demanding assurance that justice wouldn’t be stillborn. Ryan eyes me now with a cynicism that is palpable, an abiding bitterness that the journey has taken this long.

My own presence here is as a favor to Sam Jennings, the DA now out of office with whom I prosecuted Danley. Jennings is sick, too ill to make this appointment, perhaps too close to death himself to stare it squarely in the eye.

Gale Haight is here. I nodded to him as we boarded the van. He didn’t return the gesture. A normally affable man two years my senior in law school, Haight cannot bring himself to even a grudging greeting on this day. He carries a heavy burden, having defended Danley at trial.

There are a few cops here, represented because the law says they must be. The others, ten men and two women, I suspect are political favorites of the governor or the director of corrections, official guests for this grim task.

I stand next to Jim Dreyers, now retired from the sheriff’s department. Dreyers had tracked Brian Danley to a girlfriend’s apartment after the killings. Backed up by the SWAT team, he’d made the arrest and led Danley, with hands cuffed behind his back, to a squad car. The suspect spat at cameras all the way there; a large green lugi caught in mid-flight centered the frame of one of the shots. It made the cover of Newsweek, a special crime edition.

Since the conviction, Danley’s been handled by skilled appellate attorneys, people who’ve delayed this date six times in seven years. Whenever cameras are made available now, Danley is the picture of polite reserve. A bleeding-heart piece in the bar association’s house organ a year ago pictured him the circumspect image of justice denied. He is, if the story is to be believed, the pitiable victim of fetal-alcohol syndrome. An army of shrinks is now assembled to attest to this malady. It’s the latest in an endless series of social ills raised to excuse his crime, or at a minimum to avoid its punishment. These news articles are well placed for maximum effect. They don’t play in the magazines “for inquiring minds.” Instead Danley’s lawyers shoot for a more lofty readership, fed into publications an appellate judge might read in an idle hour.

The chamber door, something from a vintage submarine, is open facing the other side.

Three people were already in the room when we arrived, an older woman and two clergymen. One of them comforts the woman, an arm around her shoulder. She, I assume, is family.

Confronting him daily through four months of trial seven years ago, I wonder whether Danley will show the same sand now. Then, he’d been hard. Unremitting.

He was his own lawyer’s worst nightmare. Through weeks of trial endless versions of a smug expression occupied his face. He smiled through half-a-day of horrors—testimony by the medical examiner that caused one juror to lose her breakfast. Against the advice of his own attorney he took the stand, denying all association with the crime, this in utter contradiction to a sea of physical evidence that included his own fingerprints at the scene. Danley was at some loss to explain how they’d become superimposed in the blood of his two victims.

After conviction, in the penalty phase, to an astonished jury which was only a little less dazed than his own lawyer, Danley admitted that he’d done it. His version of throwing himself on the mercy of the jury, it seems, was a public survey of the crimes in mind-wrenching detail.

I remember the vivid photos of Sally Ryan and the Maldinado girl after they had been raped and sodomized. These shots were dominated by the grotesque rust hues of congealed blood—their throats sliced with the precision of a scalpel. Danley used the razor-sharp hooked blade of a linoleum knife. “A tool of the trade,” he called it. This particular knife hadn’t seen linoleum in years. He kept it for special occasions. It was once used to carve a deep letter “A,” to the bone, in his wife’s right cheek. Danley, after a little too much to drink, found himself fantasizing about marital infidelities on the part of his common-law wife, a woman he hadn’t seen in a year. Some bar-babbling luminary, it seems, had given him a more lurid than literal review of The Scarlet Letter. I steel myself with the thought that Brian Danley is a creature the world is well rid of.

I check my watch. It’s now one minute past the appointed hour. There are noises on the other side of the chamber. The agonized wailing of a man, his words, except for one, unintelligible. The repetition of a single syllable grows louder: “No-o-o-o...”

Two stone-faced guards enter from the other side. Behind them, struggling feebly, Brian Trevor Danley is unrecognizable to me. Forty pounds lighter than at any time during the trial, he is a ghost. The swagger and bravado are gone. His knees are bent, feet dragging. He’s carried under each arm by two guards, bulls who could snap him like a twig should he resist. Danley’s hands are manacled in front. His eyes are wild, haunted, searching as if to devour every image left to them in the seconds that remain. He searches the faces beyond the glass without apparent recognition as his stockinged feet are dragged over the threshold into the chamber. As he’s turned and pushed down into the chair, he sees her. His eyes light up.

“Bampa. Bampa.”

He’s imploring the woman with the two clergymen. Her arms are extended, as if she could reach out and grab him.

I nudge Dreyers and motion with my head toward the woman.

“His aunt. Bampa’s the name he gave her as a kid.” Dreyers shrugs his shoulders as if to say “Don’t blame me.”

Danley’s wearing a pressed blue work shirt, the kind made here by inmates, open at the neck, and prison denim pants. The fact that he’s shoeless says reams about this journey. From the front of his shirt protrudes a small black tube. This is part of the stethoscope which will be connected to a device in the wall. From this a physician will determine the instant of death.

In quick, efficient motions, three of the officers strap him into the metal chair. Two-inch web straps, two around each arm, two around the chest and abdomen, hold him erect and still. The other guard straps his legs tightly to the chair. They are finished in less than a minute. Three of the guards leave. The last hooks up the stethoscope, then gives Danley a quick pat on the knee and says something to him. I can’t hear the words, but I read his lips. “When you hear the gas, breathe deeply.”

Now Danley is terror-stricken, beyond comprehension, his head whipping wildly from side to side. His moan is constant, a low groan from the tiny room, a tortured mantra.

The last guard ducks backward out of the chamber, and the door is closed and sealed from the outside. The cries of agony inside are now muted. He turns his head and looks back at us. “Somebody ...” His words trail off and I can’t make out the rest. But this is some form of plea. He’s begging for someone to intervene.

At two minutes past the hour, the condemned is alone in the sealed chamber.

Suddenly his head slump...

About this edition

• Publisher: Putnam Pub Group
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0399137122
• ISBN 13: 9780399137129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 379