That book! The Judge placed imaginary bets each day, keeping elaborate records of every race, track, jockey and horse in the game, using wisdom, insight, and a staggering knowledge of statistics to run a ten-year winning streak that was recorded in the thick leather journal, a book so feared by the bookmakers that they had once banded together and offered him six figures if he would burn it. He refused but never gave tips or shared his vast knowledge of the game to anyone else. The Judge had amassed an imaginary fortune of over two million dollars, all of it on paper.
So he would spend his mornings in Butterfly's, challenging young lawyers, and his afternoons at Wall Eye McGinty's lush emporium for horse players.
His third joy was matching wits with Marty Vail. It was more than a challenge, it was a test of his forty-five years on both sides of the bar. His forays and collaborations with Vail provided an excitement unmatched by his horse playing. They would bet silver dollars arguing points of law, sliding the coins back and forth across the table as each scored a victory. After almost fifteen years, the Judge was exactly twenty-two cartwheels ahead of Vail.
A gangster client of Vail's, HeyHey Pinero, had once called the Judge swanky. 'A most swanky guy,' he had said, and it was the perfect way to describe the Judge.
A most swanky guy.
And then age and the turbulent past caught up with the old jurist. At eighty-one, a series of strokes felled him. He had survived his third stroke, but it left him arthritic and frail, unable to cook for himself or even scrounge up a snack. Ravaged by insomnia and elusive memories and trapped in his memory-drenched house, he stared out of the windows at passing traffic or dozed in front of the TV set every day until one of the regulars came by, helped him get dressed, and carried his frail bone-flesh body to the car and from there to Wall Eye McGinty's horse parlour, where the players greeted him with almost reverential solicitude. McGinty, charitable bookie that he was, always drove the Judge home when the parlour closed.
Someone came every day. Vail, his paralegal executive secretary, the incomparable Naomi, Stenner, or one of Vail's young staff lawyers. And on days when everyone seemed bogged down with other things, Vail would send a cop over to perform the duty. On those days, McGinty met the officer at the door so as not to make him uncomfortable, no questions asked. After all, McGinty's betting parlour had existed in the same place for more than twenty years. The cops would hardly have been surprised had they got to peek through the door.
Six days a week the Judge doped the horses and entered his picks in the new encyclopedia-size black book.
On the seventh day, the Judge rested. Collapsed in his wheelchair, his atrophied legs tucked under a blanket, dressed as nattily as his palsied hands and weakened eyes would permit in a tweed jacket and grey flannels, he sat in his garden, facing the sun, his eyes shielded behind black sunglasses, and tanned the grey tint of old age from paper-thin flesh.
Age had robbed him of everything but pride.
So, on a warm Sunday morning in June two years before, dressed in his nattiest outfit, the Judge sat in the garden, spoke softly to the long gone Jenny about their life together and his life without her, and told her he could no longer go on. Then he put the business end of .38 special in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
He left behind a simple note for Vail, who had watched as the detectives did their work, then rode the ambulance to the morgue with the man who was as much a father to him as anyone had ever been. When he had overseen the cruel journey, he walked out behind the hospital, sat on a bench, and wept uncontrollably for more than an hour. Stenner had stood a hundred yards away, watching over, but not wanting to impose on, his boss. Finally Vail had opened the note.
Dear Martin:
I liked you better on defence, but you're a great prosecutor. I love you as a son. You always made me proud to know you. My mind is slipping away. We all know it, right? Haven't picked a winner in weeks. Can't even eat a bagel anymore. Need I say more, my brash and brilliant friend? I won't ask for your forgiveness - nothing to forgive. Invest in Disaway, third race at Del Mar tomorrow. Buy a round for the gang on me with the proceeds.
Farewell, dear friend,
The Judge
Twenty-two silver dollars had weighted down the note. The tip had parlayed the twenty-two cartwheels into nine hundred and seventy-four dollars.
It had been one hell of a party.
'He's not coming, Martin,' Stenner said, breaking his reverie. Vail snapped around towards him, aware that he had been staring at the door revisiting the past.
