Steve Martini: The Judge

She is like a rose: tall and slender, with complexion of a dusky hue, eyes and teeth that flash, and a manner that at times produces its own barbed thorns.

Lenore Goya has been a friend since my brief stint three years ago as special prosecutor in Davenport County. Except for a couple of brief encounters in the courthouse, I have not seen her since shortly after Nikki’s funeral. On several occasions I have considered calling her, but each time I suppressed the impulse. I have never aspired to the image of the widower on the make, and have silently subdued all desires.

Yet when she called I knew she could sense the yearning in my voice.

Tonight I meet her at Angelo’s, out on the river. It is brisk. A light breeze sends flutters through the Japanese lanterns overhead. The tables are set on the wharf at the water’s edge. Pleasure boats bob at their slips in the marina beyond. I’ve dressed in my casual finery, a look that required two hours of preparation. It sounded more like business than pleasure when she called. Still, I am hopeful.

When I see her, she is across the way, on the terrace, a level above me. Lenore is dressed for the occasion, wearing a pleated floral skirt, tea length, and a bright pastel sweater with a rolled collar. Lenore as the shades of spring.

She sees me and waves. I am casual, breezy in my return, just two friends meeting, I tell myself, though in my chest my heart is thumping.

This evening she is lithe and light, both in body and spirit. Lenore’s fine features are like chiseled stone-high cheekbones and a nose that, like everything else about her, is sharp and straight.

She wends her way through the mostly empty tables. The crowd has opted for the indoors, a hedge against the chill of the evening air. It is not quite summer in Capital City.

She turns the few heads as she approaches. Lenore is one of those striking women who become a focal point in any room. Hispanic by heritage, she has the look of the unspoiled native, a visual appeal that hovers at the edge of exotic, Eve in Eden before sin.

“What a wonderful place,” she says. A peck on my cheek, the squeeze of her hand on my arm, and I am rung out.

“It’s been such a long time,” she says.

“A while,” I say. My moves are all calculated for cool.

I tell her that she looks wonderful, slide her chair in for her. Then I manage to trip over her purse on my way back to my own seat.

She laughs, putting one hand to her mouth. Our eyes meet and I see the spark in hers. Even in this, her laughter at my expense, there is something that fascinates.

She is often in my dreams, but not in the way one might envision. My dream is inspired by memory: the hulking figure of Adrian Chambers poised over me, the metal stake arcing toward my chest, and behind him, Lenore, fire and wind, sparks on the air, the burnished image of some ancient goddess of war.

We do not mention it, but in every conversation there is always the undercurrent of that perilous day and the knowledge that Lenore killed a man to save my life.

We exchange pleasantries, discussing mutual friends from days past, our kids, who are close in age. Lenore has two girls just a little older than Sarah.

“She must be getting tall,” she says of my daughter.

“Looking more like Nikki each day.” A thousand things I could mention, and I pick the maudlin. Her eyes dart away. There is pain in this for Lenore-the thought of a motherless child. She is maternal to the core.

“How are you making out?” The “you” I take to be collective, for Sarah and me.

“We’re adjusting,” I tell her. “It’s harder for Sarah.”

“But you must miss her. It’s in your eyes,” she says, “when you mention her name.”

I do not deny it, but move the conversation to a different subject: Lenore’s new job.

It seems I have picked the wrong topic.

“It has its moments,” she says. “Most of them unpleasant.”

Lenore crossed over the river nearly a year ago to take the position as chief deputy prosecutor for Capital County. Perhaps it is part of the reason we have not socialized. We live in opposite corners of the same ring, bouncing off the ropes like rum-dumb boxers. We have as yet not encountered each other in court, and I wonder how this will affect our friendship when we do. I may never know.

There is word of stormy waters in her office. Duane Nelson, who hired Lenore, has left to take a spot on the bench. He has been replaced by a new, more acerbic and insecure appointee. Coleman Kline is a political handmaiden of the county supervisors. He is busy putting his own mark on the office-rumblings of a purge.

According to Lenore, each day when she goes to her office she looks for blood on the doorpost and wonders whether the Angel of Death will pass over-in this case, a woman named Wendy, who delivers the pink slips to those who are canned. “So many people have been fired,” Lenore says.

Without civil service protection, and holding a prominent position in the office, Lenore is a target of opportunity. There are a dozen political lackeys who hauled water in the last election now vying for her job, trying to push her out the door.

The waiter comes and we order cocktails and an appetizer. He leaves and I study her for a moment in silence as she watches a motor yacht sail upriver, its green running light shimmering on the water.

When she looks back she catches me. “A penny for your thoughts,” she says.

Somehow I suspect it is not this-the travails in her office-that is the reason for our meeting.

“I’d like to believe that you called because of my charm,” I say.

“But you’re thinking there’s some ulterior motive?” She finishes my thought.

I smile.

“You’re very charming.” Her eyes sparkle as she says this, like the shimmering dark waters beyond. There are dimples in each cheek.

“But?” I say.

“But I need your help,” she says. “I have a friend,” she tells me. “A police officer who is in some difficulty. . ”

“You have two choices,” he tells me. “Your man testifies, or else.”

“Or else what? Thumbscrews?” I say.

He gives me a look as if to say, “If you like.”

Armando Acosta would have excelled in another age: Scenes of some dimly lit stone cavern with iron shackles pinioned to the walls come to mind. Visions of flickering torches, the odor of lard thick in the air, as black-hooded men, hairy and barrel-chested, scurry about with implements of pain, employed at his command. The “Coconut” is a man with bad timing. He missed his calling with the passing of the Spanish Inquisition.

We are seated in his chambers behind Department 15, sniffing the dead air of summer. There is an odor peculiar to this place, like the inside of a high school gym locker infested by a soiled jockstrap. Seven million dollars for a new addition to the courthouse, and the county now lacks the money to change the filters on the air-conditioning-a marble monument to the idiocy of government.

Acosta settles back into the tufted leather cushion of his chair, the manicured finger of one hand grazing his upper lip as if he were in deep contemplation.

“I will hold him in contempt,” he says. “And I will not segregate him. No special accommodations.” This idea seems to please Acosta immensely, confirmation of the fact that the judiciary is still the one place in our system where authority can be abused with virtual impunity, especially here in the privacy of his chambers.

“The jail is overcrowded.” He says it as though this condition offered opportunity.

“And you know the risks to a cop in the general lockup. Some of those people in there are animals. What they might do to him. .” He would draw me a picture, his version of “hangman,” but with the stick figure on its hands and knees, its Y-shaped rump in the air.