Authors: Barbara Allan
I
f nothing else, traffic court serves as a reminder that the average midwesterner is still in abject fear of the law’s long arm. The anxiety in the air was palpable—you could almost hear the knees knocking.
I sat with Mother and Mr. Ekhardt in a secondary courtroom of the Serenity Courthouse; the much larger trial room—reserved for murders and mayhem, where Mr. Ekhardt had won many a high-profile case—was located on the top floor. In my opinion, traffic court should have been moved up to those spacious digs, considering how all of us were stuffed into these pews like ancient frat boys cramming phone booths—granted, horizontal ones, but we’d have set a campus record, if this had been a campus.
Every walk of life was represented this morning: young, old, rich, poor, white, black, Asian, Hispanic … all equal in the eyes of the law (that’s the story), all equal in their sweat-inducing fear (no question), waiting for the gavel of fate (nobody here was thinking “justice”) to fall.
I was wearing a sleeveless retro floral-print dress by Too Cool and Brandy-affordable lime rubber Juicy Couture thongs. Mr. Ekhardt looked the elder statesman in his navy pin-striped suit, crisp white shirt, and red-patterned tie with elegant pearl stickpin.
But the getup Mother had chosen to don was as mysterious
as what goes on in the books her mystery reading group tackles. She might have been an old frontier schoolmarm in the shapeless, austere gray skirt and jacket, high-necked blouse, and cameo-brooch, her thick, wavy, silver hair pulled back in a severe bun. Maybe she wanted to appear forthright and upstanding before the judge.
Hey, it worked for Lizzie Borden.
This much I knew about Mother, however: she had a reason for everything … even if it wasn’t always clear, or logical, or even sane. But there would always be a
reason.
…
I had the feeling Mother felt very much at home here. This was, after all, a theater of sorts, the players talking among themselves, sotto voce, defendants going over their alibis, family members expressing concern, lawyers explaining procedure … the side door next to the judge’s bench opened and an official-looking woman in a brown uniform entered.
She may have been attractive once, but years of unpleasantness—from her job, initially, from herself, later on—had taken a toll, etching permanent scowl lines on her spade-shaped face.
The official woman planted herself next to the American flag and barked,”
Quiet!”
Pin-drop silence followed as she slowly scanned the room like the Alien trying to sense potential lunch in a dark spaceship. That she was chewing gum in a cow/cud manner took the edge off for me, but it was pretty chilling nonetheless.
Finally she said, in a wholly unnecessarily nasty way, “This is a courtroom and deserves
respect!”
Then from the pack an anonymous voice (it sounded a lot like mine) said, “Then why are you chewing
gum
?”
“Who said that?”
the court clerk snapped.
Everyone looked around, including me. Frowning, my expression seemed to say, “Yeah—yeah, who said that? How rude!”
“One more outburst,” the woman threatened, “and I’m going to clear the courtroom.”
And then what? We’d have to come back another day? As if a reprieve wouldn’t be welcomed, even for twenty-four hours.
Besides, did she really have the authority to do that? I sure didn’t think so.
But the voice that sounded strangely like my own seemed to have nothing to say now—in fact, everyone fell into submission, reinforcing the gum-chewing bailiff’s self-deluded power. (With a certain satisfaction, though, I noticed the witch ditching her gum in a wastebasket when she thought nobody was looking.)
After what seemed like forever, a male judge in a flowing black robe came through the side door—our little theater at last had a star (besides Mother). His hair was thin on top, long strands unsuccessful in covering a bald spot, the black bags under his eyes packed for a badly needed vacation.
The judge took his dignified if weary position behind the raised desk and called court to order with a bang of the gavel that, even though we saw it coming, made us all jump.
We sat through several hearings, waiting for Mother’s turn.
A father and mother, dressed like they had money, came before the bench with their teenage son, a round-faced boy with long hair that had been slicked back for the occasion; the kid seemed incredibly uncomfortable in a suit and tie. Their well-dressed attorney lawyer pled not guilty to the charge that the boy drove sixty miles an hour on a downtown street, the lawyer’s confidence at odds with the kid who was staring at the floor, as if waiting for the blade to fall. They were dismissed pending a trial date.
A young black man in a black T-shirt and jeans, with no
lawyer, admitted to various parking violations and took his lumps: two hundred dollars and court costs.
A middle-aged woman with overbleached hair got fined for parking in a handicapped place without displaying the necessary tag. She claimed a recent injury had inspired her to use the spot. Even though she sort of limped on her way out, it looked faked, and she won no sympathy and a couple of “boos.”
The courtroom was an oven baking the defendants and their retinue, the old-time ceiling fans ineffective in circulating what paltry air a single rattling window air conditioner was able to pump out. Maybe the town
did
need a new courthouse … and maybe the gum-chewing witch had reason to be crabby.
Slender, white-haired, handsome Mr. Ekhardt had fallen asleep, head bowed, snoring ever so softly. But when Mother’s name was called, he suddenly snorted awake, eyes clear, with some of the old fire that had gotten more than one husband killer off scot-free (ironically, one of those husbands had been named “Scott”).
Earlier, at his office, Mr. Ekhardt had told us just how Mother’s hearing was to go, a director laying out the script for his star actress, detailing her disappointingly small and unchallenging role:
Judge
(to Mother):
And how do you plead to the charge of operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license?
Mr. Ekhardt
(speaking for Mother, who was instructed to say nothing):
Your honor, my client pleads not guilty.
Judge: Then trial will be set for …
(consults calendar, names date).
Gavel.
Curtain.
No applause.
Mr. Ekhardt had explained that there would be no trial (the same as with the sixty-mile-per-hour boy above), for
behind closed doors he would cut a deal with the district attorney that would be more lenient than had Mother pled guilty.
Why?
Because no court wants to waste the taxpayers’ money on a minor traffic case.
But, naturally, Mother double-crossed us.
“Your Honor,” she said, chin up, head high, a noble frontierswoman facing a hanging judge, “I … am …
guilty.”
Her voice could have reached the last row of the last balcony in any Broadway theater; in this cubicle, it rang and echoed and made everyone (but Mother) shut their eyes. In my case, I considered not opening them again.
She was rattling on, in her best Katharine Hepburn–esque manner: “How can I say that I am not? Why, that would be dishonest … and honesty means everything to me.”
Half of little Brandy wanted to run away, but the other half was glued to her seat, captivated—the woman could deliver a line.
Mr. Ekhardt, for his part, sighed and stood by dutifully, long since resigned to Mother’s theatrics. Truth be told, he probably expected this, and had only been going through the motions when he explained a script that he’d known would go out the window.
“Your Honor,” continued Mother, gesturing with Shakespearean flare, “may I ask you a personal question?”
The question was apparently rhetorical, for when the judge’s mouth dropped open—possibly in surprise, but perhaps to reply—she rushed on, “Do you have any children? For if you do, you’d know that you would do
anything
to protect them … even—and I will say this proudly and unashamed, before this court and my country and my God …”
“My God,” Mr. Ekhardt muttered.
“… a good mother will, if she must, to protect her
child
—break the law!”
She whirled to the audience, as if they were the jury. She smiled in a beseeching manner that made me wonder if she were suddenly Peter Pan, asking the audience to believe in fairies so that Tinker Bell could live.
“When I thought that my daughter—” Mother suddenly went off-book and pointed. “That’s her sitting there … such a lovely young woman, and unattached at the moment, by the way.…”
I cringed and did my best to disappear down into the pew.
She shook her head, as if reassembling mechanical parts into the correct order, and picked up again.
“When I thought my daughter was in mortal danger—that she might even be
harmed
—I … went … to … my … automobile! Did I have a license to drive? No. But I had the license to look after my child’s welfare, which is the right of every parent, every father … every
mother.
…”
The judge’s hand was on his gavel but either he was so astounded by this performance that he’d been frozen mute, or perhaps had decided to let the defendant save him the trouble by hanging herself.
She was really going now: “And so I got in my car, even though my license had been suspended—unfairly, I might add … what were those cows
doing
there, anyway, at that time of night, in an unlighted field? Where was their supervision? Where was sufficient
lighting
… but I digress.”
She sought out the faces of individual women in the gallery on each of her following “lines.”
“As a mother, what
could
I do? What
should
I do? Indeed, what
must
I do!” She looked from female face to female face and a low, resonant voice intoned: “I … rushed … to … my … child’s …
rescue!”
Mother paused for much-needed breath. “Of course, my daughter, as it turned out, wasn’t where I thought
she’d gone, where I thought danger was waiting, when I went to save her, not knowing she was not there.…”
The audience was getting lost. So was I. So, for that matter, was Mother.
Finally she raised a finger like Mammy Yokum making a point and said, “But … she
could have been!”
“Aaaahl riiiight,” the judge said in a gravelly voice, and banged his gavel, putting an end to the melodrama.
“License no longer suspended,” the judge said.
Mother beamed.
“License
revoked
for a full year,” he stated. “Three-hundred-fifty-dollar fine and court costs.”
Mother bowed grandly and, with ludicrous charm, said, “Thank you, Your Honor.”
His expression was stern, his tone the same: “I’m not finished, madam—
plus
sixty hours of community service.”
Mother smiled like a little girl and waved that off. “Oh! I can do
that
standing on my head!”
“That,” the judge said, an eyebrow raised, “is strictly optional, Mrs. Borne.”
Outside the courtroom, in the small marble rotunda that echoed nonetheless, Mother, smiling primly, looked from me to Mr. Ekhardt and said, “Well! I think that went
very
well … don’t you?”
Mr. Ekhardt’s smile was curdled and he somehow managed to say, “It could have been worse,” patted her arm, as I smiled weakly. No use crying over spilled milk—but three hundred and fifty–plus dollars is a lot of cow juice, whether their pasture was well lighted or not.
“You understand,” the ancient, elegant attorney said, “that today dealt only with driving without a license. There is still the matter of the corpse you ran over, and the murder investigation.…”
I said, “Neither one of us had anything to do with that, Mr. Ekhardt.”
“I know, I know. But both of you behaved, well, in an eccentric manner the night of the incident.”
Shaking my head, I said, “But Officer Lawson said he wouldn’t put any of that in his report.…”
The attorney nodded. “And we’re lucky he decided to be a nice guy about it. But the word is around at police HQ that you two were eager to confess and cover up for each other. If your mother weren’t well known locally for her eccentric behavior—”
“Wayne,” Mother said sternly. “Don’t talk about me as if I weren’t here.”
“Viv, I apologize. But I’m keeping an eye on that murder investigation. Just to play it safe.”
So was I. But I thought it better not to share my Missy Marple activities with the attorney.
Our little party exited the courthouse, but parted company on the front steps. Mother and Mr. Ekhardt were going back to his office, where she wanted to amend her will. She did this quite frequently. Her Last Will and Testament had more codicils than a vintage tugboat has barnacles. One would think Mother had a fortune to consider, which of course she didn’t; but it was important to her (as Mother so often stated) that she had her house in order, even though that house didn’t have much in it at the moment.
With Mr. Ekhardt’s misgivings about the Clint Carson murder ringing in my ears, I walked a few blocks over to the police station—time, I thought, to sit down with Chief Tony Cassato.
Perhaps three years ago, Tony had come from the East to head up the department, and even now was a man of mystery to most Serenity-ites, which caused a myriad of stories to circulate as to why a person of his caliber and experience might end up in these particular boonies.
One rumor was that he had taken on the New York mob, and in retaliation they killed his family (this sounded
suspiciously like an invention of Mother’s, however). Another story had him in charge of a Lower Manhattan precinct on 9/11, where he witnessed firsthand the collapse of the Twin Towers with some of his own men inside (which sounded a little too much like a TV movie). A more sinister tale making the rounds was that the chief had been caught by his own NYPD vice squad, and forced to resign in disgrace (this was probably spread by a small core of local cops jealous of an outsider getting the top slot).