The Hanging Judge (6 page)

Conversation around the table resumed, mostly unheard by him for some time. He finished his wine. When his consciousness returned to the present, Norcross noticed Novotny’s blonde undergraduate staring at him again with the same intense expression.

“I think Gerry is,” she began, glancing nervously sideways. “I mean, I think Professor Novotny is right. If it’s wrong, thumb …” She hesitated and spoke slowly. “Someone should put a stop to it. I mean, you’re the judge, aren’t you?”

“I don’t make the laws, Tiffany.”

“It’s Brittany, David,” Anne broke in, not unkindly, but with emphasis.

“Brittany. Excuse me. I can’t always keep bad things from happening, Brittany. Sometimes my job is just to make them happen in an orderly way.”

“Orderly? Is that what you call it?” Novotny asked. His eyes narrowed, and he took on the expression of a boxer moving in to land a knockout punch.

But at that moment, the Pratts’ doorbell rang.

Anne looked at her husband. “Jehovah’s Witnesses, at this hour?”

“Deus ex machina, at any rate,” Dixwell said, glaring at the front hall with the hostility of a man who was being cheated out of something tasty.

Anne went to the door and opened it. Claire had come back.

Although the Norcross clan was Lutheran, and the judge still occasionally attended church services, he had never personally experienced a miracle before. Claire had come back, more beautiful than ever. Norcross, who’d felt rooted in place a minute earlier, now seemed to float up from his chair.

“What happened?” he asked.

She gave him a mildly distraught look, then dropped her eyes to the floor.

“Well,” she said, speaking like someone who’d decided to face the guillotine as bravely as possible, “it’s slippery as hell out there, and I seem to have dinged your car.”

“Really!” A flood of joy almost lifted him onto his toes.

Dixwell, speechless, looked appalled.

“Are you all right?” Anne asked.

“I’m fine,” Claire said, “physically.” She looked up at Norcross again. “I’m so sorry!”

Norcross and Dixwell bundled on their raincoats and hurried out into the night with Claire. The plunge into the raw, wet elements was shocking at first. Rain was clattering on the brittle leaves, and bursts of wind blew sleet into their faces.

Claire took hold of Norcross’s elbow as they worked their way down the slick driveway.

“I was backing up,” she said. “And the car just started sliding. I feel terrible.”

Even in the darkness, one look told them the impact had produced much more than a ding. The whole right front panel of the judge’s car was pushed in, and the tire on that corner was flat. Norcross felt like laughing, clapping his hands, and breaking into a song.

“I could give you a ride home,” Claire said. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Oh, there’s no need,” Dixwell broke in. “I can take him.”

“You cannot!” Anne’s voice shot through the wind, clear and penetrating even at a distance. She was standing on the front porch with her hands on her hips, sheltered from the rain.

“What about the car?” Dixwell said. “We can’t …”

“We’ll deal with it in the morning,” Anne responded, even louder.

“But he’s way out of Claire’s way,” Dixwell called back.

“Dixwell, don’t make me wake the neighbors,” Anne shouted, louder still. Dixwell tucked his chin in, looking alarmed.

“That would be terrific,” Norcross said to Claire. “I mean, I’d very much appreciate that.”

Dixwell hurriedly said his good-byes and walked up the driveway, bent against the slippery incline. David and Claire waved to Anne, and to Gerry and Brittany, who had joined her in the doorway. Anne swung her arms in an exaggerated fashion, like someone guiding an airplane into a gate.

“Well, finally,” Claire said, her eyes shining in the darkness. “Let’s go.”

7

S
andra Hudson, the wife of Clarence “Moon” Hudson, woke with a leaping heart and a prickle of fear running up the back of her neck. The rain rattled steadily on the roof, and the sleet clicked against the windows. Someone, she was sure, was trying to get into their apartment. She could almost feel the weight of feet on the sagging front porch, hear the soft creak and strain of the door being tested. Was that a muffled voice? A thump?

She reached over and prodded Moon, sleeping deeply, as he always did, on the far edge of their bed. He didn’t stir.

Moon’s broad back exuded that heavenly, warm yeasty smell that, even in her jangled state, brought Sandra a wave of comfort. They had known each other two years now and had been married just under a year. Their baby, Grace (her grandmother’s name), would be six months old next week. Like her daddy, she was a good sleeper.

It was probably nothing, and Sandra knew Moon would tease her again about her suburban nerves, but she needed to see his slow smile and hear his reassuring voice. She’d loved the way he talked right from their first meeting.

Sandra met Moon at the University of Massachusetts while she was working on her master’s in library science. She’d seen him in the student union and, like everyone, was intimidated by him at first. His chiseled features were usually expressionless and made him seem reserved and aloof. He was nearly six feet, broad-shouldered, and very dark. A long, pinkish-gray scar drew a ragged furrow on his forearm. People gave him space.

Sandra asked around and learned that Moon was attending UMass part-time through the University Without Walls program. He lived in Holyoke, and the word was he’d spent time on the streets, running with the gangs. Two or three times, in the cafeteria line or buying coffee in the morning, he caught her checking him out. She turned away and brushed her hair back in her most beguiling manner, but his face remained unreadable.

Then one day as she was grabbing a sandwich before class, he slid into the booth across from her and started talking in his deep voice, asking her what she was studying. The delighted smile he gave her when he learned that there was such a thing as library science, and that she was actually taking classes in it, instantly captured Sandra’s heart. Moon’s tickled expression transformed his face from something brooding and almost scary into the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Library science? They teach that?” He looked at her. Then he tilted his head back and laughed in disbelief. “What do they do—give you lessons on how to shush people?”

Sandra started to reply indignantly, but he just shook his head, continuing to grin. “No disrespect,” he said. “I’m learning something new all the time these days.”

They never made it to class. Instead, they spent the rest of the afternoon walking from one end of the campus to the other, talking and talking. That day and in the days that followed, Sandra learned the story of Moon’s life, which seemed to her to be a kind of social worker’s nightmare: a fatherless childhood in the Flats with a mother on and off crack, out of school by fifteen, on his own by sixteen, with more fights and near misses than he could remember. One half-brother was in the grave, killed while in prison in revenge for a busted drug deal, and another was at Cedar Junction doing a twelve-year bid for armed robbery.

There had been a gang phase, too, with La Bandera, dealing heroin, crack, powdered cocaine, and methamphetamine on the street corners and in the dark alleys of Holyoke and Springfield. At one point, he was the chapter’s warlord and conducted negotiations with the Latin Kings to form an alliance against another gang, the Walnut Street Posse, that was trying to push into their territory. People on both sides ended up dead; it was not a time he liked to remember. Then, after his second drug conviction, two years followed in the correctional center, where he got his high-school equivalency diploma and finally had time to think about his life.

When he got out, two miracles happened. First, his mother, who had been playing the same two-dollar number each week for years, finally hit. Her win paid more than $15,000, and she gave $7,500 to her recently released son, partly because she’d been playing his birth date and it was only fair, but mostly because she owed it to him after all the shit she’d put him through.

Moon used the cash to get out of the Flats and move into the bottom half of a two-family in a safer neighborhood. For the first time in his life, he had first and last month’s rent and a security deposit, with enough money left over to pick up some used furniture and an old Hyundai that was a little squashed but ran okay.

The second miracle was a stubby Pole named Kostecki, who ran a food warehouse in Hatfield and who, even knowing his record, gave Moon a job loading trailers at night. Soon he was driving a forklift from ten p.m. to six a.m., six nights a week. After a couple months, when the crew chief turned up drunk one too many times, Kostecki promoted Moon, who was always on time, never complained, and had an upper body “like George fucking Foreman.” Now he was making $16.50 an hour with time and a half for Saturdays, and bringing home more than $500 a week after taxes. He had a credit card and a bank account with free checking, and he paid his bills on time.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he laughed. “I’m like Columbus, you know? It’s 1492, and I just discovered America.”

Sandra’s protected, upper-middle-class upbringing outside Rochester, New York, where her father had been the first black vice president at Kodak, made her trusting but not stupid, and even as she listened and sometimes cried for Moon, a corner of her mind had the sense to wonder about the stories she was hearing. Her instincts told her that Moon’s arsenal of street smarts included the ability to lie convincingly, or at least to hold back the full truth, when the need arose. Once she caught him lying about supposedly not knowing a girl she’d noticed wiggling her eyebrows at him. She got so pissed, she called him an asshole and kicked out the bottom of his screen door. But, even as she recognized the danger, her heart was tumbling.

It impressed her, for one thing, that he didn’t try to push her into bed right off. He seemed just to want to talk to her as a friend—the first real friend, he said, that he’d ever had. In fact, for a while she wondered if they would ever move beyond friendship, but when they did, my God! With the Skidmore boys, before grad school, sex was like holding a sparkler on the Fourth of July, very sweet and, most of the time, mildly thrilling. But with Moon, it was like she was inside the fireworks, at the heart of the grand finale, with the shuddering booms and bright colors all around her.

When she’d basically been living at his place for months, unknown to her parents, and accidentally on purpose had gotten pregnant, she’d been terrified he’d take off. But she had no sooner told him, tearfully, than he had folded her into his arms and, to her amazement, asked her to marry him. A month later, at the First Episcopal Church of Springfield, with her parents looking on with that tight look she knew so well, determined to be supportive, her uncle had pronounced them man and wife, and they’d jumped the broom.

In the darkness of their bedroom now, Sandra Hudson was sure she heard something, but this time it was at the back of the house. Somebody walking a dog? It was crazy. Then she was positive, almost positive, she saw a shadow pass the window four feet from her head. What was going on? She lifted herself on one elbow, pulling the sheets up over her breasts. Grace would be ready to nurse soon, and Sandra’s nipples were beginning to leak milk.

“Moon,” she whispered, and poked at his shoulder with two fingers. He moved but did not wake. Was it their upstairs neighbor, pacing with her grandchild again?

A moment later, as Sandra lay in the dark, she felt Moon finally responding, not to her but to an unmistakable crackling noise on the porch. His whole body tensed, and his head snapped up from the pillow, which scared her more than anything else.

Suddenly, there was a splintering crash, as though a gravel truck had just plowed through the front door and spilled most of its load. A rush of footsteps followed, then a second, smaller crash as something tipped over in the living room—a voice yelling “Go, go! Get to the fucking bedroom!” The baby started to shriek. Everything was happening at once. Someone said, “Son of a bitch!” The lights went on and three huge men—one in a blue uniform, two in orange vests—were standing at the foot of the bed pointing pistols at them, two-handed, just like in the movies. The door to the baby’s room made a sickening bang. Lights were going on all over the apartment.

“Freeze! Police! Show me your hands!”

“Get on the ground! On the ground!”

There was another tremendous crash from the back porch. Sandra had already swung her feet to the floor, yanking the sheet around her nightgown, heart pounding, thinking to get to Grace. More people were pouring into the room, coming at her.

“On the fucking ground!”

A large uniformed cop grabbed her shoulder and pushed her roughly toward the floor, his big hands shoving down on the middle of her back. Something—a knee?—was pressing painfully onto her ankles, and a gun near her eye was so close she caught its acrid, oily scent deep in her nostrils and at the back of her throat. Then her arms were being jerked behind her back, and cold metal was snapping around her wrists. The cuffs grabbed so tight they stung.

“The baby,” Sandra said, trying to look up.

A deeper voice from the doorway ordered loudly, “I want the canine in the basement. Clear the basement.”

“Have you got a weapon in here?” the voice above her asked. “Keep on the ground like I said. Your baby’s fine. Stay on the ground!”

“Lie down, babe,” she heard Moon’s voice from the other side of the bed. “Do like they … ” There was a sudden splintering crunch as something heavy fell.

“Shit,” a voice said.

The deeper voice in the doorway, commanded “Hey, knock it off!” and a mocking, singsong voice over near Moon added, “He got out of bed, and he bumped his head …”

Her cheek was flattened on the carpeting. The hand in the middle of her back was still pushing her down. Her breasts, wrists, and ankles hurt fiercely, and she gave a little cry. It was getting difficult to breathe.