Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

How could this be? Harlan Madden had introduced the man as if they knew each other, as if they were colleagues.

Matías was a lawyer?

The man who had talked about his wife, his daughter. Who had cried when he came.

Was sitting at the defense table.

She was beginning to feel prickly hot and a little nauseated.

The man she was never going to see again , ships passing in the night as she’d put it, cliché or no cliché.

Two very separate worlds were somehow colliding, worlds she had been so meticulous about keeping apart.

After Matías had introduced himself, she could hear nothing but the thudding of her heart. Glenda Craft’s eyes had narrowed as she waited for Juliana to speak.

For a moment, she’d lost her train of thought. Then it came back to her. Wondering whether she was flushing visibly, she cleared her throat and said to Madden, “By Monday, I’d like to see all of the Slack chats between Ms. Meyers and Mr. Allerdyce and any that mention Ms. Meyers. I’ll then rule on the motion. I think that does it for today.”

She was slowly beginning to understand that she’d been used, seduced.

Set up.

He must have known she was the judge on the Wheelz case. She felt humiliated, disgusted.

She found herself running through her options. Maybe she should have said something as soon as the man walked into the courtroom. But what could she have said? She had no standing to protest an addition to the defense team. They had the right to add whomever they wanted, especially in the pretrial phase of a case.

He had the right to be there. It was their call.

And what if she’d said something like, Who are you, and why are you here? Matías would have produced credentials, no doubt showing him to be a member of the bar in good standing, and then what could she have said?

Aren’t you the guy I slept with one night last week in Chicago?

That would be the end of her marriage, the destruction of her reputation.

She could say exactly nothing.

There was a knock on the door. She could see a silhouette of a figure through the clouded-glass panel in her door.

“Come in.”

“Excuse me, Your Honor?”

Her clerk, Kaitlyn Hemming, a waifish woman in her mid-twenties with a pixie haircut, a recent Suffolk Law grad, stood there with a sheaf of papers in her hand. Juliana shared her law clerk with another judge.

“Got a minute?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Come on in,” Juliana said.

Time to get back to work.

The Bostonia Club was one of Boston’s grandest private clubs, located in a large, handsome brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue with a highly polished black-painted front door and brass fittings and a doorknob that gleamed. It was a club for lawyers, primarily, a place where they could socialize, play poker, shoot pool, have dinner. And talk law, if they wanted, without being accused of being boring. There were a few nonlawyer members, and civilians were brought in all the time, usually for dinner and a predinner talk. One Juliana attended recently had been titled “Great Defense Attorneys in Film (Besides Atticus Finch).”

It was funny, she had to admit, that she belonged to this fancy club, given that her mother had worked in one. Her mother, Rosalind, had been the operations manager at another exclusive private club in Boston, the Clarendon Club. She was a staff member — not very well paid — and not a member, of course. But she was a fixture at the club and much-beloved (or so she always said, herself). Yet not one of the members attended her funeral.

Juliana remembered coming up with the idea, in the year after her mother’s death, of a memorial service at the Clarendon Club. She mentioned the idea to her mom’s boss, the gloomy Mrs. Cooper. Mrs. Cooper took young Juliana’s hands in hers and gently disabused her. “Such a sweet thought!” Mrs. Cooper said. “And I know that’s how your mom saw this place sometimes. But I gotta tell you. When Mr. Carducci retired after half a century as caretaker, I could barely get six people to sign a going-away card. I mean, folks were like, ‘We’ll miss him — bet we can hire a replacement for half the cost.’ I mean, that’s just the reality of this place.”

With a sinking in her stomach, Juliana recognized the truth.

“Your mom,” Mrs. Cooper went on, “bless her heart, preferred her own reality.”

Tears had come to Juliana’s eyes. She left in a dazed state, a little sickened. Mrs. Cooper had nailed it: her mother invented, lived in, her own reality. She’d told Juliana how the members would say, What would we ever do without you, Roz? And she would believe it.

She remembered talking to her mother, shortly before her death, about her brother, Calvin, two years younger, who’d died when he was twenty. “You know,” Rosalind had said, “your brother was an extremely talented musician. A poet, really.” Juliana nodded, too weary to point out that Calvin had been a mediocre guitarist at best. “You remember that song he wrote, the one about a lady who’s buying a stairway to heaven? That was so beautiful. So much talent.” She was starting to slur her words. If she was at home, she was inevitably drunk.

Juliana couldn’t take it anymore. “Mom, Calvin... didn’t write that.”

“No?”

“It’s Led Zeppelin.”

“Well. ‘Great artists steal,’ T. S. Eliot said. Calvin put his own touch to it, is my point.”

She lived in her own world.

Linda Zucchetti already had dinner plans at the club but agreed to meet her for an after-dinner drink in the club’s library at eight o’clock. Linda was around her age, in her early forties, and had been a judge on the Superior Court for six years — a good friend and a good person to share a cosmo with. So first Juliana went home at five thirty, arriving at an empty house, and defrosted some lasagna in the microwave for Duncan and Jacob. She herself had some leftover chicken tikka masala from their favorite Indian place, on Boylston Street, while distractedly checking her e-mail.

She washed her face, put on toner, then her eye cream and some tinted moisturizer. Her mind was replaying the image, over and over, of Matías walking into the courtroom. She had recognized the walk even before she’d seen his face. It was definitely him. She brushed on some blush and stared at her reflection in the mirror. What had she done?

“Idiot,” she said aloud. She turned away from the mirror, disgusted, her stomach cramped with anxiety. What a terrible mistake.

She drove her blue Lexus sport-utility vehicle the mile or two into downtown Boston, lucked into a parking spot on Exeter Street, and entered the club at seven thirty.

Linda was standing in the foyer, in the middle of an extended good-bye with another woman who was probably her dinner date. The two of them stood underneath the John Singer Sargent portrait of Lucius Graham, the Boston lawyer who’d founded the Bostonia Club early in the nineteenth century. He had a handlebar mustache and wore his collar up with a black tie and black coat and looked sort of raffish, leaning back on his chair with his hand dangling casually in the air.

Juliana caught Linda’s eye, smiled hello, gave a little wave — she didn’t want to interrupt and didn’t feel like being introduced to someone she’d probably never see again — and wandered upstairs to the library. It was lined with books, like a library, but it was also the customary gathering place for club members to have drinks before and after dinner. She found a table as far away as possible from a raucous gathering of members seated in mismatched easy chairs around the unlit fireplace, waved at a few she knew, and told the waitress she’d wait to order until she was joined by her friend.