The One-Eyed Judge

by Ponsor, Michael;

  Norcross’s guilty knowledge that he had not been entirely honest with Claire about his reasons for declining to recuse himself compounded things. The whole truth was that, only a month before, he’d passed off a jumbo securities case involving Massachusetts Mutual, a local employer that he held stock in. The case had bounced over to a dear friend in Boston, Judge Bertha Weinstein, who was struggling through chemotherapy and needed a twenty-defendant securities class action like a hole in the head. He just couldn’t bring himself, so soon after that, to duck yet another messy trial and have it redrawn to a new judge. He probably should have told Claire all this, except he couldn’t see how it would help.

  AUSA Campanella had been leaning toward the case agent, conferring in low tones. He now stood. Attorney Ames turned away from her client and gazed over at Campanella with a look of amused expectation. Campanella might be uncomfortable with where this was going, but there was little he could do about it. Absent facts much more compelling than this, the recusal decision was within Norcross’s discretion.

  Campanella started on easy terrain. “Your Honor, let me begin by introducing Special Agent Mike Patterson of the FBI. He’s up here from Washington, and he will be the government’s case agent.”

  The judge nodded. “Welcome.”

  Patterson nodded back with one-tenth of a smile, and Campa­nella went on.

  “With regard to your friend’s acquaintance with the defendant, might I inquire?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think you said she was a close friend of yours?”

  “Right.”

  Campanella shifted his weight over to his right foot and scratched the back of his head. How much, Norcross wondered, did the AUSA know about his relationship with Claire? In the greater Springfield legal community, everybody basically knew everything about everybody, but Campanella was new in town, still green, and Patterson was just joining the local FBI office. Did the prosecutors pass around gossip they’d heard about a judge’s private life? He’d certainly done that, back when he was trying cases. Every little bit helped.

  “Would Your Honor be comfortable, um, revealing the name of your friend? I could approach side bar if you’d prefer.”

  “Professor Claire Lindemann.”

  The second the words were out of his mouth, Norcross regretted uttering them. The very competent Springfield Republican reporter was in her usual corner of the gallery, jotting away. On the one hand, the judge reminded himself, he didn’t want to come across as though he had something to hide. On the other hand, it would probably irritate Claire if her name got into the papers, and that would make it even harder to iron things out between them. He should have provided the name off the record or found some way to avoid mentioning it at all. In fact, he realized, he probably should have passed the case back to the clerk to be redrawn to another judge, no matter how guilty it made him feel. But it was too late to jump now. It would look as though he’d chucked the case because he’d been scared off by Campanella’s question.

  Norcross didn’t want to appear flummoxed, so he fell back on a technique he regularly used when he couldn’t trust his face. He popped a Kleenex out of the box he kept under the bench and began cleaning his glasses. If he got really ruffled, he’d bend over and retie his shoes.

  Campanella examined the surface of the counsel table and rotated his mouth in a circle several times. Linda Ames folded her arms and cocked her head to one side, just short of chuckling.

  “Well, obviously,” Campanella said finally, “if Your Honor is not concerned, the government has no objection.”

  Judge Norcross turned to Attorney Ames and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Agent Patterson writing something down. Would they be doing a background check on Claire now? Terrific.

  Ames bobbed to her feet. “Defense has no objection, Judge.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll get started.” He turned to the defendant. “Mr. Cranmer, I have some information for you, and some warnings I need to pass on to you. Can you hear me all right from there?”

  Cranmer nodded, and after a nudge from his attorney, sat up straighter and said, “Yes, very well. Thank you.”

  Judge Norcross fell into the stock series of questions he employed at all arraignments, beginning with: “For the record, do you have any difficulty with the English language?”

  In response, Cranmer sagged and grimaced, bringing home to Norcross the irony of posing this question to an Amherst College English professor. The judge was tempted to observe that he routinely asked this question, that it was merely a formality—maybe even find a way to lighten things up with some humor—but decided against it. Excessive explanation or waggish remarks, he’d learned, tended to complicate things. Stick to the script.

  A rustle from the back of the gallery brought the judge’s attention again to the Republican reporter, who was scribbling fast and muttering something to the man next to her. The exchange about whether Cranmer had problems with English might make a nice lead to her story. The case was certainly going to sell newspapers.

  “No, Your Honor,” Cranmer said. He smiled wanly. “Not so far.”

  The reporter’s smile widened; she drew an underline and looked up happily.

  The next portion of the process followed a well-trodden trail: making sure the defendant had received a copy of the indictment, reviewing the charges, reminding the defendant again of his rights pursuant to Miranda, confirming that he was retaining his own lawyer and did not need one appointed, and entering his pleas of not guilty to the various counts. The trick was to cover all this very standard stuff in a way that was sufficiently fresh and pointed to penetrate the defendant’s reeling brain.

  Professor Cranmer seemed to get the gist. At least, he nodded at the right moments. Then came the hard part. Norcross turned to the AUSA.

  “Mr. Campanella, I understand from your written motion that the government is moving for pretrial detention. Is that correct?” The muted phone on Ruby Johnson’s desk below him emitted a soft buzz, and he noticed Ruby picking up and whispering.

  Campanella quickly stood, squaring himself like a man preparing for hand-to-hand combat. His posture instantly told the judge that he was not entirely confident of his arguments, or at least had doubts about their reception by the court.

  “Yes, Your Honor. It is the government’s position that the defendant, if released prior to trial, would present both a danger to the community and a risk of flight.”

  Ruby, who had been scribbling on a sheet of paper, now turned in her chair and handed up a folded note to the judge. When he opened it, it read: “Your brother’s office is on the phone. Important. Holding for you in chambers.”

  Judge Norcross considered these words, half weary and half wary. His brother, Ray Norcross, the former governor of Wisconsin, was now the country’s secretary of commerce. His influence had been key in getting David Norcross his job on the federal bench. From childhood, Ray had always viewed minor inconveniences to himself as extreme emergencies justifying any and all demands upon others, especially upon his younger brother. Still, it might be something about their mom, who had late-stage Alzheimer’s. Norcross had no choice.

  Campanella was rattling forward, carried on by his own momentum and ignoring the fact that the judge was distracted by the note. “There are three compelling reasons, any one of which …” he was saying. A more experienced lawyer would have waited with an expression of sympathy until he had the judge’s full attention.

  “Very sorry to have to do this,” Norcross interrupted. “Something has come up I have to deal with, and I’m going to need to take a recess.” He looked over at the deputy marshals. “You can take the defendant down to the lockup. He may need to, you know …” He tipped his head toward Cranmer, and the deputies nodded back, understanding. The poor guy might need to pee, or throw up. “Fifteen minutes. Possibly a little more.
Ms. Johnson will call you when we’re ready to resume.”

  5

  The defense attorney, Linda Ames, had three passions: her son, Ethan; Weight Watchers; and defending criminals.

  Ethan, nine, was the product of a three-beer fling with a roofing contractor who’d dropped by one winter evening to discuss her leaky porch. Ames had considered terminating the pregnancy, but she figured (a) at age forty-one, it was probably her last chance at motherhood and (b) Charlie Buchannon was a healthy, easygoing man who looked like he had decent genes. Charlie soon drifted to the margin of her life, never more than sorta-kinda acknowledging that Ethan was his, which was fine with Ames. The baby, however, plopped right down in the center of her world: the absolute coolest person Linda Ames had ever known.

  Ames’s romantic life over the years had been a patchwork of both men and women. She never understood why a person had to choose. It was like Chinese versus Italian food. Depending on the quality of the ingredients and the skill in preparation, they could both be delicious. For a while now, things in that department had been in suspension anyway. The fires had died down, and she was too busy with her fabulous boy and her creepy clients to worry much about Valentine’s Day.

  A second time-sucker was Ames’s obsession with Weight Watchers, which had her counting points and filling a small wire-rimmed notebook with scribbles in her endless campaign to drop ten pounds. On the morning of Sid Cranmer’s arraignment, Ames was on a roll—low-fat yogurt with berries, two tablespoons of sliced almonds, and black coffee for breakfast, leaving her twenty-one of her twenty-six points available for the rest of the day. With salmon and peach salad and a Diet Coke for lunch, she’d have space for a five-ounce glass of Australian red (four points) with her bunless veggie burger at dinner.

  Unfortunately, her meager breakfast had provoked in Ames a yearning for sugar so intense it was reaching what saints must feel for God. Sitting in court, she reflected that she would have given anything for a sticky bun, even if it meant she’d be on celery and herbal tea until a week from Wednesday.

  Ames acquired her third passion, criminal law, while watching Perry Mason reruns as a grade-schooler. She was a patient person who moved slowly but thought fast, and she had the rare ability to ask blunt questions without being offensive—all of which made her very good in the courtroom. In law school, she took every criminal law course available, and she summered at the public defender’s office. After graduation, she worked for two years for Bill Redpath, a very skillful Boston defense lawyer, before moving to the greener pastures, and the smaller pond, of Amherst. The one drawback in her professional life was that in twenty-five years defending criminals, she’d had to adjust to the fact that, unlike her hero Perry, she nearly always represented guilty people.

  Innocent clients, in her practice at least, came along about as often as buffalo nickels, and Professor Sidney Cranmer did not look like one of them. The big tip-off was that he was obviously holding out on her. Ames’s rare innocent clients were usually so outraged and hysterical she couldn’t shut them up. Guilty clients tended to be vague and cagey, surrendering the truth in teaspoonfuls, which was what Sid Cranmer seemed to be doing. On the other hand, she only liked about a quarter of her creeps, and she was getting concerned that poor Sid might end up being one of these. Hard to say why. The charge against him was certainly putrid, and she assumed he was guilty. Maybe it was just that he had half a brain, which most of her clients did not, or that he was so totally screwed. It was always painful when one of her guys, even someone disgusting, fell into the yawning black mouth of the Bureau of Prisons, and for Sid it was going to be a very long drop.

  The Amherst College Dean’s Office had put Professor Cranmer in touch with Ames after his arrest, based on her recent victories with two college faculty members facing DUI charges. This was rash, since DUIs were Pop-Tarts compared to federal child porn trials, but they’d been lucky to stumble onto her. She actually had handled porn cases, one in federal court in Worcester, one in state court up in Greenfield, both guilty pleas with decent outcomes (prison terms, but survivable), and she had plenty of experience before Norcross doing drug and gun cases. He wasn’t going to give her any special breaks—he didn’t give anyone special breaks—but she could tell he respected her, and the feeling was mutual.

  The U.S. Marshal’s area on the first floor of the courthouse contained a row of cubicles and an array of surveillance monitors and electronic equipment along one wall. Making her way past the desks, Ames nodded to the deputies, all of whom knew her. As she turned down the windowless corridor leading to the attorney-client conference rooms, she breathed in the aroma of hot coffee. It made her think of pecan rolls.

  Sid was waiting in the room set aside for them, slumping to one side as though someone had tapped all the blood out of him. The area, roughly eight by six feet, was arranged so that the detainee came in through one door and the attorney entered through another on the opposite side. The air was stuffy and smelled of Lysol. Sid was seated on a round metal stool that was bolted to the floor to keep it from being used as a weapon. Ames eased herself into one of the two chairs on the attorney’s side. A scratched steel counter and a heavy mesh screen separated them.

  If the screen hadn’t been there, Ames might have been tempted to pat Sid on the shiny crown of his head, which was tipped toward her dolefully. His meager hair hung in gray commas over his collar. Some helpful deputy must have shown him that morning’s Republican story, detailing the child porn charges and the news that Amherst College had suspended him.

  “How you doing?” Ames asked.

  “I’m alive.” He looked up at her. “That’s about it.” He squirmed on the metal stool, and the humming fluorescent light reflected off his glasses. “One night in the slammer, and I’m already picking up some new vocabulary. My fellow inmates refer to me as a ‘diddler,’ which seems to be their word for a pedophile.”

  “Are they getting on you? I can talk to the sheriff …”

  Criminals, Linda knew, had a harsh code of morality, and the drug dealers and gang members bunking with Sid could be very tough on sex offenders, especially child abusers.

  “So far, so good.” Sid pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked. “What are my chances of getting out of here, Linda? Tell the truth, it’s a fucking nightmare. I already miss …” The face he tipped up to her was painful to see. He looked like a man struggling to bend his mind around a terminal cancer diagnosis. “There isn’t a single thing I don’t miss.” He breathed in shakily. “The bed is killing my back, the cell smells like puke, and most of the other men I’ve seen scare me to death, even the guards.”

  “I can’t promise anything.” Ames shook her head. “Campanella’s a world-class drip. He can’t seriously think you’re going to flee or endanger anybody. My guess is, one, he’s showing off for his FBI agent up from Washington, who’s trying to frighten me with his big, intimidating game face. And, two, he wants you detained to soften you up so you’ll plead. Problem is, Norcross might just buy what he’s selling. I can’t …” Ames paused to emphasize the bad news. “I can’t honestly predict what he’ll do, Sid.”

  Her client’s detention would make trial preparation much harder. Worse, after seven or eight months moldering inside a cell, the professor, even if somehow he were innocent, would look exactly like the pasty-faced pervert the government wanted the jury to think he was.

  “It’s just …” Sid dropped his eyes and shook his head again. “I know it sounds silly, but the cats will be freaking out. My intern is feeding them. The poor girl was there when they showed up. The problem is, she can only come by every other day or so, and the cats are Siamese. They hate being alone.” He broke off, staring straight ahead but obviously seeing nothing. “I still can’t believe what’s happening. It’s a cliché, I know, but I keep hoping it’s just some bad dream, and I’ll wake up.”

  “It’s horrible. It always is.” Ames leaned f
orward, placing her hands on the cool metal counter. “We don’t have much time here, though. I need your help on a couple things if we’re going to have a chance at getting you out.” Ames watched Sid as he looked back at her warily. This was only their second meeting. She was still trying to figure him out, and he was still deciding whether he could trust her. How hard should she push?

  “Tell me some more about this DVD.”

  “Like I told you, I do remember getting a flyer about it with an order form.”

  “And you didn’t just toss it?”

  “I couldn’t figure out where it came from. It weirded me out.”

  “The postal inspectors must have gotten wind somehow that you were interested in this sort of stuff. Maybe from a chat room they were monitoring?”

  Sid groaned. “Chat rooms.” He put his hands over his face and talked through his fingers. “I spent a lot of time in them after my mother died. Late at night.” He dropped his hands. “I can’t even remember half the places I went, or the stuff I said. A lot of idiotic things, I know that.”

  “Campanella showed me a couple juicy passages they recovered. Not good. They must have seen what you were saying and decided to mail you the brochure, toss you some bait as part of their sting operation. Its code name is ‘Window Pane.’ It’s all over the country.”

  “Can they do that? Isn’t that, like, entrapment or something?”

  “Not if they just give you the opportunity to commit the crime and you bite. It’s only entrapment if they keep pushing you to do something you don’t really want to do.” This was a quick and dirty explanation of the law; Ames was more interested in other things. “I’m just trying to figure out what I can say when Campanella tells the judge you deliberately ordered that DVD.”

  “I can’t believe I ordered it.” He shook his head.

  “Really.”

  Sid’s answer had two possible meanings: (1) He didn’t think he ordered the DVD, or (2) he knew he ordered it, but he couldn’t believe how stupid he was for having done it. This sort of roundabout bibble-babble was typical of Linda’s white-collar clients. Whether it was a Ponzi scheme, embezzlement, or child porn, it took these clients forever to cough up what they’d done. She’d have to give it time.