Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

She's still wavering, but the truth is that Nile won't want her on this case. She saw too much of his family, especially his father. Eddgar in those years was dangerous, cunning, a zealot who some claimed had even sponsored murders. Like father, like son. That's the thought Nile will be afraid of. With a wave, Sonny closes the discussion.

'We'll do it your way, Marietta. See what the defendant says. It was twenty-five years ago.'

'Sure,' says Marietta, and then seemingly takes a second to review in her own mind the twisted, long-attenuated connections Sonny has explained. She turns, then turns back with a vague smile, fixed on a predictable thought. 'So your boyfriend went off and got rich and famous and you was young and dumb and let him go?'

'I suppose.' Sonny laughs. Marietta has long intimated that Sonny has poor instincts for romance, hinting frequently that the judge has not properly renewed her social life.

'And you don't never hear from him or nothing?'

'Not in twenty-five years. We had a strange parting.' She smiles a bit, consoling Marietta, if not herself, then catches sight of the clock. 'Shit!' She is late for Nikki.

' Shit,' she says again and flies about the chamber stuffing papers she must study overnight into her briefcase. She runs down the hall, cursing herself, and feeling a lurking foreboding, as if this lapse with Nikki is symptomatic of a larger error. Dashing across the windowed gangway that connects the Annex to the main courthouse, she wonders again if she is doing something wrong, capitulating to whatever it is – the titillating yen for foregone things and the hope of being master over what once was daunting

– that comes with thoughts of the Eddgars and that period in her life. So often in this job there is never a correct decision. Far more frequently than she imagined when she was a law student, or even a practitioner, she chooses, as a judge, the alternative that seems, not right, but simply less wrong. And in some ways, this sense of being maladjusted, in the wrong place, has been a hallmark of her life. She often feels, like those people who believe in astrology, that her life has been driven by mysterious celestial forces. In earlier years, she came and went from things with alarming briskness, leaving men with little warning, passing through three different graduate programs and half a dozen jobs before she landed in law school.

Even now, she is not certain the bench is really right for her. It was an honor, and a convenient exit from the US Attorney's Office, where she had begun to repeat herself. At the most pragmatic level, becoming a judge met the desperate need of a single mother to control her working hours and, almost as important, kept her in the law. She had tired of the battle hymn of practice, the race going always to the aggressive and the shrewd. It had brought out the Sonny she least liked, the child always secretly wounded, and, as she explained to herself in the most secret way, had forced her to accept the world according to men. After Nikki – after Charlie – she wanted to have a working life that depended not on slick maneuvering and sly positions, but which was anchored instead by kindness, which had some feeling connection to what surged through her when she held her child, the emotions she knew, knew were truly the best, the lightest things in life. But is the serious-looking dark-haired woman of fading looks, the Sonny she envisions up on the bench, this person scolding and sentencing the vicious and the woe-torn, is that her?

She is alone now, racing along in the strange night world of the central courthouse, with its empty corridors and isolated, purposeful habitues: bail bondsmen, police officers. Her high heels resound along the marble. At this hour, arrests are processed here from across the city. A broad young Hispanic woman in a bold ill-fitting print camps with a far-off look on one of the granite benches positioned just outside the bank of metal detectors. She embraces a child of three or four, who faces her, asleep, black ringlets dampened to one side of her face. They are always here: mothers, babies, families exhausted by trouble, waiting in the wasted hope their men will be bailed, acquitted, somehow freed.

Racing by, Sonny smiles in fleeting communion. Stirred by this momentary connection, she finds urgent visions of Nikki beckoning to her again. She foresees the humbling scene which is waiting, Nikki a straggler at Jackie's, and Sonny apologizing, vowing nevermore, even as Jackie insists it's not a problem. It is the sight of Nikki herself that will be worst: already in her coat and backpack, wiping her nose on her coat sleeve, gripping Sonny's hand by the fingers and urging her to suspend apologies and to leave; that little life, ragged with the toil of her own day and the worry of a prolonged separation. Within Sonny, there is always the same recriminating thought: How many times did Zora do this to her? How many thousand? It is startling to find how near at hand the pain remains, still fully memorized, how clear the recollection of the occasions when her mother was gone. Gone to meetings. Gone to organize. Gone to touch someone else with all those grand important yearnings: for freedom. For dignity.

So this is who she is, Her Honor, Judge Sonia Klonsky. The sheer momentum of her passions has her dashing a few steps down the street toward her car. The night has entered that moment of magic dwindling light when the sky almost clamors with drama and perspective drains, so that the buildings, figures, trees, the small circling birds, the Center City looming beyond, seem to stand on top of one another in the reduced proportions of a diorama. Neon promises glow cheaply in the storefronts of the tatty bond emporia across the street: 'Bail. Fast. E-Z terms.' Gripped by the heartsore cycles of her life, any life, the vexing complications of this case, and the perpetual anguish that seeps like a pollutant into the air around the courthouse, she rushes on. She rushes with high feeling and a sudden silvery fragment of happiness lacing her heart. She is thinking of her child.

Seth

When the electronic bolt is disengaged admitting them to the guard desk at the Kindle County Jail, Seth Weissman finds that Hobie Turtle and he are not the sole civilians. A delivery man from Domino's, a skinny guy everyone calls Kirk, is also there with lunch.

' Yo,' he tells the three correctional officers and shoves off, counting his tip. The bolt is shot again, a potent sound of slamming metal, stark as a rifle shot, and Kirk departs. On the door a sheet of bulletproof glass has been mounted, but it is the bars beneath which occupy Seth's attention. They are squared off and thick with rust-resistant paint, a depleted shade of beige which is the color of everything here – the walls, the floor, even the reinforced-steel guard desk.

'Warden's got to clear any press interviews, man.' A guard waves his fingers, tainted with pizza grease, over the form Hobie has been filling out.

'Nobody doin any interviews, man,' says Hobie.

'Says right here,' 'Michael Frain. Profession: Journalist." ' The guard looks from the form to Seth twice, as if to assess whether the description fits.

'No, no, here's what I'm sayin now,' says Hobie. 'This young fella, your inmate, Nile Eddgar, he asked Mr Frain here to help him find counsel and he chose me. Okay? So he's part of the attorney visit.'

After another go-round the captain is summoned, an erect black man who looks longingly at the pizza but shows the discipline to first finish his business with them. Hobie holds forth with characteristic bluster, and the captain, wary of messing with the press or simply hungry, lets them go. They pass from one brick guardhouse to another. Their wallets are checked in a small tin locker, and another solemn correctional officer pats them down.