for affirmance. I need to get my ducks in a row.”

John departs, but with the discussion, George’s thoughts drift back to Warnovits. The case, when he can bring himself to contemplate it, remains welded to his memories of Lolly Viccino. Eventually, as he kept her company in the dormitory library, he realized that her ragged look was due in part to having had no chance to bathe. Late in the afternoon, he stood guard outside the men’s room so that Lolly could shower. It was there Grigson found him.

‘She’s still here?’ Grigson asked.

George told the dorm proctor her story.

‘Well. I’m very sorry to hear that, Mason, but if her own people won’t take her in, what are we to do? She can’t stay.’

George stood the only ground he could. ‘I’m not telling her.’

‘Well, you don’t have to,’ Grigson said. ‘You just move along, George Mason. I’ll deal with this. Go on.’ The dorm proctor waved the back of his hand. From the mettle that had come into him, George realized that the proctor had heard about the goings-on the night before. Franklin Grigson was going to enjoy turning out the likes of Lolly Viccino.

So, George thinks at his desk, he actually failed Lolly Viccino twice. He made no further protest on her behalf nor, more practically, did he escort her from the dorm to one of the local rooming houses, where he probably could have financed a leisurely stay for her after a frank chat with Hugh Brierly about the ‘rent’ he’d collected the night before. Instead, George did what kids do in tough situations-he hid. Visiting the library an hour later, he found the only remnant of Lolly’s stay was the dirty plate from the canteen heaped with cigarette butts. George fingered one or two, overcome by things he could not explain. And yet he knew that, much as he had hoped the night before, some fundamental transition had begun for him.

For a second, George’s guilt feels like a dagger point against his heart. How could he have made no effort to find out what had become of her? To see if she had even lived out the day safely? Or to determine what mark all this had left on her?

Banion knocks and returns from the small clerks’ chambers with a draft of three new paragraphs to be inserted in the movie theater opinion.

“John, if I wanted to locate somebody I knew forty years ago in Virginia, is there any way to go about that?” His clerk can research anything on the Internet.

“What’s the name, Your Honor?”

As soon as George gives it, he realizes this is an impossible task, even for John. Assuming the average course of events, she married and, as was usually the case with women from Virginia of his age, had given up Viccino. And Lolly could not have been the name on her birth certificate. Not to mention the fact that George has no idea of precisely where or when she was born. The judge shakes his head at length to show he’s had second thoughts.

“It’s a personal matter, John. Don’t waste your time with this. I may poke around myself some evening. I just wondered how to go about it.”

Banion has scratched out the names of a few Web sites on a pad, but the notion that the matter is personal is as good as crashing down a gate. John permits himself little, if any, inquiry into the lives of others and thus seems to have no clue how curious everyone is about him. This winter, he was down for days with a serious bronchial infection. Working from home, he had reluctantly asked Dineesha to bring him a set of briefs he needed. She is the one person in chambers with whom he holds any semblance of a personal relationship- they exchange small gifts at Christmas-but even she had never been to his house. When she returned, there was a palpable atmosphere of suspense. Cassie; the clerks from the adjoining chambers; Marcus, the elderly courtroom bailiff; and the judge himself-everyone awaited some description of what Dineesha had found. She was far too dignified to indulge them, but the next day, when she fetched in a messenger delivery, the judge said to her, ‘Dare I ask?’

After gently closing the door, Dineesha rendered a brief but vivid portrait. The stucco bungalow, in which John’s parents had raised him, had visible cracks in the outer walls and a patch of shingles missing from the roof. But the true bedlam was inside. It was not dirty, Dineesha said, but so dense with piles that she could barely get into the front hallway. It was as if he had a recycling center in the house. He did not appear to have thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last ten years. They were piled in columns to the ceiling in the living room, where there was also a virtual fortification of books, in eight-foot ramparts as if to form a bunker. Under the load, the hardwood floor had literally begun to sag. Two parakeets flew free throughout the house and made a squeaking racket.

George is taken from these thoughts by a buzz arising somewhere in the room. The unfamiliar sound spooks him a bit until he realizes it’s Patrice’s cell groaning intermittently as it vibrates. Fishing it from the suit jacket that hangs behind him, the judge sees letters on the gray screen. A text message, his first ever. He’s mildly pleased to have caught up with the times, until he reads what’s there.

“Number One,” he murmurs, “you are starting to get on my nerves.” But he cannot kid himself. It’s the first moment that requires a conscious effort to contain his fears. It’s not so much the words-‘Will get u’-that scare him. The threat is nothing new. What’s frightening is the number from which the message comes. It’s his, George’s. Number one has the judge’s missing cell phone.

11

TEMPER

At 3:00 P.M., Marina, who’s been working with the phone company for several hours, arrives with one of her deputies, Nora Ortega, a thin, dark, silent woman whom Marina has brought along on a few occasions in the past to take notes. George makes it a point to offer Marina his hand, and she exerts her entire boxy form as she shakes.

“That was over the top, Judge, putting that tail on without telling you. Sorry.”

He apologizes too, using the term ‘grouchy old man.’ They settle in familiar poses, George behind his desk, Marina in the black wooden armchair in front of it.

“So what did we learn about number 1?” he asks. “Anything good?”

“We’ve got some idea where he was. Which basically comes down to Center City.”

They’ve assumed all along that George’s tormentor is local, but this is the first proof. Nonetheless, the new information seems sparse compared with what he expected.

“I thought they could position a cell phone better than that.”

“If it’s turned on, Judge. But not if the phone is off. Which yours is, of course. It was probably off as soon as you got that text message.”

“So how can they tell he was in Center City?”

“My guy over there wouldn’t get very specific. They’ve got the government on one side and the ACLU on the other. He sort of explained all this by humming. But how I think this may go is that a cell phone actually puts out signals on two channels, and the company has a record of the second one, what’s called control channel data, which includes the location of the cell your phone connects to. The best they can do is tell us that the message went through the tower in the steeple at St. Margaret’s. He could have been anywhere within two square miles of there.”

“So you’ve narrowed it down to about two hundred thousand suspects?”

“Exactly.” Marina smiles. “We’ll have them all interviewed by morning.”

George is relieved that she has recovered her sense of humor with him. In the meantime, she holds up Patrice’s spare cell phone, which she’s brought back after getting all the info from it the telephone company needed.

“What I’m wondering is how he got this number.”

“Because I was nice enough to give it to him,” says George. “I was trying to find the phone I lost. So I called it. Made sense to me. When I got voice mail, I left a message. ‘This is Judge George Mason. If you’ve picked up this cell phone, please call me at the following number.’ I tried a few times.”

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