Judgment

by Joseph Finder

  Juliana cut him off. “Why can’t you simply redact them, remove the proprietary information?”

  “I was getting to that, Your Honor,” Madden said, and he smiled. “The plaintiff is quite aware that these chats contain proprietary company information intertwined throughout. It’s impossible to separate the personal from the official. Now, under Mass. Rule of Civil Procedure 26, you have the authority to issue a protective order and rule that this discovery may not be had, that the plaintiff is not entitled to this information.”

  Juliana had heard enough. She put up her hand and turned to Glenda Craft. “Counselor, why do you need this? What do these chats have to do with your claim of gender discrimination?”

  Craft rose to her feet. “The company chat platform, Slack, wasn’t just used for work, Your Honor,” she said in her smoke-raspy voice. “The chats between my client and Devin Allerdyce, the CEO of the company, were full of inappropriate communications.”

  Juliana had seen Allerdyce only once, on the first day of the pretrial motions, and had taken an immediate dislike to him, though of course she’d never reveal it. Allerdyce was rich and entitled, a sudden mega-millionaire at an age when most people are just starting their careers. He didn’t exactly dress up for court. He wore jeans and the obligatory hoodie, like so many Silicon Valley brats seemed to wear. Silicon Valley was replicating itself around the country, including in Boston.

  Rachel Meyers, a hotshot young lawyer who’d made partner at WilmerHale six years out of Harvard Law, had been hired by Wheelz with a generous compensation package. If she’d stayed at least two years, and past the IPO, she would have made as much as $25 million. But that wasn’t to be. What she encountered at Wheelz, she claimed, was a frat house, hard-partying and mostly male. She was often the only woman in a room of twenty men. She was subjected to demeaning comments and unwanted sexual advances. She was hit on by the CEO, whose advances she rebuffed. Before a year was up, she was fired. She got nothing.

  On the face of it, it seemed clear to Juliana that the young woman had gotten a raw deal. That she’d been fired for objecting to an atmosphere of pervasive sexual harassment.

  But cases were rarely simple, and the law was the law, and Juliana Brody was beginning to garner recognition as a fair and dispassionate jurist. This case, like every case, had to proceed step by step, motion by motion, argument by argument. Decision by decision. That’s what she was here for. To play referee.

  Harlan Madden had remained standing, ready for a back-and-forth, and swiveled as if he were back on the tennis court, preparing to return serve. “These chats were used primarily for business, Your Honor, and they include discussions of the most sensitive nature.”

  “And sometimes they were used socially,” Craft said, “for non-business purposes—and I have proof of that, Judge.” She grabbed a folder from the table and removed a few sheets of paper from it. “May I approach?”

  “You may.”

  She handed Juliana a piece of paper, then gave one to Madden.

  A moment later, as Juliana began scanning the page, Madden erupted, “This is—outrageous!”

  It appeared to be a printout of a computer chat exchange. “This is a screenshot of the December 6 chat between my client and Mr. Allerdyce,” Craft said.

  Juliana looked over the page. It seemed to start in the middle of a chat.

  RACHEL MEYERS: let me check my calendar

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: lmk. In other news, I’m in an open relationship.

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: U there?

  RACHEL MEYERS: Haha okay.

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: You’re single though right?

  RACHEL MEYERS: Haha can’t tell if you’re serious.

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: As cancer. ;-)

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: So are you? Single?

  RACHEL MEYERS: I mean

  DEVIN ALLERDYCE: Yeah?

  Allerdyce, the CEO, was hitting on his new general counsel, albeit in a clumsy and oily way.

  Juliana looked up. “Why am I seeing this for the first time?” she said.

  “Exactly,” said Madden, indignant. “Why was this not produced earlier? Also, Your Honor, we have no idea where this came from. There’s no date on it. No way, even, to substantiate its provenance. This should simply be stricken from the record.”

  “Ms. Craft? Where did this come from? And why didn’t you produce this months ago, if you had it?”

  “My client just gave it to me,” Craft said. She spoke quickly, defensive-sounding. “She just got it. It was mailed to her anonymously over the weekend. So it wasn’t in her possession until Saturday.”

  “Mailed anonymously?” said Madden. “Your Honor, she’s gotta be kidding.”

  “Obviously someone within the company—perhaps someone repelled by a culture that appears to be hostile toward women—”

  Juliana reacted even before Madden could. “Ms. Craft, table the editorializing.”

  “Printed it out and sent it to her, knowing she was suing the company.”

  Juliana turned to the defense. “Mr. Madden, you need to explain to me what there is about this clearly inappropriate exchange that qualifies as confidential and proprietary information.” She gave him a cold, level look. Her “objection overruled” stare.

  For just a moment, Madden was silent. He was a very smart guy, but this turn of events forced him to take a beat and compose himself. “The remainder of that conversation, I’m sure, dealt with company business of a highly confidential—”

  “As you can see, this can easily be redacted, Counselor,” Juliana said. She almost added, “Right?” Even after three years on the bench, she had to edit herself, modulate her natural conversational style. In court, she was the judge, and it was vital to be more firm, more . . . judicious. “All right,” she said. She heard the door to the courtroom open, and she glanced up to see someone entering. “I want to see all chats between the plaintiff and Mr. Allerdyce, as well as any that mention the plaintiff—”

  She glanced toward the back of the courtroom and saw a man with dark blond hair walk down the center aisle. She felt her face get hot. The man’s walk was familiar.

  She couldn’t help but stare.

  One of the spectators coughed. Someone snapped a binder closed.

  It couldn’t be.

  It wasn’t possible. They had agreed solemnly that they would never see each other again.

  My name is . . .

  The guy looked exactly like Matías. What kind of coincidence could that be?

  She looked again.

  Was she imagining this?

  They’d agreed. A one-night thing.

  It can’t happen again.

  My name is Matías Sanchez.

  The man crossed the bar and went over to the defense table. He nodded at Madden and took a seat, gracefully, in the only empty chair.

  Her mind went blank. Someone was talking to her, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. She turned to Madden and said, “Could you repeat that, please?”

  “Your Honor,” said Madden, “I’d like to introduce an addition to our defense team.” He turned and gestured toward the man, who stood now and nodded courteously in her direction.

  “Good afternoon, Your Honor,” he said in his pleasing baritone, that tiny trace of an Argentinian accent. “My name is Matías Sanchez.”

  5

  Juliana went right to her office, her “lobby” as the state’s arcane language called it, and sank unsteadily into her desk chair.

  Her head was spinning, and she felt light-headed. She saw little pinpoints of light. She closed her eyes.

  Matías from Chicago had said he was a businessman, in venture capital in Buenos Aires.

  I’m afraid I was staring at you before.

  How could this be? Harlan Madden had introduced the man as if they knew each other, as if they wer
e colleagues.

  Matías was a lawyer?

  The man who had talked about his wife, his daughter. Who had cried when he came.

  Was sitting at the defense table.

  She was beginning to feel prickly hot and a little nauseated.

  The man she was never going to see again, ships passing in the night as she’d put it, cliché or no cliché.

  Two very separate worlds were somehow colliding, worlds she had been so meticulous about keeping apart.

  After Matías had introduced himself, she could hear nothing but the thudding of her heart. Glenda Craft’s eyes had narrowed as she waited for Juliana to speak.

  For a moment, she’d lost her train of thought. Then it came back to her. Wondering whether she was flushing visibly, she cleared her throat and said to Madden, “By Monday, I’d like to see all of the Slack chats between Ms. Meyers and Mr. Allerdyce and any that mention Ms. Meyers. I’ll then rule on the motion. I think that does it for today.”

  She was slowly beginning to understand that she’d been used, seduced.

  Set up.

  He must have known she was the judge on the Wheelz case. She felt humiliated, disgusted.

  She found herself running through her options. Maybe she should have said something as soon as the man walked into the courtroom. But what could she have said? She had no standing to protest an addition to the defense team. They had the right to add whomever they wanted, especially in the pretrial phase of a case.

  He had the right to be there. It was their call.

  And what if she’d said something like, Who are you, and why are you here? Matías would have produced credentials, no doubt showing him to be a member of the bar in good standing, and then what could she have said?

  Aren’t you the guy I slept with one night last week in Chicago?

  That would be the end of her marriage, the destruction of her reputation.

  She could say exactly nothing.

  There was a knock on the door. She could see a silhouette of a figure through the clouded-glass panel in her door.

  “Come in.”

  “Excuse me, Your Honor?”

  Her clerk, Kaitlyn Hemming, a waifish woman in her mid-twenties with a pixie haircut, a recent Suffolk Law grad, stood there with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Juliana shared her law clerk with another judge.

  “Got a minute?” Kaitlyn asked.

  “Come on in,” Juliana said.

  Time to get back to work.

  6

  The Bostonia Club was one of Boston’s grandest private clubs, located in a large, handsome brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue with a highly polished black-painted front door and brass fittings and a doorknob that gleamed. It was a club for lawyers, primarily, a place where they could socialize, play poker, shoot pool, have dinner. And talk law, if they wanted, without being accused of being boring. There were a few nonlawyer members, and civilians were brought in all the time, usually for dinner and a predinner talk. One Juliana attended recently had been titled “Great Defense Attorneys in Film (Besides Atticus Finch).”

  It was funny, she had to admit, that she belonged to this fancy club, given that her mother had worked in one. Her mother, Rosalind, had been the operations manager at another exclusive private club in Boston, the Clarendon Club. She was a staff member—not very well paid—and not a member, of course. But she was a fixture at the club and much-beloved (or so she always said, herself). Yet not one of the members attended her funeral.

  Juliana remembered coming up with the idea, in the year after her mother’s death, of a memorial service at the Clarendon Club. She mentioned the idea to her mom’s boss, the gloomy Mrs. Cooper. Mrs. Cooper took young Juliana’s hands in hers and gently disabused her. “Such a sweet thought!” Mrs. Cooper said. “And I know that’s how your mom saw this place sometimes. But I gotta tell you. When Mr. Carducci retired after half a century as caretaker, I could barely get six people to sign a going-away card. I mean, folks were like, ‘We’ll miss him—bet we can hire a replacement for half the cost.’ I mean, that’s just the reality of this place.”

  With a sinking in her stomach, Juliana recognized the truth.

  “Your mom,” Mrs. Cooper went on, “bless her heart, preferred her own reality.”

  Tears had come to Juliana’s eyes. She left in a dazed state, a little sickened. Mrs. Cooper had nailed it: her mother invented, lived in, her own reality. She’d told Juliana how the members would say, What would we ever do without you, Roz? And she would believe it.

  She remembered talking to her mother, shortly before her death, about her brother, Calvin, two years younger, who’d died when he was twenty. “You know,” Rosalind had said, “your brother was an extremely talented musician. A poet, really.” Juliana nodded, too weary to point out that Calvin had been a mediocre guitarist at best. “You remember that song he wrote, the one about a lady who’s buying a stairway to heaven? That was so beautiful. So much talent.” She was starting to slur her words. If she was at home, she was inevitably drunk.

  Juliana couldn’t take it anymore. “Mom, Calvin . . . didn’t write that.”

  “No?”

  “It’s Led Zeppelin.”

  “Well. ‘Great artists steal,’ T. S. Eliot said. Calvin put his own touch to it, is my point.”

  She lived in her own world.

  * * *

  —

  Linda Zucchetti already had dinner plans at the club but agreed to meet her for an after-dinner drink in the club’s library at eight o’clock. Linda was around her age, in her early forties, and had been a judge on the Superior Court for six years—a good friend and a good person to share a cosmo with. So first Juliana went home at five thirty, arriving at an empty house, and defrosted some lasagna in the microwave for Duncan and Jacob. She herself had some leftover chicken tikka masala from their favorite Indian place, on Boylston Street, while distractedly checking her e-mail.

  She washed her face, put on toner, then her eye cream and some tinted moisturizer. Her mind was replaying the image, over and over, of Matías walking into the courtroom. She had recognized the walk even before she’d seen his face. It was definitely him. She brushed on some blush and stared at her reflection in the mirror. What had she done?

  “Idiot,” she said aloud. She turned away from the mirror, disgusted, her stomach cramped with anxiety. What a terrible mistake.

  She drove her blue Lexus sport-utility vehicle the mile or two into downtown Boston, lucked into a parking spot on Exeter Street, and entered the club at seven thirty.

  Linda was standing in the foyer, in the middle of an extended good-bye with another woman who was probably her dinner date. The two of them stood underneath the John Singer Sargent portrait of Lucius Graham, the Boston lawyer who’d founded the Bostonia Club early in the nineteenth century. He had a handlebar mustache and wore his collar up with a black tie and black coat and looked sort of raffish, leaning back on his chair with his hand dangling casually in the air.

  Juliana caught Linda’s eye, smiled hello, gave a little wave—she didn’t want to interrupt and didn’t feel like being introduced to someone she’d probably never see again—and wandered upstairs to the library. It was lined with books, like a library, but it was also the customary gathering place for club members to have drinks before and after dinner. She found a table as far away as possible from a raucous gathering of members seated in mismatched easy chairs around the unlit fireplace, waved at a few she knew, and told the waitress she’d wait to order until she was joined by her friend.

  Linda arrived a few minutes later, apologizing for keeping her waiting, and put a hand on Juliana’s shoulder. She was an attractive woman who looked easily ten years younger than she was. Linda and she had had their issues in the past—for a while, when they were both in the US Attorney’s office, they were competitive—but now they were allies. They’d even d
one SoulCycle together. Linda was wearing a suit of pale green silk. Her hair was light brown with blond highlights. I work in a sack all day, Linda had once said. When I dress up I want to look nice. And she had the figure to pull it off.

  Juliana stood and gave Linda a hug, inhaling her wonderfully sultry perfume.

  “You’re still on civil, aren’t you, poor thing,” Linda said with a big smile.

  Twice a year they rotated between civil and criminal cases, and Linda made no secret of the fact that she much preferred criminal, where the action was, even though some of the homicide cases they had to hear could be wrenching. The criminal session, Linda had once announced, was heartache; the civil session was headache.

  “I like it,” Juliana said. “You know that.”

  “Even the endless Wheelz case?”

  She shook her head. “Well, except for that,” Juliana admitted.

  Linda sat in the chair next to her, rather than across from her. When the waitress approached, Juliana ordered a cosmo and Linda ordered a Grey Goose vodka martini. Juliana was determined to limit her drinking to one cosmo tonight.

  “You sounded concerned on the phone, Jules. Is everything okay? The family, the kids?” When Linda crossed her legs you could see the effects of her daily Pilates sessions.

  “Everyone’s fine. Ashley’s in Namibia and loving it.” Well, as much as you could “love” taking care of terminally ill people; she couldn’t even imagine what that was like, those poor women infected with AIDS by their husbands.

  “Ashley’s still in Namibia? God bless that child.”

  “We have to schedule Skype sessions once a week. I miss her.”

  “Of course you do. And Jake?”

  “I wish he’d go off to college already.”

  Linda laughed. She knew that Juliana was kidding, mostly. They both complained, jokingly, about their kids, knowing that they loved and appreciated their children, while agreeing that having teenagers in the house was a special kind of stressful. She didn’t know what she’d do if it weren’t for Duncan, who was like the Teen Whisperer. He and the kids always seemed to be tuned in to the same frequency. But she worried about Jake a lot recently, his apathy, his dropping grades. It was like he was floating through life, blowing with the winds. Whereas Ashley had always been the straight-A student. Maybe girls were just easier to parent.