“That’s what they call the section of my state where the Jimson kids were first tried.”
“Is it meant to be a compliment or a slam?”
“It started out one way but ended up the other.”
“That’s what I figured,” she said.
Adair looked at each member of his audience. “Any other questions?” When no one had any, Adair continued. “But despite Combine’s brilliance, I could sense that at least four of the brethren weren’t buying his argument. It could’ve been because three of them were up for reelection and figured that voting to put two rich kids to death wouldn’t do them any harm with the voters in my state, who, on the whole, are rather partial to executions. The fourth vote belonged to the lone weirdo on the court, who got and, I guess, still gets a kind of kinky pleasure from upholding death sentences. At least he’s never yet voted to overturn one. But then I have to admit I got plenty of satisfaction-of a different kind, I hope-from voting just the opposite.”
“You’re opposed to the death penalty then?” Mansur asked.
“Yes, sir, I am. Unalterably.”
“How peculiar.”
“Ever see one carried out, Mr. Mansur?”
Before Mansur could reply, which he obviously wanted to do, B. D. Huckins again interrupted with an impatient, “Let’s get on with it.”
Adair smiled at her. “With my account rather than my philosophy, I take it?” Not waiting for an answer, he said, “After I did my vote-counting, I came up with what appeared to be a four-to-four tie with old Justice Fuller holding the swing vote.”
Parvis Mansur couldn’t resist another interruption. “When you say old, is that a colloquialism or a statement of fact?”
“Justice Fuller was then eighty-one, which made him not only old but aged. His full name was Mark Tyson Fuller and he’d served on the court for thirty-six years and liked to call himself its institutional memory, although for a quarter of a century the clerks had been calling him The Weathervane because of his voting with the majority eighty-nine percent of the time.”
“Was he competent?” Mansur asked.
“He wasn’t much of a legal scholar and he was lazy, but he had a facile mind, all of his marbles, and he was the best vote-counter on the court-even better than I was and I was more than a fair hand. But he was also determined to stay on the court till he died because his wife had Alzheimer’s and the constant care she required had almost ruined him financially.”
“How much does a supreme court justice make in your state?” Dixie Mansur asked.
“Sixty-five thousand,” Adair said. “The chief justice gets seventy.”
“Huh,” she said. “Law clerks down in L.A. make almost that much.”
“I’m sure they do,” he said. “But some of us could afford to serve on the court. Others thought a term or two would help them politically or when they returned to private practice. And some of us enjoyed the prestige. There’s an old saw about how a state judge is a lawyer who knows a governor. But in my state, being
B. D. Huckins glanced at her watch and said, “Could we-”
“Yes, ma’am,” Adair said. “No more digressions.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the dining table, and stared at Parvis Mansur, who stared back with brown-velvet eyes that would have looked as mild as a doe’s had it not been for a slight cast in the right eye, which managed to give the Iranian’s entire countenance a look of profound skepticism. The rest of Mansur’s face was also slightly out of kilter, Adair decided. The eyes themselves were set too far apart in the thin-nosed and big-jawed face that seemed to be missing some essential component, possibly a mustache, and Adair found himself wondering how many times Mansur had grown one only to shave it off.
“To continue,” Adair said. “Justice Fuller made his approach a few days after we’d finished hearing the Jimson case. He dropped by my chambers and hinted how he was kind of leaning toward overturning the two kids’ conviction and ordering a new trial. So I told him fine, I was leaning that way myself. Then he switched to what a tough reelection he had coming up, which was utter nonsense, but I let him prattle on till he came to what was really on his mind.”
“Which was what?” Mansur asked.
“He asked me to let him write the majority opinion because he said he had a real feel for the case, and also because he thought it might give him a little political boost, which was more nonsense. But I’d counted the votes by then and couldn’t see any harm in it, so I said, ‘Okay, Mark, you write it.’ So he eventually did and the court voted five to four to overturn the verdict and order a new trial for the Jimsons.”
Adair paused to look at Kelly Vines. “Okay so far, Kelly?”
“So far.”
“About a month after that an investigator for the state attorney general’s office got an anonymous phone call from some guy with an obviously disguised voice who claimed Justice Fuller and I had split a million-dollar bribe to make sure the Jimson appeal went the way it did.”
“Just like that?” B. D. Huckins said. “Out of the blue.”
“Just like that,” Adair said. “Thirty minutes after the call came in, the attorney general himself was in my chambers, playing me a tape cassette of the call, which was a damn fool thing for him to do. But with the primary just a few months away, I expect he was thinking more about his gubernatorial campaign and political fallout than he was about the law. So I listened, thanked him kindly and asked whether somebody else was playing a copy of the tape for Justice Fuller.”
“And were they?” Mansur asked.
“I don’t think it’d even occurred to the A.G. because he looked surprised, maybe even shocked, and said no, of course not, because he’d wanted to talk to me first. I had to point out that I didn’t think the two of us should discuss the matter any further. He remembered his law then and left. It was about ten-thirty in the morning and he left all hunched over like the sky was falling, which, in a sense, I suppose it was. It was then I decided I’d better get myself a good cheap lawyer. So I called my son-in-law.”
Mansur looked at Kelly Vines. “You, of course.”
“Me,” Vines said.
Jack Adair, looking suddenly tired, leaned back in his chair and said, “I think Kelly should tell you what happened next.”
After talking to Adair, Vines had telephoned the home of Justice Fuller only to get a busy signal. He kept redialing for fifteen minutes, then called the operator, claimed it was an emergency, and asked her to find out whether the Fuller phone was in use or off the hook. She checked and said it was off the hook.
The Fuller house was a large old two-story frame monster, painted white, with a deep covered porch that advertised it had been built back in the 1920s before air-conditioning. It was also in the heart of a steadily deteriorating neighborhood that had been designated a “Historical Section” by the city in a vain attempt to maintain property values.
Kelly Vines rang the doorbell repeatedly. When no one responded, he tried the door itself and found it unlocked. His first impulse was to get back in his car and return to his office. Instead, he entered the house out of what he described as “curiosity and an ill-defined sense of obligation.”
A wide center hall led to the stairs. To the right was the living room. To the left, the dining room, which adjoined the kitchen. Vines walked into the living room and found Mrs. Mark Fuller, the Alzheimer’s victim, sitting in a rocking chair much like the one John Kennedy had popularized, dressed in a long pink flannel nightgown and dead from what seemed to be a gunshot wound in her chest. Her hands, folded in her lap, still held a pair of silver- rimmed eyeglasses.
Vines left the living room, crossed the hall and entered the dining room. Justice Fuller sat in an armchair. It matched the dining table that was made from some very dark, almost black wood, possibly Philippine mahogany. The table was part of a suite composed of eight matching chairs, a carved sideboard and a glass-fronted china cabinet.
Seven of the eight chairs were drawn up to the long table. The one Justice Fuller sat in had been shoved back
