The Hanging Judge (26 page)

Redpath took his time and responded slowly, leaning toward the boy. “I suppose you know you’ll damage your rectum if you don’t pull your head out of your ass one of these days.”

“That’th pretty crude,” the blonde girl broke in, finally deigning to look at him. She’d been staring up at the top of the flagpole where the stars and stripes were snapping in the icy wind.

“I’m a pretty crude guy at the moment.”

“Shut up, Brittany. You mean the judge can just do whatever he wants? How can he do that?” Denise’s tone was so indignant, and her voice so loud, that four or five people standing near the corner of the plaza looked over. Most of the protestors were gone; they must have heard what happened.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Redpath said. “It’s Denise, right? I’ll make you a deal, Denise. You answer me a question first. Then I’ll answer yours. Do you realize that, thanks to you, Moon Hudson probably just lost the best chance he’ll ever have to hold his baby daughter again?”

“The outcome is irrelevant as long as the system’s corruption is exposed,” the young man chanted.

Redpath blew a mouthful of smoke in Peter’s direction. “What fortune cookie did you read that in?”

“We shut down the trial,” he said in an earnest tone. “That’s what matters.”

“Shut up, Peter,” Denise said. She turned to Redpath. “The answer is, no. Okay? We didn’t know that.”

“I’d thtill do it anyway,” Brittany said.

“Okay, fair enough,” Redpath said. “And the answer to your question is, yes. You’ve committed contempt of court by screwing up my trial.”

“Right,” Denise said. “He found us in contempt.”

“I find him in contempt,” Peter said.

“And, after Reverend Safford signed our bond, and we promised to stay away, the judge said he’d wait to sentence us until after the trial was over.” She paused. “And we don’t get a jury? I thought we had a right to a jury of, you know, our peers. ”

Redpath shook his head. “Sorry. The conduct was in front of him, so he can do whatever he wants to you.”

“Crap. That’s bad.” Denise’s mouth trembled. “What sort of sentence can he give us? He looked wicked pissed when they brought us back in.”

“He was bananas,” Peter said, grinning happily.

“He’th a moron,” Brittany said.

“Oh, give up the lisp, Brittany,” Denise said. “You got us into this shit box.”

“The usual rule,” Redpath said with studied casualness, “is to give the contemnors—that’s you—the same sentence that the defendant eventually gets out of the trial they disrupted.” He waited with relish for this to sink in. He was lying, of course, but it cheered him up enormously to watch as even Peter looked staggered by the implications of Redpath’s remark.

“You mean … ” Peter began, “we could get the death penalty?”

“Whatever!” Denise said.

“It’s possible,” Redpath said. Then he added reassuringly: “But of course it’s very, very unlikely. It’s a flukey rule. In all probability, the most you’ll be looking at is life.”

He tossed the Lucky at Peter’s feet and walked off toward the parking garage, feeling a little better. Maybe the pro-death penalty folks were right, after all. Maybe random sadism was good for the soul.

34

A
fter he finally escaped from court, Judge Norcross sat at his desk for a long time, looking west from his windows as the darkness deepened. Five years exactly since Faye had died. He watched, his mind blank and boiling, while the stars slowly took up their positions over the horizon, silver nicks on a black granite cliff of sky. The years went by so fast.

When Faye was pregnant, after the amnio revealed they were having a girl, they’d picked out a name for their daughter: Jessica. To avoid bad luck, they hadn’t told anybody. Jessica Norcross. Faye said it sounded like the heroine in a private eye novel.

The starlight deepened and seemed to throb as Norcross stared at it. With better luck, they would have been celebrating their little girl’s fifth birthday in a couple months. He shook off the ghostly vision, pushed himself up from his desk, and walked down the silent corridor to take the elevator to his car. Everyone else had left the courthouse hours ago.

The trip north to Amherst was an empty blur. As he clawed up his slick driveway, lined with mounds of dirty, plowed-up snow, he realized that he had no memory of a single landmark during the entire half-hour journey. The garage door groaned slowly open, sounding like death, and the interior light clicked on.

Claire’s presence in his life had changed Norcross’s parking practice. Before her, he’d put his car in the center, leaving himself plenty of room on both sides. Now, with Claire staying over more and more often, he’d begun, out of politeness and without being asked, to squeeze over to the left to make room for her Prius.

This evening, he followed the new routine without thinking, bouncing up onto the garage’s concrete slab to the far left. His numb preoccupation made him sloppy—everything was making him sloppy—and he eased in more snugly than usual. The car grazed the rakes and shovels hanging from nails on the garage’s exposed two-by-fours, making them clang musically.

Norcross turned off the ignition, tipped back against the headrest, and closed his eyes. The cold, damp air fell across his face. How could he have been so stupid? Something like this was bound to happen. Anyone,
anyone
, but him would have seen it coming a mile off.

He imagined the swelling force of tomorrow’s newspaper stories, today’s Internet reports, the tidal wave of words arching over him. Skip Broadwater would be calling, probably this very evening, full of sympathy and concern, offering to help in any way he could, as though Norcross were an imbecile. Horrible. But the harder problem was how, after all this fresh publicity, he would ever manage to rustle up another sixteen unbiased, death-qualified jurors so he could, once and for all, shove this accursed case off his docket. His brother, Raymond, was right. Davy Norcross was a very nice boy. Just soft. Soft—as Raymond loved to say—as a slipper full of shit.

After several minutes, Norcross roused himself and started to get out of the car, but the door only opened a foot before bumping against something. He worked the door back and forth furiously, until a rake fell with a bang over the hood and gave him another two or three inches, just enough to squeeze his exhausted body through.

As he made his way along the cramped space between the car and the clanging tools, he stepped on something and started to topple sideways. Grabbing backward for support, his left hand smacked against one of the garage’s two double-hung windows and punched a grapefruit-size hole clean through the upper pane. His hand, when he snatched it back, sported a nasty red smile all the way from the base of his pointer finger across the palm to his wrist.

Regaining his balance, Norcross examined the wound with pleasure. He could actually see where the flesh split open. Blood was busily spreading down his wrist into his cuff and dripping onto his pants. He licked the wound, enjoying the taste.

“Good.”

Pressing backward, knocking over tools as he went, he inched free of the car and out into the mouth of the garage. He stood for a moment stooping and pressing his left hand against his pants, breathing heavily. The wound was beginning to sting fiercely. The sound of whimpering reached him, Marlene scratching against the door.

As Norcross walked to the door to let Marlene out, he noticed the unbroken twin garage window, mocking him with its virginity. Next to the door into the house was a set of black metal shelves with used quart and pint-size cans of paint, turpentine, and thinner.

Impulsively, he grabbed one of the pints with his good right hand.

“Batter up!”

He pitched the can toward the upper half of the window, winding up and firing with all his strength, but his aim was off. The can struck the window frame and rebounded, vomiting green paint back at him onto the floor.

He grabbed another can, a full quart this time, and tossed it lightly up and down, adjusting to its heft.

“David,” a voice said, not too loud.

Claire had rolled up unnoticed. She was standing next to her car in a pool of light from the garage.

“Oh, hi there,” Norcross said. He took aim at the window. “I won’t be a minute.”

“David,” Claire said again.

He paused. “Hmm?”

“May I have a turn?”

“Well.” He let his arm drop and examined Claire without expression. The sound of whimpering and scratching was now very loud.

“I don’t know,” he mused. He began swinging the arm holding the paint can. “It’s a version of solitaire, really.” He sniffed and frowned. “Kind of a one-man game.”

“You hurt your hand.”

“That’s true. I did.” He held it up to her.

Marlene began barking.

“Well,” Norcross said.

“If you need any …” Claire began.

“You know,” he blurted, very loud. “I could always count.” He pivoted and fired the paint can with a crash through the upper section of the window, sending it bouncing across the frozen ground on the other side. “I could always count on Faye not to discuss my work.”

Claire looked at him, pale in the light from the garage, her face utterly immobile. Then she turned and with a short cry got into her car and sped off, spraying snow and gravel.

Norcross trotted to the mouth of the garage, thinking to call after her. But her lights swerved down the driveway and quickly disappeared into the trees. In a few seconds, he turned toward the house, pressing his hand against his thigh to slow the bleeding. After he let Marlene out, he paused in the doorway and looked back at where Claire’s car had been. He’d done one thing right at least. He had heaved the paint can through the window so hard, because his impulse—his horrible, insane, utterly unfair impulse—had been to throw the can at Claire. It was not very nice, perhaps, but that was the truth. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

35

I
n the atmosphere of anti-Catholic bigotry in Hampshire County in 1806, the configuration of the court that was to preside at Daley and Halligan’s trial was ominous. Capital cases in Massachusetts at that time required two judges, and one of the two selected for the upcoming trial was Samuel Sewall of Boston, the same man who’d joined in Bradbury’s frosty opinion about Catholics. Sewall had the distinction of being the direct descendant and namesake of the Judge Samuel Sewall who had presided at the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692. The other judge was Theodore Sedgwick of Stockbridge. Sedgwick’s contempt for common farmers and working people was so notorious that during the agrarian uprising in 1787 called Shay’s Rebellion, Sedgwick’s mansion was one of the first to be burned down.

On Tuesday, April 22, 1806, after five months in custody, Dominic Daley and James Halligan came before Sewall and Sedgwick and formally offered their pleas of not guilty to the charge that they murdered Marcus Lyon.

Employing the traditional phrasing, the court clerk, Joseph Lyman, then inquired of them: “Dominic Daley and James Halligan, how will you be tried?” To this, they replied, “By God and my country.” And Lyman rejoined, “God send you a good deliverance!”

After they tendered their pleas, the two defendants formally requested that counsel be assigned to defend them. Recognition of the right to appointed counsel under the federal Constitution was still more than 150 years away, but Sewall and Sedgwick, applying state law, appointed two lawyers for each defendant. For Daley they selected Thomas Gould, a member of the bar for one and a half years, and Edward Upham, with seven years’ experience. They gave attorneys Jabez Upham and Francis Blake, with eleven and nine years in practice, respectively, the task of representing Halligan.

Having made these appointments, the court then set April 24, 1806 as the day of trial, giving the defense team two days to prepare. Had the defendants’ lawyers wished to take the elementary step of visiting the scene of the alleged murder, the trip on foot or horseback from Northampton to Wilbraham and back would have exhausted nearly the entire interval between their appointment and the commencement of testimony. Because of this, defense counsel never viewed the crime scene before the trial, and they had no opportunity to contact potential witnesses in the area.

Meanwhile, as the day of trial drew near, the excitement among the local population intensified. Attorney General Sullivan—himself a former member of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court—rode into town to conduct the prosecution, accompanied by attorney John Hooker, specially appointed to assist him. To accommodate the enormous crowd gathering to witness the trial, Sewall and Sedgwick transferred the case from the courthouse to the Northampton Town Meetinghouse.

On April 24, 1806, shortly before nine a.m., the sheriff’s deputies chained Dominic Daley and James Halligan inside a horse-drawn wagon and drove them the short distance from Prison Lane to court to begin their trial. References in the reports of the case indicate that Daley’s wife and mother somehow made the long journey from Boston and were awaiting him at the meetinghouse. Halligan had no such support.

Once the defendants arrived, Justices Sewall and Sedgwick called the court to
order and supervised the selection of the twelve men to act as jurors. Jury service by women remained more than a century away. The foreperson of the jury was the ironically named Justus Dwight. The eleven others were: Elijah Arms, John Bannister, Elijah Hubbard, Jabez Nichols, Samuel Patridge III, Thomas Lyman, Roland Blackmar, Elijah Allen, Asa Spalding, John Newton, and Jonathan Peterson.

After the men were seated in the area set aside for the jury, Thomas Hooker rose to present the opening statement on behalf of the Commonwealth. Hooker began by noting that the jury’s situation was “one of the most solemn to which men are ever called.”

“The fondness with which we all cleave to existence,” he told the twelve men, “will on the one hand render you slow to condemn; at the same time it should, on the other, make you determined to protect.” The jury’s consolation would be that “if you follow the dictates of your own understanding as influenced by the testimony, you will discharge your duty to yourselves and to your country, however afflictive the event may be to others.”