by Paul Levine
So strong and decent, so unlike my own father.
She learned enough psychology to know Tony was the father she had never had. But he was so much more, too. Tony didn’t rescue her as Max had done; he treated her as an equal, something Max never did. Tony was everything. And then, suddenly, he was gone.
Just as Max had hoped, she came back. He told her she had changed, that he liked the old Lisa better. The old Lisa is dead, she said. He didn’t ask who she had been with, and she never told. The past and the future both remained unspoken.
Now, pacing in the apartment overlooking the park, he said, “I’d leave Jill for you in a second if you’d ask me to …”
She let the bait dangle. Ten years ago, she prayed to hear those words. Now, they left her confused and troubled.
“God, Lisa, I love you. I always have.”
Whoa! What did he say? And why now?
“Do you love me, Max, or do you just need me more?”
“When the case is over, I’m going to ask Jill for a divorce and we can get married.”
“Max, please …”
“Okay, I won’t pressure you. But you’re right about one thing. I need your help. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t. Hell, I’m begging you. This is even more important than you know.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t. Not now.”
She thought about it. Hard as it was for Max to say it, he did love her. She never doubted it. And he had helped her when no one else cared whether she slept under a bridge or went hungry. Now he was asking her to choose between him and some flowery notions of right and wrong.
No one would ever know. It was just one case.
But what about her beliefs? What about the new, improved Lisa Fremont, to use Max’s mocking phrase? Could she put her new ideals on the shelf just this once? And how deeply did she believe them anyway?
The marble statues and bronze doors notwithstanding, justice was an ethereal concept, a divine ideal, which like sainthood was rarely seen on earth. Justice was the pearl in the oyster. Keep on shuckin’ and good luck huntin’. Despite the lofty notions she’d learned from the law books, her views were shaped by her own experiences. Weren’t everyone’s? What was it Justice Cardozo had said? “Try as we might, we can never see with any eyes except our own.”
And what my eyes have seen.
Now, after four years at Berkeley, summa cum laude—thank you very much—three years at Stanford Law, magna cum laude with a prize-winning law review note, and one year clerking for a federal court of appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit, she had all the credentials. So why did she consider herself a fraud?
She wanted to believe, but damnit, Max had pressed the right buttons. She was a priest without faith, a pagan inside the holy tabernacle. To Lisa Fremont, the law was not majestic. The slogan carved into the pediment—equal justice under law—was a benediction for the Kodak-toting tourists. The law was as cold as the marble of its sanctuary.
Disregarding the lofty symbols and images, she thought of the legal system as a dingy factory with leaking boilers, broken sprockets, and rusted cogs. The law was bought and sold, swapped and hocked, bartered and auctioned, just like wheat, widgets … and girls who run away from home.
In the upcoming term, she knew the Court would be asked to consider nearly seven thousand cases but would issue fewer than one hundred rulings. Law clerks, whose first function was to summarize and analyze the petitions seeking review, frequently complained about the workload. No problem, Lisa thought.
If I get the job, I’ll read them all. I’ll plow through the research, draft the justice’s opinions, and make his coffee, if that’s what he wants me to do.
She’d know the legislative history of the statutes and the precedential value of the cases. She’d master the procedure and the substantive law. She’d write pithy footnotes and trace the source of a law back to Hammurabi. She’d prepare incisive pool memos for the judicial conferences and brilliant bench memos for her boss. She’d stay up all night with the death clerk on execution stays, and she’d be at work at 8 A.M. sharp.
She’d be prepared to search for the truth, to do justice.
She’d do all of those things in every case … except one.
The case of Laubach v. Atlantica Airlines, Inc., would be different. She already had read the file. She knew the issues and the arguments on both sides. Even more important, she knew who had to win.
* * *
“I’ll do it, Max. I’ll do it for you.”
“Great! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” The tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. “We make a great team, Lisa.
When your clerkship’s up, you should come into the airline’s legal department. Pete Flaherty’s going to retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general counsel?”
“Max, please stop planning my life. Let’s just get through this.”
“Whatever you say, darling.”
His smile was still in place. He had done it. And he hadn’t even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have rushed to help him. But this way was better.
She’s doing it for love, not pity.
Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her judge—the swing vote, according to Flaherty—to go their way. But he had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was trusting her with his life.
* * *
Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn’t know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was never part of the bargain.
She would do it because her loyalty to Max outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all along.
She didn’t believe in the words carved into stone.
Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as icy.
Deep inside, she was just like him.
* * *
NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF CRASH
WASHINGTON D.C.—(AP) The National Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.
Citing contradictory evidence and the failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane pointedly stated that there was “substantial evidence” to support the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever the hydraulic lines.
“Traces of PETN were recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not found,” McGrane said. “Presumably, they are buried in the muck of the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive conclusion.”
PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the number two engine.
Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station. He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None of the jets reported firing a missile.
Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport. The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the New York-to-Miami flight.
CHAPTER 2
The Junior Justice
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR. SAT HERE. Oh, not in this chair. Not even in this building, if we’re being tediously literal about it, Sam Truitt thought.
But Holmes sat here, at the far end of the bench, to the chief justice’s left, when he was the junior justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
So what the hell am I doing in old Ollie’s chair?
Which was also, at various times, figuratively at least, the chair of Brandeis, Cardozo, Black, Frankfurter, and Brennan. Giants of jurisprudence whose thundering pronouncements were engraved in stone for the ages. Men of soaring intellect and towering integrity.
How will I even begin to measure up?
It was a rare moment of insecurity for Sam Truitt, who frequently was described as egotistical and vain, even by his friends. His enemies called him a left-wing, Ivy League intellectual snob who was out of touch with the real world. But friends and enemies alike agreed that he was brilliant and eloquent. His opponents feared that eventually, with a long enough tenure, he would be worth two or three votes on the Court, using his superior intellect and persuasive skills to sway others.
At the moment, though, Truitt wasn’t capable of persuading cats to chase mice. Deep in a crisis of confidence, drowning in waves of self-doubt, he was an imposter, a graffiti artist in the Louvre, a trespasser in a shrine.
Though he was a broad-shouldered man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a former athlete still fit at forty-six, at the moment, he felt he was a dwarf in the imposing, marble-columned courtroom.
Sam Truitt still had not recovered from the confirmation process. Looking back now, the stinging vitriol of the personal attacks had caught him by surprise. On CNN and before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans hauled out their hatchet men, and the sound bites dug deep wounds. He remembered his discomfort at being grilled by Senator Thornton Blair of South Carolina, mouthpiece for the right-wing Family Values Foundation.
“So if ah git this right, Per-fessor Truitt,” Blair droned, waving a fistful of Truitt’s Harvard Law Review articles on civil liberties, “you’d hire gay teachers but ban the Bible in our schools. You’d give away condoms to our innocent children and take away guns from our law-abiding citizens. You’d have federal marshals protect baby-killing abortionists but leave the public defenseless against rapists and murderers. Does that about sum it up, Per-fessor?”
“That’s a fallacious representation of my views,” Truitt said, sweating under the lights, sounding uptight and uncool, even to himself.
“Fal-la-cious, is it?” the senator asked rhetorically, making the word sound obscene. “When’s the last time you attended church, Per-fessor?”
“I don’t see the relevance of that,” Truitt said, backpedaling, trying to keep his feet on a rolling log in a treacherous river.
“Didn’t think you would,” Blair said, turning to the committee chairman. “With lawyers as thick as fleas on an old hound, you’d think the president could find one that reads the Good Book on Sunday mornings.”
The hate mail delivered to his Cambridge office had shocked Truitt. Protesters spewed invective and picketed in Harvard Square, calling him a card-carrying ACLU leftist and a pornography worshiper who cared more about spotted owls and snail darters than jobs and families.
Despite the uproar, the Senate had confirmed him, and if the 53-47 vote was not exactly a resounding vote of confidence, it should no longer matter. He was appointed for life, or more precisely, in the words of the Constitution, during “good Behaviour.”
With a capital B.
Sam Truitt intended to lead an exemplary life on the Court. He would do nothing to attract the attention of the Family Values Foundation, which had begun a “Truitt Watch,” promising an impeachment petition at his first lapse. He had a single blemish in his past “Behaviour,” one that attracted the attention of the FBI when he was on the president’s short list for the nomination. Ten years earlier, a law student named Tracey had filed a sexual harassment claim against him after he slept with her, but nonetheless gave her a C in constitutional law. He had remained true to his academic virtue—if not his marital vows—but Tracey believed he had not held up his end of the unstated bargain.
In truth, she had seduced him, but still, he had violated university rules. Stupid.
With a capital S.
In case he didn’t know just how stupid, his wife, Connie, had fixed him with that icy, New England smile and said, “Next time you screw a student, Sam, spare me the humiliation and give her an A.”
Before the misconduct claim could be heard, Tracey dropped out of law school, sparing him an ethical dilemma. Would he have told the truth?
Sure I screwed her, but she wanted it.
Oh, brilliant. Just brilliant. Want some more, Dean? The Veritas, the whole Veritas, and nothing but the Veritas.
While I was grading her paper on the legality of strip searches at border patrol stations, she came into my office and pulled up her skirt. “Want to pat me down, Officer?” She was young and willing and hot, and God help me, I’m just a man.
With a small m.
Or would he have lied?
I never touched her. She is obviously a deeply troubled young woman with an overactive imagination.
That would have violated his principles, but thankfully, he never had to confront the question. Ironic, he thought how his personal life did not live up to his professional standards.
Now, he had taken a vow of monogamy, which in his marriage was akin to a vow of chastity. When he told this to Connie, she laughed and said, “Don’t forget poverty. You’ve taken that vow, too, and dragged me with you.”
Poverty to Connie meaning the inability to afford a summer home in the Hamptons.
But he was serious about living a blameless life. No scandals in or out of Court. No ammunition for the Foundation’s muskets. He wanted a long, productive career, writing cogent opinions that would live forever in our jurisprudence. He wanted to join the thirty-year club with Marshall Story, Holmes, Black, Douglas, and Brennan.
I’ll drive my enemies crazy and then out-live them.
But that morning, Truitt was worried about getting through his first day, not his first decade on the Court. He felt as if he had sneaked into the ornate building. Just after dawn, he’d come up the steps and paused before the giant six-ton bronze doors. Even earlier, he’d sat on a bench on the oval plaza, the Capitol glowing behind him in the rosy early morning light. At the base of the flagpoles, he’d noted the scales of justice, the sword and book, the mask and torch, the pen and mace. He’d gazed up at the two marble figures flanking the steps, seated as if on thrones, Justice on one side, Authority on the other. Above him, sixteen huge marble columns supported a towering pediment with a sculpture of an enthroned Liberty guarded by other symbolic figures. Atop it all was engraved the lofty phrase, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.
In a place where the figures were carved from marble, he had feet of clay.
It was a building to be entered triumphantly on the back of an elephant, following a cavalcade of golden trumpets and shimmering banners. Instead, he felt like a thief in the night.
And now, Samuel Adams Truitt—at least the name sounded like he belonged here—sat in Holmes’s chair at the wing-shaped bench of gleaming Honduran mahogany, looking toward the heavens, or at least toward the four-story-high coffered ceiling, when he heard the voice of God.
“Justice Truitt!” the voice boom
ed.
Chief Justice Clifford P. Whittington both sounded and looked like God, if you pictured the Creator as a sixty-seven-year-old Iowan with a barrel chest, a rugged profile that, like the statues, could be carved from marble, and long, wavy white hair swept back and curling up at the neck.
Startled, Truitt swiveled toward the front of the courtroom. “Chief,” he answered.
The chief justice strode toward the bench. He looked vigorous enough to vault the bronze railing that separated the public section from the lawyers’ gallery.
“Getting a little head start on the rest of us?” the C.J. bellowed, his deep voice resounding in the cavernous chamber. “Or just walking the field before the game?”
The game.
The sole point of common ground between the two men, Truitt thought, was that they both had played football in college. Whittington had been a lineman at Yale in the days before face masks—though some liberal academics claimed he played too long without a helmet—then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was a Renaissance man, a throwback, a midwestern farm boy who beat the eastern intellectuals on their turf at their game. He liked to think of himself as a common-sense judge with traditional values. Truitt considered him rigid, small-minded, and mired in the past.
Truitt also knew that the chief had huddled with Senator Blair, feeding him damaging questions for the Judiciary Committee hearings. If there was one man in America that Whittington did not want on the Court, it was the glamour boy from Harvard who appeared on even more news shows than the biggest publicity slut on the Court, Whittington himself.
“It’s customary for the chief justice to chat privately with a new member of the brethren,” Whittington said, somewhat ceremoniously. By this time, Truitt was making his way down from the bench. It didn’t seem proper to have the chief looking up at him.
“Can we still call ourselves brethren when we have two women on the bench?” Truitt asked with a smile.
“I don’t know,” the chief replied with a malicious grin. “I hear you’re the expert on sexual harassment, Professor.”