Mr. Justice (4 page)

The FOX News reporter told the television audience, “This guy really knows his stuff. I should know. I went to law school myself.”

A new personal record: the reporter had waited a full ten minutes before mentioning that he, too, was a lawyer.

“But there are limits on how the law should evolve, at least judicially,” McDonald said. “When a judge reads entirely new values into the Constitution, values the framers and ratifiers did not put there, he deprives the people of their liberty. That liberty, which the Constitution clearly envisions, is the liberty of the people to set their own social agenda through the processes of democracy. In short, my philosophy of judging is neither liberal nor conservative. It’s simply a philosophy that gives the Constitution a full and fair interpretation but, where the Constitution is silent, leaves policy struggles to the Congress, the president, the legislatures and executives of the fifty states … and to the American people writ large.”

McDonald reached again for the glass of water that stood alone on the elegant table at which he was sitting. “I welcome this opportunity to come before the committee and answer whatever questions the members may have. I am more than willing to discuss with you my judicial philosophy and the approach I would take to deciding cases. I cannot, of course, commit myself as to how I might vote on any particular case, and I know you wouldn’t wish me to do that.”

The FOX News reporter said, “Senator Burton ‘wishes’ the nominee would discuss at least one ‘particular case’:
Tucker v. University of South Carolina
. That’s the case her daughter and son-in-law are appealing to the Supreme Court.”

It was the first insightful comment the TV pretty boy had made all morning.

CHAPTER 9

Billy Joe Collier left The Rebel Bar and Grill feeling two things: (1) drunk as a skunk and (2) disappointed about his meeting with Earl Smith. The first was no big deal. Collier spent most of his evenings on the south side of sobriety. Why shouldn’t he? His life was on the fast track to nowhere. Booze helped him to forget that fact. However, when Smith had suggested that they meet about the matter Senator Burton wanted them to address, Collier had assumed that meant he would get to take part in the killing. But Smith had said that he would handle the matter alone. “I think it’s best if the Realm keeps a low profile on this one,” Smith had said. “The heat hasn’t died down yet from the Harvey Gates thing.”

Harvey Gates had been the wildly popular black mayor of Charleston. Three years earlier he had provided Alexandra Burton with a stiff challenge for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Gates had called Burton’s dedication to civil rights enforcement into question and accused the five-term incumbent of being out of touch with the “new South Carolina.” Gates had been right, of course. Conveniently for Burton, though, the mayor had turned up dead in a fleabag motel in a seedy part of the city. The Klan had shot him at the senator’s request, and Billy Joe Collier had been the trigger man. Consequently, Earl Smith had suggested that Collier sit this one out.

Collier understood his place in the chain of command and was willing to do what his grand dragon had asked him to do; namely, nothing. But he wasn’t happy about it. The Gates murder had been almost three years ago, and the lynchings that had taken place since then—that of Lincoln Jefferson, for example—had been a group effort.

Billy Joe Collier liked to kill alone.

CHAPTER 10

The morning session had gone as expected: the senators who supported the president had asked nothing but softball questions, while those who opposed the president had come about as close to accusing Peter McDonald of wanting to rewrite the Constitution as good taste would permit. “Is it true, Professor McDonald, that you graduated at the top of your law school class?” Hamilton Holt, a pro-Jackson senator from New Hampshire, had asked. McDonald had answered, “Yes, Senator.” Meanwhile, Susan Armstrong, an anti-Jackson senator from Georgia, had wanted to know why the professor had written an article “calling for the end of the death penalty.”

McDonald had written nothing of the kind. He had simply concluded in an essay for the
Harvard Law Review
that the death penalty was sometimes misapplied by jurors who didn’t understand the law and that, as a consequence, judges needed to do a better job of explaining the law to them. But subtleties such as that were often lost in the hardball politics of the Supreme Court confirmation process. Just ask Robert Bork, the brilliant conservative jurist whose nomination went down in flames after liberal interest groups spent millions of dollars on television ads distorting his record.

Then came the confrontation for which everyone had been waiting: that between the nominee and Senator Gregory Carpenter.

“This should be good,” the FOX News reporter said to his TV audience.

Gregory Carpenter was the junior senator from South Carolina. He previously had served as Alexandra Burton’s top legislative aid, the post currently occupied by Jeffrey Oates. It was no secret in Washington power circles that Oates was jealous of Carpenter because Burton had recommended Carpenter rather than Oates when the South Carolina Republican Party had been looking for a candidate to challenge the state’s then-incumbent Democratic senator in the most recent election. Thanks both to Burton’s tireless efforts on Carpenter’s behalf and the increasingly conservative makeup of the South Carolina electorate, Carpenter had won by a landslide. As a result, he was now a member of the nation’s most exclusive club—the United States Senate—while Oates was forced to continue serving a woman he no longer respected.

Given the fact that Carpenter owed his Senate seat to Burton, he was more than willing to ask the question that Burton herself couldn’t ask—the question about affirmative action. “Good afternoon, Professor McDonald,” Carpenter said.

“Good afternoon, Senator.” McDonald squeezed his water glass.

“I very much benefited from listening to your answers to my colleagues’ questions about the death penalty, privacy, abortion, and so forth, but I’d like to take up another issue for a few moments if it’s all right with you.” Senator Carpenter flashed a tobacco-stained smile. Big Tobacco paid the bills in South Carolina politics. “It is, of course, the issue that almost everyone in this room has been waiting with bated breath to hear about: your views on affirmative action.”

McDonald said in a voice that for the first time sounded rehearsed, “As I mentioned in my opening statement, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on litigation that is currently pending before the Court.”

It was a predictable response from the nominee—no nominee in recent history had failed to respond in a similar fashion to thinly-veiled questions about how he or she might vote in a potentially landmark case wending its way to the high Court—and Carpenter replied in an equally predictable manner. He asked for McDonald’s “theory” for deciding such cases. “You are, of course, an academic, Professor. As your responses to my colleagues’ questions made plain, you have theories about most issues of constitutional law. I assume affirmative action is no different.”

McDonald said, “You are correct, Senator. I’ve got a theory on the subject.” The nominee fidgeted in his seat. “My theory is this: a tension underlies all facets of equal protection jurisprudence involving race. That tension is between government neutrality and anti-subordination. Is it better to have a flat per se rule of invalidity of all racial classifications? If you believe in the primacy of government neutrality on matters of race, this might be appealing. It’s what the first Justice John Marshall Harlan referred to as ‘color-blindness’ in his legendary dissent in the Court’s infamous 1896 segregation decision,
Plessy v. Ferguson
. But if you believe that anti-subordination is at the heart of the equal protection clause, you may be skeptical. Anti-subordination is a theme that Justice Harlan also embraced in his
Plessy
dissent when he insisted that the Constitution does not tolerate a ‘caste system.’ In short, Senator, whether a judge accepts or rejects affirmative action turns on which principle—color-blindness or anti-subordination—the judge emphasizes.” McDonald cleared a tickle from his throat and then said, “If the judge emphasizes color-blindness, then affirmative action would violate the equal protection clause. But if he emphasizes anti-subordination, affirmative action would likely pass constitutional muster.”

Senator Carpenter leaned forward in his chair and frowned. “
That’s
my question, though. Which do you emphasize?”

McDonald leaned back in his chair and smiled. It was the first time he had smiled—
truly
smiled—since Jenny and Megan had been killed. “And
that
I’m afraid I can’t answer, no matter how much Senator Burton might wish I could.”

CHAPTER 11

Billy Joe Collier pulled into the Exxon station down the street from The Rebel Bar and Grill. He needed to refill the tank on his aging Ford Monte Carlo. The car was a gas guzzler, but he liked how much power it had. He also liked how large the trunk was; there was room enough to fit two bodies inside. Usually, he killed only one person at a time. Tonight, he felt the urge to kill two.

Collier swiped his Visa card through the designated slot on the gas pump, removed the nozzle, punched the regular unleaded button with his index finger, and began to fill his tank. A Toyota Pathfinder pulled up to the pump at the far end of the service island. Out jumped the black man who had been in The Rebel with the white woman—the guy Collier had called a nigger and chased from the bar.

The black man’s eyes met Collier’s. Talk about shitty luck, he seemed to be saying to himself. He said to Collier, “We don’t want any trouble.”

The white woman turned to see what the commotion was about.

Collier said, “Me neither.” Of course he was lying. He lived for trouble.

The white woman said, “Let’s get out of here, hon. There’s a Chevron near my apartment.”

The black man said, “It’ll be OK.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Collier allowed the couple to pay for their gas and exit the station. He followed them to the woman’s apartment. It was in a nice part of town. That made him wonder why the two had shown up at The Rebel in the first place. He was glad they had, though.

He killed the black man first. He smashed the man’s head with a seven iron he had removed from the white woman’s golf bag. “Is your nigger’s dick as long as this golf club?” he asked the woman while he drove the club into her boyfriend’s skull. “Fore!”

The white woman simply sat and cried. She was too frightened to move or scream.

Collier stuffed the black man’s body into a laundry bag he found under the sink. He turned and faced the white woman. “It’s your turn, bitch. But first I’ll show you what a real man is like. Niggers ain’t nuthin’ but animals with big dicks.”

Collier ripped open the woman’s blouse. He removed her skirt. She was still too frightened to scream. “Don’t you know it’s against God’s will to fuck a nigger?”

Collier proceeded to rape the woman for forty-five minutes. When he was done, he smashed her skull with the same golf club he had used on the black man. “I see why golf is such a popular sport,” he said to the now empty room.

He felt good. He always felt good after a kill. He couldn’t wait to tell Earl Smith all about it.

CHAPTER 12

Earl Smith watched out of the corner of his eye while the young woman dressed. He was lying on the bed of a twenty-dollar-a-night motel room on the south side of Charleston draining a bottle of warm beer.

The young woman was in the bathroom struggling to pull on a pair of nylons in a space only a bit larger than a broom closet. Her raven hair and chocolate skin reflected off the mirror like freshly polished coins tossed into a fountain.

“Hurry up,” Smith said to her. “I’ve gotta get going.” There was a surprising amount of tenderness in his voice.

The young woman picked up on Smith’s welcoming tone. This wasn’t the first time they had slept together—not by a long shot. She said, “You gonna come by and see me later?” She smiled and reached for her bra. “I’ll treat you to a piece of strawberry pie.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Smith flipped on the Weather Channel to see what the temperature was in D.C. He would be heading there soon.

The young woman knew why they couldn’t be seen in public together: she was black. She liked to tease Smith about it, though. It was a running joke between them. “Don’t your Cat do it like you like? Don’t I always?”

Smith lifted the beer bottle in the young woman’s direction and smiled.

Cat Wilson waited tables at the Waffle House off of exit 39. She had worked there for about two years. It wasn’t a good job, but she needed something to support herself and her infant daughter. High school dropouts weren’t in much demand in the information age. Hard luck stories weren’t, either. She was lucky she was pretty. At least she got good tips.

Smith had met Cat—short for Catherine—late one night after the graveyard shift at the tire plant had gotten out. He had stopped in for a plate of eggs but ended up leaving with a lot more than that.

At first, Smith had approached his relationship with the young waitress as a rite of passage. Every klansman believed that blacks were animals, and every klansman was permitted one opportunity to experience for himself what sex with an animal was like. But for Smith, one opportunity had turned into two, and two had quickly become a weekly rendezvous at the Interstate 26 Motor Inn.

Smith had tried to rationalize his relationship with Cat as nothing more than a red-blooded male’s weakness for good sex—and Cat certainly was good in the sack—but he knew it was more than that. He actually cared about her. He actually loved her.

Of course, he knew he was a dead man if Billy Joe Collier and the rest of his brothers in the South Carolina Realm found out. The image of Lincoln Jefferson’s lifeless body dangling from a tree flashed through Earl Smith’s mind as he kissed Cat Wilson good-bye.