The Mourning Sexton (8 page)

“Why me?” Dulcie asked.

He looked up from his reverie, regrouping his thoughts.

“Because I'm representing someone I never met,” he said. “I need to learn more about her. I need to find out what she liked and didn't like. Who her friends were. Whether she had any enemies. Did she have hobbies? Did she have dreams? Did she have plans for the future?”

“That's a lot of information.”

“For one life?” He shook his head. “Not really.”

“What do you have so far?”

“I have two photo albums from her childhood, a few graduation portraits, a box or so of personal papers. I have a packet of morgue shots and another one of postmortem X-rays. I have a list of names I copied down from her calendars and holiday cards and personal papers.”

Dulcie leaned back in her chair. After a moment, she said, “She loved Eva Cassidy.”

“Who's that?”

“A jazz singer. She's dead, too. Died in her thirties. Her favorite movie was
Sleepless in Seattle.
” She smiled at the memory. “Her second favorite movie was
Cinderella.
She owned both on videotape.”

She crossed her arms over her chest as she thought back, her lips pursed in thought. “She loved Charles Dickens. I never met anyone who loved Dickens the way Judith did. Especially
Great Expectations
and
Bleak House.
She'd read each at least a half dozen times. Her favorite song was ‘Fields of Gold'—the version by Sting. Actually, she loved just about anything by Sting.”

Dulcie's eyes seemed to go distant as she thought back.

“Did she have a boyfriend after Reggie?”

“No one special.”

“How about anyone at all?”

“She had a few dates. Nothing serious.”

“Girlfriends?”

She thought it over. “She never talked about anyone else to me, but that doesn't mean she didn't have other friends. I do know that she spent a lot of time on her own. Especially her last year. Or at least I didn't see her as often. But through it all, she never cut back on her time at the family justice clinic. Right up to the end. That was unusual.”

“How so?”

“I've had many dedicated student volunteers, but students tend to view the clinic as a law school thing. Once they graduate, they move on. But not Judith. She was there two evenings every week and all day every Saturday—summer, winter, spring, and fall.”

“What did she do at the clinic?”

“We provide legal services to abused women and their children. The real challenge is to gain their trust when they first come in. Judith had a wonderful ability to connect with the women, to gain their confidence and serve as a link between them and the lawyers who would deal with their legal problems. She was an incredibly valuable asset at the clinic. I miss her anyway, but I miss that part of her, too.”

“Was she as close with anyone else as she was with you?”

“I don't know. I never heard of anyone else. But you need to understand that we weren't friends in the typical sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“I began as her professor, and then I was her supervisor at the clinic. There was the age difference and the authority difference. We'd have a cup of coffee together maybe once a week. Occasionally we'd go out to lunch. I'd do a lot of listening.”

“To what?”

“To her life. Judith talked about her life almost obsessively. Especially about her father. It was really quite sad. I suppose we're all hung up to a certain degree on our parents and on what we think they did or didn't do to us. But most of us are able to get on with our lives. Not Judith.”

He handed her a photocopy of the list of names he'd copied down from Judith's personal papers. “Do you know any of these people?”

She took a moment to scan down the list. There were thirty-seven names on it, including hers. “I recognize a few students. Barry Embry's one. He was in her class. I think he clerked for an Eighth Circuit judge after graduation. Linda Hartstein. I had her in a class. Bonnie Ross, too. A few other names look familiar.” She shrugged. “Maybe they were law students.” She looked up at him. “Maybe not.”

“Could you check? You can keep the list. It's an extra copy.”

She gave him a curious look. “Why do these names matter?”

“I'm looking for connections.”

“To what?”

“To Judith,” he said, keeping it general, trying to convey through his tone and manner that he'd fully answered the question. “To her life.”

She studied him a moment. “Okay.”

“Thanks.”

She folded the list in half and dropped it into her purse. “I won't be on campus tomorrow. I'll have time to check the school records the following morning. We can touch base later that day. I'll be at the clinic the entire afternoon. You can call me there.” She closed her purse and glanced at her watch. “Is that it?”

“One more thing. How would you describe her relationship with Judge McCormick?”

“Her relationship? She was his law clerk.”

“Did she talk about him?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Yes and no. The first year of her clerkship she talked about him all the time.”

“Good or bad?”

“All good. She worshipped the man. Thought he was a genius.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You worked with him, right? I had a couple of cases before McCormick back when he was a state court judge. We both know that when it comes to judges, he's no Learned Hand. But not to Judith that first year. You'd have thought she was clerking for Moses.”

Hirsch nodded, surprised that she knew that part of his own history. Had she looked him up or known it all along?

“The whole thing was strange that first year of her clerkship. Like she'd become a Moonie. Never complained about his temperament on the bench, even though it's awful. Never complained about working for him, even though he's supposed to be one of the worst judges to clerk for in this district.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. Former clerks I've talked to tell me he's arrogant and impatient and irritable. But to hear Judith talk about him that first year, you would have thought she was working for Mister Rogers.”

“But that changed?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What happened?”

“I never found out. Around the middle of her second year, she stopped talking about him. Completely. A few times I tried to ask her how the clerkship was going, but she'd just deflect the question, telling me she didn't want to talk about work.”

Hirsch asked, “Do you think they had an affair?”

She stared at him. “The thought crossed my mind.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged. “Pure conjecture. She didn't have a boyfriend, and he was divorced. The first year she adored him, and then all of sudden she wouldn't talk about him. He was a skirt chaser even when he was married. He had a reputation.” She leveled her gaze at him, her eyes cool. “Not unlike some other powerful men.”

He met her gaze, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Maybe he changed. Sometimes that happens.”

“Usually not.”

She checked her watch, reached into her purse, took out a business card, and handed it to him. “I need to go. This has my office number and the number at the clinic. I should have something on those names the day after tomorrow.”

He stood as she did. She slipped on her coat and turned to him as she buttoned it.

“Thank you, Dulcie.”

She shook her head. “No need to thank me. I'm not doing this for you. Judith was a wonderful person. If her death is someone else's fault, and if I can help make the case against that someone, I'm happy to do so. But not for you. And not for me. And not for her father. Just for her.”

She turned and left.

Just like that.

He watched through the coffeehouse window as she stepped through the snow toward her car. He felt the ache of desire, something he hadn't felt in years. But he also felt the sting of knowing that she detested him.

CHAPTER 11

M
issy Shields looked up from her milk shake and gave him an exaggerated eye roll. “What-
ev
-er.”

She had that sorority thing down pat. French manicured nails, perfect makeup, eyes a vivid contact-lens blue, shoulder-length hair too blond and too puffy. Facial expressions announcing emotions like Kabuki masks—wide eyes, O-shaped mouth, hands pressed to cheeks, eyebrows arched. Prada bag on the seat beside her in the booth. BCBG suit with a frilly blouse unbuttoned at the throat to reveal a David Yurman platinum choker.

But what made the persona noteworthy was what it hid. While Missy Shields might still affect the perky princess crowned Sweetheart of SAE's Spring Fling her junior year, she was now a young partner at Drahner Cortez LLC, known in the legal community as Drawn & Quartered. It was an aggressive litigation boutique headquartered in West Palm Beach with a nationwide class action practice. Missy Shields had earned her stripes in the Enron class actions down in Houston and in tobacco litigation in several states. Drawn & Quartered was one of six law firms serving as lead co-counsel for the plaintiffs in
In re Turbo-XL Litigation,
and Missy Shield was one of three attorneys from the firm on the case.

Hirsch found her the same way he found Dulcie Lorenz, during that long afternoon of digging through boxes of Judith's personal belongings in Abe Shifrin's basement. Unlike Dulcie, though, he didn't actually find Missy by name. He'd come across two recurring telephone numbers on Judith's phone bills, both in the 561 area code. The first call was on November 9 of the year before Judith died. The calls continued on and off for about seven weeks—three calls one week, four the next, one the following week, eight the week after, and then gradually tapering off. There were no calls after the first of the year.

He had dialed both phone numbers that evening. The first was answered on the fourth ring:

“You have reached the law firm of Drahner Cortez LLC. Our office is closed now. If you know the extension of the party—”

He had hung up, mystified. He recognized the law firm name but didn't make the connection to the Peterson Tire case.

He had checked the front pages of his telephone directory, found the map of area codes, and confirmed that 561 was indeed West Palm Beach, Florida.

Why did Judith call a south Florida law firm, he paused to count, thirteen times over a two-month period? A personal legal matter? Something else?

He called the second number, also answered on the fourth ring:

“Hi there,” a cheerful woman's voice said. “You've reached Rob and Missy. We'd love to talk but we can't come to the phone right now, so like please leave us a message at the beep and we'll—”

He tried again an hour later, got the recording, hung up, tried back a third time, and Missy answered. He told her who he was and explained why he was calling.

“Oh, poor little Judith,” she'd said. “I miss her so.”

From her tone of voice and the number of calls Judith had made to her home number, he'd assumed the two had been dear friends. Instead, he learned that they'd been merely casual acquaintances in college who'd gone their separate ways after graduation. They met freshman year in Political Science 101, a lecture class with assigned seats in alphabetical order. Thus Shifrin found herself next to Shields. They became friendly that semester and occasionally had lunch together. The relationship went nowhere, though. Judith was living at home, and Missy was pledging a sorority. They lost touch after that first semester. Both were poli-sci majors, though, and they got reacquainted senior year when they shared the same faculty adviser and took the same honors seminar on the Vietnam war. After graduation, Missy moved back home to south Florida. She didn't see or talk to Judith again until a Peterson Tire hearing in St. Louis nearly five years later.

When she'd mentioned that hearing during their first phone call, Hirsch had been surprised, wondering what she'd been doing in that courtroom, never even imagining from her “whatevers” and “for sures” that she was an attorney, thinking instead that perhaps she was related to one of the claimants, or maybe she was someone's paralegal.

But when he asked her if there would be a good time for them to talk about Judith, she answered, “How 'bout like over lunch the day after tomorrow?”

“Down there?”

“No, silly. In St. Louis. I've got to be up there in the morning to argue a motion before Judge McCormick. I'll be done by noon. We can talk then, but only if it's over lunch at Crown Candy Kitchen.”

“Crown Candy?”

“For sure. Their BLTs and shakes are to die for.”

She was working on that milk shake now—a peanut butter one, her head bent over the tall glass, lips puckered around the straw.

As he'd learned over lunch, there'd been no grand reunion when the two women spotted each other that first time during a court hearing. It had been about a week after Halloween the year before Judith's death. Judith had been seated in the empty jury box, a yellow legal pad on her lap, taking notes as Missy argued the motion. Although she looked familiar, Missy couldn't connect the face with a name or a history. After the hearing, Judith approached and introduced herself. She suggested maybe they could meet that afternoon for a cup of coffee. Missy said absolutely yes.

“It was like a totally awesome opportunity for me,” she explained to Hirsch.

Missy knew that a relationship with her old college acquaintance would give her unique access, since Judith was the sole law clerk assigned to
In re Turbo XL Litigation
. That meant that Missy could giggle with her over college memories and gossip about former classmates and catch up on their lives since graduation and along the way try to pick up some insights into the judge's attitude and perspective on the case, especially specific claims. She just had to be careful not to cross the line and place Judith in an awkward position by initiating any conversation about the case.

But Judith had no interest in giggling over college memories or gossiping about former classmates or catching up on their lives since graduation. And Judith hadn't invited Missy for coffee to reminisce. She wanted to talk about the case, but not the merits. Instead, she wanted to talk about the discovery materials, namely, the documents produced, the answers to interrogatories, the testimony at depositions.

Missy quickly saw that Judith's focus was not on the topics Missy had expected. Judith had no interest in the physics of tire tread separations or the testimony of the engineering experts concerning manufacturing defects or the economic losses to the victims' loved ones or any of the other issues that Missy viewed as the heart of the case. Instead, Judith was fascinated by the corporate structure of the Peterson Tire Corporation—the chain of command, who did what, who was there now, who'd been there before but was now gone, what positions each person had held while employed at the company's headquarters. And not just the top executives. She was interested in everyone within the organization, including secretaries and filing clerks and mailroom employees. Anyone and everyone who'd worked at the headquarters.

“Is that in Knoxville, Tennessee?” Hirsch asked.

“That's right.”

He was thinking of all the calls on Judith's phone bills to the 423 area code. Unlike the pair of phone numbers in the 561 area code—one for Missy's home phone and one for her office phone—at least three dozen different phone numbers in the Knoxville area code had appeared over a five-month period beginning in April of Judith's last year. She'd called the same number more than once only four times, and none more than twice.

Hirsch asked Missy about her telephone conversations with Judith. What did they talk about? What did Judith want?

Judith's first call was just a few days after they'd met for coffee in St. Louis. She wanted to know: 1. What kinds of discovery materials existed, 2. How much of it there was, and 3. how much had been converted into computer files.

The answers were: 1. every kind, 2. tons, and 3. all.

As Missy explained, over three hundred witnesses had been deposed. Transcripts of those depositions totaled almost four hundred thousand pages. As for documents, Peterson Tire alone had produced more than one million pages of them. With numbers that high, computer storage-and-retrieval systems were indispensable. Missy's firm had all of the deposition transcripts entered into a searchable database. You typed in a key word or phrase, pressed the search key, and the computer retrieved every reference by every witness to, say, the March 4 memo from Terry Fitzgerald to Jim Hedstrom. So, too, Missy's firm had used imaging software to replicate, one by one, the entire warehouse of documents produced by Peterson Tire. Those documents were also in a searchable electronic database. Thus, if you wanted to see all memos between Terry Fitzgerald and Jim Hedstrom, you could type in the search request and the computer would retrieve an image of that March 4 memo along with dozens of others between the two men.

Judith called back a few days later to ask for copies of those databases to load onto her computer. Missy was taken aback by the request. She'd never had a court ask for the raw discovery data; instead, the court only addressed those discovery materials that became an issue, either before or during trial. Judith assured her that she wanted nothing of an attorney-client nature, and certainly nothing privileged. She explained that as the sole law clerk on the case, she needed an efficient way to access the voluminous discovery records. That way, whenever certain testimony or category of documents became the subject of a motion filed in the case, Judith could quickly retrieve the relevant materials and, if necessary, print off copies for the judge.

The request sounded reasonable to Missy. Even better, it would give her firm a chance to do a favor for the judge's law clerk at little cost, since it simply involved copying existing electronic files onto CD-ROMs.

Hirsch asked, “Was she getting similar materials from lawyers for the other parties?”

“I have, like, no idea. I didn't ask, and she didn't volunteer.”

“Were you able to get her what she wanted?”

“Totally. Next time I went to St. Louis, I brought along the disks.”

“What about your subsequent phone calls with her?”

“She had lots of questions.”

“About what?”

“Like I said, mostly about employees at the headquarters. Who was this guy? Was he still there? If not, did I know where he lived now? What did he do for the company? That sort of thing.”

“Anyone specific?”

She thought about it. “No one stands out. Just lots of names and lots of questions.”

“Did you get all her questions answered?”

“I guess, but it took awhile. Judith was an e-mail fanatic. Sometimes I'd have five from her in one day.”

“Same types of questions?”

“Pretty much, but she started having specific questions about documents, too. I finally put her in touch with Becky, who was one of our document paralegals. Judith kept poor Becky busy answering questions.”

“How long did that last?”

“I think like a couple months. I guess she finally got all her questions answered, 'cause it was like, poof, and then no more.”

“No more?”

“No more e-mails, no more questions.”

“When did that happen?”

She thought about it. “March maybe.”

“You mentioned her e-mails. Do you still have any of them—the ones to you or to your paralegal?”

“I'll ask Ray tomorrow. He's our systems guy. If they're still in there, Ray will know how to find them.”

“If he finds any, could you ask him to print out a copy for me? I'm interested in the ones she sent to you, the ones she sent to your paralegal, and the replies.”

“For sure.”

“One last thing. Did Judith ever talk to you about Judge McCormick?”

Missy gave him a curious look. “Talk about him? In what way?”

“In any way—personally or professionally.”

She thought about it as she poked her straw around the bottom of her empty milk shake glass.

“Not exactly . . . well, there was this one time. It was several months later. I was up for some mini-trials that summer. We were riding down the courthouse elevator over the lunch break, just Judith and me. She asked what we thought about the mini-trial procedure. If we were satisfied with the outcomes.”

“How'd you answer?”

“I told her we were generally happy, which was pretty much true. We had issues, but I didn't want to cross any line with her.”

“What kind of issues?”

“That was what was so weird. Our main issue was the size of the damage awards. And that's the very next thing she asked me. I was, like, ‘Whoa.' I wasn't sure how to answer. I mean, she was his law clerk, and he's the one handing out the awards. I finally said that some of us thought some of the awards were on the low side, and she asked, ‘By how much?' I told her it varied case by case. Sometimes the numbers were real good, but other times they were, like, low. I was careful not to sound like I was whining.”

“How did she react?”

“She wanted specific examples. I was like so uncomfortable, but I finally mentioned a couple recent cases. Like we'd submitted this case the month before that was worth nine hundred and twenty thousand dollars and the judge awarded only seven seventy-five.”