The Judge

by Steve Martini

  So professional that their books are now inscribed in fading ink on the back of barroom napkins. Just the sort of records of account Lano would favor.

  “I don’t think you have to worry,” he says. “The grand jury is off on a giant circle jerk. They’ve got nothing. On this skimming thing—the union dues.” He waves a hand, loose-wristed across the surface of his desk, as if to sweep the allegations off the edge.

  “You sound like the voice of experience,” I say. “Have you talked with the grand jury in their little room?”

  He gives me a look like “Yeah, right. And I’m gonna tell you.” He leans forward in his chair, his eyes little slits, some moment of truth in the offing.

  “Tell me, Counselor, what kind of a deal were you trying to cut with the judge—for Tony’s testimony?”

  My moment of truth, not his.

  “What kind of a platter were you serving us up on?”

  “Chef’s secret,” I tell him. “Client privilege,” which Tony seems to have already waived by unburdening himself on Lano’s shoulder.

  “Sounds to me like the blue plate special,” he says. “Fricasseed friends.” He looks up at his associates. “Lucky for us Tony has a higher sense of loyalty.”

  “As you say, lucky for you,” I tell him.

  “You’re getting into very deep water,” he says. “Much deeper than you realize.”

  “Good thing I can swim.”

  “Dog-paddling in a stream of shit can get awfully tiresome,” he says.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I tell him.

  “Most people don’t until they drown.”

  Death by immersion in fecal matter, just the sort of lofty allegory Lano would aspire to.

  “I might be concerned, but in this place of your visions, I’m sure you’re the lifeguard,” I tell him.

  One of the guys behind him actually catches himself laughing, until he looks at his boss and notices that Lano is not.

  “Hey, why do we have to throw rocks?” he says.

  Suddenly there’s a lot of grace here, a change of tone, like a break in the clouds on a stormy day. Broad sunshine expressions and gestures with the hands, as if he would pump this light up my skirts if he could.

  “Paul. Can I call you Paul?” he says.

  He doesn’t wait for me to answer.

  “Listen, Paul. Why not a truce? I think if you take the time you’ll find that we have a great deal in common.” He tries to intone the wisdom of age in his voice.

  This makes me want to search for a shower and a bar of soap.

  “We can be friends,” he says.

  He glances at Harry, the way he is dressed, something from Goodwill. He must figure that such a proposal, friendship, cannot cost too much.

  “We could use some good representation,” he tells me. “And I hear tell you’re one of the best.”

  Lano is the kind who can put a silk frock on a good bribe and make it walk upright.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” says Harry.

  “The union. The association,” says Lano. “This is for you, too,” he says. Bargain day. Two friends for the price of one.

  Mouthpiece to the cops. Harry’s worst nightmare.

  “What kind of representation?” I ask.

  “What you sell. The legal kind. What else?”

  “I thought you had all that covered. Remember? The grand jury circle jerk.”

  He gives me a lot of consternation in the eyes, like I’m making this more difficult than it has to be. Why not just shut up, take the money, and go along? He would say it in so many words, but a lifetime of iniquity has taught him not to screw with the science of seduction.

  “Paul. Let’s be reasonable. There’s no reason for all this hostility.” He offers us a drink and before I can decline, his minions are opening cupboards and pulling drawers. Glasses with ice clinking. Corks popping. Harry’s reaching out until I nudge his thigh with my knee. His extended hand suddenly goes up to preen what little hair he has left. He shakes his head to the offered booze, this with the resolve of someone falling off the wagon.

  “You take clients. All I want to do is hire you. What’s the going freight? Simple as that,” says Lano.

  He may be confident of Tony’s loyalty, but he’s not sure how much Arguillo has told me. Am I cheap bluster or expensive knowledge?

  “Let’s say I represented you.”

  “Let’s say that,” he says.

  “What would you expect me to do?”

  A wrinkled face. An expression that takes its color from the dark side of the soul.

  “You take a retainer. Be available,” he says. “That’s all.”

  What I thought. Visions of kissing his ring finger, ghostly echoes of a gravelly voice in my ear telling me that one day he will come to me and ask that I render some service.

  “Think about it before you say no. We’d be a big client. Cover a lot of overhead.” He is big and hearty here, full of bullshit. What you get from a car salesman before he takes the deal to his boss.

  “Hey, we’re all one big happy family. Tony. The association. Me. You can represent all of us. Like I say. What’s the tab? You name it.”

  I could tell him his firstborn and he would pay it. You’ve heard of the devil’s advocate. What Lano is proposing is hell’s own class action.

  “Gus. Can I call you Gus?” I say.

  A big smile. “That’s my name.”

  “You’ve been so nice, Gus, that I hate to tell you this. But I just can’t do it.”

  “Why the hell not?” Friendship drips from his face like tallow on a hot day.

  “Conflict of interest,” I tell him.

  No sale. I get stern looks.

  “Then you’re still representing Tony?”

  The fly in their ointment.

  “Until he fires me.”

  He swings around in his chair. A conference. Hissing voices.

  Lano’s underlings are discreet, cupping their hands to his ears as they confer. There are occasional glances in our direction by his men as they whisper to him.

  Lano is not so cautious.

  “What the fuck’s her name?” He says this out loud.

  Another hand to his ear, and he swings back around to face me.

  “This woman,” he says, “Goya. In the D.A.’s office. What’s her part in this?”

  Now I am concerned; Tony has managed to compromise Lenore. If Lano knows about her involvement, the fact that she referred Tony, it is only a short skip to her boss’s office. Coleman Kline will know it shortly. Lano has found the soft underbelly.

  “Who?” I am buying time.

  “You can cut the bullshit, Madriani.” Lano knows it.

  “From this I take it we’re no longer on a first-name basis.” More stall. He ignores me.

  “We know Tony’s been talking to her,” he says.

  “Who?”

  “Goya,” he says.

  “Ah, her.”

  “Yeah. Her.” He’s thumping his fingers on the desk, waiting for an answer.

  “Just friends,” I say.

  “Right. And the three of you were just having afternoon tea in your office.”

  “Why, Gus, I’m offended. Were you watching my office or just following Tony?” I ask.

  Maybe Tony has not compromised her after all.

  “People walk by. A public street,” he says.

  “Right. Take a note”—I turn to Harry—“to sweep the office,” I tell him. “Something may have crawled in under the crack of our door when we weren’t looking.”

  Harry smiles. Lano does not. I would not put it past him to know every intimate conversation I have had on my phone in the last month.

  “You haven’t s
aid what she was doing there.”

  I’m out of my chair, rising to leave, Harry on my heels.

  “You’re right. I haven’t.”

  I darken his door, leaving him to think the worst, that perhaps Lenore was there as an official emissary of the prosecutor’s office, some part of a dark deal for Tony’s testimony. Better this than the truth. I will have to get to Tony before he does.

  “We oughta talk again sometime,” he says.

  “I’ll bring the court reporter,” I tell him, and I am gone.

  Leo Kerns is one of those overweight balding little men who would look like a gnome except for the perennial scowl on his face. I have known him for a dozen years, and he has worn that look for every one of them. It comes with the turf, his job as a D.A.’s investigator, the place I once worked in another life, and where we were friends.

  “Shoulda called. I woulda dressed,” he says.

  Leo is standing in the doorway to his apartment in a tank-top shirt, black hair bristling from both armpits like quills on a porcupine. He has a gut like Buddha. I can smell his last meal and beer on his breath.

  “What’s it been—a year?” he asks.

  “At least,” I tell him. “But you’re looking good.”

  “Right, getting younger all the time,” he says. “Except that now all the hair on my head is growing down, comin’ out my ears and nose.”

  I can’t tell if anybody else is inside the apartment. Perhaps an inopportune moment for a visit. Leo is single and not a ladies’ man, though he has been known to entertain a few barflies.

  “I’d invite you in but the place is a mess,” he says.

  “No reflection on its occupant,” I tell him. We both laugh and finally he swings the door open.

  “How ’bout a beer?” he says.

  Saying no to Leo on this would be like refusing a peace pipe. He plucks the can from its plastic mesh and holds it up, label out.

  “This okay?”

  “My favorite. Warm,” I tell him.

  His own can in hand, he settles backward into the couch, a place where his behind fits like some oversize baseball in the pocket of a catcher’s mitt, a well-worn spot across from the television, which is on, spouting some nonsense game show.

  All of this, sitting down, brings a lot of heavy breathing from Leo. Kerns is what the people who do actuarial work-ups for insurance companies would call “high risk.”

  “Take a load off.” He gestures toward an armchair in the corner, its fabric so worn that if the thing moved I would attribute it to the molting season. The TV is in my ear. He says something but I cannot make it out.

  He finds the remote and exercises his thumb on the volume.

  “Ever watch this?” he asks.

  I look at the screen.

  “A cultural watershed,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, and the hostess has good tits,” says Leo. He mutes the sound but doesn’t turn it off, his eyes glued to the set as if he’s waiting for his two favorite peaks to appear.

  “I take it you didn’t come by for beer and conversation?”

  “How could you think that?” I tell him.

  He smiles, and we talk about the D.A.’s office, changes in the investigative staff since Kline’s ascendancy. Leo tells me there is a good deal of insecurity, people who were bosom buddies yesterday now willing to slip a shiv in your spine. Leo would know. He has his own carefully honed collection of these.

  “It’s no longer fun getting up and going to work,” he tells me. Like this has always been a major pleasure point in Leo’s life.

  “Sounds like good cause for disability,” I commiserate.

  “If safety retirement offered a presumption for working with assholes, I’d be out fishing,” he tells me.

  “Kline and his entourage are that bad?”

  “Having to say ‘good morning’ to that prick is enough to get a prescription for Valium,” he says. He calls him a “Jesus freak.” In Leo’s lexicon this could fit anybody who has darkened the door of a church in the last decade.

  He has complained about every D.A. elected in the county in this century, while he searched for the crease in their ass and puckered his lips. He has climbed over the carcasses of dead colleagues in three different regimes to become a supervisor. If Stalin took over tomorrow, Leo would show up for work dressed like Beria the next day.

  “Seems like lately we spend all day reinventing the wheel,” he complains. According to Leo, Kline insists the best ones have four corners. He follows this with a few carefully chosen profanities, all synonyms for his employer.

  “You should get other work,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, right, at my age.” What offends Leo is the last word in my comment, the one that starts with W. Besides, where else would he find such intrigue?

  “Just when you get one of these fuckers well trained,” he says, “the voters turn his ass out of office.” Leo talks as if the elected D.A. were Pavlov’s dog, and the army of perennial bureaucrats were a form of the canine corps with choke chains and training leashes.

  I remind him that Nelson left as DA. to take the bench.

  “Same thing,” he says. “We were finally getting on with him. A good prosecutor,” he calls him. This is in stark contrast to the nouns and adjectives he used to describe the man two years ago.

  “This one’s a humorless, tight-ass . . . fuckin’ soul saver.” To Leo religion is a crime.

  “Yes. I’ve heard that he prays to the bush in his office,” I tell him.

  He cuts his tirade in mid-syllable and he looks at me, wondering if perhaps I am serious.

  “Someone has seen this?” he says. Leo would like pictures so that he could get Kline certified to the state booby hatch.

  “No. They’ve just smelled the bush burning,” I tell him.

  It takes him an instant before he realizes that I am kidding and he cracks a smile.

  “Maybe they’ll do like Nelson,” he says.

  I give him a look.

  “Appoint the fucker to the bench.” He’s talking about Kline.

  This would suit Leo. Take someone whose personal views offend him, and make him a judge so that Leo’s life of indolence could be made easier.

  “Talking about judges,” he says, “you heard about Acosta?”

  “Read it in the paper,” I tell him. “Cried all night.”

  My problems with the Coconut are well-known, a matter of record among the D.A.’s staff.

  “Yeah. I figured you’d be out selling tickets for a table at the wake,” says Leo. “Maybe that’s why you came by this evening?” He’s back to the main course. Wondering why I am here.

  “In a manner. It has to do with Acosta, and the grand jury,” I tell him. “Got a client, a cop. Good cop.” This puts me on the side of the angels. “But he’s gotten himself a little sideways with. . . .”

  “Tony Arguillo,” he says. Before I can finish my pitch Leo is on me. If it slithers through the bushes in this county Kerns knows about it.

  I make a gesture, like “There you have it.”

  “And you’re wondering how this good cop got himself in all this trouble?”

  I’m making a lot of hand gestures, bobs and weaves with my head, all of which add up to “yes.”

  “Word is, it’s the company he keeps,” says Leo.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he’s gotten in with some bad people.”

  “Lano and his crowd?” I say.

  Leo says nothing, but I can tell by his silence that this is exactly what he means.

  “I grant you Lano,” I say, “is not someone I would take home to meet the family. And I’m aware of the allegations, skimming from the pension fund. Still it seems like a bit of overkill,” I tell him. “Roll out
the canons. Call up the grand jury. Sounds like a little union busting to me.”

  “If that were all of it,” he says.

  I take a bead on Leo. He is a bullshitter extraordinaire, but there are moments when you know he is dead serious.

  “Jungle drums and smoke signals?” he says.

  This means that what is about to follow comes from the office grapevine, rumors that have no confirmation this side of the grave.

  “It’s my life on the line,” he tells me. “You gotta promise it goes no further.”

  I give him three fingers in the air, poking out from my beer can, like some blood oath between brother inebriants. Leo cannot wait to tell me, which, knowing the man, is a good hint that what is to follow is bad news.

  “There was a case, maybe six months ago, a cop named Wiley, shot in a raid out by the park, a crack house.”

  “Killed, as I recall,” I tell him. “I remember reading about it. Some controversy.”

  “He was off duty at the time, which raised a few eyebrows,” says Leo. “Part of a rat pack. Hotshots with battering rams in the trunk of their cars like other people carry fishing rods. Their idea of a good time was picking some pusher’s nose with the barrel of a Beretta. You know the type,” he says.

  To Leo this is a mortal sin, a violation of the wages and hours rule that governs all life. Leo has never worked a minute of overtime for which he was not paid.

  “They made some kid for the killing. Sixteen. They tried him as an adult,” says Leo.

  “Sounds like justice to me,” I tell him.

  “Except for one thing,” he says. “The kid denied he did it. Said the gun wasn’t his.”

  “Imagine that,” I say. “Novel defense.”

  “Yeah, very novel,” says Leo. “Novel-type story. That’s why nobody gave it much credence. They checked the serial number. This is no Saturday night special, mind you. Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. Well, lo and behold,” says Leo, “the piece was stolen. Household burglary. So everybody figures the kid for it. Right?”

  I give him an expression, the picture of logic.

  “Except there’s more history to this particular piece. Seems one of the clerks down in Property is going through records doing a little inventory, trying to see how much they lost over the course of the year, cars, planes, hotels, that kinda shit, and what do you think he finds?”