Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor (solomon versus lord)

by Paul Levine

  ***

  “I’ll do it, Max. I’ll do it for you.”

  “Great! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” The tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. “We make a great team, Lisa.

  When your clerkship’s up, you should come into the airline’s legal department. Pete Flaherty’s going to retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general counsel?”

  “Max, please stop planning my life. Let’s just get through this.”

  “Whatever you say, darling.”

  His smile was still in place. He had done it. And he hadn’t even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have rushed to help him. But this way was better.

  She’s doing it for love, not pity.

  Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her judge-the swing vote, according to Flaherty-to go their way. But he had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was trusting her with his life.

  ***

  Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn’t know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was never part of the bargain.

  She would do it because her loyalty to Max outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all along.

  She didn’t believe in the words carved into stone.

  Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as icy.

  Deep inside, she was just like him.

  ***

  NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF CRASH

  WASHINGTON D.C.-(AP) The National Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.

  Citing contradictory evidence and the failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane pointedly stated that there was “substantial evidence” to support the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever the hydraulic lines.

  “ Traces of PETN were recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not found,” McGrane said. “Presumably, they are buried in the muck of the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive conclusion.”

  PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the number two engine.

  Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station. He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None of the jets reported firing a missile.

  Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport. The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the New York-to-Miami flight.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Junior Justice

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat here. Oh, not in this chair. Not even in this building, if we’re being tediously literal about it, Sam Truitt thought.

  But Holmes sat here, at the far end of the bench, to the chief justice’s left, when he was the junior justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

  So what the hell am I doing in old Ollie’s chair?

  Which was also, at various times, figuratively at least, the chair of Brandeis, Cardozo, Black, Frankfurter, and Brennan. Giants of jurisprudence whose thundering pronouncements were engraved in stone for the ages. Men of soaring intellect and towering integrity.

  How will I even begin to measure up?

  It was a rare moment of insecurity for Sam Truitt, who frequently was described as egotistical and vain, even by his friends. His enemies called him a left-wing, Ivy League intellectual snob who was out of touch with the real world. But friends and enemies alike agreed that he was brilliant and eloquent. His opponents feared that eventually, with a long enough tenure, he would be worth two or three votes on the Court, using his superior intellect and persuasive skills to sway others.

  At the moment, though, Truitt wasn’t capable of persuading cats to chase mice. Deep in a crisis of confidence, drowning in waves of self-doubt, he was an imposter, a graffiti artist in the Louvre, a trespasser in a shrine.

  Though he was a broad-shouldered man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a former athlete still fit at forty-six, at the moment, he felt he was a dwarf in the imposing, marble-columned courtroom.

  Sam Truitt still had not recovered from the confirmation process. Looking back now, the stinging vitriol of the personal attacks had caught him by surprise. On CNN and before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans hauled out their hatchet men, and the sound bites dug deep wounds. He remembered his discomfort at being grilled by Senator Thornton Blair of South Carolina, mouthpiece for the right-wing Family Values Foundation.

  “So if ah git this right, Per-fessor Truitt,” Blair droned, waving a fistful of Truitt’s Harvard Law Review articles on civil liberties, “you’d hire gay teachers but ban the Bible in our schools. You’d give away condoms to our innocent children and take away guns from our law-abiding citizens. You’d have federal marshals protect baby-killing abortionists but leave the public defenseless against rapists and murderers. Does that about sum it up, Per-fessor?”

  “That’s a fallacious representation of my views,” Truitt said, sweating under the lights, sounding uptight and uncool, even to himself.

  “Fal-la-cious, is it?” the senator asked rhetorically, making the word sound obscene. “When’s the last time you attended church, Per-fessor?”

  “I don’t see the relevance of that,” Truitt said, backpedaling, trying to keep his feet on a rolling log in a treacherous river.

  “Didn’t think you would,” Blair said, turning to the committee chairman. “With lawyers as thick as fleas on an old hound, you’d think the president could find one that reads the Good Book on Sunday mornings.”

  The hate mail delivered to his Cambridge office had shocked Truitt. Protesters spewed invective and picketed in Harvard Square, calling him a card-carrying ACLU leftist and a pornography worshiper who cared more about spotted owls and snail darters than jobs and families.

  Despite the uproar, the Senate had confirmed him, and if the 53-47 vote was not exactly a resounding vote of confidence, it should no longer matter. He was appointed for life, or more precisely, in the words of the Constitution, during “good Behaviour.”

  With a capital B.

  Sam Truitt intended to lead an exemplary life on the Court. He would do nothing to attract the attention of the Family Values Foundation, which had begun a “Truitt Watch,” promising an impeachment petition at his first lapse. He had a single blemish in his past “Behaviour,” one that attracted the attention of the FBI when he was on th
e president’s short list for the nomination. Ten years earlier, a law student named Tracey had filed a sexual harassment claim against him after he slept with her, but nonetheless gave her a C in constitutional law. He had remained true to his academic virtue-if not his marital vows-but Tracey believed he had not held up his end of the unstated bargain.

  In truth, she had seduced him, but still, he had violated university rules. Stupid.

  With a capital S.

  In case he didn’t know just how stupid, his wife, Connie, had fixed him with that icy, New England smile and said, “Next time you screw a student, Sam, spare me the humiliation and give her an A.”

  Before the misconduct claim could be heard, Tracey dropped out of law school, sparing him an ethical dilemma. Would he have told the truth?

  Sure I screwed her, but she wanted it.

  Oh, brilliant. Just brilliant. Want some more, Dean? The Veritas , the whole Veritas, and nothing but the Veritas.

  While I was grading her paper on the legality of strip searches at border patrol stations, she came into my office and pulled up her skirt. “Want to pat me down, Officer?” She was young and willing and hot, and God help me, I’m just a man.

  With a small m.

  Or would he have lied?

  I never touched her. She is obviously a deeply troubled young woman with an overactive imagination.

  That would have violated his principles, but thankfully, he never had to confront the question. Ironic, he thought how his personal life did not live up to his professional standards.

  Now, he had taken a vow of monogamy, which in his marriage was akin to a vow of chastity. When he told this to Connie, she laughed and said, “Don’t forget poverty. You’ve taken that vow, too, and dragged me with you.”

  Poverty to Connie meaning the inability to afford a summer home in the Hamptons.

  But he was serious about living a blameless life. No scandals in or out of Court. No ammunition for the Foundation’s muskets. He wanted a long, productive career, writing cogent opinions that would live forever in our jurisprudence. He wanted to join the thirty-year club with Marshall Story, Holmes, Black, Douglas, and Brennan.

  I’ll drive my enemies crazy and then out-live them.

  But that morning, Truitt was worried about getting through his first day, not his first decade on the Court. He felt as if he had sneaked into the ornate building. Just after dawn, he’d come up the steps and paused before the giant six-ton bronze doors. Even earlier, he’d sat on a bench on the oval plaza, the Capitol glowing behind him in the rosy early morning light. At the base of the flagpoles, he’d noted the scales of justice, the sword and book, the mask and torch, the pen and mace. He’d gazed up at the two marble figures flanking the steps, seated as if on thrones, Justice on one side, Authority on the other. Above him, sixteen huge marble columns supported a towering pediment with a sculpture of an enthroned Liberty guarded by other symbolic figures. Atop it all was engraved the lofty phrase, EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.

  In a place where the figures were carved from marble, he had feet of clay.

  It was a building to be entered triumphantly on the back of an elephant, following a cavalcade of golden trumpets and shimmering banners. Instead, he felt like a thief in the night.

  And now, Samuel Adams Truitt-at least the name sounded like he belonged here-sat in Holmes’s chair at the wing-shaped bench of gleaming Honduran mahogany, looking toward the heavens, or at least toward the four-story-high coffered ceiling, when he heard the voice of God.

  “Justice Truitt!” the voice boomed.

  Chief Justice Clifford P. Whittington both sounded and looked like God, if you pictured the Creator as a sixty-seven-year-old Iowan with a barrel chest, a rugged profile that, like the statues, could be carved from marble, and long, wavy white hair swept back and curling up at the neck.

  Startled, Truitt swiveled toward the front of the courtroom. “Chief,” he answered.

  The chief justice strode toward the bench. He looked vigorous enough to vault the bronze railing that separated the public section from the lawyers’ gallery.

  “Getting a little head start on the rest of us?” the C.J. bellowed, his deep voice resounding in the cavernous chamber. “Or just walking the field before the game?”

  The game.

  The sole point of common ground between the two men, Truitt thought, was that they both had played football in college. Whittington had been a lineman at Yale in the days before face masks-though some liberal academics claimed he played too long without a helmet-then went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He was a Renaissance man, a throwback, a midwestern farm boy who beat the eastern intellectuals on their turf at their game. He liked to think of himself as a common-sense judge with traditional values. Truitt considered him rigid, small-minded, and mired in the past.

  Truitt also knew that the chief had huddled with Senator Blair, feeding him damaging questions for the Judiciary Committee hearings. If there was one man in America that Whittington did not want on the Court, it was the glamour boy from Harvard who appeared on even more news shows than the biggest publicity slut on the Court, Whittington himself.

  “It’s customary for the chief justice to chat privately with a new member of the brethren,” Whittington said, somewhat ceremoniously. By this time, Truitt was making his way down from the bench. It didn’t seem proper to have the chief looking up at him.

  “Can we still call ourselves brethren when we have two women on the bench?” Truitt asked with a smile.

  “I don’t know,” the chief replied with a malicious grin. “I hear you’re the expert on sexual harassment, Professor.”

  Touche.

  “I just figured you were doing some field research,” the chief continued, eyes twinkling.

  “Actually, I’ve written extensively about sex discrimination,” Truitt said.

  “So you have. I read your piece on the male-only military college case. You didn’t much care for my dissent.”

  “I just thought it was too late in the day to allow a public college to bar women. The states can no longer discriminate based on gender, race, or sexual preference.”

  “‘No longer’? I rather like that term. It implies that the Court has changed, which it damn well has. But the Constitution hasn’t changed, except for those twenty-seven amendments. So, how do you explain it Sam? How did we get so far from the framers’ original intent?”

  “We haven’t. They simply weren’t faced with these questions in the context of the current era. If Madison or. Jefferson were alive today, I doubt they’d disagree with giving women the right to vote which took an amendment to their Constitution. I wrote a piece called, ‘Whose Original Intent?’ in which-”

  “Read that one, too, and didn’t agree with a damn thing. As for your forays into legal realism, inviting judges to ignore precedent and use the social sciences to shape our lives, well it’s just plain dangerous. Then there’s your essay on legal pragmatism. There are no grand foundational principles, eh Sam.” The chief raised his bushy eyebrows. “Being a legal pragmatist means never having to say you have a theory.”

  “That’s a bit of an oversimplification.”

  The older man beamed a photogenic, white-toothed grin. He was still tan from a summer at Martha’s Vineyard, where he enjoyed tweaking the noses of Boston’s liberal establishment at clambakes and cocktail parties. Truitt looked directly into the chief justice’s eyes. The two men were the same height, six two, though the chief probably weighed twenty-five pounds more than Truitt.

  “You probably think I’m a troglodyte,” the chief said.

  “I think you like getting a rise out of people, particularly the junior-most justice.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong about that, but I mean what I say. You know what makes me a good judge, Sam… hell, a great judge?”

  “Modesty?” Truitt ventured.

  Whittington laughed. It was a big man’s laugh, water tumbling over a falls. “Because I don’t have an agenda. I do
n’t give a rat’s ass if a woman has an abortion. But I object to this Court finding a constitutional right of privacy when the sacred document doesn’t mention the word.”

  “Needless to say, I-”

  “Save your breath, Sam. I know your position.”

  Truitt wondered what the judicial conference would be like, the chief’s thunderous voice shouting down all dissent. He was reminded of Samuel Goldwyn’s famous line to a young screenwriter: “When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”

  “I’ll tell you something else,” the chief rumbled. “ Miranda is a disgrace. Hell, now the cops have to urge a defendant not to confess. I’d overrule the so-called exclusionary rule, too. If the constable blunders, why should the criminal go free?”

  “I suppose you’d like to do away with the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.”

  “Not entirely,” Whittington said, without a trace of irony. “But what’s the trial judge required to do when a defendant doesn’t take the stand?”

  The old buzzard’s treating me like a first-year law student.

  “The judge instructs the jurors that they’re not permitted to draw an adverse inference from the defendant’s failure to testify,” Truitt said, straining to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

  “Doesn’t that just fly in the face of common sense? Why shouldn’t the jury consider just why the little weasel didn’t even try to contradict the evidence against him?”

  “Because this Court held that such an instruction compelled the defendant to be a witness against himself.”

  “A ridiculous decision!” Whittington roared. “I’d overrule it if I had the votes.”

  A door opened, and a marshal in a blue blazer-perhaps attracted by the noise, most of which came from the chief-stuck his head inside, saw the two men, and ducked out again.