The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  The judge nodded as if he recalled the whole thing. All he really remembered was that Blane was a loser who had got what was coming to him for having killed his best friend in a fit of rage. He glanced at Merkovitch. Prosecution or Defense? He tried a fishing tactic. “Well,” he said, “I guess our man’s done a bit of time since you and I laid eyes on each other, eh?”

  Merkovitch nodded, smiled.

  Prosecution, the old judge decided. He nodded and smiled, too.

  Squinting just enough to make out the number over the nearby courtroom door, but not enough to make Merkovitch pity him, he gave the door a good push and let himself into the courtroom.

  It still smelled the same. The heat of the old, cranky boiler system. The sweat of fear. The mustiness of papers long trapped in boxes and drawers. The hint of camphor from the mothballs that kept the legal robes from being eaten.

  It sounded the same, too. Right down to the audible breathing of the entranced spectators, shifting in their hard wooden pews. Some of them were mere gawkers, but not all. It had long simultaneously amused and appalled Judge Marshall that spectators in murder cases always sat in two distinct groups. Family and friends of the victim. Family and friends of the accused. Like witnesses at a wedding of the damned.

  “Judge Marshall—a pleasure! Come in!” This in a hushed whisper from the guard at the door, who wasn’t supposed to say anything—just usher people in. The judge raised his hand in a small, silent salute. The courthouse was full of well-meaning lackeys like the doorman. There was no way in the world he was going to remember the name of any of them.

  He tried to slide soundlessly onto a bench at the back. No such luck. The little metal pull on the zipper of his jacket scraped along the wooden seat. The sound reached the ears of the sitting judge, who turned her eyes on him for just a second, enough to embarrass Judge Marshall into sinking down onto the seat in a slouch.

  But in a minute, he decided that the snooty-looking lady judge hadn’t recognized him and wasn’t likely to glance his way again. He sat up straighter and took the liberty of having a good look around.

  The first thing he saw was that he was sitting with the family of the accused. The man in the prisoner’s box was surrounded by glass walls, guarded by two strong-looking young officers, and possibly even shackled to the floor, though nobody but the guards would know that. Yet it wasn’t hard to see that the offender was a handsome boy with a distinctive look that Judge Marshall thought marked him as a southern European—Spanish or Italian. He’d taken as many ethnic sensitivity training workshops as the next judge, so he knew that you weren’t supposed to even think about such things.

  But a lifetime in the law, first as a family lawyer, then in criminal law, then as a prosecutor and finally as a judge, had taught him to take note of everything. And he noticed that the man in the box looked exactly like the people sitting in the three spectator rows ahead of him. There must be thirty of them.

  Wait a minute! Roma, that’s what they looked like.

  He was puzzling over whether that might mean anything, trying to remember things he’d lately read about the prejudice against that particular group the way he’d once read about the history of particular groups, when he felt that someone was studying him as intently as he’d been studying his neighbors.

  Dismissing ridiculous old ideas about the evil eye, he looked up.

  And he saw his wife glaring at him right from the witness stand!

  He’d forgotten that he’d promised her that he wouldn’t remain in the courtroom during any portion of her testimony. He had very little idea of what she intended to say. They’d agreed to keep it that way. Well, it was too late now. He shrugged his shoulders.

  But she didn’t see the gesture. Her eyes were back on the prosecuting attorney as he shuffled his papers, stalled for effect, spoke.

  “One final thing, Mrs. Marshall. When you entered your garage on the evening in question, were you alone?”

  “Yes. My husband always goes grocery shopping with me. But he lags behind. Talking to people in the elevator and things like that. I just go ahead and wait for him in the car.”

  “Thank you.” The lawyer smiled slightly, then dipped his head in the direction of the defense table, as if he were turning over his witness for cross-examination with the greatest of confidence.

  The defense rose. Yet another young man. They all seemed like children, even the lady judge. Even the grandmothers of the accused were younger than old Judge Marshall and his wife. He almost let out a sigh, but he caught himself in time.

  “You told the court you were headed out to do your grocery shopping the night my client was arrested, did you not?” the defense began. He had a grating sort of voice, the kind Judge Marshall knew his wife hated.

  “Yes.” She closed her lips tight after that one word.

  “And you also stated that you and your husband usually do your grocery shopping together? Isn’t that what you told my friend here?” He nodded toward the prosecutor, who did not respond.

  “Yes, but…”

  Judge Marshall tried hard to avoid eye contact. The reason his wife didn’t want him in court while she was testifying was because she felt he’d exercise some sort of undue influence on her. He thought that was batty, but she maintained that after nearly fifty years of marriage, she could tell what he was thinking by the way he was looking at her.

  What he was thinking was this: That the night his wife had seen a dark-haired man running through the parking garage beneath their condo, he, himself, had been sick in bed. He knew for certain that he’d stayed home that night because he’d watched the season finale of The Great Race. In fact, much as he would have hated to admit it, he’d really not been that sick. He’d just wanted to see who’d win. The show had been half over when his wife had walked out the door. He was sure of it, because the winner hadn’t been revealed yet and he remembered feeling relieved that he could watch the most important part of the show without her interrupting him by talking while he was watching, which was a bad habit of hers.

  “Mrs. Marshall…” the lawyer said, swaying a little. Judge Marshall wished the man would stand still—wished he could tell him to do so, as he had so often told lawyers in the old days. “Mrs. Marshall, are you sure you allowed yourself to be unaccompanied during those moments in the garage on the evening in question? Don’t you think it was rather late to be in an underground garage alone?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  His wife’s tone was sharp. Judge Marshall knew what that meant. Her toes had been stepped on.

  “I’m asking you whether you are sure there were no other witnesses present in the parking garage that late at night.”

  “You think I’m too old to go out at night?”

  An audible gasp spread across the gathered court the way the leak of air from a kid’s balloon would spread across the condo party room.

  The head of the presiding judge snapped around. “Just answer the question,” she warned.

  By the look on his wife’s face, Judge Marshall knew the exact thought that was going through her head. Nobody can tell me what I’m too old or not too old to do.

  “Maybe I can rephrase that a little,” the lawyer said. He glanced toward the jury, and for the first time, Judge Marshall took a look at the lucky twelve. There was a pretty good mix of male and female, young and old. A witness like his wife was a sure bet with a jury like that. They would believe whatever she said. The old people would identify with her as an equal. The young people would be reminded of their grandmothers—or maybe their ancestors….

  “You state that you entered the parking garage at about 8:30 p.m. You state that you saw a young man who fit the description of my client running through the garage at that time. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  The defense attorney grinned. Judge Marshall could only see the lawyer’s face because the man had turned around to face his client. The accused himself seemed suddenly frightened. He tried to turn arou
nd as if to seek some kind of support from the thirty look-alikes behind him. The lawyer turned back to face Mrs. Marshall. “Madam,” he said, “your testimony puts my client in the garage one full hour before the crime was committed, doesn’t it?”

  Justice Marshall saw the look of shock on his wife’s face. “But--?”

  The prosecutor rose as if to make an objection.

  But even the jury seemed to understand that there was nothing to object to. He sat back down. He frantically searched through the papers in front of him with such energy that Her Honor had to ask him to be quiet.

  “I saw him running,” Mrs. Marshall stuttered. “It was him—”

  For a wild instant, Judge Marshall thought his wife was pointing in his direction, but of course she was really pointing to the prisoner.

  “My client doesn’t deny being in the garage, Ma’am. You’re aware of that fact, are you not?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “In fact, it is his contention that he left prior to 9 p.m., the time at which the murdered woman made a frantic phone call to her girlfriend.”

  The defense lawyer paused. Judge Marshall knew the pause was meant to give the jury time to consider what they’d just heard—to come to the only possible conclusion, which was that his wife had just destroyed the Crown’s case. In the silence, Judge Marshall could hear all those old familiar sounds again. The breathing of the people in the court, the useless rifling of papers that could prove nothing, the sigh of relief of a killer about to be let off…

  And of course Judge Marshall knew it was not the prosecutor who had made a mistake. It was his wife. If the murdered woman had been alive at nine p.m., she would have been alive at the beginning of The Great Race. How long did it take to strangle somebody, then to run down seven flights of stairs? About as long as it took to find out who had won the race.

  He’d been a judge for a long time. A lot of case law began to reel itself out in his mind. The Crown versus this one and that one.

  Would he stand up, like someone out of those old Perry Mason shows and set the record straight?

  Would he take aside that nice guard who had greeted him at the door and tell him that he needed a word with Her Honor?

  Would he send some sort of signal to his wife to alert her to her error and get her to change her testimony?

  Thinking hard as he was, he missed what happened next. But he soon figured that either the judge or the prosecutor had called for the lunch recess. Because the jury filed out and then his wife left the stand and made her way toward the table where the prosecutor stood. There was some sort of exchange between the lawyer and his wife, but Judge Marshall couldn’t hear anything. The lawyer’s back was to him, and his wife was so short that he couldn’t even see her face, hidden as it was by the broad shoulders of the prosecutor.

  What Judge Marshall had once liked most about sitting on the bench was that he could take all the time in the world to make up his mind about most things. Send a man to jail for life? I’m giving it some thought…. Call a mistrial and begin all over again at a cost of a couple hundred thousand dollars? I’ll let you know.

  But of course, he didn’t always have that luxury. Sometimes he had to make up his mind in a single instant.

  Now seemed such a time.

  What he decided was to keep his mouth shut. He hadn’t tried to influence a witness in forty years—not since his last day as a practicing lawyer—and he wasn’t about to start now.

  The accused was led out of the court and his relatives filed out, too. Judge Marshall was the last one of the spectators to leave.

  Just as he got outside the door, he heard a familiar whisper. The door guard was standing there. He had a paper bag in his hand.

  “Security sent this up to you,” the man said proudly—like one who is pleased to offer impeccable service of some sort. “They said you might be needing it.”

  Mrs. Marshall’s lunch!

  The Judge took it. He reached out and shook the man’s hand. In the old days, he would have said, “Good man,” or “Well done.” These days such remarks were considered patronizing. “Thanks,” he said to the guard. “Thanks a lot.”

  He took the lunch and walked slowly toward the down escalator. He thought the best thing was just to sit downstairs by the door for a while. For almost the whole of his career in this courthouse, there had been back door, side doors and more than one front door to use as exits, but since 9/11 that had changed.

  Now there was only one exit. If his wife decided to go out—or even to come looking for him—sitting by the exit was his best chance of seeing her—or of her seeing him.

  But he didn’t think that would happen.

  He figured that the lawyer would take her back to his office—the Office of the Prosecution in the secure area on the first floor and that together they would somehow try to undo the damage she’d done to the case.

  Judge Marshall decided to wait for half an hour. Then, he would go home.

  And if she wanted to explain what had happened, how she had made such a terrible mistake, then she could tell him.

  Otherwise, he would just keep his own peace.

  Concentrating as he was on these thoughts, he jumped when someone was suddenly standing in front of him, blocking the light from the exit’s barred window they’d installed right after 9/11.

  “It was eight-thirty. You and I have gone grocery shopping every Thursday at 8:30 since we moved into that condo. Plus, I probably would have checked my watch to make sure the store would still be open.”

  “If we did the same thing every week for years,” Judge Marshall said, “why would you need to check your watch? Besides, that store’s twenty-four-seven—has been for five years.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m Alzheimer’s,” she said.

  That grim possibility had never occurred to the judge, but it did now. He looked at his wife. Nah.

  She had just made a simple mistake, that was all.

  “Everybody’s wrong once in a while,” he said. “Want some lunch?”

  She glanced at the paper bag where he’d placed it on the seat.

  “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?” He picked up the bag and patted the empty place beside him.

  Mrs. Marshall sank into it. She’d always been a small woman. That was one of the things he loved about her. In the old days, he used to call her “my pocket wife” the way he called his favorite book “my pocket criminal code.” She seemed smaller than she’d ever been. No, he reminded himself. That was stupid.

  “I told that lawyer right from the start that I was in that garage. He looked in all his papers but he can’t find where he wrote it down. He thinks I’m the one that made a mistake. He thinks he can still fix things if…

  She looked up at him. He could see she was fighting the urge to ask him for help.

  “It’s a good sandwich,” he said. “No onions.”

  She accepted half the sandwich and took a bite. She chewed carefully, swallowed, shook her head.

  “When people do the same thing every week of their lives, how can they make a mistake about what they did?”

  Judge Marshall didn’t answer. He was thinking about the Blane case, the one that Merko kid had worked on with him. He remembered there had been some sort of time mistake there, too. It wasn’t that unusual for several witnesses to an event to give differing times for the same occurrence. One of the things that working in court for fifty years—heck, for fifty minutes—soon taught a person was that eye-witnesses were often the worst kind. And the more eye-witnesses there were, the more conflicting stories might be told.

  In the Blane case, Judge Marshall had seen a discrepancy right from the word go. Of course, it wouldn’t have been his place to say anything to the witnesses, though he might have held some sort of a hearing with the lawyers if it had become necessary.

  But it hadn’t been necessary. The erring witness had suddenly remembered that on the night in question, she had been on the way to her sister’s
birthday party. An easy-to-remember event like that—the jury had believed her. The erroneous testimony had been rescinded. The record had been corrected.

  But what did that have to do with his wife?

  She was picking at her sandwich as if she had no appetite.

  “Something wrong with the sandwich?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Not fresh enough?”

  “What?”

  “I used the lettuce we bought last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Oh, come on,” he said with mock impatience. “Now are you going to tell me that you can’t remember that we went grocery shopping last night?”

  “That’s right,” she said absently. “It’s Friday today. Thank God.”

  “Thank God?”

  “Yes. No matter what happens to me this afternoon, there won’t be any court tomorrow.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you this afternoon,” he said. But it was a sort of lie. Because at the very least, there would be some sort of re-examination, and that would give the prosecutor plenty of time to grill his wife.

  “You know,” she said, “all the years you worked in court, all the cases you tried—”

  “Yes.”

  “You never talked about them when you came home.”

  “So?” Was she going to tell him that he should have shared his experiences so that she could have learned how to be a better witness? That didn’t make any kind of sense.

  “So I got used to thinking that you had this—I don’t know—this other life—like some sort of mystery existence or something.” She stared into the air in front of her for a minute. Then she smiled. Judge Marshall felt a pang. The smile looked awfully sad. “But the fact is, when you retired, I could figure out that you must have been the same way in court as you were at home….”

  “Meaning?”

  “Always doing the same thing at the same time. Routines. That’s why we always shopped on Thursday. You said routine was important. You said if you do the same thing at the same time as often as you can, you—”

  She stopped. Again a look of shock crossed her face. But only for an instant.