Free Undue Influence by Steve Martini Page B

comes down to in the end. She can hear me fuming on the other end, the silent thought that a lawyer should never cut and run. Though in this case, with Laurel on the lam, I must admit that it is an open question who has abandoned who. “Listen, if it’s a question of money…

    ”

    “It isn’t the money. That ran out a month ago. Laurel passed me two bad checks since,” she says. “Bounced and skipped like flat stones on a pond,” she tells me. We are siblings under the skin, Gail and I. Like the criminal bar, it seems rubber is the stockin-trade of divorce. “I kept going for the reason that a lawyer always keeps going,” she says.
    “I didn’t know how to say no.” I tell her to send me her rubber checks and I will give her cash.
    “You’d be putting good money after bad,” she says. “It’s not just the money. It’s the case. There is no way,” she says. “How do I tell the court that my client hasn’t abandoned her kids? Your honor, she’s a fugitive from justice, the cops can’t find her, but she is a good mother. She cares for her children. She just does it long distance.’ It isn’t gonna wash,” she says. I bite my tongue. I want to tell her about my conversation with Laurel, but disclosure has implications. As absurd as it might seem, at this moment Laurel could claim that she was just traveling, some urgent mission with a purpose, unaware that the cops were after her. I am the only one who knows from her own lips that this is not the case. For the moment I must keep it that way. “They haven’t charged her with anything,” I say. “If she turns up, what then? There could be a logical explanation for her disappearance.” Some pained breathing on the other end. Gail Hemple trying one more time to muster the sand to say no. “Vega’s getting ready to turn a paper blizzard,” she says. “And right now he’s got a monopoly on all the wind machines. If she came back today maybe, with a good story, I’d have time to prepare.
    After that, anybody appearing on the merits is nothing but a punching bag. There would not even be a basis for the slightest compromise,” she says. “In a way she might be better off unrepresented,” says Hemple. “If she beats the criminal charges, or they don’t bring them, a court on review might be more sympathetic revisiting custody.” I have no answer for this.
    “If you hear from her before five, and she has a good one” Gail means a story “give me a call,” she says and hangs up. The State Capitol building is a showcase, historic rooms preserved on the main floor like museums and gilded elevators with live operators, at least when the Legislature is in session. The hundred and twenty men and women office here live like rajas, with personal attendants to cater their every whim. There is no money for schools or hospitals, but austerity is not part of the decorative scheme here. As the boundless party-line goes, the dignity of the people demands that their elected leaders operate in opulence. The political class of this state are about as out of touch as the fops of yore whose heads rolled from the guillotine. To get to Jack’s office I run the gauntlet of a rogues’ gallery, framed oil portraits the size of small houses, spaced along the walls leading to the rotunda. These are pictures of former governors, mostly robber barons from the last century who bought respectability with their public office. Mixed in with these are the feckless oily smiles of a few contemporaries, actors and the sons of political nobility, official portraits of men bearing expressions of constipation, straining to look like they belong to the ages. What Jack wanted to talk about when I returned his call could not be discussed over the phone. I trek to his office in the Capitol, more from curiosity than anything else, the thought that any information, even that which Jack wants me to have, is better than none. His receptionist offers me coffee and a chair to cool my