Steve Martini: The Judge

Sarah is an inveterate and natural peacemaker. She will avoid conflict at all cost. For Sarah it was more painful to witness conflict between Nikki and me over decisions of discipline than it was to hunker down and accept her fate. By the age of five she would no longer come to me with entreaties. And on those few occasions when, after hearing angry words from her mother, I would, in the stillness of another room, ask Sarah what was wrong, she would cheerfully look up and with a smile say, “Nothing.”

I have now learned the sorry and thankless task that falls on the voice of responsibility in a child’s life. The hardest task of my day is to steel myself and tell my daughter, “No.” Tonight I attempt to do this with reason.

“We’ve talked about this before,” I tell her. “What have I told you?”

“D-A-D-D-Y.” She can draw the word out to five syllables at moments like this.

“Daddy nothing. I told you that if you wanted to stay over at Amber’s house you had to clean your room. That’s the rule,” I tell her. “Remember?” At this moment I’m afraid there’s more pleading than conviction in my voice. “Didn’t we agree that was the rule?”

I try for consensus.

“But, Daddy. Amber didn’t pick up and she made most of the mess.” She tries equity, while Amber and her mother wait in the hall downstairs. Sarah is twirling a lock of hair as she stands, knees akimbo by the foot of her bed, and looks at me with plaintive brown eyes.

The daughter of a lawyer, she has learned to negotiate.

“Amber isn’t my daughter,” I tell her.

She gives me a look like she wishes her little girlfriend were just that, a surrogate whipping post at this moment. There are dolls in various stages of undress strewn about the floor of her room, some with missing arms or eyeballs, more bodies than on the field at Gettysburg. For reasons of self-preservation I have stopped buying my daughter toys with little parts. I have stepped on these in bare feet on several occasions and have the scars to prove it.

“But what about Amber? She’s waiting,” she tells me. There’s a lot of moping around with this, swinging by one hand around the corner pole of her bed.

“Clean up. Now,” I tell her. The emphasis on the N-word.

She gives me a look of mortal resignation and starts to toss raggedy bodies into the plastic basket that is their home.

I turn back toward the stairs and amble down to find Becky Saunders, Amber’s mother, standing near our front door. I make Sarah’s amends for her.

“I don’t think tonight is a good night,” I tell her.

“Maybe some other time. Sarah has some things to do.”

Amber gives me a look, something the munchkins reserved for the Wicked Witch.

“Sure. We understand,” says her mom. “Kids,” she says.

Amber’s pulling on her pant leg. “But, Mom.” The universal plea.

“Some other time,” she tells her daughter.

“It must be tough without Nikki.” She’s looking down the hall at the mess that is our kitchen, the kid still hanging on her, pleading. Becky does her best to ignore her. Nikki and Becky knew each other. At times they operated a shared taxi service delivering the children to various events.

“There are times it is very difficult,” I tell her.

“Have you tried Parents Without Partners?”

Visions of matchmaking, I shake my head.

“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?” she says. My suspicious mind tells me she is doing some quick calculations in her head. What I might bring on the matrimonial auction block. “I can get the number if you’d like. There’re a lot of professional women. .” Her voice trails off.

With one hand out like a traffic cop, I’m shaking my head. “No. No. That’s okay. You’re busy.”

“Not at all,” she says. “It must be very interesting being a lawyer.” She is distracted now, making a note on the back of a card that she drops into her purse. I see my name and the letters P amp;P. That is the problem with being a single man in a sea of housewives. They all want to take care of you.

“It’s just awful.” She is gazing absently past my shoulder, and I think for a moment she is talking about Nikki’s passing. “You think you can trust people like that.”

I have suffered my own bouts of anger in the months after Nikki’s death, but I have never attributed it to an issue of trust. “Like what?” I ask.

“Like that judge.”

“What judge?”

“The one they arrested tonight,” she says. She is pointing behind me to the muted television, flickering in the living room.

I turn to look, but the station has cut to a commercial.

“You didn’t hear? They arrested some judge tonight. Prostitution. Can you believe it? You trust people like that. Makes you wonder what’s happening out there.”

By my look she can tell she now has my attention.

“Oh, yeah. Early this evening, at some big hotel downtown. He was arrested with a call girl. Just awful,” she says.

“Who was it?”

“Hmm?”

“The judge’s name?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What was it?” She snaps her fingers two or three times, looking up at the ceiling. “Locata? Armada? Some Spanish last name.”

“Acosta?” I say.

“That’s it.”

Becky Saunders looks at me, wondering, I am sure, why with this dark news my face should be ablaze with a broad smile. She must think me crazy, but I don’t care. All is well with the world. There is indeed a God in Heaven.

I’m reading sketchy details in the morning paper, a picture of the Coconut, a file shot a column wide below the fold. Under the photo a cut-line: “Judge Arrested in Prostitution Sting.”

Just what the doctor ordered come election time. Toting my briefcase in the other hand, I emerge from the elevator on the fourth floor of the D.A.’s office, situated in one of those modern metal-and-glass buildings, no frills. This particular one sits catty-corner to the courthouse at the edge of a slum only partially reclaimed before the collapse of urban renewal. The D.A. shares space with the County Registrar’s office and some other paper-pushing bureaucracies that take up the ground floor.

A receptionist sitting behind two inches of bulletproof glass calls Lenore, and a few seconds later buzzes me through. I am down the corridor, past a dozen cubicles, the government equivalent of private offices. There are lawyers, some on phones, others laboring in silence like monks in an ancient scriptorium, bent over desks piled high with papers. Some of these offices are stacked with case files climbing halfway up the walls, all active and pending matters.

As a repository of your tax dollars, the public prosecutor’s office of any large metropolitan area of this country is likely to be the one place where you get your money’s worth. Here there are young overworked lawyers putting in the equivalent of most people’s average workweek on any single day. Some, the Future Moralists of America, are careerists out to cleanse corruption and decay from our times, law-and-order zealots who view every issue in monochrome, black or white. Others, more pragmatic, are simply paying their dues, cutting their teeth in court before selling out to one of the high-toned silk-stocking firms where crime wears a white collar and is often perpetrated over lunch in some private club.

Lenore has one of the larger offices near the corner inhabited by His Eminence, Coleman Kline. Here there is a second reception area, a couple of secretaries jealously guarding Kline’s office. I can hear his voice on the phone inside behind closed doors. The interior walls? of this place have all the tensile strength of Kleenex. Someone sneezes, and everyone down the hall goes “Gesundheit.”