Justice

by Doug Sutherland

  Kelly was one of only two women on the force and she’d been mildly pissed off when the two new guys, emphasis on guys, had been hired. She was in somewhat the same boat as Comeau, though, and she knew there was no use in making any noise about it. She needed the job, and while she’d never felt any particular calling to police work she felt she was pretty good at it, certainly better than either of the two cigar store dummies across the street. She still chafed at the memory of Scofield smiling smugly down at her when they’d been introduced, as if he’d expected her to swoon at the mere sight of his manly biceps. She was at least seven or eight years older than the kid, and she’d already seen it, done it, been there and got the t-shirt with her ex. The only good things that had come out of that had been the little boy and girl who were now sitting at her parents’ place wondering where their mommy was.

  4

  The turnout for the memorial service was larger than Ed Cunningham had expected. Jonathan Landers had stayed in touch for the first year or two after he and Bethy left, but after that contact had petered out in the way such things usually did.

  Ed felt vaguely guilty about that, knew that he should have made more of an effort to maintain contact. It had never been a particularly warm or close relationship—the judge didn’t encourage that sort of thing—but he’d learned a lot from the austere Landers, for a while even fancied himself as his protégé.

  Ed Cunningham had reached the stage in his life—particularly when triggered by events like this one—where his regrets outnumbered the things he felt good about. He knew that ultimately he’d disappointed the man, let his own political fantasies override a promising career in the D.A’s office.

  Cunningham had disappointed people before. He’d always chosen the path of least resistance, and when he got out of law school he’d decided to go back to Strothwood, use his family connections to establish himself before moving on. For a while it had worked, allowing him to slide into the D.A.’s office as an assistant prosecutor in an office that hadn’t needed or wanted one before or since. That had turned into a non-starter. The incumbent D.A., Judson Wells, apparently had no inclination to go anywhere else. The trouble was that after a few years Ed’s heart wasn’t in it. He felt no calling to the law, no feel for detail, no sense of mission. That was reserved for his political ambitions, and his work suffered for it. In the courtroom he was pedestrian at best. He had none of the presence or flair that could compensate for his technical shortcomings, and definitely not the work ethic. Cunningham certainly had an ego but he also had enough self-awareness to know that his prosecutorial technique, such as it was, was uninspired and dry.

  Henry Whittaker, on the other hand, was a defense attorney and everything in the courtroom that Ed Cunningham wasn’t. He’d arrived in town a few years after Cunningham and had quickly built a reputation as a formidable showman, buoyed by the fact that most jurors’ concept of the law was filtered by the quick solutions of courtroom dramas on TV. Under normal circumstances, if Ed found himself up against Whittaker and there was even a sliver of reasonable doubt Ed knew he’d get his ass handed to him.

  The last thing Cunningham had wanted was a showdown, but he got one. Ed had always thought of Judson Wells as a confirmed lifer and he’d been as surprised as anyone when Wells had inexplicably handed him a high-profile case. All the pieces were in place for a slam dunk, something Wells normally would have kept for himself. The mystery was solved when Wells bailed out only days later for an unexpectedly lucrative offer from a private law practice in Philadelphia.

  Henry Whittaker was acting for the defense, but this time even that lined up in the prosecution’s favor. Only a few members of the tiny Strothwood legal community were aware of it, but Henry was drinking again, slipping badly under the strain of a messy and expensive divorce. Henry didn’t have anything close to his A game, and Ed Cunningham knew an opportunity when he saw one. He did what he had to do, and the resulting win got him some unaccustomed attention in what passed for the local media.

  The rest was timing. Darrell Cowan, the mayor back then, was well into his sixties and had some health problems, made it known at a memorable council meeting that he was tired of all the petty bullshit that went along with the job. Cowan had decided to resign while it was still his idea, and fuck you all anyway.

  Nobody else wanted the job, but Ed Cunningham saw possibilities that no one else could. He knew that his post-trial bump in popularity was the best springboard he was going to get, and if he wanted to get anything out of it he had to take a run at the Mayor’s office. Ironically enough Whittaker had seen it as an opportunity too. The loss of the trial had shocked him into cleaning up his act, and when Cunningham won the election Whittaker pulled some strings of his own and moved into Cunningham’s old slot in the D.A.’s office. It was a sequence of events neither man had mentioned since.

  Cunningham had originally pictured the move as an end run to bigger and better things and the next logical step toward state or even federal office. Unlike Landers he’d never felt a particular calling to the law itself, other than regarding it as a necessary part of his preparation for politics.

  Looking back he realized what a horrific miscalculation it had all been. Even though he’d thought himself savvy and sophisticated, he wasn’t. He’d grown up in Strothwood, and the small town blinders he’d been born with limited his awareness of just how much of a backwater the place really was. Nothing he did there, no amount of boosterism, would ever attract the attention of the political establishment in the rest of the state. Strothwood just didn’t matter, and that meant Ed Cunningham didn’t matter either. He was doomed to be an outsider, circling the periphery of power in a dark orbit that seemed to get progressively farther away from the center of the state’s political life. By the time he fully realized that it was too late. All he’d been able to do was keep what he had, find ways to make Strothwood—and by extension himself—bigger and better than they really were. Ed Cunningham had always wanted to be important, and at least in Strothwood he could be.

  Someone touched him on the arm and he started, realized he’d been standing there lost in thought, ignoring the people who were milling around the church gymnasium that had been commandeered for the reception. Bad form for a politician.

  “They should have done this somewhere where you could have a real drink,” Henry Whittaker told him.

  Ed just mumbled something in half-hearted agreement. Jonathan Landers had always discreetly kept a bottle of expensive single malt in his chambers for the rare occasions when he and a very select coterie of insiders felt so inclined.

  “What’s Wagner doing here?” Whittaker asked suddenly.

  “What?” Ed looked across the room, saw Jeff Wagner’s cadaverous figure towering above the crowd of silver-crowned heads.

  “He wouldn’t have known Landers, would he?”

  “Probably,” Cunningham allowed, “but not for long. Landers was on the way out when Wagner was on the way in.”

  Wagner looked up from his conversation with Ralph Jenkins and saw Cunningham and Whittaker watching him. He stared back at them for a moment and then turned back to his conversation.

  “He’s not a happy camper,” Whittaker said.

  “He’s a pathologist, for God’s sake. He’s not supposed to be happy.”

  “I heard,” Whittaker said, “that Jenkins has been talking about the Frank Stallings situation.”

  Ed tried to keep his expression neutral, wasn’t sure if he’d pulled it off or not. From the smug look on Whittaker’s face he decided he hadn’t managed it. Whittaker could afford to be smug. He was a popular man, the D.A. in a law and order town, and that made him a political threat. The two biggest cases in Strothwood’s recent history had been successfully closed, even though Whittaker had had little to do with their resolution. All that mattered to the good people of Strothwood was that the bad men had gone away.

  “Frank Stallings isn’t a situation anymore,” Cunningham said, steering Whittaker a l
ittle farther away from the crowd.

  “Okay, if you say so,” Whittaker grinned. “So what about Brent? What are you going to do about him? That ‘acting chief’ thing is getting a little old. It’s been months now.”

  Ed shrugged, kept his expression bland.

  “You know as well as I do,” he said, “that nobody could do anything until we cleared up the Kenny Langdon incident.”

  “Incident?” Whittaker barked a short, explosive laugh, loud enough to turn some heads in their direction. “That was a fucking bloodbath.”

  “Lower your voice, Henry. This isn’t the place for it.”

  Both Cunningham and Whittaker were what in Strothwood passed for high-profile, were used to the surreptitious scrutiny that went along with it. The difference was that Whittaker was genuinely popular while Ed Cunningham was, well, Ed Cunningham. A public scene of some kind wouldn’t hurt Whittaker, but they both knew that Ed Cunningham couldn’t risk it. Fuck it, Ed thought. He could play these games all day.

  “Due process, Henry. You were part of it too. Don’t try to distance yourself from it now.”

  “If I were you,” Henry said, “I’d get the Brent situation straightened out. Makes you look indecisive.”

  • • •

  Karl Jamieson hadn’t had much personal contact with the late Judge Landers, but he’d felt that he should attend the funeral out of respect and that if he didn’t his absence would be noticed. Truth was that no one would have cared if he was there or not, but it was a measure of Karl’s inflated sense of self-importance that he thought they would. He was, after all, the managing editor of Strothwood’s only and fading newspaper, even if supervising a total staff of three full time people and a couple of wannabes didn’t require a lot of management. It wasn’t even unreasonable to consider himself a prominent citizen, and prominent citizens felt obligated to attend the life events and/or funerals of other prominent citizens.

  It was also, of course, an opportunity to mingle with the class of people who made things happen in Strothwood while keeping his eyes and ears open at the same time. He didn’t engage in a lot of direct conversations—other quote prominent citizens unquote for the most part didn’t regard Karl Jamieson in the same light—but he’d perfected the dark art of positioning himself on the periphery of group conversations, close enough that an observer would have assumed that he was actually involved. He’d been about to try it with Ed Cunningham and Henry Whittaker when he’d noticed that what looked like a casual conversation might develop into something more intense. Both men had drifted into a corner, far enough away from anyone else that they couldn’t be overheard. Karl was only in his mid-thirties but he knew enough local history to know that the two men were friendly enemies, had built up a certain amount of rivalry from Ed Cunningham’s sojourn in the D.A.’s office. Whittaker had done well as a D.A., even if his drinking and romantic adventures sometimes got in the way. Back when he’d been a defense lawyer he’d tangled with Cunningham several times and almost always had come out on top, guilt or innocence of his clients notwithstanding. Then Cunningham had finally won a big one and gotten out while he was ahead.

  Karl couldn’t hear what was being said, but from the body language of the two men it looked like they could end up in a courtroom all over again. Finally Whittaker delivered some kind of parting shot to Ed Cunningham and walked away.

  Karl was intrigued. He thought of just going up to Ed Cunningham and getting into a conversation, maybe get a hint of what the run-in was about. He considered the idea for maybe ten seconds and then dismissed it. Cunningham would probably just tell him to go pound sand and Karl might endanger whatever tenuous job security he had. Increasingly The Ledger, Karl’s newspaper, was turning into little more than a local advertising platform. It was part of a collection of similar papers, all owned by the same company, scattered in various small towns and cities throughout the rust belt. Newspapers weren’t exactly a growth industry anywhere. A lot of the advertising revenue Karl’s paper depended on was placed by City Hall or other prominent players who were a lot closer to Ed Cunningham than he was. Pissing off Ed Cunningham would in turn piss off the people who owned the paper Karl worked for, and they cared a lot more about the bottom line than they did about his attempts at journalism.

  Karl changed course and headed for the fringe of a safer conversation.

  • • •

  Ed Cunningham took a discreet look at his watch. It was too early to leave yet, although after his brief encounter with Whittaker he certainly wanted to. Ed knew that eyes were always on him, and leaving too early would either be taken as a sign of disrespect for the memory of Jonathan Landers or, worse, an indication that Whittaker had gotten the best of him. That was just the way things worked.

  He looked around for his wife, saw her in animated conversation with a clutch of people in the center of the room. Somehow she sensed that she was being watched, glanced in his direction and gave him a little wave and a smile. He smiled back, knew that if they left now she’d be disappointed. Vickie had never been as ambitious as Ed, liked living in Strothwood and liked the status of being the mayor’s wife. They’d married a couple of years after Ed had gotten back from law school, Ed full of big plans for the future and Vickie just happy to be in love with him.

  She was a few years younger than Ed, only just turned twenty-two when they’d started seeing each other, with auburn hair and a nice figure. He’d been in his late twenties, ambitious, and the truth of it was that he’d engineered their first meeting, attracted not only by her considerable beauty but by his own fantasy of how they could become what was in that era tiresomely described as a ‘power couple’. They’d had a promising start, first with Ed’s tenure in the D.A.’s office and then by making what he thought was exactly the right move at exactly the right time, risking what political capital he had on the run for mayor. They’d both looked at it as the beginning of something, not an end in itself, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Strothwood was a backwater and always would be, and although in the early years he’d come close to taking the next step up and out it had never actually happened. Now it was probably too late, and although it didn’t seem to matter to Vickie it had left Ed frustrated and bitter.

  His coping mechanism was an ongoing attempt to fashion Strothwood somewhat in his own image and then dominate the result as thoroughly as possible. That had worked pretty well in local terms but hadn’t made a damn bit of difference anywhere else. At the end of the day it was still Strothwood and as far from D.C. as you could get without actually leaving the country.

  None of that was Vickie’s fault. Even though Ed would never have admitted it she was probably the reason he’d made it as far as he had. People liked her on sight – something that was effortless for her but a quality Ed had always had to work at.

  He shook himself out of it, or tried to. He was spending too much time replaying his past, going through all the various mistakes and missteps and misjudgments that had led him where he was now. This was a recent phenomenon for Ed Cunningham and uncharacteristic. The frustration itself had started to develop long before but he’d always been able to keep it at bay with the everyday mechanics of running a place like Strothwood. He was fifty-four years old now and the limitless future he’d started out with had compressed into a drastically narrowed field of options.

  • • •

  Jeff Wagner wasn’t sure when attending funerals and memorial services had gone from being a distraction from his normal life to becoming a major part of it.

  Not that Wagner had ever had much of a social life to begin with. Funerals bothered him, primarily because he spent most of his time eviscerating dead people for a living. All he’d found so far was blood, bone, and tissue—not to mention the occasional bullet or blade—and as a result he sometimes found the inevitable platitudes and clichés hard to put up with. In spite of all that he still wanted to find something more, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary. He knew he was probably in f
or a rough night. That was when he had time to think, and it was getting harder to keep leavening his thoughts with some kind of optimism. He’d seen too much and not enough, all at the same time. That only left hope, faith – whatever it was, it was harder and harder to hang on to. It had gotten much worse after what had happened to the Nesbitt boy.

  He looked around the room, realized there wasn’t anybody in there he wanted to talk to. He’d paid his respects, shown the flag – he had politics to deal with, like everybody else, and while Judge Landers had been a crusty old bastard they’d always gotten along. Even Wagner had to smile at that.

  He knew why. Wagner was an old soul, and it had just been the grudging affinity of one cranky old sonofabitch for another. He started drifting toward the door, taking his time, nodding occasionally to people he knew but not maintaining eye contact long enough to get sucked into a conversation that would delay his escape. He’d already exhausted his limited supply of banalities and small talk.

  It was getting on to four o’clock, close enough to the end of office hours that he could simply go home. Not much to do there, no one and not much to go home to. Sadly enough the office seemed a more comforting option.

  5

  Henry Whittaker liked needling Ed Cunningham. He thought Cunningham was the southern end of a northbound horse, and Henry was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Over the years they’d settled into an uneasy rapprochement, in large part because neither one of them felt they had much in common with anybody else. Both men saw themselves as part of a small local elite in a town where elites were defined by doctors, lawyers, and a very few business owners. It was a constricted, incestuous circle, and whether they liked it or not they were thrown together again and again.