The Judge

by Steve Martini

  “You haven’t heard?” he says.

  I shake my head.

  “The D.A. dismissed the grand jury. Case closed.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The association has a clean bill of health. Acosta’s witch-hunt died with the man,” he says.

  What he’s saying is that with Acosta’s demise, and the way he went down, the legal power structure has now regrouped, its collective tail between its legs.

  “Your day in the sun,” I tell him. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  He looks at me, a grin that could only be called vicious.

  The conversation is over and he starts to move away. Igor nearly trips over him when Lano stops short and turns back to look at us one more time.

  “Oh, by the way,” he says. “I almost forgot to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “The carpet fibers,” says Lano. “The ones found on the girl’s body. Seems they’re a perfect match to the stuff in the trunk of Acosta’s car.” Lano’s pipeline has no limits, even unto the sanctity of the county’s crime lab.

  “Thought you’d want to know,” he says. He gives a little finger wave. This I think is aimed more at Lenore than at me.

  “Bye.”

  CHAPTER 10

  WITH ACOSTA’S SCALP HANGING FROM HIS BELT, LANO possesses a fear factor that can be measured only by the collective knocking of knees on the Richter scale. Under these circumstances it is not likely that elected officials will open another grand jury probe into the affairs of his association.

  I had hoped that we could ride on the back of the official investigation, revelations that could be used to mount a defense on behalf of Acosta, a crusading judge, set up and framed by dirty cops. This undoubtedly will be a major theme of our defense. Now we have a problem. Prosecutors will be able to argue that while at one time there may have been an investigation, no evidence of corruption was found. If there’s no dirty linen, nothing to turn up, why would the cops go out of their way to silence a crusading judge?

  The other half of our case is to put a face on the real killer. As much as I dislike the man, I don’t believe that Acosta is a murderer. Lenore and I are still engaged in mental casting calls for that role.

  If I had to hazard a guess at this moment, it is that Brittany Hall’s death is related not to the judge, but perhaps to a jealous lover, a random burglary that went awry, or a sex crime. The problem with the cops’ current theory as it regards the last two is that she knew her killer and let him in.

  It is Friday night, and I am working in the office late. We spent the afternoon, the three of us, Harry, Lenore, and I, poring through more documents of discovery, including videotapes of the investigation in the alley where the body was found, and later shots outside Brittany Hall’s apartment. Some of these have been taken by police photographers, others we have subpoenaed from two local television stations.

  I am bleary-eyed. Lenore left early because of a social commitment. Harry pitched it in an hour ago and went home.

  It is nearly ten when I hear a key in the lock to the outer office door, some clicking of the latch, and then the door closing.

  When I look up, Lenore is standing in my doorway, in a sleek black evening dress, tight at the hips, with a hem that ends at midthigh, her bare shoulders aglow. She holds a pair of three-inch spiked heels, made of black patent leather, hooked on two fingers of one hand.

  “Got anything for blisters?” she asks.

  Lenore has been partying, a social engagement that she committed to months ago, before she left the D.A.’s office, some prosecutor’s bash.

  She shows me a hole in her nylons, worn through at the heel on one foot.

  “Walked half a mile,” she says.

  “So how was the date?” I ask.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I feel better already. Standing in my doorway, a slender hip thrust against the frame, with tasteful gold earrings dangling from her ears, and lips glossed to a sexy sheen, Lenore is a remarkably beautiful woman. Tonight her hair is up, lending an air of mystery.

  “I take it you didn’t hit it off with Herb?” I try not to sound too satisfied.

  Herb Conners is one of the supervisors in the prosecutor’s office, a corporate climber and tight-ass extraordinaire. We had a bet, Lenore and I. She bet Conners would find some excuse to break their date. Lenore figured she was damaged goods, a social liability for any ambitious climber in the office since Kline had fired her. I told her that in any contest between career and libido, lust always wins out. It seems I was right. I think Lenore kept the date herself only because she refused to be cowed by Kline, who would most certainly be present.

  “Conners grew hands from every appendage on his body in the car on the way home,” she says.

  “Horny devil,” I tell her.

  “Not anymore.” Lenore gives me a wicked smile, leaving me to wonder what she did to him.

  “I got out four blocks from here, tried to hail a cab, and missed. So I walked. Saw your light on.”

  With the visage of this woman in my doorway, Conners is no doubt now huddled in a cold shower somewhere.

  I’m fishing in my drawer for a Band-Aid. I find it and hand it to her.

  She drops her shoes on the corner of my desk, and the fragrance of her perfume envelops me like mustard gas on a doughboy in the trenches.

  Lenore is one of those women who can turn her sensuality on and off like a light switch. One minute she is all business, with the lawyer’s professional eye and gnashing teeth, the next minute she is a vamp, as she is tonight. Unfortunately, now, when I am mired in the details of work, Lenore does not have her business switch turned on.

  “You’re burning the oil awfully late,” she says. “You ought to go home.”

  “Somebody has to work,” I tell her.

  “Still trying to figure out how we pick up the pieces of the broken cop show?” She’s talking about the abandoned grand jury probe.

  “You got it.”

  “Any ideas?” She talks to me while she rubs the calf of one leg, her foot now raised onto the seat of the client chair across from my desk, the hem of her tight dress hiked nearly to the top of one thigh. I’m getting lots of ideas, none of them concerning this case.

  I make an effort. “We can try to subpoena the grand jury records, the transcript, all their investigative files,” I tell her.

  “Lotsa luck on that one,” she says. Lenore is right. Grand jury investigations, particularly those that are closed without indictment, are classified, something on the order of a missile silo’s nuclear code. It would take a court order from a senile judge to pry them open.

  “We can hire an investigator, see what we can find out on our own,” I tell her. “It would take a lot of legwork.” I’m staring at her own right now.

  “And maybe by the next ice age,” she says, “we would come up with something.”

  “Or tonight,” I say, “you could just go over and give Herb Conners a back rub. By morning he’d back his car up to our front door and dump every file from the D.A.’s office in our reception area.”

  “You give him the back rub.”

  “It would take a lot longer,” I tell her.

  She slips behind my open office door like she’s playing Indian to my cowboy. I am left to wonder what she’s doing back there.

  “For your information,” she says, “they didn’t kill the entire grand jury probe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She is still a voice behind my door. “The investigation of the drug raid, the questions regarding the shooting of that cop a couple of years ago. That,” she says, “is still viable.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No.”

  We have talked about this, Leno
re and I, a sensitive point because of Tony’s involvement. She does not believe that he could have played any part in the killing of another officer. She thinks the investigation will come up empty, though she has no theory as to how the gun that killed the cop found its way from the evidence locker downtown to the scene. When it comes to Tony, she has the blind confidence of a child.

  “How did you find out the investigation’s still active?” I say.

  “It pays to go to some dinners,” she tells me. “You’d be surprised, the things that pass over crackers and cheese. Especially when they’re washed down by wine.”

  “Was it Conners? Is he the one who told you?”

  “Do I look like I submitted to that?” she says. Lenore’s not telling me her source.

  I’d hoped for a broader-ranging investigation. But at least it is something. If we work at it we may be able to weave it into our case.

  “This source, will he talk to you again?”

  When she emerges from behind the door she is bare legged, tossing her panty hose in my wastebasket.

  “He wasn’t talking to me this time,” she says. “I was an ear hiding behind my date.”

  “So Herb was at least good for something,” I say.

  “Tall. Big broad shoulders.” She smiles. “A good listening post.”

  She’s picking lint from her dress off of one thigh, tanned and smooth, with skin like vellum. She sits down in the chair across from me and with the delicacy of a wood nymph, teasing, but never revealing, folds one leg over the other. Executing contortions only women are capable of, she applies the Band-Aid to her heel, oblivious to my stare.

  By now I am breaking into an open sweat. I’m talking business, but I’m thinking frolic. A weak moment.

  “Any ideas as to an investigator we might hire?”

  By now she is sitting still, having attended to all the needs of first aid, her elbows on the corner of my desk next to her shoes, chin propped up by the palms of both hands, her countenance like Hepburn in her prime. She is, I think, engaged in business of her own. She ignores my question as her scent drifts across my desk.

  “Where’s Sarah tonight?” she asks.

  “At a friend’s house. Sleeping over.”

  “My girls are at Grandma’s,” she says. “For the night”

  A smile spreads on her generous, glossed lips.

  There’s an awkward moment of silence; telepathy, as we consider the possibilities. By mutual consent we have studiously ignored the undercurrent of lust in our relationship. The complications of working together on a difficult case, the downsides of office romances, children—there are a hundred reasons we should not do this. At the moment I can’t remember a single one of them.

  “So what are you going to do,” she says, “work all night?”

  She is looking at me with bewitching eyes as the glint of gold plays from one earring: the delicate chiseled features of her face, her tawny complexion almost ethereal, a frame of film shot through gauze. Like a junkie craving a hit, I suck in this image.

  “I should say good night and go home,” I tell her.

  Her gaze back is trancelike. Suddenly I find myself standing at the door, coat over my shoulder, not knowing how I got there, Lenore’s hand holding mine.

  “Yes,” she says, “we should go home and say good night.”

  CHAPTER 11

  WE CAN THANK GOD FOR LITTLE FAVORS. WE HAVE checked Acosta’s optometry records and we believe we have identified all the lenses that have been prescribed for him. Lili Acosta has located each one of these, except for the pair the cops took from her husband that day in the jail. These, the ones the police have, were carefully marked for identification so that there is no chance of error, some mix-up. Since we can produce each of the glasses prescribed for our client showing dates of prescription and purchase, the cops cannot prove that the glasses found at the scene of Hall’s murder belong to the judge.

  This morning we are in the superior court, trying to dodge another bullet, the second day of argument on a motion for a stay, trying to stave off Kline, the man Lenore called an idiot. So far he has demonstrated more agility than a cheetah in heat.

  Acosta is seated next to me at the counsel table, a wary sheriff’s guard positioned behind him, with two more standing like linebackers deeper in the courtroom in case the Coconut tries to go off tackle.

  Lili sits one row behind him, the rail of the bar between them, not allowed to touch by the attending guard.

  There is only a smattering of the press in attendance.

  Two weeks ago, out of the blue, with no warning, Kline set a trial date on the charge that everyone had forgotten about, the original prostitution count.

  A verdict is not his purpose. Kline wants to try Acosta not in a court of law but in the forum of public opinion, poisoning a vast audience with charges of vice. Potential jurors who hear this might find themselves halfway to a verdict in the capital case before we can empanel them in the later murder trial. If along the way he can force us to defend in the prostitution case, he gets a peek at some of our cards.

  Even Lenore must concede that the effort shows a certain ingenuity, more than she is willing to credit Kline with.

  I think it is a mistake to underrate him. What he lacks in style he makes up for in dogged persistence. He is aggressive, competitive, and articulate. There is not a tentative bone in the man’s body. As for temperament, the only time I have seen him lose it was that day in Lenore’s office, in their spat over Acosta’s case and who would interview the witness. I think perhaps there is a volatile chemistry here between Kline and Lenore. It is something that gives me pause in the ensuing trial.

  At this moment he is at his own counsel table with one of his subalterns, when he breaks from their hushed discourse and crosses the void. From the corner of one eye, I can see that he is starched from cuffs to the elbows, replete with gold links that blind me.

  “Mr. Madriani.”

  I turn to him.

  “We’ve not had time to talk,” he says, “since that day in my office. I would wish you good luck, but under the circumstances . . .” He gives me a look that finishes this thought. “But I do hope we can begin and end as amiable adversaries,” he says. “Professionals to the end.”

  He has a broad smile, one that leaves me wondering at the depth of his sincerity. It is the thing about Kline. You never know.

  I shake his hand.

  “Counsel.” He eases past me, open hand still extended.

  Lenore looks at him but says nothing. Nor does she take his hand.

  “Well,” says Kline, “I tried.”

  He smiles one more time and retreats to his own side.

  Acosta is looking at her. Any illusion that Lenore as a former prosecutor might possess influence with the state goes the way of the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

  “Good move!” I whisper to her from the side of my mouth. “Stick your spur in a little deeper. Let’s see if we can really motivate him.”

  Before she can humor this with a reply there is movement in the corridor behind the bench. Judge Radovich emerges, announced by the bailiff.

  Harland Radovich is from one of the mountainous counties to the north, a place presided over by a dormant volcano and a three-judge court, where cattle ranching and open range are still a way of life. Radovich drew the short straw from the Judicial Council as the out-of-county candidate and has landed Acosta’s case along with all of its pretrial trappings.

  He is ageless, though if I had to guess, I would put him in his mid-fifties. He sports cowboy boots and a ruddy out-of-doors look with a straight Oklahoma hairdo, including cowlick and forelock like the spiraling ends on a cob of corn. He makes no pretense of being a legal scholar, but seems imbued with a certain innate common sense that for some reason we normally a
ttribute to a closeness with the earth.

  It is difficult to say what Acosta’s take is on this. He and Radovich are beings from different planets.

  “Good morning,” says the judge.

  We make the representations for the record, Kline for the people, Lenore for our side. It is, after all, her case. I am striving to keep a low profile. If I can substitute out early on, I will.

  Yesterday was lawyers’ day. We all sallied forth with arguments on the hot legal issues. There was the question of joinder: whether the crimes, solicitation and murder, were sufficiently related, one allegedly being the motive for the other, that they were required to be joined in the same trial. This was Lenore’s pitch, to head off a separate trial on the misdemeanor case. The state has after all charged the killing of a judicial witness as the basis for special circumstances, the grounds to seek the death penalty if Acosta is convicted.

  Radovich spent much of the day scratching his head. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? If he’d had a haystalk he would have put it in his teeth. He is not one prone to reason on a high level. It is something Kline discovered early on, and all day he played the judge like a piano.

  He argued that our attempt to avoid a separate trial was an invasion of prosecutorial discretion, the sacred right of the state to bring to justice those who have violated the law. He reminded Radovich that the court could not substitute its judgment for that of the state in determining when to bring charges.

  From the wrinkled eyebrows on the bench I could tell this was a sensitive point with Radovich. After all, he is a mere visitor in our county, not somebody who has to face the electorate here.

  In all of this, the politics of Kline’s arguments weighed heavier than the law. He had sized up Radovich, a keen assessment. Here sits a judge reluctant to extend his judicial reach, a conservative cowboy of the old school. Tell the judge that your opponent’s argument will offend another branch of government, and watch him recoil.

  We lost the argument on joinder, and this morning we are down to our last straw if we are to avoid a potentially disastrous mini-trial on the iniquities of the Coconut. It may not be one of those momentous events in the law— a man and a woman haggling over the terms of vice—but if seeded into the minds of a jury, it may be enough for Kline to execute our client.