Limitations

by Scott Turow

  But his oddness makes John in some ways a hero to his boss. The judge has often speculated that if he could put a probe in Banion’s brain, he’d enter a world more colorful than some $200 million Hollywood epic. But John has found a bridge to the rest of the world in the law. He functions in the hermetic zone of the appellate court, as a valued professional. In George’s judgment, John Banion is about as good as a law clerk gets. Precise. Talented. Unobtrusive.

  “John,” the judge says, as the clerk stands to have another go at the opinion, “Cassie tells me you don’t mind if she does the drafts in Warnovits. I want to be certain she’s not elbowing you out of the way.”

  “Hardly, Judge.” He looks at the carpet and mutters, “If she wants to deal with all that stuff, let her. I’ve had enough of those boys.” From John this is what passes as outspokenness. Generally, he embodies the selflessness to which the law aspires in the ideal. After nine years working with John, George still cannot tell whether he favors the prosecution or the defense, corporate interests or the little guy. He undertakes his work with the apparent disinterest of a shoemaker. Nonetheless, the judge has a brief, paralyzing thought of the comments Harry Oakey, Cassie’s father and George’s friend, might pass if he ever learned about his daughter’s newest assignment, which will require her to study that videotape. Not the sort of education Harry had in mind when he sent his daughter to George’s chambers.

  The judge asks Banion to give Cassie the bench memos John prepared before the oral argument and to tell her she can start work.

  “Still two drafts? Affirming and reversing?” John avoids a direct look, reluctant to confront the judge about his indecision, but it dawns on George that he is starting to make a fool of himself in his own chambers.

  “It’s a hard case, John. On the law. I seem to be stuck on the limitations issue. But whichever way I go, there will be a dissent. Koll wants the case reversed because the videotape couldn’t be used, and Purfoyle’s strictly for affirmance. I need to get my ducks in a row.”

  John departs, but with the discussion, George’s thoughts drift back to Warnovits. The case, when he can bring himself to contemplate it, remains welded to his memories of Lolly Viccino. Eventually, as he kept her company in the dormitory library, he realized that her ragged look was due in part to having had no chance to bathe. Late in the afternoon, he stood guard outside the men’s room so that Lolly could shower. It was there Grigson found him.

  ‘She’s still here?’ Grigson asked.

  George told the dorm proctor her story.

  ‘Well. I’m very sorry to hear that, Mason, but if her own people won’t take her in, what are we to do? She can’t stay.’

  George stood the only ground he could. ‘I’m not telling her.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to,’ Grigson said. ‘You just move along, George Mason. I’ll deal with this. Go on.’ The dorm proctor waved the back of his hand. From the mettle that had come into him, George realized that the proctor had heard about the goings-on the night before. Franklin Grigson was going to enjoy turning out the likes of Lolly Viccino.

  So, George thinks at his desk, he actually failed Lolly Viccino twice. He made no further protest on her behalf nor, more practically, did he escort her from the dorm to one of the local rooming houses, where he probably could have financed a leisurely stay for her after a frank chat with Hugh Brierly about the ‘rent’ he’d collected the night before. Instead, George did what kids do in tough situations—he hid. Visiting the library an hour later, he found the only remnant of Lolly’s stay was the dirty plate from the canteen heaped with cigarette butts. George fingered one or two, overcome by things he could not explain. And yet he knew that, much as he had hoped the night before, some fundamental transition had begun for him.

  For a second, George’s guilt feels like a dagger point against his heart. How could he have made no effort to find out what had become of her? To see if she had even lived out the day safely? Or to determine what mark all this had left on her?

  Banion knocks and returns from the small clerks’ chambers with a draft of three new paragraphs to be inserted in the movie theater opinion.

  “John, if I wanted to locate somebody I knew forty years ago in Virginia, is there any way to go about that?” His clerk can research anything on the Internet.

  “What’s the name, Your Honor?”

  As soon as George gives it, he realizes this is an impossible task, even for John. Assuming the average course of events, she married and, as was usually the case with women from Virginia of his age, had given up Viccino. And Lolly could not have been the name on her birth certificate. Not to mention the fact that George has no idea of precisely where or when she was born. The judge shakes his head at length to show he’s had second thoughts.

  “It’s a personal matter, John. Don’t waste your time with this. I may poke around myself some evening. I just wondered how to go about it.”

  Banion has scratched out the names of a few Web sites on a pad, but the notion that the matter is personal is as good as crashing down a gate. John permits himself little, if any, inquiry into the lives of others and thus seems to have no clue how curious everyone is about him. This winter, he was down for days with a serious bronchial infection. Working from home, he had reluctantly asked Dineesha to bring him a set of briefs he needed. She is the one person in chambers with whom he holds any semblance of a personal relationship—they exchange small gifts at Christmas—but even she had never been to his house. When she returned, there was a palpable atmosphere of suspense. Cassie; the clerks from the adjoining chambers; Marcus, the elderly courtroom bailiff; and the judge himself—everyone awaited some description of what Dineesha had found. She was far too dignified to indulge them, but the next day, when she fetched in a messenger delivery, the judge said to her, ‘Dare I ask?’

  After gently closing the door, Dineesha rendered a brief but vivid portrait. The stucco bungalow, in which John’s parents had raised him, had visible cracks in the outer walls and a patch of shingles missing from the roof. But the true bedlam was inside. It was not dirty, Dineesha said, but so dense with piles that she could barely get into the front hallway. It was as if he had a recycling center in the house. He did not appear to have thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last ten years. They were piled in columns to the ceiling in the living room, where there was also a virtual fortification of books, in eight-foot ramparts as if to form a bunker. Under the load, the hardwood floor had literally begun to sag. Two parakeets flew free throughout the house and made a squeaking racket.

  George is taken from these thoughts by a buzz arising somewhere in the room. The unfamiliar sound spooks him a bit until he realizes it’s Patrice’s cell groaning intermittently as it vibrates. Fishing it from the suit jacket that hangs behind him, the judge sees letters on the gray screen. A text message, his first ever. He’s mildly pleased to have caught up with the times, until he reads what’s there.

  “Number One,” he murmurs, “you are starting to get on my nerves.” But he cannot kid himself. It’s the first moment that requires a conscious effort to contain his fears. It’s not so much the words—‘Will get u’—that scare him. The threat is nothing new. What’s frightening is the number from which the message comes. It’s his, George’s. Number one has the judge’s missing cell phone.

  11

  TEMPER

  AT 3:00 P.M., Marina, who’s been working with the phone company for several hours, arrives with one of her deputies, Nora Ortega, a thin, dark, silent woman whom Marina has brought along on a few occasions in the past to take notes. George makes it a point to offer Marina his hand, and she exerts her entire boxy form as she shakes.

  “That was over the top, Judge, putting that tail on without telling you. Sorry.”

  He apologizes too, using the term “grouchy old man.” They settle in familiar poses, George behind his desk, Marina in the black wooden armchair in front of it.

  “So what did we learn about #1?” he asks.
“Anything good?”

  “We’ve got some idea where he was. Which basically comes down to Center City.”

  They’ve assumed all along that George’s tormentor is local, but this is the first proof. Nonetheless, the new information seems sparse compared with what he expected.

  “I thought they could position a cell phone better than that.”

  “If it’s turned on, Judge. But not if the phone is off. Which yours is, of course. It was probably off as soon as you got that text message.”

  “So how can they tell he was in Center City?”

  “My guy over there wouldn’t get very specific. They’ve got the government on one side and the ACLU on the other. He sort of explained all this by humming. But how I think this may go is that a cell phone actually puts out signals on two channels, and the company has a record of the second one, what’s called control channel data, which includes the location of the cell your phone connects to. The best they can do is tell us that the message went through the tower in the steeple at St. Margaret’s. He could have been anywhere within two square miles of there.”

  “So you’ve narrowed it down to about two hundred thousand suspects?”

  “Exactly.” Marina smiles. “We’ll have them all interviewed by morning.”

  George is relieved that she has recovered her sense of humor with him. In the meantime, she holds up Patrice’s spare cell phone, which she’s brought back after getting all the info from it the telephone company needed.

  “What I’m wondering is how he got this number.”

  “Because I was nice enough to give it to him,” says George. “I was trying to find the phone I lost. So I called it. Made sense to me. When I got voice mail, I left a message. ‘This is Judge George Mason. If you’ve picked up this cell phone, please call me at the following number.’ I tried a few times.”

  “And how would he have gotten into your voice mail without your password?”

  “The whole sequence is programmed into the phone when you hold down the one key. Obviously he figured it out.”

  “Obviously,” answers Marina.

  “Any idea who else he called? Did he give himself up in some way?”

  “Not really. The company says there’s no detail in the last two weeks.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If he used the phone, the calls are free under your plan. Voice mail. Stuff like that. He’s smart,” she says. “But we already knew that.”

  Next, she wants to replay how George’s cell turned up missing and the steps his staff and he took to find it. After some talk, it makes more sense to include in the conversation everyone who had a role in the search, and George summons them. Dineesha and Cassie take places on the gray sofa beside Nora. Marcus, tall and bearded, stands at the door, working over a toothpick. Not to be overlooked, Abel wanders in last and with much effort puts himself down on a low colonial boot bench, next to John Banion.

  George had noticed that the phone was not in his suit jacket pocket as he was leaving the Hotel Gresham after the Kindle County Bar Association’s Judges’ Day event, two weeks ago yesterday, but his last clear recollection of having it went back to his departure from chambers the evening before. The staff and he attempted to retrace his steps over the intervening period. Banion called the hotel lost and found. Marcus checked to make sure George had not left it at the courthouse metal detectors that morning. Cassie phoned the restaurant where George had dinner the preceding night, and went out to search his car. Dineesha combed the chambers. The judge himself looked everywhere around his house when he returned there.

  “Truth is, Marina, until today, I’ve been convinced I was going to lift some pile of papers and see it there.” In the last few hours, fitting things together, George has been spinning another theory: Zeke took it. He now suspects that what Zeke was up to yesterday was an effort to lift something else. As George envisions the first episode, the road dog Khaleel must have walked up and down the corridor until he could see that everyone was out of chambers for a minute, then signaled Zeke, who came up and grabbed the phone. That way, if anyone returned and found Zeke inside, he could say he had just come by to visit. The judge is reluctant to try out this notion on Marina, however, until he’s forewarned Dineesha. That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to.

  “Maybe I can help,” says Marina. “According to the records the company pulled, your last charged call was the day you lost it at 12:12 P.M. One minute.” She reads the number he’d dialed. It’s Patrice’s, her other cell.

  “I must have been checking to see how she was,” says the judge. “One minute means I probably got her voice mail.” That’s why he forgot making the call.

  “And where were you?”

  He cannot recollect. There have been so many stolen moments in so many corridors in the last months, brief, hushed conversations to let Patrice know she’s on his mind.

  “Do you remember when we left for the hotel?” George asks Cassie. He’d invited both clerks to the Judges’ Day event, but John, as he does every year, had shunned the crowd.

  Cassie searches her handheld.

  “We were supposed to meet the other judges in the lobby at 11:45. We were out of here by five till, for sure.” The Chief insists on punctuality in all things. All but two or three of the judges of the appellate court, a dozen and a half of them, and their clerks had been transported by Marina’s staff to the hotel in several vans. George and Cassie both recall being in the first vehicle to leave.

  “So you called from the hotel, Your Honor?”

  He seems to remember that now. Had he stood just outside the men’s room? Cassie recollects the judge going off for a few minutes before they entered the reception. But a vague memory is so suggestible. Neither Cassie nor he had put this together the day after. Perhaps #1 had the phone in hand at 12:12 and had hit the speed-dial keys to see where they would take him. But why just one? Thinking now, the judge is fairly certain he’d clicked off the connection when he got Patrice’s voice message.

  “Best recollection,” he answers, a lawyer’s phrase that passes for truth in the courtroom.

  “Meaning he picked your pocket there,” Marina says.

  “That doesn’t do much for your Corazón theory, does it?” George says to her. There’s no point in shying away from the name after Marina broke silence yesterday. After a second, the judge realizes that Zeke has also become a far less likely suspect, assuming the phone was lifted at the hotel.

  “I don’t see that.”

  “Come on, Marina. You think a kid in baggies and a prison buzz is going to walk into the Kindle County Bar meeting, with two hundred judges and six hundred lawyers around, and stick his hand in my suit jacket?”

  “Judge, you know what goes on with the gangs these days. Cops are undercover, and so are they. Do you really believe, Your Honor, that if we did a background on the servers, and the security guards, and the people taking coats we wouldn’t find one person with a connect to ALN? A quarter of the guards in the jail are courted in, Judge. Hell, not to be repeated, but there are a couple of people on my staff that Gang Crimes has questions about. If Corazón wanted to boost your cell, he could find somebody to do it.”

  Empiricism will never guide police work. Investigators fashion their theories and shape all evidence to fit. Forget the hatreds between the black and Latin gangs, the near impossibility of picking out George as a mark in a crowd of eight hundred. Corazón’s still the man. There are moments when George cannot avoid falling back into the grip of the perpetual antagonism he felt as a defense lawyer toward the cops and the way their habits shortcut the truth. And in this he reaches the hard rock of what’s between Marina and him: she’s more or less insisting he run scared.

  “May I be blunt?” the judge asks her.

  She takes a beat. “Sure.”

  “Maybe you ought to ask yourself, Marina, what it’s worth to you to stick to Corazón.”

  “‘Worth’?”

  “I use the term advis
edly. How much do you get to add to your emergency funding request to the County Board when you can trot out a name like Corazón’s? Ten percent? Twenty percent?”

  Marina sucks her cheeks into her mouth.

  “Whoa,” she says and glances over her shoulder to observe Nora’s reactions. “Judge, I think you’re starting to forget who’s on your side.”

  * * *

  When George Mason reaches home that night, he finds Patrice asleep in their room and steals back downstairs to the large kitchen she designed several years ago. There’s a profusion of light from a rectangular walnut-and-glass fixture. The cabinets match, with panes of German crackle glass inset with rectangular rose-color panels, all the elements intended to complement the existing fireplace in what was the living room when they bought. The space has a mellow warmth, and it’s probably his favorite place in the house, but tonight it cannot alter his mood. Solitude only allows him to wallow. He’s yet to recover from his second dustup with Marina. It’s a point of pride that he seldom loses his temper, and justified or not, it was thoughtless to blast her in front of everyone. Worst of all was the look on her face. George knows enough at this age to realize that somebody who followed her father into his profession is going to be especially vulnerable to the opinion of older men. She left with a chafed, sorrowful expression, which might as well have been an ice pick in George’s heart.

  Then at the end of the day, Cassie gave the judge outlines of the two potential opinions in Warnovits in the hope he would look at them over the weekend and choose between them. Examining the pages on the slate-topped kitchen island pulls him down further. Both drafts make sense, naturally. There’s no analytic trick he learned in law school or since then that allows him to pick one or the other apart. For a century and a half, legal education has been focused on reading the opinions of judges like George who sit on courts of review. In his day, his professors discussed these decisions, just as they would now, in terms of the policy concerns, the political views, the jurisprudential beliefs that drove them. After holding this job for nearly a decade, he regards much of what he was taught as romantic, if not completely wrong.