Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  Helen Evers wasn’t much older than the college girls who’d made him feel so old on his solitary trip to the coast, but she had a face, she used her eyes on him; she made him feel interesting. That wasn’t why he’d come back, though. He had spent the afternoon roaming around Green Hills, having lunch in a diner, dropping into stores, striking up what he hoped sounded like idle conversations. A couple of people had begun reminiscing about Jenny Fecklewhite, but all of them stopped to ask Jordan’s interest, and as soon as he revealed that he was representing Wayne Orkney, the town’s collective face had closed down. They weren’t rude, they were just vague—adamantly so.

  Helen Evers was the only person in town who had acted as if she wanted to tell him something. So he was back. But now she looked at him skeptically.

  “This county is dry, Mr. Marshall. So the only way you can get a drink is to drive twelve miles to the county line, where just by coincidence there happens to be a liquor store just on the other side, then you drive back here and sit in your car and drink from the bottle inside a paper sack, mak­ing sure to drop it out of sight if a police car comes in sight. So, no, thanks, I don’t think I’d like to have a drink. Why don’t you just ask me whatever it is you want.”

  “Who is it, Helen? Oh.” The self-sufficient older lady ap­peared in the back doorway, wiping her hands on a cloth. “Did you find the library, Mr. Marshall?”

  “Yes, ma’am, thank you for the advice. It’s simple,” he continued in a lower voice. “I just want to know what every­body knows that I don’t. The DA offers my client life in prison for what should be a ten- or twenty-year case. The courthouse staff treats me like some creature from the slime pit just because I had the bad luck to be appointed on the case. I understand this Jenny Fecklewhite was well liked and everybody thinks Wayne killed her. But what makes the case such a big deal at the courthouse? Why can’t they treat it normally?”

  Helen Evers’s mouth had the closed look of consideration. It made her look much older. She opened it only slightly. “I’m sure Jenny had friends at the courthouse. She was in and out of there regularly, and she made friends wherever she went”

  “Can you tell me anything about Mike Arriendez’s per­sonal life?” Jordan asked as if switching subjects.

  The reporter was a little taken aback. “Mike? He’s the most happily married man in town. Has four kids.”

  “Well, children don’t necessarily make a marriage happy.”

  Evers frowned. “What’s your problem?”

  “I’m just curious about the people I’m going to be work­ing with. What about the judge? Married?”

  “For thirty years.”

  “Happily?”

  She hesitated and shrugged. “Who knows about people’s home lives?”

  “You knew about Mike Arriendez’s.”

  Jordan waited for the reporter to answer, but she didn’t have one. “Here’s the thing,” he said softly. “I have this suspicion. You’d probably just say I have a dirty mind, and maybe that’s it. But I’ve asked around, and you’re right, everybody loved Jenny. And the closer you get to the court­house, the better they seemed to know her. You said your­self she was in and out of there regularly. And that people suspected the judge might have helped her with her speech. And this ugly suspicion of mine, it would explain a lot of things.”

  “Why does it have to be ugly?” Helen Evers asked quickly. “You’re never going to understand. Jenny was something special.”

  Jordan asked carefully, “Special to whom? Besides every­body, I mean.”

  “Helen,” her mother said warningly from the back doorway.

  “Maybe he ought to know what he’s up against, Mom. Besides, somebody’s bound to tell him.” She hadn’t taken her eyes off Jordan

  as she spoke over her shoulder. Evers was trying to read from his face whether she was doing the right thing in telling him. “You’re right about what you’re thinking, but not the way you’re thinking. Jenny was special to the judge.”

  4

  Not guilty, your honor.”

  Now everything made sense—almost. Once more ap­pearing in Judge Waverly’s courtroom, Jordan no longer had the feeling people were exchanging knowing looks over his head. Now he understood, too. Understood the glare the judge directed at Wayne Orkney and the way Wayne—Was he in on the judge’s secret too?—couldn’t lift his eyes to the judge’s. He understood the backbreaking plea bargain offer the district attorney had put on the table and the way Arriendez wanted Judge Waverly to know that this defen­dant wasn’t going to get a good deal out of him. When a prosecutor spent every day in a particular judge’s courtroom, it was part of the prosecutor’s job to keep that judge happy.

  “Does your client still find himself unable to speak for himself, Mr. Marshall?”

  “Apparently, Your Honor. I certainly can’t get much out of him.”

  Jordan felt more at ease now—in his suit, in on the secret But in the first day after learning about Judge Waverly’s relationship with the dead girl, he’d been a little panicked. He’d gone for advice to Jerry Ramirez, who had been Jor­dan’s first lead prosecutor in a felony court and had pre­ceded Jordan into private practice by several years. Jerry always seemed to know what he was doing, seldom had newsworthy victories in court but didn’t seem flustered by the losses. He was always midstream in the great river of days, happily aware of all the currents. “So your problem,” he’d said when Jordan explained, “is that the judge who’s going to judge your client hates him because the client— What’s his name? Wayne. Of course—because Wayne also killed the judge’s girl friend. Now you’re sure about the relationship between the judge and the girl, the other victim?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jordan had said. “Sure enough to be sure, if you know what I mean. Nobody’d say it straight out, but then they wouldn’t, would they? But they’d tell me how the judge and the girl spent a lot of time together, which every­one seemed to think was perfectly natural since they were the two smartest people in town. And after Jenny Fecklewhite developed an interest in law, she started spend­ing a lot of time at the courthouse because the judge was mentoring her, you know—”

  “Yeah,” Jerry had said knowingly. “You can get some serious prison time in this state if you start ‘mentoring’ a girl before she’s seventeen. So your boy should’ve known better than to pick on the judge’s one true love. So what’s your problem?”

  “Well, there was the bond deal, you know, it’s just way too high. And so is the plea bargain offer, and I’m not going to get a better one, because the DA wants to please the judge by hammering my guy on the easy case, because they might not ever be able to prove the case everybody really cares about. And I can’t go to the judge for punishment, needless to say. Plus I’m just getting out-of-town-lawyered to death down there. I go to the jail to see my client, and suddenly they’ve got visiting hours that they strictly enforce, even against attorneys. I can’t get the case reset like I’d like to because there’s this great rush on. It’s just—”

  “Yeah. And you think the judge is behind it all.”

  “Well, not necessarily telling people what to do. It’s just they all want to please him, and they think the way to do it is to screw my guy to the wall and me with him. This Judge Waverly is something else, Jerry. Have you ever ap­peared before him?”

  “Oh, yeah. Old stone face. Heart the same.”

  “Have you ever asked around about him? That’s what I spent all yesterday afternoon doing. It’s not like here, where most people on the street couldn’t even name a district judge.”

  This conversation had taken place in one of the court­rooms of the Bexar County Justice Center in San Antonio, where Jordan and Jerry had met as they were just finishing up trundling clients back to jail. They’d sat in the courtroom chatting while Judge Sherman was taking pleas. Jordan had thought how different was this atmosphere from that of the small-town courthouse. Judge Sherman’s court alone proba­bly disposed of more cases in a month tha
n the only court in Green Hills handled all year. The San Antonio court was chaotic, lawyers running in and out, a jury box full of prison­ers, anxious family members rubbing shoulders with watch­ful victims. Jordan’s memory of the Green Hills court was pastoral by comparison. In San Antonio he and Jerry could sit in the middle of court and have a perfectly private con­versation, not because their privacy was so scrupulously re­spected, but because no one gave a damn what they were talking about.

  “This judge has been the judge in Madera County—the only district judge, civil and criminal—for fifteen or twenty years. Seems like he’s touched every life in town. You know, anybody who’s hurt his back in a slip and fall and wants punitive damages has been in Judge Waverly’s court. He’s sent people’s uncles and brothers to the penitentiary and the victims remember that and are grateful to him. And the other people know he has that power. Sometimes he’s put people on probation when they were young and he thought they were just stupid instead of mean. And then he’s watched them like a hawk for ten years. He keeps track of everyone who’s ever been through his court. He’s married half the people in town, and he’s divorced the only ones who’re divorced—and a couple of times he’s refused to grant divorces, like he was somebody’s minister. One of those cou­ples is still together and grateful to him. Jerry, it’s weird. He’s got some kind of political influence, too, I don’t know what that deal is, but it’s damned important to the DA to keep him happy, I’ll tell you.”

  Jordan had gotten a strange feeling while asking towns­people about the judge. In Green Hills Judge Waverly was a judge in the biblical sense, the leader of the community. His judgment extended beyond the courtroom. What had felt strange was that the information had confirmed Jordan’s first impression: that the judge’s vision took in everything. That the courthouse brooded over the whole town because the judge was inside it, watching.

  “And everybody knew he had this girl friend?” Jerry had asked.

  “No, not everybody. People saw them together, but prob­ably hardly anybody would admit what it was. Those that did wouldn’t call it by its right name. But the people in the courthouse, they’d damned sure have some idea.”

  “And nobody thought he was ridiculous, this old man with this teenage girl friend?”

  “No, that’s another weird thing. It was like everybody respected the two of them so much they thought it was natural, it wasn’t even unexpected that they got together. The three or four people I thought must know about it didn’t look inclined to snicker at all. I’ve never—”

  “So you want to know what to do,” Jerry had summed up, growing a little bored. Jerry had a broad, shiny face, always deeply tanned, as if he’d just come from a golf course, which was usually true. “Easy. You file a motion to recuse, you ask the judge to take himself off the case be­cause he’s prejudiced against your client. Think the judge would grant it?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “No, of course not. So the motion gets heard in another court, probably one in the neighboring county where the judge is an old pal of your judge.”

  “You’re so cynical.”

  Jerry had grinned. “You bring in witnesses to say Judge Waverly had this illicit sexual relationship with the dead girl. Think you could get someone to testify to that?”

  “Are you kidding? They’ve all got to live there.”

  Jerry had nodded knowingly, as at a pupil with the right answer. “So you’ve got no evidence, you’ve just got this unsupported nasty allegation. Plus, your client isn’t even charged with murdering the dead girl, that’s not the case your judge is considering. Was your guy even arrested in the girl’s murder?”

  “They didn’t have to arrest him for that, they had him dead to rights for killing this other guy.”

  “So no official record shows he’s even a suspect in the girl’s case and you can’t prove that one’s even connected to your case, so what difference does it make if Judge Waverly has some personal involvement in the other case. Right? So the other judge rules against you on the motion to recuse and you end up right back in Judge Waverly’s court with him real fond of you now because you’ve smeared these rumors about him all over a public record. Does this sound like your best option?”

  Jordan had sat mute, as Jerry expected.

  “Or does your best option sound like letting your guy get what’s coming to him and you get the hell out of Dodge and just make sure you’re not appointed on the other case if he ever does get indicted for it?”

  This time Jerry had sat waiting for an answer, which Jor­dan had been slow to deliver. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Jerry had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “So what’s the problem?”

  No problem. Jordan was just going to go through the mo­tions, as he was doing now.

  “Mr. Marshall, you’ve filed a motion to suppress evidence. Can you inform the court of the nature of the evidence?”

  “I believe the defendant made some statements while in custody, Your Honor.”

  “Very well. Are you prepared to go forward on your motion?”

  Jordan was nonplussed. “Actually, no, Your Honor. In light of the change in the charge from our last hearing to this one, from attempted murder to murder, I had expected we’d sort of ... start over, that I would just file motions today and have them heard at a later date.”

  Judge Waverly let him pick slowly through words to the end of his remarks, regarding him steadily, then speaking as if to a slow student. “This is the date the court had set to hear motions, Mr. Marshall, do you remember that? Were you informed of any reset to another day? No? As for the fact that your client has been indicted in the interval, it has been ten days since the grand jury handed down the murder indictment, as I see from the face of the indictment, so you have had your statutorily required ten days to prepare for trial, which this is not.”

  Everyone was looking at him. He felt again as if he were standing there in his shorts. Even the court reporter, Laura Stefone, glanced at him, her fingers poised to record what­ever stupid excuse he made next. Jordan stepped forward, trying to make the exchange between him and the judge more private.

  “Your honor, I’m prepared to argue the motions that don’t require testimony, such as the motion for discovery.”

  The judge spoke just as patiently, just as coldly. “Mr. Mar­shall, today is a Thursday. As attorneys who have familiar­ized themselves with our local rules are aware, on Thursdays this court hears motions that require testimony. Motions merely to be argued are heard on Fridays.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Are you prepared to call witnesses on your motion to suppress?”

  Jordan’s lips rubbed together, but neither was moist enough to do the other any good. The answer was no, he was not ready. But if the alternative was to waive his motion altogether, which seemed to be the case, he could wing it. “Yes, sir. I’ll call Officer Wilcox.”

  He felt the heat dissolve as he took his seat. In a moment he’d be the one doing the questioning. Even if he wasn’t as prepared as he would have liked, he’d questioned thousands of witnesses in his career, he could think his way through that, and he had read the police reports. He glanced aside at the district attorney, who gave him a small, comradely smile that showed no hint that Arriendez had been enjoying seeing his opponent reduced to an unprepared law student by the judge of their case. The small nod Jordan gave him in return acknowledged that they both knew who was winning this contest from the outset. But just wait, Jordan’s confident nod said, now you’ll see me at my professional best.

  Nothing was happening. The bailiff still sat at his desk, his lip twisted as he watched Jordan. The clerk at her desk was openly glaring at Wayne. No one was doing anything to fetch a witness. Sweat beads suddenly popped out at the top of Jordan’s spine, atop the ones that had just begun to dry. He looked up and saw that he himself was still the object of Judge Waverly’s attention.

  “Is your witness here, Mr.
Marshall?”

  Oh, shit. Jordan stood hastily, glancing at Arriendez, who was still giving him the same brotherly smile.

  “Your honor, I had expected the State would bring the witnesses for the hearing.”

  The judge’s eyes said this was the most curious statement he had ever heard. “Really, Mr. Marshall? For your motion?”

  “Your honor, in the jurisdiction where I’m more used to practicing, the prosecution always arranges for the police witnesses for any hearing. Since the prosecution always has easier ac­cess to police officers, it seems to facilitate—”

  “Here in the court where you are practicing at this mo­ment, Mr. Marshall, our rules provide that the proponent of the motion is responsible for securing witnesses for the hearing.”

  Jordan coughed. “Your honor, could I maybe get a copy of these local rules?”

  “I don’t believe they’re published anywhere, are they, Mr. Arriendez?”

  “No, sir, Your Honor.” Arriendez stood ever so slightly to speak, then sat again, hastily so as not to steal the spot­light from his adversary.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Marshall,” the judge said benignly, “we’ll inform you of the rules as necessary.”

  As I violate them, you mean. Jordan again moved forward, trying to think on his feet. He had forgotten he had a client somewhere back there far behind him. Jordan seemed to be the only person on trial in this courtroom today.

  As he came abreast of the court reporter’s table, he glanced at her, looking for a friendly face or even a smirk of human recognition. He received neither from Laura Stefone, but he noticed something unusual. The court reporter was equipped with the standard stenography machine, but there was no tape recorder on the table. Jordan frowned. When he spoke again it was very distinctly, still looking at Ms. Stefone. She stared back at him flatly.

  “Your honor, I’d ask that instanter subpoenas be issued now. The only witnesses for the motion to suppress are two police officers, who I’m sure could be brought into court with very little delay.”