Undue Influence by Steve Martini

about battles. I understand you broke up a good fight in the courthouse this afternoon?” says Lama. “Me?” I say.
    “Yeah. Laurel Vega attacked the victim the deceased?” He says this with all the emphasis on the “d” word. “Like I said, a minor disagreement.
    Custody matter. A difficult situation. She got a little emotional. I wouldn’t call it an attack.”
    “Geeze I heard she nailed the woman with her fucking purse?” says Lama.
    He snaps his fingers a couple a times, and his colleague with the notebook is fanning pages. The guy finds what he’s looking for. ” Laurel Vega said she wished it was a sledgehammer,’ ” the cop reads from his notes. “Maybe she found something better than a hammer,” says Lama.
    “Nice thought,” I say, “but if that’s all yous’ve got, I think maybe you should get up off your honkers and start looking for whoever actually killed Melanie Vega.”
    “Oh, I think we are,” he says. He chews on what is left of the little stick in his teeth, then gives a wicked smile. “Are we finished?”
    “For the moment,” he says. He gets out of his chair like he’s going to escort me personally to the door. He touches me at the elbow. I nearly recoil from the contact. Lama looks at me. If I didn’t know better I’d think he was offended. “Now, you will tell us if you see her won’t you?”
    “Sure,” I say. “You bet.”
    I know that I won’t have to. Vega will have me tailed by his minions.
    “We appreciate the cooperation,” he says. He’s almost giggling to himself. I can sense the joy building inside of him, the knowledge that I am now tangled in this mess. We get to the door. He sees me out onto the portico. Lama steps off the welcome mat and into some dirt, potting soil, and broken shards of clay. He’s wearing black boots with low heels what they call Wellingtons with little zippers on the side. I have seen these on the CHP and a few drill sergeants, his heroes. He scrapes the dirt off the bottoms on the mat. “Looks like somebody made a mess,” he says.
    There’s a spray of black dirt on the siding by the front door.
    Lama looks up. My eyes follow.
    “Geeze somebody really nailed it,” he says.
    There, under the ceiling of the portico, ten feet up, is a single security camera, aimed down at the entrance, its lens caked with dirt, its plastic outer case cracked like an egg. He smiles. Jimmy Lama’s giving me a message that a picture is worth a ream of words.
    “Uncle Paul.” Danny Vega is waiting for me at my house, a hangdog expression under the bill of a Giants cap. He is all elbows on knees, the architecture of youth, good for propping up chins when sitting, as he is now on my front porch. It is nearly four in the morning, and he is about the last person I would expect to see. “Danny?” I say.
    He can read the question in my voice.
    “Baby-sitter said we could come over. I put my junk and the scooter in the garage,” he says. He looks up at me, brown oval eyes. “It’s okay, isn’t it?” He says this like maybe I’m going to throw him out into the street. “Sure,” I say. I give him a smile, perhaps the only soft look he’s had from an adult in days. I can see the little Vespa by my workbench, Danny’s way in the single-parent world. Next to it is a red helmet and a small day pack.
    Laurel and I had given him the little motor scooter as a gift on his last birthday. Danny made a small wooden box that fits neatly on the back where, under hasp and lock, he keeps the mystical items that capture the fancy of a fifteen-year-old. “Where’s your mother? Why didn’t she drive you?”
    He humps his shoulders and shakes his head, as much as forearms will allow. “Thought she might be with you,” he says. Danny hasn’t got a clue where Laurel is. Chills course through my body, a combination of sleep deprivation and thoughts of where Laurel might be at this hour. None of this seems to concern Danny. He is glum in the way teenagers often