The Hanging Judge (8 page)

“I’ve never in my life seen such a tidy garage.”

“Rural upbringing. A man’s judged more by his barn than his house.”

Two sharp woofs came from inside.

“Oh, that’s right—you have an exploding dog!” Claire said delightedly.

“Yes.” He realized that Marlene had been barking for some time, not in anger but with the mechanical persistence of a car alarm. “Could you, uh, come in for a minute?”

“I think,” Claire said carefully, “that might be a little too soon.”

“No, no,” David said. “I didn’t mean that. That would be too much.”

“ ‘Too soon’ is what I said.”

“I just wanted to rescue my poor dog.” He rocked back into his seat, trying discreetly and without success to arrange his erection at a more comfortable angle.

“Uh-huh.” She glanced down and looked up at him with her eyes crinkling. “Go release your animal. This will do for now.”

As David swung his legs around to get out of the car, he was finally able to reposition himself and stand up with reasonable ease. The blowing rain on his face felt terrific.

“Don’t worry about my car,” he said, bending down.

“Oh, I won’t.” She lowered her window. “I did that on purpose, you know.” Her voice began to fade into the wind as she drove off. “Just kidding! Maybe. Now call me, you jerk!”

Back in his home, safe out of the weather, David’s yellow Lab was waiting; she banged her thick tail against the doorframe and pushed her nose into his knees in greeting.

“Marlene,” David said, “we really need to talk.”

9

A
fter they took Moon Hudson away, Holyoke Police Captain Sean Daley spent a few minutes checking out the mess inside the apartment. Then he gave Jack O’Connor a call and asked if he could come over and talk to him and the boys. It was late, he said, so he’d only take a minute.

Daley had never married; instead, he’d poured his life into his job. He’d been hospitalized twice for stab wounds and nearly killed when a .38 round struck his “bulletproof” vest. Two civilians and a fellow officer were still alive because of his quick action, and he had four commendations for bravery. On duty, Daley’s views on discipline made him as unbendable as a tire iron, but in the supermarket he might easily have been mistaken for a bookkeeper or an introverted shop foreman.

Daley’s habit of passing out peppermint balls and telling hair-raising stories about the criminals he’d caught made him a favorite among his nieces and nephews. He loved to recount the tale of the family’s great-great-grandfather Dominic Daley, hanged in Northampton in 1806, supposedly for a murder but, in fact, for the crime of being an Irish Catholic passing through town when a local Protestant turned up with his head bashed in.

Of all the adoring younger generation, his niece Ginger Daley O’Connor had been Captain Daley’s secret pet. In fact, when she’d been a nursing student and he’d been in his mid-thirties, he’d had half, and maybe more than half, a crush on her, though of course he never let anyone know. He still remembered how radiant she looked at her graduation from Holyoke Community College, and how jealous he was of that big sap Jack O’Connor. At her wedding, Ginger’s were the prettiest brown eyes he’d ever seen and her young spirit the most luminous.

In his decades as a police officer, Daley had looked on death many times, but he had never dreamed that any loss would tear out his heart like this one. It had been Daley who, to spare Jack, had formally identified Ginger’s graying body at the morgue for the medical examiner’s staff.

Jack was standing on the porch, waiting with his arms crossed, oblivious to the blowing rain as Daley parked his Crown Victoria cruiser. The two men nodded, and Jack pushed the door open for him.

The boys were waiting in the kitchen in their pajamas and bathrobes, looking mussed and sleepy. It was a school night, and already after midnight. Jack Jr., the oldest and handsomest, was at the far end of the kitchen table, sitting like the image of his father with his arms folded. Ed, the middle child, the only one in the family who’d had the poise to speak at his mother’s memorial service, was to Jack Jr.’s left with his head resting on his arms, half asleep. Michael, the eleven-year-old, was sitting on the counter next to the flour and sugar canisters. His dark, wide-awake eyes looked scared.

They all said “Hi, Uncle Sean” when he walked in, but there were no smiles these days, and their voices were lifeless.

“Boys,” Daley said, standing just inside the kitchen doorway, “you need your sleep, so I’ll get right to it. It will be in the papers tomorrow anyway. We just arrested the man we think …” He started to say “killed your mother,” but he couldn’t get the words out, so after clearing his throat he just said, “did the shooting.”

“Who is he?” Jack Jr. asked. “Where’d they put him?”

“He’s a black drug dealer from Holyoke named Clarence Hudson,” Daley said. “They think he’s a Flag—that’s what they call members of the street gang called La Bandera—or somebody associated with them.”

“I wish they’d killed him,” Jack Jr. said fiercely, clenching his fists in front of him.

“Well,” said Daley, “we’ll see what happens.”

“How do they know it was him?” Michael asked.

“Now that’s a smart question, Mike,” Daley responded, nodding at Ginger’s youngest boy, the one who reminded him most of her. “Seems like the driver, a kid named Rivera, about Eddie’s age, says Hudson did it. He says Hudson was selling drugs up at UMass and got into some kind of beef with Delgado, who was supplying his drugs. Rivera says Hudson told him he was only going to scare Delgado, not shoot him, and that he got a hundred dollars to drive the car.”

“That’s funny,” Michael said. “Why would he just want to scare him?”

Daley scratched his head again and frowned. “Tell you the truth, Mike, it
is
funny. Rivera’s uncle Carlos is a big shot in the La Bandera street gang, and he’s disappeared. We’ll find him, and we’ll see what Rivera says in a day or two.”

“This Hudson guy,” Jack Jr. asked, “will they execute him?”

“God, I hope so!” Eddie burst out, sitting up. “I want to be standing right there when it happens. I want to pull the damn …”

The boys’ father broke in, “Edward!”

“Sorry.” Eddie lowered his head back to the table, staring forward.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “It wasn’t on purpose, was it? It was, like, a ricochet. If Mom just hadn’t stopped and leaned over …”

“Right,” O’Connor said. “That’s all the news for tonight, boys. They got him. We knew they would. Off to bed now. We can talk more tomorrow.”

The three boys moved slowly out of the room. Daley brushed a hand through Michael’s dark hair as he dragged himself toward the door. The child was thin—the belt of his bathrobe seemed to go around him twice—and he looked as though he were hauling a slab of concrete behind him.

Jack squatted down in front of Michael after his brothers had passed.

“Mikey, listen to me. I’m going to stay home from work tomorrow. We’ll talk about this, okay? Just like Dr. Rosen said. And don’t forget, I’m not going anywhere.”

When he gave the boy a hug, the eyes of both father and son were shining. Daley turned and examined the darkness outside the window over the sink.

After they heard the bedroom doors close, Jack said, “Come in the front room a minute, Sean. You want some coffee?”

Daley shook his head, and they walked down the hall and into a far corner at the front of the house, where their voices would not be heard upstairs. They collapsed into a pair of armchairs.

Daley said, “Sweet Jesus! How do you do this?”

O’Connor threw his head back, put his hands over his face and breathed deeply, then dropped his arms in his lap and leaned forward. Sharp lines were pulling down at the corners of his mouth. His face looked ravaged.

“So what do you think, Sean? What’s up?” He looked at Daley. “Can we trust this?”

“Jack, I honestly don’t know. This Rivera kid’s a born liar, one of these Puerto Rican halfwits. You know me—I don’t say this about all of them. We have some fine Puerto Rican officers, but my God, Jack, some of the kids down in the Flats these days are barely human. They grow up with no fathers, their mothers can’t cope, they hardly speak English, they can’t read or write in any language, and they’re peddling drugs by the time they’re thirteen.”

As he’d been speaking, his voice had increased in intensity, and a flush had spread up his cheeks.

“They’re not bad people, most of those poor women,” he said, speaking even more quietly, as though talking to himself. “Most of them work like billy-be-damned. What hurts is I couldn’t stop this.” He paused. “Now she’s gone, and she was worth the whole basketful of us.”

After a moment, he turned and looked at O’Connor, wiped his hand over his eyes, and continued more briskly.

“I have no idea whether this Rivera kid is telling the truth, Jack. He’s got this pipsqueak lawyer, who, I swear, looks like Ronald MacDonald and knows exactly nothing about what he’s doing. He couldn’t get the pope off. Hudson’s another beaut. He prances around that twit factory up in Amherst and pretends to be a student while he sells pot, which he had to be getting from somewhere. Hudson had a dustup with Delgado when they were in Ludlow, I guess. He was a Flag, and Delgado had a deal with some other gang, I forget which, so it seems Delgado and some of his friends gave him a thumping. To me, it doesn’t make sense that La Bandera, which is mostly Puerto Ricans, would bring in a black guy, a former member, and pay him to shoot Delgado when they could do it themselves for free. But who knows with these people?”

“Mike’s the one I’m worried about,” O’Connor said. “He’s a special kid, probably the smartest one in the family. You saw how he’s taking it.” He leaned forward and rubbed his hands together. “I wish they’d stop with all this death penalty stuff, to tell you the truth. It’s not helping Mikey one bit.”

“I hate it!” Daley said with sudden ferocity. “Some of the people down at the station are all for it, and I keep my trap shut, but I
hate
it, Jack. Sure, I hope Hudson dies soon, and I hope he dies hard, but let God take him when He’s ready. Ninety percent of the cops here in Holyoke these days are top drawer. But between you and me, one or two are complete chumps. They screw this up, with all their jabber about lethal injections, and their fancy equipment that doesn’t work half the time, and with a decent lawyer Hudson could go scot-free.”

Jack nodded. “Why’s the case in federal court in the first place?”

“The feds have this RICO statute, and Hogan’s using it to go after the gangs. Tell the truth, it’s not a bad idea. They can put animals like Hudson away for good.” He blew out a breath disgustedly. “But why get everyone’s temperature up just to put him out of his misery? I say put the creature in a hole somewhere and let him rot.”

“I guess Washington wants to get Massachusetts on board, and Buddy’s their guy.” Jack said. “They say he’s going for governor.”

“Well, the Lord knows we could use a sensible Irishman on Beacon Hill, but this is no way to get him there.”

He looked at the floor and ran a hand back through his wiry gray hair.

“They’re quite capable of making a dog’s breakfast of this,” Daley said, still looking at the carpet. “That’s the thing.” He lifted his face with an expression of exhaustion almost as profound as Jack’s. “It makes me so sick I can’t sleep nights, you know? It’s bad enough how Ginger went. But, some day a year from now, you and Mike and me could be stopping off at the 7-Eleven, and there will be Hudson, big as life, buying himself a Slurpee. And we’ll all just have to stand there minding our manners. We owe it to Ginger not to let that happen.”

10

J
udge Norcross and Maria Maldonado observed the same court proceeding, one from the front and one from the back, seeing utterly different things.

Maria entered the courtroom through the public doorway, slipping, with as little stir as possible, into the most distant corner of the gallery and hoping to be invisible.

Judge Norcross strode in through a paneled door at the far end and walked quickly to the bench, accompanied by the booming voice of the court officer, which caused Maria to grab the pew in front of her and jerk her small body upright.

“All rise! All persons having anything to do before the Honorable David S. Norcross, judge of the United States District Court, now holden in Springfield, in and for the District of Massachusetts, shall draw near, give their attendance, and they shall be heard.” The volume increased a notch for the finale. “God save the United States of America and this honorable court! The court is now in session. You may be seated.”

The judge’s elevated perch gave him an easy view of the entire courtroom. To the right sat the assistant U.S. attorney, accompanied by a porky cop with a face as round as a pie plate, probably the government’s case agent. To the left, at a separate table, was the defendant whose guilty plea Norcross was about to take, along with his lawyer, an attorney he didn’t know.

The judge’s courtroom deputy called the case: “United States versus Ernesto Rivera, Criminal Action Number 09-30087-DSN.” The court stenographer adjusted her chair slightly and sat with her fingers poised over her machine.

Silence. The aroma of wood polish and carpet cleaner, the formal arrangement of the furniture, the vaulted ceiling with a few drifting dust motes turning gold in the sunlight, the bright colors of the flag against the oak paneling—all these elements were, after almost twenty years as a lawyer and judge, deeply comforting to Norcross. This was home. The judge set his water cup well off to one side and scooted forward to the edge of his chair to make sure he didn’t snag the hem of his robe in a caster. Showtime
.

From the rear of the courtroom Maria Maldonado, tilting awkwardly to try to catch a glimpse of her son’s face, saw only the back of his head. Her English was so-so, and except for “God save the United States of America!” she hadn’t completely understood the belligerent words of the white-haired man in the blazer. The judge’s frown as he looked down at her boy made her heartsick. Nothing good could happen in a place like this.