Good Intentions

by J. D. Trafford

  The entries that followed reflected Harry’s struggle to find that better way. He sought a balance as the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other, as social workers were accused of being too lax and then too aggressive. Often they were accused of being both, simultaneously. Whether true or not, it didn’t matter. Both narratives fed into the conventional wisdom that all government agencies were incompetent and provided a justification for the reduction of funding.

  As I turned the final page of the last journal, I thought about Benji Metina’s newest article in the San Francisco Chronicle and the one she was going to be writing about Harry Meyer, Helen Vox, and Marshall Terry. Metina was laying the groundwork for the governor’s new task force. It was clear she had an agenda, a point to be made. The pendulum was swinging again. But this time it was coming through me.

  “You coming to bed tonight?” Nikki stood in the doorway. She wore one of my old Smiths concert T-shirts as a nightgown, revealing a considerable amount of leg.

  “Be there soon.”

  I looked at the stack of journals, then at the four photographs I’d found. As I was reading the journal, all the entries had started to blur together, different variations of tragic. Not only had I not found any mention of corruption, I hadn’t made any progress identifying the children in the photographs.

  “So the real answer,” Nikki said, “is that you’re going to be up all night, reading sad stories.”

  “Not all night.” I was a little too defensive. “I’m just going to go back and read the journal entries written at about the same time these kids would have been in the system.” I looked at the photo of the three older kids holding the baby. “Has to be a reason Harry kept this.”

  Nikki nodded slowly. She’d heard it all before. “Well”—she turned away—“if you change your mind, you know where I’ll be.” With one smooth movement, the T-shirt came off, revealing a beautiful back. Her hand balled up the T-shirt and, without looking, she tossed it behind her as she walked toward the bedroom. “Our baby ain’t gonna make itself, you know.”

  The T-shirt landed in my lap, and Augustus whimpered at me. The dog cocked his head, wondering what I was doing. He was right. What was I doing?

  It was time to call it a night. Even a dog knew that a baby couldn’t make itself.

  I was awake early the next morning. Nikki was still asleep in the Smiths T-shirt. I should’ve pecked her on the cheek as I crawled quietly out of bed, but I didn’t want to wake her.

  I returned to the living room after getting the coffee maker going in the kitchen. It felt a little like cheating on her, but I couldn’t stop myself, and for that, I felt guilty. I should’ve been sleeping in with my wife. Instead I was drawn back to the journals, convinced they contained clues that nobody else could find.

  The first pass through them was only a test. Now I needed to really study them.

  Perhaps the pictures found in Harry’s office were the secret. If only I could figure out who they were and why Harry had kept them hidden in a book, I’d understand. Harry would, in short, be restored to sainthood.

  Google helped me date the T-shirt the older boy in the photograph wore. It was from one of the many superhero reboots, mid to late 1990s. A few minutes later, I’d located the journal that contained entries from the appropriate time period. Then I began skimming these entries for any case related to three kids and an infant.

  When that didn’t work, I expanded the scope of my search to journal entries related to any child that fit the description of any of the kids in the photograph, but each time I was unsuccessful. Just when I thought I was getting close, the ages, genders, or race didn’t match the other children in the family.

  Luckily, during my morning commute from home to the courthouse, I figured out a better way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  When I arrived, Karen was plugging away on some orders that were due in a few days. “Morning,” I said, stopping at her desk. “Can I talk to you for a second about a new project?”

  She stopped typing. “A project?” She found a notepad and picked up a pen.

  “It’s kind of a big, boring one,” I said. “Sort of a research project.”

  She looked skeptical. “Like for a law review article?”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to come up with a plausible story. “Maybe a law review article or maybe just a personal remembrance of Judge Meyer for the bar association’s magazine.”

  “OK.” Karen nodded, pen at the ready. “What is it?”

  “I want you to make a list of all of Harry Meyer’s cases that he handled during the 1990s.”

  “All of them?” She didn’t look too excited about the job.

  “All of them,” I repeated. “I want a spreadsheet: name of the case, case file number, and then all the kids involved, including their names and ages.”

  Karen squinted and pursed her lips, silently running some sort of calculation. When the math was completed, she said, “That’s going to be like twenty-five hundred families, maybe more.”

  “I know.” I took a long pause. I wasn’t used to abusing my power, although I’d certainly seen other judges do it. “It’s important. Talk to the tech folks. Maybe they can do something electronically. They run reports like this all the time.”

  “What’s your time frame?”

  “As soon as possible.” I turned to walk to my desk. “Thank you, Karen.”

  I logged on to my computer to get a sense of how my day was going to go. At that moment, I felt pretty good. Surely my day would go much smoother than yesterday.

  Unfortunately, my prediction was wrong.

  My inbox was filled with over twenty e-mails, all marked urgent. The subject lines contained just one word: Thill. I held my breath as I clicked the first one, from the county social worker:

  I wanted to provide an update to the parties related to the status of the two older girls. They came to the McDonald’s as promised. They are now back with their foster families. Unfortunately, the youngest boy, Bobby, stole his foster parent’s car last night. He was stopped on the freeway. Although Mr. Thill has no permanent address, he had been staying at a house somewhere near Modesto. In Bobby’s pocket there was a piece of paper with that address. I believe Bobby got that note from his father at the pretrial hearing and Bobby was trying to drive to Modesto.

  It was that weird handshake at the end of the hearing, I thought as I clicked through the other e-mails, that’s when he passed the note. I heard a knock on my door.

  “What is it?” I asked, still scrolling through the e-mails.

  Karen kept at a distance, choosing to remain in the doorway. “You got a call from that reporter.”

  “Benji Metina?”

  “On hold right now.” Karen glanced back at her phone as the other lines began to ring. “She says they picked up one of our kids on 580?”

  “Yep, I know.” I sank lower in my chair, but somehow my stomach sank even lower.

  “She says the kid driving the car was eight years old.”

  “That’s right.”

  “One of Tanya Neal and Peter Thill’s kids.”

  “Correct.”

  “Do you want to talk to her?”

  I closed my eyes, trying to avoid thinking about the next wave of public humiliation. “Refer her to the district’s media guy,” I said. “We don’t comment on pending cases.”

  “OK,” Karen said.

  “No, don’t,” I said, my eyes still closed. “I’ll pick up. I’ll talk to her. What line?” I opened my eyes. Karen looked at me with such sympathy that I now felt incredibly guilty for forcing her to create a gigantic electronic spreadsheet based on a wild theory premised on four old photographs.

  Karen nodded, ever polite. “On line one.”

  She turned and left, closing the door behind her as I picked up the phone. “Benji Metina,” I said, trying hard not to sound ashamed and incompetent. “News travels fast.”

  “Especially this news,” she said. “I need to post
the story before everybody beats me to it.”

  “I thought we had a truce,” I said. “I thought you were going to cut me a little slack while I weighed whether or not to give you a full interview and comment on how Alameda County does or does not choose appropriate people to provide services for families in the child protection system.”

  “This Thill guy sort of ruined that for you, Judge,” Metina said. “I’m sorry about that. It illustrates how overwhelmed the system is and how unable it is to do its job.” She paused. “Do you want to comment on this situation?”

  “It’s a pending case,” I said. “You know I can’t.”

  “OK,” she said. “Then things are just going to fall where they fall, nothing personal.”

  Metina posted an electronic version of her article at noon, and, as expected, the story broke the Internet. It was posted, reposted, shared, and tweeted. Although the article was brief and damning, the video was what everybody wanted to see. The whole thing was captured by a series of traffic cameras courtesy of the California Department of Transportation.

  Although there were wars in the Middle East, rogue nations with nuclear weapons, and domestic and global economic problems, people had an insatiable appetite for a video of an eight-year-old driving a car and being slowly chased by a half dozen police cruisers. It was like an elementary school reenactment of O.J. Simpson’s ill-fated escape in his white Bronco.

  Only in America.

  Chief Judge Karls summoned me to a meeting that afternoon. The moment I arrived, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t just Chief Karls. It was Nancy Johns and the entire executive committee. This included the assistant chief judge, the presiding judge of the civil division, the presiding judge of the criminal division, and the head of family and specialty courts.

  “Judge Thompson.” Chief Karls stood and pointed at an empty chair. “Please have a seat.”

  I nodded and tried to project calm as I walked to the empty chair and sat. All eyes were on me. The faces of the people assembled were somber, almost pitying. Clearly there had been a premeeting I wasn’t invited to, and now I was here to simply learn my fate.

  Chief Karls flipped through his notepad, and I waited. I suspected that at some point he was going to press a hidden button and an opening would appear in the floor beneath me. I would fall into a dark pit beneath the courthouse, never to be heard from again.

  “Judge Meyer’s passing has been very hard,” he said. “And everyone here is sympathetic to your situation, but I got a call from the governor this afternoon as well as our chief justice. They are very concerned about the situation. The governor wants to see some action, doesn’t care what. The chief justice is more supportive, but she’s worried about the legislature. It’s a budget year. The courts have many new initiatives, including a pay raise for all of us. She’s concerned about how all this negative publicity is going to impact our budget proposal.”

  I stared at him, trying to read between the lines. “You’re saying that if judges don’t get a raise, it’s going to be my fault?”

  Chief Karls started to respond but stopped himself and decided to try a different approach. “I’m merely telling you what’s happening, Jim. I’m also getting all sorts of phone calls and e-mails from people all over the world, wanting you fired.”

  “How is it my fault that this kid stole a car?”

  “You’re the judge, Jim. Everything is your fault.”

  The assistant chief, Tracy Fink, decided to chime in. “We have a situation where a boy died after you returned him home to his mother. Now we have a kid on a freeway, and I’m told there is going to be another, longer article posted shortly about how you’re showing up late for hearings, and that the older sisters ran from foster care during court, right from under your nose, and you didn’t do anything about it.”

  “That’s not entirely true.” I tried to defend myself, but a growl from the other side of the table interrupted me.

  Judge F. Michael Christiansen folded his arms across his chest. “Why don’t you just get these kids adopted by a good family?” His bald head and crooked teeth gave him the appearance of an angry Muppet. Judge Christiansen was the presiding judge of the district’s civil division. He was obviously irritated that he had to be present for the meeting. I’d never really spoken to him, since he considered any judge who was not handling multimillion-dollar class actions to be below him in the hierarchy. The civil division was first. Criminal felonies was second. Criminal misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors were third. Family was fourth, and anything having to do with juveniles or children was last. Judge Christiansen was often heard saying, “We are not social workers. We are judges.” And, clearly, I was not only a social worker; I was a bad social worker, too.

  “There are rules and statutes I must follow, Judge Christiansen.” I tried not to sound patronizing, but it was difficult. “Parents have due-process rights. Children have rights. There is a statutory procedure that I need to follow.”

  Judge Christiansen rolled his eyes. He started to respond, but Chief Karls interrupted. “Let’s stay focused, shall we?”

  The others around the table nodded in agreement. There was nothing uglier than a judge fight.

  “We need to start cleaning some of these matters up,” Judge Karls continued. “Nancy has an update related to your former law clerk.” He looked over at Nancy Johns.

  “Yes, Chief,” she said. “We’ve made an offer to his attorney to resolve the matter for ten thousand dollars. That’s much less than it would cost to fight in court, and the benefit is that Billy Pratt would be required to sign a confidentiality agreement. He would have to stop speaking to the press.”

  The mention of my former law clerk was a surprise. I hadn’t really thought about Billy since Metina published her first article. I figured he’d nicknamed me “The Kitten,” given her a few quotes, and was done punishing me for letting him go. “Do you think he’ll accept the offer?”

  “The Executive Team authorized me to go up to twenty thousand dollars, if necessary.” Nancy hated to spend the district’s money on such things. It was evident by the look on her face, but Harry and I had put the district in a difficult position. “I’m confident he’ll settle,” she said. “An eviction notice was recently filed by his landlord. He needs the money.”

  “I don’t see how we can enforce the confidentiality clause.”

  “I’ve thought about that.” Nancy smiled. “He needs a new job, and that job is going to check his references. Part of the agreement is that you and the district merely confirm his dates of employment and salary. We make no comment regarding his performance or reasons for our separation.”

  “I guess I’m not following.”

  She leaned forward. “Billy Pratt, more than anything, needs a job. That settlement money is only going to last a limited period of time. If he breaks the agreement, then perhaps we are also not bound by the confidentiality clause.”

  I had my doubts, because it’d be foolish to disagree with Nancy Johns. My guess was that Billy Pratt would also know not to cross her. “When will you know?”

  “His lawyer will get back to me in the next few days,” she said. “It will hopefully be resolved soon.”

  Sensing the conclusion of that agenda item, Judge Karls cleared his throat and moved on to the next item of business. “As it relates to you, Judge Thompson.” He put both of his hands on the conference table, as if bracing himself for impact. “I would like you to take a vacation for today, and maybe tomorrow as well. Stay away. Let this stuff die down.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “It will.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  This time Chief Karls ignored my question. He wasn’t going to engage in a back-and-forth. “I’m going to tell the governor and the chief justice that you are no longer assigned to the child dependency division. You are no longer going to handle cases involving children or juveniles.” He took a heavy breath, the burden of leadership.
“We had talked about this previously, Jim. I informed you of the possibility, and now it seems like the best course of action. The public wants to see that we are taking these criticisms seriously, and this will objectively show them that we are doing just that.”

  “What about my cases? I have motions pending and trials scheduled.”

  Chief Karls stayed calm. “Perhaps you should be quiet and listen now.” He nodded, then continued. “I’m putting you on the criminal team, misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors, since that was your background before coming onto the court. But that, however, requires you to retain some cases so as not to disrupt or compromise the well-being of the children on your—”

  “Nobody wants to do this job,” I said. “Nobody understands it, and when they do, they’re not going to come.”

  “They will go where I say.” Chief Karls looked me in the eye and held it. “You will go where I say.” He wasn’t going to be pushed around.

  “There are deadlines,” I said. “With Harry gone and now me, there won’t be anybody. We need two judges, not just one.”

  Chief Karls looked at Nancy Johns. “Let us worry about that,” he said. “Although this announcement is being made and it is effective immediately, Ms. Johns will work with you to make sure the transition is smooth.”