by Chris Bauer
The parking lot was where she crashed, more battered, more exhausted than she’d realized, on a patch of grass under an elm at the far end from the rental station, next to a park bench with worn, dark green enameled slats. With minimal effort she tuned out the tourists unloading and reloading themselves in the canoes and kayaks and paddleboats. A short rest here was what she needed, in the shade of a tree holding on to its leaves, the tree enjoying some Indian summer weather.
The questions rattled around inside Naomi’s head. When had they planned on exploiting this scholarship sham? Why go to all this trouble? Why her?
At her office window, she parted the sheers for an unobstructed view of an autumn afternoon in this corner of D.C. An unusually warm day for the season. Small whirlwinds churned up stray brown and green leaves around hedges needing a late summer trim, blowing them past smooth stone benches on the tree-lined plaza outlined by marble columns. From her window there was a partial view of the Capitol, which further grounded her in the seriousness of these surroundings, and yet, emotionally, she was a million miles away, this view lost in the gravity of what she’d just learned. Her shoes were off, her stockinged toes free to find comfort in the thick oriental carpets.
The pinnacle of her legal career. She’d either soar to the heights expected of this appointment, or she’d crash and burn before she rendered her first decision as a sitting associate justice. She would address this landmine when the people who had unearthed it arrived.
She removed a framed wall hanging, admired at arm’s length the off-white parchment under glass while she carried it back to her desk. A letter opener helped her remove the frame’s thin, pressed wood backing. She liberated the document, pondered it a moment more, then tucked it into a desk drawer. Her toes located her high heels inside the desk kneehole; she slipped them back on.
A knock on her chambers door. Naomi expected two separate sets of visitors, in no particular order, and she was quite sure she wouldn’t be happy seeing either set.
“Come in.”
Senator Folsom barged past her administrative clerk and the court cop. She marched up to Naomi’s desk, irate. What Naomi had expected.
“Why are you canceling on my Saturday breakfast meeting?” the senator bellowed.
“Senator. So glad you could fit this visit in with me today. Have a seat.” Trailing the senator but entering on a more reserved note was evangelist Higby Hunt.
More senatorial bluster. “I have the District’s National Museum of the American Indian booked for the entire morning on Saturday! A number of constituents and their families will be there to hear you speak. Your story is inspiring, Your Honor. You committed to this!”
“Senator, have you ever heard of a Chester Plunkett?”
“Who?”
“Chester ‘Fights Like A Badger’ Plunkett. Full-blooded Cherokee. Law professor emeritus, University of Oklahoma Law School. A close friend of mine. The Oklahoma Law School and Indian community lost him today. He was eighty years old.”
“Yes,” Reverend Hunt interjected. “I know of him. I’m sorry for your loss, Your Honor.”
“Yes, you do know him, Reverend. You and the senator both.” Naomi produced a copy of the document she’d received today from the Badger, may he rest in peace. She slid it across her desk, under Senator Folsom’s nose.
“Chester Plunkett discovered this by way of the Texas Public Information Act. It was there for the asking, except no one, least of all me or my family, would have ever thought there’d be a need to ask. One open-ended, phantom scholarship, set up for one person only, worth in excess of two hundred thousand publicly funded dollars. Some people might even view this as money laundering, Senator. It seems,” Naomi’s jaw muscles tightened, “that in one underhanded, shameless, politically-influenced maneuver expected to yield some preferred treatment to be named later. I already know of one situation where it might come in handy, you, Senator, are now in a position to tarnish my credentials and limit whatever effectiveness I might have hoped to achieve on the Supreme Court. You can have that copy. Oh, you can have this, too.”
Naomi opened her desk drawer and removed what she’d taken down from her wall. The grandiose document commemorated the occasion of her college scholarship award, done up splendidly with calligraphic letters, gold seals and a few Native American markings, and signed by the senator, a retired Texas governor, and other Texas dignitaries.
“My academic scholarship was a pretense. For what, I don’t know. You are going to tell me the significance of this sham. Now.”
Unflinching stares on both their parts, until another knock on the door broke the tension. Her admin clerk leaned in. “Your next appointment is here, Madam Justice.”
“Make them comfortable, please,” she told him. “We’re not through in here.”
Naomi sat up straighter at her desk, folded her hands in front of her. “I need information from you on this, Senator.”
Reverend Hunt shifted in his seat, but it was clear he was waiting for the senator to respond. Naomi remained patient, didn’t flinch. Senator Folsom was in full assessment mode, evaluating what she’d heard. She tilted her silver-white head, produced an intense, furrowed-brow stare at her accuser. She leaned in.
“Perhaps the state budget wouldn’t allow for funding after that first scholarship, Your Honor. Law school is expensive, remember? Don’t forget, if it weren’t for that scholarship, you might still be paying it off.”
A test salvo. A miss. “I would have been like every other law student with loans. But regardless, the state had a budget surplus for more than a decade. The money was there to keep that scholarship going. Don’t impugn my intelligence, Senator. This is influence peddling. How you intended to use it, considering at that point I was simply a mouthy student feminist, is what I want to know.”
“The committee could not have known, Your Honor,” Senator Folsom said.
“What does that mean? Could not have known what?”
“We wanted to make sure you were equipped to do well. To excel. We never dreamed…”
“Look, Senator, stop speaking in generalities. Who is this ‘we’? And why me?”
“I’ll speak however I want to, damn it. There was no intention of using this ‘phantom scholarship’ against you, Madam Justice. None. The ‘we’ was, and is, a small group of conservative Christian faithful who set about to prove a point. That an unborn baby’s life matters.”
“You’re not making any sense, Senator! You funneled money to some random Native American kid…me…to validate that Christians are pro-life?”
“Listen carefully, Naomi Coolsummer. There was nothing random about it.” The gravel in her voice intensified. “In nineteen eighty-five, when you were in high school…”
“Mildred, is this the time and the place for this?” Reverend Hunt said. “I thought Saturday…”
“Shut up, Higby. You heard her. There is no Saturday. It has to be now.”
She was referring to Naomi at age fifteen. A normally awkward high school experience for her until then, raised by a middle-income, two wage-earner family. But from sixteen forward, a world of difference for her. People suddenly knew who she was, paid more attention to her upbringing, her family.
Naomi’s interest piqued ten-fold. “Go on.”
“When you were a teenager we learned something about you. Something your adoptive parents never knew. How we learned it, you needn’t worry about, but it was information obtained with the best of intentions. For the greater good.”
“I’ll cut to the chase. Certain closed adoption records were made available to us. We learned who your birth mother is.”
The senator was keen to Naomi’s facial expression, waiting for feedback. Naomi was angrier about the senator’s arrogance than shocked at the revelation itself.
“You pompous, self-righteous windbag. I’m supposed to be thankful you ferretted out this information on me? You had no right to it, and having learned it, no right to withhold it. How dare you!
”
“Naomi…”
“Madam Justice to you. You need to leave, Senator.”
“Do not mistake my civility with you,” the senator’s eyes narrowed, “or my willingness to accept your misguided derision, Madam Justice, as a sign of weakness. Few adoptees from back then can say they know the names of their birth mothers. Even I can’t say that about myself. This information, once it was in our hands, turned a life that was already special, because all life is, into a life that over time became much more significant. Yours.”
Naomi’s face tightened. “Again with the generalities. A group of people not including my adoptive parents knows who my birth mother is. Thirty years you’ve kept this information to yourself. And you rigged public scholarship money for me because of it? I’m supposed to be happy learning this now? This is sick, Senator. What’s more, it’s probably criminal. Get out.”
The reverend stood, ready to leave. The senator didn’t budge. Naomi punched a button on her chambers phone. “Send in Deputy Marshal Trenton please,” she said into the phone’s speaker, “there’s a situation in here.”
Senator Folsom tented her fingers, leaned farther back in the chair.
“I’m having you forcibly removed, Senator.”
The senator drilled a challenging, unblinking stare into Naomi’s enraged eyes.
“I’ll get to the point. Jane. Roe. Your mother is Norma McCorvey. Jane. Fucking. Roe.” She shrugged her shoulders, feigning apology. “It seemed like you weren’t going to ask.”
The heavy wooden door to her office burst open, Edward shouldering his way into the chambers. His gun drawn, he strode quickly in front of Naomi’s desk, inserting himself between her and her guests. In his wake was a court policeman.
“What’s the problem, Your Honor?” Edward faced down the reverend, seemed less interested in the elderly senator, who remained seated. In the hallway, heads poked into view through the open door, all three of them, Naomi was sure, intrigued by the excitement.
The pendulum, Naomi now realized, had swung in a different direction, and it could well decapitate her.
“You have proof of this, Senator?”
“Of course. Birth certificate, hospital, month, day, year. Parents’ names and ethnicities. I will gather it up.”
“Edward, thank you, but I’ve changed my mind. Leave us alone please.”
THIRTY-THREE
The door to the justice’s chambers closed again. Deputy Marshal Trenton and the court cop were back on this side of it, with them.
“’Sup with the Wild West show?” Owen asked the marshal.
“Nothing. Court business. You need to wait.”
This, after they’d already spent time being interviewed by the FBI, the U.S. Marshal’s office, NSA, court police, and the one organization Judge was surprised to see there, the Secret Service. If each of them hadn’t badged them, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart. Geenie had spilled all of what she could remember, some of her info handwritten, some of it verbal with only minor mouth action. Larinda Jordan remained a fugitive, but because of Geenie’s information they had more on her now than before.
They waited a little longer for Justice Coolsummer. After another ten minutes, Geenie started to fade. Judge pulled the marshal aside.
“Look, Mister Trenton, Edward, we need to forgo the thank-yous here. Geenie’s out of it. Pay our respects to the judge for us, please. We could use that ride back to my van now.”
Owen whined. “C’mon, dude, this is a big deal, meeting a U.S. Supreme Court justice. It’s on my bucket list.”
He ignored Owen and waited for Edward to get on board with his decision. Before he could respond the door to the judge’s chambers opened.
The first one to exit was the longest tenured U.S. senator still in office, Mildred Folsom from Texas, flashing her photogenic, cap-toothed smile surrounded by a shoe-leather-tan face. Following her was, no shit, that Texas televangelist asshole Higby Hunt, Judge mused. Edward ushered the new set of visitors inside Justice Coolsummer’s chambers.
The judge stood at an office window, her back to the room. The marshal waited for her to acknowledge that someone had entered before announcing them. When she didn’t he shooed them forward. It was then Judge realized she wasn’t looking out the window but rather at something framed on the wall. A law school diploma. She lifted it off its hanger.
“Madam Justice,” Edward said. “Mister Drury, Miss Pinto and Mister Wingert are here to see you.”
The judge admired her diploma close up, her response distant. “Who?”
“They flushed out the Planned Parenthood assailant, Your Honor. You said you wanted to meet Mister Drury.”
“Ah, that Mister Drury. I did say that, didn’t I?” She rested the framed diploma on an armchair, finally devoting her attention to her guests. “And with him Miss Pinto, the woman who nearly captured the terrorist. And, of course, Chigger Wingert, beloved Dallas sports writer. That brings us up to speed on the introductions. Have a seat, everyone. This needs to be quick. I have some movers delivering furniture this afternoon. Mister Trenton, you’re dismissed.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. I’m not leaving you…”
Her face soured. “Wait outside, Mister Trenton. I want a word with them, alone, please. I trust them.”
Mr. Trenton frowned at her sharp tone. “But Madam…”
“Edward, stop arguing. You need to get out. Now.”
The door closed behind him. Geenie and Judge sat, Justice Coolsummer sat. Owen did not. Things were now a little tense. To their right on a conference table were what looked like a half-eaten lunch with an untouched second lunch next to it. Right about now, she had their undivided attention.
“Fairly exciting day today,” she said, “wasn’t it?”
They murmured things that went along with agreeing headshakes.
“Yes,” she said, “a one-of-a-kind kind of day. Yes, indeed. Well, it seems your government owes you great thanks for your vigilance this morning. I asked you back so I could provide that. Thank you all. Mister Drury, we owe you an apology for what I understand was a nasty bruising by Deputy Marshal Trenton, so let’s include that apology here as well, shall we? Oh, and let’s be thankful your pain and suffering seems to have been limited to the bruised ribs you are holding as you sit. Is this correct?”
“I won’t be suing anyone, Your Honor.”
“Excellent. If I’m sounding a bit cynical, yes, maybe I am. Sorry. We all have crosses to bear. Today’s crosses…well, today has been especially eye-opening for me, and I can’t say I’m all that thrilled with having to socialize much more right now. So, have we covered everything?”
Rude, and not how Judge had pictured her at all. Owen seemed immune to it, smiling like he was about to get laid. “Madam Justice. This is such an honor, ma’am. I also do a court blog through an alias…”
“‘Thurgood Cochran.’ Yes. Cute, irreverent name. You like pissing off the white majority, don’t you? I’m aware of the blog and your interest in the Court, and in me in particular. But, sad to say, Mister Wingert, it seems you’ve been chasing fool’s gold when it comes to me. So, again,” she clapped her hands once, signaling finality, “we need to wrap this up, which means whatever else you have to say, Thurgood, you will need to leave for your blog. Thanks for stopping by.”
She summoned Mr. Trenton. The big man collected them, ushered them out the door and closed it behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, staying composed. “I’ve got no explanation for that. I’m chalking it up to a good person having a bad day. Deputy Abelson will bring the van arou…”
A loud crash on the other side of the door had the marshal whirling, his gun drawn as he shoved his way into her chambers. Judge entered behind him.
Judge Coolsummer stood next to the conference table, her feet apart for balance, her hands holding the split bottom half of a picture frame. Broken wood from the frame’s top half and jagged glass chunks were s
ettling on the table and the floor. A law school diploma parchment teetered from the table’s edge, a large tear in it. It fluttered, then settled onto the rug. She absentmindedly released the rest of the fractured frame, letting it fall on top of the other debris.
“Ah, Mister Trenton, you’re back. Be careful. There’s some broken glass in here.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Larinda jolted awake, needing to orient herself. It was five after three in the p.m.; she’d slept longer than she wanted. A tree overhead, grass against her arms, a slight wind on her bare shoulders, water lapping against a dock. Her wrapped wrist throbbed. One more reason her oxy stash needed to be replenished ASAP. That, plus the abdominal pains, the body sweats and the nausea. Withdrawal.
She climbed into her SUV. The dead parking attendant’s electronic meter was where she’d left it, on the floor in front of the front passenger seat. A glance in her rearview confirmed her cargo remained covered. She surveyed the Key Bridge Boathouse dock, where the kayaks and canoes were piling up, more people returning from their time on the river than leaving. Across the river, which now showed some chop, was a stretch of wooded Virginia coastline. After the near disaster on the Supreme Court plaza, things were coming back together. As long as the reverend came through with her meds.
His response to her text had been yes, he’d meet with her, and he’d bring what she needed. She texted him with a meeting place:
—Foundry Branch Valley Park
The park was five minutes from the Key Bridge, close to the Potomac, according to Google, and full of overgrown green space plus walking and hiking trails:
—Yes. But Larinda, you must agree to stop what you’re doing.
The phone beeps kept coming, one after another, when she didn’t respond. She’d retrieved a few of the texts, all pleas from him. Her final text to him:
—Just bring the meds. We’ll talk then.
But before they met she needed to recon something first, across the Key Bridge, plus she had to get rid of the parking attendant’s meter.