The Missing Piece (7 page)

“They want to be able to afford a house like ours?” said Hugh.

“Not exactly,” said Linda. “The Department of Social Services calculates the stipends by following a complex system of regulations. The issue is whether the department followed those regulations.”

“You don't have Mark working on this decision, do you?”

“Dear God, no,” said Linda.

“You?”

“These issues are way too technical for me. I sent it to the law department. Bernadette's got it.”

The screen cut to a reporter, who explained that the demonstration began overnight. The police initially cleared the park, but the group obtained an injunction from a judge and they returned just before dawn.

“I wonder who signed that injunction,” said Hugh.

“I can give you ten names.”

Linda successfully avoided any serious conversation with Hugh for the rest of their morning together. She was in the shower when he shouted to have a good day and not to get caught up in the protest. She counted out a minute in her head to make sure he was truly gone, then she sank to the floor and cried.

*   *   *

At first, Linda saw no protestors in the park, and her immediate thought was that the injunction had been lifted and the demonstration disbanded. But as she crossed Foley Square, she spotted a few people holding signs near a makeshift podium and realized that the hundreds of rabid protestors portrayed on television were two dozen bored unfortunates in real life.

Linda climbed the wide, imposing steps of 60 Centre Street, then rode the judges' elevator to the fifth floor. The old courthouse, originally conceived as circular, ultimately had been built as a hexagon. And nowhere was this hexagonal shape more noticeable than on the fifth and sixth floors, where the judicial chambers lined long narrow corridors that cornered at one hundred-twenty-degree angles. Linda reached her chambers and, having arrived earlier than usual, was not surprised to see the transom dark. She unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The outer office, wedged into an angle of the hexagon, was crammed with two desks, two tall bookcases, and four small tables piled with motion decisions in various stages of completion. Her own office was furnished with a large desk, two sofas, end tables, accent lamps, and the obligatory built-in bookcases filled with dark green case reporters.

Linda plopped herself down into her desk chair and breathed deeply. As disillusioned as she had become with life on the bench, the smell of chambers in the morning still excited her. Today, that mix of wood and paper, of air unmoved since the previous day, precisely recalled her elementary school classrooms. The memory was particularly poignant, harking back to a simpler time when a word like
pregnant
held no meaning for her. Quickly enough, though, both the smell and the memories faded. She took out the box from her purse and lifted the flaps for one more look at the test stick. The plus sign, vague now but still visible, showed in the round window. She dumped the box into the wastepaper basket beneath her desk, shaking the basket so the box settled deep into the plastic liner.

For the next half hour, Linda carefully read and signed several letters she had dictated the previous day. In this quiet atmosphere, performing these mundane tasks, the sight of the blue plus sign in the little window took on an aspect of unreality. She had not dreamed it, of course; she had seen what she had seen. Instead, she doubted the accuracy of the test result, not on any scientific basis but on the simple belief that life would not throw her this curve.

Her staff showed up just before nine o'clock. Karen Pawling blew in like a cyclone and trilled a sprightly “hello” before firing up chambers with her morning ritual of brewing coffee and pulling messages off the voicemail. Mark Garber rolled in like a cloud blotting the sun. His plodding transit across the anteroom door included a grunt that might have been a greeting and a hand flick that might have been a wave.

Karen and Mark were contract hires, which meant that Linda had been obligated to hire them in return for the support of their political club. In New York City, judicial elections usually involved cross-endorsed candidates or Democrats running in solid Democratic districts. The real election occurred at the nominating convention, when the archipelago of neighborhood clubs that controlled the city's politics negotiated the slate of candidates. Often a candidacy came with a quid pro quo: the new judge must hire a law clerk or secretary from the club. Linda was told to hire both.

Karen turned out to be a gem, someone Linda would have hired in a minute if she had been lucky enough to find her on her own. Mark was more of a rough cut—an extremely rough cut. He had a quiet demeanor that came across as intellectual reserve, but that Linda now realized masked a serious ignorance of the law. In conference, he could drop the appropriate legal buzzword at the appropriate moment. But his written work was terrible, and unfortunately civil litigation in New York City required judges to issue hundreds of written decisions each year. Mark's decisions looked presentable to the eye and sounded intelligent to the ear, but whenever Linda parsed the actual language she found that the legal reasoning skipped a beat. Consequently, she needed to perform cardiac resuscitation before signing off on any of Mark's decisions. Though she returned heavily copyedited drafts to demonstrate the smooth style and impeccable reasoning she expected in a decision, Mark simply keyed in the changes on his computer, never taking the obvious hint that Linda's edits were meant to be instructive.

The deal with the West Chelsea Reformed Democrats was that Linda would keep Mark for two years. The two years had less than three months to run, and, problematic as their work relationship had been, Linda still believed that on some mysterious political level Mark had played a role in her becoming a judge. So rather than simply let him go at the end of the year, she had been trying to place him with a private firm.

The phone rang, and “S. Belcher” showed on the tiny screen. Linda picked up immediately.

“Hi, boss,” she said, trying for a breeziness she did not feel.

“Morning, Linda. I need to see you. Now, if it's good.”

It was good, of course. When the administrative judge called, you made yourself available. Linda pushed up from her desk, steadied herself, then headed out to the anteroom.

“Going up to see the AJ,” she said.

*   *   *

Linda was no sooner out the door than Mark shot her a double bird.

“Now what?” said Karen.

“I went to that goddam fund-raiser last night specifically to talk to Mr. Justice Conover.” Mark spat out those last three words, his derisive code name for Hugh Gavigan. “All I got was bullshit.”

“Maybe you should have spoken to the judge first,” said Karen. “Let her pave the way.”

“That's easy for you to say. Your deal is different from mine. You get to stay as long as you like.”

“She doesn't need to get rid of you,” said Karen. “Two years was the minimum. She can keep you if she wants.”

“Right. Like that'll happen. She never gave me a chance and we never really got along. She always nitpicks at what I do.”

“She nitpicks at me, too.”

“Like hell. She loves you. And me, I have one foot out the door.”

“She is helping you,” said Karen. “I type the letters.”

“And what have they gotten me? Zilch.”

“There's still time,” said Karen.

“It's October,” said Mark. “The year's almost over.”

*   *   *

Climbing the stairs to the sixth floor disabused Linda of any idea that the test results were wrong. Halfway up, her stomach went queasy and the edges of her vision darkened. She gripped the handrail until her stomach settled and her vision cleared. The question now was not whether but how far along. She breathed deeply, running the dates through her head. The way life had been lately, the possibilities were not endless.

Sharon Belcher was the administrative judge of the Supreme Court in New York County. Her duties were threefold: carrying her own modest inventory of cases, setting policy for the court as a whole, and administering the court's daily activities. In this third category, the duties ran from the banal, like addressing complaints lodged by a largely uninformed public, to the substantive, like overriding the usual random method of assigning cases to judges.

Judge Belcher's chambers was a modest three-room suite with entry through the secretary's office in the center, the law clerk's office to the right, and the judge's to the left.

“Missed you at the fund-raiser last night,” Judge Belcher said, sitting down in a wing chair beside Linda rather than going behind her desk.

“We left early because Hugh needed to go back to the office. He's preparing for a trial in Texas.”

“Still the big dog at the firm, eh?”

“He is,” said Linda. “I saw the protest on TV this morning.”

“Yes. Well. I wouldn't have signed the injunction, but no one asked me. Don't worry, it will blow itself out like they always do.”

“I'm not worried,” said Linda.

“Good, because that's not why I wanted to see you.” Judge Belcher leaned forward. “The Appellate Division is about to hand down a decision in the Roman silver case. I got the call about this last night. In addition to deciding those appeals, the AD wants the new trial to go forward immediately, and the presiding judge suggested that I assign you as the trial judge.”

Linda took a deep breath and settled back in her chair. Her stomach felt queasy again, but not for the same reason as when she climbed the stairs.

“The credibility of our court took a big hit three years ago,” said Judge Belcher. “Think about it. Gunmen invade a courtroom. A court officer gets shot. It seems like a dream now.”

“A very bad dream,” said Linda.

“That's why it's important to get this trial done quickly and get it done right. You are the judge in the best position to get it done. You understood the issues in the case then and you'll understand how the AD decision affects those issues now.”

“Can I think about it?”

“Sure, just don't take too long,” said Judge Belcher, smiling to soften the edge of what Linda clearly understood to be an order.

Linda left Judge Belcher's chambers, but rather than go back to her own she walked a slow circuit of the sixth floor. It was barely nine thirty, and she already had been whipsawed by two surprising developments. She stopped to look through one of the windows that opened over the deep light courts in the interior of the hexagon. Up above, white clouds hurried past the gold roof of the federal court building.

She ran the numbers in her head. She was only a little bit pregnant, as the joke went, and if the Appellate Division ruling was as imminent as Sharon said, she could be done with the trial well before she started to show. And with Hugh leaving for Texas, she would be well into the trial before he returned. But there was another consideration beyond the timing. That day three years ago had been the worst day of her professional life and a pivotal day in her personal life. One rarely had the chance to return to the scene of such a thumping disaster with a clear mission to make amends. And one rarely had a murky future suddenly become so clear.

Linda continued around the rest of the hexagon and poked her head in Judge Belcher's chambers.

“I'll do it,” she said.

Judge Belcher looked up from her desk.

“Thank you,” she said. “As soon as the decision comes down, I'll cut an administrative order assigning the case to you. As soon as I cut that order, you call the lawyers in for a pretrial conference.”

Inside her own chambers, Linda found a cleaning woman emptying the waste paper baskets in the outer office. She never could remember whether the woman's name was Jessica or Jessie Mae, so she merely said “hello,” then closed herself in her office.

 

CHAPTER 7

Gary Martin hadn't expected such a big crowd three years after the shooting. But Foxx scheduled the fund-raiser on nearly the exact anniversary because he believed a phenomenon called cyclic memory would persuade more people to attend. Foxx liked way-out theories. He would read an article in a magazine, then come into the locker room to preach about it because, he would say, it was his duty to edify his benighted brethren.

Gary never bought into Foxx's theories, but this cyclic memory idea stuck because he had noticed it himself in the days leading up to the first two anniversaries. His dreams, which he rarely remembered, suddenly became as vivid as HDTV. They replayed in minute detail the pedestrian aspects of that day—drinking coffee with Foxx and McQueen, sitting alone at the Pearl Street desk, waiting on the front steps to meet the armored car, looking at the treasure piece with Linda. In each dream, he had the conscious sense of being able to avoid the inevitable if he could alter just one of these minor details. It never happened, not even in dreamland, and after a couple of weeks the dreams faded into dull shapes at the edge of his consciousness. In Foxx's terms, the angle of the sun had changed, and the new angle cued not the trauma of that day but the tedium of the many that followed.

This year, the dreams had been different.

Gary awoke on his left side, hard along the edge of the bed. He rocked twice, then rolled onto his back. He could feel the sheets twisted around his waist, but below that, nothing. He used the controller to raise the bed, and the rest of him slowly came into view as the mattress bent itself. Rolling over had left his legs weirdly crossed, like the devil's in a medieval woodcut.

The clock on the night stand showed 10:00 a.m. Damn, he had fallen back to sleep for another three hours after Ursula left. They had returned just before midnight and gone straight to the bedroom. She helped him into bed, peeled down his pants, then dropped her skirt to the floor for the game she called her sexy nurse fantasy.