Sleepless Nights (25 page)

The ice was broken—or, at least, the surface of the ice was chipped, and soon we were chatting as best we could with the band of lawyers about family matters and then—in lower tones—local politics (“’Course he’s corrupt, but at least you know where you are with him,” Freda told us, of one rising politician, with a broad wink) until the clerk announced, in deep bass tones: “All rise for the Honorable Alan Ackerman!”

The lawyers flew back to their seats and stood respectfully while a sprightly man in his sixties strode along the bench. Judge Ackerman had bright eyes and a paternal-looking fuzzy gray beard, although, Kent whispered to us, beneath the rustling cover of fifteen people settling back into their seats, “He’s a pretty tough one, much harder than Judge Field.
He
looks like an Old Testament prophet, but he’ll give
any
defendant a break if you can only get ’em to cry.”

The business of the court proceeded briskly, Judge Ackerman listening to the array of driving offenses, tenant-landlord disputes, and divorce cases with an appearance of undivided attention. Which was impressive, because there was something almost inescapably soporific about the proceedings. Both Tom and I struggled to swallow yawns that threatened to split wide our faces. The expanse of carpet covering the floor muffled the sounds of human activity (chairs moving, people walking) like a thick, deep blanket of snow. The loud hum of the air-conditioning focused our thoughts to a sin
gle monotone that became, as the minutes passed into an hour, and then into a second hour, and then a third, a trancelike state.

Finally, though, it was Kent’s turn at the lectern—case #1124—to ask the judge to consider community service instead of incarceration for his client.

Jay Axelrod, a hopeless-looking young white man in his early twenties, had been found with a glassine envelope of heroin in his jeans pocket when he was pulled over for a driving offense six months previously. Once the prosecutor, a fresh-faced, bespectacled young man, had finished outlining the case, Kent detailed Axelrod’s life with considerable emotion and pathos, lingering over physical abuse from a biological uncle and stints in three separate foster homes. Judge Ackerman listened to Kent’s plausible story of neglect and mistreatment with narrowed eyes. In the midst of a particularly harrowing account of how, as a child, the client had been torn from the care of the foster mother he loved in the middle of the night, when the woman was found to be a drug user herself, the judge cut in abruptly. “Yes, yes, Counselor; very tragic I’m sure. And he never saw her again, and his life was blighted. But let’s be practical here, please. Perhaps you’ll be so good as to tell me, Mr. Tyler, what evidence you have that this young man will
benefit
from the Community Service Labor Program? What reason do I have to think that your client is a candidate for a rehabilitative approach? You have known me many years, Counselor; I have long been concerned about the need for a punitive response on the part of the state judiciary in such matters. So tread carefully, Mr. Tyler, tread carefully…”

Kent bowed his white head deferentially, locking his hands together in an almost prayer-like gesture. “We have indeed known each other many years, Judge,” he said somberly, “and you know that I only take on clients I have
confidence
in.” He paused, allowing his words to settle into the faint buzz of the courtroom, which, in response, fell into almost complete silence. Kent held the stillness, then flashed a cheerful grin around the courtroom. “Of course, we
can
all
make mistakes, Your Honor; I am guilty of plenty, you know!” His colleagues—even the prosecutor—laughed appreciatively; the judge concealed a small smile. “But it is a man’s ability to stand at a crossroads and say,
now
is the time to change,
now
is the time to forge a new path, that marks him apart from the entrenched villain,” Kent went on, bringing in all the theatrical flourish at his disposal, including a few bangs with his hand on the lectern for additional emphasis. It was a sterling performance.

“Mr. Axelrod here has been dealt a terrible hand by fate, but he
does
want to make something of his life. He has a lovely young girlfriend, a child on the way, and a new job as a painter’s apprentice, which he found in spite of the economic downturn,” Kent continued, adroitly turning Mr. Axelrod’s fractured life into a narrative of partial redemption. “Today, Judge, he stands in this courtroom at the crossroads of his life. Today he looks at the different roads opening up before him. He has said to me, Judge, that both are rocky; yet one has the promise of fine scenery unfolding in the distance! Your Honor, I believe that we, that the state, must allow him to set off on the
right
path today, that we must help him stay clear of the wrong one. And that, Your Honor, is why I ask for a rehabilitative approach in place of incarceration.” His words rang in the air. Even Mr. Axelrod was sitting up a bit higher at the end of Kent’s stirring speech, his mouth half-open.

Judge Ackerman, who seemed entirely used to Kent’s style, looked as if he was resisting its theatrical sway—“Mr. Tyler, I shall nominate you for a Golden Globe one of these days”—but he ruled in his client’s favor. Mr. Axelrod punched the air delightedly and kissed his heavily pregnant girlfriend loudly on the lips; Kent sat down with a self-satisfied smile. The prosecutor yawned, and turned to his next case.

“If
you’d
come in and defended Axelrod, you’d have been home-towned,” Kent told us afterward, tightening his ponytail over a cup of greasy coffee in the court’s small, ill-stocked dining room,
“meaning you’d have lost. No question about it. Ackerman’s no friend to the ‘drug court’ program, not his politics at all. But he’ll work with us, you see,” he explained, “‘us’ being the local lawyers, that is. He knows us and he trusts us. If you think your client is truly beyond help, you make a bland case and the judge picks up the cues. He knows you think there’s no point in trying to rehabilitate, the client’s a hopeless case. But if you crank out something really overblown, he knows you mean it, and nine times out of ten he’ll rule your way. But if a lawyer comes from out of town, the judge doesn’t know if he or she understands the score, see? He doesn’t trust the lawyer to flag the truth for him, make the whole case clear. So he’ll almost certainly rule against them. It’s just the way things work,” he added, seeing the expression on our faces. “In a rural criminal court, anyway. You’ll have to get in good with Ackerman if you’re going to make a success of the practice.”

The door opened and Judge Ackerman himself appeared in the dining room; Kent, grinning, hailed him over, then introduced us.

The judge had his hands thrust in his pockets. “My, my, my, if I’d had a dollar for every city lawyer who fancied a new life overlooking the water,” he remarked, rocking back on his heels with a rolling laugh. “Beautiful place, slow pace of life, that’s what you think, eh? Ha ha! Still, maybe you two’ll be different…Ha ha ha…Kent tells me you have potential, although Kent—well, you haven’t been firing on all cylinders recently, have you, ha ha ha! Still, if you two are here next month, I’m hosting a small dinner for the local lawyers, I’ll tell Betty my secretary to send you an invitation.
If
you’re still here, that is…”

He went off, crowing to himself, to bury his head in a large piece of apple pie on the other side of the room. Kent was visibly irritated. “Acts damn high and mighty sometimes, but we were the ones who got him elected,” he muttered in a furious undertone. “We decided who it should be, we told him to run; that’s the way it’s always worked
around here. Us lawyers got together, we sorted the whole thing out for him. What, he thinks he can tell me how to run
my
practice now?” He glowered blackly at the unconscious judge across the room. “I may have to remind him about that before too long…”

The door opened a second time, and the lawyer named Mick strolled in to make himself a cup of coffee from the machine. He slopped in the milk, hesitated for a fraction of a second, then came over and slid out the fourth chair at our table. He took a sip of his coffee, watching us reflectively over the rim. “Bumped into McColley the other day,” he said at last, casually. “Al McColley, from Sussex. Representing Ryan Cormier. You’re representing the wife, right? Emmie—used to be Vaughan, before she was married?”

The three of us immediately organized our features into the appropriate expression of pleasant disinterest. “Yeah, nice girl,” Kent said, uncommunicatively. He paused a moment. “
Very
nice girl. And a damn good mother,” he added.

Mick raised his eyebrows over his cup of coffee, then charitably took the bait. “You think so, huh? That’s not what McColley says, but you’d expect that, I guess. He’s an honest man, though; not the kind to make stuff up. He says he’s got big-time, tight-as-can-be evidence Emmie Cormier is a real neglectful mother. I kinda took it seriously, coming from him. Then I saw Ryan a few days later at The Fisherman, that new bar across from The Lobster Pot, crowing all about it to his buddies, saying if his—ah—glamour photos of her don’t win the case, he’s got other evidence that will.”

Kent’s face was smooth as the sand on the ocean floor. “’Course he is, he’s claiming all sorts of dumb stuff, that Ryan,” he said neutrally. “McColley’s just spouting what Ryan says. I wonder which one of his half-assed claims he was talking about this time, though…” He kept the question mark out of his voice, but left the sentence hanging.

Mick clearly knew he was being played; for a moment or two he
watched a heavyset cleaner mopping the table beside us with slow, deliberate swipes. Then he turned back. “Kent, I’ve never known you take a case you didn’t believe in,” he said seriously. “And I’d always thought well of young Emmie Vaughan. McColley wasn’t specific of course, but I think it had something to do with the first child’s death. Something that came up in the autopsy. I suggest you put in an application to the local registrar to get a copy of the death certificate,” he added, draining his cup at last, and standing up. “Ryan was talking about the whole thing pretty publicly at The Fisherman, so I’m not breaking any confidences here.”

Kent slowly put out his hand, and grasped Mick’s. Then he leaned back and inspected the table top. “Word is,” he remarked, “that old man who died of pancreatic cancer three months back, Chuck Monro, never got around to signing the divorce papers from his first wife down in Florida. Anyone trying to sort out the Monro estate might want to check out all the S. Monros living in Tallahassee.”

Mick stared at Kent, who continued his careful investigation of the melamine surface beneath his teacup. After a moment, Mick placed his free hand briefly on Kent’s shoulder, squeezed it, and left.

“That’s one of the reasons I never miss court,” Kent said to us in a low voice as the door banged closed, looking up with suddenly sharp eyes. “The gossip. Amazing what turns up. Right then, I’ll stop off at the registrar’s office on the way home, get a copy of the death certificate. God knows what Ryan’s talking about, but we got to be prepared…”

“He sounds dodgy to me,” my mother said, suspiciously, of Kent when I described our morning’s experiences, “very
American,
don’t you think?” as if the two were synonymous. “All this stuff about playing the court, about corrupt local politicians—it sounds highly dubious to me. Things aren’t like that in England, I can promise you that,” she added, proudly, in ringing tones (although just the other day she was telling me about how her local MP had been forced to
resign for taking “cash for questions” in the Houses of Parliament. This entire event seemed to have slipped her mind, although I didn’t fail to point it out). “Well, anyway, this Kent chap—I bet he’s trying to reel you in,” she went on. “He says he’s got to get out of his firm sharpish—have you ever wondered why? What the real reason is? I bet he’s got some disasters hidden in the woodwork, I bet the business is going to hell in a handbasket, he’s going to leave you with no end of problems, Q. Still, it’s your business I suppose; you never listen to me…”

I relayed this conversation to Tom, expecting a burst of hilarity (“ridiculous as ever, your mother”), but instead he shrugged. “Frankly, she may have something,” he said. “I’ve been wondering exactly the same thing. Why does he want to get out so fast? Wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kent has the odd skeleton in his cupboard. Not much we can do about it, I suppose, just wait for it to rattle.”

45

Jeanie

I
would have liked to go home, if I could, away from the entire continent that housed Paul, but my sister was relying on me and, given that she’d paid for my flight out to the States, I couldn’t really leave. Particularly not once she’d started working
again (well, sort of). But living in Paul’s house was a torment. I had to take his graduation photo off the desk in my bedroom, wrap it in a tea towel, and hide it in the bedroom cupboard. Even so, I was acutely conscious of it. I was constantly fighting the temptation to go and unwrap it. I could have hidden it somewhere else in the house, of course, out of my own reach, but I was worried Q and Tom might find it, and I couldn’t think how I would explain a photograph in a dish towel. I knew I would look completely mad.

But he was in my thoughts constantly. And I also missed Dave. He wasn’t perfect, but he was my friend. I kept wanting to pick the phone up to tell him something, and was so sad to remember I couldn’t. I tried to tell Q about this; she was irritable and impatient. “For goodness sake, Jeanie, make up your mind!” she said, shaking her head. “First you want him, then you don’t, then you do. Honestly…” Alison, to my intense frustration, said almost the exact same thing on the phone.

I dialed Paul’s number two hours before he was due to collect me on that longed-for Tuesday evening. “Paul, I’m not coming,” I said abruptly, before the sound of his voice could put me off my stride. There was a pause.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, politely. “Are you ill?”