by now, Merrion's paid in for his pal Danny. That's fairly serious money.'
'Cowa'bunga,' she said. 'On the salary a clerk makes? You've got to be kidding. How on earth could he possibly do that? How much are we paying district court clerks these days?'
'It depends on where you're the clerk,' Robey said. 'The statute doesn't actually come right out and give any specific numbers. It's this very complicated formula that of course the legislators made just as hard to figure out as they possibly could when they wrote the salary statute. Sixty or seventy grand, I would say, by and large. Some of them probably get around eighty. And since Merrion's Hilliard's pal, and Hilliard used to have mucho clout, Merrion's probably one of those.
Say eighty thousand a year.'
'Well, that's not too shabby,' she said. 'But still, I wouldn't think it was country-club country for him and a friend. Not Grey Hills level, at least.'
'Well,' Robey said. 'Bissell sort of seems to think that what he gets for salary isn't all he makes, result of being clerk. Seems to think he's got some other source of income. I assume it isn't bribes if it was, Bissell'd have him keeping his room tidy at Club Fed by now, down in Allentown PA. But what it could be I can't imagine. He didn't come from big money. His father was a car salesman up at Valley Ford in Holyoke. Nice guy. Everyone liked him, but he wasn't rich and he died young. His mother worked in a bakery. I don't think he's moonlighting at anything, either.
'Still, his overhead's always been low. He's never been married, so he's never been divorced. If he's had any children he's had to support and send to school, no one seems to know about it. His mother's in a nursing home; I assume she's on Medicare. I assume he supports her, whatever else she needs. When she had to go into the home, he sold his condo up at Hampton Pond and moved back to the house he grew up in. So really, I don't know how he could afford Grey Hills either, when he first did it or now. It's a mystery to me.'
'Maybe he's teaching law,' the judge said. 'Nights or something? At Western New England.'
'I don't think he's a lawyer,' Robey said. 'He may be, but I don't think he is. If he had've been, I don't think he'd be doing what he is now, being a district court clerk. I think Hilliard would've gotten him a judgeship.'
'Yeah,' she said, nodding, 'he probably would've at that. Well, I don't know Danny all that well, but what I know I've always liked. And now this pretty picture starts to unfold before us. I wont say I can hardly wait.'
'I can't say I'm looking forward to it much myself,' Robey said. 'My mother's father opened the Armstrong Tile store over in West Springfield after World War Two. Bigelow Carpet line was later. My father ran the business after Grumpy died, 'til it was his turn to retire. Your family's been living in an area, really not that large a one, doing business fifty years, going into people's homes, time and time again; whenever something like this happens you're bound to know some of the people affected by it. Not that they're friends of yours, exactly; they're just people you've been on good terms with, part of the landscape, the same social fabric. Hate to see them fall and get disgraced, get their lives destroyed like that, torn apart in public.
In a way it's happening to you.'
'Although not saying that I think, for one instant, mind you,' the judge said, 'that Dan Hilliard never did anything wrong. Something most other people probably also would've done, but still very much against the law? Sure, of course he did. He had balls. He would've done lots of slightly illegal things; shady, questionable things.
Probably hundreds of them, over the course of the years.'
She paused and then chuckled. 'Like everybody else in his line of work back then, when he was still in it. It was the custom and usage of the trade, the good old political trade. No one ever got too badly hurt.'
She reflected. 'Come right down to it,' she said, 'I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't want to see the guy caught. Must be about sixty by now; a small living legend around here by now so I would think, anyway. Living legends should be more careful. Stay out of these little schemes and scrapes they always seem to be getting into, and then getting hurt by. Avoid doing things that'll wreck their careers, if they get caught doing them. And if they can't manage to do that for themselves, then we should look out for them, as though they were endangered species. Can't have our legends becoming extinct.'
She hesitated. 'Like you say, it's funny how it hits you. Almost like you were somehow involved in whatever they had going on up there in Canterbury, and now what's happening to them is also happening to you.'
'Yeah,' Robey said, 'but Cohen still wants his hearing, so I've got to call him and tell him: When do I tell him to come in?'
She sighed. 'Ahhh,' she said, 'tomorrow, I guess. Tomorrow afternoon.
Quarter of two. And this one we'll do here, in chambers. If the US Attorney wants to showboat this thing now, making public speeches and calling for Dan's head, first let him get an indictment.'
Two.
From the very beginning Janet LeClerc, then twenty-nine, had felt threatened by Merrion. 'The guy,' she would say abruptly to the impersonally cheerful cashier at Dineen's Convenient where she bought her cigarettes and coffee, '1 forget his name. You know him, the one I mean; big white-haired guy down there, the courthouse; not the judge, the other one.' This happened Friday mornings following the third Thursday afternoons when Corinne (pronounced 'Kreen' by her fellow workers), 'the switchboard woman' called to remind Janet soothingly that she must report on Saturday for her monthly conference. 'Because we know that sometimes, you, well, sometimes people who're scheduled to report, forget. These things. Everybody does they're not part of their routine.'
'I don't know what he wants me to say. And I need to do that, don't I, say what he wants me to say he could have me put in jail.' Therefore every time she had to see him she told him she did her best 'to have a regular routine, you know. That's what I do.' Because from what Corinne said to her, that seemed to be what they wanted. But because it never seemed to satisfy him' It like he don't believe me or he doesn't want to listen' she felt anxious each time as she did it, wanting him to believe her. Then afterwards she wasn't sure she remembered doing it.
So at their eleventh conference in the clerk-magistrate's office of the saddeningly rundown Canterbury District Courthouse, on the morning of the third Saturday in August, she once more earnestly described to Merrion her trust in routine as a pathway to the virtuous life she believed he wanted her to lead. 'I think that's how I can do, you know, like you said for me to do: to see if I can just stay out of trouble. For a year. So that other thing I did there, you can make it disappear. You know: like you said you would.'
The courthouse, closed on Saturday, was quiet. 'Not so much distraction,' Merrion explained to Hilliard. 'Man can actually hear himself think in there if he wants to, on a Saturday. Not so many fuckin' people always callin' you, the phone, bumpin' into you and stoppin' you, asking' things and sayin' things, getting' in your way.
'S why whenever me and Lennie decide we're gonna take on another one our projects stay outta trouble a year and we drop the charges on 'em I always see them Saturdays, when there's a chance I can think straight.'
Mornings Mondays through Fridays the beige rubber-tiled corridors and stairwells, eight feet wide, were fetidly overcrowded. The ventilation system became overloaded by nine' fifteen each day. Too little air rebreathed too often by too many nervous, sweating people became warm and moist.
Describing his work-day environment at the shag end of a winter day to Hilliard in the dark-panelled grill room of the clubhouse at Grey Hills, the room lightly touched with the aroma of maple logs burning on the hearth, Merrion said: 'When I first got into it, over Chicopee, I wasn't ready for it. Mobs of people, day after day, smelling like meat that went bad. When I was doing the substitute teaching; when I was with you and we're out campaigning, meetings and rallies, conventions and so forth: there were people around us, and they weren't all always our friends; sometimes they hated our guts. But at least you could go toe-to-toe with 'em, stand there and fight with the bastards, th out turnin' your stomach and suddenly thinkin': 'Jesus, I'm gonna throw up.'
He stared morosely through the mullioned bay window at the orchard of fruit trees bare and black in snow behind the clubhouse at the base of Mount Wolf, the remaining blue light darkening into violet and black in the late afternoon. The maple wood snapped in the fire and the bartender made the bottles clink as he removed and replaced them one by one on the shelves, wiping dust from their collars and shoulders.
'Most of the people who come to the courthouse 'cause they're in trouble: The way they stink, they deserve it. You should get in trouble for smelling like they do. They don't wash themselves or brush their teeth or even use some mouthwash. They don't change their underwear and socks, or their other clothes either. And lots of times you'd swear the person that you're talking to's never figured out why the stalls in public toilets always seem to have those rolls of paper in them. So as a result they look dirty and they stink. Their breath's foul, and it seems like there's armies of the bastards. Day after day after day they keep comin', an ill wind that blows through the
