Chambermaid

  “Ow!” Nelson squealed again, before his ear was freed by one of his security guards. His other guard carted off Robert Nussbaum. Two courtroom police officers hovered in the back behind an American flag. So much for our bravest.

  “Order! Order!” Judge Fleck yelled, returning from his hiding place under the bench. To their credit, both Judge Adams and Friedman hadn’t moved from their chairs, like captains unwilling to desert their judicial ships.

  “Holy shit—isn’t that the guy we saw with the mayor?” Kevin asked Betsy within earshot of us.

  “Shut up, Kevin,” Betsy said and slapped his knee. “Just shut up.”

  “Did you hear Dell Nelson’s voice?” Matthew asked.

  “Order!”

  It took another five minutes for order to be restored. A woman sitting a few feet from Dell Nelson had fainted. She came to, saying, “Nine-eleven” over and over again. The relevance of September 11 was not immediately clear to anyone.

  “Oh my God, that’s Izzie, Dell’s sister—I recognize her from the Time story!” Matthew whispered as the paramedics hauled her away.

  “I apologize, Ms. Northum, for the disruption,” Judge Fleck said, smoothing his new haircut. Ms. Northum seemed to be the only person, aside from Adams and Friedman, who wasn’t remotely phased by the drama. “And we, of course, will let you resume where you left off.”

  Something about the public outburst had changed the dynamic on the bench. The judges allowed Ms. Northum to complete her argument largely uninterrupted before introducing David Kang, the attorney general of Pennsylvania to argue for the state.

  “Good morning and may it please the court,” he started. I wondered why lawyers never changed the introduction—just for a little variety. Maybe “Greetings” or “Good day.” And what did “may it please the court” mean anyway?

  “We’ve certainly gotten an earful today,” Mr. Kang said, giggling nervously. Nobody else did. Laughing at a lawyer’s joke (if bad) during oral arguments was a felony in some states.

  “Well then”—he cleared his throat—“we are here today because of judicial deference. Deference that is afforded—”

  “What about Drexel v. California?” Judge Friedman didn’t wait long to drop that one.

  “Well Judge Free—Friedman”—he fumbled with some papers—“Drexel is a ninth circuit case and thus not binding on this court.”

  “I don’t need a lesson in federal courts, Mr. Kang. I am a judge,” Friedman retorted. It was a good thing she cleared that up for the audience. “And to make it easier for you, let’s assume that Drexel was a third circuit case. How could you differentiate it from the case we have before us now?”

  “Um, if you look at, um—”

  “Oh, please, Judge Friedman,” Linda Adams butted in, “for every Drexel there is another case from another circuit finding that the lawyer did not err. This is an issue of applying facts to the law. We are not bound by Drexel and therefore it is a nonissue.”

  Mr. Kang breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Well, that’s not totally true,” Judge Greenman whispered, “Drexel is remarkably similar to the current case.” Greenman’s nickname (or, actually, behind-his-back name) was “Silent Ted.” As he rarely spoke from the bench, nobody dared to interrupt him now. “Of course, the actual facts of the case were different. No two cases are ever exactly alike. The lawyers’ behavior in both cases is almost identical. Both lawyers slept through much of the trial and sentencing. In fact, Mr. Evans slept even more than Drexel’s lawyer. Both lawyers were badgered by their clients’ friends and family to allow them to testify to spare their clients’ lives, and they did not use them as mitigation witnesses. Both lawyers strangely allowed their clients to take the stand and basically left them there to dry. As such, for my sake and just for the sake of argument, let’s use Judge Friedman’s hypothetical, that Drexel did come from this court. What would be the outcome today if Drexel were a third circuit case, Mr. Kang?”

  The crowd hushed. Mr. Kang looked up, down, left, right in search of the answer. Linda Adams sat silently, exhibiting Herculean restraint. Time stood still.

  “The outcome would be the same,” Mr. Kang whispered.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Kang, we couldn’t hear that,” Judge Friedman said, leaning forward and cupping her ear.

  “Sorry. I said that if Drexel had been decided by this court and not the ninth circuit, then you all would be compelled to give Mr. Nelson a resentencing.”

  The court went wild.

  Dell Nelson clapped to himself. I could have sworn that even his security guard looked pleased.

  “Order! Order!” Judge Fleck screamed for the second time in less than ten minutes. The en banc had devolved into a bad rerun of Night Court.

  Order came and went during the remainder of Mr. Kang’s deflated arguments, which were buoyed only momentarily by a few well-rehearsed questions from Judges Adams and Fleck.

  “Thank you, Ms. Northum and Mr. Kang, for your arguments today,” Judge Fleck announced before banging his gavel. As the judges filed out of the courtroom, chatter erupted.

  “Holy shit,” Matthew exclaimed, “today was worth every second of agony from this year!”

  “I completely agree,” I said, laughing out loud.

  “Well, it doesn’t really even seem like Robert Nussbaum’s involvement with Mayor Adams even matters at this point, right?” Evan added. “I mean, there’s no way Nelson’s not getting a rehearing now.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Betsy interrupted. “You all—none of us—has any clue what’s going to happen once the judges are by themselves, without all this nonsense,” she said, nodding toward the audience—in her mind, the hoi polloi, the masses, the riffraff.

  Matthew and I collected the judge’s belongings from the bench and delivered them to Judge Fleck’s chambers, where the entire court was convening to discuss the case. We quickly placed them in front of Friedman’s nameplate and managed to scurry off and out of the courthouse unseen.

  The indoor drama paled in comparison to what awaited us outside. Ten thousand microphones jammed into our faces as we attempted to get lunch.

  Is it true that the attorney general admitted defeat? CNN.

  Is it true that there was a 9/11 scare? Fox News.

  Did the dead guy’s brother really eat the killer’s ear? Inside Edition.

  Perhaps there was something to be said about letting the media inside the courtroom.

  Matthew took my hand as we plowed through the mayhem. Just as we were in the clear, Joe’s Shanghai in sight, I spotted a short, round balding man talking to Anderson Cooper in an alleyway.

  “Matthew, I just want to get a good look at Coop, OK?” I whispered, standing a few feet behind the camera.

  “So, please state your name into the camera again,” the Coop said.

  “My name is Tippard Evans and I served as Dell Nelson’s lawyer in the Peter Nussbaum case.”

  Oh my God—the Tipper! The Coop was a genius—how did he find the Tipper?!

  “As I said, I’m in my sixtieth day of being awake,” the Tipper said, opening his eyes widely, “and it feels great.”

  “So, how, um, how did you get awake?”

  “I’m in this program, called Staying Awake. It’s a twelve-step thing and . . .” The Tipper spotted me. “Excuse me, miss, miss—this is an exclusive with CNN, you need to leave.”

  “Stop rolling,” Anderson Cooper ordered the cameraman and turned to face his intruder. “Yeah, we’re kind of in the middle of something, so could you please excuse us?”

  I stood frozen. The Tipper. Talking to Coop? In an alleyway? A 12-step sleeping group?

  “Sorry about her,” Matthew said. He grabbed my arm and yanked me into Joe’s Shanghai. “Sheila, are you OK?”

  “I, um, I’m fine. It’s just surreal, I guess. The whole thing.”

  “Yes, it’s true. I am truly beginning to think that fact is indeed stranger than fiction.” Matthew shook his head, ordered our usual s
oup dumplings—and then made it a double. It’d been a long morning.

  Chapter Twenty

  The judges tied.

  According to Judge Friedman, Judge Fleck was able to convince five others that allowing the Drexel opinion to dictate the outcome of the case would be akin to taking orders from the ninth circuit, the judicial equivalent of getting bossed around by your twin sibling. It was bad enough having the Supreme Court tell them what to do; the chief judge of the third circuit wouldn’t take such crap from anyone lesser.

  I’d prematurely anticipated victory, foolishly assuming that reason might trump ego. I wasn’t alone—not since O.J. Simpson had a courtroom provided such fodder for the press. MSNBC finagled a fifteen-second clip of Dell Nelson getting in the Department of Corrections car. He was timidly grabbing his ear, whispering, “Ow” as his security guard gently escorted him into the back. Every network bought the rights to the video and played it on repeat. It was tough to see how such a man could be a “murderous animal,” something Robert Nussbaum kept screaming on his way out of the courthouse, flanked by police officers. This, too, was caught on tape and frequently juxtaposed with Dell Nelson’s earache. Add to that the Coop’s exclusive interview with the Tipper, who’d admitted to a sleeping problem, and the latest CNN poll had 62 percent of Americans demanding a resentencing. Heck, many were demanding a retrial altogether.

  As a result, Linda Adams found herself in a most precarious situation. Being tough on crime and tough on the Ear Whisperer had suddenly become mutually exclusive. But she couldn’t publicly change her mind—nobody liked a wishy-washy Supreme Court nominee.

  Well, that’s not totally true. Judge Friedman was positively giddy. A week after the hearings, the New York Times ran a picture of Dell Nelson clutching his ear. To his right was a photo of Friedman, to his left, one of Adams. The caption: “A Deadly Match Point: Friedman v. Adams.”

  “Good morning, law clerks,” the judge said, breezing into our clerks cave holding the paper. “The Nelson case is looking rilly rilly good.” She greeted Roy and Janet and proceeded to her office. Because the judges had tied, the past week had been spent with each judge lobbying the other to switch his or her vote. To the outside world—silence. Nothing fueled speculation like silence.

  Linda Adams was apoplectic. She seemed like the murderer now. Ironically, in order to save her nomination, she needed to save Dell Nelson, something she’d so emphatically fought against over the past sixth months. Kevin said she was secretly begging two of her best friends on the court to switch their votes, votes she’d relentlessly courted prior to the en banc.

  “Sheila, hey, ah, he called, the clerk called,” Evan whispered to me behind my cubicle. “Grab Matthew and meet me in the back.” I followed his orders.

  “So, Sheila—seems you have a future, if not in the law, in investigative journalism. You were right—this Nussbaum guy has been funneling money to Mayor Adams’s campaigns. Three times the amount that should have gotten Adams recused from the get-go. Anyway, Judge Fleck should be alerting the rest of the court any minute now. Adams’s vote is no good.”

  “So the tie’s been broken!” I smiled.

  “We won!” Matthew hugged me. “That poor guy will get another shot.”

  “Sheba! Martha!” All the good press had somehow managed to increase the judge’s vocal capacity. The building shook.

  In the third week of June, Justice Linda Adams, along with her law clerks, moved to Washington. She’d been confirmed by a wide margin in the Senate.

  Mayor Adams’s campaign assumed full responsibility for its “negligent oversight” and “faulty donor reporting,” thereby absolving Linda Adams of any appearance of wrongdoing (and killing Joe Adams’s chances of running for governor one day). As it was, her belated recusal from the Nelson case at once silenced the press on her alleged insensitivity and started her confirmation hearings. Remarkably, Friedman’s quest to derail Adams’s nomination gave Dell a second chance at life and ensured Adams’s life tenure on the Supreme Court. Talk about twisted fate.

  Adams asked her current clerks to stay on for her first year on the Supreme Court, proving that that best things do happen to the worst people. While I was happy for Kevin, it made my skin crawl to think that Betsy would be penning the law of the land. Even worse was that Brian had scored a clerkship with Justice Breyer. The grand finale was that after completing their clerkships, Betsy and Brian would both be recruited to become managing partners at a law firm, teach at Yale, perhaps govern a Baltic state. Former Supreme Court law clerks ran the world.

  It didn’t help that Bob died two weeks after Justice Adams’s promotion. I’d been praying (and even lit a candle) that he’d last another month, until I was safely back in New York and one of the judge’s new maids was sitting in my cubicle. Funny—almost a year earlier, I’d found myself haggling on the phone with her former law clerks, the folks I’d labeled as “jerks” for not staying an extra week so that I could enjoy one measly week of vacation after the bar exam, before the clerkship. Now I understood.

  Yoko Oshima from Stanford, my replacement for the upcoming year, had called a few months back asking me the same thing. I told her pointblank that I’d be out of there on the first of August. Could I stay an extra week so she could “decompress” after the bar exam? No, sorry. What about a few days so she could drive and not fly from Palo Alto to Philadelphia? Sorry, not possible. I could only imagine what she had to say about me to her friends on the West Coast.

  My name would be cleared soon enough. Next year, Stanford Yoko would be pulling the same shit with the judge’s next pack of chambermaids. That is, if she didn’t quit first. But at least she and her coclerks wouldn’t have to deal with the biggest three-ring circus of all: SHIVAH.

  In the Jewish tradition, family members “sit shivah,” for the seven days following death, in the home of the deceased. Basically, you were to receive visitors, mourners, etcetera. It should have come as no surprise that Fried-man’s shivah universe involved neither sitting nor her home but, instead, screaming in the torture chamber. She “barked shivah.” As for the rest of us, we desperately wanted to join Bob. The judge had planned for a single day of mourning, one week after Bob passed away. She appointed me shivah coordinator (“Sheera, we rilly rilly have lots to do with shee-vah! Now get to it!”).

  My job was to order the food and flowers and contact all friends, family, and colleagues. While the judge had minimal family and friends, unless you counted Roderick, her hairdresser, Bob apparently had gazillions (or about forty). Calling them all within a few days was a little tricky as a quantitative and qualitative matter, considering that I was still not allowed to use the phone. But I’d found a way around this little snafu. I moved Matthew to the back, where Pregnant Kate used to sit and where he could furtively go through Bob’s Rolodex.

  Kate had left a week earlier, presumably to give birth. We still hadn’t heard from her. I had a feeling I’d never see or speak to her again, since she managed to evade my request for her contact information. I couldn’t blame her, though. I had no intention of leaving my forwarding address in chambers. Heck, I’d even considered joining the Witness Protection Program at the end of year. Maybe getting a time-share in Dick Cheney’s underground bunker. But there was no time for such considerations now; Sheera had a shee-vah to plan.

  Medieval Roy was in charge of the flowers. Though he’d proven himself to be a disastrous green thumb during the year, flowers still seemed a safer bet than food. I’d heard enough stories about what he and his medieval comrades ate on the weekends. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that he said: “Hey, Sheila, Matt, did you guys know that for Dudley’s feasts in 1575, ten oxen were eaten each day?”

  Desperately wanting to be a part of the judge’s personal life, Janet was overjoyed that I’d delegated the food to her. It was the least I could do. The menu so far: tongue, whitefish salad, pickled herring. I shuddered to think where the pickled fish would end up. Certainly not on Evan, who’d s
teadfastly refused to participate in anything funereal on the judge’s behalf.

  It was day three of “sitting” shivah and already this sitting had elicited more screaming than all the other sittings combined. I’d just finished appeasing Roy after a “mean florist” yelled at him when Matthew’s phone rang. Since he was in the back trying to reach Uncle Henry and Cousin Mort, I answered. It was Heidi.

  “Hey, you must be Sheila. I’ve heard so much about you.” The voice was sophisticated rather than cheesy. In a minute flat, Heidi shattered my image of her in a paisley sweater-vest and hairsprayed bangs. Suddenly, I felt like a pickled fish.

  “Um, ah”—jeez, though Pregnant Kate wouldn’t leave her e-mail address, she seemed to have left her mild speech impediment—“um, hey Heidi. Um, I’ve heard lots about you, too.”

  “Ah, well then, is Matty around?” I stumbled to the back to retrieve “Matty,” but he was nowhere to be found.

  “Um, Heidi, he must have just stepped out. Can I have him call you back?”

  “Sure, that’d be great, Sheila,” she said, sighing loudly. “Does he seem OK to you today?”

  “Yeah, he seems fine, why?” Fine was putting it mildly. I’d never seen Matthew in such a good mood. He’d arrived at work that morning with bagels and coffee for everyone, including Roy and Janet. Shortly thereafter, he’d squeezed my shoulder, announced he’d find Cousin Mort “come hell or high water,” and traipsed to the back.

  Heidi started sniffling. “Well,” she said, “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you. We, we broke up last night.” My head started spinning. Why hadn’t Matthew told me? He’d spent days, weeks, months discussing the breakup and when it finally happened—bagels?

  “Wow. Heidi, I, I don’t even know what to say.” I tried sounding the exact opposite of how I felt—namely, ecstatic. “I, um—”

  “It’s OK, Sheila. You don’t have to say anything. Matty’s been trying to do this for some time but I just wouldn’t let him. He’d say he wasn’t happy and I’d say we could work it out and on and on and then finally last night”—she was freely crying now—“he said he was in love with someone else and that there was nothing he could do about it and there was nothing further for us to work out.”