Immoral Certainty (23 page)

“Anything I can do?”

“No thanks, V.T. It’s just a surfeit of life. New York disease.”

“Yes, I see. Well, crawling into this hole and gnawing on yogurt won’t help. You need a good uptown lunch and half a bottle of decent wine. I’m buying. Slip into your shoes and let’s travel.”

“Thanks, V.T., but I have court at one-thirty.”

“Don’t we all? Lucky for us we’re lunching with a judge. He’ll give us a note.”

The judge was Herbert C. Rice, a large jolly man in his early sixties, with a round dark pink face, fitted with glittering teeth. His hair was curiously baby-like, pale and silken, and he wore it swept back in the old Senatorial style. He was a friend of V.T.’s father.

The restaurant, one of the several hundred scattered through the east side of midtown, was dark and cozy. It had that expensive restaurant smell, too, and after Marlene had ordered the sole and had gone through a glass of the Montrachet that V.T. bought to go with it, she felt better than she had in a while.

Good food and light talk—could it be that simple?
Why do I feel like a country mouse in the big town,
she asked herself.
I’m not a country mouse; 1 was born here and 1 used to do this all the time. When 1 was single. V.T. and the judge here still do it all the time. Partake of civilization. Why else do people live in cities? Because they
like
muggings and filth?

It was not socially demanding either. Judge Rice had a wealth of amusing anecdotes, mostly at the expense of his colleagues on the bench and other courthouse denizens, and Marlene and V.T. were expected to chuckle appreciatively and not interrupt the flow.

A friendly and urbane fellow, Marlene thought, if a little too full of himself. This pleasant mien belied his reputation on the bench, where he was a severe and impatient tyrant. Not-Nice Rice he was called by the D.A. staff and the court officers. The defendant side called him Hangman Herb. Strange, Marlene thought; but judges were.

Rice was holding forth on the current deficiencies of defense counsel. He had been one, and a brilliant one by all accounts, before his translation to the bench. “It’s simply amazing,” he said, “how some of these nincompoops carry on in court. If you want to see true love, you ought to take a look at the affair between these people and the sound of their own voices. Look, what’s the first law of questioning?”

He snapped this question at Marlene, who shot back with hardly a thought, “Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.”

“Of course,” said Rice professorially. “And what is what we might call the first corollary to that rule?”

This required some thinking. She glanced at V.T., who allowed his jaw to drop slightly and a blankness to come into his eyes, in his famous impersonation of an upper class twit. After a moment, Marlene ventured, “How about, ‘Never ask the same question more than once unless you want a different answer?’”

“Excellent! So this pipsqueak the other day is elaborately establishing that his defendant has never seen this other thug involved in the robbery. ‘Did you ever see him before?’ No. ‘Did you ever meet him?’ No. ‘Are you sure you don’t recognize him?’ Absolutely. But the idiot can’t stop. He says, ‘So this man is a complete stranger to you?’ And the witness says, ‘Yeah, and he better stay a stranger, because if he comes around my house again I’m gonna break his face.’”

Marlene laughed at this, although she had heard the story before, starring another judge and another lawyer. V.T. contributed a similar story and Marlene told the one about the client who complained to the judge about incompetent counsel and when the judge asked the lawyer what he had to say about it, the lawyer said, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, what did he say? I wasn’t listening.”

“OK,” Marlene continued, “we’ve established our superiority over all these dumb lawyers. But when you look at the mess the criminal justice system is in now, I tend to doubt that the quality of legal education has much to do with it.”

“But surely you’ll agree that standards generally have fallen,” said Rice. “Education, respect for the law, civility. My God, it used to be possible to walk in this city. I mean on the streets, and at night too.”

“Yes, but I don’t agree that standards have much to do with the fall of New York. People were the same in the old days, and if anything they’re probably better educated now than they were then. I remember what the city was like—I’m not that young. We used to leave the house unlocked and we never got ripped off.”

Rice was now looking at her as something more than a decorative and passive audience. “Yes, and you wouldn’t dare do that today. To what would you attribute that change, except to a complete collapse of respect for the authority of the law?”

“Too abstract,” answered Marlene, who noticed that she had miraculously stopped feeling like a cretin. “Look—take me: one New Yorker. I was born in the middle of Queens in nineteen forty-eight. Total prosperity, New York the world’s greatest port, one of the biggest manufacturing cities. My dad, who barely finished high school, was able to buy a house and raise six kids, paying for parochial school for all of them, on a skilled worker’s salary.

“Where I lived, I was surrounded by maybe a hundred square miles of houses and apartments in which nearly every man had a job, in which nearly every woman was home all day, taking care of kids and watching the street. Now the schools and the cops are supposed to do both of those two things, with about a thousandth of a percent of the workforce.”

“Surely you’re not blaming women’s lib,” Judge Rice said, cocking an eyebrow.

“Women’s lib is a symptom, not a cause,” Marlene shot back. “Women
have
to work, and they don’t want to work in crappy jobs for shit wages.”

“Then what would the cause be?”

“Stupidity and greed, like always. And lack of imagination. Look, they industrialized agriculture in Mississippi and Puerto Rico. Where did they expect the people they kicked off the land to go? They came here, a lot of them, just in time to watch the industries leave for the ’burbs on the big highways we were building around then. And then our captains of industry, they let the factories rot, because why invest in making stuff when you can get rich a lot faster in real estate?”

“But surely, there have been hard times before,” said Rice. “The Depression, after all …”

“Yeah, and there was plenty of crime during the Depression, but we had a big country with only a hundred-fifty million people in it—a lot of escape valves there. And remember we hardly had any kids back in the thirties, so we got less of the casual street crime.

“And also—we always forget this—the poorest section of the population and all the blacks, was suppressed by what amounted to state terror. You know what cops used to do to people they thought were bad guys? The kind of bad guys who didn’t pay them off? And not even bad guys—
any
guy who didn’t look like he belonged in a white middle-class neighborhood. Judge, jury, sentencing, and punishment in thirty seconds.

“So, then we became enlightened—no more nightsticks, no more third degree, we got Miranda, we got Escobedo—fine. I approve. But we have a courthouse and prison system that was built for that middle-class city in which the cops kept most of the crime jammed into the poverty pockets, and handled a lot of it informally. Because, God knows, the people who run this city, who ripped off this city, didn’t want to pay for a criminal justice system. More cops, yes, but no place for the cops to put the mutts they catch. Hence the revolving door we have now.

“And there’s no way out for the poor bastards who feed it either. That’s changed too. My father paid six-thousand dollars for his house, in 1946, and he could afford it on a take-home of ninety a week. He’s been offered nearly two hundred grand for it. I make six times what he made when he was my age and I’ll never be able to afford that house.

“And I want to know—where did all the money go? To Japan? Bullshit! Something a lot closer to home sucked the marrow out of this country, and this city. What you were talking about, the joke of a system down at Centre Street—that’s just embalming the corpse. And I’ll tell you something else. You know who really pays the bill? Children. They always do, because they’re the weakest and there’s no one they can pass the pain on to.”

Marlene had not wanted to get started on this particular hobby horse, knowing it could lead up dangerous paths, but her argument had naturally led to this pass, and she could not stop herself. She thrust on.

“We’re murdering our children, and we don’t know why, and we can’t seem to stop. We have this Disney myth of childhood that we all pretend to believe in, and meanwhile we’re raping and beating and stabbing and burning the actual kids, and even if we don’t get around to the physical stuff we’re grinding their little spirits into powder. The half dozen or so kids who actually end up in dumpsters are symbolic—the whole society is one big dumpster for children.”

She stopped and took a big swallow of Montrachet. V.T. said, “Gosh, Marlene, what a toot! And here I thought you were just another pretty face.”

Rice’s expression had turned grim. “Now that’s something that really concerns me. I couldn’t agree with you more, Marlene. It’s a scandal. I’m far from being a bleeding heart, as I’m sure you know, but my heart bleeds when I see what people do to their own children. I don’t know, though—I still find it hard to credit these sociological or economic explanations you give. Surely there’s some spiritual deficit involved.”

“You mean the decline of organized religion?”

“No, although I do think they’ve failed past all argument. I mean a rebirth of spiritual power, something grounded more in the real nature of the world, and the real needs of men and women.”

As Rice said this, Marlene noticed that for an instant his face took on an expression of terrible longing, one that was at odds with the image of assured authority he presented to the world. It was this revelation, even more than the four glasses of wine, that loosened Marlene’s tongue. Before she had clearly thought through the consequences, she found that she had steered the conversation from child abuse in general to a particular example, and had blurted out the entire story of the St. Michael’s affair, including the fiasco with Raney and Mrs. Dean, and ending with the tongue lashing from Wharton.

“That’s quite a tale, Champ,” said V.T. when she had finished. “What are you going to do?”

Marlene shrugged, “Do? I don’t know—forget the whole thing, I guess.” V.T. sniffed unbelievingly at this and rolled his eyes heavenward. But Rice cleared his throat heavily and spoke as if delivering a judgment. “Yes, from a purely legal point of view, the District Attorney is correct. There is no case, and any further intrusion on your Mrs. Dean might be construed as harassment, especially since a child-care operation is so vulnerable to charges of this type.

“But I have to tell you that what you have said is deeply disturbing to me. It’s disturbing first because of what we were talking about earlier—about the ills of our society being taken out on the children. Surely we have a special obligation to the reputed victims when the victims are young children, and this may tend to counterbalance our traditional concern for the accused. And second, as you may know, I am myself associated in a small way with the center.”

“You?” said Marlene, startled. “With St. Michael’s? How?”

“Well, we have been associated with the church itself for many years—my family that is. And when the center started up, I think it was three years ago, Reverend Pinder asked me to be on the board. So I know your Mrs. Dean—and I agree with your reading of her: a formidable lady indeed.”

“And so what are you saying, Judge? I shouldn’t forget it?”

“Not exactly. Let’s say instead that an investigation should proceed under less formal auspices. Let me poke around and see what I can find out; as a board member I have a certain license. Similarly, if you should happen across any additional evidence—and naturally, I am not suggesting you violate the D.A.’s orders—if you should, then perhaps you could see that it finds its way to me. In time a clearer picture may emerge.”

“I felt like kissing him when he said that,” Marlene confided to V.T. later that afternoon, when Rice had dropped them off at the Courthouse and they were walking together toward their afternoon tasks.

“Did you? He might have enjoyed it if you had. His wife’s been dead for years. Never married again as far as I know. A good guy, I think. Dandled me on his knee when a babe, and so on.”

“He can dandle
me
if he wants. What a terrific man, especially for a judge! God, I feel like an incredible load has been taken off my head. I’ve been carrying this shit all by myself and now another player is taking it seriously.”

“You’re going to keep poking?”

“Umm … let’s say I’ll be open to anything that drifts by. I think it’d be prudent to keep a low pro for the next couple of weeks, until we see what Rice comes up with. But it would be good if … nah, forget it!”

“No, what? Forget what?”

“Oh, just thinking about Mrs. Dean. I don’t know anything about her, really. Her background, her finances … somebody could probably pick that up without alerting her that an investigation was still going on.”

“Somebody, huh?” said V.T. “Was that loud noise I just heard a hint dropping? Just because I know a few bankers.”

“I didn’t hear any noise, V.T. But if you decide to do anything in that line, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t advertise it.”

“Yeah, Bloom would have a fit.”

“Fuck Bloom,” said Marlene fervently. “I don’t mean Bloom—
Karp
would have a fit.”

Back in her office, after court finished that afternoon, Marlene called Raney. She felt that maybe she was on a roll, maybe she could needle Raney into putting a little undercover freelance investigative time into Mrs. Dean’s affairs. Nothing fancy—just enough to keep the pot boiling. But when she got through to his office, they told her he was out on an investigation.

This was the truth. Jim Raney was at that moment looking around Stephanie Mullen’s bloodstained apartment. Tapes on the floor showed where Mullen and her son Jordie had recently lain in their blood. The photographers and the forensic people had come and gone. Raney and his partner, Peter Balducci, were alone in the apartment.