The Hanging Judge (18 page)

Norcross recalled how uncomfortable the high cheekbones and slanted eyes of the Kikuyu men had made him feel when he’d first arrived in Kenya as a volunteer. His jitters had quickly disappeared with real human contact, but unless Redpath worked some magic, the trial would give Hudson precious little opportunity to reveal any of his human side to the jurors. Several of them were already darting anxious looks the defendant’s way, and the burly man in Seat Five seemed to be sizing Hudson up for a fistfight.

Norcross pushed on
.
“You’ve been pulled away from your jobs and your personal lives to play a part in our constitutional process, our living democracy. My staff and I will do everything we can to make sure your time is not wasted.”

As he spoke, part of the judge’s mind continued rolling along on its private track. Suppose Gomez-Larsen exercised her peremptory challenges to knock off any minority jurors that made it onto the final panel? Would she stoop to that? He jotted, in caps, a single word,
BATSON
, the controlling Supreme Court decision, to remind himself to get Eva or Frank to swat up a memo on the problem.

“So. Let me move quickly to the thing that’s probably foremost on your minds: How long is this business going to take? When am I getting out of here?” The judge leaned forward to deliver the whack. “The bad news is that, for reasons I will get to in a moment, jury selection may be lengthy, perhaps as long as three or even four weeks. And you are only our first pool; there are others behind you if we need them to put together the ultimate panel.”

At this, many of the occupants of the gallery began to grow mutinous, shaking their heads, murmuring in disbelief, or turning for sympathy to a neighbor. Number Four tossed her dark hair, sighed dramatically, and fixed her mouth in a spoiled pout.

He hurried on. “The good news, however, is that no individual will need to be here longer than one or two days to learn if he or she is going to be a juror. In many cases, we’ll be needing you for less than a day.”

This helped, but not much. Norcross gathered his robe over his knees, raising his voice slightly and holding up three fingers.

“Now, today, we’re going to proceed in three stages. First, we will be distributing questionnaires for all of you to fill out. We’ve set aside a half hour for this, while I take a recess and you get to work with your pencils. Next, I will be giving the whole group of you some general instructions covering this portion of the process. After that, we’re going to be excusing all of you for the day, except these sixteen lucky folks here to my right in the peanut gallery.”

Lucky, ha-ha. Not many cheerful looks from the jury box.

“Those of you who are off the hook for today will be coming back tomorrow, later in the week, or next week, in batches of sixteen, for more detailed instructions.”

Up to this point the judge’s courtroom deputy, Ruby Johnson, had been placidly sitting at her desk below the bench. Her job involved scheduling the judge’s cases, making sure everyone was in position before he stepped onto the bench, and handling routine courtroom tasks, such as swearing in witnesses. Ruby’s resonant West Indian voice was perfect for the job, employing a tone that was kindly but brooked no nonsense. Now she turned and gave her boss the fish eye: danger. Ruby always managed to do this without making it obvious that the judge needed rescuing, but Norcross knew he was about to flub something. In fact, he might already have.

The numerous reporters—from all the western Massachusetts papers, of course, but also
The Boston Globe
,
The New York Times
, the Associated Press—sat in the front row with their pads and pens, looking like so many vultures ravenous for a gory catastrophe. So far the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in fifty years had been blessedly dull. They were not bad people, these journalists, but he knew if he fouled things up, they’d grind his bones to bake their bread.

“With luck, then, by around eleven o’clock, all but sixteen of you will be on your way. In just a minute, we’ll begin distributing the questionnaires, but before we do, I have one or two additional things to tell you.”

Think.

Norcross let his eyes drop to Ruby’s face again; she was willing him to remember. Then the crackle of connection jumped between their brains; he often forgot this part of the ritual and needed reminding.

Ruby received the judge’s minute nod and turned forward without expression. Norcross moved seamlessly on.

“But before we commence actual jury selection, it is part of our process that the defendant be presented formally to those of you who may be making up his jury. We’ll take care of that now. Ms. Johnson, if you please.”

Ruby rose from her chair. Her voice during this stage was always queenly perfection.

“Clarence Hudson, please stand.”

The defendant stiffened and looked at his attorney. Redpath must have failed to mention this phase of the ceremony. The lawyer nodded, and the two men rose together. Norcross saw with a sense of helplessness that Hudson’s tight face probably made him appear beyond hope to many of the strangers looking on—just another who-gives-a-damn, street-gang killer, whose picture appeared two or three times a week in every city newspaper.

The whole room was gaping; people were craning their necks and half rising from the benches to stare. The defendant looked down at his hands resting on the counsel table, swallowed, set his jaw, and lifted his eyes to a spot somewhere over the judge’s left shoulder, in the area of the large American flag beside the bench.

Ruby’s words were soft, but her accent carried easily over the stilled courtroom.

“Clarence Hudson, you are now set to the bar to be tried. These good people who shall be selected are to pass between you and the United States upon your trial. If you object to any of them, you must do so before they are sworn. You may be seated.”

21

L
unch recess. Bill Redpath sat on a wooden chair tipped back against the conference room wall, in a shaft of gray winter light from the room’s only window. Over his shoulder, a sign in bold red letters shouted ABSOLUTELY
NO
SMOKING
ANYWHERE
IN
THIS
BUILDING
!!
The court had given counsel an hour to eat, and, desperate for time, Redpath was spending the break with his thermos of black coffee alone in the quiet room.

His right hand held a questionnaire, which he was reading with ferocious intensity. His left hand was squeezed through a four-inch aperture at the bottom of the casement window. This was the widest Redpath had managed to pry the balky mechanism open.

Grimacing from arthritis, the old attorney pulled his hand back into the room and positioned the cigarette he’d been holding outside between his lips. He then flipped the page of the questionnaire, took a drag on the cigarette, and stuck it back out the window. After reading for a few moments, he pulled his arm in, bent to the side, and blew the smoke out through the opening. The arrangement was not working very well—a faint pall was starting to thicken against the ceiling—but, given time constraints, this was his only choice.

Judge Norcross had allowed Redpath and Gomez-Larsen a paltry sixty minutes to eat lunch and read the questionnaires of the sixteen jurors who would be individually questioned this afternoon. Even sticking to coffee, Redpath had far too little time. Any fair-minded judge, any judge who had ever tried a major criminal case himself, would have allowed them to study the questionnaires overnight and come back in the morning. Redpath was furious at being jammed by this judicial greenhorn. A man’s life, a possibly innocent man’s life, could be lost for this baloney.

Too much pique at a judge’s stupidity or meanness, Redpath knew, would only weaken his focus, but he could not help picking at this scab of injury. All the pressure, the judge had told them blandly, was in the cause of “moving the case along” and “not unduly inconveniencing the jurors.” From what Redpath could see from his frantically hasty review of almost two hundred pages of questionnaires, precious few of the jurors would be in jeopardy of any real inconvenience anyway, since most of them would probably be excused (as the phrase went) “for cause.” In seven of the thirteen questionnaires he’d read so far, including the one filled out by the panel’s only black juror, the writer had claimed utter inability to sit for the four to six weeks this trial would take. It was maddening, but, really, who could blame them?

There was a double rap on the door, and the white-haired court security officer leaned into the room. Redpath released the cigarette to begin its five-floor plunge to the sidewalk and pulled his hand inside, praying there was nothing flammable below.

“Couple of people to see you,” the CSO said. He sniffed and looked up at the ceiling. “You aren’t smoking, are you?”

“Smoking?”

Redpath innocently ran his left hand through his hair, feeling something like panic. An interruption right now was a disaster. In just a few minutes, he would need to be back in court, and he hadn’t even looked at two of the questionnaires. Every single second was precious.

But the anxious, exhausted face of his client’s wife was already visible around the CSO’s shoulder; she and her older brother, Lucas, were pressing into the room. The officer backed out of the way, angling another suspicious glance upward, and closed the door behind them.

“I’m really sorry to bother you,” Sandra said. “I just needed to know, you know, how things were going.”

“So far the day hasn’t gone too bad,” Redpath said. “Can we talk tonight? You’re catching me at a tough moment.” He glanced at his watch.

“I tried to tell her,” Lucas said, sighing and lobbing Redpath an apologetic look.

Both Sandra and Lucas were well dressed. Sandra wore a maroon suit, tastefully set off with a navy-and-gold scarf. She’d lost a shocking amount of weight since Redpath’s first meeting with her, and the suit’s tailoring flattered her model-slim body. Lucas, in an expensive charcoal suit, regimental tie, and heavy gold cufflinks, looked the picture of the successful corporate lawyer.

“So. Everything’s okay?” Sandra’s her whole posture begged for some kind of reassurance.

“Sandy,” Lucas said quietly, “come on.”

“So far, so good.” Redpath made a show of looking at his watch again and smiled up at Sandra distractedly.

For the first time, however, Redpath took a good look at Moon’s wife, and he could not help but feel sympathy for her. It was as though her pretty, smooth face had been printed on cloth, and someone had grabbed a fistful of it and twisted. One of her eyes seemed lower than the other, and her nose looked enlarged, almost bulbous. As she bent toward Redpath, her lips were parted; they seemed to be holding themselves in readiness to speak but still waiting for instructions from her brain about what words to use. Sandra looked at him intently for a few seconds, and then, as sudden as a sneeze, a sob leaped up from her chest, and she covered her face with both hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said through her fingers. “I’m sorry. But … to see him sitting there like that.” She shuddered, still hiding her eyes, and a tear began working its way down the outside of her hand onto her wrist. “To see him like that. With all those people staring at him. Like some kind of animal.”

“Sandy,” Lucas whispered. He put his hand on her arm.

“I knew it would be awful, but I didn’t know how awful.” She was shaking and taking deep breaths.

Redpath dropped the questionnaire onto a pile on the floor and stood up. Bending over his two visitors, he placed his hands on Sandra’s shoulders.

“You know what I need you to do?” Redpath asked in his oil drum voice. “You know what Moon needs you to do? He needs you to take care of yourself, Sandy. You need to eat. You need to sleep. Do you hear me?” He squeezed her shoulders.

“Mmm-hmm.” Sandra took her hands away from her face, nodding and wiping the tears.

Redpath looked down, shaking her shoulders gently for emphasis. “If he sees you like this, it will make everything ten times harder for him. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Okay.” She inhaled deeply and swallowed, then nodded again. Her trembling subsided.

“I know it’s awful,” Redpath said, patting her shoulders. “Believe me, I know exactly how awful it is. But all we can do is not make it worse.” He sat down again and picked up the questionnaire. “Now I badly need the next few minutes, all right? We’ll talk tonight.”

Sandra nodded without saying anything, and Lucas steered her out of the room. By the time the door clicked, Redpath was already lost in Number Twelve’s description of the extent of her exposure to pretrial publicity. It took a few seconds for him to realize that Lucas had remained in the room.

“I’d like a moment of your time. Privately, if I might,” he said.

“Okay,” Redpath said impatiently. “But not now.” He paused and softened his tone. “You must know how it is.”

Lucas looked steadily at the old lawyer in his rumpled suit and unshined shoes. He looked up at the ceiling and took in the aroma of stale cigarette smoke.

“Fine,” he said. “Tonight then.”

As he turned to go, there was another knock.

Redpath slapped the questionnaire onto his knee furiously and exploded, “Christ Almighty!” But this time it was the courtroom deputy, Ruby Johnson.

“Showtime! His Highness is coming back in five minutes. I’m rounding everybody up.” She crinkled her nose. “Uh-oh! Here’s a warning, Bill, free of charge: If Tom Dickinson catches you polluting his conference room …”

“Me?”

“He’s a fine, kindhearted gentleman, but let’s just say I would not provoke him, you know?”

Redpath sighed and began gathering up the questionnaires. Lucas Cummings hurried out of the room and down the hall to catch up with his little sister, who’d managed to get herself into such a world of trouble.

22

A
ssistant U.S. Attorney Lydia Gomez-Larsen sat in the paneled courtroom at counsel table offering up an expression of well-practiced calm and waiting for the judge to make his entry. The juror questionnaires sat in a neat pile in front of her, arranged in order, one through sixteen. Next to the pile, and exactly parallel to it, lay her yellow pad, with her notes printed out for each juror. In the middle of the pad, at a forty-five degree angle, was her black Sharpie. Like Redpath, she’d skipped lunch and felt a little sick.