A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  They don't pay me here to have ideas." '"Well, you're a big help," I say to him. He gets kind of pissed off at me. "Hey," he says, "don't look at me. You've got these people here charged with a crime and you don't know what to do with them. I'm not in charge of homeless."

  "Well, he's right, isn't he?" Diane said. "It isn't a crime to be homeless. The police aren't supposed to do anything except call the proper authorities when it looks like otherwise they might freeze to death, starve, or die without immediate medical care. Back when we were building the new station, I don't recall making any provision for that kind of problem, facilities for short-term family shelter."

  "We didn't," Merrion said. "There aren't any."

  "Well, doesn't that tell you something?" she said. "The sergeant was right."

  "Well, that's what I'm trying to tell you, for Christ sake," Merrion said. "If you'd just… you know what it is about you people all the time, that gets on people's nerves? It's that it's always so important to you, matter what the situation is, to never get excited. Act like anything ever really mattered to you. You've always got to be completely in control. Always superior, cool, calm and collected, never upset about anything. That and the fact that you just will not listen. When somebody tries to tell you something that you may not understand, maybe don't know all the facts about even though you always think you do; always sure of that well, you got no time to hear it.

  "You're always sort of lookin' down your nose all the time, at people like me who look to you as though we're getting' so riled up and everything, like I guess I am right now; doing things you look at, and then sit back and say: "Well, that's a stupid idea." The reason you can do that and the reason we can't, and that we do what we do, is because we're in the situation. We don't have your luxury, being able to stand back and shake our heads and say: "No, I don't like the looks of that one. I wont take that case. That problem don't appeal to me.

  Not my specialty at all. Take it away. Find someone else. Don't leave it for me to get rid of."

  "We're the people running the places where those people and problems you don't want get taken away to. We are the last fuckin' stop. After us there ain't nobody else. Every day we're in situations where it's pretty clear someone'd better do something, someone's got to do something, and fast, or something bad is gonna happen and we'll all be in the shit. The wheels'll come off a the world.

  "To deal with this kind of problem day after day, we have to have passion. You can't do the hopeless work that we have to do every day without taking risks, and you can't take those risks without passion.

  Without believing… not that you're better'n anybody else, or that someone else couldn't do it better… just believing that you can do something that will make things better, because you know that you are it: there is nobody else. Behind you is the edge; people who get past you fall off. There is nobody behind you. Better, worse, almost as good: doesn't matter, they're not there there is nobody else.

  "I know I'm not saying this's right. I can't help it. I'm doing it like I always try to do everything else: the best way I can in the time that I got. That is the best I can do. Me and Danny're the kind of people who believe that people have to be taken care of; the work has to get done, any which way you can do it. And if this means you have to get excited, and take some risks, that's what you do: you get excited and you take them. So you can get something done. Because that is a damned sight more important than just making sure that you're not losing your cool all the time, and that's why we're doing what we are doing to poor little Janet LeClerc'

  She did not reply but reached her left hand forward and turned up the volume of the music. The traffic remained heavy but well-behaved all the way to the Route 20 exit in Lee and he took that west to Route 7 north up to West Street in Lenox. They talked about a movie that had cost more than 100 million dollars to produce and was doing almost no business, and how long it had been since there had been any new movie that either of them or anyone they knew had been eager to see.

  The seats that Rachel had given to Diane for the concert were in the center of the shed twenty-two rows back from the stage, close enough so that they could see that the musicians in their shirt-sleeves in the orchestra were sweating at their work, and that both the piano soloist and the guest conductor had put on even more weight than their newspaper pictures and preview stories had suggested. The conductor had evidently taken no pains to moderate the volume and the tone of the orchestra so that the pianist's work on Brahms's second concerto would be presented to best advantage, but the soloist's work was perfunctory so that no real harm was done when the orchestra submerged it by playing too loudly.

  At dinner at the Red Lion they were seated next to a table of six hosted by a red-faced man in his seventies who provided the entertainment for everyone at their end of the dining room by indignantly relating how he had lost a great deal of money at Saratoga the preceding day, more than he cared to say, betting on horses he had carefully selected from records he had spent many winter-evening hours systematically compiling and analyzing on his computer.

  He said he believed the horses had 'lost on purpose. I'm convinced of it. It wasn't the jockeys it was the goddamned horses. They were doing it deliberately. Stumbling, bearing out. All sorts of stupid mistakes. Any fool could've seen it. It was a conspiracy, a conspiracy of horses. They'd gotten together in the barns or in the paddock or someplace or other and cooked it up. Just to make me lose all my money and feel bad and look like a damned fool in front of my friends."

  Then leaving the track, chagrined and downhearted, 'what did I do but run into Dorothy," one of his ex-wives, 'just what I needed." She had insulted him loudly in front of a great many strangers. "She disparaged my sexual prowess, can you believe it? Asked me if I could get it up "even once a year now." The nerve of the damned stupid cow.

  When the reason she gave all the papers when she left me eighteen years ago was that I wouldn't leave her alone for a minute. I couldn't deny it, it was true. But I should've anyway. I must've been out of my mind." Diane and Merrion listened and then laughed along with all the other eavesdroppers, and the red-faced man beamed at all of them.

  When they got back to the grey house with the yellow door on Pynchon Hill a little before 10:00, Diane invited him to come in for coffee, which in their code was her way of informing him that she would make love if he really wanted to, but he said he had a full day ahead of him and thought he better head home, and she was not displeased when they lightly kissed good-night.

  TWENTY

  On the job that Monday morning, Judge Leonard Cavanaugh at sixty-eight was the senior justice in terms of years of service in all the seventy-one district courts of Massachusetts, 'in my thirty-seventh year of presiding over routine arraignments and other foolishness."

  Taking no pains to conceal the immensity of his accumulated weariness even on the morning of the first day of the week, sometime around 10:00 when he was 'good and ready," he would take his place in his tall black chair behind the bench in Canterbury Courtroom 1. There as usual he would regard Merrion, whatever news that he came bearing, and the world and his own place in it the same way he had gradually come to view nearly everything: disapprovingly, usually powerlessly, with what he intended to convey as quiet resignation bordering on noble endurance.

  "If you saw him you'd have no trouble believing he's the judge who's been sitting the longest. He looks it," Merrion would say, when Cavanaugh's occasionally-puzzling, sometimes-intemperate behavior on the bench came up in conversation. "He looks like it's been damned hard work, too; like it hasn't been easy for him. He doesn't look as though what he's been doing all these years's been a job that involved the use of his brain which a lot of times, he'll tell you, it hasn't.

  "That's just the way they write it up." He looks like it's been heavy lifting. Hods of brick. Or he had to wear a wooden yoke, like they put on oxen, throw his shoulders into it all day, move a lot of heavy weights from here to over there. And then come in tomorrow
and drag 'em back again. But he says he wont retire until they make him."

  Cavanaugh had been appointed an associate justice of the Canterbury District Court in 1958 at the age of twenty-nine. Like many lawyers he had in his student days begun to harbor an ambition to become a judge, seeing the judicial selection as official validation of professional distinction. But in 1958 his career history although bright was rather short. His student days were not yet six years behind him. His resume recorded two years in the army's Judge Advocate General's corps discharging the ROTC obligation he had undertaken both to avoid the draft during his years at the College of the Holy Cross and then at Fordham Law School and for the Army Reserve pay that helped to subsidize the education and four years teaching commercial law at Northeastern Law School. He had also begun to lay the foundation of a money-making outside practice; he was Of Counsel to a seven-lawyer Boston firm specializing in corporate law. He had published two ponderous scholarly articles in the Hastings Law Journal on provisions proposed for inclusion in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code:

  Secured Transactions. They had been cited favorably by two obscure commissions established by state legislatures considering the UCC; the Maryland commission had invited him to contribute two days of expert testimony, paying his expenses and a consulting fee of $1,200.

  He had thus positioned himself nicely to make a lot of money when the day at last arrived as it did, a decade later when the UCC governed almost all business transacted in the United States; all he had to do was persist in the same fashion and his measured opinions about what the new law really meant and actually allowed 'would carry considerable weight," a euphemism lawyers use for 'worth big money."

  In those days when he now and then allowed his mind to stray from productive thought and muse about his career, he usually thought ruefully about the time, energy and passion that his work was taking from his days and many nights, and wondered guiltily whether what was left for his wife, Julia, and their three young children was truly adequate. They were building a good life for themselves in their new Royal Barry Wills-designed colonial-reproduction home in Sudbury the Maryland consulting fee had really boosted their hopes that soon they'd actually be able to afford it and he was quite content with the progress he had made, reasonably sure that he had made full use of his time, intelligence, education and good fortune. His only real uneasiness came from his awareness that he was selfish, neglecting his family by working too hard, too many hours, as much because he revelled in it, knowing that he did it well, as because it was a dead-certain lock to lead to his advancement and the enrichment they would share. He soothed his conscience by telling himself that a young matron who insisted on a custom home in a wealthy suburb and started making Ivy League plans for her children before delivering them assumed the risk of spousal inattention.

  So, unlike most prospective judges inwardly rejoicing but striving mightily to blush when their appointments are at last announced, Leonard Cavanaugh when singled out had not considered, wanted, sought or anticipated nomination to the bench in Canterbury, a town that he had never visited or any other judicial nomination for that matter, that soon. Consequently he was not prepared to evaluate the development carefully, in order to decide calmly what he ought to do.

  His surprise designation had been an exaction made upon a Republican governor by Cavanaugh's doting bachelor uncle, Andrew Finn, June Finn Cavanaugh's elder brother. He lived in West Boylston and owned and operated a Pontiac dealership in Worcester. He was short, five-six or so, barrel-chested and bow-legged; he had a seaman's rolling gait.

  "People think that I look funny. My own dear sister says that, so I guess it must be true. I think it gives me an advantage when I deal with people. While they laugh at me, I take their money."

  In the late 1940s, like many other dealers in the car-starved, newly prosperous postwar United States, Finn without making any significant changes in the way that he'd been doing business since 1937 had suddenly started making lots of money, selling every new Pontiac and second-hand car he could get his hands on. He was delighted with the new prosperity, but he was not deluded by it into thinking that the Pontiac Division of GM had stumbled upon a secret formula that forever would sell cars to people who didn't need them.

  Privately he believed that the product he was selling 'costs too much.

  It's nice to have, but isn't necessary. You can get along without what I have to sell. Your life wont be as easy or convenient, or anywhere near as much fun but it'll be a helluva lot cheaper. The chief reason that most people have for buying cars, Pontiacs or any other kind, is because they want them and they're not thinking straight. Their ego's gotten the better of 'em. Otherwise they'd never take on the debt like most of 'em have to, buying something they don't actually need. Like they do milk and bread, a place to live, electric light and so forth."

  He believed further that the only way to sell more of his particular brand of the product than other dealers sold of theirs was by selling himself. He did that first by making himself well-known in the community where he had his place of business, and secondly by doing everything he could to ensure that its most prominent and respected leaders were seen smugly driving his product. "So the other people seeing them get the fool idea that the way to get prestige which I guess means looking like you've got a lot of power and money is by giving me most of your money to get yourself a Pontiac'

  He had therefore commenced to use his new riches partly to support substantial and successful-looking candidates for national and statewide elective public office who shared at least some of his political views. They appreciated his generosity and happily agreed to be transported and thus seen and photographed — during their campaigns and subsequent official duties arriving and departing from widely publicized events and riding in parades in highly polished red-and-white Bonneville convertibles, glossy ivory-on-russet Star Chief hardtop coupes and shiny dark blue Catalina sedans from Finn Pontiac in Worcester, "The Friendliest Pontiac Dealer in Central Massachusetts At Finn Pontiac, Everyone Wins."

  All of Uncle Andy's choices were Republicans. Except for his three congressmen, from the 1st, 10th and 12th districts, his state senator and his district attorney, most of his winners three mayors, a governor's councillor, a secretary of state, one attorney general, and his biggest prize, this governor had been electral long-shots coat-tailed into office during the Eisenhower years, doomed on arrival by overwhelmingly Democratic voter-registration figures to be losers the first time they sought re-election without Ike at the top of the ticket, meaning: after 1956.

  When he wanted something from them that he thought his proven friendship entitled him to ask, Uncle Andy frankly and mercilessly reminded them that he had not become well-fixed in the automobile business 'by believing in the fuckin' Easter Bunny."

  Finn's governor he called him that: "My governor' was no exception. He had told the candidate before he was elected that he would most likely win, but that his prospects for re-election would not be promising.

  After the election Finn did not shilly shally He made it clear to his governor early in his term that what he wanted in exchange for his support was 'a little present for my kid sister, June. She's married to a jerk, a failure, never liked the guy. But her son, my nephew Leonard, Lennie's a good kid. Worked his way through college, Holy Cross. Good school, everything I hear, at least, nothin' wrong with that; and then Fordham Law School. He's teaching law now, at Northeastern. And not only that, he's got some sense. Unlike most of the assholes you're gonna find you hafta appoint alia time. So I want you to make Lennie a judge. This'll make June happy, and she's a good kid herself, even if she does say that I'm funny-lookin'. It's the least I can do, my kid sister."

  The governor at first resisted, saying that although Leonard was obviously smart and able, he was too young. His nomination would become a cudgel that the governor's next opponent would use to 'beat me over the head with," denouncing him for cronyism. Finn said that unless the governor somehow changed "Bo
ston Harbor into beer with a good creamy head, and make sure you get the credit, you know just as well as I do you're not going to have a chance against any Democrat two years from now. All he'll have to do to win is stay alive 'til the votes're cast and counted."

  Therefore, Finn told the governor, what was important was not whether the appointment of Finn's nephew to the bench would bring resounding cheers from the public. "It's whether you remember who your friends've been, and do the right thing here, nominate my sister's fuckin' kid while you still got the power to do it, 'fore you get booted out on your ass. I don't ask for much from anybody, Eddie, even when I've got every right to ask. But this one I am asking; this one I want from you. So don't go making it hard for me here, all right now? He'll be an excellent judge, and his mother'll be proud of him. I'll even be happy I'll be the one who's grateful to you, 'stead of you being grateful to me. All you got to do here is just get him appointed, while the appointing's good. It's simple; even you can do it without breaking a sweat. And it's not only something I want from you here; it's also the right thing to do. God'll reward you in heaven."

  When the governor came back and said his legal counsel told him that the Canterbury District Court judgeship was the best that he could do 'without having them get up a mob to tar and feather me," Finn believed him and told his favorite nephew that if he knew what was good for him he'd 'grab it while I still got it within reach. I dunno how many other sponsors you've got that hang around with guys who want to be governor, or what their chances are, but Eddie is the very first one I've ever had, in my life and I been tryin' a long time, at no small expense to me. Which is why I'm as sorry for my own sake as I am for you to tell you it don't look to me as though he's gonna last, you know? Looks like a one-termer, I'm sorry to say, once Ike retires and plays golf full-time. And I can't promise you I'm gonna have a replacement for him real soon. It doesn't look good at all."