Limitations (16 page)

“Is this why you were talking about not running?” she asks.

“Not really. Not for the most part.”

“Well, what’s ‘the most part’? And please don’t say me.”

He tells her about Warnovits and Lolly Viccino. She listens to the whole story without letting go of his hand.

“You’ve been having a rough time, mate, haven’t you?” She puts an arm around him again. “George,” she says. “You are a good man. A very good man. It was another era. Things like that-It was vulgar, George. It was disgusting. But it wasn’t criminal. Not then. Times change. Things get better. Humanity improves. And you get better with it. With the help of other human beings. That’s what law’s about. I don’t have to give you that speech. You’ve been giving it to me for thirty years.”

“And you haven’t believed a word,” he says, smiling.

She takes a second to consider.

“Well,” she says, “at least I was listening.”

They are still sitting together, talking about the effects of fear, what it takes from life and, oddly, adds, when he hears her cell phone buzz in the pocket of his jacket, which is hanging from his chair. He tells himself not to look, but Patrice stands to get the phone for him, and he reaches back rather than let her be the first to see the text message.

The screen says, “Next time 4 real. C U.”

When George wakes up at 6:30 he can hear voices outside, and he cracks one panel on the bedroom shutters. Behind the black-and-white, which has been positioned at the curb all night, three TV vans have parked. Their long portable antennas, looking like giant kitchen whisks, have been raised for broadcast. Awaiting George’s appearance, the crew members from the competing stations are lounging together against one of the vans, drinking their coffee and shooting the breeze with the two cops who are out there to guard the judge.

“Mate,” he tells Patrice, “you aren’t going to like this.”

Marina arrives in a courthouse van an hour later. Three more cruisers have shown up as well. George calls Marina’s cell to invite her into the house rather than appear outside and reward the camera crews for lying in wait.

“Shit,” she says succinctly when he shows her the text message. “We gotta give this phone to the Bureau. See if they can set up some kind of trap. I can’t believe he had the balls to do this again.”

#1 clearly knows what Marina explained the other day about the difficulty of tracing text messages. And therefore did not care who had the cell phone now, law enforcement or George. He’d get the message either way.

“Maybe you should think about staying here, Judge.”

“Good luck talking sense to him,” Patrice says.

But George knows he’s being prudent. Today every local security resource will be dedicated to his protection. He’ll be safer than the President. And it would send the wrong message to stay home and cower. He took this job recognizing that the responsibilities are often symbolic.

Patrice continues peeking through the curtains to inspect the growing crowd on the parkway. There are at least a dozen journalists now, as well as eight cops and, naturally, quite a few of their neighbors. Patrice is having fits about the fate of everything she labored to plant this spring, an act of love and dedication that required energy she didn’t really have so soon after surgery.

At 8:30, George opens his front door, feeling for all the world like he is entering a stage set. His arm remains too sore for any thought of abandoning the sling, and so his coat is draped across his right shoulder in the fashion of somebody who got winged in a western. Eyes forward, he endeavors to appear pleasant but businesslike and speaks not a word as the camerafolk and reporters dash beside him along his front walk.

Looking more officious than a general, Marina marches a step ahead of him while Abel alights to sweep open the van door. On George’s behalf, Marina recites a one-line statement George and she composed inside-‘The judge is feeling well and looks forward to conducting the business of the court’-while the cameramen jostle one another for the chance to poke their huge black lenses through the open window on the driver’s side of the van. Screwing up his courage, George glances back to the line of little white sweet alyssum that have been trampled along the edging of the walk.

The vehicles take off in a convoy, one cruiser in front of Marina’s van and another behind, while the TV trucks zoom up and drop back for camera angles. He considers how this is going to play on the news and laughs.

“What?” Marina asks.

“Private joke.” After this star turn as urban war hero, George realizes he could not only free the Warnovits defendants but order the state to pay them reparations and still win the retention election.

The morning is a procession of visitors to chambers expressing sympathy, as well as constant phone calls from friends and reporters, which George does not take. The only persons he can’t defer are his colleagues on the court. The Chief, appropriately, is the first to show up, instants after George has reached his chambers. He requires a full rundown of last night’s events, shaking his head throughout.

“Nathan is bonkers,” he says then. “He’s sure he’s next. I’ll bet he’s found himself a ‘secure location’ that’s not within three hundred miles.”

Neither of them can keep from laughing.

“So what’s your theory?” Rusty asks. “About last night?”

Unrelated events, George explains, except that attempting to be bold in the face #1’s threats seems to have made him more stupid.

“Still not buying Corazon?”

Strangely, only now, after avoiding it for weeks, the fear that properly belongs with that possibility invades the judge. His heart knocks and his hands clench as he imagines what it would mean to be stalked with lethal intent by a ruthless sociopath like Corazon. With his self-imposed exile, Koll might have the right approach if that actually were what is happening. But in his heart of hearts, George still does not believe it.

“To me, it doesn’t fit,” he tells the Chief. “But the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if the cops scoop up those kids and see whether they have any connection to Latinos Reyes. And I wouldn’t bet a lot on that happening. My car’s probably been peddled or chopped and those kids are high on the money.”

“Probably,” Rusty agrees.

By noon, the last of his visitors seem to have paid their respects. George is closing his door in hopes of getting some work done, but hearing it scrape over the carpet, Dineesha abruptly stands. Her hands folded across her plump middle, she faces him with an expectant look. She is handsome, if matronly, with a large globe hairdo, a seventies remnant she never abandoned. He motions her in with a leaden heart. He has seen her hangdog expression a thousand times before and knows just what’s coming. There is only one cause.

“Zeke says the police talked to him, Judge, wanting to know where he was Friday. And he was in St. Louis, Judge. I’m sure. We had his dog while he was gone. And he says he had papers showing he went.”

“I don’t think anyone doubts that, Dineesha.”

“The thing is, Judge, this is a good job for him. But if the police call the company, Judge. Well-” Her hands are still clasped in front of her waist. There’s no point in asking whether Zeke truthfully answered the question on the employment application about whether he’d ever been convicted of a felony. For a guy like Zeke, it’s all a circle anyway. Do it the right way and you’ll never get your foot through the door.

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he tells her. She sighs and smiles. “But one thing that bothered the police is that they thought you told Zeke to expect them.”

Her mouth forms a dark O.

“It wasn’t like that, Judge. I just had it out with him, Thursday night. I wasn’t trying to warn him, just give him a piece of my mind. Judge, he says he wouldn’t ever do you any harm. I believe it, Judge.”

That’s the problem, of course. His mother will always believe Zeke. No other sane person should.

“Dineesha, you don’t really believe he and his pal were up here to use the bathroom, do you?”

She wilts with the question and takes a seat in the same straight-backed chair by the door that she found the other day in order to weep out of sight about her oldest child.

“No, Judge. I don’t think that.”

“So what were they doing? Were they here to steal something?”

She manages a quick, sharp laugh. “No, Judge. Just the opposite. They were putting something back.”

“From my chambers?”

“From my purse. Zeke had been by that morning, Judge. Because of the dog. And he’d grabbed hold of my keys out of my purse.”

“And why was that?”

She presses her finger to the center of her lips, determined not to cry again.

“He wanted to get into our shed. We stored his things when he went off, Judge.” Prison is what she means. “And I don’t know how exactly, but Reggie found two guns in there, and when Zeke came out, his father wouldn’t let him have them. You know, he can’t own firearms.”

It’s both a federal and a state crime for a felon even to hold a gun.

“And Reggie and Zeke, they go around about those guns every couple of months. Zeke says all he wants is just to sell them, that they’re worth good money. So he took my keys and got them. That boy Khaleel, he has the guns now, but I guess they made a deal, Khaleel was supposed to walk in and put the keys on my desk when I got up for a second, and if anybody saw that, he’d just say he’d found them in the hall, right outside the door.”

She has her face in both hands.

“Judge, if he could just get himself going in the right direction, he’d really be all right. I truly believe that.”

There is no divorcing your children, George thinks. For Dineesha, hope is eternal. And thus, so is the heartbreak.

“I mean, Judge, I don’t have any right-”

“I’ll keep it to myself, Dineesha.” She stands, still under the weight of it.

Ten minutes later she knocks again. No more, George thinks. Even for Dineesha. But when she opens the door, he can see she has regathered herself. This is business.

“Murph’s on the phone, Judge,” she says. “Area Two picked up two boys. They want you for a lineup.”

Area 2 headquarters is a fortress, a limestone redoubt built near the turn of the century. It is frequently shot by TV and movie crews when they need an exterior that appears utterly impregnable. Entering, you confront a much newer cinder-block wall, interrupted only by a small window of bulletproof glass, behind which the desk officer sits. Years ago there was a little metal teller’s tray at the bottom so bondsmen or relatives could pass bail money, but that was before some gangster stuck a sawed-off in the slot and seriously wounded three officers. These days everybody passes first through a metal detector.

Cobberly, the red-faced detective who enjoyed giving it to George last night, is on the other side.

“So what do we know about these fine young lads, Philly?” Abel asks him. On the way over, Abel said that the younger boy had been grabbed in a nod in George’s Lexus, which was parked on a North End street. An hour later, the older one strolled up with the car key and a sack of burgers.

According to Phil Cobberly, the two are brothers, the last of four.

“Nice family,” the detective says. “Dad was always in and out of the joint, but now there’s sort of a family reunion. Older two boys are in Rudyard with him. I just love happy endings,” he adds.

“Bangers?” George asks.

“Natch.”

“Latinos Reyes?”

“Nope. Over where they’re from in Kewahnee, that’s Two-Six turf.” Twenty-sixth Street Locos.

“So no connection to Corazon?”

“Can’t say that. Two-Six and Latinos Reyes make their deals.”

Abel asks if the boys gave any statements.

“Usual speeches,” says Cobberly, “don’t know nothin’, but we didn’t take it down. They’re juvie.”

Juveniles may not be questioned outside the presence of their parents, who, in Area 2, do not tend to answer when the police come knocking. In their absence, a youth officer must attend the interview. The State Defender assigned to the station was summoned too, since both boys will be charged as adults. He, in turn, called for his supervisor. George suspects he is the reason a higher-up was needed. The State Defenders want to tread carefully with a judge, especially one on the appellate court who sides with them occasionally.

When the supervisor arrives, it turns out to be Gina Devore, who oversaw the S.D. s in George’s courtroom during the two years he sat at the trial level in the Central Branch. She was famous in the courthouse for punching out one of her clients in the lockup when he grabbed her breast. Five feet in her heels, Gina knocked the guy cold.

“The best and brightest,” George greets her. She surprises him a bit with a quick hug despite being on duty. Married to a police lieutenant in Nearing, she gives him a one-sentence rundown on both of her kids.

“How’s the arm, Judge? I heard about you on TV.”

“It’s all right, but I don’t think I’ll be sending your clients a thank-you note.”

“Judge,” she says, “I bet when you get a look, you’ll realize they’ve got the wrong kids.” She is utterly stone-faced making that remark, although both George and she know that not only were these boys arrested in the judge’s car, but each kid’s clothing-and the guns discovered under the front seats-matched his descriptions.

The boys’ defense, if it goes according to the book, will be that they found the Lexus abandoned with the key in the ignition. It’s farfetched at best. But if George makes the IDs, the case becomes a lock. No jury will disbelieve a judge in these circumstances.

Led by the Detective Commander, Len Grissom, a bony, self-contained Texan, the procession- two defense lawyers, a Deputy P.A. named Adams who has arrived from Felony Review, Cobberly, Abel, and several other officers, and, finally, the judge-enters the shift room, where the Area 2 cops assemble to start duty. It looks like a classroom, full of school chairs with plastic desk extensions on the right arms. In front, a track of high-wattage floodlights blares down. They were installed for lineups, both to illuminate the participants and to prevent them from getting a good look at the witnesses.