Steve Martini - The Judge

The thought that I am doing something illegal, for some strange reason peculiar only to Harry, seems to mollify him, but only a little.

“Tell me what’s going on.” It also inspires more interest.

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Maybe I don’t know myself, not for sure,” I tell him. “A hunch. Something I have to check out.”

“So you’re not gonna tell me?”

“No.”

His briefcase is loaded down with books as we saunter toward the elevator, where our paths will diverge.

“We punched a pretty good hole in their case,” says Harry.

“We did.”

“Still, like you told the judge, we got a lotta questions unresolved.”

He means Acosta’s glasses at the scene, and the note with his name on Hall’s calendar. For Harry, from the inception, these have been imponderables, a large part of the reason he has never believed that Acosta was innocent.

I agree that refuting these in court will be difficult.

“It’s difficult, particularly when you know what happened, and can’t put on the evidence.”

Harry gives me a quick dark glance, stark and naked. “Something I missed?”

It has always bothered me that Acosta had said things to the cops before his arrest, equivocal statements about the note on Hall’s calendar that had allowed Kline to get this into evidence despite its hearsay nature.

You can say a lot of things about the judge, but he is no man’s fool. It had settled on me that his statements to the cops were not inspired by a sudden loss of judgment, but something else.

“Didn’t it trouble you,” I say, “that Hall would agree to meet with Acosta in private when she was preparing to testify against him in the prostitution sting?”

“The thought crossed my mind. But with Acosta, I never gave it a lotta thought.” He means that anything is possible. “You don’t buy Acosta’s theory that the cops planted the note with his name on her calendar?”

I shake my head.

“Maybe she wanted to shake him down?” Harry’s thinking blackmail.

“No. If there is anything certain about this case, it is that Brittany Hall was a dyed-in-the-wool gold digger. She was not in it for a one-time strike, a quick payoff to go away. She was a lady taking the long view. If she set Acosta up, it was to get something more. My guess on this has always been career favors from Gus Lano.”

Harry mulls this for a moment, but does not disagree.

“So why did she schedule a meeting at home with the judge?” he says.

“The fact is, she didn’t,” I say.

“You just said you didn’t think it was planted. That she wrote it.”

“She did. There are two items that run in tandem through this case: the glasses and the note,” I tell Harry. “Both had a common genesis.”

He gives me a quizzical look.

“Forget the note for a moment. Think about this. You have a broken pair of glasses, a missing temple screw. You’re a busy judge. Do you take them to the optician yourself?”

Harry thinks for a second, then shakes his head. “You send your clerk, or your secretary.”

“Or your wife,” I add.

The look that comes over Harry’s face at this moment is its own form of illumination, like the rising sun.

“Lili.” The two of us say her name virtually in unison.

“My guess is that the glasses had been in her purse for weeks. Maybe she took them out when she was fishing for Kleenex. We’ll never know for sure,” I say. “But one thing is certain; they were there that afternoon when she went to meet Hall at the apartment, to plead for her husband’s career.”

The gospel according to Armando. If I had to guess, he had told his wife the story of how he was set up. That he went to meet Hall on legitimate business and how the cops nailed him in the sting.

“Then the note on Hall’s calendar?” says Harry.

“It never read Armando,” I remind him. “It just said ‘Acosta.’”

“You think he knows that she was there?”

“As someone recently told me, I would stake my life on it.”

Harry stands looking at me, dumbstruck, the elevator door now open behind him. In a daze he looks, then takes two steps back into the empty car. It is several seconds before he can speak.

“The fucker lied to us,” he finally says. Harry’s last words before the steel doors close, separating us.

Indeed he did-but to the judge, it was an honorable lie.

Lenore has a friend, a superior court judge. Together they belong to all the distaff clubs. They lunch together periodically. This evening Lenore has prevailed on this friend to use her empty chambers, ostensibly for research, to use the stacked casebooks that line the walls.

“So what is this all about?” she asks. “Why did you want to meet here in the courthouse?”

Lenore has heard about what happened in court today. She is no doubt now wondering if she has been wrong about Tony. Childhood loyalties die hard.

She is seated on the couch. I am leaning, my back to the desk, one cheek planted firmly on the corner.

There is one piece to this whole thing that doesn’t make sense, unless it involves Tony. It is the reason I have called Lenore here tonight.

“You remember when we went there that night, to Hall’s apartment?”

She nods. Lenore’s study of me at this moment is intense.

“You remember we saw something? Something glittering, a piece of jewelry on the floor, half-buried in the dirt from the broken pot, the house plant?” I say.

“I remember,” she says.

“You got the better look at it. Do you have any recollection as to what it was?”

“You’re thinking the metal scrapings on that table?” she says.

“I am.”

“It was so quick. And it was dark,” she says. “I didn’t pay much attention. It was small. Maybe a ring. Part of a bracelet.” She shakes her head, uncertain.

“The fact is the cops never found it,” I tell her.

“They say they didn’t,” she corrects me.

“No. I think on this one they may be straight-shooting. But there’s one other possibility.”

She looks at me.

“Did Tony take it?”

There’s a deep sigh from Lenore. “You think he did it.” It is a statement of fact, not a question. Lenore now knows that Tony had lied to her, that he was there that night.

“Have you talked to him?” I ask.

It takes a moment, but Lenore finally nods.

“What did he say?”

“He admitted he was there. But he says he didn’t kill her. Says he found the body.”

“He moved it, didn’t he?”

“How did you know that?”

“Call it intuition,” I tell her. “Did he take anything else from the scene?”

“Some pages from her phone book. That’s all he told me.”

“He never mentioned the item of jewelry on the floor?”

She shakes her head.

I stand and start to pace the room. We are a hundred feet from Radovich’s courtroom, connected by a private corridor that rings the courthouse on each floor against the exterior windows of the building. This is used by court personnel to deliver papers and provides a controlled emergency exit in the event of fire, or violence in the courthouse.

“The answer may lie down the hall.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Assume for a moment that Tony did not take the item on the floor under the table that night. And that the cops didn’t find it. Where did it go?”

She shakes her head, makes a face, and finally shrugs her shoulders.

This is what has been bothering me.

“Process of elimination,” I tell her. “There was the killer. Let’s assume he or she dropped it. There was Tony. Let’s assume that he had bigger fish to fry, phone numbers to destroy. He didn’t see it. Perhaps he was too busy with other matters. There was you and me, and we didn’t touch it.”