The Judge

by Steve Martini

  I give him a shrug.

  “One thirty-eight Smith and Wesson—missing.”

  “Let me guess. The same serial number.”

  “Bingo,” says Leo. “Theory is somebody, one of the cops, dropped the piece on the kid at the scene.”

  “What? An accidental shooting? One of them panicked?”

  “You’re too trusting,” says Leo. The only man more cynical than me.

  “Then why?”

  “That’s the other shoe,” says Leo. “We been hearin’ rumblings—no complaints, mind you—but tom-toms from the street for over a year that some cops have gone into business for themselves, shaking down dealers, taking cash, and when they can, drugs. Nothing too big,” says Leo. “A little here, a little there, a grand here, a kilo there. It all adds up. Now, mind you, these guys, the victims, are in no position to file a consumer complaint. So what we hear is just informal.” Leo’s getting animated, into the story.

  “Like, Officer,” he says. “See that son of a bitch over there? He took my bag of crack and this month’s supply of horse. Yeah, that’s right, the one over there, wearing the uniform just like yours.”

  “I can imagine how it might chill a complaint,” I tell him.

  “You think that’s chilling,” says Leo. “Try this one. All of the officers on the raid with Wiley that night were part of Lano’s clique. Two of them were officers in the association. On the board,” he says.

  Leo is zeroing in.

  “What does that have to do with Tony Arguillo? You’re not telling me . . .?”

  He starts to nod his head.

  “Your man Tony,” he says, “was the one who took the gun off the kid.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I HAVE BEEN CALLING LENORE’S APARTMENT ALL EVENING with no success. Sarah is now asleep in her bedroom and I while away the time going over some files from the office. Ten minutes later I pick up the phone and have one of those extrasensory experiences that occur once in an eon. I go to dial and there is a voice on the other end. It is Lenore.

  “Mental telepathy,” I tell her. I look at my watch. It’s after ten. “You must be burning the oil,” I add.

  “Clearing the cobwebs from my life,” she tells me. Her voice is thick with a nasal quality. I’m wondering if she has a cold.

  “I was calling to find out if you know where Tony Arguillo is. I’ve been leaving messages on his phone for two days. He isn’t returning my calls.” I don’t tell her about my meeting with Gus Lano, or the icy information from Leo Kerns, the reasons I have to talk with Tony.

  “I haven’t a clue,” she says. “I haven’t seen him since our meeting in your office.”

  There follows that awkward kind of silence on the line—the pause that might normally accompany news of a death in the family.

  “Your turn,” I say.

  “I need to talk to somebody,” she tells me. “If just a friendly voice.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve been fired.”

  A half hour later there is a quiet knock on my door. When I open it, Lenore is standing on the porch, with hair as disheveled as I can ever imagine hers becoming. There is a slight odor of alcohol as she says, “Hello.” She looks like a smoldering Mount Saint Helens after the main explosion, a great deal of psychic smoke with the fire mostly out.

  I usher her in and offer her coffee or a drink.

  “What have you got?”

  In her current state hydrochloric acid is probably too mild. I lead her to the kitchen and throw open the cabinet door so she can take her pick.

  “You weren’t surprised?” she says. “By the news of my demise?”

  “A little,” I tell her. “But then I figured you and Kline for different management styles.”

  She laughs. “A graceful way to put it. Always the diplomat.”

  “Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t see it coming,” I say.

  “I saw it,” she says. “It’s just that you’re always most surprised by your own obituary.” It’s the kind of bravado that covers a lot of hurt. She has a few choice words for her former employer, but most of the invective seems gone, consumed, I suspect, in some earlier heat. I am wondering who among her cadre of friends got most of this, maybe over drinks after leaving the office.

  She takes Johnnie Walker by the neck in one hand, and pours half a glass into a large tumbler, talking to me all the while, like “who’s measuring.” She uses no water or ice to cut this. Lenore doesn’t want to remember any of this tomorrow.

  “So tell me what happened. Another argument?”

  She shakes her head and sniffles just a little. “Uh-uh. He’s too calculating for that. He wanted to think about it, and plan it. Savor the moment,” she says.

  “I get back from court in the afternoon, about four-thirty, and my office door is open.” She takes a long drink from the glass and coughs a little, like some kid after his first drag on a cigarette.

  “This is awful.”

  “You picked it.”

  “Got any wine?” Lenore is not a serious drinker. She is looking for pain medication, something to add to the buzz she is already feeling.

  “You can get just as drunk on that.”

  “But wine takes longer, and I’ve got a ten-hanky story,” she says.

  I rummage through my cupboard and come up with a couple of bottles.

  “The Gewurtz,” she says.

  “Remind me never to seduce you with liquor,” I tell her.

  “If you can’t take the time to do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all,” she says.

  “Anyway, you get back from court and your office door is open.” I pick up the point while I look for a corkscrew.

  “Yeah. As I was saying. My office door is open. I remember closing it before I left. There’s a deputy sheriff parked in a chair outside, reading the paper. I thought maybe he was a witness in a case waiting to be interviewed.”

  I give her a nod. Logical conclusion. I pop the cork and pour her a glass.

  “Then before I can get there I hear noises in my office, somebody rummaging around. You know, I’m like, what the hell? Then he stops me.”

  “Who?”

  “The deputy,” she says. “He puts his hand out and grabs my arm like he’s going to tackle me if I try to enter my own office. He demands identification. So I show him my I.D. The little folder,” she says.

  This is something that looks like a passport, and serves for that purpose at crime scenes, issued with a picture on it by the prosecutor’s office to each of its deputies, a ticket to the law enforcement fraternity.

  “He looks at it, then puts it in his pocket,” she says.

  I agree with her that there is a message in this.

  “Yes, well. I tell him I want it back. He tells me to take a seat. I ask him what the hell’s going on, and he doesn’t answer.

  “Mind you, while this is going on somebody’s inside my office going through my desk drawers. I can hear the rustle of papers, voices inside, so I’m arguing with the cop outside in the hallway. And I’m getting pretty pushy.”

  Visions of Lenore, all one hundred twenty pounds, taking on some burly deputy.

  “Three guesses,” I tell her, “and the first two don’t count. Kline’s inside with a flashlight and picks working the tumblers on your desk drawer?” I say.

  She gives me a nod like “damn right.”

  “He’s got that woman with him. Wendy. The pink slip dispenser. Someone he brought from the outside. They worked together at that association before he was elected.” She makes the word association sound like something dirty.

  “Anyway, she’s standing there taking notes on a little pad, apparently taking inventory of everything in my office. I ask him what the hell�
��s going on.”

  Lenore sips her wine. “This is good.”

  “I’ll break out the cheese and we can do the wine tasting later,” I tell her.

  She gives me a pain-in-the-ass expression.

  “Anyway, he wants to know where all my notes are in the Acosta case. I tell him everything was in the file, that I gave it to him.”

  She tells me that for some reason he doesn’t believe this.

  “At that point I start getting really pissed. I guess I said some things,” she says.

  She takes a drink, and I am left to use my own imagination to fill in the blanks, what part of her mind she no doubt gave to Kline at this point.

  She swallows, then looks at me. “Then he tells me I’m fired.” The look on her face imparts only a small measure of the shock she says came with this news.

  “I ask him why, and he tells me he’s been advised by the County Counsel’s office not to state the grounds, that I’ll be getting a letter, but that I’m terminated effective at five o’clock today. No explanation,” she says. “Can you believe it?”

  The sorry fact is that I can. It is a measure of job security in the modern workplace. We discuss Lenore’s recourse, which takes all of a nanosecond. As part of management she is what is called a “pleasure appointment,” exempt from civil service protection. Hired and fired at the pleasure of the elected district attorney. Kline does not even require cause to fire her. Anything that is not grounded in discrimination will do. She tells me she has no intention of fighting it, that taking the long view, it is probably for the best. “Time to strike out on my own,” she says.

  I ask her about prospects, clients or money. She has neither.

  “I could give you Tony as a client,” I tell her.

  “Yeah, right. Just what I need.”

  I think perhaps this is a lot of booze talking, that when she considers the sum of her financial obligations around payday, she may have other thoughts.

  “Did you ever figure out what Kline wanted from the Acosta file? What it was he thought was missing?” I am thinking maybe this has something to do with her firing.

  “With that one, God only knows,” she says.

  “You said he asked about your notes?”

  She gives me a face that is a question mark. She doesn’t have a clue.

  “What happened then?”

  “High drama,” she says. “He has Wendy hand me a cardboard box filled with personal items they’ve taken from my office and Kline tells the deputy to escort me from the building. Like I’ve committed some crime,” 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. Lano 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 mattress 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 m
akes 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 time 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 takes 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.”

  When 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 Hamilton 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 bingers 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.