His phone rang twice. Outside call. “United States District Court, Eastern District of Missouri,” said the caller ID software.
“Hello?”
It was Judge Stang’s secretary.
“Ida?” he said, almost smelling lavender water.
Her voice was thready, kind, polite, and ultimately terrifying: Judge Stang wanted to meet with the lawyers again on the Whitlow case.
“Meet?” asked Watson with some trepidation. “You mean, for the pretrial conference? Already?”
“The judge has ordered the lawyers to appear in chambers,” said Ida. “He didn’t say anything about a pretrial conference. Those are usually scheduled and held in the courtroom.”
A frisson of terror traveled up his spine. Judge Stang in chambers. Twice! On the same case?
“When?” asked Watson.
“Well,” Ida sounded surprised. “Now. I assume he meant now.” Watson heard her turn the receiver aside and speak to the judge.
“No,” cried Watson in vain, “don’t
ask
him.”
“You wanted to meet with those lawyers on the Whitlow matter now, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Where
are
the lawyers?” Watson heard the judge shout from his chambers. “What’s keeping them? Didn’t we order them to appear? And they have not appeared, right?”
Watson politely thanked Ida, hung up, and then hollered, “Myrna! Help!”
Watson left Harper a message, Harper left Watson a message, Harper left Myrna a message, and then they all ended up on a conference call—the three of them at a loss for why Judge Stang was summoning them to his chambers. Maybe it was a pretrial conference, and Ida just didn’t realize it. Or maybe the judge wanted to hear the lawyers argue their motions in person. Unusual in federal court, but not unheard of. A settlement conference?
He grabbed copies of his motions and supporting memoranda, then looked at the stack of papers filed by Harper and decided he didn’t need to bring copies of those.
On the way downtown, Myrna, who had been in stretch pants and an
Elvis Costello T-shirt, disrobed in the backseat of Watson’s Honda and donned amazon courthouse armor. Gunmetal gray suit, white silk blouse, opaque brown nylons, gray flats. Just enough eyeliner, no eye color, amber hair drawn back into a tight bun, her face game and warlike. They toed off at the foot of the courthouse steps and assessed each other’s appearance. She stood on her tiptoes and brushed off his shoulders, straightened his tie, stepped back to look him over.
“Middle button,” she said, pointing at his suit. “Judge Stang does not tolerate open jackets. Am I OK?”
“Beyond corporate,” said Watson.
Inside, they entered what Judge Stang had called “those talking time-and-temperature elevators” and rode to the twenty-eighth floor of the Courthouse of the Future, took deep breaths, and stepped out to meet destiny.
Myrna had told him that Harper was a big guy, but Watson had considered the source and forgotten about it until they walked off the elevator and were met by a tall, pacing man in a blue khaki suit, with shoulders too big to see around. Watson instantly recognized the familiar smoker’s voice, but it was incongruously coming out of a lawyer with the physique of an NBA power forward. A blunt-cut and blown-dry shock of silver hair gave him a patrician distinction beyond his thirty-something years.
When they shook hands, Watson felt his own large hand get wrapped in fingers as thick as cigars and folded into a wide, dry palm. Harper’s face was lean and tanned everywhere except where his golfing visor had been. At Stern, Pale & Covin, only rainmakers and shirkers had suntans. On a government lawyer, it probably meant only that Harper carefully took his leisure no matter what the demands of his sole client.
“Mike Harper,” said the Assistant U.S. Attorney warmly. He seemed smooth, professional, collegial, radiating the easygoing self-confidence of a large, healthy specimen, with an apparent noblesse oblige for smaller people—until Watson noticed that he was pointedly ignoring Myrna Schweich. She was scurrying underfoot, looking for somewhere to throw her gum wrappers, because she could not smoke in a federal building and was reduced to chain-chewing sticks of Juicy Fruit.
Finally she stepped out from under Watson’s elbow and put her little white hand up for a high five—a low five in Harper’s case—“Hey, Mookie. How are ya?” she said.
Harper refused to look down at her and looked at Watson instead. “She’ll do nothing but hurt your case. Have you met her clients? Does Judge Stang know about her?”
“Hey, asshole in the sky,” she said, “I’m down here at just the right height to do some serious damage to the government’s posture in this case.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” said Harper, glancing down from glacial heights of disdain.
“Aw,” said Myrna, “Mookie’s mad, Joey. We hurt his feelings. And they say it’s the women lawyers who get emotionally involved.”
“Let’s go see the judge,” said Harper irritably. “Sooner the better.”
“You guys go on ahead,” said Myrna, “I have to take a piss.”
Harper and Watson found Judge Stang’s outer office empty, with no sign of Ida except her four-footed cane, looking forlorn and abandoned in the center of the room.
Then they heard Judge Stang muttering again from within the penetralias of federal justice.
“They are saying I intentionally inflicted emotional distress on a lawyer?” said Judge Stang, apparently on a phone call. “Well, Judge, I can’t help that.”
When the lawyers peeked through the door into chambers, Ida caught sight of them, bowed, and whispered to the judge.
“They can wait until I rise from the dead, Ida! They kept the court waiting, didn’t they?”
She flapped a palsied hand at them and motioned for the lawyers to sit on the cracked leather sofa in the outer chamber, while Judge Stang continued his phone conversation. Myrna showed up, fluttered her fingers in a familiar wave to Ida, and mouthed: “Hi, Ida.”
“Yes, Judge Hunsicker, I know you are the chief judge of this district. But I have seniority. In my day, that counted for something. It’s my word against some neurasthenic lawyer’s.”
There was a pause.
“I can’t help it if one skittish member of the bar has a nervous breakdown. They didn’t have to call an ambulance. That was for show! You’ve heard of the thin-skull rule with regard to unnaturally susceptible plaintiffs? Well, there’s probably a thick-skull rule for fat-headed lawyers, isn’t there? I’ve got three of them waiting to see me right now, and I suppose you’ll hold me responsible if one of them breaks out in attacks of fantods and whim-whams?”
Another pause. The lawyers exchanged glances.
“Ida,” said the judge, “Judge Hunsicker did it again.”
“She hung up on you?” she asked. “The woman has no manners. She was brought up by a different class of people.”
The judge sighed and then cussed under his breath. “All right, send in the clowns. Let’s get this over with.”
Myrna, Harper, and Watson all greeted Judge Stang, who swiveled away from them and looked out his window.
Watson immediately noticed that there was a single hard-back chair available this go-around. He saw Harper looking at it and was too late in making a move for it. Harper got there first.
“Mr. Watson,” said Judge Stang, still not turning to look at his visitors, “would you please carry that chair back to the outer chamber. My last visitor was not a lawyer.”
Watson gingerly picked up the chair and carried it out of the judge’s office. Ida showed him its place against the wall. He heard Judge Stang speaking and rushed back inside.
“The court is not sleeping at night, and I’ll tell you why. The court wakes up with chest pains thinking about how it is on the brink of hosting an unnecessary murder trial. A trial that competent, professional officers of the court should be able to settle. But, it is not being settled, which means that one or more of the lawyers involved is incompetent, unprofessional, or both. I intend to find out if it is one, two, or three of you who are incompetent and unprofessional.”
“Judge, excuse me,” said Harper, “just a clarification. Is this a settlement conference, a pretrial conference? Or perhaps a hearing on the motions now pending before the court? And if it’s any of those, may the government request that a record be made of these proceedings?”
“Your boss, our aspiring senator, told you to say that, Mr. Harper,” Judge Stang said.
Harper flushed. “That’s not true, Judge, I was merely trying …”
“To set me up,” said the judge flatly. “This is a conversation, Mr. Harper. Human beings have conversations in which they speak plainly to one another, instead of constantly holding forth in the fashion of assistant United States attorneys while records are made of their timeless oratory.”
“Judge, I—” began Harper.
“Mr. Harper, we are neighbors. My house is on the corner of the busy intersection of Nowhere Street and Elsewhere Street. You are my next-door
neighbor, you live on Nowhere Street, second house from the corner.”
Judge Stang remained slumped in his recliner as he slowly swiveled around to face his desk. He seemed to be aging before their eyes, his chest caving in, his wispy, Wildroot-slicked silver hair falling out onto the lapels of his funeral suit. Still not looking at the lawyers, he reached out with a nearly fleshless hand and opened a handcrafted walnut and polished-brass humidor. He selected a cigar from the cedar and velvet-lined interiors (another ten-dollar Davidoff; Watson couldn’t help noticing the trademark white-and-gold band).
“If you were gentlemen,” Judge Stang said without looking at them, “I’d offer you cigars. But you’re not, so I won’t.”
“Judge—” began Harper.
“Don’t interrupt me, Mr. Harper. I’d like to taste this fine cigar for just a moment without having the portals of my ears soiled by the slubbery speech of lawyers.”
Judge Stang selected a cedar match from an etched shot glass and lit it by scratching it on the leg of his desk. He puffed comfortably, turned the cigar sideways to check the burn, then settled back into his recliner.
“Every morning I sit at my window overlooking the four-way stop signs at the intersection of Nowhere Street and Elsewhere Street. I often see you leave for work of a morning, drive south on Nowhere, and stop at the four-way stop. And I notice that you, being a conscientious government official, always come to a full stop before crossing Elsewhere Street.”
Judge Stang stopped and, for the first time, looked at Harper, whose mouth had come unhinged.
“Are you taking notes, Mr. Harper?”
“Notes, Judge?”
“Never mind,” said the judge, swiveling slowly away from his audience and back around to his view of the river. “Each morning, at precisely seven-fifteen
A
.
M
., I watch Freddy Fuckhead, who lives on the other side of me on Elsewhere Street, come out to his car. Each morning at exactly seven-fifteen, I see him start his car, race the engine in a most obnoxious way, then proceed west on Elsewhere at fifty miles an hour, right through the stop sign without so much as touching his vehicle’s brake pedal. I have watched Freddy do this every morning, of every business day, for the past four years.”
The judge stopped talking, puffed, and stared out the window,
watching the morning sunlight dapple on the surface of the widest river in North America.
“That’s Mark Twain’s river,” he said. “Huck and Jim are probably still out there somewhere enjoying each other’s conversation, while I’m stuck on land with sham kings and bogus dukes.”
The judge silently puffed and continued staring. Harper and Watson looked at each other. Then Harper leaned a little off keel, sneaking a peek to see if Judge Stang had perhaps slipped away from them. When the judge began talking again, Harper snapped to attention.
“But this morning,” the judge continued, “this morning, this crappy case was weighing on my mind, and I was suddenly overcome by a sudden urge to take a crap. So I got up from my place at the window and went to take a crap, at precisely seven-fourteen
A
.
M
.—sixty seconds before Freddy Fuckhead usually emerges to start his car.
“When I finally returned to my perch overlooking the intersection of Elsewhere and Nowhere, it was seven-nineteen
A
.
M
. I looked out my window and saw that a terrible accident had occurred during my bowel movement. Freddy Fuckhead had apparently broadsided your car, and both cars had burst into flames. You were stumbling around carrying your own head by the hair, and Freddy was smoothing the wrinkles out of his suit, which had apparently been rumpled by his vehicle’s air bag.
“Now,” said the judge, “in a civil action for negligence or in a criminal action for criminal negligence or motor vehicle homicide, your estate or the prosecutors, as the case may be, want to call me as a witness to testify that I saw Freddy Fuckhead run that stop sign every single weekday morning for four years, and that, even though I did not see him run the stop sign on the day of the accident, I am all but certain that he did it that day, too, and in all probability caused the accident.”
Clouds of smoke billowed softly against the judge’s window.
“Freddy is being represented by Ms. Schweich and Mr. Watson. When the prosecution calls me as a witness, she stands up and objects. On what grounds, Ms. Schweich?”
“Uh, Judge,” said Myrna, “begging the court’s indulgence and with all due respect, if I answer correctly, instead of a cookie, may I please have a cigarette?”
“State the grounds for your objection, Ms. Schweich,” the judge commanded.
“Federal Rule of Evidence 404,” said Myrna. “Evidence of crimes or acts other than those charged should not be admissible merely to show
that the defendant, having committed other bad acts, has a propensity toward crime or bad character.”
“Exceptions?” asked the judge.
“Such evidence may be admissible to prove some other fact at issue, such as motive, opportunity, intent, or other elements outlined by other rules. But on your facts, motive and intent are not elements of the charged crime, and so far I’ve heard no other fact at issue which the evidence would be admissible to prove. The other side wants you to testify that Mr. Fuckhead was routinely negligent and therefore was probably negligent on the day of the accident—exactly the kind of evidence Rule 404 was designed to keep out.”