Steve Martini: The Judge

I darken his door, leaving him to think the worst, that perhaps Lenore was there as an official emissary of the prosecutor’s office, some part of a dark deal for Tony’s testimony. Better this than the truth. I will have to get to Tony before he does.

“We oughta talk again sometime,” he says.

“I’ll bring the court reporter,” I tell him, and I am gone.

Leo Kerns is one of those overweight balding little men who would look like a gnome except for the perennial scowl on his face. I have known him for a dozen years, and he has worn that look for every one of them. It comes with the turf, his job as a D.A.’s investigator, the place I once worked in another life, and where we were friends.

“Shoulda called. I woulda dressed,” he says.

Leo is standing in the doorway to his apartment in a tank-top shirt, black hair bristling from both armpits like quills on a porcupine. He has a gut like Buddha. I can smell his last meal and beer on his breath.

“What’s it been-a year?” he asks.

“At least,” I tell him. “But you’re looking good.”

“Right, getting younger all the time,” he says. “Except that now all the hair on my head is growing down, comin’ out my ears and nose.”

I can’t tell if anybody else is inside the apartment. Perhaps an inopportune moment for a visit. Leo is single and not a ladies’ man, though he has been known to entertain a few barflies.

“I’d invite you in but the place is a mess,” he says.

“No reflection on its occupant,” I tell him. We both laugh and finally he swings the door open.

“How ’bout a beer?” he says.

Saying no to Leo on this would be like refusing a peace pipe. He plucks the can from its plastic mesh and holds it up, label out.

“This okay?”

“My favorite. Warm,” I tell him.

His own can in hand, he settles backward into the couch, a place where his behind fits like some oversize baseball in the pocket of a catcher’s mitt, a well-worn spot across from the television, which is on, spouting some nonsense game show.

All of this, sitting down, brings a lot of heavy breathing from Leo. Kerns is what the people who do actuarial work-ups for insurance companies would call “high risk.”

“Take a load off.” He gestures toward an armchair in the corner, its fabric so worn that if the thing moved I would attribute it to the molting season. The TV is in my ear. He says something but I cannot make it out.

He finds the remote and exercises his thumb on the volume.

“Ever watch this?” he asks.

I look at the screen.

“A cultural watershed,” I tell him.

“Yeah, and the hostess has good tits,” says Leo. He mutes the sound but doesn’t turn it off, his eyes glued to the set as if he’s waiting for his two favorite peaks to appear.

“I take it you didn’t come by for beer and conversation?”

“How could you think that?” I tell him.

He smiles, and we talk about the D.A.’s office, changes in the investigative staff since Kline’s ascendancy. Leo tells me there is a good deal of insecurity, people who were bosom buddies yesterday now willing to slip a shiv in your spine. Leo would know. He has his own carefully honed collection of these.

“It’s no longer fun getting up and going to work,” he tells me. Like this has always been a major pleasure point in Leo’s life.

“Sounds like good cause for disability,” I commiserate.

“If safety retirement offered a presumption for working with assholes, I’d be out fishing,” he tells me.

“Kline and his entourage are that bad?”

“Having to say ‘good morning’ to that prick is enough to get a prescription for Valium,” he says. He calls him a “Jesus freak.” In Leo’s lexicon this could fit anybody who has darkened the door of a church in the last decade.

He has complained about every D.A. elected in the county in this century, while he searched for the crease in their ass and puckered his lips. He has climbed over the carcasses of dead colleagues in three different regimes to become a supervisor. If Stalin took over tomorrow, Leo would show up for work dressed like Beria the next day.

“Seems like lately we spend all day reinventing the wheel,” he complains. According to Leo, Kline insists the best ones have four corners. He follows this with a few carefully chosen profanities, all synonyms for his employer.

“You should get other work,” I tell him.

“Yeah, right, at my age.” What offends Leo is the last word in my comment, the one that starts with W. Besides, where else would he find such intrigue?

“Just when you get one of these fuckers well trained,” he says, “the voters turn his ass out of office.” Leo talks as if the elected D.A. were Pavlov’s dog, and the army of perennial bureaucrats were a form of the canine corps with choke chains and training leashes.

I remind him that Nelson left as DA. to take the bench.

“Same thing,” he says. “We were finally getting on with him. A good prosecutor,” he calls him. This is in stark contrast to the nouns and adjectives he used to describe the man two years ago.

“This one’s a humorless, tight-ass. . fuckin’ soul saver.” To Leo religion is a crime.

“Yes. I’ve heard that he prays to the bush in his office,” I tell him.

He cuts his tirade in mid-syllable and he looks at me, wondering if perhaps I am serious.

“Someone has seen this?” he says. Leo would like pictures so that he could get Kline certified to the state booby hatch.

“No. They’ve just smelled the bush burning,” I tell him.

It takes him an instant before he realizes that I am kidding and he cracks a smile.

“Maybe they’ll do like Nelson,” he says.

I give him a look.

“Appoint the fucker to the bench.” He’s talking about Kline.

This would suit Leo. Take someone whose personal views offend him, and make him a judge so that Leo’s life of indolence could be made easier.

“Talking about judges,” he says, “you heard about Acosta?”

“Read it in the paper,” I tell him. “Cried all night.”

My problems with the Coconut are well-known, a matter of record among the D.A.’s staff.

“Yeah. I figured you’d be out selling tickets for a table at the wake,” says Leo. “Maybe that’s why you came by this evening?” He’s back to the main course. Wondering why I am here.

“In a manner. It has to do with Acosta, and the grand jury,” I tell him. “Got a client, a cop. Good cop.” This puts me on the side of the angels. “But he’s gotten himself a little sideways with. . ”

“Tony Arguillo,” he says. Before I can finish my pitch Leo is on me. If it slithers through the bushes in this county Kerns knows about it.

I make a gesture, like “There you have it.”

“And you’re wondering how this good cop got himself in all this trouble?”

I’m making a lot of hand gestures, bobs and weaves with my head, all of which add up to “yes.”

“Word is, it’s the company he keeps,” says Leo.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s gotten in with some bad people.”

“Lano and his crowd?” I say.

Leo says nothing, but I can tell by his silence that this is exactly what he means.

“I grant you Lano,” I say, “is not someone I would take home to meet the family. And I’m aware of the allegations, skimming from the pension fund. Still it seems like a bit of overkill,” I tell him. “Roll out the canons. Call up the grand jury. Sounds like a little union busting to me.”

“If that were all of it,” he says.

I take a bead on Leo. He is a bullshitter extraordinaire, but there are moments when you know he is dead serious.