The Judge

by Steve Martini

  “My name is Madriani,” I tell him. I come closer. “I was given your name by a mutual acquaintance.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A friend,” I tell him.

  The initial smile drops from his face.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk,” I tell him.

  I can sense him stiffening. What I myself would do if I worked for the police department and some stranger came up knowing my name.

  “I’m on my lunch hour. If it’s business it will have to wait.”

  He gives me another once-over, this time with his dark glasses on.

  “You look familiar,” he says. “Have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m an attorney,” I tell him. I hand him a business card.

  “You’re one of the lawyers representing that judge,” he says.

  “That’s right.”

  “I saw you on TV.” The ticket of fame. Apprehension seems to melt. I’m giving out business cards, not bullets.

  “You mind if I take a seat?”

  “Suit yourself,” he says.

  “I was told that you might know something about a case that occurred a couple of years ago.”

  “I think maybe you have me confused with somebody else,” he says. “I’m not a cop.”

  “Right. Your name is James Cousins. You work the police property room.”

  “You know a lot about me. Like I say, if you want to talk business, chain of custody on drugs or something, catch me in the office.”

  He pulls a paperback book from inside his shirt, opens it, and starts to read.

  “I want to talk to you about Zack Wiley’s murder,” I tell him.

  With this he looks up and shakes his head. “What is this? All of a sudden everybody and his brother wants to talk about Zack Wiley. Do I look like an information booth?”

  “Is somebody else trying to talk to you?”

  “Listen, I’m not saying a word. Either leave, or I will.”

  “The grand jury?” I say.

  He looks at me but doesn’t say a word. From behind his dark glasses I cannot read his eyes. His face is stone. He picks up his spoon and yogurt, pockets the apple, gets up, and starts to walk away.

  “We can do it here, or I can subpoena you and we can do it in open court,” I tell him.

  “Fine. Do it in open court,” he says.

  “In front of the press, where everybody you work with will know what you have to say—or at least what questions I have to pose.”

  This stops him. He turns, looks at me.

  “That assumes you know the right questions,” he says. The glasses come off, a smug look.

  “Oh, I think I do. The gun was a setup from the start. What did they do, set it aside in case they needed to drop a convenient piece on a suspect?”

  This draws nothing but pensive looks.

  “When it landed in the property room they didn’t fudge on the serial number. That would be too obvious,” I tell him. “It must have been something else.”

  If he could mislead me with his eyes at this moment he would, take me where it is cold, colder, coldest.

  “What was it?” I ask him. I scratch my chin, turn to sun a little, gestures for effect. Suddenly I snap my fingers and look back at him. “The model number!”

  With this I can actually see his jaw drop a millimeter.

  “Sure. That would do it,” I say.

  A little saliva going down his throat.

  “They must have needed some help inside the property room. An identification tag that gave the correct serial number, the right make and caliber, but forgot to include the model number. Smith and Wesson must make what, a dozen different models in that caliber?”

  He almost answers me, but at the last instant holds back.

  “The manufacturer would use the same serial numbers over for each different model, so there would be no way to identify a specific weapon unless you had both the serial number and the model number. That’s smart,” I tell him.

  He wants to talk, but he doesn’t dare.

  “How did they mess up?” I ask. “What tipped off the grand jury that this gun had been in the property room before it was used to kill Wiley?”

  “Listen. I can’t talk,” he says. “Not here. Not now.”

  “They don’t know you testified, do they? Your friends?” Suddenly it hits me. I am talking to the grand jury’s star witness, and whoever killed Wiley doesn’t know it.

  “Where can my process server find you?” I ask him. “In your office?”

  “Gimme a break,” he says. “I didn’t know what was happening until it was over.”

  “Right. You just looked the other way,” I tell him.

  “They’re satisfied. They’re not after me,” he says.

  “Gave you immunity, did they?”

  He doesn’t answer this. He doesn’t have to. It is written in the dodging pupils of his eyes.

  “How did the grand jury get onto them? How did they find you? Fingerprints? Did you leave yours on the gun when it was in Property?”

  “When’s the last time you saw prints lifted off a handgun?” he says. He laughs at this. “Something from the movies. All they get in real life are smudges. Everybody grips a gun too hard. The oil, the recoil. It all leads to nothing but smudges. Test ten thousand you might get a single thumbprint,” he says.

  “But you weren’t shooting it,” I tell him.

  “It wasn’t fingerprints,” he says.

  “Then what?”

  Cousins is in a box and he knows it.

  “If I tell you will you forget the subpoena?”

  Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  “Then why should I tell you?”

  “Weigh a maybe against a certainty, you have your answer,” I tell him.

  A lot of saliva going down his throat, Adam’s apple bobbing in time to the tune on a boom box that some kid is packing on his shoulder near the fountain.

  “How did they know the gun had been in the property room?”

  “A scratch on the cylinder,” he says. “And a scribe mark inside under the handle.”

  “What?”

  “Whenever a revolver comes into Property, it’s unloaded, usually in the field. For safety,” he says. “Each bullet or empty cartridge is taken out and put in a separate envelope, and the cylinder is marked with a scribe, a little scratch on the metal, showing which chamber was lined up with the barrel at the time the gun was taken into custody. They also mark it inside someplace where it’s not so easy to see. It’s the procedure,” he says. “When Forensics picked up the gun after Wiley was shot they did this. What they didn’t realize is that there was already a second scribe mark on the piece,” he says, “from when it was taken the first time. Somebody at Internal Affairs, a guy who used to work ballistics, got onto this.”

  All the reasons you never want to commit crime. A million things you do not know, half of them microscopic, any one of which can trip up the most canny mind.

  “Who was the triggerman?” I ask.

  “Hey. I’m not saying another word. You want to subpoena me, you go ahead.”

  My question assumes that he knows the answer, which I doubt.

  “Then tell me who took the gun out of Property.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that what you’re telling the grand jury?”

  “It’s the truth,” he says. “They just asked me to look the other way. Leave the door unlocked for a few minutes while I had coffee. I didn’t even know what they took.”

  “Who asked you to look the other way?”

  A stern face, like maybe he has gone too far already, more candor than he gave the jury.

 
“I’m not saying another word,” he says. Suddenly his gaze is lost in the distance, some floating object off in the direction of the garage. I wonder for a moment if perhaps Leo has come back for another peek, to see how long we talk.

  “I gotta go,” he says. “You’ve screwed up my whole lunch hour.”

  “Yeah. Well, somebody screwed up Zack Wiley’s whole life,” I tell him.

  “It wasn’t me,” he says. “And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t follow me.”

  The last I see is his long stride making its way around the fountain and off toward the traffic light at the corner.

  While we were talking the park has filled with people. It is twelve-thirty, and workers have made their way out of City Hall. Women with brown bags and dressy heels take a moment in the sun from their busy day. I see two judges strolling on the sidewalk across the way, their daily trek from the courthouse to restaurant row a few blocks away.

  “Counselor!” It’s a voice from behind me, the direction of the garage.

  I turn.

  Staring at me with a Nicholson grin is Tony Arguillo, sporting round aviator shades over pearly white teeth, and a tan like he’s just stepped off a Caribbean beach.

  “You do get around,” he says.

  “Tony. How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” he says. “Just fine. More than I could say for some people I know.” He looks off in another direction for an instant, and I track on his line of sight. Cousins is making his way up the steps of the center, back to his office.

  Tony’s looking back at me. He does the thing that little kids do to the tune of shame-shame, one finger pointed at me, with the first finger of the other hand scraping over its top. He is backing up away from me all the while as he does this, in the direction of McGowen Center.

  “Dangerous liaisons,” he says. “You should watch yourself.” With this he spins on his heels like something choreographed in a dance step, snaps the fingers of both hands down to his side, and walks away.

  CHAPTER 14

  WITNESS LISTS HAVE NOW BEEN EXCHANGED, AND THE name Oscar Nichols does not appear on theirs. Harry admits that Lenore was right not to kick this particular sleeping dog. For the moment, at least, he and Lenore seem to have put aside their differences. In the grind of final preparations for trial, they are both too busy and tired to fight.

  It is midmorning and ten days have passed since the unpleasantness with Tony in the park. Arguillo is the original cop-child, what you would get if you issued guns and badges to kids in the fifth grade. Perhaps one day he will grow up, but with Tony I do not see it happening in this life.

  “Well, do we have a consensus?” Lenore whispers, leaning over the counsel table. “What do we do with Mrs. Ramirez? Is she on or off? Or do you want to do more voir dire?”

  Today we are ensnared in the next course of the Coconut’s juridical minefield. The four of us, Harry and Lenore, Acosta and I, are camped at the defense counsel table in Radovich’s courtroom, delving through a pile of jury profiles.

  We did some legal parrying last week, motions to suppress, arguing that the cops had exceeded the scope of the warrants when they collected the fibers from Acosta’s county car and the animal hair from his home. Radovich gave them wide berth. With this judge, if we are to win at trial, it will not be grounded in the nuance of constitutional law. He gave our motion the old smell test, and flatly pronounced that the warrants were specific enough. The hair and fibers are in, subject to the state showing relevance and proper foundation.

  Kline seemed vindicated. First blood for his side. On a roll, he told the judge that he wanted to join the prostitution case with the murder. We were hard-pressed to resist this, having argued for it originally ourselves, and so the matters are now joined, to be tried in one case.

  It seems that he is headed somewhere with this, but we are not sure where. Kline then told Radovich that he had one other matter to be discussed in chambers when we are finished here today.

  “The judge is waiting,” says Lenore. “Mrs. Ramirez,” she reminds us. “Thumbs up or down. Do we burn a preemptory or leave her on?”

  “Maybe the state will waste her,” says Harry. “Mediterranean flavor,” he says, “they can’t be too happy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” says Acosta. Harry’s getting the evil eye.

  “No offense,” says Harry. “But if I were defending, I would swing for a panel of your people every time. The last time they voted conviction was at the Inquisition,” he says.

  “I don’t think so,” says Acosta. “It is true there is an ethnic factor,” he says. “But there is something about her I do not like.”

  It is the thing about juries. There are as many theories as there are lawyers to produce them.

  Ordinarily I would not expect the defendant to play an active role in the selection of jurors. But the facts that Acosta is trained in the law and has a vital stake here make it necessary for him to participate. It has me wondering if in doing this we are not merely spreading the accountability for a bad result.

  “Could we have just one more moment, Your Honor?” Lenore says to Radovich.

  “Take your time,” he says. “I want you to be happy with this jury,” he tells us.

  If that’s the case, Acosta has a few hundred relatives in the hallway outside who would be happy to join the jury.

  “Come on, guys, I need a decision,” says Lenore.

  “Lookie here,” Harry whispers, lips barely moving, “she has a history of drugs.” Like a car salesman pitching the fact that his model has air conditioning.

  Acosta hasn’t seen this in the profile, more personal information than a juror usually discloses.

  Harry points it out to him. “No convictions, but to listen to her therapist, she’s a cognitive basket case, some shrink’s lifetime meal ticket,” Harry hisses.

  “Maybe I have misjudged the woman,” says Acosta. This is the only place on earth where flirting with a criminal background is a positive reference.

  I read the profile more carefully. Ramirez got hooked on cocaine in her late twenties, buying from a friend at work. She nicked her employer on a disability claim on her way out the door. At thirty-seven, she has been receiving supplemental Social Security benefits for eleven years, on the social fiction that self-induced drugs are a disability on the order of Parkinson’s disease. She lives in a group home, owned by a therapist who apparently tells her she will never recover, at least not until the government largesse runs out. Last year, largely on the political drag of her therapist and the drug culture’s circle of benevolence, Ramirez was appointed to a county commission and now serves as the local “drug czarina” of Capital County, where she makes public policy for other addicts. For this she is given a county car and a small stipend to go along with her perennial SSI. Upward mobility on the public dole.

  “She’s our perfect juror,” says Harry.

  “On its face,” I tell him. “But I am troubled as to why anyone would disclose this kind of lurid information unless they had to.”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” says Lenore.

  It’s a tricky point, sensitive materials picked over in front of the other jurors. And yet we cannot just ignore it.

  Lenore gives me a gesture, as if to say, “Be my guest,” and sits down.

  Mrs. Ramirez sits near the center of the jury box, in the second row. The courtroom is full of mostly other prospective jurors waiting their turns in the tumbler as we bounce their predecessors.

  There is one row for press. This is mostly empty. Jury selection doesn’t rate heavy coverage. In the back row, Lili Acosta sits by herself. An elderly man and woman are across the aisle from her, flanked by a younger man. I am told that this is Brittany Hall’s mother, father, and younger brother, here to see that justice is done.

&nbs
p; Like most things with this judge, Radovich does voir dire in his own way. For this trial, because of the early publicity, he has called five hundred prospective jurors. Our first meeting was in a county auditorium, where Radovich asked some preliminary questions, what people saw and thought they knew. He weeded out nearly two hundred souls, including a woman whose husband had been cited downtown in a prostitution sting. It is unknown whether she would have hanged the police for their efforts, or Acosta for being so stupid. Radovich didn’t care.

  “Mrs. Ramirez, how are you today?” I ask her.

  “Fine.” She smiles, no toothy grin, but businesslike. She may be in her late thirties, but looks older. She is slender and small, a kind of Latin pixie with wavy dark hair pulled back by a comb.

  “You have been very forthcoming in your juror questionnaire,” I say. “You have volunteered a lot of details regarding your background. I want to thank you.”

  “I wanted to be honest,” she says. “I am a recovered drug user. I have been taught that acknowledgment and acceptance is the first step in any cure. I do not deny my past,” she says.

  She would give me twenty more minutes of this, admission of sin being good for the soul, the Church of Reformed Zealotry, but I cut her off.

  “A healthy attitude,” I tell her.

  There are now big red flags fluttering in my brain. To one holding such views, the Coconut could be seen as in a state of denial, the only cure being some further fall from grace.

  She is immaculately dressed, in a silk print and high heels, wearing tasteful earrings, an outfit to make an impression. What makes me think that she wants to sit on this jury?

  “As long as you have been so honest with us I think we have an obligation to be honest with you, and with the rest of the panel. You have no criminal record. Is that right?”

  “No.”

  “And you have never been arrested for drug use, have you?” My merit badge for the day: Self-esteem 101.

  “No.” With this she sits an inch taller in her chair. She may have been a walking pharmacy, but the cops never caught her.

  “And you never dealt drugs? Sold them for cash to anyone else?” On this I am on squishy ground, so I try to make the question as narrow as possible. I hold my breath until she answers.