The Laws of our Fathers (8 page)

    For both our sakes, I allowed Nikki to skip the car pool and dropped her at school myself. That left me twenty minutes behind our frantic morning schedule. 'Great thing about this job,' one of the old-timers told me when I was sworn in. 'They can't start without you.' Yet I have always regarded a full courtroom waiting for a missing judge as a token of arrogance. I rush through the back door of the courtroom onto the bench, not quite prepared for the scene that greets me. It feels as if both the lights and the heat have been turned up. Beyond the bulletproof divider, the gallery is thick with court buffs and other citizen-onlookers: sickos, retirees, court watchers, and the thoughtfully curious drawn in primal wonder to the act of murder. Within the well of the room, extra deputies in uniform mill idly at the periphery, while the many reporters crowd the limited space available. The jury box must remain empty, awaiting the prospective venire, which will be summoned shortly. Instead, Annie has created a makeshift press gallery, positioning folding chairs on the near side of the yellowish oak panels of the jury box. The best seats, in the front row, have been occupied by three sketch artists, who have laid their pastels at their feet.

    As soon as she catches sight of me, Marietta cries out her 'Hear ye's,' bringing court to order. The room is caught up in the commotion of hundreds of persons shifting to their feet, papers rattling, conversations adjourned in a final buzz.

    
'People versus Nile Eddgar,
,' Marietta cries out, when we all are seated. 'For trial.' To my surprise, my stomach rebounds with the words. Two of the artists begin work immediately, eyes revolving between their pads and me. On the one earlier occasion I saw a rendering of Judge Sonny on T V - during a heated divorce case - I was disturbed by the severe look the artist gave me, my even-featured face grave with shadow. Surely I'm better-looking and lighter-hearted than that?

    Meanwhile, the participants stalk slowly toward the oak podium at the focus of the room: Gina Devore from the State Defender's Office, a sprite in Ann Taylor, accompanied by a burly black man who must be the lawyer from D C she said would appear for trial. From the other table advances Tommy Molto, the Homicide supervisor, who has elected to try this case, a rarity for him these days. He too has a companion, Rudy Singh, a slender, inexpressibly beautiful young man with a delicate way and a musical Indian accent, who was assigned to this courtroom only last week to handle more routine matters. Finally, behind all of them, somewhat shyly, stands Nile Eddgar. He is more than six feet, far taller than I remember his father, and looms over both Molto and Gina. When he was last here, for arraignment, his hair was pony-tailed and not especially clean. Since then, he's shaved and had a dramatic haircut too, albeit not a particularly becoming one. He looks as if he simply bargained to let the barber cut off half. Charged up by winter static, his brownish hair Christmas-trees about his ears, resembling some hapless Dutch boy's. Nonetheless, as the resident emblem of authority, I'm pleased Nile has made these concessions to respectability, even if off the bench I'd regard the same gestures as silly or conventional.

    Back in the lockup, keys are jangling and voices are raised. The transport deputies have been searching desperately for the prisoner, and a peal of relieved laughter sails into the courtroom when they realize he is not in custody but on bail. The lawyers state their name for the record.

    'Your Honor,' says Gina, 'may I introduce Mr Turtle from

    Washington, DC Her motion to substitute counsel and Turtle's appearance form ascend, handed up from Gina to Marietta to me: H. Tariq Turtle. At arraignment, I allowed the State Defender to stay on the case while Nile attempted to find his own attorney. An out-of-towner is welcome, since that will avoid the sticky conflict issues that might arise if Nile was the probation officer for other clients of his lawyer. I note aloud that Turtle has a local attorney number, meaning he's admitted to practice in this state.

    'Took the bar here, Your Honor, before I moved out to DC.'

    'Welcome back, then.' I allow the motion, and Gina, tiny and energetic, disembarks at once for the half a dozen other courtrooms where she has cases up. 'Mr Turtle,' I say, 'help me with your first name, so I don't mangle it when I introduce you to the jury. Tariq?'

    The question startles him. He stares up briefly, then pronounces the name. 'It's just on the license, Judge, I don't go by that much anymore. The second syllable's like "reek." As in odor.'

    He smiles at himself. The message is unmistakable: Don't worry, I'm not that way. He's magnificently groomed, a large man of substantial weight, his bulk gracefully draped in a splendid suit of a greenish Italian wool. He is all soft contours, a half-head of Afro hair, roundly sculpted, and a beard trimmed close to a broad cheeky face. He shows the slick courtroom poise of a big-city criminal defense lawyer. This is a man who has stood at many podia, making jokes at his own expense. For the moment, ingratiating himself, he is radiant as the sun. But the worm will surely turn. Between a judge, laboring to rule properly, and the defense lawyer, always criticizing her for the sake of appeal, there is a natural rivalry. The process starts at once.

    'If the court please, I have a motion.' From beneath his arm, Turtle slowly removes a newspaper, as if revealing a concealed weapon.

    'Before you start, Mr Turtle, let me spread one matter of record again.' I begin an oration about my past relations with the Eddgar family, but Turtle shakes his head amiably.

    'We're grateful for your sensitivity, Your Honor, but there's no problem. Mr Eddgar acknowledges his past acquaintance with the court, without objection. As, of course, do I.'

    'You do?' I ask. I have never been good at hiding my emotions. Instead, since taking this job, I have practiced letting them emerge with a certain confidence, as if I figure it was worth getting to forty-seven to know what I do about myself. Even so, I often find myself undone, as I am now, by the dumb impulsive things that escape me. I am still ruing my lack of control when, unexpectedly, I see what I have missed. Despite my resolve to show presence of mind, I find my mouth has actually fallen open.

    It's Hobie. Ho-bie!

    'Forgive me, Mr Turtle. It's been some time.'

    'Contact lenses, Judge,' he says. 'The name. The beard.'

    'The belly,' I hear from near the jury box, a lowered voice that nonetheless carries distinctly in the angled contours of the room. A few of the reporters join in collegial laughter, but it is brought to an immediate conclusion by a single astonishing clack of Annie's gavel on the block she stations on the lower tiers of the bench. You could probably do case studies about what happens when you give a person subjected to a lifetime of ethnic suppression a gavel and a uniform. Annie maintains relentless decorum. She does not permit reading, talking, chewing gum. Even the young gangbangers who come to catch a glimpse of their homies are forced to remove their hats. Now she scalds the offending reporter with a look so furious that he's dropped his face into his hands in shame. Hobie, too, has turned, arms raised imploringly, shaking his head until the man dares to look up again and I recognize Seth Weissman. He scoots himself half upright on the chair arms, faces me, and mouths, 'I'm sorry.' I find my jaw slackened again.

    It isn't really seeing Seth that's shocking. He's come to mind often enough with thoughts about the case that I'm vaguely prepared for his presence. It's his appearance that stuns me. My first impulse is that he's been sick. But that, I recognize, is my dismal inner urge to pull everyone down to my level. His injury is benign: he's gone bald, a smooth pink dome that nevertheless strikes a note of bathos on a man who used to wear his dishwater hair behind the shoulder. Otherwise, he appears only incrementally reduced by time, thicker in the middle, and still a little too tall for his slender limbs. He has a long, male face, nose-dominated, now more fleshy at the jaw. Gravity has done its work. He has lost color. The same things I would say about myself.

    'Mr Molto,' I ask, when I regain myself, 'does the court's prior acquaintance with defense counsel have any impact on your position regarding my presiding?'

    Molto stands with small nail-bitten hands folded before him, exhibiting his customary impatience. We have been over the issue now half a dozen times.

    'None,' he says distinctly.

    In the meantime, my eyes cheat back to Seth in the jury box. What's he doing here? I've finally wondered. But the answer seems obvious. A column. About coincidence. And serendipity. He will write about the strange whims of fate, how the figures from his past have reappeared with everyone written into odd new roles, as bizarrely misplaced as the characters in a dream.

    'Your Honor,' says Turtle. 'My motion? I take it Your Honor saw this morning's
Tribune?'
The news I get generally comes to me on NPR on the three mornings I drive the kindergarten car pool. Sometimes late at night, in moments of supreme indulgence, after Nikki is bedded down, I'll take a glass of wine in the bathtub and turn the pages of the
Tribune
or the national edition of
The New York Times.
Most evenings, though, I am too burned out for more than rattled reflections on the day that's passed and the hundreds of tasks undone at home and in court, counted, instead of sheep, as I drift off.

    Now as I open the paper that's been handed up, I confront a headline stretching across the top ofthe front page,
state: pol's son meant to kill him, not mom.
Trial Starts Today,
the kicker reads. The byline is Stew Dubinsky's. Exclusive to the

    
Trib.
I scan: 'Sources close to the investigation… murder conspiracy trial of Nile Eddgar starting today… Prosecuting Attorney's Office plans to offer evidence that the intended victim of the plot was not the Kindle County Superior Court probation officer's mother, June Eddgar, who was gunned down by gang members on September 7, but his father, State Senator Loyell Eddgar… mistake in identity is believed to have occurred when Mrs Eddgar borrowed her former husband's car that morning.'

    By now, I've piled a hand on my forehead. God, the calculations that accumulate. Eddgar! I find this news unsettling, most of all perhaps, because in a single stroke it feels far more likely that the strange young man before me may actually be guilty. At last, I nod to Hobie to proceed.

    'Your Honor,' he begins in a resonant courtroom bass; he grips the podium with both hands. The impression is of some opera star about to hit a booming note. 'Your Honor, I have been trying cases for twenty-some years now. And I have seen devilish conduct by prosecutors in that time. I have been sandbagged and back-doored and tricked. But to have leaked this kind of incendiary detail to the press on the day we are trying to pick a jury, knowing that this news concerning a prominent citizen is bound to become a page 1 headline and irreparably prejudice the venire against my client -' Hobie does not finish. He smacks his hand against an extra copy of the paper, which he has held up for illustration, and tosses his large head about in embittered disbelief. He goes on to paint a vivid tableau of dozens of citizens in the jury room in the main building, forming firm impressions of the case even as we speak. Most of them, he predicts, with time on their hands and a peculiar interest in what's occurring in the courthouse today, will have read this one-sided account of the state's evidence in the very papers which, ironically, are provided to them free. His rhetoric is overheated, but I have little doubt he's correct and that most of the potential jurors will have seen this story.

    'Your Honor, really,' he concludes, 'how can this man get a fair trial? I must, I have to, I have no choice but to move to dismiss this indictment.' He punctuates his request with a grunt of continuing outrage.

    Molto, chubby in his inexpensive charcoal suit, his wiry, thinning hair barely combed, appears somewhat dumbfounded when I call on him for a response.

    'Judge Klonsky,' he says, ‘I received no notice of this motion. I came here to pick a jury. I have witnesses subpoenaed. This is the kind of last-minute -'

    I decide to save Tommy from himself. 'Mr Molto, let's start from scratch. Is this report fundamentally accurate? Is the state going to contend that it was Nile Eddgar's father who was the actual, intended victim of this crime?'

    Tommy takes a deep breath. He looks forlornly to Rudy Singh, who has taken a seat several feet behind Tommy at the prosecution table, where a diminishing circle of light appears on the oak-toned laminate. Eventually, Molto allows his shoulder to drop.

    'Basically, that's it,' he says. In the courtroom, there is a stir, particularly among the reporters, contending with the fact Dubinsky got it right.

    'So I take it, then, that the senior Mr Eddgar, the defendant's father, Senator Eddgar, will be a witness here?'

    Molto grimaces. I'm asking too many questions, as usual.

    'We expect him to testify for the People,' says Molto. Now there's a real riffle in the press seats. Hard news:
prominent dad to implicate killer son
. Nearby I hear a bracelet jingling, Annie or Marietta, readjusting, caught unawares.

    'And as the intended victim, he, too - Senator Eddgar - is without objection to this court presiding? In spite of our prior acquaintance? Have you taken that up with him?'

    'Judge, it's not a problem.' 'Period,' he seemingly would like to add. Clearly, Tommy has his orders. The mullahs in the PA's Office have met and concluded that Tommy should try the case and I should preside. Slowly, I am beginning to recognize that Molto is not especially content with either prospect. I turn my copy of the
Trib
in Tommy's direction.

    'Now looking at that headline, Mr Molto, I can't pretend to be pleased. You know better, the state knows better, than to try a lawsuit in the newspapers, especially when you're aware that the prospective jurors have not yet been admonished about viewing media accounts of this case. Now -'