No. I close my eyes to the mental picture forming like cancer in my brain.
“There was no suicide note,” she continues. “They called somebody named Judge Galanter, who lives in Rosemont. This Galanter gets to be chief judge now, eh?”
I shake my head. There must be some mistake. “My God,” is all I can say.
“Judge Galanter says the court will continue with its operations as before.”
I think of Galanter, taking over. Then Armen, dead. This can’t be happening.
“Galanter said the
“Who found him?”
“His wife, when she got in from Washington. She’s the one who called the police.”
“Susan found him? Did she say anything? Did they interview her?”
Her response is an abrupt laugh; I imagine a puff of smoke erupting from her mouth. “She’s holding a press conference this morning.”
Susan. A press conference. What is going on? Why would Armen do such a thing? I close my eyes, breathing him in, feeling him still. Just hours ago, he was with me. Inside me.
“Are you there?” my mother asks.
I want to say, I’m not sure.
I’m not sure where I am at all.
5
I pack Maddie off to school in record time and barrel down the expressway into Center City, rattling in my VW station wagon past far more able cars. KYW news radio confirms over and over that Armen committed suicide. I swallow the pain welling up inside and tromp on the gas.
I can’t get to the courthouse doors because of the press, newly arrived to feast on the news. Reporters are everywhere, the TV newspeople waiting around in apricot-colored pancake. Cameramen thread black cables through a group of demonstrators, also new to the scene. There must be forty pickets, walking in a silent circle, saying nothing. I look up at their signs, screaming for justice against a searing blue sky: HIGHTOWER.
But I have to get inside.
“Would you like one?” asks an older man in a checked short-sleeved shirt. He holds a pink flyer in a hand missing a thumb; his face is weatherbeaten like a farmer’s. “It tells about my daughters.”
“Your daughters?” I look up in surprise.
He nods. “Do you have children?”
“Yes. A daughter.”
“How old?”
“Six.” I don’t want to talk to him. I can’t think about
“Does she like Barney?”
“No, she likes Madeline. The doll.”
The deep creases at his eyes soften into laugh lines. “My little one, Sally? She liked dolls. She had a Barbie, and Barbie’s sister, too. What was the name of that sister doll?” He looks down at a pair of shiny brown shoes and scratches his head between grayish slats of hair. “My wife would know,” he says, his voice trailing off.
“Skipper.”
“Right!” He laughs thickly, a smoker. “That’s right. Skipper. Skipper, that’s the one.”
I seize the moment. “Well, I should go.”
“Sure thing. You hafta get to work.” He thrusts the flyer into my hand. On it is a black-and-white photograph of two pretty girls sitting on a split wooden rail. The typed caption says SHERRI AND SALLY GILPIN. I glance at it, stunned for a second. I knew the way they died, but I didn’t know the way they lived. The younger one, Sally, has a meandering part in her hair like Maddie’s, a giveaway that she hated to have her hair brushed. I can’t take my eyes from the little girl; she was strangled, the life choked out of her. What did Armen say last night?
“You better go, we don’t want you to get fired on our account,” says the man. “God bless you now.”
I nod, rattled, and make my way through the crowd with difficulty. Several of the women in line look at me: solid, sturdy women, their faces plain, without makeup. I avoid them and push open the heavy glass doors to the bustling courthouse lobby. I slip the flyer into my purse and flash a laminated court ID at the marshals at the security desk in front of the elevator bank. Two minutes later, I plow through the heavy door to chambers.
Eletha is sitting at her desk, staring at a blue monitor with a stick-figure rendering of a courthouse made by one of the programmer’s kids. Underneath the picture it says: ORDER IN THE COURT! WELCOME TO THE THIRD CIRCUIT COURT WORD PROCESSING SYSTEM! The door closes behind me, but Eletha doesn’t seem to hear it.
“El?”
She swivels slowly in her chair. Her eyes are puffy, and she rises unsteadily when she sees me. “Grace.”
I go over to her, and she almost collapses into my arms, her bony frame caving in like a rickety house. “It’s okay, Eletha. It’s gonna be okay,” I say, feeling just the opposite.
I rub her back, and her body shakes with highpitched, wrenching cries. “No, no, no,” is all she says, over and over, and I hold her steady through her weeping. I feel oddly remote in the face of her obvious grief, and realize with a chill I’m acting like my mother did when my father disappeared; nothing has changed, pass the salt.
I ease Eletha into her chair and snatch her some tissues from a flowered box. “Here you go.”
“This is terrible. Just terrible. Armen, God.” She presses the Kleenex into her watery eyes.
“I know.”
“I can’t believe it.”
Neither can I. I don’t say anything.
“I was going to call you when I came in, but I couldn’t.” Her eyes brim over again.
“It’s okay now.”
“Susan called me. This morning. Then the police. Then Galanter. God, how I hate that man!”
“It was Susan who found Armen, right?”
“She came in from Washington and there he was.”
“When did she come in, right before dawn?”
“I guess. I don’t know.” She blows her nose loudly.
“Who told Galanter?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“I don’t understand. I was with Armen until five.”
“So you two worked late.”
“Right.” I avoid her eye; Eletha left at two o’clock. Then I think of the noise I heard, or thought I heard. What time was that? “Eletha, last night after you left, did you come back to the office?”
“No, why?”
“When I was with Armen, I thought I heard somebody out here.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t they come into Armen’s office?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
She shakes her head; she’s not wearing any makeup today. “The clerk’s office, the staff attorneys, they got work to do on a death penalty case. Maybe it was one of them, dropping off papers.”
Just then the chambers door opens and in walk Sarah and Artie. They both look like they’ve been crying; I recognize Sarah’s anguished expression as the one I saw in the mirror this morning. She breaks away from Artie and storms into the room.
“Is Ben here?” she shouts, pounding past us to the law clerks’ office, her short cardigan flying. “Where the
