The Hanging Judge (32 page)

42

T
he plan for David’s next outing with Claire took some negotiating. During the first two phone calls, they just talked, mostly showering each other with apologies, and he didn’t even suggest getting together. Finally, during a third call, he proposed a lunch at his house that weekend so they could talk more comfortably. After an awkward pause, Claire offered a counterproposal: that he take her for a tour of his courthouse that Sunday, when nobody would be around. David instinctively resisted the idea. Claire and his job did not mix well.

“Come on. We need an outing, David. If I come over there, we know what will happen.”

“Well,” David began, “that wasn’t what I …” A wave of something skittered over him that woke up every cell in his body.

“Uh-huh. We were doing just fine in that department before the crash, dearie. Time to branch out.” As she was speaking, David found himself visualizing how Claire’s navel made a perfect zero. They’d gotten tomato sauce in it once, eating pizza in bed.

“Time to view you in your natural habitat, David. See what all your protective coloration is about.”

In the end, he couldn’t deny her. As they headed south on the interstate toward Springfield, the view opened up, displaying a broad vista of the Holyoke Range, pale green lower down in the Connecticut River flood plain, turning to dark blue-green on the upper slopes where the conifers took over. The profile of the hills was like a giant sleeping under a lumpy green bedspread.

“So pretty,” she murmured.

David turned, took in Claire’s profile against the greenery. “Beautiful.”

In a few minutes, they were passing the exit for Holyoke, and Claire asked suddenly, “Do you think Hudson didn’t do it?”

“What?”

“Are you worried he didn’t do it? Is that what’s so hard?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” David craned over his shoulder to check the traffic as he accelerated into the passing lane, taking care not to look at Claire. “Okay, yes, a little, among a lot of other things. But we’d probably better not talk about it.” He got around a long semi and back over, concentrating on his driving.

“I get it. The biggest thing in your life, and we’re not allowed to touch it.” Several seconds passed, and David could feel Claire gathering herself. Finally, she said, “Is that because you can’t discuss it generally? Or because you opened up to me once, and I dropped the ball?”

“That was my mistake, not yours.”

“Because you talked to me.”

“I put you in an unfair position.”

“Would it matter if I were your wife?”

The car lurched, and David accidentally flipped on the turn signal. Claire gave a snort and laughed.

“Don’t worry, Igor, I’m not proposing. Just trying to get the rules down.”

There was a silence before the conversation resumed on other topics. By the time they arrived at the courthouse and parked in the judge’s private spot in the basement, some of the awkwardness between them had dissipated. They rode the elevator to the fifth floor, made their way along the wide hallway that led to the courtrooms, and stepped at last through the ten-foot oak door that formed the public entrance to Courtroom One.

“Well,” David said, spreading his arms up toward the vaulted ceiling. “Here it is, my little piece of heaven.” The courtroom felt to him like the interior of a church: well ordered, portentous, watchful—as though it had a life of its own, separate from the people standing inside it. He pointed at the witness box. “We’ll be picking up with the cross-examination of Officer Torricelli in about”—he consulted his watch—“eighteen hours and twenty-four minutes.”

“Torricelli?”

“Holyoke cop who arrested the driver. Chunky, squirmy guy.”

They strolled down the carpeted aisle through the public gallery, six rows of polished benches on either side, until they reached the waist-high wooden partition separating them from the well of the court. Three walls of the courtroom were paneled in oak. A high row of windows on the fourth wall admitted a blue-gray glow, with the outline of a tree limb dancing in one corner. At the foot of the room the bench towered; behind it, above the judge’s enormous black chair, a bronze art deco eagle spread its fifteen-foot wings.

“That’s your pulpit, huh?” Claire pointed over the swinging doors that led into the well.

“Yes, and that’s where the jury sits.” David gave a nod to the closed-off box that contained two sedate rows of blond wood and burgundy velour seats, screwed into the floor.

“They bring the defendant in through there from the lockup.” The small door at the side, made of the same wood as the paneling, was almost invisible. “He and his attorney sit at the defense table there.” He pointed to a long table at his right, and went on wearily. “No cuffs or leg irons of course. The assistant U.S. attorney sits there with the case agent. They always grab the table closest to the jury.”

David listened to himself rambling. The trial lay heavily on his stomach; he felt his body tensing around it.

“Come on.” He pushed open the swinging gate and strode down between the counsel tables, around the podium and toward the bench.

Claire held back.

“Am I allowed in there?” She peeped through the gateway at the freshly vacuumed carpet. “I’m not a lawyer, you know.”

David turned and looked back at her. Her outfit was simple: khakis, a green silk blouse, and a black corduroy jacket, unzipped. Her hands were in her pockets, and she was looking at the area in front of the swinging doors as though it were a swamp where an unsanctified person might sink and disappear. Sucking on her lower lip and widening her eyes, she flashed her loopy goose expression at him inquiringly.

This,
David thought,
is the Claire Lindemann trapeze.
One moment everything was tumbling and chaotic, and he couldn’t make anything out. Then her face would come into focus, and there they would be, gently swinging, hand in hand over the serene world. How many times now had she worked this magic?

“I think you’d better lead me,” she said quietly. “I’d feel safer that way, passing into the underworld.” She held out her hand, palm up.

The judge hesitated. Standing there beneath his own heavy bench, looking at this woman in green, he felt himself beginning to crack open. Love? It was not what had lifted him up so long with Faye, the certainty that they had been born to be with each other forever. But something new was wrestling out of the eggshell within him. This woman might drive him crazy, but he did not want, very much did not want, to be without her.

She was still waiting for him.

“You’re safe with me,” he said, taking her hand and drawing her through the gate. “See? You just passed the Bar.”

The feeling of astonishment at how exactly their two hands meshed, and how deliciously, struck him hard, and a prickle of lust began its familiar crawl up his spine and along the back of his neck. Nice to know they’d have the whole rest of the day.

“That’s the witness box.” He gestured to the right of the bench. “My stenographer, Maureen, sits there, and my courtroom deputy, Ruby Johnson, swears in each witness from her desk right here.”

“Where do you come in?” Claire dropped his hand and drew her arm around his waist companionably.

“Right over there.” Another paneled door stood at the side of the bench. The judge and the professor looked at each other, smiled, and kissed. Claire put her hand on the back of David’s head and hungrily pressed his mouth down onto hers.

Of course,
David thought delightedly.
She’s as ready to bust as I am.

After they’d been kissing for some time, David began to feel self-conscious about where they were. Claire, he knew, had few inhibitions about anything, beyond avoiding conduct that might actually get them arrested.

“All rise?” Claire asked when they finally broke, sweeping her hand up his lower belly.

“You bet.”

“Can I check out what it’s like up there?” Claire pointed at the bench.

“Go, please. I’ll take a seat here at defense table. Try to restore my heart rate.”

Claire circled around to the back of the bench and climbed the stairs.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s high up here. How do you avoid nosebleeds?”

David gazed at his girlfriend. The massive chair made her look as though she belonged in junior high.

“I have no idea.”

Claire leaned forward and blew into the microphone, which crackled. Her voice suddenly boomed out over the courtroom. “You’re a little freaked— Whoa!”

“It’s voice-activated,” David laughed. “There’s a switch on the base.”

Claire turned off the microphone and continued. “You’re a little freaked out about this trial, hmm?”

David slumped forward, setting his elbows on the door-size oak defense table, and scrubbed his hands over the back of his head.

“Claire,” he said. “I have never been so, so … I can’t think of the word. It’s not nervous, exactly. Nervous is when I’m on a plane, and it starts bouncing around.” He paused and looked up at her. “Nervous is when I think you’re about to start winging croquet balls at me.”

“So I noticed.”

“Yes, well, this is not that. I’m just so pumped, I guess. I feel like I could burst into flame any second.”

He stood up, walked behind the chair, and gripped the leather back with two hands, tipping it backward slightly.

“Right here is where Clarence Hudson will be sitting tomorrow at nine a.m. I’ll be up there.” He sniffed and pulled on the end of his nose. “This probably sounds awful, but to tell the truth, I try not to worry too much about whether he did it. I think about it, naturally, but the main thing is I want Hudson to get a fair trial. A
truly
fair trial. And the simple fact is this.” He’d been speaking louder than he needed, almost at his workday courtroom volume. Now he noticed and dropped his voice.

“The simple fact, which I can tell you but no one else, is this: In my whole life, I’ve never done anything this hard. I’m pretty sure I’m up to it, but unpredictable things happen in trials, and we definitely can’t afford another
ka-boom
.” He waved at the witness box. “If I exclude testimony incorrectly, the government may be unfairly pinched, and a killer could go free.” He gestured down at Hudson’s chair. “But if I mistakenly admit evidence or instruct the jury incorrectly, this human being here could die of a botched trial—like those poor guys they hanged over in Northampton way back in eighteen-whatever.”

He walked around to the front of the table and sat on it, swinging his legs.

“There are so many ways to make mistakes. You can do it just with a tone of voice, or a sarcastic comment. I was a very good trial lawyer, if I do say so, but I mostly did employment, personal injury, and civil rights cases, for crying out loud. Now here I am, with a man’s life at stake, and tomorrow I’ll be the guy in charge.”

Claire got up from the big black chair, daintily shifted her behind onto the bench, and then swung her legs up after her. She pushed the water jug and blotter to one side and sat hugging her knees, looking down at the judge.

“I have a suggestion, Your Honor,” she said.

There was a light behind her eyes, her naughty-girl look. Seeing it, David felt his mouth twist into a tired smile. He was expecting too much of her, going on like this.

“Well, I’m open to anything, believe me.”

Claire looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. “Thirty-some years ago there was a pitcher named Mark ‘The Bird’ Fidrych, who played for Detroit,” she began in her professorial voice.

“Oh, cripes, not baseball again.”

“Hey!” She held up a finger. “Baseball players deal with a lot of pressure. And you said you were open to anything.”

David flapped a hand at her. “Fine. Go on.”

Claire swung her legs down over the edge of the bench and crossed her ankles, tapping her heels against the oak veneer.

“As I was saying … The Bird pitched for the Tigers. He was a starter. He used to talk to himself the way you do.”

“I don’t talk to myself.”

“You do, dear, incessantly. But getting back to Fidrych, he was famous for talking to himself when he pitched, and especially famous for talking to the ball. The most pertinent fact, however, for our purposes today, is that he had a really hard time for a while in the minors. He struggled like crazy with the pressure, being up there on the mound all by himself, having to hit the corners, kind of like you.”

“I see.”

“So his girlfriend came up with this idea to help him. The two of them climbed over the fence to the ballpark in the middle of the night. Whew, it’s hot in here.”

She took off her jacket and smoothed it out beside her.

“And they crept out onto the pitcher’s mound and made love, right there under the stars.” She looked down at him and tapped her heels against the side of the bench again. “Right where he’d be working the next day.”

David’s mouth dropped open. Claire tilted her head, made her goose face, and lifted her eyebrows.

“So”—she ran her tongue over her upper lip—“somehow, after that, he just felt a lot more comfortable up there. He won nineteen games as a rookie and started for the American League in the 1976 All-Star Game. Lord, don’t they ventilate this place on the weekends?” She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. “It’s stifling.”

“Claire,” David said. “We could damage something.”

“Oh, I don’t know, this seems like a pretty well-constructed piece of furniture.” She slapped the heavy wooden surface a couple times. “Seems pretty solid to me.”

“I’m not talking about the bench.”

She looked at him. “Don’t you keep a blanket or something in your office?”

He paused. “I have an afghan.”

“Why don’t you go get it?”

43

T
hat same weekend, Captain Sean Daley was putting in some overtime on the Hudson case. He was accompanying a Massachusetts Department of Social Services case worker, Irma Wallace, a close friend of one of his nieces, on a home visit to the residence of Zinnia “Spanky” Sanderson. The temporary custody the DSS had awarded Spanky over the child of her deceased daughter had been called into question by the discovery of drugs and the arrest of a drug dealer and accused murderer in the two-family house where she lived. A foster-care placement for the child, Tyler, was under consideration. Captain Daley was joining the caseworker strictly on an informal basis, to see if Spanky might cooperate in answering a few questions about her old downstairs neighbors, Clarence and Sandra Hudson.