The Justice Game

by Randy Singer

  His face was still square and handsome with the perpetual five-o’clock shadow that Kelly had always found alluring. He had a touch of gray around the temples and wore half-moon reading glasses that were a new addition since the days of Kelly’s clerkship. The glasses alone added ten years to his face.

  She could remember watching him seven years ago presiding over cases, the aphrodisiac of power weaving its spell. She could still recall, with no small amount of shame, how she had marveled at the thought of being a confidant to a man this powerful. Lawyers would jump through hoops to curry favor with him, yet the judge would ask Kelly, in the solitude of his car in front of her apartment, how she thought the most important cases on his docket should come out. They normally saw things the same way, so much so that Kelly had convinced herself they might have been soul mates under different circumstances. A different time. A different place. A younger and unmarried Judge Shaver.

  Her standards had been raised just by being around him.

  She tried to remember when her guilt about the two of them spending so much time together had left her. That was the problem with this type of thing—it was all so gradual. There was no single defining moment, although the night she learned about his wife’s affair was surely a turning point. From then on, Kelly no longer felt she was breaking up a marriage. The ugly truth was that the marriage had been over long before Kelly arrived on the scene.

  How long had it been after that night? A week? Two weeks? Events blurred together between the night of their first touch and the night he asked to come in. Somehow, she had known he was going to ask that night. She had promised herself that she would say no, but she had cleaned the apartment anyway. At the time, it all just seemed so natural, one emotion leading to the next, the excited beat of her own heart, the judge’s sensitivity. They talked for a half hour, and Kelly knew he wasn’t going to leave.

  She didn’t want him to leave. They both knew how it was going to end.

  When he leaned over to kiss her, she closed her eyes and didn’t resist. Later that evening, she took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

  When he left at midnight, guilt arrived in waves.

  He must have been able to read her face the next morning. He called her into his office, shut the door, and told her that the night before had been the most incredible night of his life.

  “It was wrong,” Kelly said in response. “We both know it. We can never let it happen again.”

  He looked devastated. “Are you sure about this, Kelly?” He was thinking about a future together. Somehow, he would make it work.

  It had taken every ounce of moral fiber she had left, but Kelly did not let him dissuade her. She could still picture it clearly in her mind—the look on his face, his quiet pleading, his apologies, and ultimately his pledge to accept her decision.

  To his credit, the judge never raised the issue again during her clerkship. She began taking the Metro. They never spent another unguarded moment alone together. Judge Shaver treated her with professional courtesy and worked hard at rehabilitating his own marriage.

  Two years later, he had called. “They’re talking about a spot on the Fourth Circuit again,” he told Kelly.

  “You deserve it,” she had said. And she meant it.

  “If I’m nominated, they’ll do a careful vetting. They’ll talk to all my former clerks, try to find out whether I’ve done anything that could be used to blackmail me. There’s a chance they might ask about affairs.”

  The thought of it stunned Kelly. FBI agents asking questions about Judge Shaver’s private life. The wrong answers could destroy his chances. “I can’t lie, Judge.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t ask you to lie.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  The judge inhaled deeply on the other end of the phone. “Kelly, you know how sorry I am about what happened. Lynda and I are still together and trying hard to make it work. I’m just saying, anything you can do short of lying, I would really appreciate.”

  “Maybe you should pull your name,” Kelly suggested. “Family reasons. Not wanting the spotlight. You like being a trial judge. There could be a million reasons.”

  Shaver didn’t respond right away. “I know I could,” he eventually said. “But Kelly, the things you and I believe in are the right things. The right causes. We need judges on our highest courts who are willing to stand up for the most vulnerable in our society. I can’t sell them out just to save myself some potential embarrassment.”

  No longer blinded by her infatuation, the words sounded hollow. The president could find a hundred other judges who shared Shaver’s judicial philosophy. This was about his ego, his opportunity to go as far as he could go.

  “I’ll do what I can,” Kelly had said.

  “That’s all I can ask.”

  46

  When the hearing ended, Judge Shaver invited Kelly back to his chambers. He introduced her to his current clerks and waited while Kelly exchanged a few pleasantries with the judge’s secretary. Kelly then followed the judge into his spacious chambers, where he took off his judicial robe and hung it on a coatrack.

  “Can I take your coat?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Kelly said, though it was a little warm.

  Shaver’s chambers showed even less wear and tear than the judge himself. Paperwork was neatly stacked. The same pictures and diplomas adorned the walls. Even the kids’ pictures on his desk looked like the same ones Kelly remembered from seven years ago. He had left his office door open, but his desk was on the other side of the massive office from the doorway. If they talked quietly, they wouldn’t have to worry about being overheard.

  The judge made the kind of conversation you might expect when a former clerk stops by. “How’s the law practice?… I read that article about you in the Post.… Interesting case you’re handling against that gun company.…” Etc., etc.

  Kelly responded politely, asking her own softball questions. Judge Shaver expected the confirmation hearings to start in a few weeks or maybe months. It was hard to predict. “This is the third time my name’s been floated but the first time I’ve made it this far,” he said. “I’m hoping the third time’s the charm.”

  “Me, too.”

  The judge leaned forward and softened his voice. “Thanks for what you did with the FBI.”

  It was a tone that used to give Kelly goose bumps. Today, she just left the comment hanging. She reached into her briefcase and retrieved the e-mail from Luthor.

  “We’ve got a problem, Judge. This showed up in my inbox last week.”

  She watched Judge Shaver put on his reading glasses, his face darkening as he read the e-mail. He placed the letter on his desk and stared at it.

  “Who knows about us?” he asked.

  “If by that you mean, ‘Whom did I tell?’ the answer is no one.”

  “I wasn’t accusing you, Kelly. I’m just trying to think this through.”

  Kelly looked down at the desk. There was something she had never shared with the judge, preferring to shoulder the pain on her own. She had dealt with it, condemned herself for what she had done, and then willed herself to forget about it and move on.

  “I was pregnant,” Kelly said. She swallowed, her voice suddenly thick. “I took the RU-486 pill five weeks later.”

  She glanced up at the judge and saw nothing but sympathy on his face. She tried to continue, stopped, pulled herself together, and started again. “I went to a clinic and got a prescription. They guided me through the process and had me return to the clinic the day the abortion occurred for some counseling and observation.” She blew out a deep breath. “I expelled the fetus at home. But half a dozen people at the clinic probably know.”

  Saying it out loud brought back a rush of emotions and images. At the time, Kelly had worked hard not to think about the implications, knowing she would probably talk herself out of what she felt she had to do. She took the initial dose of RU-486 at the clinic and suffered through a few
hours of nausea, headache, and fatigue. For the next forty-eight hours, she walked around like a zombie, trying not to focus on what she had done.

  She took the Cytotec pill at home and a few hours later began to dilate. According to the information she had read, the fetus would be tiny at this stage, about half an inch or so. She made it a point not to look before she flushed the toilet.

  She was businesslike when she returned to the clinic for observation. But she fell apart when she returned to her apartment, sobbing deep into the night. Just before dawn, emotionally exhausted and weak with grief, she had finally collapsed into a fitful sleep.

  Weeks later, she couldn’t keep herself from researching fetal development. She’d even looked at a few pictures on the Internet. At five weeks old, tiny arm and leg buds would have been formed. The baby’s tiny heart would have been beating. The image of the fetus was burned into her mind.

  “I’m so sorry,” Judge Shaver said. “I had no idea.”

  He got up from his chair and walked over to close his office door. Then he sat down again and handed Kelly some Kleenex.

  “I just wanted to deal with it on my own,” Kelly said. “I wanted to get my life back on track.”

  She pressed her lips together and held back the tears, watching the recognition dawn on the judge’s face. This wasn’t just his and Kelly’s word against the world. Somewhere there was proof that Kelly had been pregnant.

  Kelly had spent the last few days wondering how he would react. Would he question whether the baby was his? be angry at her for not telling him? go immediately into damage-control mode?

  She saw none of those calculations in his eyes. Just an overwhelming sadness and an almost palpable sense of sympathy.

  “I can’t believe you had to go through that alone,” Judge Shaver said. He paused, searching for words. “I can’t change the past, Kelly. I wish I could… but I can’t do anything about that. The thing I can do is keep you from suffering any more. It’s not too late to withdraw my name.”

  She appreciated the offer, but he wasn’t thinking this through. “That won’t really change anything, Judge. If the press gets hold of this, they’ll still run the story to explain why you withdrew. The coverage might not be as intense, but it would be out there just the same. My statements to the FBI have already been made. Everyone we care about would be hurt. Your family. My family.”

  Judge Shaver nodded solemnly. She was right, and he knew it.

  For a second, Kelly was struck with the irony of it—this man who had so mesmerized her with his Solomonic wisdom a few years ago now seemed so overwhelmed. It was amazing how love—or was it just passion?—had destroyed her objectivity and neutered her common sense.

  For Kelly’s part, she had steeled herself for whatever lay ahead. A part of her just wanted this whole thing out in the open—the secrets that haunted her finally revealed. Maybe on the other side of humiliation she would find liberation. But the thought of disappointing everyone who mattered most held her back.

  “I need to play this out a little,” Kelly said, trying to sound more confident than she really was. “Dance with this guy for a while. See if he makes a mistake. Maybe I can represent my client zealously and still figure out who Luthor is before the case goes to trial.”

  Shaver looked skeptical. “There’s a lot at risk here,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  47

  Before she left her condo Friday morning, Kelly checked the Kryptonite blog one last time. Though her blackmailer’s threat had been very specific—exposure of her affair only if she settled the case—she still couldn’t keep from obsessively monitoring the site.

  The blog seemed to consolidate everything evil about the Internet in one URL. For starters, it was a vicious rumor site, populated by sordid stories attributed to unnamed sources. The comments were smarmy and full of vulgarity. It was basically a place to verbally tar and feather defenseless public figures based on either pure speculation or the flimsiest evidence imaginable.

  Kelly breathed a sigh of relief every time she checked the latest post and saw that it wasn’t about her. Her fears were compounded by what she had learned in the past few months about the public-relations aspects of gun control. The mainstream media would be her ally. The “intellectual elites,” as the right-wingers called them, generally believed that the country’s fascination with guns was unhealthy, that its frontier mentality was a bad thing. Civilized countries, like those model democracies in Europe, solved their disputes with clever editorials and dueling political philosophies, not guns at high noon.

  But the “flyover zones” were filled with rabid gun enthusiasts. Many of the ordinary folks in battleground states lost all sense of objectivity when the government made noises about controlling firearms. Kelly had already seen a little of that fury in the e-mails she had received and the letters to the editor that mentioned her name. If word about her affair ever hit the press, she would be red meat for a pack of Second Amendment wolves.

  The fickle media would probably abandon her as well. She would be like a pup-tent camper in the middle of a hurricane, exposed to its destructive fury with nowhere to turn.

  Today’s Kryptonite story, thankfully, was about the latest political sex scandal. In the few days she had been checking the blog, Kelly had noticed a definite pattern. Political stories focused on sex and corruption. For movie stars, the stories were about sex and drugs. For rock stars, who were expected to be stoned and promiscuous, Kryptonite trotted out the really bizarre accusations, accompanied by unflattering photos of the stars looking either bulimic or severely overweight.

  And then the “fans” would crucify them.

  The common denominator to all the stories was sex. It wasn’t lost on Kelly that her escapade with Judge Shaver certainly fit the profile.

  Kelly read a few comments, said a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t her turn yet, and started to get ready for work. The gossip rag sheets could wait. Today would be the crucial deposition of Jarrod Beeson.

  * * *

  Beeson’s deposition started at 1 p.m. in a dingy conference room in the Patrick Henry Correctional Unit near Martinsville, Virginia. The site was a minimum security facility that housed about 150 inmates. It was classified in the Virginia system as Level 1 High Security, not a country-club prison but also a far cry from the types of places where violent felons served long stretches.

  Because of the difficulties associated with having Beeson transported to Virginia Beach for the trial, Kelly and Jason had agreed that this would be a de bene esse deposition, meaning it could be used at trial in lieu of Beeson himself appearing.

  Kelly knew that Beeson would be dressed in an orange jumpsuit and look like a felon, so she had ordered only a court reporter and not a videographer. That way, the deposition would be read to the jury, but they wouldn’t be watching a static head shot of a guilty-looking Beeson on videotape. Unfortunately, Jason Noble had anticipated this move and paid for his own videographer, determined to show Jarrod to the Virginia Beach jury.

  Beeson had an unnerving stare as he answered Kelly’s questions. He was a small man with thick black eyebrows that nearly touched in the middle and short, wiry facial hair covering his chin and jaw. His leg was in constant jittery motion, and he leaned forward as he talked, eyes glued on Kelly, as if he couldn’t get enough of her. She wanted to tell him to look at the camera, but she knew Jason would object and accuse her of coaching the witness, thereby drawing more attention to Beeson’s creepy demeanor.

  Kelly got through her preliminary questions without incident. Beeson had purchased a total of twenty-three guns from Peninsula Arms. When the ATF agents carried out a search warrant at his apartment, they had found only three of those guns remaining, along with a fourth gun that had its serial number filed off.

  Under questioning by the ATF agents, Beeson had cracked, admitting that he was acting as a straw purchaser for felons and others who couldn’t buy guns on their own. Two of the guns he had p
urchased had been traced to violent crimes. One of them was the MD-9 used by Larry Jamison to kill Rachel Crawford.

  That part of his testimony was undisputed. The key would be showing that the clerks at Peninsula Arms knew Beeson was a straw purchaser who would resell the guns to unqualified buyers.

  “How did you get your customers?” Kelly asked. “How did you learn about men who needed guns but couldn’t purchase them on their own?”

  “Objection, calls for hearsay,” Jason said.

  Jason had been sitting back during most of the deposition, watching more like a bemused spectator than an attorney. He had shown up in jeans and a long-sleeved pullover, knowing that he wouldn’t be on camera. It was also, Kelly realized, a subtle form of psychological warfare. This witness isn’t worth dressing up for.

  “It’s a deposition,” Kelly responded. “Hearsay is allowed.”

  “I’m just preserving my objection for trial, where hearsay is most definitely not allowed.”

  “You can answer,” Kelly told the witness. “Mr. Noble is just objecting for the record.”

  “How did I get my customers?” Beeson snorted. “The gun store sent ’em to me. I didn’t go looking for ’em.”

  “Move that the remarks be struck from the record,” Jason said, his voice monotone, as if it was hardly worth the bother. “There’s no foundation for that other than hearsay.”

  “Let’s talk about this sale,” Kelly suggested. “The MD-9 used to gun down Rachel Crawford. When did you first learn that Larry Jamison needed a gun?”

  “Objection. Hearsay.”

  Kelly blew out a breath and looked at Jason. “Why don’t you just make an objection to this whole line of questioning and quit interrupting every single question?”

  Jason gave her a tight smile. “Thanks for the suggestion. But I think I’ll try my own case.”