The Laws of our Fathers (5 page)

    "The Mayor?'

    The two lawyers both laugh, a peculiar outbreak of sound in the courtroom where everyone else is silent in hopes of getting an idea of what is transpiring beside the bench. When she became a judge, Sonny found she had grown much funnier. In the interval, she ponders what Molto is saying. Hardcore has flipped, turned state' s evidence, which the gangbangers seldom do. It's an interesting development.

    'Look,' she says, 'when you can talk about the case, you call me. This is going to require some discussion.' Sonny is visited by her recurring suspicion: they are setting her up. Somebody is -the cops, the prosecutors, the Chief Judge Brendan Tuohey. They are hoping she'll make a noteworthy mistake, so they can run her out of the building. She gathers her robes, ready again to ascend, then thinks to ask if Molto plans to indict Hardcore and his co-defendant together. Molto nods. It will be her case. She will preside at trial, if the threat of Hardcore's testimony does not persuade whoever engineered the murder to plead guilty. Molto speaks up to detain her.

    'Judge,' he says. His voice has dropped to the very edge of audibility. Even his lips are self-consciously stiffened to defeat the most intrepid of the reporters. 'Judge. Just so you know. It's Nile Eddgar. It's no problem for the People. But so you know. Given what you said.'

    An empty second passes among the three.

    'Wait.' She's come down the last stair. 'Wait. I'm playing catch-up. Let's not be cryptic, Tommy. You're telling me Mr Aires's client, whatever, Hardcore, that he's going to testify that his probation officer, Nile Eddgar, conspired with him to plan this killing of Mr Eddgar's mother?'

    Molto looks at length across his shoulder to the reporters before he answers. 'More or less,' he says. The two lawyers face her without expression, awaiting whatever will come next. Sonny labors an instant with the turmoil. 'We haven't picked him up yet,' Molto says. 'We'll probably get a warrant tomorrow.' It's a secret, he's telling her. She nods two or three times, numbed.

    After the call, she finds Wells and Lubitsch loitering in the inner office. They've placed the draft on her desk, but Lubitsch winds his head back around toward the courtroom as soon as she appears.

    'Average American family, right?' he asks her. 'Apple pie, hot dogs, and Chevrolet, right?' This gloating, the usual cop smugness - us and them - is rankling to Sonny. Only yesterday, Fred Lubitsch would have called Nile a player on his side. With a bare inspection, she signs the warrant and lets the officers go.

    Marietta slinks in about an hour later, having wheeled the morning files across to the main building. She is curious, naturally, about the goings-on at sidebar and utters a startled, dyspeptic groan upon learning of Molto's news about Nile, but shows little other emotion. Marietta has been around.

    'Should I take myself off the case now?' Sonny asks.

    'Cause you knew these folks twenty-five years ago? Hell, who they gonna give the case to, Judge? Everybody else sitting in the Criminal Division knows Nile Eddgar better than you now. You're the junior here, Judge. The other judges? They've all had Nile before them a bunch of times, worked with him, believed his testimony under oath. We've only had him in here but once. And plenty of these judges know the father, too. He ran for controller a couple years back, didn't he? He was at all the dinners. Sides, Judge. A case like this? Nobody's gonna be happy to see it turn up on their calendar.'

    Race. That's what she means. The great unmentionable. That's

    what the case will be about. Black against white. On the street. On the witness stand. In the jury room as well. With the press holding up its magnifying glass throughout. Her colleagues will be convinced that politics, not scruples, led her to dump it. There will be narrow looks in the corridors, colder shoulders. Tuohey, surely, will call.

    'I'd like to hear it. Really. Who wouldn't be intrigued to see what's happened to people decades later? But it feels so - close.' She pauses, waging battle with her own fierce propriety. Is she
afraid
of something, she wonders suddenly.

    'Hell, Judge,' says Marietta. 'This here's bound to be a jury trial anyway. Defense lawyer's gonna wag his finger and say how this gangster can't be believed, when he's puttin all the blame on someone else. We - all seen that a thousand times. Won't be anything for you to decide, except the sentence. Why don't you wait and see, Judge? See what the parties say? Spell it out for them. Like you done today. If it don't bother none of them, no reason it oughta bother you.'

    She's still wavering, but the truth is that Nile won't want her on this case. She saw too much of his family, especially his father. Eddgar in those years was dangerous, cunning, a zealot who some claimed had even sponsored murders. Like father, like son. That's the thought Nile will be afraid of. With a wave, Sonny closes the discussion.

    'We'll do it your way, Marietta. See what the defendant says. It was twenty-five years ago.'

    'Sure,' says Marietta, and then seemingly takes a second to review in her own mind the twisted, long-attenuated connections Sonny has explained. She turns, then turns back with a vague smile, fixed on a predictable thought. 'So your boyfriend went off and got rich and famous and you was young and dumb and let him go?'

    'I suppose.' Sonny laughs. Marietta has long intimated that Sonny has poor instincts for romance, hinting frequently that the judge has not properly renewed her social life.

    'And you don't never hear from him or nothing?'

    'Not in twenty-five years. We had a strange parting.' She smiles a bit, consoling Marietta, if not herself, then catches sight of the clock. 'Shit!' She is late for Nikki.

    ' Shit,' she says again and flies about the chamber stuffing papers she must study overnight into her briefcase. She runs down the hall, cursing herself, and feeling a lurking foreboding, as if this lapse with Nikki is symptomatic of a larger error. Dashing across the windowed gangway that connects the Annex to the main courthouse, she wonders again if she is doing something wrong, capitulating to whatever it is - the titillating yen for foregone things and the hope of being master over what once was daunting

    - that comes with thoughts of the Eddgars and that period in her life. So often in this job there is never a correct decision. Far more frequently than she imagined when she was a law student, or even a practitioner, she chooses, as a judge, the alternative that seems, not right, but simply less wrong. And in some ways, this sense of being maladjusted, in the wrong place, has been a hallmark of her life. She often feels, like those people who believe in astrology, that her life has been driven by mysterious celestial forces. In earlier years, she came and went from things with alarming briskness, leaving men with little warning, passing through three different graduate programs and half a dozen jobs before she landed in law school.

    Even now, she is not certain the bench is really right for her. It was an honor, and a convenient exit from the US Attorney's Office, where she had begun to repeat herself. At the most pragmatic level, becoming a judge met the desperate need of a single mother to control her working hours and, almost as important, kept her in the law. She had tired of the battle hymn of practice, the race going always to the aggressive and the shrewd. It had brought out the Sonny she least liked, the child always secretly wounded, and, as she explained to herself in the most secret way, had forced her to accept the world according to men. After Nikki - after Charlie - she wanted to have a working life that depended not on slick maneuvering and sly positions, but which was anchored instead by kindness, which had some feeling connection to what surged through her when she held her child, the emotions she knew,
knew
were truly the best, the lightest things in life. But is the serious-looking dark-haired woman of fading looks, the Sonny she envisions up on the bench, this person scolding and sentencing the vicious and the woe-torn, is that
her?

    She is alone now, racing along in the strange night world of the central courthouse, with its empty corridors and isolated, purposeful habitues: bail bondsmen, police officers. Her high heels resound along the marble. At this hour, arrests are processed here from across the city. A broad young Hispanic woman in a bold ill-fitting print camps with a far-off look on one of the granite benches positioned just outside the bank of metal detectors. She embraces a child of three or four, who faces her, asleep, black ringlets dampened to one side of her face. They are always here: mothers, babies, families exhausted by trouble, waiting in the wasted hope their men will be bailed, acquitted, somehow freed.

    Racing by, Sonny smiles in fleeting communion. Stirred by this momentary connection, she finds urgent visions of Nikki beckoning to her again. She foresees the humbling scene which is waiting, Nikki a straggler at Jackie's, and Sonny apologizing, vowing nevermore, even as Jackie insists it's not a problem. It is the sight of Nikki herself that will be worst: already in her coat and backpack, wiping her nose on her coat sleeve, gripping Sonny's hand by the fingers and urging her to suspend apologies and to leave; that little life, ragged with the toil of her own day and the worry of a prolonged separation. Within Sonny, there is always the same recriminating thought: How many times did Zora do this to her? How many thousand? It is startling to find how near at hand the pain remains, still fully memorized, how clear the recollection of the occasions when her mother was gone. Gone to meetings. Gone to organize. Gone to touch someone else with all those grand important yearnings: for freedom. For dignity.

    So this is who she is, Her Honor, Judge Sonia Klonsky. The sheer momentum of her passions has her dashing a few steps down the street toward her car. The night has entered that moment of magic dwindling light when the sky almost clamors with drama and perspective drains, so that the buildings, figures, trees, the small circling birds, the Center City looming beyond, seem to stand on top of one another in the reduced proportions of a diorama. Neon promises glow cheaply in the storefronts of the tatty bond emporia across the street: 'Bail. Fast. E-Z terms.' Gripped by the heartsore cycles of her life, any life, the vexing complications of this case, and the perpetual anguish that seeps like a pollutant into the air around the courthouse, she rushes on. She rushes with high feeling and a sudden silvery fragment of happiness lacing her heart. She is thinking of her child.

    

    

    Seth

    When the electronic bolt is disengaged admitting them to the guard desk at the Kindle County Jail, Seth Weissman finds that Hobie Turtle and he are not the sole civilians. A delivery man from Domino's, a skinny guy everyone calls Kirk, is also there with lunch.

    ' Yo,' he tells the three correctional officers and shoves off, counting his tip. The bolt is shot again, a potent sound of slamming metal, stark as a rifle shot, and Kirk departs. On the door a sheet of bulletproof glass has been mounted, but it is the bars beneath which occupy Seth's attention. They are squared off and thick with rust-resistant paint, a depleted shade of beige which is the color of everything here - the walls, the floor, even the reinforced-steel guard desk.

    'Warden's got to clear any press interviews, man.' A guard waves his fingers, tainted with pizza grease, over the form Hobie has been filling out.

    'Nobody doin any interviews, man,' says Hobie.

    'Says right here,' 'Michael Frain. Profession: Journalist." ' The guard looks from the form to Seth twice, as if to assess whether the description fits.

    'No, no, here's what I'm sayin now,' says Hobie. 'This young fella, your inmate, Nile Eddgar, he asked Mr Frain here to help him find counsel and he chose me. Okay? So he's part of the attorney visit.'

    After another go-round the captain is summoned, an erect black man who looks longingly at the pizza but shows the discipline to first finish his business with them. Hobie holds forth with characteristic bluster, and the captain, wary of messing with the press or simply hungry, lets them go. They pass from one brick guardhouse to another. Their wallets are checked in a small tin locker, and another solemn correctional officer pats them down.

    Then they are inside, enclosed in a small admitting area. The barred door with its lock, thick as a book, clangs home irrevocably behind them. Hobie takes in the sick look on Seth's face.

    'Number 47 said to Number 3,' he quips, amused. He is quoting 'Jailhouse Rock.'
Number 47/said to Number 3/You 're the cutest jailbird/I ever did see.
On the way over from the airport, Hobie did a complete head-trip. 'If we get on those catwalks, man, stay on the rail, don't go near the cells, those mean dudes will grab your tie, man, just for a hoot, they'll knot it around the bars and watch you strangle yourself screamin "Help!" You'll keep 'em laughin for a week.' He roared at the thought. Although they are 1,000 miles from Hobie's home in DC, this is still his world.

    Another guard points them along a path through the yard. The jail hulks about them, seven red-brick structures, remnants of the institutional era in American architecture. These buildings could be factories or, these days, schools, especially with the heavy chain-link that cages each window. They are set down amid acres of asphalt, the sole greenery the weeds and lichens worn but still persisting in the gaps between the path's paving bricks. At the

    perimeter, stout walls with freshened mortar joints are topped by nasty whorls of razor wire.

    'You think he's okay in here?' Seth asks.

    'Might be. Might not be. We're gone know in a minute.'

    'Oh my,' says Seth, 'aren't you the hard case? You know, it won't dent your armor, Hobie, if you show just a little concern about your client.'