Limitations (12 page)

George had noticed that the phone was not in his suit jacket pocket as he was leaving the Hotel Gresham after the Kindle County Bar Association’s Judges’ Day event, two weeks ago yesterday, but his last clear recollection of having it went back to his departure from chambers the evening before. The staff and he attempted to retrace his steps over the intervening period. Banion called the hotel lost and found. Marcus checked to make sure George had not left it at the courthouse metal detectors that morning. Cassie phoned the restaurant where George had dinner the preceding night, and went out to search his car. Dineesha combed the chambers. The judge himself looked everywhere around his house when he returned there.

“Truth is, Marina, until today, I’ve been convinced I was going to lift some pile of papers and see it there.” In the last few hours, fitting things together, George has been spinning another theory: Zeke took it. He now suspects that what Zeke was up to yesterday was an effort to lift something else. As George envisions the first episode, the road dog Khaleel must have walked up and down the corridor until he could see that everyone was out of chambers for a minute, then signaled Zeke, who came up and grabbed the phone. That way, if anyone returned and found Zeke inside, he could say he had just come by to visit. The judge is reluctant to try out this notion on Marina, however, until he’s forewarned Dineesha. That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to.

“Maybe I can help,” says Marina. “According to the records the company pulled, your last charged call was the day you lost it at 12:12 P.M. One minute.” She reads the number he’d dialed. It’s Patrice’s, her other cell.

“I must have been checking to see how she was,” says the judge. “One minute means I probably got her voice mail.” That’s why he forgot making the call.

“And where were you?”

He cannot recollect. There have been so many stolen moments in so many corridors in the last months, brief, hushed conversations to let Patrice know she’s on his mind.

“Do you remember when we left for the hotel?” George asks Cassie. He’d invited both clerks to the Judges’ Day event, but John, as he does every year, had shunned the crowd.

Cassie searches her handheld.

“We were supposed to meet the other judges in the lobby at 11:45. We were out of here by five till, for sure.” The Chief insists on punctuality in all things. All but two or three of the judges of the appellate court, a dozen and a half of them, and their clerks had been transported by Marina’s staff to the hotel in several vans. George and Cassie both recall being in the first vehicle to leave.

“So you called from the hotel, Your Honor?”

He seems to remember that now. Had he stood just outside the men’s room? Cassie recollects the judge going off for a few minutes before they entered the reception. But a vague memory is so suggestible. Neither Cassie nor he had put this together the day after. Perhaps #1 had the phone in hand at 12:12 and had hit the speed-dial keys to see where they would take him. But why just one? Thinking now, the judge is fairly certain he’d clicked off the connection when he got Patrice’s voice message.

“Best recollection,” he answers, a lawyer’s phrase that passes for truth in the courtroom.

“Meaning he picked your pocket there,” Marina says.

“That doesn’t do much for your Corazon theory, does it?” George says to her. There’s no point in shying away from the name after Marina broke silence yesterday. After a second, the judge realizes that Zeke has also become a far less likely suspect, assuming the phone was lifted at the hotel.

“I don’t see that.”

“Come on, Marina. You think a kid in baggies and a prison buzz is going to walk into the Kindle County Bar meeting, with two hundred judges and six hundred lawyers around, and stick his hand in my suit jacket?”

“Judge, you know what goes on with the gangs these days. Cops are undercover, and so are they. Do you really believe, Your Honor, that if we did a background on the servers, and the security guards, and the people taking coats we wouldn’t find one person with a connect to ALN? A quarter of the guards in the jail are courted in, Judge. Hell, not to be repeated, but there are a couple of people on my staff that Gang Crimes has questions about. If Corazon wanted to boost your cell, he could find somebody to do it.”

Empiricism will never guide police work. Investigators fashion their theories and shape all evidence to fit. Forget the hatreds between the black and Latin gangs, the near impossibility of picking out George as a mark in a crowd of eight hundred. Corazon’s still the man. There are moments when George cannot avoid falling back into the grip of the perpetual antagonism he felt as a defense lawyer toward the cops and the way their habits shortcut the truth. And in this he reaches the hard rock of what’s between Marina and him: she’s more or less insisting he run scared.

“May I be blunt?” the judge asks her.

She takes a beat. “Sure.”

“Maybe you ought to ask yourself, Marina, what it’s worth to you to stick to Corazon.”

“ ‘Worth’?”

“I use the term advisedly. How much do you get to add to your emergency funding request to the County Board when you can trot out a name like Corazon’s? Ten percent? Twenty percent?”

Marina sucks her cheeks into her mouth.

“Whoa,” she says and glances over her shoulder to observe Nora’s reactions. “Judge, I think you’re starting to forget who’s on your side.”

When George Mason reaches home that night, he finds Patrice asleep in their room and steals back downstairs to the large kitchen she designed several years ago. There’s a profusion of light from a rectangular walnut-and-glass fixture. The cabinets match, with panes of German crackle glass inset with rectangular rose-color panels, all the elements intended to complement the existing fireplace in what was the living room when they bought. The space has a mellow warmth, and it’s probably his favorite place in the house, but tonight it cannot alter his mood. Solitude only allows him to wallow. He’s yet to recover from his second dustup with Marina. It’s a point of pride that he seldom loses his temper, and justified or not, it was thoughtless to blast her in front of everyone. Worst of all was the look on her face. George knows enough at this age to realize that somebody who followed her father into his profession is going to be especially vulnerable to the opinion of older men. She left with a chafed, sorrowful expression, which might as well have been an ice pick in George’s heart.

Then at the end of the day, Cassie gave the judge outlines of the two potential opinions in Warnovits in the hope he would look at them over the weekend and choose between them. Examining the pages on the slate-topped kitchen island pulls him down further. Both drafts make sense, naturally. There’s no analytic trick he learned in law school or since then that allows him to pick one or the other apart. For a century and a half, legal education has been focused on reading the opinions of judges like George who sit on courts of review. In his day, his professors discussed these decisions, just as they would now, in terms of the policy concerns, the political views, the jurisprudential beliefs that drove them. After holding this job for nearly a decade, he regards much of what he was taught as romantic, if not completely wrong.

Most of the time, no matter what your political or philosophical stripes, whether you like the law or not, you find that your decision feels preordained. Even when you can imagine a route to another result, loyalty to the institution of the law, and more particularly to other judges, good women and men who’ve sat where you sit and who’ve done their level best to decide similar cases, requires you to follow the same paths they’ve trod. The discretion his professors talked about exists only on the margins, in no better than three or four cases a term.

But Warnovits is one of them, where neither the words of the legislature nor prior decisions will yield a sure answer. Ugly as the crime was, these boys were prosecuted later than the law normally allows. The trial judge-Farrell Kirk, no Cardozo but a reasonable guy-made a fair reading of the concealment provision and a balanced assessment of the testimony, and Sapperstein is equally right that, in doing so, Kirk basically erased the neat boundaries the legislators had drawn on how long a victim’s age could lawfully prolong the time to indictment. With the arguments essentially even, the truth is that the law in this case will be whatever George Mason says it is. And right now the best he can do is flip a coin. He actually removes a quarter from his pocket and sets it on the counter beside the drafts. Even to Patrice, he has never admitted that in the last nine and a half years he has decided two cases this way, albeit tiny civil matters in which the decisional law was a hopeless mess.

He is still staring at the coin when Patrice wanders in, drawing her hands down her face to drain off the sleep. By reflex, she moves forward to kiss him in greeting, then thinks better of that. She’ll be minimally radioactive until early Sunday.

“Wow,” she says, focusing on him. “What did the bartender say when the horse came into the tavern?”

He smiles wanly at the old joke: Why the long face?

“Nay,” he says, “nay, not that one.”

He gets a simpering grin before Patrice goes to the fridge for a bottle of water. Her back is still to him when he asks, “What would you say if I didn’t run for retention?”

“What?”

“I’ve actually been thinking about it. I could work less and make twice as much money. We could travel.”

She has finally completed her slow turn.

“George, you love this job. You’ve always loved this job. How can you even possibly consider that? What’s changed?”

He lifts his hands. She watches him without much charity. If he has one lasting lament in their marriage, it’s the way Patrice can go cold at the core. Her father, Hugo Levi, was a morose son of a bitch, a lawyer by training who went into the packaging business. He had his own sad history-a mother dead before he was five-but he punished his family by often growing stonily remote and in those moods voicing heartless judgments. Having come of age in the Old South, George has probably fought no biblical notion harder than the idea that the sins of the father are destined to be punished for generations. He despised the suggestion that a free human being should simply yield to fate and, worse, the idea that he could not be freed from the effects of what he despised. But he’s at an age when he’s come to recognize the scripture’s wisdom. Patrice yearned for the embrace of this hard man and in so doing took a slice of him into herself. She’s never had a gentle way of expressing her disappointments. And she’s clearly disappointed now.

“Look, mate.” She leans over the counter so she is beside him, closer than she’s been for days. “I want to say something to you. I’ve tried not to, but you have to hear this: Stop being scared. I can see it on you, George. You’re scared. And it bothers the hell out of me. I look at you, and I think, What have the doctors told him they haven’t told me? You’re making this a lot worse than it has to be. It’s hard enough to handle myself. I can’t handle you too. You can have your eleventh midlife crisis on your own time. But it’s my time now.”

“Patrice-”

His wife leaves the kitchen, looking back to speak just one word more: “No.”

George has been at his desk for only a few minutes on Monday morning when Dineesha enters from the reception area. She leaves the door ajar, addressing the judge in formal timbre.

“Your Honor, Judge Koll was hoping you might have a minute for him. He’s right outside.”

“Crap,” George mouths. Nine A.M. and Nathan has already come to demand the draft of the Warnovits opinion. He can’t bear to wait any longer to see the target he’ll be shooting at in his dissent.

“Nathan!” George cries, hail fellow well met, as he strides out.

On the green sofa beside Abel Birtz, Koll is drawn into himself like a molting bird, his dark face screwed up in a stormy look. He’s come down without his suit coat, and his white shirt looks as if it should have seen the laundry three wearings ago, wrinkled like a discarded lunch bag.

“I need to speak with you,” he says and charges past George into his inner chambers. “Look at this!” He reaches into his shirt pocket. “Look at this, for Chrissake.”

Nathan has withdrawn an envelope, from which he next removes a single sheet, the lower half stained brown.

“It was in the morning mail.”

After the first glance, George places the paper on his desk to avoid handling it further. It’s a printout of one of the bounced e-mails George received: “You’ll bleed.” That, George realizes, accounts for the irregular blot on the bottom half. Dried blood.

“Have you contacted Marina, Nathan?”

“Well, I thought I’d give you a chance to explain, George. I can’t imagine what you were doing sending that kind of message to anyone.”

George calls out to Dineesha to summon Court Security, then explains the situation to Koll.

“Oh my God,” he says several times. “You must be jumping out of your skin. I heard there was something unsettling going on. I had no idea it had reached this level.”

“ ‘Heard something,’ Nathan?”

“You know the clerks gossip. One of them mentioned that you’d been getting annoying e-mails. I thought that meant spam. Not death threats. Good Lord! No wonder you’re hesitant to run again.”

In other circumstances, George might take the last remark as tactical, designed to smoke out his intentions, but Koll looks completely unstrung. He’s slumped in one of the wooden chairs in front of George’s desk, and there’s a rill of sweat next to his overgrown sideburn. What could be harder on a paranoid than real enemies? Because it’s Koll, George cannot shutter a ray of competitive joy. Even in his worst instants, he hasn’t been this frightened. Not yet.

“Frankly, Nathan, I think it’s all hot air.”