The Judge

by Steve Martini

  As she says this I am still perusing the copy of Brittany Hall’s phone directory, the little book with its missing pages. It strikes me that they were on a first-name basis. Someone went to such trouble to remove the letter L from this little book, and still missed the entry under the Gs: a phone number and a name in parentheses—the name of Gus Lano.

  CHAPTER 13

  SHORT AND FAT, STEALTH WAS NEVER HIS STYLE, though today Leo Kerns cloaks himself behind the concrete pillar of a parking structure, sneaking peeks at City Center Park across the street. The park is bordered by McGowen Center on the other side, the police department headquarters. We have come to do the devil’s deal: exchange some information. Leo is about to finger a face from the P.D. for me.

  “No sign yet,” says Leo. “But he takes lunch here every day, like fucking clockwork. The guy’s in a rut,” he says.

  Leo’s munching on a hot dog, mustard dribbling down his chin as he says this. I have purchased it for him from one of those vendors at a rolling cart on the corner; that and a Coke, which rests on top of a trash can next to him. I have dragged him here during the noon hour, and Leo made it clear he wasn’t coming without lunch.

  “You know you owe me big time for this,” he says, his mouth bulging.

  “What’s the matter? You want another hot dog, Leo?”

  “Fuck you,” he says. “I mean big time. It’d be my ass if they knew I was helpin’ you. If they even saw us talking.”

  Leo would like me to believe that I now owe him my life. With Kerns, the amassing of guilt in others is a business, like the church coining sin and selling dispensation to the sinners.

  “You could at least tell me what’s happening,” he says. “Why you wanna see this guy?”

  “That’s for me to know, Leo.”

  “Yeah, right. I look like a mushroom,” he says. “Everybody wants to keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.” Leo droning on. “After all, I’m not looking for anything privileged,” he says.

  This is big of him.

  “They don’t tell me a damn thing anymore. Like I don’t exist,” he says.

  Leo’s ego has taken a beating in the last several months. He is finding it more difficult than he thought to regain his footing following Kline’s election.

  “The man won’t let me get close,” he says. “I wanna help,” he says, “but he won’t let me.” Leo now bears the disfigurement of a permanent pucker from mentally pursing his lips in quest of his boss’s behind.

  These days he is relegated to drunk driving cases, accidents in which some bodily injury has occurred. He is sent to reconstruct the scene of the crime. He hasn’t seen a homicide in over a year.

  What worries Leo is the young cadre coming up, a handful of investigators in their thirties, several of whom are making gains with Kline. Kerns has visions, over-the-shoulder looks from others engaged in hand-to-mouth conversations, all eyes on him. It is the kind of thing that tends to grow a kernel of truth in one’s patch of paranoia.

  For three months now Kline has had one of the other deputies in the office riding roughshod on Leo. Carl Smidt is known as “the Hatchet”—management’s quickest route to an early retirement. Leo has called Smidt a tight-ass—behind his back, of course—a corporate-set piece to Kline. Word is that Leo has been marked for oblivion. He is seen as the unsavory remnant of an earlier age: “B.P.C.,” Before Politically Correct.

  He takes another peek across the street, and while he is looking away, I throw Leo a bone.

  “Smidt cannot be entirely without a partying soul,” I tell him. “After all, he’s the subject of a formal complaint for harassment.”

  Leo nearly loses his lunch coming back to me.

  “Of the sexual variety,” I add.

  “Where’d you hear this?” he says.

  “I’ve seen the complaint.”

  Sexual harassment is the topic of the hour in the nooks and crannies of government, what some might call high crimes and misdemeanors. It is the kind of activity that gets your dog neutered and public officials defrocked.

  “You’re serious?” says Leo. His smile is something one would normally reserve for the second coming.

  “I know the lady’s lawyer,” I tell him.

  This is a friend Leo would like to cultivate.

  “Tell me about ’em. Give me a name,” he says. “We talking mere words or touching?” Leo wants all the details.

  “First count, third-degree touchy-feely with a secretary over the copying machine,” I say.

  “Ohhh, God.” Leo sounds like a man in orgasm.

  “His Holiness would have no choice but to sacrifice the fucker for that. Violating the holy of holies,” says Leo. He is already figuring ways to get Smidt’s body elevated onto the D.A.’s altar and to put the flint dagger in Kline’s hand. The corporate medicine man.

  “Count two, gratuitous bumps and grinds in doorways while passing this same secretary.”

  I can tell by the look that Leo is mentally chipping stone to a sharp edge.

  “This complaint,” he says, “you can get me a copy?”

  I shake my head. “It hasn’t been filed yet. And it may not be,” I tell him.

  With this Leo nearly comes out of his skin. He is animated motion all over the concrete parking garage, like finger-fanned ink drawings of the whirling dervish. When he stops there are flecks of yellow mustard all over his shirt like a Jackson Pollock painting.

  “Why the fuck not?” he says. “This is serious shit. You know the federal courts get into this stuff.”

  I look at him like I’m questioning this.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It’s like fucking bank robbery. They got a federal law for destroying a broad’s good name.” Suddenly Leo wants his own chapter of NOW, a platform to uphold the honor of womanhood.

  “The woman’s lawyer is hesitant,” I tell him. “Without more corroboration.”

  “What’s he want, pictures? Tell the victim to lift her cheeks on the copying machine next time.”

  Leo senses this opportunity vanishing as he paces in frustration in front of the pillar.

  “My luck,” he says. “Wouldn’t you know. Goddamn lawyers, gotta have every t and i,” he says. “Why don’t they just get out of the way and let justice do its thing?” Like this is somehow self-executing. What Leo would like is Smidt hung by his heels in the doorway to Leo’s office, so that he could throw darts at the man’s forehead.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the law that a little lawyer genocide wouldn’t solve,” he says. “Always getting in the way,” he says. “Tell him, your friend the lawyer, to grow some balls,” he tells me.

  “My friend the lawyer is a woman,” I tell him.

  This slows Leo only for an instant.

  “Then she should borrow somebody else’s,” he says. “She oughta be indignant. Smidt is an affront to womanhood,” he tells me. This is something on which Leo is an expert.

  “Tell her to get the thing filed, to hurry up and nail his ass,” he says. What Leo means is before Smidt nails his.

  “You know,” he says, “you could gimme a hint where this came from and I could push it along,” he says. Visions of Leo with a pistol to my friend’s head.

  “There is other information, but it has not been included in the complaint because the lawyer cannot get confirmation from witnesses,” I tell him.

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that Smidt tried to bed some of the other help, and lacked a lot of grace in the effort.”

  I can almost hear him groan with the loss of this.

  “Give me their names and I could interview them,” says Leo, “make a case.” A labor of love.

  “Can’t do it,” I tell him.

  “The other victim, the one in the doorway, without
giving me a name,” says Leo. “Is it somebody I would know?”

  He would like to play twenty questions.

  “Can’t say.”

  “How about initials?” he says.

  I rebuke him with a look.

  “Privileged information?” he asks.

  “Good taste,” I tell him.

  “So you give me this piece-of-crap information,” he says. “What am I supposed to do with it?” To Leo, dirt that cannot be turned into someone else’s misery is like a joke without a punch line.

  “There is a way,” I tell him.

  “What’s that?” Suddenly Leo would eat me with his eyes.

  “If someone were to put out the right word in the ear of the press, with enough specifics to give it credence, and those details were to make it into print, Smidt would be forced to go public. To deny it.”

  “So what? Couldn’t prove a damn thing,” he says.

  “Yes. But I am told that faced with this lie, the other victims might come out of the woodwork.”

  There’s a moment of deep gravity as Leo grasps the sinister nature of this proposal.

  “Ohhhh.” A voice like wind leaving bellows. The glow of opportunity lights up his gaze. It is just the sort of bureaucratic coffin Kerns knows how to fashion, with all the screws for the lid, and carefully fitted for an enemy.

  “Of course this would have to be done by a journalist who operates without documents, willing to go to print without a second source,” I tell him.

  This slows Leo for only a nanosecond.

  “No problem,” he says, like he has a dozen such people in his pocket.

  “My friend the lawyer and her client will grow some corroboration,” I tell him. “Maybe a few more clients.”

  “And the county will lose one more asshole,” says Leo.

  I make a face. “One of those points of mutual advantage in life,” I tell him.

  “Right,” he says.

  “Your turn,” I tell him. “What are you hearing about Brittany Hall?”

  Leo has been on a mission calling in every chit he has out, looking for information on the victim. Since she was in the fold of law enforcement, Kerns was my natural choice to get this.

  “It would help if I had your parts to the puzzle,” he says. “I’ve got some stuff, but don’t know what it means.”

  “You don’t need to know, Leo.”

  “Humor me,” he says. Leo now has what he wants. He could make a dash for the door with his hot dog and leave me standing in dried mustard.

  “Tidbits,” I tell him. “That’s all.”

  He nods. Whatever he can get.

  “They found the girl’s little black book,” I tell him. “Phone numbers galore. At least a dozen from the force, home numbers.”

  Leo knows these would all be unlisted.

  “Anybody I know?” he says.

  “Mostly from one division,” I tell him. “Vice.”

  “Not much in that,” he says. “It’s where she worked.”

  Then something to prime Leo’s pump: “In all, there were seven phone numbers in that book for members of the force,” I say. “Some pages missing. One name was crossed out.”

  He looks at me, mustard under his nose. He stops chewing for a moment, waiting for the other shoe.

  “Zack Wiley,” I say.

  This catches a whimsical look in Leo’s eye.

  “Holy shit,” he says. “She knew Wiley?”

  This was the cop shot dead in the drug raid from hell.

  “And three of the others who were with him the day he died,” I tell him.

  He whistles a high soft note.

  What I do not tell him is that the fourth who was present that day, Tony Arguillo, I could not find in the book. The reason for this I suspect is only because the page for the letter A had been ripped out.

  “Then it’s true,” he says, “the lady was a player.”

  It is the thing with Leo. For his brain to work, his mouth is usually going.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he says.

  “Tell me, Leo.”

  “What are you gonna give me in return?” He laughs.

  “Your balls in one piece,” I tell him.

  “Okay, okay. Just kidding,” he says.

  “What did you hear, Leo?”

  “Just that she was getting boinked regularly.”

  He knows I’m wondering where this came from.

  “Dirt in the office.” For this Leo has a nose like a pig searching out truffles. The stuff of his life.

  “When I heard it,” he says, “I figured maybe some traffic cops scuttling by for nooners. The hike-and-bike crowd, guys who can do it on the back of their cycles without taking their foot off the starter pedal,” he says.

  Unless I knew better, I might think that Leo was talking from experience.

  “But you found out something else?” I say.

  “Yes,” he says. “I checked with my sources. Knowledgeable people. All very reliable,” he tells me. He makes them sound like college dons.

  “These are people who would not shit me,” says Leo. “What I heard was that it was either true love,” he says, “or higher ambition. She was romancing one guy, somebody important,” says Leo. “A main squeeze.”

  “Who?”

  “Whatta you think, I’m the fucking oracle?” he says. “If I knew that I wouldn’t be standing in some oily alley with you. I’d be converting it into a promotion. Making myself indispensable,” he says.

  “Are the prosecutors checking this out? Her amorous adventures?”

  “Sorry. They have their man.” Leo’s talking about the judge.

  “But somebody else may have had a motive.”

  “You don’t have to sell me. The problem is, all the physical evidence points to your client.”

  Leo has a point.

  “There was another name and a private number in that book,” I tell Leo. “Gus Lano.”

  This gets a look from Leo as he fits the pieces.

  “If she was bedding Lano,” says Leo, “my guess would be higher ambition,” he says. He means rather than true love.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  The prosecutors have clearly looked at Hall’s telephone directory. They had to have seen Lano’s number. It is not a quantum leap for them to add the information that Leo has gathered to this number and begin to wonder. Still, most prosecutions usually take the course of least resistance, which at this moment is over my client.

  “Lano’s name in her book,” says Leo, “would answer one other question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His personal interest in her the night Acosta was arrested. I suppose he was just protecting his carnal claims.”

  I give him a dumb look. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “He was there. You didn’t know that?” says Leo. “The night they busted Acosta on the prostitution thing, Lano was there.”

  The mystery man. The so-called lieutenant that Frost could not name on the stand. It is no wonder he had a faulty memory on this. It would have raised more than a few eyebrows. Why would the head of the union be present at Acosta’s arrest, unless perhaps he had his own agenda?

  “There he is,” says Leo. He snaps his head back around the other side of the pillar, back braced against the concrete, as a man strides down the steps of McGowen Center, a block away, across the park.

  “The tall one. Tan slacks, white shirt?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” Leo refuses to take another look.

  “Relax. He’s a block away,” I tell him. “You’re in the shadow of the garage. He can’t see you.”

  “That’s what you say,” he
says. “He probably has fucking night goggles on underneath his shades,” says Leo. “I’m outta here.”

  I think Leo’s going to wet his pants.

  “Where is he?” he says.

  “Heading this way. Into the park,” I tell him. “Oh, God. He’s running this way, Leo. I think he saw you.”

  “Oh shit,” he says. “Where do I go?” He’s doing tight little turns in front of the pillar, like a guy in need of a frantic pee. “Fucking A. Why do I let you talk me into these things?”

  “Because you’re a stand-up guy, Leo. Interested in truth and justice.”

  “I gotta get outta here,” he says:

  “Relax.” I’m laughing out loud by now. Pain in the midsection.

  “Your pal’s on a bench on the other side of the park,” I tell him.

  “You asshole,” he says. “Robbed me of five years of life,” he tells me. “Fuck you.” He’s stamping with his feet now, then stops and looks for fear that the noise might alert the guy.

  Then Leo does a quick sashay, straight away from the pillar, keeping the concrete between himself and the park across the street, looking over his shoulder for alignment, little baby steps.

  “See you later,” I tell him.

  “Not if I see you first,” says Leo. He’s into the shadows of the parking garage, and three seconds later I can hear only the click of his heels on concrete as he disappears around a corner.

  I head out into the sunlight and make my way across the intersection with the traffic light, all the while keeping a bead on the tall man in tan pants and white shirt. He is slender, well over six feet, with dark brown hair. He’s seated on a bench under a large elm a hundred feet from the fountain in the center of the park. The sun picks up the glint of metal in his hand as I draw near. He has a small container of yogurt, an apple, and a metal spoon in one hand. That Leo would recognize such as lunch is amazing.

  “Jim Cousins.” I use a normal voice, and I am ten feet from the bench when I say this.

  He looks up, squinting into the sunlight, his dark glasses now dangling from his shirt pocket.

  “Do I know you?”