Judgment

by Joseph Finder

  Juliana took it and glanced at it. It read PHILIP HERSH, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, and listed an address in the Park Colonnade Building in downtown Boston and a phone number.

  “A private investigator?” she asked. “And you trust him?”

  “With my life. Because I have . . . Trusted him with my life.”

  There was a long silence. Neither woman spoke for a while. Finally Juliana said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” said Martha. “I don’t. It was a long time ago.”

  Juliana nodded. It felt like she was on the verge of something life-changing, something permanent and irreversible. She put the card facedown on the table, touched it with her fingertips, feeling the cardboard as if it were warm and alive. She drummed her fingers on it for a few beats.

  “What do you think he can do for me?”

  “You are being extorted,” Martha said. “Blackmailed. You have to fight fire with fire.”

  “That’s not who I am.”

  Martha sighed. “Do you know how hard people have worked to help you get where you are?”

  They both knew Martha was referring to herself. “I know,” Juliana said, “and I’m incredibly grateful.”

  “You have so much at stake. You’re being mentioned in the right circles now. Governor Wickham is behind you. You’re being talked about for other judgeships. And maybe one day not too far in the future—who knows. The high court. You have a bright future ahead of you. And you need to play this right. We need to make this go away.”

  “And how can this PI make it go away?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Maybe by turning the tables on this—what’s his name?”

  “Matías.”

  “Right. Track him down. Find out who he’s working for. If you’re trying to outplay a blackmailer, you need to get the goods on him.”

  She nodded.

  “Honey, everyone has a little smudge on them,” Martha said. “Why do you think our robes are black? So they don’t show the dirt.”

  14

  The Park Colonnade Building had been built in the 1920s and still had a vague sort of Roaring Twenties feel to it, all the swooping gold paint on the ceiling, the high-gloss tile floor, the gold letter boxes. Juliana half-expected flappers with feathered headdresses to be thronging the lobby and a newsboy in a flat cap shouting, “Read all about it!” On the third floor, down a long, gloomy corridor, she found Hersh Investigations, gold-leaf letters on a frosted-glass panel inset in a heavy oak door. It looked period-appropriate. Ironic. Like a film noir prop. She knocked on the door, then went to turn the knob. It was locked. In a few seconds a shape loomed behind the glass panel and then the knob turned and the door opened.

  The man she assumed was Philip Hersh wore horn-rimmed eyeglasses and was balding, with a short gray fringe above his ears. He looked like a shrink from the days of the old Bob Newhart Show. Or a 1970s talk show host. Despite the heat, he was wearing a corduroy jacket over a mock turtleneck.

  Her second impression was that he was a very unhappy man. You could see it in his eyes, in the lines in his face.

  “Judge,” he said. “Come on in.”

  It was a tiny one-room office, not much more than a closet, with a crowded desk in one corner. Not promising, she thought. Certificates and plaques in black frames adorned one wall in a haphazard arrangement; the other walls were lined with bookcases filled with criminal law volumes and law dictionaries and journals.

  In front of the desk was one ladder-back chair piled high with magazines. The visitor’s chair. He hoisted the magazines away and said gently, “Please, have a seat.” He sat behind the desk and moved aside a stack of books so he had a direct line of sight to her. “Tell me how I can help you.”

  “I’m being blackmailed,” she began.

  * * *

  —

  Hersh asked dozens of questions about that night in Chicago, things she was embarrassed to talk about, especially with a total stranger. She was surprised at the range, the granularity of her recall. No, he had no tattoos that she saw. No, she was sure she hadn’t seen him before that evening in the rooftop bar. Yes, she would have noticed him; he was an attractive man. Not in the lobby, not in an elevator; no, she’d not seen him before.

  “Do you know whether he is in fact a lawyer or not?”

  She shook her head. “Not for a fact, no.”

  “Did you ask to see his credentials when he introduced himself in court?”

  “Of course not. That’s not my job.”

  “Do you think he lives in Boston?”

  “The lead defense attorney said he’s in the Chicago office of his law firm. So I assume he lives in the Chicago area. Do you think Matías Sanchez is his real name?”

  “We’ll see. It’s pretty simple to figure out if Matías Sanchez is admitted in Massachusetts. Just look in the Red Book. Won’t take long at all. When will you see him again?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “When he threatened you, did he give you a deadline?”

  “A ruling in their favor once I receive and review all of the Slack chats the defense wants withheld.” She shifted in her seat. “What can we do to neutralize his blackmail?”

  “We find out who he is and who he works for. That’s where we start. Then, if we’re very lucky, I catch him in the act of blackmailing you.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “No guarantees. I’ll do what I can. How did you get assigned this case? Did you choose it?”

  “It was randomly assigned to me.”

  He smirked. “Randomly,” he said. “I wonder. Are you being followed?”

  “Followed? How would I know?”

  “You might not.” He was quiet for a long while. Then he said, “Well, you might start to notice the same person in different locations. Or cars that seem to be lurking in your neighborhood.”

  “If they’re any good, I suspect I wouldn’t see any trace of them, right?”

  “Unless they want you to know they’re there.”

  “Huh.”

  “Can you summon Matías and the other lawyers in on some pretext?”

  “I suppose I could. But why?”

  “The more you interact with Matías, the better, from my standpoint. The more opportunities for me to follow him, trace him.”

  “What happens when you do? If you do?”

  “Then we’ll have some decisions to make.”

  “All right. Let me ask you something, just putting it right out there. Do you think they’ll release the tape, make it public? Could that really happen?”

  He shrugged, scowled. “Look, you take every precaution to prevent disaster. Knowing you may fail.”

  “Dark,” she said.

  “But what do I know?” he said with a hollow laugh.

  15

  Saturday night was the big St. Jude’s fundraiser, which everyone in the Boston political world attended, a black-tie benefit at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Duncan didn’t do black tie; he wore his black suit with a black necktie—he wore the same thing to funerals—and considered that a major concession to the powers that be. Because he’d gained a little weight in the last couple of years, he wasn’t able to button the suit jacket.

  Neither Juliana nor Duncan especially liked black-tie affairs, but Duncan particularly disliked them. She wondered if it was because most of the time, they were invited because she was Judge Brody, and maybe he didn’t enjoy being Mr. Judge Brody instead of Duncan Esposito. But he’d never admit it.

  And who could blame him for feeling that way? In his world, at the law school, he was the great Professor Esposito. Funky Dunc. The editor of a widely used anthology on critical legal studies. He had groupies.

  She remembered one in particular.

  Three years ago he started leaving carbs on his plate, working out regular
ly, paring his mini-paunch. He took the stairs two at a time. He started wearing cologne. He was looking especially good, and she told him so.

  Then one day his phone made a text-message alert sound when he was out of the room, having left his phone on the hall table next to hers. She wasn’t sure whose phone had just pinged. She picked up her own, saw nothing, picked up Duncan’s, and saw a message from a “Jenna” that contained an emoticon of a blushing smiley face.

  She called Duncan’s name and handed him his phone. Her facial expression told him she’d seen something.

  He noticed and glanced at his phone, and his face went red.

  “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?” she asked.

  To Duncan’s credit, he said, “Yeah.”

  His voice sounded faraway. She became hyperaware of her surroundings, of the dust motes floating in the sunbeam that transected the hallway, the ticking of the house settling, the distant throaty snarl of a snowblower. She thought, This moment is the divider between before and after.

  “Look,” he said, “I guess this girl has a crush on me. One of those ‘hot for teacher’ things, God help us. I mean, what am I supposed to do? I can’t kick her out of class.” He sounded casual yet at the same time slightly . . . rehearsed.

  And there was something evasive about the way he was acting. He folded his legs in a way he rarely did, and he kept avoiding her eyes.

  So that was his story—a law student named Jenna had fallen in love with him, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Part of her wanted to be content with that. Because she knew that sometimes foraging around for the marital truth was sort of like thrusting your hand down a jammed garbage disposal to retrieve a paring knife. Maybe you grasp it by the handle. Maybe by the blade. And maybe the damned thing starts grinding again.

  But she couldn’t leave it alone.

  She ferreted out the girl’s name, went through her Facebook and Instagram feeds. She asked Duncan to show her the text-message thread before the one with the blushing-smiley-face emoticon. She knew that couldn’t have been the first time they’d exchanged texts.

  He took out his phone and found the one from Jenna and handed the phone to her. She looked, saw that there were no texts before blushing smiley face, and she suddenly felt cold. He’d deleted all the earlier ones.

  Which meant that he had a reason to do so.

  A few days later she brought it up again. He admitted that maybe he hadn’t totally discouraged Jenna.

  “So what are we talking?” she said. “Anthony Weiner–style crotch shots?”

  “No, God no, nothing like that.”

  “Just friendly flirtation, then?”

  He closed his eyes momentarily, looked down for a long time, then looked up. “I’m so sorry. But nothing happened. That’s the truth. Nothing happened.”

  Nothing happened.

  Maybe.

  Yet she knew that Duncan had been transforming himself for a reason. He was thinking about this girl, about the possibility of an affair, all the time. Nothing happened. That was one truth. Another was: everything happened.

  Soon the conversation turned to trust. Duncan said, “If you can’t trust me, our marriage has problems a lot more serious than a student with a crush on me. I’m telling you that nothing happened, and that’s the goddamned truth, and if you think I’m lying to your face right now, I’d like to know. Because I’d like to know how things really are between us.”

  He was aiming the big guns at her now, and she backed down. “Okay,” she said.

  He came close and stroked her hair. He was close enough that his beard tickled her face. “You know I love you, right?” he said. “You know you’re the most important thing in my life, right?”

  “I know,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

  That had been three years ago.

  * * *

  —

  At the gala, Juliana knew she looked good. She was wearing her Michael Kors suit. She’d just gotten a manicure. She wore her hair up in a chignon. She and Duncan entered the ballroom arm in arm, and she searched the crowd for a familiar face.

  There were plenty of familiar faces. The owner of the New England Patriots was talking to the CEO of Fidelity Investments. The CEO of Liberty Mutual Insurance was picking shrimp from a large ice sculpture. A guy she’d worked with years ago at the US Attorney’s office was chatting up someone she didn’t recognize. At a distance she spied Martha Connolly, talking with the governor.

  She found herself next to Noah Miller, a senior partner at a big Boston law firm she knew only casually. A real power lawyer. Miller was a portly, rumpled man in his mid-fifties with curly black hair ringing a large bald spot and penetrating brown eyes behind rimless glasses. He was holding a rocks glass of bourbon, most of it gone.

  “How’s it going, Noah?”

  “Can’t complain, and no one listens anyway. So what’s on your docket these days?”

  She sighed theatrically. “About a thousand cases.”

  “I heard you have a sex-harassment suit against the CEO of that start-up Wheelz.”

  “Yup.”

  “You haven’t granted summary judgment already?” A standard motion, made regularly but seldom granted. She had the power, theoretically, to dismiss the case. Shut it down. Wheelz’s lawyers had filed a motion asking for summary judgment at the start, and she’d denied it quickly. Rachel Meyers had a real case and had the right to a trial.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Huh.” Like he found that puzzling.

  She gave him a sharp look. How much did he know about this? Had he been following the case for some reason? “Well, we’ll see where it goes.”

  “Because, you know, it’s a Porta-Potty. Nobody comes out smelling good.”

  She nodded, alert. Why did he care?

  “How’s Chandra?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Chandra’s spending the week at Canyon Ranch. Something about a purge?”

  “You sure you don’t mean a cleanse?”

  “Either way, you want to get that steaming pile of whatever off your docket ASAP. Purge it. Or cleanse it. Colonically irrigate it. You’ll feel so much better.” He grinned. “Just my avuncular two cents, huh?”

  She smiled tightly. “Got it, thanks.”

  She wondered why Noah Miller was so emphatic about flushing the Wheelz case. Did he have some connection to Wheelz, or to the CEO? Maybe she was just making too much out of nothing.

  A guy from the US Attorney’s office waved her over and introduced her to the new US Attorney. They chatted for a few minutes, and then a text came in on her phone.

  It was from Hersh, and it read, Found him. Meet me in the Dunkin’ Donuts on Stuart Street in 15.

  She knew where that Dunkin’ Donuts was, just a block away from the hotel. She needed to escape from the fundraiser and meet Hersh, find out what he knew about Matías. Which meant temporarily abandoning Duncan.

  Someone suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders, startling her. As she spun around, she realized she was facing the governor of Massachusetts, a blandly handsome sixty-year-old man. He was with Martha Connolly, looking elegant and austere in a black satin sheath, and the senior senator of Massachusetts, looking very blow-dried.

  “This is the woman I was telling you about,” the governor said to the senator. “Not just a brilliant legal mind but no shortage of common sense. Book smart and street smart.”

  Juliana took the senator’s hand and introduced herself. She was so distracted, thinking about Matías and what she could possibly do now, that she had to ask him to repeat himself even though she could hear him just fine. She had a hard time concentrating on the conversation.

  “In Commonwealth v. Scofield,” the senator was saying. “Am I right?”

  Both Martha
and the governor laughed, so Juliana did too, a beat late.

  There was a pause, as the governor waited for her to reply. Scrambling for something to say, she said, “Sure.”

  Another pause, and then the governor, who was apparently a bit disappointed in her performance, gestured at the wineglass in her hand. “I think you’ve either had one too many of those, or one too few.” Everybody laughed uncomfortably, and Juliana joined them. Duncan was looking at her strangely. Normally, Juliana knew her lines; she could charm on cruise control. But tonight she was drying, as stage actors say. The lines weren’t coming.

  She excused herself a few minutes later, having waited as long as she could bear, and whispered to Duncan that she was going to find the girls’ room. She left the ballroom, ran down the carpeted steps as fast as she could in her heels to the lobby, and hurried past the concierge and out onto Dartmouth Street.

  The sky was dark, but the streetlights cast the sidewalk and the slick pavement in a sickly greenish tone. She walked down the street, turned left onto Stuart Street, and then a moment later she was startled by a voice right behind her.

  “Good evening, Judge.”

  It was Philip Hersh, but it took her a moment to recognize him. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox warm-up jacket over a Red Sox T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. No glasses. He was no longer a talk show host from the seventies; now he was, convincingly, a townie.

  She breathed out.

  “Found him,” Hersh said.

  16

  They sat at a table in Dunkin’ Donuts away from the window.

  “Where is he?”

  “In an extended-stay corporate hotel,” Hersh said.

  “Where?”

  “Allston.”

  “How’d you find him?”

  “Combed databases for social links, credit card use, that sort of thing. I did what I did and it worked, let’s put it that way.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “He doesn’t seem to leave his hotel room. It’s strange.”