The Judge (7 page)

she says.

Lenore is walking, pacing across my kitchen, straggly hair, drink in hand, steam seeming to rise from her body as she revisits the image in her mind.

"I never thought I'd end up pulling for some slime like Acosta," she says.

"The enemy of my enemy," I tell her.

"Exactly. Two days ago I wouldn't have given him a second thought, or two cents for his chances." She's talking about Acosta.

"And now he's a knight on a charging steed," I tell her.

"I wouldn't go so far as that. But I think he may kick some ass. At least his lawyers will."

"You think Kline's that bad in court?"

"That," she says, "and the fact that his evidence has now suddenly turned to shit."

"What are you talking about?"

"Right after Kline grabbed the file off my desk and announced to the world that he was going to do this thing himself, the audio techs call.

The wire. The one worn by Hall that night. It didn't work." This brings the only smile she has exhibited since arriving at my house, something sinister that does not rest well on Lenore's face. "They don't know if it simply malfunctioned, or if somebody turned it off."

"Turned it off?" She gives me a look that says "think about it." "Acosta. Mendel and the association. If you sandbagged the judge ..."

She leaves me to finish the thought; that if the cops set the Coconut up, they would not produce the audiotape that might exonerate him.

"They'd be better off going one on one," says Lenore. "Hall's word against his."

"There was nothing on the tape?" I ask.

"Nothing beyond Acosta's husky voice and a somewhat salacious hello from Hall. Not exactly incriminating," says Lenore. "After that it all goes buzzy." I can feel my heart sag in my chest. Twenty more years of the Coconut on the bench.

"So it's his word against hers?" I say. She nods.

"It may be enough. She seemed as if she would come across well on the stand." A wishful thought on my part.

Lenore waffles one hand at the wrist, like it could go either way. "Before I was escorted from the premises I heard rumors," she says. "Talk of a deal."

"God. Don't tell me."

"Some reduced infraction," she says, "but only on condition that he resign from the bench." I sigh like a man before a firing squad that's just shot blanks.

"He rejected the offer," she says, "out of hand. Some story that he was visiting the witness on judicial business."

"That's his defense?" I say. "What was this business? A major mat tress inspection? I can hear him on the stand. I was merely lying on top of the woman to see if we could punch a hole in a Posturepedic."

" Lenore does not laugh. "You have to admit, it's a little strange. The judge is pressing for information of police misconduct and gets nailed in a Vice sting. Before they can get him to trial, the evidence turns sour."

"So what are you thinking? A shot across his bow. They want to warn him off."

"Who knows? All we know now is that it comes down to a credibility contest. Who the jury believes," says Lenore. "With removal from the bench as the bottom line." She tells me that Kline is getting pressure from the Commission on Judicial Accountability, the judge's answer to the Congressional Ethics Committee. I won't tell what you're doing under your robe if you don't tell what I'm doing under mine.

"They want Acosta off the bench," she says.

If there's anything more sanctimonious than a reformed hooker, it's a lawyer turned judge.

"Judicial hari kari," I say.

"You got it. They don't want a messy public hearing before the State Supreme Court," says Lenore. "As they see it, it would be better if he fell on his own sword."

"I can imagine." As we talk a beeper goes off in her purse. She puts the glass down and fishes around among hairbrushes and hankies until she finds the little black beast.

"The only thing they didn't get," she tells me. Her way of informing me this beeper belongs to the state.

She looks at the number displayed on the LED readout. "The interest of all your affections," she says.

I give her a quizzical look. "Tony's cellular number."

"Tell him I want to talk to him." As I say this, Lenore makes it, somewhat unsteadily, to the wall-mounted phone by the kitchen door. I bring her a stool in the interest of safety, and she dials. She waits several seconds, and then: "It's me." It is all she says. The voice on the other end takes over. I assume this is Tony. It is a one-sided conversation, and as I watch, Lenore's face is transformed through a dozen aspects: from abject indifference to keen interest, like the phases of the moon.

"Where are you now?" she says.

"Tell him I want to talk to him." I'm trying to get her attention, but she is riveted by whatever is being said at the other end.

Lenore ignores me, and makes a note on a pad hanging on the wall. "How did it happen?"

"Who else is there?" A momentary pause. Anyone from the D.A.'s office? " She fires staccato questions without tune for much reply, like whoever is at the other end doesn't know much. Any idea when it happened?" There is a long pause here. The look on Lenore's face is unadulterated bewilderment. "Any witnesses?" There is some lengthy explanation here, but Lenore cakes no notes.

"I'll be there in ten minutes," she says, and hangs up.

At this moment she is not looking at me as much as through me, to some distant point in another world.

"What's wrong? Tony?" I ask. She nods, but does not answer. "What is it?"

"Brittany Hall," she says. It is as if she were in a trance, mesmerized by whatever it is she has heard on the phone. She gazes in a blank stare at the wall and speaks.

"They found her body an hour ago in a Dumpster," she says. "Behind the D.A.'s office."

H hen we pull up to the curb there are a half dozen police cars parked in their usual fashion, which is any way they like to leave them, light bars blazing blue and red. A handful of vagrants stand outside the yellow tape that closes off the entrance to the alley behind G Street.

In any other neighborhood in town, this activity, the commotion of cops, would draw a crowd of home owners and other residents. But here, across from the courthouse in the middle of the night, the only interested parties look like refugees from a soup kitchen, a few homeless bums who have been evicted from the alley, who stand shivering in threadbare blankets and other discards from the Goodwill.

Inside the tape is a smaller throng of men and one woman in uniform.

I recognize one of the Homicide dicks. They must have plucked him from his bed. He is wearing exercise pants and a gray sweatshirt that looks like something from a Knute Rockne movie.

"You better let me do the talking." Lenore does sign language as she speaks to me, the kind of gestures you expect from someone who gets giddy with a couple of drinks. I am here for that very reason. In the moments after Tony's phone call I seized her keys and made arrangements with a woman on my block, a friend and neighbor, to catch a few winks on my couch while Sarah sleeps upstairs. I was not about to let Lenore drive. Right now Kline would like nothing more than to see her arrested for drunk driving.

I can see Tony Arguillo milling a hundred feet down the alley. Well inside the familiar yellow ribbon, he is beyond earshot unless we want to make a scene.

"Stick close," she says. And before I can move around the car, I hear the click other heels on the street as she crosses over. I am trailing in her wake, trying to catch up so that she doesn't get hit by a car.

Without her prosecutor's I.D., Lenore is banking on the fact that the cops won't know she has been fired. That news may take at least a day to trickle down to the street.

Before I can catch her, she cozies up to one of the uniforms at the tape.

"Where's Officer Arguillo?" Her best command voice under the circumstances, and not much slurring.

A familiar face, the guy doesn't look too closely, or smell her breath. Instead she gets the perennial cop's shrug. Lenore takes this as the signal of admission, and before the man in blue can say a word she is under the tape. For a moment he looks as though he might challenge her, then gives it up. Why screw with authority?

"He's with me," she says, and grabs me by the coat sleeve.

A second later I find myself tripping toward the crime scene, following a woman who, if not legally drunk, is at least staggering under false colors.

Thirty feet down the alley Tony is chewing the fat with another cop. Seeing us, he stops talking and separates himself from his buddy. He seems a bundle of nervous gestures tonight, over-the-shoulder glances, anxious looks at the other cops down the alley closer to the garbage bin, as if he knows that if he is caught here talking to us his ass is grass. Though he shakes my hand and says hello, Arguillo seems put off seeing me here, his own lawyer.

"I thought you were coming alone." He says this to Lenore, up close, but I can hear it.

"Paul wanted to drive," she says. She asks him who's heading up the investigation. He gives her a name I do not recognize, and motions down the alley to where some guys dressed in overalls are pawing through mounds of garbage by the handful.

"Has Kline been around?" says Lenore. Self-preservation. First things first.

"They have a call out. Ordinarily they wouldn't bother," says Tony. But seeing as she was a witness in a case. They caught him somewhere on the road to San Francisco for a meeting tomorrow morning. Word is, he's on his way back."

"Then we don't have much time," says Lenore. "What happened?" she presses.

"Maybe we should talk over there." He points to the other side of the tape.

"We're not going to ogle the body," says Lenore. "Just tell us what happened and we'll get out of here. Who found the body?"

"Some vagrant, less than an hour ago. He flagged down a squad car driving by." Tony tells us that he wasted no time in calling Lenore, the first call he placed from his own squad car after picking up the computer signal that the body had been found. Squad cars now use computer transmissions to cut down on the number of eavesdroppers in delicate calls.

Two cops in overalls have drawn the less desirable duty. They are inside the Dumpster, passing items out as others sort through piles of trash they have assembled in the alley. Every few seconds I can see a flash of light from a strobe inside the bin, pictures being taken to preserve what might be evidence. There are two detectives huddled over a mass of bumps covered by a white sheet. There are no obvious signs of blood.

"Did he see anything? This vagrant?" Lenore asks.

"Like who dumped the body?" says Tony. He shakes his head. "Our man was too far into a paper bag and the bottle inside of it to notice.

Cars come and go in the alley. He says he doesn't pay any attention." "Maybe he's afraid," says Lenore.

"This guy's too far gone for fear." "How did he find her?" says Lenore.

"You kiddin'?" Tony gives her a sideways glance. "A metal Dumpster, roof over your head, and four walls. Street of dreams. Haifa dozen burns sleep in there on any given night. If a truck picks it up and dumps it that day, the place is Triple A approved."

"Only today it wasn't empty?" I say.

"No." Tony eyes me warily. I think perhaps he has been counseled by Phil Mendel so that I am now persona non grata, no longer to be trusted.

"He found the body just dumped in there? Must have been quite a shock," I say.

"It was wrapped." Tony says this as one would describe a tuna sandwich in a lunch box. "Rolled up in a blanket. They pore through the shit like rodents." He's talking about the homeless men who make this particular metal box home.

"He thought maybe he found some treasure when he saw the blanket," says Tony. "We're lucky he didn't sleep with her for a couple of nights before he called us." Tony does not think much of the under class.

"How did she die?" asks Lenore.

"Could be strangulation. Some marks on the throat. The M.E. hasn't made a call yet. She wasn't exactly overdressed," he says.

"What do you mean?"

"She was wearing a pair of panties and a cotton top. Had a small towel wrapped around her head like a turban."

"Washing her hair, perhaps?" says Lenore. "Maybe she was going out, or getting ready for bed." Arguillo raises an eyebrow, a little tilt of the head, as if to say, "Read into this whatever you want." "Any evidence of sexual assault?" says Lenore.

"Your guess," he says. "Half-naked woman, dumped in a trash bin, young, good looking. I wouldn't put it out of my mind," he tells us.