The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  'He's in the Tribune,' Marietta says. 'How'd you call it, what he writes, Judge?'

  'Lifestyle, I suppose. The sixties survivor point of view.'

  'Right. You know how funny people can be in what they do.'

  ‘I think the column is called "The Survivor's Guide." Michael Frain,' says Sonny. 'He writes under the name of Michael Frain. He's syndicated,' she adds and then feels that she's fallen into

  Marietta's trap and is actually boasting about this boy who came and went from her life before Noah set to sea.

  'Oh, I read that,' says Annie. 'He make me laugh. He was your boyfriend?'

  'Momentarily. But his name isn't really Michael Frain. It's Seth Weissman. Michael Frain is a pen name. The whole thing is somewhat confusing. We knew somebody named Michael Frain at that point. He lived in the building, too.'

  'With Nile Eddgar and them?'

  'Right. Nile and Eddgar and June in one apartment. Seth and me in another. And then Michael Frain. Other people, too, obviously.'

  'Sounds like some commune,'says Marietta, and Sonny cannot contain herself, she laughs aloud. Sometimes Marietta might just as well say it: You white folks are strictly crazy. Yet there was some aspect of happy communalism in those years - young, before the walls were up, the boundaries drawn. Seth's best friend, who was in law school, was always in their apartment, Hobie something, a big, funny guy, black, a wild character.

  Annie has looked up from the files and studies the judge, trying to comprehend all of this - the names, the relations. She has delicate looks, her eyes smallish against a broad flange of cheek. Sonny repeats herself.

  'Michael wasn't my boyfriend. My boyfriend's name was Seth. He's the one who writes the column. But the pen name he uses is Michael Frain.'

  Marietta, with a big-city look of mistrust, finally speaks the lingering question. 'So what happened to Michael Frain?'

  ‘I haven't the foggiest,' says Sonny. 'God's truth. Seth and I were past tense by then.' Not that she hasn't wondered. A sudden stab of curiosity sometimes reaches her when she sees the name, the picture at the heading of the column. How did Seth become Michael? Where did Michael go? The questions, even now, make her uneasy.

  This talk of Seth, of newspapers, brings Sonny's mind again to June Eddgar and the murder. There will be reporters in the courtroom. A white lady murdered in a drive-by. Mother of a probation officer. A prominent politician's ex. Lubitsch is right. It's a doozy.

  'I'd love to keep this case,' she says to Marietta. It's not really the attention that excites her. Since all new judges face a yes-no retention vote six years after appointment, the accepted wisdom is to avoid publicity, so that the voters will have no reason to reject you. It's more the past that seems somehow alluring. The unexcavated remains of her own existence. Something back there, perhaps merely her youth, inspires curiosity, the vaguest thrill to think of the distances she's moved.

  'Keep it,' Marietta answers. 'Chief Judge don't like you to transfer cases anyway.' The judges - lawyers, pols, bureaucrats by training - are often schemers, inclined to dump demanding or controversial cases on colleagues with less clout. As a result, the Chief, Brendan Tuohey, has erected strict rules. The mere thought of Tuohey and his edicts makes Sonny uneasy. Raised without a father at home, she inevitably finds men of a certain age formidable. And Tuohey, a crafty pol whose probity has long been open to question, has never cared for Sonny or the Reform Commission that forced her into his domain. To her face, he is unfailingly polite, even courtly, but Sandy Stern, Sonny's old friend and occasional mentor, has gone so far as to suggest that Tuohey placed her in the Criminal Division, in spite of her limited judicial experience - a year in the matrimonial division, a few months in the criminal branch courts - in the hope she would fail.

  'Well, I have to put something on the record. About knowing June. When's this case up for the bond hearing? Now?'

  It's nearly 2:00. There will be no bail, of course. The gang defendants are invariably on probation or parole, and bond, under the law, is not permitted. Sonny asks about Hardcore's probation status and Annie sets off to the outer office to get the answer from Marietta's computer console. Marietta continues racking the files from the morning call on a stainless-steel cart for transport back to the clerk's office.

  'Hardcore has himself a probation officer.' Lubitsch, having thrown open the door a bit too forcefully, is on the threshold, with Annie beside him. Beaming, virtually luminous with secret knowledge, the policeman engages in a stage pause until Sonny beckons with a hand.

  'Nile Eddgar,' says Lubitsch. 'He's Hardcore's probation officer.'

  In the corridor outside, between the chambers and the courtrooms, somebody important enough to be disdainful of the peace happens by whistling.

  'This gangbanger killed his probation officer's mother in a drive-by?' Sonny asks. 'That's a coincidence?'

  'That's no coincidence. And no drive-by. Maybe the Saints want to make it look that way. This was a contract killing.'

  The portent of this is bad: A street gang taking deliberate aim on a probation officer's family. A new battlefront opened in the war on the streets.

  'Want to know the rest?' asks Lubitsch, still glowing.

  'I'll hear it in court, Fred. I'm going to do your warrant after my motions.'

  'Whatever you say, Judge,' he answers, but cannot restrain one more disbelieving toss of his head. He says yet again, 'It's a doozy.'

  Sonny grabs the black robe from the coat tree behind her desk and zips it halfway. With a certain processional formality, Marietta and Annie hasten before her down the hall into the courtroom. A double doozy. Everyone will want a piece of this case. The Mayor will be on TV, sticking up for law enforcement. An atmosphere of brooding anger will penetrate the courtroom. Sonny, who has not yet endured the storm of a controversial case, becomes conscious somewhere at her center of the troubled qualms of fear.

  In the corridor, Marietta's fine alto arrives, so round with pride you would think it's her own name she is singing out. 'The Honorable Sonia Klonsky,' she can be heard crying, 'judge presiding.'

  *

  Two p.m. bond call. Black men in manacles. The Chief Judge, Brendan Tuohey, sets bail according to a pre-established scale on all cases on which the grand jury returns an indictment. But under state law when a defendant is arrested on the basis of a prosecutor's complaint, he is entitled to a bond hearing before the assigned trial judge. Sonny regards it as one of her saddest duties to deliver the crushing news most of these young men receive, that their liberty, like some item checked at the door, is lost and unlikely soon to be retrieved.

  April, Eliot said, is the cruelest month. But if he was looking for the cruelest place, he should have come here, to the Superior Court of Kindle County. A kind of barbarity seems to blow in with the defendants from the bad neighborhoods and mean streets, a grim devastation, a slaughterhouse reek. Here are freely traded the secrets no one wants to hear. At one point last month, there were four different trials ongoing involving mothers or fathers who had murdered their children. This morning Sonny arraigned six gang members who surrounded a recalcitrant twelve-year-old in a housing project stairwell and beat him with a pipe until the brain matter was literally oozing from his skull. These tales of astonishing brutality, of stabbings and rapes, of shootings and stickups, of the inevitable 'crime of the day,' so heinous that, like certain forms of pornography, it seems beyond normal imagining - these are routine, routine, routine, and their meanness is matched only by the system of which she is standard-bearer and emblem, whose clandestine rationale too often seems to Sonny to be to capture, judge, and warehouse the very poor. Every month or so, preparing for a status call, she will go back to the lockup, looking for Annie or the transport deputy, and confront, through the bars, the day's load of prisoners, twelve or fourteen young men. You would expect them to rise up and revolt, but most are quiet, shifting about, smoking their cigarettes. If they dare to look her way at all it is without defiance or, often, hope. They ha
ve been humiliated. Tamed.

  On the bench, though, sorrow is seldom the predominant emotion. In this atmosphere of loathing and fear she labors on, trying to impose reason where, generally speaking, impulse and emotion have held sway. Murder is the marquee business of this courtroom - gangbangers killing gangbangers; men killing men. They use guns mostly - also knives, bats, razor blades, automobiles, crowbars, and, in one celebrated case, an anvil. The young people kill each other for reasons that are often incomprehensible: because somebody was signifying on the wrong corner; because a jacket was torn. In nine months, she has mastered all the terminology: 'ride-by' (shooting on the move); 'drive-up' (firing from a stop); 'drive-through' (the car is the weapon); 'chase-aways' (the enemy flees). The older folks also live in a world from which anger and desperation emanate, as tangible as heat. Yes, men still kill each other over dice games, drugs, and, naturally, who was coveting whose girl. What can you say about a loaded gun in the hand of a spurned and drunken man? On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

  Now the courtroom lingers in the somnolent air of the afternoon. This morning, during the weekly status call, the courtroom and corridor teemed with all the urgent antagonists, the defense lawyers, the cops and prosecutors, the aggravated citizen witnesses, the deputies sullenly transporting the defendants, and those defendants' beleaguered, woebegone women. But now there is a melancholy stillness. Outside the open doors at the rear of the courtroom, a custodian mops the halls in the yellowing light.

  Marietta hammers the gavel sharply, and the lawyers and reporters and sheriff's deputies slowly gather themselves to their feet, as Sonny climbs up the four stairs beside the bench, a clean-lined oak affair of faux-Bauhaus design. The senior judges sit in stately palaces in the main building on the third and fourth floors, vast chambers that bespeak the same architectural strategies as cathedrals - the individual dwarfed by the majesty of marble columns and gilt-framed portraiture, by the rococo gewgaws of carved walnut and ceilings vaulting two and a half stories above. These courtrooms in the Central Courthouse Annex were built in the eighties, when DC poured what money there was into law enforcement. The room strikes a clanging note of late-century efficiency - bang for the buck. For Sonny, the courtroom feels as intimate as her living room, but like certain children, its glory is not obvious to outsiders. It is a pie-shaped room, broadening back from the bench, rickety public construction, the plasterboard gouged in places, the meal-colored carpet already tearing away in hairy chunks. The jury box and witness stand repeat the stark lines of the bench. Weirdest is the track lighting, reminiscent of a motel lounge, which is positioned over the major players -judge, witness, attorneys - leaving dim spots throughout the windowless courtroom where the lawyers, the bailiff, the clerks tend to retreat in relaxed instants, like actors offstage.

  In the wake of the shooting death of a matrimonial court judge several years ago, these courtrooms have been built with a wall of bulletproof glass in front of the spectators' sections. The sound of justice being done is piped back there by way of microphones which seem to pick up the heavy breath of everyone - defendants, lawyers, Sonny herself - in the intervals between words. She looks out there every day, toward the friends, the relatives edging forward on their seats to catch some sight, some news about their loved one in jail overalls. In warning to them, Marietta has taped a hand-lettered sign to their side of the glass:

  No eating no drinking no visiting In the Lockup Or the Courtroom

  Now the dozen reporters who are present resume the leather barrel chairs in the jury box, where they have placed themselves to ensure that they can hear. The amplification system to the region beyond the glass often conks out, and the angled walls make the acoustics unpredictable. The journalists are mostly the hangdog beat reporters, but two of the pretty faces of local TV are present. Stanley Rosenberg, the little ferret from Channel 5, in a $500 blazer - and ratty blue jeans that the camera will not see - scurries to a seat next to a sketch artist he has brought along. In this courthouse, where the judges are elected, the press is inevitably accommodated, especially in the afternoon, when the reporters are all on deadline. Marietta calls first the case about the murder of June Eddgar.

  'People versus Ordell Trent!' From the lockup, the defendant, a.k.a. Hardcore, is brought into the courtroom in his blue jumpsuit, handcuffs, and ankle chains. With mild alarm, Sonny recognizes the lawyer who comes to stand beside him, Jackson Aires. Aires has fought these wars so long he comes up firing out of instinct - one of those guys who talks the trash he knows his clients want to hear, albeit in a somewhat inanimate fashion, with no real body language to his lament. A worn-out-looking black man of mid-tone complexion, with a pomp of age-whitened African hair, Aires wears an old burgundy sport coat and scuffed bucks. With reporters here, he will put on a hell of a show, demanding bail for his client.

  The lawyers state their names and Sonny makes her record: she knew the Eddgar family twenty-five years ago but has had no contact with any of them since, save Nile Eddgar, who may have appeared as a probation officer in this courtroom once. Tommy Molto, deputy supervisor in Homicide, a smallish dumpy-looking lifer who rose close to the top of the PA's Office a few administrations back, only to slide back down in the shadow of some disremembered scandal, has appeared for the state, filling in on the initial appearance.

  'Mr Aires, or Mr Molto, if either of you feel the slightest reservation, I'll be happy to return this case to the Chief Judge for reassignment.'

  Aires just shakes his head. 'No problem, Judge.' Molto repeats the same words. She knew the Prosecuting Attorney's Office would have no objection. They have 106 cases in this courtroom. They will have between 98 and 112 cases on her docket every day of the year. They are not about to question her impartiality. Not on the record. The only cavil she will hear, if there is one, will come in the corridors, through the grapevine.

  Sonny recites the charges in the complaint. Hardcore looks on alertly. The defendants are usually fazed or anxious, lost to arcana of the courtroom. But Hardcore, burly, dark, with thick eyes, maintains himself with dignity. He knows what is occurring. Innocently, as if she did not know she was sounding a battle alarum, Sonny asks, 'Mr Aires, do you have a motion?' Long-limbed, still lithe-appearing, Jackson Aires uncrosses his arms and edges closer to his microphone that angles up from the oak podium before the bench. To Jackson Aires the criminal law really has no categories, only colors, white and black. He can play the game, talk your talk, cite the precedents, but with no evident belief they control, or even contribute to, the result. To him, every rule, every procedure is simply one more device to delay, by other means, the emancipation of the slaves. Now he looks disconsolately at the rug.

  'No motion, Judge.'

  There is a decided change, a pulse in the atmosphere. The two lawyers look up at her like collared hounds, hoping for understanding. They wish to say no more in front of the reporters, many of whom nonetheless seem to have gleaned the significance of Aires's remark. Stanley Rosenberg, Sonny notes, has slipped over two seats toward Stew Dubinsky from the Tribune. Stanley's smooth coiffure holds a spot of courtroom light as he bobs his head, absorbing Dubinsky's interpretation.

  'Perhaps counsel should approach,' says Sonny. She waves away Suzanne, the court reporter, and meets the lawyers, remaining on the lowest step beside the bench. 'What's the deal?' she whispers. ‘I take it the defendant has made an arrangement with the People?'

  Aires looks to Molto. Molto says, 'That's correct, Judge. We've worked something out. If the court approves.' His Adam's apple does a turn beneath the second chin. He is badly pockmarked. 'We're still checking the details, Judge,' Molto whispers. 'There's a lot to investigate. But if the defendant's story holds, we've agreed to twenty years, Judge.'

  'On the shooter?' She has raised her voice more than she would like. With day-for-day good time, Hardcore will be out of the penitentiary in a decade. 'On this case? With a sheet? He's only doing ten inside?'
/>
  'He's not the trigger, Judge. And he's giving us someone else. He was just the broker, Mr Aires's client. There was someone else who got him to do it.'

  "The Mayor?'

  The two lawyers both laugh, a peculiar outbreak of sound in the courtroom where everyone else is silent in hopes of getting an idea of what is transpiring beside the bench. When she became a judge, Sonny found she had grown much funnier. In the interval, she ponders what Molto is saying. Hardcore has flipped, turned state' s evidence, which the gangbangers seldom do. It's an interesting development.

  'Look,' she says, 'when you can talk about the case, you call me. This is going to require some discussion.' Sonny is visited by her recurring suspicion: they are setting her up. Somebody is -the cops, the prosecutors, the Chief Judge Brendan Tuohey. They are hoping she'll make a noteworthy mistake, so they can run her out of the building. She gathers her robes, ready again to ascend, then thinks to ask if Molto plans to indict Hardcore and his co-defendant together. Molto nods. It will be her case. She will preside at trial, if the threat of Hardcore's testimony does not persuade whoever engineered the murder to plead guilty. Molto speaks up to detain her.

  'Judge,' he says. His voice has dropped to the very edge of audibility. Even his lips are self-consciously stiffened to defeat the most intrepid of the reporters. 'Judge. Just so you know. It's Nile Eddgar. It's no problem for the People. But so you know. Given what you said.'

  An empty second passes among the three.

  'Wait.' She's come down the last stair. 'Wait. I'm playing catch-up. Let's not be cryptic, Tommy. You're telling me Mr Aires's client, whatever, Hardcore, that he's going to testify that his probation officer, Nile Eddgar, conspired with him to plan this killing of Mr Eddgar's mother?'

  Molto looks at length across his shoulder to the reporters before he answers. 'More or less,' he says. The two lawyers face her without expression, awaiting whatever will come next. Sonny labors an instant with the turmoil. 'We haven't picked him up yet,' Molto says. 'We'll probably get a warrant tomorrow.' It's a secret, he's telling her. She nods two or three times, numbed.