Steve Martini - The Judge

“Now that that’s out of the way,” he says, “what do we do next?”

It is suddenly clear to me that he actually has no clue. A man who has spent twenty years in the law, a good part of it on the bench, he has not the slightest hint of a defense.

Lenore discusses first the question of an alibi, some good citizen who could vouch for Acosta’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. This is a problem, as the police have not as yet indicated their best guess as to when Hall was killed. Acosta compounds this, telling us that he was alone much of the day and that evening. Depressed, he’d parked his car at a turnout on the highway near the river. What he was contemplating while doing this he does not say, though the look in his wife’s eye, the glance she sends to Lenore, conveys volumes.

“No one saw you?” says Lenore. “You didn’t talk to anyone?”

“At the time I would have been poor company,” he says. “I wanted to be alone. I was upset.” According to him, he had bottomed out, having been removed from the bench by order of the supreme court the week before. In a fit of frustration he had fired his lawyer on the prostitution charge that morning.

“I understand,” she tells him. “Still, during that entire period, the day she was killed and that evening, you didn’t talk to anybody, by phone? Call a friend? Go anywhere where someone would have seen you?”

He shakes his head.

“Did you purchase anything? Food, gasoline? Perhaps a merchant who might remember you around the time that she died?”

More head shaking.

“What time did you get home that night?” I ask.

“I didn’t. I didn’t return home until the following afternoon. Sometime around two,” he says.

His wife confirms this sorry fact, that she was worried sick during this period.

We question Acosta as to any statements he may have made to the police following the murder. Unfortunately we don’t have the details of his precise words. He tells us that he made some equivocal comments concerning a note with his name on Hall’s calendar. Lenore and I exchange glances when he mentions this. It is the note she had seen that night.

According to Acosta, based on his confused statements, the police are now contending that he knew about this note, and that he was there the evening of the murder.

It is the rule of nature on the order of gravity that the desire to talk when in trouble is always a mistake.

“Is it possible that they have another suspect?” This happy thought is injected by Lenore.

“I don’t think so,” says Acosta.

“How can you be so sure?” she says.

“Because they have convened a grand jury to take evidence, and I have not been called to testify.”

Lenore looks at him slack-jawed. He doesn’t tell us where this information comes from, and we do not ask. The Capital County courthouse has more leaks than a pack of dogs with bad kidneys, and Acosta would of course know where each of these lifts its leg.

“A number of acquaintances have been called as witnesses,” he tells us. “Mind you, I don’t know what they were asked, or what they might have said under oath.”

“Give us a guess,” I say. Cat and mouse.

He gives a little shrug, a tilt of the head, best guess.

“If a prosecutor were to ask the right question, of the right witness. .” He makes a dried prune of his face, all wrinkles around the mouth, conjuring the possible. “One of them,” he says, “might mention certain rash statements. Some intemperate remarks made in a moment of anger.”

I let my silent stare ask the obvious.

“I was upset,” he says. “And I said some things.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t remember the exact words. I might have said something, called her a liar, maybe something worse.”

“Brittany Hall?”

He nods.

“I was angry. They set me up,” he says.

“Who?”

“The cops,” he says. The defense of every john: entrapment.

“The entire prostitution thing was a setup,” he says.

“And you were angry. You called her a liar. What else?” I say.

There’s a lot of rolling of eyes here, resolve turning to concession.

“I might have said something else.”

“What?” This is like pulling teeth.

“Maybe. . I don’t know. I might have wished her dead,” he tells us.

“I would think you might remember something like that,” I tell him.

Acosta shrugs.

“You told somebody you wished she was dead?”

“I might have said something like that. Called her some names,” he says, “and wished she were dead.”

“Terrific,” I say. “Can you remember the exact words?”

“Is that important?” he says.

“If the cops have talked to the witness,” I tell him.

He puts fingers to forehead, like the Great Karnak summoning all his powers.

“I think I might have said that death was too good for the cunt.” The Coconut’s loose translation of wishing someone dead.

“Wonderful. And this death wish. Who was it made to?” I ask.

“You have to understand,” he says. “After the arrest none of them would talk to me. They passed me in the hall as if I were a ghost. People I had worked with for twenty years pretended they didn’t know me. My own clerk called in sick the next morning. Can you believe it? My own clerk. And the others were laughing at me. . ”

“Who did you make the statement to?”

He gives me a large swallow, his Adam’s apple doing a half-gainer from the ten-meter platform.

“Oscar Nichols,” he says.

Nichols gets my vote for “Mr. Congeniality” on the bench, everyman’s judge on the superior court. Lawyers all love him because, like the village harlot, he is easy. An African-American in his early sixties, quiet and soft-spoken, he is judicious to a fault, seeing every side of every issue so that he is terminally paralyzed by indecision. Given his way, he would massage every case so that no one loses. I am not surprised that it was Nichols who became Acosta’s psychic shoulder to cry on in his time of trouble.

Even so, I am sucking air, breathless. I have a client trained in the law who makes statements to a sitting judge that may now be construed as a death threat against a dead witness.

“He was a friend,” says Acosta. The operative word no doubt being the one that puts this in the past tense.

“You don’t know any felons?” I ask him.

As soon as I utter these words I regret them. The expression on Acosta’s face at this moment is not one of anger or arrogance, but something I have not seen before. It is the lost look of anguish. It is a natural inclination that we hide our vulnerability from those we dislike or do not trust, and there is a galaxy of suspicion that separates the two of us.

In a world in which one’s occupation is interchangeable with his identity, Acosta is now a professional leper. Except for his wife and his liberty, he is a man who has lost it all.

The light on my com-line flashes. A second later the phone rings. I pick up the receiver.

“A gentleman out here to see you.”

“Who is it?”

“His name is Leo Kerns. An investigator from the D.A.’s office.”

“Leo? What does he want?”

“Says he needs to talk to you.”

“Be right out.”

I look at Lenore. “I’ll be right back.” I drop my pen on my notepad, right next to the closing quotation on the Coconut’s death threat. “Don’t lose my place.”

I’m out of my chair, leaving Lenore to cover the bases. Perhaps she’ll turn the conversation to something lighter, like Acosta’s possible disbarment.

The instant I am through the door, there is a dark sense, one of those premonitions a lizard must get just before becoming roadkill.