Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Page now.”
“That’s not necessary, Mr. Cuddy. Stephen disappeared on her day off. I’ve already questioned her thoroughly, and she knows nothing.”
And, I gathered, if she did know anything, Mrs. Page wouldn’t share same with me.
I said goodbye and went out into the hall. I retraced my steps down the stairs, and as I reached the front door I was aware of Mrs. Page behind me. At least she hadn’t frisked me to check for the family silver.
I smiled at her, and Mrs. Page shook her head. As I crossed over the threshold, the big door creaked behind me. “Blakey’s gonna eat you alive,” she said in a tsk-tsk whisper.
I considered knocking on the now-closed door, but I didn’t think Mrs. Page would elaborate even if she opened it again. I got in the Merc, drove down to the main road, and swung toward Boston, opposite the first strains of the westward commuter traffic. Almost immediately, a big, black sedan swerved into my lane and I had to cut onto the shoulder. I glared over at the driver. My eyes caught one frame of a beefy, stupid face before he was past me. I wrestled my car back onto the roadbed.
I got to Route 128, but instead of turning north toward the Mass Pike and its fast way into Boston, I turned south and picked up the usually mis-named Expressway, which leads into the city from the southeast. This looked as if it was going to be an effort-intensive case, and I wanted to pay a visit first.
“J
UST CARNATIONS
.” I SET them down and stepped back. “Mrs. Feeney said the roses at the flower market were tired-looking.” I felt too distant standing up, so I squatted down on my haunches, facing the etched granite stone.
“Remember Valerie Jacobs, Chuck Craft’s friend? Well, she’s brought me a case, and it’s a beaut. Rich family and all kinds of troubles. The grandmother, you’d like. Good Yankee, you’d call her. The grandson I haven’t met yet, and won’t, if I don’t roll pretty hard and fast on finding him. Still, he sounds like the type you’d have liked, too. Serious and studious. Just like me.” I laughed for both of us.
I stared at the carnations for a while. I began blinking rapidly, so we talked inside for a bit.
“Anyway, I’m afraid I won’t be visiting for a while. I’ll see you when the case is over. Or sooner, if I hit a problem. Just like always.”
I straightened up and turned around to walk back down the path. A teenager holding a rake and wearing a maintenance shirt and dungaree cut-offs gave me a funny look. I didn’t recognize him. Summer help, probably, and young. Too young to know anything.
Especially anything about cemeteries.
When I got back to Charles Street, I put the Merc up at the garage on the river side and grabbed a steak at the charcoal place that was then near the intersection of Beacon. In the apartment I mixed a screwdriver (the orange juice makes me feel healthy) and played back my telephone tape. The only message was from Valerie Jacobs. She wanted me to call her back and tell her about my interview with Mrs. Kinnington. Instead, I dialed Chief Calvin Maslyk’s home number in Bonham and asked him if he’d like to fire a few strings with me at his range tomorrow. He said he couldn’t but would be available the next day, around 9:30. The chief would meet me there.
After I hung up, I thought about Valerie. I downed the second half of my screwdriver and left the telephone on “TAPE” rather than “RING” for the rest of the night.
I
GOT UP AT
6:30 on Thursday morning and did my double-declining calisthenics. I start with fifty push-ups, one hundred arm rotations, and one hundred fast-flapping over-and-under motions. For the last, I stand, swing my arms horizontally forward with fists clenched until they pass each other. Then I swing them back hard, trying to touch them behind my back. Then I swing them forward again, and so forth. After I finish, I repeat the series, halving the number of repetitions of each exercise. I then did a fast (for me) three miles along the river and wolfed down the “farmhand breakfast” (three eggs, four sausages, hash browns, toast, juice, coffee, parsley, oregano, and God knows what else) at a luncheonette on Cambridge Street.
I got back to my apartment and cleaned up. I checked the phone tape. Valerie had called again and said that the reason I couldn’t reach her last night was because she and a girlfriend had gone to a drive-in and she was leaving for the beach and wouldn’t be in until six and would I please call her then and she … at which point, mercifully, the tape’s maximum run was reached. Feeling vaguely relieved, I erased the message and reset the tape. Then I put on a conservative dark suit and equally bland accessories.
As the concerned father of an accused delinquent might.
I turned into the Meade District Court’s parking lot. It was almost three-quarters full at 8:30 A.M. I wanted to at least get a look at His Honor before I started after his son. Also, because of my understanding with Eleanor Kinnington, I thought I ought to do my observing before I did any poking around that would identify me for him.
The courthouse itself looked brand-spanking-new. It was red brick and from the exterior had some stylish peaks that implied cathedral ceilings inside. As I walked from the lot toward the door, I caught a glimpse of a court officer (or, in many states, “bailiff”) in lighter blue blouse over darker blue pants with a hand-held metal detector at the entrance. And she was air-frisking an obvious lawyer-type carrying an attaché case.
I immediately spotted an embarrassing scuff on my right shoe, whipped out a handkerchief, and failed miserably to remove it. Nervously shaking my head, I walked quickly back to the Mercury Monarch, where I opened the trunk, reached in for an imaginary rag, and slipped my wood-handled .38 Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special and clip-on holster from over my right hip. I fussed with my shoe and then tucked both revolver and holster completely under the plastic rug in the trunk before closing the lid and retracing my steps toward the courthouse door.
Ever since the bombing at the superior court in Boston several years before, varying degrees of security had been imposed on entry to the commonwealth’s courthouses, but virtually none included checking out suited, distinguished-looking, mature men. Apparently Judge Willard J. Kinnington’s building, which he would run as presiding judge, was the exception.
I passed inspection and milled around with the crowd inside the lobby of the courthouse. As I bumped my way up and down the broad corridor, I realized there were two courtrooms on the main level and at least one other (based on signs at the staircases) on the second floor. I drifted into the clerk’s office and casually asked who was sitting in the First Session (Massachusetts legalese for the courtroom to which all cases report and from which all cases are assigned to other sessions for hearing). A faded disco queen behind the desk said “Judge Kinnington, of course.” I thanked her and went back into the mob just as a short, elderly court officer wearing the blue-and-blue began shrieking like a banshee.
“First Session, First Session, court is coming in. All criminal business. Court is coming in.” The doors of the First Session swung open, and a virtual-world vacuum cleaner sucked inside nearly all us inhabitants of the corridor. The only exceptions were a few lawyers who looked well-to-do and vaguely uncomfortable, which probably meant they were out here defending General Motors or Boston Edison on some minor but time-consuming civil matter on the second floor.
I became part of the leading wedge cutting its way into the First Session. The courtroom was like a church, with one of the cathedral ceilings I’d spotted from the outside. The doors opened onto a wide center aisle, and seating for the public was on high-backed benches, rather like Catholic pews without the kneelers. The center aisle ended at a gateway in a fence. The fence is the “bar enclosure,” so-called by lawyers because usually only members of the bar may sit within it. The fencing reminded me very much of a half-scale model of the balustrade on the stairway in the judge’s house. Past the bar enclosure, which was sunken like a split-level living room, was the bench, raised like a pulpit.
I spotted two especially scuzzy-looking, early-teenaged boys sitting near the aisle. I sat down next to them and practiced a concerned glance in their direction. They returned a disgusted look, probably thinking that I was there on a morals charge.
“Courrrrrrrt!” bellowed the same court officer, and the congregation rose as the Honorable Willard J. Kinnington fairly scooted from a door to the right side of the bench and ascended. Possibly he moved so quickly because he was only barely medium height and didn’t wish to advertise it. Kinnington had slightly graying, blondish-red hair and was wearing amber, hornrimmed glasses. He clutched a small book in his right hand; against his black robes, this gave him the appearance of a new parish priest slightly late for his first mass. Once standing behind the bench, however, he fixed the entire courtroom with a baleful eye. Given the added height of his raised eagle’s nest, Kinnington now looked as though he could jump center for the Celtics. He bowed his head as the court officer intoned the full salutation, a wall clock showing 9:00 A.M. on the nose.
“Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. All those having business before this, the Fourth District Court of Western Norfolk, now sitting in Meade, within in and for our county of Norfolk, the Honorable Willard J. Kinnington presiding, draw near, give your attention, and ye shall be heard. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and this Honorable Court. Be seated.”
I watched the judge as his court officer spoke; he didn’t twitch during the entire soliloquy. In Massachusetts, there is a district-court system, which handles lesser matters, and a superior-court system, which handles graver matters. Each district court is in an important town and includes several smaller towns within its jurisdiction. The superior courts are county-wide venues. Until court reorganization becomes a functioning reality, the major difference between the two systems is that whereas the district court is apparently less prestigious, the superior-court judges have to ride circuit, rotating every month or so all over the state. A district-court judge sits almost exclusively in his or her own home venue. Accordingly, some of them, appointed for life, have built up substantial little fiefdoms over which they exercise almost unbridled control. I’d been in a dozen district courts, and every superior court in eastern Massachusetts during my time with Empire Insurance. Although the full “Hear ye, hear ye” salutation is occasionally used in superior court, I’d never before heard it in a district one.
When the court officer ended, Kinnington sat down briskly and spoke a name quickly. The clerk had materialized in the wooden kangaroo’s pouch immediately in front of the bench. He turned to the judge and began giving short, nervous answers to whatever questions Kinnington was asking.
Meanwhile, I caught sight of the back of a huge court officer who was sliding down the left-hand side aisle toward the judge’s bench. He looked to be about my height, but he was enormously thick across the back and butt. He clicked open a side gate, entered the bar enclosure, and moved up next to the clerk, who literally cringed away from him. Seeing the officer standing with his back to me and looming over the clerk, I pushed his height up to six-feet-five. The giant’s head bobbed up and down, as though he was talking. Kinnington’s expression clouded, then cleared, and he muttered something to the big guy in blue-and-blue. Giant nodded and backed away as the clerk called out the first case.
A couple in front of me popped up with their daughter and blocked my view of the bench momentarily. They said their lawyer would be late. Kinnington asked the clerk if the lawyer had called his office, and the clerk said no. At that point the judge stated that their daughter’s case would not be heard until 3:00 P.M. The father began to say something, but the clerk had already begun calling the next case.
As the trio hesitatingly sat back down, I saw the giant court officer in the side aisle. He drew even with my row and rolled his gaze toward me before walking back toward the only public entrance.
Or exit. His was the beefy, now not-quite-so-stupid face I’d seen in the black sedan that had swerved at me the day before. He had a fringe of wispy blond hair around, and combed in ridiculously long strands across, his balding head. I didn’t watch him move all the way to the rear of the First Session, but no sound came from the central doors, which had squeaked a bit when opened by a latecomer the moment before.
So much for my concerned-parent cover.
The next case was a Bonham police matter. The defendant’s name was called, and the defendant and her attorney answered “Ready, your Honor.”
Nobody, however, answered for Bonham, which, like most Massachusetts departments, prosecutes its own minor cases through a specially trained officer instead of tying up an assistant district attorney. A young, clean-cut guy within the bar enclosure (who turned out to be the town of Meade’s police prosecutor) stood up haltingly.
He said, “Your Honor, I believe the Bonham police prosecutor is on the telephone arranging to bring in a witness.”
Kinnington glared down at him, then raised and banged his gavel once, sharply. “Case dismissed for lack of prosecution.”
I was stunned, but the young cop/prosecutor gamely tried a stall. “If your Honor please, I can run back and—”
“Case dismissed!” boomed the judge, whose microphone was set, I suspect, a bit higher than anyone else’s. The defendant and her lawyer wisely got the hell out of dodge as fast as their feet could carry them.
And so it went. Of the twenty or so preliminary rulings I saw Kinnington make, at least six were similarly outrageous, yet he seemed to favor neither police nor defendants as a class. Each decision seemed arbitrary, depending only upon which party was giving the most affront to the judge’s sense of how his time was best spent. I’m sure all six rulings were technically defensible. My point is that it was clear to everybody in the courtroom that the six were unfair and showed an incredible disregard for common sense.