Shadow of Power

Tuchio is halfway out of his chair, worried, I suspect, that Arnsberg might try to say something, like, Please don’t kill me. I didn’t do it. This is matched by Qui

It is one of those moments when dumb luck plays a hand, surprise aided by awkward i

It’s a good thing none of the jurors have X-ray vision, or they’d be looking at the edgy artwork, swastikas, and other social commentary tattooed on his arms and upper body.

Carl stands there gri

Under the glare from the bench, I put a hand on Carl’s shoulder, and we both quietly sit.

Qui

When you’re defending, the one thing you don’t want sitting in the chair next to you at a murder trial is the invisible man, a silent, emotionless cipher of a client charged with crimes so vile that normal people have trouble imagining them.

When I look over, Tuchio is hunched at his table, working over the notes for his opening statement, his pen whittling away. He has a kind of benign no-crime, no-foul grin on his face, though you can bet he is seething inside. If he wants to put Carl to death, he will have to burn out of their brains the image of the defendant standing in front of the jury, smiling at them with the homespun geniality of Will Rogers.

“I’m going to give the jury a brief break. Ten-minute recess,” says Qui

10

en minutes turns into an hour, a good part of which is spent with Qui

“He didn’t, Your Honor.”

“Damn lucky for you,” he says. “And what’s this business with your investigator? Where the hell is Hinds?” He reminds me that Harry is assigned the penalty phase of the trial in the event that Arnsberg is convicted and the jury has to decide whether he gets life or death. “He’s supposed to be here.”

“When the evidence comes in,” I tell him. “When the first witness is sworn, he’ll be here.”

“I asked you where he was.”

“You want to know where he is, ask Mr. Tuchio.”

Qui

“He’s back at the office checking for roadside bombs tucked into the truckload of materials from the victim’s computers that your office delivered to us at eight o’clock this morning.”

“Oh, that,” says Tuchio.

At this, Qui

Tuchio’s turn to wiggle.

“What about it?” says the judge.

The Tush fishes the affidavit from his IT people out of his briefcase. “We sent the court a copy as soon as we got it,” he says.

“What the hell is this?” Qui

“We didn’t know ourselves until the last minute,” says Tuchio.

The judge tries to throw the paper. It seems to add to his frustration when it lands with all the force of a fallen leaf on the blotter in the middle of his desk.

“Get Hinds over here,” he says.

“When do we get to look at the materials?” I ask. “I know it’s a small point, but they may be central to our case.”

“You think maybe Scarborough left a suicide note in his computer?” says Tuchio. “‘I’m angry with the world. I’m depressed. P.S.-I’m go

“I want it on record”-I ignore him-“that this stuff came late. That the cops didn’t even see it before they charged.”

“You can look at it over the weekend,” says Qui

The fact that the cops haven’t even had the time, let alone the inclination, to look at these leaves open the question whether there are e-mails with death threats strewn all over Scarborough’s hard drives. And God knows what else.

“It’s a safe bet, given the subject matter of his writings, that there were probably regional chapters of ‘Hate Scarborough’ committees,” I tell them.

“Yes, but did they all have their fingerprints on the hammer?” says Tuchio.

“For all you know, there could have been a line forming outside that hotel room door with people paying quarters to take a whack at the back of his head,” I tell him.

“Yes, and they all wiped their fingerprints off the hammer except your client.”

“Enough,” says the judge. “You.” He points at me. “Call your partner. Get him on the phone and tell him to get over here now.”

It takes Harry almost an hour in midmorning traffic to cross the bridge, drive downtown, park his car, and hoof it to the courthouse.

Qui

“Did you find anything?” I ask.

Harry and I eat stale sandwiches out of wrappers from a deli around the corner. We are standing up at a counter listening to the strains of “We Shall Overcome” over the backdrop of the percussion section of the Nazi National Orchestra beating their hard hats against garbage-can covers they’ve turned into shields.

“There’s a lot of stuff there,” says Harry. “And there’s no way to be sure we got it all.” He tells me that he has left two paralegals separating the materials by date and subject. The most important-the stuff pregnant with possibilities, according to Harry-are Scarborough’s e-mails, though he did a quick toss, turning as much of the stack as he could upside down looking for early drafts of Scarborough’s book. It is here, according to Trisha Scott, that Scarborough left references to the letter supposedly written by Jefferson, the would-be dynamite for Scarborough’s next book.

“Nothing,” says Harry. “Maybe she’s right. If he shredded the printout copies of all his old work, maybe he erased everything from the computers as well.”

The state’s theory is that Carl killed Scarborough for reasons of racial animus, not because the author was black, since he wasn’t, but because his words both written and verbal threatened the Aryan sense of racial superiority-that, and to impress others with similar views.

Over all of this, the missing Jefferson Letter now looms large. There is the question of its intrinsic value as a motive for murder, assuming that the original letter was available and Scarborough could get his hands on it. It is also possible, though there is no evidence at the moment, that perhaps the author had the original at the time of his death. If so, the fact that it is missing and that the police did not find it on Carl or at his apartment in the hours following the murder may be the stuff of which a credible defense is made.

Beyond this is the information from Trisha Scott, how Scarborough tried to use the letter in Perpetual Slaves and how she convinced him not to, for reasons of questioned authenticity. We have the detective’s note, following his interview with Bonguard, that the letter was the inspiration for all-the book, the tour, and what is now approaching $30 million in earned royalties. It is possible that whoever possessed the original of the letter, and who presumably gave Scarborough his copy, might be jealous. Maybe he wanted a cut of the book’s earnings and Scarborough refused to give it up? All of these are possible motives for murder, and from everything we know, none of them apply to Carl Arnsberg.