William Lashner - Past Due

“Then we’ll take them too, is that all right, R.T.?”

“It’s your seizure,” said R.T.

“Derek won’t be happy,” said Rothstein.

“I suppose not,” I said. “The name’s Victor Carl. Carl with a C. Derek will know how to get hold of me.”

WHERE SIT THEhonorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?

Any place they want to.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a lovely chamber in the statehouse in Harrisburg, with fine leather chairs and murals on the walls and a great stained-glass dome, but who the hell wants to sit in Harrisburg? So there is a courtroom in Philadelphia and a courtroom in Pittsburgh and satellite chambers in each of those cities, and the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court can pretty much work anyplace they choose. Which is why Justice Jackson Straczynski spent most of his time in his hometown of Philadelphia.

It’s not a bad life, the State Supreme Court life, the pay is high, the perks many, and the justices get to wear those boss robes. A lot of lawyers have their eyes on that particular prize and there is only one small requirement for getting your very own seat: enough votes. Aye, there’s the rub. It takes not merit to rise to Pennsylvania’s highest court, just politics.

What do you get when you mix justice and politics?

The Marx Brothers starring in Duck Soup .

I don’t mean to paint the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as a bunch of vaudeville clowns honking horns and making wisecracks to Margaret Dumont, but then I don’t have to, they do a good enough job themselves. And I’m even not talking here of their legal decisions, which are generally considered boneheaded at best and venal at worst. The court is infamous for charges of ethical violations, countercharges of case fixing, vulgar insults hurled from justice to justice in the public press. One guy got impeached for sending his employees out to buy Valium and jockstraps. I’m not making this up. He used the subterfuge so his enemies wouldn’t suspect he was crazy. They suspected him anyway when he wore the jockstrap on his head. No, the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have not covered themselves with glory. All except for Justice Jackson Straczynski.

Justice Straczynski was the most respected jurist to ever sit on that court, a brilliant legal scholar who used economic theory to slice through the Gordian knots of the most difficult legal problems. His great legal treatise, The Economic Laws of Constitutional Interpretation, once a fixture only on the bookshelves of the most conservative law student and right wing legal activist, had become, with the rightward tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court, a staple desktop reference for every constitutional scholar in the country.

After a stint making policy at the Department of Justice for Ronald Reagan, and a period teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, Straczynski was tapped by the Republican Party to run for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He wasn’t much of a campaigner, his speaking style was likened to that of an aardvark on Quaaludes, but it just so happened that during the campaign he published a much-publicized article interpreting the Second Amendment to protect the unequivocal right to buy and bear anything with a trigger. Two things are wildly popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, guns and funnel cakes, both are tasty, both are deadly, but if the state’s denizens had to pick one, well, you can’t kill an eight-point buck with a funnel cake, now can you? Straczynski won his election in a walk and now he sat on the state’s highest court, writing uncompromising decisions of uncompromised brilliance and waiting for that call from Washington. The pundits all said it was coming.

“So we agree, right, Kimberly,” I said, as we sat side by side on the beige couch in the justice’s wood-lined waiting room, “I’ll do all the questioning, you’ll just sit quiet and watch the show.”

“Whatever.”

Kimberly glanced at the stern-eyed secretary with the high gray hair manning the desk in the middle of the room. “But remember,” Kimberly said in a hushed voice, “Mr. D definitely wants his name kept out of this.”

“Mr. D?”

“Sure. He was very clear about it.”

“Okay.”

She sat for a moment, something obviously bothering her. “What if a question sort of pops out of my mouth on its own?”

“Gosh, I hope it doesn’t. He might not want to tell us his favorite boy band.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed like quite the career woman, so long as the career was taking place in the early 1960s, bright green faux-Chanel business suit, matching heels, and small clutch.

“You look like a bowl of Jell-O in that getup,” I said.

“We’re visiting a judge, right? This is my government outfit. Mint green, get it?”

She gave a little smile, but the way she bit her lower lip with nervousness made me feel like a jerk. She had that way, did Kimberly.

“Okay,” I said. “Ask what you want. But my advice would be to say as little as possible to this guy. He’s not your usual drunken frat boy.”

Just as I said that a tall man in a black suit came into the waiting room. “Mr. Carl, Ms. Blue,” he said, his voice gilded with an Island lilt. “My name is Curtis Lobban,” said the man. “I am Justice Straczynski’s file clerk.”

Curtis Lobban stood straight and tall, with the deep voice and dignified manner of a dignitary, his dark suit, broad shoulders, and the gray at his temples all added mightily to the effect. He held in himself the same hush of serious purpose that pervaded the entire suite of offices and he looked down at me with a gaze of thinly veiled contempt that made me feel every inch the two-bit hustler invading some grand temple of the law. I jumped to standing at the sight of him, fighting the urge to salute.

“Pleased to meet you, Curtis,” I said. “We talked on the phone, I believe.”

“Yes, we did,” he said slowly.

I reached out a hand to shake, but Curtis Lobban, his face as somber as his outfit, refused the proffer. Pleased to meet me too, obviously.

“The justice, he is sorry to have kept you both waiting and is ready to see you now. Follow me, please.”

He turned and led us out of the waiting area into a large library, its walls lined with huge sets of law books. State reporters, federal reporters, U.S. Supreme Court reporters, digests of all sorts. Two young lawyers, a man and a woman, were hard at work at a conference table, books piled around them, legal pads thick with notes. Gnawing at the pylons supporting the Bill of Rights like hungry termites, I figured. They both gave Kimberly a long look. Kimberly always drew long looks, especially dressed in mint green, but the clerks barely noticed my presence, and why should they? Only the best and brightest clerked for Justice Jackson Straczynski, and I was neither. They only paid me enough notice to wonder what the hell I was doing there. What the hell indeed?

It’s not so easy to get close to a Supreme Court justice, even a State Supreme Court justice, so I hadn’t expected much when I called that morning before running off to seize Manley’s Eldorado. I mentioned my name, I mentioned Tommy Greeley, I waited on the phone a bit. And then it was this Curtis Lobban who came on the line. “What is the purpose of the inquiry?” he asked in his deep somber voice. “It is personal and I can’t say anymore,” I said. “Hold on for a moment please,” he said. I waited, and when he came back on the phone I was told, shockingly, that the justice would see me that very afternoon.

So here we were, Kimberly and I, passing by the serious young law clerks, headed for a visit with their august boss, Tommy Greeley’s old college pal.