Authors: Midnight Hour
Grace felt an unwelcome stab of sympathy for the woman.
“Any priors?” she asked Herb Pruitt, the prosecuting attorney, brusquely.
“He has one conviction for shophfting, Your Honor. And he’s a habitual truant. Nine days absent so far this school year.”
As school had been in session just over a month, that was an impressive total.
“Was it his stepfather’s car he stole?”
The prosecutor looked down at his notes. “Yes, Your Honor.”
“It wasn’t stealing, Your Honor. Gordon lets him
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drive it sometimes, He was just mad.” The mother’s voice was pleading. Her eyes beseeched Grace. “Robby’s a good boy. He just … don’t think sometimes.”
Ordinarily a parent would not have been allowed to speak out like that in Grace’s courtroom. She prided herself on running a tight ship. But as an embattled mother herself, Grace felt an unexpected kinship with the woman. There but for the grace of God went …
The thought was unpleasant, and she dismissed it with determination almost as soon as it appeared. There was no comparison between Jessica and this boy. Ye t.
The sneaky little qualifier made its way into her head before Grace could completely close her mind to her own problerhs. She stifled a sigh.
“All right.” Grace fixed the young offender with a girret - ze. “Taking a car without the owner’s permis,,a I I
sion is stealing, Mr. Boylan, whether the owner is your stepfather or not. I want to make that perfectly clear, Nevertheless, I am going to give you one more chance. Otte more, got that? Under these conditions: You get yourself to school every day, come rain, shine, or the cormnon cold, and you stay out of trouble. Any more shoplifting, car stealing, or the like and you will be taken away from your family and remanded to an institution until you are eighteen. Do we understand each other?”
“Uh-huh.” The kid nodded eagerly, looking relieved. His attorney poked him in the ribs with her elbow. “Uh, yes, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor.”
“A social worker will call your school every week to
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make sure you’re attending and will report any absence to me. If I see you in this courtroom again, Mr. BoyIan, I promise you, you won’t like me.”
It was a threat she used often. Every time she did, she halfexpected a smart-alecky kid to come back with, I don’t like you now, but so far none ever had.
“Yes, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor,” the kid said again, breaking into a wide grin. Grace pursed her lips, wondering if she was being played for a sucker. Once again her gaze went to the mother, who was shedding tears for real now and wiping them away with the backs of her hands.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” the mother said. For a moment their gazes met.
Grace nodded. The sense of fellow feeling the woman engendered in her was what had saved the kid from a probably well-deserved punishment. Grace didn’t know whether she felt good or bad about her unaccustomed leniency.
At the moment she was too tired to worry about it. “Case disrru’ssed.”
She closed her eyes briefly and rubbed her temples as the Boylan kid and his mother embraced, then left the courtroom, attorneys in tow. Her head hurt. It had been almost seven A.m. by the time they’d gotten home from the emergency room, and she’d been in court since nine, with an hour break for lunch.
“Next case,” she said, opening her eyes.
It was an ongoing custody dispute, a particularly ugly one in which the father, a well-to-do dentist, accused his ex-wife, and former hygienist, of being an unfit mother because (he said) she was an alcoholic and
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entvrtalned i succession of inen In then-home with their two daughters present. In retaliation, she accused him of being An unfit filther because (she said) he physically, emotionally, and sexually abused her and their daughters. Both parties had appeared before her on at least half a dozen occasions, and by this time she believed neither one. Today’s installment involved the father’s request for lowered child support because, he said, he now had custody of the children more often than was specified in the divorce decree.
She listened to the opposing lawyers’ arguments, unimpressed.
“Dr. Allen, I don’t find that keeping your children over Super Bowl weekend while your ex-wife was out of town justifies a reduction in child support. I therefore rule in favor of the defendant. Case dismissed.” Thank God, she was done for the day.
The dentist spluttered angrily, while his ex-wife looked smug.
“Just a nunute, Your Honor.” Dr. Allen’s attorney, Colin Wilkerson, was better known to her even than his client. In fact, she had made the mistake of dating him for three months in the spring and early summer, before coming to her senses. “May I approach the berich?”
The question was moot, since he was already bearing down on her like a train on a crossing while the courtroom slowly emptied behind him.
“What is it, Mr. Wilkerson?” Grace asked wearily. He was tall, fair, balding, with a long nose and sharp features. She had once thought him handsome, in a William Hurt kind of way. His navy suit, like all his
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clothes, looked expensive. His blue shirt and tie had no doubt been selected to match his eyes, which at the moment were narrow with anger as they met hers. His fingers twitched at his sides in a compulsive way she had noticed before.
“This wouldn’t be personal, would it, Your Honor?” he asked, voice soft so that he wouldn’t be overheard. His mouth curled into an unpleasant smile. His fingers twitched again.
“What?” She was really, really not in the mood for histrionics at the moment. In a nutshell, that was why she had stopped seeing him. He took nothing lightly. Everything was a matter of life or death to him. Such as where they went for dinner, or what movie they saw, or whether it was the right weather for boating on the Scioto.
Life was too short to have to deal with that kind of personality on a daily basis. It was bad enough to have to deal with it in her courtroom.
“You’ve ruled against my clients every time I’ve appeared before you since you stopped seeing me. I don’t think it’s just coincidence.”
Grace regarded him steadily. “It is, Mr. Wflkerson, I assure you.”
“I don’t believe it. What did I do to make you mad at me, Grace? Was it my ties? My aftershave? The way I drive? Not that I care. All I ask is that you don’t take your personal animosity toward me out on my clients.”
“You’re skirting very close to contempt of court right now, Mr. Wilkerson.” Her voice was cold, her eyes hard. What had she been thinking, she asked her—
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self, to get involved with this man, even for so brief a time?
All right, she’d been lonely. But as she had learned, and was still learning, loneliness was sometimes preferable to the alternative.
“Oh, that’s right, hide behind your udge’s robes. But I’m putting you on notice right now: I’m not going to let you punish my clients because you’ve got a grievance with me. I’ll file a complaint with the Judicial Oversight Board first.”
“File a complaint with anyone you please, Mr. Wilkerson. And now I’m putting you on notice: If you don’t leave my courtroom right now, I will cite you with contempt of court, and you will spend the night in jail.” She stared coldly at him. His face turned red, then purple. His hands clenched at his sides. For a moment the issue hung in the balance.
Then he swung on his heel and stalked away, pausing only to collect his client before exiting the courtroom.
As the heavy oak door at the rear of the courtroom closed behind them, Grace permitted herself a mental sag.
“Rough day,” the bailiff said sympathetically. Walter Dowd was sixty-two, with the wrinkled, jowly face of a basset hound atop the massive build of an NFL linebacker. Grace considered him a good friend.
“Aren’t they all.” Grace’s smile at him was wry as she stood up, eager to reach her chambers and indulge in a much-needed jolt of caffeine. She would allow herself ten minutes to relax. Then she needed to call Chief Mapother of the Bexley Police Department and
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inquire about the status of their investigation into the intruder in her house the previous night. On the way home she had to stop by the dry cleaners and the grocery. After that came supper and Jess’s homework. And sometime tonight, she had to have a serious discussion with her daughter, to which she wasn’t looking forward one bit.
All on the approximately three hours’ sleep she’d had before discovering thatJessica was missing from the house.
That old saw about a woman’s work never being done was certainly right on target in her case. Exhaustion on a daily basis seemed to be her lot.
The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and a man walked into the now hushed and echoing chamber. Already on his way to lock that same door, Walter stopped in his tracks in the center aisle and looked at the man.
“Court’s over for the day.” He tended to be protective of Grace, which most of the time she appreciated. His voice was gruff, his stance meant to block the intruder from advancing farther.
“I know that. But I was hoping to catch the judge before she left.” He looked over Walter’s head at Grace, who still stood on the dais behind the bench. “Got a minute?”
Grace recognized him at once: the cop from the night before. Mr. Obnoxious himself Grace’s eyes narrowed and her lips compressed, but she nodded. TO Walter she said, “It’s all right. You can let him in. And you can go ahead and lock up and leave. I know you need to get home. He can go out the back with me.”
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“Thanks, Your Honor.” Walter’s wife of forty years, Mary Alice, was recuperating from a hip replacement and needed him at home, Grace knew.
As Walter again headed for the courtroom door, the cop walked past him toward Grace, who was stepping down from the bench.
“What can I do for you?” she asked coolly as he came up to her. He was still half a head taller than she was even though she was wearing heels, and as scruffylooking in jeans and a battered army jacket as he had been the night before. His gaze swept over her. Grace thought with satisfaction that she must present a far different picture in her solemn black judge’s robes than she had in her previous incarnation as a frightened, harried mother. A picture more deserving of respect.
“Sorry to keep you late, Your Honor,” he said. Grace thought she detected a hint of irony in the honorific, and her frown intensified. But it was impossible to be sure. He continued, “I thought you might want to know under just what circumstances we found your daughter last night.”
Grace sighed inwardly. She did want to know, of course. No, correction, she didn’t really want to know, but she needed to know. Oh, the joys of motherhood.
“Come into my chambers,” she said with resignation, and led the way through the door in the wall behind the bench.
CHAMBERS WAS P-ENLLY nothing more than fancy JU dicial lingo for an office, and not much of an
office at that. The floors were brown-speckled linoleum, the walls ancient plaster painted beige, and the furniture-a desk, three chairs, a credenza, and a pair of glass-fronted bookcases-was all of heavy dark walnut. There was an ancient black leather couch against the wall through which the door opened, a greenshaded pharmacy lamp on her desk, and a framed, faded print of a long-ago foxhunt in shades of brown and red and green on the wall over the couch. Except for the assortment of family pictures and mementos scattered on the shelves of the bookcases, and the photograph of herself and Jessica perched on one corner of her desk, the room was completely impersonal.
“You want a cup of coffee?” Glancing over her shoulder as she spoke, Grace headed directly toward the Mr. Coffee machine on the credenza directly behind her desk. If she didn’t ingest caffeine soon, she would die, she thought.
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“No. Thanks. You go ahead.” Standing just a few steps inside the door, he was looking around the room.
Pouring herself a cup of coffee-the smell alone was to die for-Grace cradled the cup in both hands and then took a sip. God, it was strong, so late in the day! Beginning to revive, she sipped again and turned around to find that he was watching her now, in the same judgmental way that she remembered from the night before. What was with this guy, anyhow, she thought with growing resentment as she sat down in the chair behind her desk, placing the coffee cup on the glass-covered wood surface in front of her. If she was the worst mother he had ever run across, he sure didn’t get out much.
She looked up at him. “You know, I don’t think I caught your name last night.” Her voice was cool, her manner very much that of the person in charge.
“Tony Marino. Detective.”
Marino. That was the nairie of the other police officer, the one who had first told her that Jessica had been found. So they were related. Grace wasn’t surprised. Their looks and mannerisms were very similar, although this one was the more unpleasant.
A quick tap sounded at the door, distracting them both. He looked around and she looked past him as Nancy Lutz, one of the pool secretaries she shared with the other four juvenile and Domestic Court judges, appeared in the doorway.
“Need anything before I leave?” Nancy was a slender, attractive blonde of twenty-something with a wide, ready smile, which she turned on in full force
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after a quick appraisal of Grace’s visitor. Recently divorced, she was vocal about her newly restored interest in men.
“No, thanks, Nancy. Good night.” From somewhere Grace summoned tip an answering, if somewhat dry, smile.
” ‘Night, Your Honor.” She turned and left, her pert bottom in its snug black skirt swaying with every step, her blond hair swinging saucily about her shoulders. Marino was so obvious about checking her out that Grace’s smile vanished. By the time he turned back to her, faintly smiling in lingering appreciation, her mouth was set in a thin, straight line and her eyes were cold.