Steve Martini - The Judge

“Get off my back,” she tells him.

I motion to Harry to back off.

“You don’t think I feel bad enough about this already?” she says.

“Oh, well. Gee whiz,” says Harry. “Why don’t we have a group therapy session to see who feels worse? Why don’t you take the couch?” He makes a mocking gesture toward the sofa, an invitation for Lenore to recline.

“How do you feel, Paul? Tell us. You feel like you got fucked?” Harry at his sarcastic best. “Oh my! How could I be so insensitive?” he says. “Lemme rephrase that. You think you got fucked today in court?”

Harry’s paranoia running wild.

“What the hell is going on?” he says. “Did you know she was there at Hall’s apartment?” Harry is looking to me for answers. He is angry, feeling deceived.

I think he suspects, though we have not told him, that I was with Lenore at the victim’s apartment that night. This would surely send him screaming out of the office.

Before I can respond he puts a hand up. “Don’t answer that,” he says. I think Harry can read my mind. He is savvy enough to grasp that there are some things that are better left unknown-or at least not stated.

“I don’t know what to say to either of you,” says Lenore.

“That makes two of us,” says Harry.

She ignores him. The best medicine with Harry.

“I apologize,” she says. “I got you into this. Now I don’t know how to get you out.”

For the moment she has her own set of problems. Kline was emphatic that he intends to call her as a witness. He tried to assign two detectives to interview her this afternoon at police headquarters, but I convinced Radovich to intervene. The cops would have a field day probing the theory of our case. They are not saying whether they will bring charges against Lenore, breaking and entering, or obstructing justice if they can show that she tampered with evidence at the scene.

“Any ideas on what I should do?” she asks.

“Yeah. Tell ’em you lost your mind,” says Harry. “They’ll believe you,” he says.

At the moment Harry is playing this up not so much because of Lenore’s conduct, but because he suspects a cabal between the two of us, something we haven’t let him in on. Had we invited him along that night, he would have warmed to Lenore in a minute. It was just his kind of party. Harry, like most of us, is an inveterate hypocrite.

“I almost forgot,” he says, “for what it’s worth. Here.”

Harry hands me a stack of documents, printed forms with a familiar logo on the letterhead.

“Until this afternoon I thought it was a break for our side,” he says. “The victim’s telephone records for the period in question.”

One page is marked with a paper clip and a note in Harry’s hand.

“That one is for the day she was killed,” he says. “Of course maybe you were there when she placed this particular phone call.” He looks at Lenore. “In which case,” he says, “you can tell us what the two of them had to say to each other.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

He points with a finger to the record in question. “Gus Lano and Hall. She called him on the number, the one in the little black book, no more than two hours before she was killed. If the state’s estimate as to time of death is correct, it was the last phone call on record. Little good it will do us now.” Harry’s view is that we are now so compromised by Lenore’s conduct that nothing can help.

I tell him that I need a moment alone with Lenore in my office.

“Sure,” he says, “what the hell do I care? I’m outta here. God knows why I ever let you talk me into this.” Harry’s still muttering under his breath, occasional profanities and other choice words, as he marches out and closes the door behind him.

“I may have cost you a friend,” says Lenore.

“Harry likes to be angry,” I tell her. “He enjoys it. It’s what keeps him going.”

It is true. Ire, it seems, is the only vital force left in his life. By tomorrow he will find something else to raise his hackles, and forget it just as quickly by the next day.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever looked at myself as a health tonic,” she says.

I give her a look, indicating that there is more truth to this than she knows.

“Any suggestions on what I should do?” she asks. “If they question me?”

“They gotta come over Radovich’s body,” I tell her. “I don’t think he will allow it. The risk of invading client confidences is too great,” I say.

“I could just tell them that I went to the door, touched the outside, but didn’t go in.”

“That assumes your print was found on the outside,” I tell her. Kline did not deliver over a copy of the fingerprint report so we do not, at this moment, know where they found it.

Lenore is a lawyer. In a cooler moment she would know it is a mistake to lie.

“A million ways to catch you up,” I say. “And it would raise more questions than it answers. ‘Why, Ms. Goya, did you go all that way, to the apartment of a murdered woman, merely to touch her front door?’”

She looks at me sheepishly.

“They’re certain to ask me whether I was alone,” she says.

Now it comes down to lying for me.

“They are going to want to know what you saw there, whether you touched anything. But the first question is sure to be why you went there. And then they would get to that. Whether anyone was with you.”

“They can’t honestly think that I killed her. What motive could I have? Besides, I was seen in the alley talking to Tony after the cops found her body. They can put two and two together and figure I went from there to Hall’s apartment, after the murder. That doesn’t make me a killer.”

“No, just someone who tramps around in the evidence,” I tell her. “And it still begs the question.” The one I have thus far delicately asked, and which she is dodging. “What were we doing there?”

She gives me a pained expression. “Would you believe satisfying simple curiosity?”

“In a word,” I tell her, “no.”

Her moves that night had more purpose than idle inquisitiveness. There was a reason why she went there. If I had to guess, it was something in the kitchen. I was with her every moment of the time, except for the short span when she was out of my view in Hall’s kitchen.

“You put me in a difficult position,” she says.

“Another conflict?” I ask.

“Of a sort.”

“Would it help if I guessed?”

She gives me a face, like she might tell if I come close. Then again she might not.

“It had to do with Tony, didn’t it?”

Her face is without expression, but the shift of her eyes gives her away.

“Was he seeing her?” It is not a far call, given the fact that having once set his eyes on Hall, Tony would likely go into rutting, like some oversexed Chihuahua.

Harry has struck out with Hall’s neighbor, the one who saw her with the shiner. The woman never saw the man who did it. But Tony Arguillo is rapidly becoming a candidate, someone who in a fit of machismo might be likely to punch Hall’s lights out.

“Let me guess. He left something behind?”

Lenore doesn’t answer.

“You will tell me if I get warm, won’t you?” I say.

I put one hand to my head like the Great Karnak, and venture a guess. “A used condom into which the Great Tony spilled the better part of himself?”

She laughs and turns her nose up at the thought.

“I will try again.” I muse for a brief instant.

“A mighty jockstrap encrusted with sequins and a gold zipper to encase the family scepter?”

She begins to giggle, gallows humor as a sedative in an otherwise unbearable situation.

“Guess again, O Great One,” she says.