inclined to reverse. But not here. Sapperstein’s prominence has been a call to combat for George’s colleague Nathan Koll. Koll, who left his position as an esteemed faculty member at Easton Law School to take a five-year interim appointment on the appellate court, prefers to treat attorneys as if they were his students, exuberantly pummeling them with sly hypothetical questions aimed at undermining their positions. Wags have long called this style of Socratic classroom interrogation ‘the game only one can play,’ and here too there is no winning with Nathan. The truth is that, for him, each case, no matter what the actual subject matter, presents the same issue: proving he is the smartest lawyer in the room. Or perhaps the universe. George is uncertain where the boundary falls on Nathan’s sense of grandeur.
If nothing else, with his beerhouse voice and squinty inquisitorial style, Koll makes good theater, and he tears into Sapperstein not long after the lawyer begins his oral argument with a quotation from an exalted legal commentator, spiced, in turn, with the words of the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Statutes of limitations on felony prosecutions, which ‘are found and approved in all systems of enlightened jurisprudence,’ implicitly reflect a legislative judgment that the moral gravity of an offense can be measured by the urgency with which punishment is pursued. ‘The general experience of mankind’ is that true crimes ‘are not usually allowed to remain neglected,’ ” Sapperstein declaims.
“Hardly, hardly,” Koll answers immediately. Even seated, he reminds George of a linebacker ready to tackle, hunched forward, his stocky hands spread wide as if to hinder any effort to evade him. “Limitations periods, Mr. Sapperstein, arise fundamentally from worries that memories weaken and evidence is dispersed over time. Which should not concern us when there is a videotape of the offense.”
Sapperstein will not back down, and the academic jousting between the judge and the lawyer continues for several minutes, two legal peacocks spreading their feathers. In George’s mind, the impressions of noted legal scholars about why Anglo-American jurisprudence favors statutes of limitations count for very little. The only operative fact is that the legislature in this state voted for one. As a judge, George takes it as his principal task simply to resolve any doubts about the meaning of the words the lawmakers used.
Ordinarily, he might interrupt with that observation, but on balance, he prefers to keep his distance from this case. Besides, it’s seldom an easy matter to get a remark in edgewise when you sit with Nathan Koll. Judge Purfoyle, on George’s right, has several questions written on his yellow pad, but Koll has yet to yield the floor, despite several gentlemanly efforts by Summer.
In any event, George’s attention is soon drawn to the thumping entrance into the courtroom of one of his two law clerks, Cassandra Oakey. Cassie cannot go anywhere without causing a distraction: she is too forceful, tall and attractive, and entirely unschooled in self-restraint. But as she charges forward to the clerks’ table at the far side of the courtroom, George realizes that she is not, as he might have expected, simply late. Cassie casts her large, dark eyes urgently toward him, and he sees she is holding a note. And with that a little wrinkle of terror creases the judge’s heart. Patrice, he thinks. This happens to George Mason several times each day. Lost in the professional issues that have always overwhelmed him like a siren call, he feels shocked and selfish when the recollection smashes home: Patrice has cancer. She had been hospitalized for two days now for post-operative radioactive treatments, and his immediate fear is that something has gone wrong.
Cassie creeps close enough to get the folded paper to Marcus, George’s white-whiskered bailiff, who passes it up. But the subject, George finds, is his own well-being, not his wife’s. Dineesha, his assistant, has written: We have heard again from #1. Marina would like to brief you on what she found out from the FBI but has to leave the building for the day at 1:00 P.M. Any chance you could put off the judges’ conference for half an hour to see her?
George lifts a temporizing finger in Cassie’s direction. Koll has now taken to battering Sapperstein about his other principal argument, which is that the videotape of the assault was too graphic and inflammatory to have been played for the jury without substantial editing, especially of the boys’ priapic displays to one another and Warnovits’s gynecological inspections of Mindy with the camera.
“You are not contending,” Koll says, “that the videotape, at least in some form, was inadmissible?”
“The videotape, Your Honor, as the jury saw it, should not have come into evidence.”
“But only on the grounds that some elements were unduly prejudicial?”
Sapperstein has been in enough courtrooms to sense a trap of some kind, but his evasions only intensify Koll’s efforts to steamroll him.
Enough, George thinks. He looks to the clerks’ table. There John Banion, the judge’s other law clerk, has his finger on the buttons that control the three tiny warning lights atop the lectern, which indicate how much time for argument a lawyer has left. Currently, the orange lamp in the middle is aglow in front of Sapperstein. Banion, a doughy figure in his early forties, is often referred to behind his back by the other law clerks as ‘the Droid’ because he is remote as a hermit. But for years John has proven perfectly attuned to the judge’s professional needs, and George drops his chin no more than an inch before John snaps on the red light signaling that Sapperstein’s time is up.
“Thank you, Mr. Sapperstein,” George says, cutting him off midsentence.
At the farther counsel table, nearer the clerks, the acting Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, Tommy Molto, rises with a mess of papers in his hands to respond for the state. Asking for a second, George covers his microphone, a black bud on a black stalk, so he can confer privately first with Purfoyle, then Koll. Koll can’t quite summon an agreeable expression but, like Purfoyle, grants George, as the presiding judge, the courtesy of a half- hour reprieve before the conference that normally would immediately follow the last argument. There the three judges will decide the cases they have heard this morning and assign among themselves the writing of the court’s opinions.
“Tell Dineesha I’ll see Marina,” the judge says to Cassie after waving her up. In a crouch beside the judge’s tall leather chair, Cassie is ready to depart, but George detains her. “What did number 1 say?”
Her brown eyes shift, and she gives her straight blond Dutch boy cut a toss in the interval.
“Just the same junk,” she finally whispers.
“More wishes for my health and happiness?” George asks, wondering if the joke sounds brave or foolhardy.
“Really,” she says.
But her reluctance about the message is provocative, and he circles his hand, asking for more.
“He, she, it, they-whoever it is sent a link,” Cassie responds.
“A link?”
“To a Web site.”
“What Web site?”
Cassie openly frowns. “It’s called Death Watch,” she answers.
2
Judge George Mason is in the final year of a decade-long term on the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District, an area principally composed of Kindle County. The chance to run for the appellate court had unexpectedly arisen only a year after he had been elected a Superior Court judge, presiding over a criminal courtroom downstairs in this same building, the Central Branch Courthouse. Many friends had discouraged him from considering the higher court, predicting he would find this life isolated and passive after a career on the front lines of trial combat, but the job-hearing arguments, reflecting on briefs and precedents, writing opinions-has suited him. To George Mason, the law has always posed the fundamental riddles life has asked him to solve.
In Virginia, law had been a family tradition, going back to his great namesake, the fabled American founder George Mason IV-the real George Mason, as the judge will always think of him. During George’s years as an undergraduate in Charlottesville, a legal career was yet another of the many ponderous expectations his parents had placed upon him that he was determined to escape. With his degree in hand, he fled here, spending two years as an ordinary seaman on a coal freighter, a job that provided an alternative to Vietnam. His vessel sailed up the river Kindle and around the Great Lakes, and in his solitary hours on watch, when duty required him to contemplate
