“And how would he have gotten into your voice mail without your password?”
“The whole sequence is programmed into the phone when you hold down the one key. Obviously he figured it out.”
“Obviously,” answers Marina.
“Any idea who else he called? Did he give himself up in some way?”
“Not really. The company says there’s no detail in the last two weeks.”
“Meaning?”
“If he used the phone, the calls are free under your plan. Voice mail. Stuff like that. He’s smart,” she says. “But we already knew that.”
Next, she wants to replay how George’s cell turned up missing and the steps his staff and he took to find it. After some talk, it makes more sense to include in the conversation everyone who had a role in the search, and George summons them. Dineesha and Cassie take places on the gray sofa beside Nora. Marcus, tall and bearded, stands at the door, working over a toothpick. Not to be overlooked, Abel wanders in last and with much effort puts himself down on a low colonial boot bench, next to John Banion.
George had noticed that the phone was not in his suit jacket pocket as he was leaving the Hotel Gresham after the Kindle County Bar Association’s Judges’ Day event, two weeks ago yesterday, but his last clear recollection of having it went back to his departure from chambers the evening before. The staff and he attempted to retrace his steps over the intervening period. Banion called the hotel lost and found. Marcus checked to make sure George had not left it at the courthouse metal detectors that morning. Cassie phoned the restaurant where George had dinner the preceding night, and went out to search his car. Dineesha combed the chambers. The judge himself looked everywhere around his house when he returned there.
“Truth is, Marina, until today, I’ve been convinced I was going to lift some pile of papers and see it there.” In the last few hours, fitting things together, George has been spinning another theory: Zeke took it. He now suspects that what Zeke was up to yesterday was an effort to lift something else. As George envisions the first episode, the road dog Khaleel must have walked up and down the corridor until he could see that everyone was out of chambers for a minute, then signaled Zeke, who came up and grabbed the phone. That way, if anyone returned and found Zeke inside, he could say he had just come by to visit. The judge is reluctant to try out this notion on Marina, however, until he’s forewarned Dineesha. That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to.
“Maybe I can help,” says Marina. “According to the records the company pulled, your last charged call was the day you lost it at 12:12 P.M. One minute.” She reads the number he’d dialed. It’s Patrice’s, her other cell.
“I must have been checking to see how she was,” says the judge. “One minute means I probably got her voice mail.” That’s why he forgot making the call.
“And where were you?”
He cannot recollect. There have been so many stolen moments in so many corridors in the last months, brief, hushed conversations to let Patrice know she’s on his mind.
“Do you remember when we left for the hotel?” George asks Cassie. He’d invited both clerks to the Judges’ Day event, but John, as he does every year, had shunned the crowd.
Cassie searches her handheld.
“We were supposed to meet the other judges in the lobby at 11:45. We were out of here by five till, for sure.” The Chief insists on punctuality in all things. All but two or three of the judges of the appellate court, a dozen and a half of them, and their clerks had been transported by Marina’s staff to the hotel in several vans. George and Cassie both recall being in the first vehicle to leave.
“So you called from the hotel, Your Honor?”
He seems to remember that now. Had he stood just outside the men’s room? Cassie recollects the judge going off for a few minutes before they entered the reception. But a vague memory is so suggestible. Neither Cassie nor he had put this together the day after. Perhaps #1 had the phone in hand at 12:12 and had hit the speed-dial keys to see where they would take him. But why just one? Thinking now, the judge is fairly certain he’d clicked off the connection when he got Patrice’s voice message.
“Best recollection,” he answers, a lawyer’s phrase that passes for truth in the courtroom.
“Meaning he picked your pocket there,” Marina says.
“That doesn’t do much for your Corazon theory, does it?” George says to her. There’s no point in shying away from the name after Marina broke silence yesterday. After a second, the judge realizes that Zeke has also become a far less likely suspect, assuming the phone was lifted at the hotel.
“I don’t see that.”
“Come on, Marina. You think a kid in baggies and a prison buzz is going to walk into the Kindle County Bar meeting, with two hundred judges and six hundred lawyers around, and stick his hand in my suit jacket?”
“Judge, you know what goes on with the gangs these days. Cops are undercover, and so are they. Do you really believe, Your Honor, that if we did a background on the servers, and the security guards, and the people taking coats we wouldn’t find one person with a connect to ALN? A quarter of the guards in the jail are courted in, Judge. Hell, not to be repeated, but there are a couple of people on my staff that Gang Crimes has questions about. If Corazon wanted to boost your cell, he could find somebody to do it.”
Empiricism will never guide police work. Investigators fashion their theories and shape all evidence to fit. Forget the hatreds between the black and Latin gangs, the near impossibility of picking out George as a mark in a crowd of eight hundred. Corazon’s still the man. There are moments when George cannot avoid falling back into the grip of the perpetual antagonism he felt as a defense lawyer toward the cops and the way their habits shortcut the truth. And in this he reaches the hard rock of what’s between Marina and him: she’s more or less insisting he run scared.
“May I be blunt?” the judge asks her.
She takes a beat. “Sure.”
“Maybe you ought to ask yourself, Marina, what it’s worth to you to stick to Corazon.”
“ ‘Worth’?”
“I use the term advisedly. How much do you get to add to your emergency funding request to the County Board when you can trot out a name like Corazon’s? Ten percent? Twenty percent?”
Marina sucks her cheeks into her mouth.
“Whoa,” she says and glances over her shoulder to observe Nora’s reactions. “Judge, I think you’re starting to forget who’s on your side.”
When George Mason reaches home that night, he finds Patrice asleep in their room and steals back downstairs to the large kitchen she designed several years ago. There’s a profusion of light from a rectangular walnut-and-glass fixture. The cabinets match, with panes of German crackle glass inset with rectangular rose-color panels, all the elements intended to complement the existing fireplace in what was the living room when they bought. The space has a mellow warmth, and it’s probably his favorite place in the house, but tonight it cannot alter his mood. Solitude only allows him to wallow. He’s yet to recover from his second dustup with Marina. It’s a point of pride that he seldom loses his temper, and justified or not, it was thoughtless to blast her in front of everyone. Worst of all was the look on her face. George knows enough at this age to realize that somebody who followed her father into his profession is going to be especially vulnerable to the opinion of older men. She left with a chafed, sorrowful expression, which might as well have been an ice pick in George’s heart.
Then at the end of the day, Cassie gave the judge outlines of the two potential opinions in Warnovits in the hope he would look at them over the weekend and choose between them. Examining the pages on the slate-topped kitchen island pulls him down further. Both drafts make sense, naturally. There’s no analytic trick he learned in law school or since then that allows him to pick one or the other apart. For a century and a half, legal education has been focused on reading the opinions of judges like George who sit on courts of review. In his day, his professors discussed these decisions, just as they would now, in terms of the policy concerns, the political views, the jurisprudential beliefs that drove them. After holding this job for nearly a decade, he regards much of what he was taught as romantic, if not completely wrong.
Most of the time, no matter what your political or philosophical stripes, whether you like the law or not, you find that your decision feels preordained. Even when you can imagine a route to another result, loyalty to the institution of the law, and more particularly to other judges, good women and men who’ve sat where you sit and who’ve done their level best to decide similar cases, requires you to follow the same paths they’ve trod. The discretion his professors talked about exists only on the margins, in no better than three or four cases a term.
