Steve Martini: The Judge

I’ve gone no more than five steps when I see her. Across the rink, looking this way, against the railing: Lenore, wary eyes scanning the crowd.

I wave but she misses me. Then, like a camera focusing for depth, I see a tall figure closing on her from behind. My eyes lock on his like radar. Kline has seen her. He is no more than twenty feet away, pushing his way through bodies like an icebreaker.

I cut and run, nearly knocking over some kid. Out of the crowd, around the rink, I am sprinting, dodging in and out, searching the crowd for her. All around is the blare of music, the clatter of some mindless electronic bell, the hush of wheels on steel.

And then I see them, wrestling in the middle of the street. Lenore, her arm outstretched, fist tight, holding the object, Kline’s gold cuff link engraved with his initials and scribed with the incriminating tool marks like fingerprints in metal. Lenore is struggling, trying to pull away. Kline behind her, grappling, clawing at her outstretched arm.

I race.

Out of the corner of my eye I see it, the sleek metallic white and blue, glistening windows, five cars of light rail speeding up the street toward the tight turn onto the mall. Around the angle the operator cannot see Lenore and Kline wrestling on the tracks.

Then, in an instant, she reaches with one arm, a feeble toss, and the glint of gold in the air, the object of their struggle from here only a blur: Kline’s gold cuff link. It travels five feet on a dying arc, bounces twice, and lands in the crevice formed by the track and the street.

I am still twenty feet away.

The train is closing. Through the flat glass the operator finally sees them, but it’s too late. Steel grinding on steel, sliding, the physics of speed and momentum.

Kline has her from behind, one arm around her as he struggles to pull them both toward the object in the tracks, toward the oncoming train.

I lower my shoulder. With all the force my body can propel, I slide in front of Kline, nailing Lenore between hip and thigh, my arms closing around her, my legs driving. The impact of my body striking hers peels Lenore from his grasp. The impetus carries us across the tracks, tumbling on the concrete like Jack and Jill.

It seems my only functioning faculties at this instant are those receiving sound and vibration: the dead thud of metal hitting flesh and the stone silence of the crowd in the fleeting moment that follows.

We lay sprawled on the street, Lenore and I, pain finally filling in the voids.

The train slides for nearly half a block before coming to a stop, the last car finally passing us. Kids clamoring for a look stampede like wildebeests.

There is an effusion of blood, an explosion like a Dali painting on the concrete at the point of impact twelve feet away. A single shoe shot from its owner by the force rests between the rails; like some morbid fashion statement, comets of blood shine across its toe.

Lenore is shaking, stunned, all the symptoms of shock. In a daze I remove my coat and put it around her.

I crawl on my hands and knees, surveying the tracks as I go. The thought that the county’s chief prosecutor now lies dead, a spectacle for a horde of teeming youths, and that we have no evidence floats through my brain like a dark cloud. The cuff link is gone.

Lenore comes up behind me.

I wonder aloud at the obsession that could cause a man to take on thirty tons of speeding steel and glass.

“What in the world could have gone through his head?” I ask.

“Probably his ass,” she says.

As I look up at Lenore quivering in the cold behind me she has an expression that is something between a grimace and a smile. Her cold humor in the face of Kline’s death is the final edge of enmity in a bad relationship.

I turn back toward the chore at hand, my search along the gleaming rail.

“I can’t find it,” I tell her. I’m combing the crevice with my fingers, a foot at a time, grease and grime, looking for the missing cuff link.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“Yes. It’s not here.” Panic beginning to set in. What we will tell authorities in the absence of evidence I do not know.

For a moment I feel her presence leaning over my shoulder as she joins in the search. “Damn it,” she says. “They were my favorite pair, too.”

I stop and look up at her shivering form under the tinseled lights.

Standing there, she is holding a single gold earring in the open palm of one hand, and for an instant I don’t get it. I study her face, which wears the mask of an enigmatic smile, until she opens the palm of her other hand. In it is Kline’s gold cuff link.

It was the final irony, that in the struggle for their lives, unwilling to part with the evidence of Kline’s crime, Lenore had performed her own sleight of hand: an exchange of one of her earrings for his gold cuff link. It was the earring I saw, which she had thrown onto the tracks that night, and that Kline had pursued to his death.

More than a week has passed, and Radovich has declared a mistrial in Acosta’s case. The newspapers are now filled each day with new revelations: the mounting evidence that Kline killed Brittany Hall. From pictures shown to her by police, Kimberly has finally identified Kline as the man she had seen with her mother the night of the murder. It was the reason Kline absented himself during her testimony both times in court: fear that the little girl would identify him.

The attorney general has stepped in, and two days ago announced that based on evidence he now has, charges against Acosta have been dismissed. The judge is a free man.

Armando and Lili came by the office yesterday and we talked. There is still no admission of Lili’s presence in Hall’s apartment that day. Some things are better left unsaid.

This morning Lenore and I are at the house. We are both exhausted, looking for a rest. Harry has agreed to hold down the fort for a week, so we are packing the car, taking the kids, Sarah and Lenore’s two girls, into the mountains for a few days to camp. Sarah has loaded the car with her fuzzy stuffed animals so that we may all have to ride on the roof.

“Will we need this?” Lenore is holding up the box containing the camp stove.

“If we want to eat,” I tell her.

“I thought we’d just call out for Chinese.” I’m getting the idea that tents and sleeping bags are not Lenore’s notion of a rest. Still, we will decompress in the clear mountain air with no television or phones, or reporters to hound us.

While there are still questions, Tony Arguillo has filled in some of the blanks, both to investigators who have questioned him, and in private to Lenore.

In pillow talk, Hall told him about her affair with Kline, which by that time had gone sour. She was making noises of sexual harassment. Some are saying that he refused to give her a job. Lenore thinks it is something more. Woman’s intuition.

Lenore says Kline would have given Hall a job in a minute. “With a staff of a hundred, positions in his office were a dime a dozen,” she says.

“So what do you think?” I ask.

“My guess? Hall was after the gold ring. She wanted him to leave his wife, but it was his wife’s money that fueled his career.”

Caught between the two jaws of this particular vice, a wife with money and a mistress charging sexual harassment, Kline cracked. In the heat of passion, anger flashed like powder in a pan at her apartment that night. The rest we know.

Lenore is cryptic. She gives me an arched eyebrow, like a woman would know, leaving me with a grain of doubt; perhaps Kline was right. Had Hall said something to her that day that may have given a clue? Or is this just hindsight? I will never know.

It was only a guess, but I had pieced bits of it in my head following Kimberly’s examination on the stand. Why, after going to the trouble of trying a high-profile case, would you turn on your heels and allow a subordinate to examine the most sympathetic witness, the survivor, the little child Kimberly? Unless, that is, you had something to fear. It was Kline’s uncertainty as to whether she saw him that night that made him such a reluctant player. And then there was the look on his face from the back of the courtroom that day, mystified, as she fed jelly beans to the little bear, the light in his eyes, as it finally dawned, the final piece to the puzzle: what happened to the missing cuff link. For a time, I suspect that he thought Lenore had it, that she had found it that night when she left her fingerprint on the door to Hall’s apartment. Perhaps he thought she was just one more scheming female, waiting for the right moment to use it, to extract the maximum advantage. There was a great deal that was cryptic in his conversation with me that evening at the fund-raiser: that Lenore knew something, that perhaps she had something.