Courting Death
Page 17
“Good morning, Ms. Melanie, how are you?”
“Just fine, Judge.” He nodded to Phillip and Arthur and then turned back to her. “Good job on the eyeball case. I think you’re right. What happened there went way beyond malpractice.”
“I think so too.” She flushed with pride, and he caught Arthur casting a glance her way. Did he divine something not quite chaste in the way Arthur looked at her? They would make a well-matched couple, but the last thing he needed was romantic drama in chambers.
“Judge,” Arthur asked, “do you know Dorothy Henderson, the choir director at Clarkeston College?”
“Sure, her father used to be an attorney in town long ago. But she went off and studied music, worked with Robert Shaw in Atlanta, and then came back here.” He smiled at the memory of Dorothy integrating her choir before any local schools had complied with Brown v. Board of Education. She had scandalized the Clarkeston establishment more than once. “She’s gotten in almost as much trouble as me over the years.”
“Do you think that I could sing with her this spring? Rehearsals start at four thirty on Tuesdays and Thursdays … That’s why I ask.”
He thought for a moment. “As long as you’re caught up in your work, I don’t see why not. And as long as your colleagues don’t have any objections.” He looked at Phillip and Melanie who shook their heads.
“That’s awesome, Arthur!” Melanie was beaming. “Professor Henderson used to come to my high school every year to do a choral workshop. Singing with her is like a religious experience.”
“Why don’t you audition too?” Arthur said. “She might need another soprano. Ms. Stillwater told us you’re a great singer.”
The young woman blushed and shook her head. “No … I’ve got too much to do here.” Then, she changed the subject. “Could I ask you a question, Judge? How do you deal with people who are ignorant about the South? I just talked to a friend in New York who always refers to Georgia as ‘the land of the KKK.’”
He thought for a moment. “Tell her that you just read about serious sectarian violence in her part of the country. Did you all see the story in the paper about the Unitarian Klansman in Boston?”
“No.”
“They caught him,” he drawled, “burning a question mark in someone’s lawn.”
He managed to keep a straight face while his clerks sputtered and moaned. “Enjoying a joke at the Unitarians’ expense, are we? That’s not very open-minded. Did I ever tell you about the Catholic priest, the rabbi, and the Unitarian minister?”
“No,” they answered in unison.
“Well, the wealthiest man in town bought himself a BMW 420i, and he wanted it blessed, so he sought out the leading clerics in the town. ‘I want you to say a blessing for my 420i,’ he asked the priest. ‘What’s a 420i?’ the priest replied. ‘It’s a car,’ said the rich man in disgust. ‘I’ll go ask the rabbi instead.’ So, the rich man asks the rabbi, ‘I want you to say a blessing for my 420i.’ ‘What’s a 420i?” the rabbi asks. Disappointed once again, the rich man goes to the Unitarian minister. ‘I want you to say a blessing for my 420i. And please tell me that you know what a 420i is!’ ‘Sure,’ replied the Unitarian, ‘it’s a car … but what’s a blessing?’”
“That’s terrible,” Arthur groaned. The other two could not get anything out at all. While they recovered, the Judge stood up, gave them a slight nod, and left for his office.
* * *
“What the hell was that about?” Melanie spoke first, still delighted that the Judge had singled her out on the “eyeball case” before he had launched into his comedy routine.
“What a total drive-by!” Phil turned his palms up and shook his head. “Who knew?”
“That was awesome.” Arthur nodded. “I wonder why he’s not always like that. At the beach, Jack Ramsey told me that the Judge used to take his clerks with him on a fishing trip every year. Can you imagine sitting out on a lake with just the Judge and a case of beer?”
“Not really,” Melanie replied, “where the hell would I pee on a boat?”
The shrill ring of the phone interrupted her as she speculated whether the fishing trips had stopped when the Judge started hiring women clerks. The guys looked at her, and she waited four rings to give Ms. Stillwater a chance to pick up before she finally answered.
“Hello? Oh, hey, Angie …” Melanie spoke quietly into the phone while her co-clerks went back to their work. A few minutes later, she hung the phone up and stared at them.
“That was interesting.”
“What?” Phil asked.
“I called a friend of mine at Cravath and asked her about Carolyn Bastaigne.” She pursed her lips and confessed. “Actually, I was hoping to get ahold of her personnel file.”
“Are you crazy?” Phil accused her in a hoarse whisper.
“Apparently so, because they don’t let those files out of the office. According to my friend, I’d have to go up there with a court order if I wanted to look at it.” She cut Phil off before he could speak. “And no, I’m not going to forge one. But she did say something very interesting. Cravath apparently revoked Carolyn’s offer just before she was supposed to start work.”
“How did you find that out?”
“The recruitment person there looked at the file. She wouldn’t give it to Angie, but she wanted to correct the misimpression that ‘someone like Carolyn’ was going to work at Cravath.”
“Did she say what happened?” Phil frowned.
“Nope, just that the offer had been revoked.”
“Maybe they finally figured out she was lazy.”
“Maybe.” She pushed back from the table and laced her fingers behind her head. “But if they asked for a writing sample or something, she would have given them something good. She was capable of writing well. The merger memo proves it.”
Contemplative silence.
Then, Phil tapped his fingers on the table. “Maybe the Judge torpedoed her.”
“Huh?”
“If they did a reference check and he said something negative, they wouldn’t hire her.” Phil paused, but no one jumped into the empty space. Melanie was well aware of the Judge’s influence and what a good or a bad recommendation could do for her career. “Or …”
“Or what?” Melanie studied Phil and suddenly understood where he was going.
“What if your stock manipulation theory is right? What if the Judge found out that Carolyn had misused her position and planned to trade on news of the beverage company merger before it was made public.” He let out a low whistle. “Talk about a breach of confidentiality!”
“I can definitely see him calling up Cravath,” she said. “In fact, he might even have an ethical obligation to call.”
“Yeah, but why would he know about your imaginary stock scheme?” Arthur asked. “Even if the insider trading theory is right, how would the Judge know what she was planning?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie replied slowly, but she still thought she was on to something big. She could sense it.
“And that’s why,” Melanie announced with certainty, “we’ve got to read Carolyn’s personnel folder.” She cast a glance in the direction of Ms. Stillwater’s filing cabinets.
“You need to read it,” Arthur said. “I don’t need to read anything. I don’t see what good can come of it. And if you look at her file, you’ll be breaking the Judge’s confidentiality rules too.” Phil looked at Melanie seriously and nodded his agreement.
Their advice was sound, but not irresistible. The impulse to impress the Judge was simply too strong. Her co-clerks had not grown up in the State that he had dominated for decades. They couldn’t understand what it really meant for a Georgian to leave her mark in these chambers. It was not enough to write excellent bench memos. She wanted to solve the mystery of Carolyn Bastaigne’s death, and for the time being, the ends clearly justified the means.
XIX.
SPIRIT IN THE SKY
Late in the afternoon, Arthur left the c
ourthouse and walked through the Clarkston College campus to his first rehearsal. Although it was barely four o’clock, the winter sun was already spent and provided nothing more than a cool orange shadow to illuminate his walk.
He followed a small group of students under the arched portico of the Music Building into the chorus room, and took a seat in the middle row of risers, just to the right of a piece of paper labeled “T.”
Professor Henderson entered at exactly four thirty.
“Let me welcome you to the first rehearsal of the spring semester. Most of you have sung with the chorus before, but let me welcome those who have not.” She scrutinized a group of about twenty sopranos, twenty-five altos, fifteen basses, and seven tenors. “As you can see, although we’ve borrowed a tenor from the federal courthouse, we could still use about five more.”
Arthur saw a couple of curious altos sneak a peek at him.
“And if you know any other gentlemen who might like to join us, I would appreciate your sending them to me.” She clapped her hands. “Now, let’s get started. To the right, massage!”
He stood up and joined the line of choristers each rubbing the back and neck of the person next to them. His hands ran self-consciously over the soft sweater of a red-headed soprano. The students around him talked animatedly.
“My, haven’t we been working out over vacation.”
“Ooooh, angora, this is softer than my cat.”
Everyone but Arthur seemed comfortable running their hands over their neighbors.
“Pound!”
He felt his back being rhythmically karate-chopped, neck muscles first, then over each side of his spine from shoulders to kidneys. He transferred to the soprano’s back whatever was being done to him.
“To the left, massage!”
As he worked on the shoulders of the tenor on the other side, the girl behind him chided him on how tense his neck muscles were.
“Pound!” After a brief flurry of punches, the director commanded them to raise them over their heads, stretching and moving their arms down in the same motion used to complete a snow angel.
“Face forward and massage your own neck.” Henderson rubbed her neck and groaned.
Arthur reached back and found the soprano was right about his muscle tension.
“Now, roll your head forward from your right shoulder to your left and back again.”
The girl next to him laughed as Arthur’s neck crackled and popped.
“Shake out your hands.” She demonstrated by placing her hands in front her, palms facing her body, and shaking her fingers like a cat trying to flick water off its paws.
“Now, open your mouth, touch your tongue to your front teeth and pant silently like a dog. This is important. I want you to be aware of the lower abdominal muscles that provide your breath support.” She spread her hands flat on her stomach, pinkies extending below her belt-line. “Put your hands on your belly and pant again. Feel that? That’s where your body should work when you sing. Not your throat. Your throat should always be relaxed and open.”
Then, she opened her mouth wide and vocalized a lazy yawn which started at the extreme high end of her voice and gradually descended to the lower end of her range. When she opened her mouth again and made eye contact with the choir, they took her cue, emitting a cacophony of orgiastic wails. When they quieted down, she waved her hand gracefully in the direction of a plump girl with a beautiful complexion sitting at the piano in the corner of the room. “Let me introduce our accompanist for this semester, Debbie Richardson.” Raucous applause and hoots confirmed that she was a favorite of the group.
“Now, let’s warm up our voices.” She started them humming octaves, sliding as smoothly as they could down a scale starting at B flat. For the next twenty-five minutes, she ran them through a variety of increasingly demanding vocal exercises working their abdomens and intensifying the resonance of their voices.
“Good people.” She waved them quiet after a couple of repetitions of the exercise and scanned the room for offenders. “I’m detecting a lot of shadow-singing. Do not wait to hear the person next to you initiate the pitch. Hear it in your head beforehand and enter on the beat. Be virtuous and step into the note! Faith comes before confidence.”
Arthur wondered how long it would take him to develop the faith Professor Henderson prescribed.
It turned out that anyone could potentially be guilty of shadow-singing, but only the altos and sopranos could be guilty of “chirping like little girls.” Exhorting the women to sing with a “cathedral space” in their mouths, she imitated Pee-Wee Herman and then contrasted his squeaking with an operatic version of the same scale. “Now, which sounds better?”
Although the professor projected well and was always dead on pitch, she did not have a beautiful voice, but this worked to her advantage in coaxing the proper sound out of the women in the group. No alto or soprano could ever claim that God did not give her the tools to sing as well as her director. If a chorister failed, it was because she lacked a spiritual commitment to Dorothy Henderson’s world of open mouth, relaxed throat, active belly, and attentive mind.
In general, the women were more frequently the object of her attention than the men, but basses who sang in the back of their throats were treated to a growling imitation of their transgression. Tenors got off the lightest. She didn’t want to scare any of them off. They seldom heard anything harsher than, “Sing out and enunciate! You’ve got the notes, but nobody is going to hear you mumble.” She paid attention to everyone in the chorus. On one alarming occasion, she met Arthur’s eye when he went flat and made a finger-turning motion that looked like she was trying to start a car, sending the message to tune up the pitch.
Forty minutes into the rehearsal, she set the basses humming on the tonic in the key of B flat major, tenors on the fifth, altos on the third, and sopranos an octave above the basses. Once they were in tune, she asked them to articulate “me, may, meh, mo, moo” at increasing levels of intensity until her face became transfigured like the Virgin Mary holding the slumping body of her crucified son. For one rapturous instant her body and soul were fused in an epiphany of sound, electrified, ecstatic, transcendent, filled with grace, fixed eternally in the moment. She lowered her arms, stilling all sound and movement in the room. When, she opened her eyes, Arthur felt that she was looking at him.
“That’s what we’re working for—those times when we are one, precisely in the center of the pitch. Consistently finding that sound will be worth all the effort you expend this semester.”
She pulled out a battered score. “All right, let’s learn some music. Take the Honegger King David out from underneath your chairs and let’s look at the first chorus, marked number three.”
Arthur looked up at the clock—they had been warming up for forty-five minutes. They spent the next hour going over the first chorus, a song written in unison, and the second chorus, a piece constructed in such tightly dissonant harmony that Arthur strained to hear another tenor singing the first half of each note so he could join in on the second half. Shadow-singing be damned; he was struggling for survival. To his relief, one tenor voice stood out, a bellwether for the accuracy of his guesses as to just where the line was going.
Finding the precise pitch was just one piece of the puzzle. In addition to demanding perfect intonation, she was insistent in her indication of the proper dynamic level, pronunciation, and places to breathe. “Always come to practice with a pencil,” she sighed as she tossed extras to the miscreants among them. By the time they finished, his score was as heavily notated as his old law school textbooks. At five minutes after six, she dismissed them into the darkness of a moonless winter night.
As he walked home, still alive with the music, a middle-aged baritone, one of a handful of obvious non-students in the chorus, fell in step alongside him and introduced himself as the Herman Kennedy, Chair of the History Department. He was interested in legal history and asked Arthur who he worked for in the courthouse.
“I did my dissertation on the role of federal judges in the civil rights movement,” he explained, “and hedged my bets against not finding an academic job by starting law school.” In spite of his garb, he seemed utterly without pretense, face beaming with good intention. “When the dissertation won a minor award, I left Penn law school for a job at Miami University in Ohio before taking the job here about ten years ago.”
“I used to be a history person too,” Arthur explained. “I even got a masters while waiting for my ex-wife to finish up her bachelor’s degree.” The two unhurried years in graduate school seemed like ancient history now. They talked until Kennedy stopped to turn down a quiet residential street.
“My co-clerk Phil and I sometimes hang out at the Wild Boar after work.” They shook hands. “If you really miss talking about law, I could give you a call the next time we go.”
“Please do!” He looked conspiratorially at Arthur. “That’s a perfect place to go to avoid my colleagues.”
Arthur walked home, humming as he crossed the river, bouncing snatches of the Honegger off the hard walls of the downtown buildings.
He entered the foyer of Suzanne’s house, singing forcefully the line from the second chorus that he was most sure of, “Saul has slain his thousands and ten thousands, David!” His voice echoed off the acoustically live plaster, bounced off wood floors, and seemed to gather momentum off the far end of the hall, slamming him like a hurricane, blowing his hair back, and forcing him to lean slightly forward to avoid being knocked over.