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Authors: Lisa Scottoline

Final Appeal (6 page)

BOOK: Final Appeal
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“Judge Galanter.” I start talking, almost reflexively. “Artie and Armen were close. This is hard for him. For us all.” I hear an involuntary catch in my voice, but Galanter’s gaze is fixed in the direction of the clerks’ office. I feel a shiver of fear inside, from somewhere deep, but press it away. “You were saying, Judge, about the memorial service?”

Galanter looks down at me, still lost in his own anger. “What did you say?”

“The memorial service.”

“The memorial service? Oh, yes.” He exhales sharply, regaining control, and returns the pen to his breast pocket. “Memorial service. The day after tomorrow, Thursday. In the ceremonial courtroom. The time’s not fixed yet.”

“Have you heard about the funeral arrangements?”

“No idea. Senator Waterman said she’d call about that. Eletha, get me that memo I sent you.”

Eletha doesn’t move a muscle. “Memo? What memo, Judge?”

Galanter hasn’t drunk enough to miss the challenge in her manner. He tilts his head ever so slightly. “The one about the new sitting schedule. I sent it this morning, on E-mail.”

“I was busy this morning.”

“So was I. Get it now,” he says, staccato.

Eletha leaves the room. In a second she’s slamming her desk drawers unnecessarily.

Galanter hands me some papers from his book. “Xerox these for me and come right back.”

I take the papers and leave the office. When I open the door to the hallway, Eletha’s giving the finger to the wall.

I read the papers on the way to the Xerox machine. It’s a complete sitting schedule, with Armen’s initials crossed out next to his cases and a new judge’s written in. All of Armen’s cases, reassigned so fast it’d make your head spin.

READY TO COPY
, the photocopier says. I open the heavy lid, slap the paper onto the glass, and hit the button. The light from the machine rolls calcium white across my face.

Suicide? I don’t understand. They were going to file for divorce, if what Armen said was true. I feel a pang of doubt; would Armen lie? Of course not. Afterward we talked for a long time, holding each other on the couch. He was an honest man, a wonderful man.

READY TO COPY
. I hit the button. You don’t kill yourself just because you’re Armenian. Armen was a survivor. And he hated guns, was against keeping them in the house. Where did he get the gun?

READY TO COPY
, says the machine again, but I’m not ready to copy. So much has happened. We found and lost each other in one night. I stare at the glass over the shadowy innards of the machine; all I see is my own confused reflection. What was that noise last night, and does it matter?

I turn around and look down the hall, but it’s empty. There are only two occupied judges’ chambers on this whole floor, ours and Galanter’s; the rest are vacant, the chambers of judges who sit nearer their homes in Wilmington and northern New Jersey. Only eleven people work on the entire floor.

Now it’s ten.

A boxy file cabinet sits against the wall next to the judges’ elevator. A few paces to the left is the door to the law clerks’ office. To the right, down the hall, are Galanter’s chambers.

Everything looks perfectly normal.

I step away from the machine and peer at the government-spec brown carpet. There’s nothing on the rug, no trace of anything. I straighten up, feeling stupid. What am I looking for, muddy footprints? Clothing fibers? What am I thinking? I shake my head and turn back to the Xerox machine.

ADD PAPER
, it says. The words blink red, like the old pinball machines that go tilt.

Damn it. Why am I the only one who refills this thing? I look in the cabinet next to the machine for a ream of paper, but it’s empty except for the torn wrapper. The law clerks never pick up after themselves. I slam the cabinet door and walk down the hallway back to chambers.

Bbbzzzzzz
goes the security camera, as I tramp angrily by.

Then it hits me. I do an about-face and look up at the camera. It’s black and boxy, and looks back at me like a mechanical vulture perched above the judges’ elevator.

The camera’s on all the time, monitored by the federal marshals. It saw everything that happened in the hall last night and probably recorded it, like at ATM machines.

It knows if anyone came into chambers and saw Armen and me together. And it knows who they are.

7

 

H
is breast pocket bears a plastic plate that says
R. ARRINGTON
over the shiny five-star badge of the marshal service. His frame is brawny in its official blue blazer, and his dark skin is slightly pitted up close. “Lunchtime!” I say to him, making an overstuffed tuna hoagie do the cha-cha with a chilly bottle of Snapple lemonade. “All this can be yours.”

He does not look impressed. “No can do, Grace.”

The hoagie and the lemonade jump up and down in frustration. “All I want is two minutes. I look at the monitors, then I’m outta there.”

“There’s twenty monitors, Grace,” he says, sighing deeply. Maryellen, the cashier in the building’s snack shop, cocks her head in our direction. She may be blind, but she’s not deaf. I decide to be more quiet.

“Come on, Ray. You said only one monitor shows our hallway. How long can it take to look at a monitor?”

He folds his thick arms. “Maybe if you tell me why this matters.”

I glance at the jurors behind us buying newspapers, gum, and fountain soda. The ice machine spits chunks into a tall paper cup, and a juror plays mix-and-match to find the right size lid. He’ll never find it; I never can, and I have a J.D. “Let’s just say I want to check security.”

“Come clean, Rossi.”

I consider this. Ray is one of the few marshals who liked Armen; he’s also one of the few African Americans, which I suspect is no coincidence. “Tell you what. Get me in. If it pays off, I’ll tell you why.”

“What am I supposed to tell the marshals?”

“What marshals? You’re the marshal.”

“I’m a CSO, technically. A court security officer. I mean the marshals watching the monitors.”

“Tell ’em I’m checking security, that I’m the administrative law clerk to the chief judge.”

“Grace.” His somber expression reminds me of something I’d rather not dwell on. Armen is gone.

“Forget it, I’ll tell them something. I’ll handle it. Just get me in, I’ll owe you. Big-time.”

Suddenly he snaps his fingers. “I know what you can do for me.”

“Anything.”

“You can introduce me to your fine friend, the lovely Eletha Staples.”

“Eletha? Don’t you know her?”

“I’ve been workin’ here as long as she has, but she won’t give me the time of day. She seein’ anybody?”

I think of Leon, Eletha’s boyfriend, who gives her nothing but grief. “No.”

“Hot dog!” He rubs his hands together; it makes a dry sound. “Lunch. I’ll start with lunch, take it nice and easy. Can you set it up?”

“Deal.” I set the tuna hoagie and Snapple on the counter in front of Maryellen. At the last minute, Ray tosses in two packs of chocolate Tastykakes.

“What are you having today, Grace?” Maryellen says. Her cloudy eyes veer wildly around the room.

“Thanksgiving dinner,” I say to her and she laughs.

After we leave the snack bar, Ray leads me through a labyrinth of hallways to the core of a secured part of the courthouse. It would have been impossible to find this myself, and when I reach the barred entrance I understand why.

It’s a prison.

Sixteen floors from where I work, in the same building. It gives me the creeps. The sign on the barred door says:
ONLY COUNSEL MAY VISIT PRISONERS
.

We head down another hall, past a room with a number of empty desks in it, and open a door onto a small room, brightly lit by a ceiling of fluorescents. A wall of TV screens dominates the room, giving it a futuristic feel. There must be twenty-five black-and-white TV screens here, trained everywhere throughout the courthouse.

The monitors in the left bank flash on the stairwells at each floor of the building, and the large screens in the middle offer an ever-changing peek into the courtrooms. In 12-A there’s a young woman crying on the witness stand. In 13-A an older man is being sentenced. In 14-A a little boy is testifying.

“It’s like a soap opera, huh, Worrell?” Ray says amiably to the stony-faced marshal watching the screens. He’s a stocky middle-aged man in a black T-shirt that says
UNITED STATES MARSHAL SERVICE
. It looks more like a get-up for Hell’s Angels, but I do not remark this aloud.

“Ugh,” the man says, his attention focused on the TV pictures of prison cells on the far right. Each cell is numbered and occupied by a man in street clothes, probably awaiting trial. They sit slumped or asleep in their cells; one is a black teenager in an oversized sweatshirt, just a kid. I think of Hightower.

“This is Grace Rossi, Worrell. She’s a lawyer, works for the appeals court. She wants to see—”

“I want to see the monitors,” I say with faux authority. “It’s a security check for the new chief judge.”

Worrell begins to laugh at one of the prisoners, a Muslim crouched over in prayer. “Say it loud, brother. You’re gonna need it.” Ray looks sideways at the monitor.

“Where’s the screen for the eighteenth floor?” I ask.

“That one.” He points to one of the screens. The bottom of the screen reads 16-B. In the high-resolution picture, a young secretary pauses to tug up her slip. Worrell chuckles. “They forget Big Brother’s watching.”

Of course they forget; I did. So did whoever came into our chambers, if anyone. I watch the picture flicker to 17-B. It’s a view of the hallway outside the judges’ elevator on the seventeenth floor. On the wall hangs a fake parchment copy of the Constitution. Our floor is next.

“Yeow!” Ray hoots as soon as the scene changes. Eletha is photocopying at the Xerox machine, her back to the camera. Her skirt clings softly to her curves, and with her back turned you can’t see how haggard she looks today. “Now ain’t that pretty?” he says, in a tone men usually reserve for touchdown passes and vintage Corvettes.

Worrell grunts. “She’s all right.”

Ray gives him a solid shove. “Listen to you, ‘She’s
all right
.’ Shit, man! She’s more than all right, she’s
fine
. And she’s mine, all mine. Right, Grace? Grace?”

“Right,” I say, preoccupied by the scene on the TV screen, which shows Eletha walking down the hall and into chambers. Bingo. The camera would have seen whoever came into chambers last night, wherever they came from. “Where’s the tape?”

Worrell looks at me blankly. “What tape?”

“The tape. The tape of what the camera saw last night.”

“We don’t tape.”

“What?”

“There’s no tape, lady.”

“I don’t understand.” I look at Ray for confirmation.

“I coulda told you that, Grace,” he says.

I don’t believe this. “At the MAC machine they tape. Even in the Seven-Eleven they tape.”

“Seven-Eleven’s got the money. This is the U.S. government. You’re lucky we got the goddamn judges.”

Ray looks embarrassed. “Downstairs we tape. The monitors at the security desk, they tape the stairwell and the judges’ garage. Just not here.”

“But somebody watches the monitors at night, don’t they?”

Worrell leans back in the creaky chair, plainly amused. “Guess again.”

“Maybe we should go,” Ray says.

“Hold on. There’s no night shift?” I hear myself sounding like an outraged customer.

“We got a fella walks around the halls,” Worrell says, “but that’s it. One marshal. The government don’t have the money for somebody to watch TV all night.” His face slackens as he returns to the screens.

“All right. Who was the marshal last night, walking the halls?”

“McLean, I think.”

“McLean? Is he the big one with the mustache?” The Mutt of the Mutt-and-Jeff marshals I see in the mornings.

Worrell nods. “Don’t you guys got some work to do?”

“Let’s go, Grace,” Ray says.

“Sure. Thanks,” I say, disappointed. So much for the short answer. We start toward the door but Worrell erupts into raucous laughter.

“Holy shit, what a case this one is.”

Ray glances at the monitor, then scowls. “I’d love a piece of that guy. He’s not crazy, he knows just what he’s doin.’ Jerkin’ us around.”

I look back. One of the prisoners is smack in the middle of cell seven, standing on his head. “Jesus.”

“What a country,” Worrell says. “That jerk’s gettin’ a nice bed for the night, and you know who’s gonna pay for it? You and me. The taxpayers. For him they got the money. For us, no. You talk to your boss about that, okay, lady?”

But I don’t answer. I recognize the man in the cell. “Ray, let’s go.”

8

 

“S
hake and Bake is in jail?” Artie says, shocked.

“Show me where, Grace.”

“You can’t visit him.”

“What do you mean I can’t visit him?”

Eletha looks over wearily, dead on her feet against the bookcase in the law clerks’ office. “That lunatic is the last thing you should be worried about today.”

“Grace,” Sarah calls from her desk, “what were you doing in the security office?”

“I wanted to see the cameras.”

“What cameras?”

“You know, the ones in the hallways. I wanted to see who’s on the other side.”

“Why?”

“I was curious. I wanted to know if they saw anything peculiar.”

“Is this about the noise?” Sarah asks.

Ben looks up from the newspaper accounts of Armen’s death. “What noise?”

“I heard a noise last night, so I wanted to see the tapes, only—”

“Tapes?” Sarah asks. “You mean of what they see in the cameras?” She flushes slightly, and I play a hunch I didn’t even know I had.

“Yes. They tape everything, for security reasons. Like at Seven-Eleven.”

“They do?”

“Sure.” I look at Eletha. “Right, El? They tape from those cameras.”

“If you say so,” Eletha says, playing along. “They keep the tapes?”

BOOK: Final Appeal
13.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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