Steve Martini - The Judge

“Jim Cousins.” I use a normal voice, and I am ten feet from the bench when I say this.

He looks up, squinting into the sunlight, his dark glasses now dangling from his shirt pocket.

“Do I know you?”

“My name is Madriani,” I tell him. I come closer. “I was given your name by a mutual acquaintance.”

“Who’s that?”

“A friend,” I tell him.

The initial smile drops from his face.

“What do you want?”

“To talk,” I tell him.

I can sense him stiffening. What I myself would do if I worked for the police department and some stranger came up knowing my name.

“I’m on my lunch hour. If it’s business it will have to wait.”

He gives me another once-over, this time with his dark glasses on.

“You look familiar,” he says. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so. I’m an attorney,” I tell him. I hand him a business card.

“You’re one of the lawyers representing that judge,” he says.

“That’s right.”

“I saw you on TV.” The ticket of fame. Apprehension seems to melt. I’m giving out business cards, not bullets.

“You mind if I take a seat?”

“Suit yourself,” he says.

“I was told that you might know something about a case that occurred a couple of years ago.”

“I think maybe you have me confused with somebody else,” he says. “I’m not a cop.”

“Right. Your name is James Cousins. You work the police property room.”

“You know a lot about me. Like I say, if you want to talk business, chain of custody on drugs or something, catch me in the office.”

He pulls a paperback book from inside his shirt, opens it, and starts to read.

“I want to talk to you about Zack Wiley’s murder,” I tell him.

With this he looks up and shakes his head. “What is this? All of a sudden everybody and his brother wants to talk about Zack Wiley. Do I look like an information booth?”

“Is somebody else trying to talk to you?”

“Listen, I’m not saying a word. Either leave, or I will.”

“The grand jury?” I say.

He looks at me but doesn’t say a word. From behind his dark glasses I cannot read his eyes. His face is stone. He picks up his spoon and yogurt, pockets the apple, gets up, and starts to walk away.

“We can do it here, or I can subpoena you and we can do it in open court,” I tell him.

“Fine. Do it in open court,” he says.

“In front of the press, where everybody you work with will know what you have to say-or at least what questions I have to pose.”

This stops him. He turns, looks at me.

“That assumes you know the right questions,” he says. The glasses come off, a smug look.

“Oh, I think I do. The gun was a setup from the start. What did they do, set it aside in case they needed to drop a convenient piece on a suspect?”

This draws nothing but pensive looks.

“When it landed in the property room they didn’t fudge on the serial number. That would be too obvious,” I tell him. “It must have been something else.”

If he could mislead me with his eyes at this moment he would, take me where it is cold, colder, coldest.

“What was it?” I ask him. I scratch my chin, turn to sun a little, gestures for effect. Suddenly I snap my fingers and look back at him. “The model number!”

With this I can actually see his jaw drop a millimeter.

“Sure. That would do it,” I say.

A little saliva going down his throat.

“They must have needed some help inside the property room. An identification tag that gave the correct serial number, the right make and caliber, but forgot to include the model number. Smith and Wesson must make what, a dozen different models in that caliber?”

He almost answers me, but at the last instant holds back.

“The manufacturer would use the same serial numbers over for each different model, so there would be no way to identify a specific weapon unless you had both the serial number and the model number. That’s smart,” I tell him.

He wants to talk, but he doesn’t dare.

“How did they mess up?” I ask. “What tipped off the grand jury that this gun had been in the property room before it was used to kill Wiley?”

“Listen. I can’t talk,” he says. “Not here. Not now.”

“They don’t know you testified, do they? Your friends?” Suddenly it hits me. I am talking to the grand jury’s star witness, and whoever killed Wiley doesn’t know it.

“Where can my process server find you?” I ask him. “In your office?”

“Gimme a break,” he says. “I didn’t know what was happening until it was over.”

“Right. You just looked the other way,” I tell him.

“They’re satisfied. They’re not after me,” he says.

“Gave you immunity, did they?”

He doesn’t answer this. He doesn’t have to. It is written in the dodging pupils of his eyes.

“How did the grand jury get onto them? How did they find you? Fingerprints? Did you leave yours on the gun when it was in Property?”

“When’s the last time you saw prints lifted off a handgun?” he says. He laughs at this. “Something from the movies. All they get in real life are smudges. Everybody grips a gun too hard. The oil, the recoil. It all leads to nothing but smudges. Test ten thousand you might get a single thumbprint,” he says.

“But you weren’t shooting it,” I tell him.

“It wasn’t fingerprints,” he says.

“Then what?”

Cousins is in a box and he knows it.

“If I tell you will you forget the subpoena?”

Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“Then why should I tell you?”

“Weigh a maybe against a certainty, you have your answer,” I tell him.

A lot of saliva going down his throat, Adam’s apple bobbing in time to the tune on a boom box that some kid is packing on his shoulder near the fountain.

“How did they know the gun had been in the property room?”

“A scratch on the cylinder,” he says. “And a scribe mark inside under the handle.”

“What?”

“Whenever a revolver comes into Property, it’s unloaded, usually in the field. For safety,” he says. “Each bullet or empty cartridge is taken out and put in a separate envelope, and the cylinder is marked with a scribe, a little scratch on the metal, showing which chamber was lined up with the barrel at the time the gun was taken into custody. They also mark it inside someplace where it’s not so easy to see. It’s the procedure,” he says. “When Forensics picked up the gun after Wiley was shot they did this. What they didn’t realize is that there was already a second scribe mark on the piece,” he says, “from when it was taken the first time. Somebody at Internal Affairs, a guy who used to work ballistics, got onto this.”

All the reasons you never want to commit crime. A million things you do not know, half of them microscopic, any one of which can trip up the most canny mind.

“Who was the triggerman?” I ask.

“Hey. I’m not saying another word. You want to subpoena me, you go ahead.”

My question assumes that he knows the answer, which I doubt.

“Then tell me who took the gun out of Property.”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that what you’re telling the grand jury?”

“It’s the truth,” he says. “They just asked me to look the other way. Leave the door unlocked for a few minutes while I had coffee. I didn’t even know what they took.”

“Who asked you to look the other way?”

A stern face, like maybe he has gone too far already, more candor than he gave the jury.

“I’m not saying another word,” he says. Suddenly his gaze is lost in the distance, some floating object off in the direction of the garage. I wonder for a moment if perhaps Leo has come back for another peek, to see how long we talk.