Rough Justice

nothing in them was helping her now. She squatted and brushed snow away from the spot with her hand, but found herself distracted by the snow's fine texture. Judy had been painting since she broke up with Kurt, who had left some of his art supplies behind. She was enjoying it and thought it made her more observant than she used to be.

Judy straightened and brushed off her knee. Everywhere was whiteness, the only splotch of color the traffic light at the cross street as it blinked from yellow to red, as it did the night Steere was attacked. Judy watched the traffic lights under the bridge changing and twinkling, their rich hues set in vivid relief against the snow. The red light glowed the brightest, tinging the icicles on its metal hood a crimson hue. The green registered cartoony, like green Dots candy. The yellow burned a hot circle like the sun; a dense chrome yellow, a Van Gogh color. Judy thought of haystacks and sunflowers and the rich gold of the artist's straw hat in a self-portrait. Judy could never get the yellows right in her own work.

Funny. Yellow, red, then green. Judy hadn't noticed it before and she wouldn't have noticed it at all but for the contrast between the snow and the colors. Under the bridge, where Steere had been attacked, the traffic lights were mounted sideways. Horizontally. They were bolted to metal frames under the buttressed ceiling of the bridge, maybe because of the low clearance. Thick covered wires snaked to the metal panel where the traffic lights sat in a row. Red was the leftmost circle, the yellow was in the middle, and the green light was at the right.

Odd. Judy couldn't recall seeing a traffic light set up this way elsewhere in the city, or at least it was uncommon. Nor did she remember it from her initial visit, when she'd been focused on the blood and the horror of the crime. Judy blinked at the traffic light, which blinked back. Colors shining bright against the white backdrop. The whiteness was just a blank sheet to her, without color of its own. Try as she might, Judy couldn't appreciate white as a color, only absence of color, and she couldn't imagine a world without color.

Then she remembered Steere's medical records, a joint exhibit of a hospital report. Steere had been taken to the hospital after the carjacking and an ER surgeon had stitched the slash under his eye. Another doctor had given him an eye test and noted that his vision was blurry. But Judy was thinking of the note in the medical records, Dichromatism. Color blindness. She had asked Steere about it later, and he'd said he was color blind and couldn't distinguish between red and green. Judy had wondered how he drove a car, but figured he knew which light was on top. Everybody knew that. Red on the top.

Wait a minute. Judy watched the traffic light under the bridge blink from red to green, sideways. How did Steere know the traffic light had turned red if the panel was mounted horizontally? There was no reason or logic to red being on the left. It could just as easily have been the other way around. There was no way to know, if you were color blind. Even if Steere did know it, he hadn't mentioned it in any of his interviews and he had been questioned in depth about the details.

Judy's heartbeat quickened. If Steere couldn't tell whether the traffic light was red, why did he stop, especially in this rough neighborhood? If you weren't sure a light was red or green and there was no traffic, wouldn't you go anyway? Was there something fishy about Steere's story? Had he meant to kill the man? Was this what the D.A. had learned?

Judy turned and hurried back to her skis. She wanted to talk to Mary about it before Erect got back. She pressed her boots into her ski bindings, slipped her hands into her pole straps, and took off for the office. It was almost dark and the snow showed no signs of letting up.

Judy skiied through the snowstorm, her eyes drawn to every light on the route back. Flurries swirled around traffic lights in whorls of red and eddies of green. Flakes swooped in fanciful halos around the white streetlights, standing out like impastoed brushstrokes against the night sky. The scene reminded Judy of The Starry Night, then of Van Gogh himself, and she found herself wondering how someone who appeared completely normal could, in reality, be utterly, truly, insane.

8

Mary DiNunzio slumped in front of the computer in her office and stared guiltily out the window at the falling snow. It was dark, and her best friend was out in a blizzard in the worst part of town because of her. The radio on Mary's desk reported that the temperature had dipped to five degrees, which felt like minus thirty with the wind chill. She snapped off the radio and pressed Judy to the back of her mind, but still couldn't concentrate.

Where was Marta? How much time was left? She glanced at her clock, a fake Waterford her parents had given her. 6:05. Shit. She had to keep working to have an answer on time. Marta had assigned Mary to read all the statements Steere made to the police and the press to see if there were any inconsistencies in his story. It was a stupid assignment, and Mary was having predictably lousy luck so far. She'd already read through the file, but it was completely consistent. Discouraged, Mary took a gulp of coffee from a mug that read FEMINAZI. At Rosato & Associates, even the dishware was political.

1955 of 2014 articles, said the computer.

Mary's brain buzzed with the caffeine. She used to drink a lot of coffee at Stalling, but at Rosato, coffee was a cult thing, with Bennie as Our Lady of the Natural Filters. Bennie's latest crusade was that the coffee wasn't hot enough, so she was actually perking the stuff on the electric stove in old-fashioned tin pots, like Mary's parents did. Mary sipped the scorching brew, winced in pain, and hit the ENTER key.

ELLIOT STEERE CHARGED WITH MURDER, read the headline, reduced to computer-byte size rather than tabloid screamer. Mary skimmed the first paragraph. The Philly newspapers, online at their own snazzy web site, had bitched about Elliot Steere since his rise in real estate development. Mary scrolled backward in time.

TRIUMPH BUILDING A LOSS, said a subhead, and the reporter detailed how Steere had bought the 100,000- square-foot building in 1975, a year after it was designated historic, with the stated intention of restoring it for condos. But the renovations never happened and Steere fell behind on the maintenance. Every year, Licenses & Inspections fired off a packet of citations for code violations, like a volley of blanks. Steere defended with lawsuits that tied the property up in litigation. In the meantime, the historic building crumbled. The story was repeated throughout the blocks of the city.

Mary sipped scalding coffee as she read. The article contained a litany of complaints against Steere. The preservationists and Chamber of Commerce vilified him. Nobody was more vocal than the mayor of Philadelphia, Peter Montgomery Walker.

'Elliot Steere is bringing down this city to his level,' said Mayor Pete Walker in an exclusive interview with this reporter. 'Frankly, by that I mean the gutter.'

According to the mayor's chief of staff, Jennifer Pressman, Mr. Steere presently owns 150 parcels in Center City, 82 of which have current fire and building code violations. In addition to his Center City properties, Mr. Steere is reputed to own hundreds of rowhomes in the city's outlying neighborhoods, with deeds recorded through a complex series of holding companies. Ms. Pressman said that the Mayor's Office is currently spearheading a review of these holdings.

Mary's conscience nagged at her. She was born and raised in Philly and was a huge fan of the mayor's. He'd managed to turn the city around and had plans to go further. The newspapers called it the 'Philadelphia