The Hanging Judge (10 page)

When Lydia went dancing, or dined out with her husband and his doctor friends, she liked to lacquer her nails with some vivid color, break out her bright dresses, and let her dark hair fall over her shoulders. At those times, she stood out in dowdy western Massachusetts like an orchid in a potato patch.

In the courtroom, it was different. She knew the gringo community and was intimately familiar with the conservative juries it produced. In a black or navy suit that muted her curves, and with her hair arranged in a discreet chignon, she presented herself during trials like one of the women on the Weather Channel: modestly attractive, competent, and utterly reliable. In her many years of gang-related drug and firearm prosecutions, she had rarely failed to win a conviction.

As soon as she tossed the Rivera file on her desk and sat down, the phone buzzed.

“Yeah, Bud, what’s the word?” She curled a leg up, removed a shoe, and tossed it onto her small sofa.

“I’ll cut to the chase, okay? The AG’s boys rejected the rec. They’re ordering us to go forward with the capital designation.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know, I know. You heard how they feel about Massachusetts having no death penalty. They think your boy Hudson is a good way to break the ice.”

Gomez-Larsen was holding her second shoe in her hand. She could feel her chest rising and falling. When she didn’t speak, Hogan said, “Sorry.” Then he cleared his throat. “Ours is not to reason why.”

Gomez-Larsen burst out. “Do they have any idea how much tougher this will make everything? It’s going to be hard enough to explain to a jury how a local street gang like La Bandera engaged in racketeering activity that supposedly affected interstate commerce. With the death penalty hanging over the case, the jury will be looking for any reason to acquit.”

“Lydia, I know you… .”

“Do they understand we might have problems charging one of the victims? Killing a rival drug dealer may be an act in aid of racketeering, but killing an innocent bystander? How does that help them? The Supreme Court hasn’t given us much guidance on that, you know.”

“Lydia, you were there. They listened to all this. They don’t give a shit.”

“We could convict Hudson, and two years later, the Big Nine could decide the nurse’s murder wasn’t even a federal crime. Jesus!”

“Hey, look on the bright side! The Supreme Court might not get around to clearing up the law until after we’ve executed him.”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Buddy.”

“I wasn’t kidding.”

Gomez-Larsen tossed her other shoe onto the sofa, stretched her leg, and wriggled her toes. She and Hogan had gone down to Washington to try to convince the attorney general’s “death committee” to adopt their recommendation only to seek mandatory life for Hudson. The recommendation hadn’t flown.

“So, anyway …” Hogan hesitated and continued more quietly. “Look. We’re a democracy, and I’m just a guy who knew a guy, so now I’m the U.S. attorney. I don’t have half your courtroom smarts, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about trying a big case like this. It certainly won’t be easy with Judge Funky up there. I’m not going to try to blow smoke up your butt. You know you’re my best choice for this. But if you want to pass, tell me, and I’ll get someone else. No hard feelings. It’s your call.”

An extended silence from Lydia’s end followed. She was leaning over her desk with her eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Had any of those “death committee” mannequins ever tried a major felony? Did they know what this would mean for her?

“Promise me one thing, Buddy,” she said at last.

“I’m a politician, Lydia. I’ll promise you any fucking thing you want.”

“Promise me if we indict this as a death penalty case, and the defendant agrees later to plead to life, and I recommend it, you’ll back me.”

“One hundred percent.” He paused. “I can’t promise they’ll buy it, though. Washington is hot for this one. They think it’s time Massachusetts got on the choo-choo.”

“Okay. Give me a day to talk this over with Greg. He and the kids are going to hate it, and it will mean a ton of nights and weekends.”

After she put the phone down, Lydia sat for a long time staring into space, not seeing anything or even hearing the hum of the lights. New U.S. attorneys came and went as administrations changed in Washington. Hogan was the third one she’d worked for, and the one she trusted least. He had a habit of shoving his face into the foreground at the press conferences after her successes, but, if Hudson walked, Buddy would have important business elsewhere. She’d be the one left to explain the disaster to the press and to the victims’ families. Just how far out on a limb was he prepared to push her? And how far was she willing to go?

12

T
he day Attorney William P. Redpath Jr. accepted the appointment to represent Moon Hudson did not get off to a great start. Redpath was sitting in his office in Boston, smoking a Lucky Strike, and editing a lengthy draft memorandum when he noticed flames shooting up from his wastebasket.

“Not again,” he said, rising from his stupendously cluttered desk. Redpath was an enormous, bearlike man, and the cigarette and the sheaf of papers he held looked tiny in his paws. The wastebasket problem was urgent, not because the building might burn down with him inside, but because his secretary, Judy, would smell the smoke any second, figure out what happened, and quit again. He’d have to spend the whole rest of the morning persuading her to come back. He didn’t have the time for that.

Redpath balanced the half-smoked Lucky on the corner of his overflowing in-box and hurried around his desk into the middle of the room. He spied an old Burger King milk-shake cup, abandoned weeks back, on the windowsill behind a photograph of himself and his son, years ago, at Fenway Park. Tommy had on the Red Sox cap he’d bought him. Redpath paused for a moment to smile at the photograph before snatching up the milk-shake cup and pouring the fuzz-covered contents—half liquid, half lumps—into the wastebasket. It did the trick.

With a sigh of relief, Redpath lowered his heavy frame back into the chair. He lit another cigarette with his Bic and within a few seconds was absorbed in the memorandum once more. Twin trails of blue smoke, one from the cigarette in his hand and the other from the forgotten cigarette tipping over the lip of the in-box, rose companionably into the air.

Redpath was “death qualified.” This meant that after more than forty years defending criminals, and on rare occasions an innocent non-criminal, Redpath’s experience as a defense attorney was prodigious. Transcripts of his politely remorseless dismemberment of prosecution witnesses were passed around at law schools all over New England as examples of the art of cross-examination at its finest. More importantly, Redpath was one of a handful of lawyers with offices in Massachusetts who had actually represented defendants facing the death penalty in other states. All this made him technically eligible, under the complex rules governing death penalty cases, to take the appointment from Judge Norcross to represent Clarence Hudson in federal court.

There was another, private reason why Redpath was death qualified. As a teenager, he’d shocked his old-money family by joining the marines, desperate to get to Korea before the armistice brought an end to the fighting. The last months of 1952 and first part of 1953 gave Redpath a protracted intimacy with the horror of deliberate killing, and he hated it. He returned home a passionate opponent of the death penalty and a chain smoker.

As Redpath settled back in his chair, there was a knock, and Judy poked her head around the door.

“Bill, I know you didn’t want to be disturbed, but …” She paused and sniffed the air, which had a sour aroma of smoke and burned sugar. “You did it again, didn’t you?” She flapped her hand disgustedly.

“I deny that,” Redpath responded in his deep voice, pretending to be lost in the memorandum.

“Didn’t you?” Judy approached his desk holding a slip of paper. “You remember what I told you? Phew, it stinks in here. You remember what I said?”

“I deny everything,” Redpath repeated, snuffing out his Lucky Strike in the overflowing ashtray and still refusing to meet her eyes.

“Well, you have a message from the federal court in Springfield.” She tossed the slip on his desk. “And, by the way, your in-box is on fire.” Then she flounced out, saying, “They ought to hang a freaking sign on you or something.”

Two hours later, after smothering the embers in his in-box, making some calls, and humbly requesting that Judy cancel his afternoon appointments, Redpath was on the Mass Pike heading west to Ludlow, where his new client was being held.

When Redpath arrived at the Hampden County Correctional Center, he thought at first that the conversation with his client would follow the same rocky path as the rest of the day. He and Hudson faced each other across a scarred pine conference table in a windowless room. The walls were pale yellow; the air carried the powerful smell of Lysol. Although discussions in this area were supposedly confidential, angry shouts from somewhere close by intruded regularly, and the room’s door had a mesh window behind which—every minute or two—a guard’s unsmiling face would hover and then float silently away. It was a lousy environment for a tête-à-tête.

Redpath began the conversation casually. “So how’d you get to be called Moon?”

Hudson was wearing an orange jumpsuit, tight across the shoulders and chest. He had a listless, distracted air and kept his eyes mostly on his hands. When he did bother to look at Redpath, it was as though he were gazing from the other side of a one-way mirror, only vaguely interested in what he was seeing. He seemed to be weighing whether to answer his lawyer’s irrelevant, and possibly condescending, question.

Redpath waited, keeping his face blank. He was worried but not intimidated. In his many years of experience as an attorney, he had found that indigent clients often treated him suspiciously in the beginning, especially black clients. Considering Hudson’s record, his restraint was hardly surprising; the defendant’s luck with appointed counsel hadn’t been very good. What must he be thinking about this ancient, possibly burned-out lawyer, chosen and paid for by the same government that wanted to assassinate him?

Still, Redpath thought, if Hudson couldn’t drop the attitude, there was no way he’d let him take the stand and testify. Right now, he was a perfect picture of someone who’d killed two people and didn’t care, and his own brooding face would be a ticket straight to the execution chamber. They’d have to work on that.

After a long pause, Hudson began to speak slowly.

“When I was born, right? I was real dark.” He looked down at the tabletop, tracing a long gouge in the wood with the tip of his finger. A private smile, perhaps unintentional, flickered over his mouth and sank quickly back into his impassive face.

“I was so black,” Hudson said, looking up at Redpath, “that when my uncle Thad saw me, I guess he started laughing. Said I was like a new moon. Nobody can see me in the dark, right? Like a new moon.”

Redpath pursed his lips and nodded. He knew it was not the time to smile, even if Hudson had. The story, true or untrue, might be a test to see if the lawyer would laugh at his new client. Hudson paused for two beats, then leaned back and continued.

“When I started school, in kindergarten, I wanted the other kids to call me Clarence, like the teacher did. But they wouldn’t. A lot of stuff goes with moon, right? Like prune and goon. Then, they’d be talking about ‘mooning’ people, you know, just being kids. So, pretty soon …” Hudson paused and shook his head at this accidental rhyme. “Pretty soon, I’m getting into a mess of fights.”

“What would you like me to call you?” Redpath asked. “You can call me Bill. Should I call you Moon, or Clarence, or Mr. Hudson, or what?”

“I don’t care.”

The two big men looked at each other for a few seconds, until finally Redpath reached down and pulled his briefcase onto the table. The guards had removed almost everything from it except a copy of the indictment, a scribbled-over yellow pad, and a couple of pencils, which bounced around inside.

“Okay.” There was no time to waste. Redpath had only a few minutes before the urge for a cigarette would begin to sap his patience. They needed to get started.

“I’m going to call you Moon, then, okay? I spoke to your wife on the phone, and that’s what she called you, so I hope it’s all right.”

“Fine.”

“I’ve got some questions for you, Moon, but before I get to them, I want to know if you have any questions for me. Do you?”

Hudson tilted his head back and looked at Redpath through half-closed eyes, took his time, then spoke deliberately.

“You ever kill anybody, Mr. Redpath?”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

Hudson shrugged, said nothing, and waited.

Now it was the lawyer’s turn to decide whether to give an answer to the question, and if so whether to answer truthfully. The ironic thing was, of course, that this was pretty much the question Redpath himself was planning, in due course, to put to Hudson.

“Probably,” Redpath said. “I’m not sure.” Reading Hudson’s face, he corrected himself and decided to plunge in. Maybe this would help. “Okay, I am sure. Yes, Moon, as a matter of fact I have killed people.”

“How many?”

“I didn’t count.”

Something may have changed in Hudson’s face, a slight alteration in the focus of his dark eyes, sifting an answer he hadn’t expected and trying to decide whether he could trust it.

“Just one for me,” Hudson said after a pause. “But not Peach, and not that nurse.”

Redpath busied himself flipping the pages of his yellow pad, searching for a blank one and purposely not looking at his new client.

Hudson was probably lying. At this point, that didn’t matter to Redpath; most of the people he represented were guilty. His job was, if possible, to keep his client alive, and to keep the prosecution honest. If, God forbid, Moon were actually innocent, it would only make his job much harder, since there would be little or no chance of a plea bargain.

Redpath positioned the pad in front of him and jotted the date in the upper right-hand corner. After he and Moon got to know each other better, he’d get to the big questions.