Steve Martini - The Judge

“What can we offer? Certainly he’s not going to cop a plea.”

He shakes his head, makes gestures with his palms open and down low, just off the surface of the desk, evidence that this is the farthest thought from his mind.

“Still.” He speaks before his hands have even hit the desk. “Your client has not been very cooperative,” says Kline. “He did refuse to talk to the police when they tried to interview him.”

“Well. We apologize for the insult,” I tell him. “But I’m sure the cops weren’t stunned by his silence.”

“Perhaps not. But you’d think an innocent man would be anxious to clear himself as a suspect.”

“Oh. So you think he can be cleared?”

“He might have been if he’d talked to us. How can we know all the facts when your man won’t cooperate?”

“I hope you took pains to explain that to the grand jury,” I tell him.

This draws his eyes into little slits. “It’s not I who is sitting here asking for bail,” he says.

“Good point,” I tell him. “And what exactly was it, what kind of information did the police want that might have cleared my client?” I ask.

He finally eases back in his chair, the fingers of both hands steepled under his chin.

“For starters,” he says, “information as to where he was at the time that Brittany Hall was killed.”

He wants to know if we have an alibi. To tell him that we do not would be to give aid and comfort. It is the one thing he cannot get in discovery, anything that is testimonial from our client. Kline has more brass than I would have credited.

“To know that,” I tell him, “we’d have to know the exact time of death.”

“Ah,” he says, smiling. “There’s the rub,” he says.

“How so?”

“For the moment we are able to fix that only within broad parameters.”

“How broad?” I say.

“Within a six-hour period.”

“That’s not broad,” I tell him. “That’s the cosmos.”

“We’re working on it,” he tells me.

I’ll bet. Unless Hall was seen alive by a witness or spoke to someone within a short period before her body was discovered, time of death is a matter of conjecture upon which medical evidence is a vast swearing contest, their experts versus ours.

“Still,” he says, “I would assume that if you had an ironclad alibi you would have given it to us by now?”

This is a fair assumption, but he would rather be certain.

“As the first syllable suggests,” I tell him, “assumptions have a funny way of biting the holder in the ass.”

Absent an alibi, the next best ploy is to keep Kline guessing. Investigators who are trying to exclude an alibi don’t have time to do other damage.

“It seems there is no basis for accommodation,” he says. There is no anger here, just a statement of brutal fact.

“A capital case, we must assume your client to be a flight risk. Certainly a risk to public safety,” he says. “I could not in good conscience agree to bail.”

I start to talk, but he cuts me off.

“It’s been nice,” he tells me. He’s on his feet, walking me to the door.

“You really should reconsider your position in the case,” he says. “At least inform yourself as to Ms. Goya’s motives.”

Suddenly I find his hand inside of mine, bidding me farewell, smoother than I could have imagined. His office door closes and actually hits me in the ass. I am left with the certain assessment that Coleman Kline is not the lawyer simpleton I’d been led to expect.

“The man is angry because his ego has gotten him in over his head,” she says. This is Lenore’s answer to Kline’s assertion of a vendetta.

Tonight she stands in the doorway to my kitchen, the tips of her thick dark hair grazing her shoulders, the whites of her eyes flashing in contrast to her tawny complexion. Her hands are on her hips. Lenore cuts a formidable and enticing figure when she is angry.

“Think about it,” she says. “He was willing to take on Acosta on the misdemeanor because it was low risk, high theater,” she says. “A judge on the hook. Now he has to do the murder case or lose face in the office.”

Lenore tells me that at least three of Kline’s senior deputies, people who were there before the change of regime, are entertaining thoughts of challenging him in the next election. These are civil servants whose job protection carries more armor than a medieval knight. Backing away on the murder case, handing it to subordinates to try, would be an admission by Kline that he is not up to the job.

She retreats far enough into the kitchen to grab the pot of coffee off the counter and is back in the dining room offering refills.

“Besides,” she says, “Kline would say anything to undercut me.”

None of this, of course, answers the charge that her representation of Acosta is motivated by all the wrong instincts. Acosta’s case is taking on all the signs of a feudal bloodletting.

Tonight we are assembled around the table in my dining room, a working dinner which we have just finished, Lenore, Harry, and I. We are sampling liqueurs with coffee. Harry wants to know if he gets paid even if he can’t remember details tomorrow. He has given up the coffee and is now alternating straight shots of creme de menthe and Kahlúa from his cup.

Sarah is playing with Lenore’s two daughters, ages eleven and ten, older girls whom she idolizes. She has reached the age at which her entire lexicon is reduced to a single word: “Cool.” The kids have disappeared into Sarah’s upstairs bedroom as if they had died and gone to heaven, the only evidence of their existence the occasional thumping of feet and laughter overhead.

Since my wife, Nikki, died of cancer nearly two years ago I have tried to spend as much time as possible with Sarah, dividing my life between my daughter and that jealous mistress that is the law. It has not been easy. There have been crying jags and shouting, not all of these emanating from Sarah.

As a father in Nikki’s parental wake it was always easy to be the good cop. Nikki was the law under our roof. She loved our daughter very much. It was out of that love that she held to standards while I became the perennial soft touch. Now I must wear both hats, partier and disciplinarian, and Sarah’s take on the latter is that her mother would always and invariably have cut more slack. I have a whole new respect for single parents and the forces that play on them.

Before us on the dining table are stacks of manila folders, legal files with labels and burgeoning stacks of paper. Harry has spent the afternoon organizing and digesting the first bits of discovery from Acosta’s case, mostly police reports and preliminary notes from their investigation. The first thing I notice is that some of these are authored by another client, Tony Arguillo.

“Worried about a conflict?” says Harry.

It is an issue, a cardinal rule in the law that an attorney may not represent two clients with adverse interests. The fear here is that Tony, should he become a witness against Acosta, might be victimized on the stand by me should I possess confidential information derived in my role as Tony’s lawyer: something to discredit him on the stand, knowledge of a crime or other misdeed. It is one reason that criminal lawyers do not make a habit of representing peace officers.

“Has Tony told you anything that might compromise him?” says Lenore.

“If he did I couldn’t tell you,” I say. In point of fact he has not. I am probably the only person in whom he has not confided.

Lenore guesses that this is only a potential problem. “We can avoid it by finding other counsel for Tony. A substitution,” she says. “Besides, his part in the grand jury probe is over.”

The fact that she knows he has testified is itself a violation of confidence.