Steve Martini - The Judge

“You know you owe me big time for this,” he says, his mouth bulging.

“What’s the matter? You want another hot dog, Leo?”

“Fuck you,” he says. “I mean big time. It’d be my ass if they knew I was helpin’ you. If they even saw us talking.”

Leo would like me to believe that I now owe him my life. With Kerns, the amassing of guilt in others is a business, like the church coining sin and selling dispensation to the sinners.

“You could at least tell me what’s happening,” he says. “Why you wanna see this guy?”

“That’s for me to know, Leo.”

“Yeah, right. I look like a mushroom,” he says. “Everybody wants to keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.” Leo droning on. “After all, I’m not looking for anything privileged,” he says.

This is big of him.

“They don’t tell me a damn thing anymore. Like I don’t exist,” he says.

Leo’s ego has taken a beating in the last several months. He is finding it more difficult than he thought to regain his footing following Kline’s election.

“The man won’t let me get close,” he says. “I wanna help,” he says, “but he won’t let me.” Leo now bears the disfigurement of a permanent pucker from mentally pursing his lips in quest of his boss’s behind.

These days he is relegated to drunk driving cases, accidents in which some bodily injury has occurred. He is sent to reconstruct the scene of the crime. He hasn’t seen a homicide in over a year.

What worries Leo is the young cadre coming up, a handful of investigators in their thirties, several of whom are making gains with Kline. Kerns has visions, over-the-shoulder looks from others engaged in hand-to-mouth conversations, all eyes on him. It is the kind of thing that tends to grow a kernel of truth in one’s patch of paranoia.

For three months now Kline has had one of the other deputies in the office riding roughshod on Leo. Carl Smidt is known as “the Hatchet”-management’s quickest route to an early retirement. Leo has called Smidt a tight-ass-behind his back, of course-a corporate-set piece to Kline. Word is that Leo has been marked for oblivion. He is seen as the unsavory remnant of an earlier age: “B.P.C.,” Before Politically Correct.

He takes another peek across the street, and while he is looking away, I throw Leo a bone.

“Smidt cannot be entirely without a partying soul,” I tell him. “After all, he’s the subject of a formal complaint for harassment.”

Leo nearly loses his lunch coming back to me.

“Of the sexual variety,” I add.

“Where’d you hear this?” he says.

“I’ve seen the complaint.”

Sexual harassment is the topic of the hour in the nooks and crannies of government, what some might call high crimes and misdemeanors. It is the kind of activity that gets your dog neutered and public officials defrocked.

“You’re serious?” says Leo. His smile is something one would normally reserve for the second coming.

“I know the lady’s lawyer,” I tell him.

This is a friend Leo would like to cultivate.

“Tell me about ’em. Give me a name,” he says. “We talking mere words or touching?” Leo wants all the details.

“First count, third-degree touchy-feely with a secretary over the copying machine,” I say.

“Ohhh, God.” Leo sounds like a man in orgasm.

“His Holiness would have no choice but to sacrifice the fucker for that. Violating the holy of holies,” says Leo. He is already figuring ways to get Smidt’s body elevated onto the D.A.’s altar and to put the flint dagger in Kline’s hand. The corporate medicine man.

“Count two, gratuitous bumps and grinds in doorways while passing this same secretary.”

I can tell by the look that Leo is mentally chipping stone to a sharp edge.

“This complaint,” he says, “you can get me a copy?”

I shake my head. “It hasn’t been filed yet. And it may not be,” I tell him.

With this Leo nearly comes out of his skin. He is animated motion all over the concrete parking garage, like finger-fanned ink drawings of the whirling dervish. When he stops there are flecks of yellow mustard all over his shirt like a Jackson Pollock painting.

“Why the fuck not?” he says. “This is serious shit. You know the federal courts get into this stuff.”

I look at him like I’m questioning this.

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s like fucking bank robbery. They got a federal law for destroying a broad’s good name.” Suddenly Leo wants his own chapter of NOW, a platform to uphold the honor of womanhood.

“The woman’s lawyer is hesitant,” I tell him. “Without more corroboration.”

“What’s he want, pictures? Tell the victim to lift her cheeks on the copying machine next time.”

Leo senses this opportunity vanishing as he paces in frustration in front of the pillar.

“My luck,” he says. “Wouldn’t you know. Goddamn lawyers, gotta have every t and i,” he says. “Why don’t they just get out of the way and let justice do its thing?” Like this is somehow self-executing. What Leo would like is Smidt hung by his heels in the doorway to Leo’s office, so that he could throw darts at the man’s forehead.

“There’s nothing wrong with the law that a little lawyer genocide wouldn’t solve,” he says. “Always getting in the way,” he says. “Tell him, your friend the lawyer, to grow some balls,” he tells me.

“My friend the lawyer is a woman,” I tell him.

This slows Leo only for an instant.

“Then she should borrow somebody else’s,” he says. “She oughta be indignant. Smidt is an affront to womanhood,” he tells me. This is something on which Leo is an expert.

“Tell her to get the thing filed, to hurry up and nail his ass,” he says. What Leo means is before Smidt nails his.

“You know,” he says, “you could gimme a hint where this came from and I could push it along,” he says. Visions of Leo with a pistol to my friend’s head.

“There is other information, but it has not been included in the complaint because the lawyer cannot get confirmation from witnesses,” I tell him.

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that Smidt tried to bed some of the other help, and lacked a lot of grace in the effort.”

I can almost hear him groan with the loss of this.

“Give me their names and I could interview them,” says Leo, “make a case.” A labor of love.

“Can’t do it,” I tell him.

“The other victim, the one in the doorway, without giving me a name,” says Leo. “Is it somebody I would know?”

He would like to play twenty questions.

“Can’t say.”

“How about initials?” he says.

I rebuke him with a look.

“Privileged information?” he asks.

“Good taste,” I tell him.

“So you give me this piece-of-crap information,” he says. “What am I supposed to do with it?” To Leo, dirt that cannot be turned into someone else’s misery is like a joke without a punch line.

“There is a way,” I tell him.

“What’s that?” Suddenly Leo would eat me with his eyes.

“If someone were to put out the right word in the ear of the press, with enough specifics to give it credence, and those details were to make it into print, Smidt would be forced to go public. To deny it.”

“So what? Couldn’t prove a damn thing,” he says.

“Yes. But I am told that faced with this lie, the other victims might come out of the woodwork.”

There’s a moment of deep gravity as Leo grasps the sinister nature of this proposal.

“Ohhhh.” A voice like wind leaving bellows. The glow of opportunity lights up his gaze. It is just the sort of bureaucratic coffin Kerns knows how to fashion, with all the screws for the lid, and carefully fitted for an enemy.