cruelty to animals. 'Guy had fourteen dogs penned up in his garage, Judge,' Merrion said. 'Hadda car in there with them too. Old Packard, hadn't driven it for years. Nobody knows why he had them, the dogs. They weren't pedigreed, reported stolen or anything. Seemed all right, they talked to him; perfectly-normal old guy. Told the cops all it was was he liked dogs. But he hadn't been feeding them, giving them any water, which seemed kind of strange, guy who liked dogs as much as he did. Or letting them go out, either. Dog officer said the garage was filthy, stunk like hell overpowering. That was why the neighbors finally complained. But then it took her over a week to get out there. By then three dogs were dead. Those animal officers: male or female, doesn't make any difference. They all scream and holler how they want the job, and then when they get it none of 'em give a good shit about doin' it. Don't care about the animals at all.
All they want's to get off the clock and have no one over them, no one they gotta report to. Then they can goof off the whole live-long day, and no one even misses them. They're always saying how overworked they are, and the towns don't give them enough money. But why should we?
They do such a lousy job. But so anyway, we got the old guy. Dunno what the hell you do with him. He's too old to put him in jail. Fine him? Just come out of his Social Security; that's all he's got to live on. He doesn't have any dough.'
'Oh shit, I dunno,' Cavanaugh said. 'Put it down at the end of the list. Maybe by then I'll think of something. Or he'll do the right thing and die.'
There were three breaking and entering charges, one of them Ottawa Johnson's. There were the two trespassing cases brought against the woman and the man arrested by the Rangers in the Canterbury State Forest. 'That'd be the Shepard and the Bennett matters, Judge,'
Merrion whispered.
'Trespassing,' Cavanaugh murmured, even though he still had his hand over the mouthpiece of the microphone. 'How the hell can somebody trespass in a State Forest? Thought that was the whole idea the damned thing: Nobody owns it; we all do. Supposed to be open to the public' 'Yeah, but with some limitations, your honor,' Merrion whispered. 'Two weeks, six bucks a night. Your time limit's up, you go home. This woman, she's the Shepard, here, and her three kids and her shit-bum boyfriend, he's the Bennett, Robert,' checking papers, 'no, sorry, Ronald, Ronald Bennett: all of them, the five of them, what they've been doin's they've been been livin' there since June. Best anyone can tell. They all look like it's been at least since June, they hadda bath. Mean to tell you, these folks stink. Rangers go up there, gonna bring 'em all in? Before they could do it, take 'em out the cabin, they hadda go and get a buncha cardboard boxes, liquor cases, you know?
Down at Wheeler's package store out on Route Five there. And then go back and help her pack up all her household goods and all their clothes and stuff. Pots and pans, everything. Blankets, and these thick quilts and pillows, filthy dirty, all of them all kinds of shit. Whalen told me Rangers said they hadda put the rubber gloves on; God knows what was livin' in that shit. Campin' wasn't what you had these people doin' there; what they were up to was settling-in the place. Gettin' themselves all dug in to stay a while, ready for winter, looked like.
Like they're woodchucks diggin' a hole for themselves in your lawn.
See 'em doing that, they're not plannin' on leavin' right off- anytime soon anyway.'
'Holy shit,' the judge said. 'It's hard to believe, you know, Amby? As long as I been here, hearing this stuff, day after day after day, I get so I think: 'I heard all of it, now. I must've heard all of it now.'
And then something else comes along. It gets so you just can't believe half of it, your mind just rejects it, it boggles, the things people dream up to do.'
'Yeah,' Merrion said, 'and I got to tell you, where this one's concerned, the camping's not all of it either. This Shepard matter, it's more complicated'n you might think. From what little I could get outta her there, other night up at the station, she may be tied up with our little friend Janet LeClerc'
The defendants and their families and the witnesses and cops stood and sat and talked and sighed and shrugged. Some of them made faces of disgust. They asked each other questions and ignored those who asked them, and when they were jabbed or poked and asked again, looked annoyed and said that they did not know either. Information about what time it was was popularly sought and repeatedly given. The people moved around with their shoulders hunched as though there might be snipers watching the room. They went from row to row and bench to bench and crowded in, getting angry looks from those they displaced to sit beside people they wanted to talk to; they talked urgently in low voices, glancing furtively every so often up toward the judge's bench, as though plotting against him and Merrion and making sure they would recognize them when the time came to harm them. They took careful note of everyone inside the bar enclosure. People came and went constantly outside the rail. They got up abruptly as though they had just remembered something that they should have done before they entered the courtroom and went out hurriedly through the swinging doors into the main foyer. Right away, as though they had been waiting for the chance, people came from the main foyer through the swinging doors into the courtroom and looked around at the seats vacated by the people who had just gone out. Finding none they liked, the new arrivals leaned against the wall and put their hands in their pockets and sighed.
Inside the bar enclosure were the prosecutors, cops and lawyers both, and probation officers, two of them plus a third one who came and went with papers. Two lawyers from the Mass. Defenders huddled together, riffling absently through their files. They talked about the Red Sox and how erratically they'd been playing, considering what a bunch of overpaid rich bums they were.
'For Christ sake, how?' Cavanaugh said. 'How the hell can that all be connected with her? Didn't you have her in? Tell her to stay away from undesirable companions? Didn't you talk to her like we agreed and you were going to there?'
'I had her in,' Merrion whispered urgently. 'I had her in Saturday morning. I gave her a good talking-to. I told her she hadda, well, you know what I told her. I told her what we said I hadda tell her and make sure she understood. I told her to stop doing what she was doing.
I told her to cut it the hell out.'
'Well, what did she tell you she'd do then?' Cavanaugh whispered.
'Tell me what she said to you. Did she tell you she'd do it or not?'
'I'm trying to,' Merrion said. 'That's what I'm trying to do here, for Christ sake. If you'd just let me, here, damnit, let me get the words out of my mouth.'
'Well then, do it,' Cavanaugh said. 'Tell me what she said to you.'
'Look,' Merrion said, 'what I did here, I think the best way that we go about this's just let this case of trespassing here that we've got, let it come forward, it's eleventh on the list, and appoint the Mass.
Defenders on this, and continue it a week. Because this Shepard woman doesn't know and neither does her boyfriend, this Bennett character either; neither one of them has any inkling about the connection that I think we've got here with Janet. Because I don't think Janet's talked to them since I had her in here Saturday. They wouldn't've had any way of knowin' what I said to her then, unless she did. They didn't have no phone or anything, livin' up at the campground. In the State Forest's what I'm saying.
'And then, what I already did this morning was, I called Sammy Paradise and I asked him, is he free for lunch today. And he said yes, he is, he could do that if we wanted, and so what I thought the best thing we all could do here is if we just get together here, you know, and see if we can get something worked out. Have some sandwiches sent in and we just have them in your office after we recess at One today. Put our heads together here and think about this thing, talk the whole thing over and see what we have got here. What we ought to do. That sound good to you?'
'If I tell you there are times when I wish I had never been born,'
Cavanaugh said, 'and you believe that I'm sincere, I really truly mean it, is there any way you know of they can make it retroactive? Anyway you ever heard of it?'
'Well,' Merrion said, becoming more offended, 'all I was just trying to do here was…' when there was a sound almost like someone with a chest-cold coughing during a lull in conversation and then someone with a deep baritone voice who was outside in the main corridor made a loud noise combining a scream of pain with a roar of outrage that stopped all the conversations in mouths-open progress in the courtroom.
Everyone turned to look at the green-padded swinging doors. Both of them swung open very slowly, tumbling a short, stocky woman with swarthy skin and short black hair, wearing a red, white and green flowered blouse and a short red skirt and red high-heeled shoes off-balance backwards perhaps two feet in the air into the room and then hard onto the floor, so that she landed crashing seated on her large buttocks with her arms outstretched and her feet in the red shoes sticking up in the air. She wore eyeglasses with red frames and her face was contorted,
