Nothing Lost (21 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

About Alice Todt, aka Carlyle: Her sense of propriety was absent, and I intuited but did not act upon the danger I suspected she posed. She was after all financing the defense, such as it was. I always had difficulty calling her Carlyle, and in the aftermath find it impossible to do so.

She and Alex Quintero did produce and publish their coffee-table book, and hired an uncredited ghost to write the text. They called the finished product
Fit for Kings,
from those signs on every road leading into town: REGENT—A PLACE FIT FOR KINGS—POP. 3,679. For a long time I would not open the book. Not to read it, however, was like not opening a long-locked closet because of what one feared might be found behind the door, and so I finally picked it up as I was trying to assemble this record. The book was everything I expected it would be—mendacious, meretricious, and self-servingly dishonest or evasive about the events in which Alice was a catalyst, shot against the seamier backdrops of Loomis County, not the falls or the epic, undulating prairie. Theirs was a mean, marginal Regent of trailer parks and pit-bull breeders, of karaoke bars and the Burlington Northern switching yard, of a cemetery overgrown with weeds and a dump where old tires burned around the clock. It was a place that seemed entirely populated by people wearing jeans that rode lower than the anal crack and soiled T-shirts that did not cover the belly button; by men and women with 56-inch waists, the product of bad weather, too little exercise, too much television, and too much sugar-saturated junk food; by women with black eyes and men with missing teeth and swastika tattoos.

In the book, I found things I had chosen to forget, observations I had opted not to confront, not least about the forbidden subject of class. I remember the predatory bookers for the daytime tabloid talk shows, cruising Loomis County in stretch limos looking for anyone who had known Bryant Gover or Duane Lajoie, or better yet had fucked or sucked one or both. The talent pimps offered these gullible souls, dressed like streetwalkers, craving this last best chance for a way out of Regent, a ride to Kiowa and first-class plane fare to Chicago or New York, a night in a big city, bright lights hotel, a prix-fixe steak-house dinner, drinks not included, and an economy ticket home. Those who signed up did not understand that to the bookers they were only human debris allowing their producers to fill another mud-wrestling half hour purporting to show the underprivileged at play. When the red light on the camera dimmed, they would return to the anonymity of the vegetable counter at the Food Treasure, or the perils of single motherhood, or the weekly visit from the domestic-abuse counselor, with a memento matchbook from the Howard Johnson Motor Inn to show for their visit to the high life, a swizzle stick from Sullivan's on Broadway, and an eight-by-ten glossy signed by Montel or Jerry Springer.

Fat blustery Merle Orvis with her teardrop tattoo was on the jacket of
Fit for Kings,
smoking a cigarette and nursing Boy, his tiny little pecker nearly erect as he stood tippy-toed on a wood stump and hung like a monkey to his mother's pendulous breast. It was celebrity of a sort, or at least Merle Orvis chose to think so. She called Alice Todt Carlyle, or Carl, sometimes Carly, and said that Carly was her best friend and asked Carly to be Boy's godmother, although she did not know exactly what a godmother's duties were, except to give presents, you know, like on birthdays. Carly said she would check with her attorneys and her financial advisors, and if there were no contractual obstacles, she would consider the request; Alex are you getting this? Alex Quintero captured it all, roll after roll. The book was a slippery New York item, a Christmas present artifact for decorated living rooms, the artist dropping in on Midlandia, and it made me fiercely protective, outsider though I was myself, of the place I called home.

For my own peace of mind, I would like to think I would have felt the same way even had the casualties not been so prohibitive.

ANGKOR WAT

20:54.16.
She opened her purse and scooped out three coins. The camera zoomed close and paused on the bag. He made out the
F
clasp.
F
for Fendi, he supposed.

She dug in the purse. No more coins except the three she had in her hand. She removed the cigarettes and snapped the bag shut.

Hold on the cigarettes, please.

Come in tight, please.

Gauloises. French and unfiltered.

Why not.

She slipped the cigarettes into a blazer pocket and then pumped the three quarters into a twenty-five-cent slot. The third quarter brought a return of six more.

She gathered the coins and quickly dropped three into one slot and three more into the adjoining machine. This time no return from either slot.

A delicate Asian cocktail waitress materialized at her side, holding a bamboo drinks tray. The woman in the dark blazer and the white blouse and the dark pleated trousers shook her head no. No complimentary soft drink, no beverage at all. The Asian waitress was wearing a white bustier and a long skirt that clung to her legs.

The waitress looks like Princess Tuptim, I said to the chief of security.

Who's Princess Tuptim? the chief of security said.

From
The King and I
.

That's the general idea, the chief of security said.

Of course. The dealers and croupiers were dressed in pantaloons and silk shirts, their hair shorn to the skull, like King Mongkut. Actually more like Yul Brynner. When Rex Harrison played King Mongkut, he had a full head of hair. Midgets in exotic dress scurried around the casino floor. The keno runners were all Asian, sloe-eyed, the brochure said, the waiters and the bell-mendressed in the orange robes of Buddhist monks. The sound system played “Shall We Dance?” and “Getting to Know You.”

It was definitely erotic.

Like a very expensive whorehouse.

Or a male brothel.

Everything is authentic, the promotional video in each room said. Down to the smallest detail. Verified by a panel of world-renowned Asian scholars. Silk spun from privately owned silkworm ranches.

Except that Angkor Wat is in Cambodia, and Mongkut ruled Siam. There was no reason to explain this to the chief of security. One does not argue with a world-renowned panel of Asian scholars.

It's a long way from Jim Hogg County, I said to the chief of security.

Say again? the chief of security said.

Just thinking out loud, I said.

She was at the front door now. She seemed to appear and disappear like Zelig. A male dwarf in silks from the privately owned silkworm ranches o fered her a scented towel.

We're going to lose her for a moment, the chief of security said. Until she gets to the pedestrian bridge.

She seemed to be laughing.

I'd like to send her home, the chief of security said.

CHAPTER ONE

Raw interviews conducted by print and electronic journalists with Alice Faith Todt, aka Carlyle, after the events herein described played out to their logical, illogical, and in some instances unexpected conclusions. They were edited, elided, and rearranged into a seamless monologue. The questions of the various interlocutors have been excised in the interest of narrative clarity. Every word, however, is hers, picked up from audio or video recording devices obtained or made available to the narrator.

For fuck's sake, Alicia, everyone blames me for what happened, like it was my fault, and it wasn't. No, no, no fucking way was it my fault, I was not responsible. You want to start blaming, start with my agent, my former agent, I'm going to own her fucking business by the time I get through with her, I'll even take her plane, it's her husband's plane, a G-4, you mark my words, I'll get that, too. The way she foisted that lawyer off on me, when all I was trying to do was keep my brother Duane out of the hot seat, I never even knew they ever called it that. The hot seat. It's cute in a way. I bet you could make a lot of money out of it, you know, a toy like a whoopee pillow, instead it gives you a little shock instead of blowing a fart. At least that's what Alex said. Alex's got a good head for business. It was his idea for me to go after Three V, he'll want a piece of it, of course, Alex wants a piece of everything, it's from growing up in Washington Heights, he thinks he's the only person in America that grew up poor. I've seen that Washington Heights of his on the way to Teterboro. I don't fly commercial anymore, it's too much of a hassle, people want my autograph and ask me questions about Jacquot and Yo! Carlyle, I don't have time for all that shit. I always ask the driver to slow down, the windows in the limo are smoked, but you can see out and it's not so bad, Washington Heights, try a mobile home in Cap City, me on the couch, and my mom grinding away in the sleeping area, it was from my mom I learned you're supposed to go “Oooo” and “Ahhhh,” like it's some kind of big deal. Everyone thinks I was getting off with Alex, but you know, we never did it. Except for that time at the Gritti, we were there for a Jacquot shoot, I hate Venice, all that water, it makes me sea-sick, it was only twice anyway, I think a model of my stature should stay away from photographers, they're just people who work for you. Except for Irving what's-his-name, shoots the flowers and fruit and shit. Anyway, he's been married twice, Alex, first to someone from the hood on West 153rd, the second time to that Jap model, maybe she's Chinese or something like that. His first wife's married to a dentist in Riverdale now, and the second wife, the slope, she's in rehab, Hazelden this time, she's tried them all, Silver Hill, where Billy Joel went, Promises in Malibu, Charlie Sheen's home away from home, Alex always picks up the tab for her, he should tell her to take a hike back to Tokyo, but he never will.

So what I mean is, I got my own troubles, without taking the blame for those four people dying. I mean, who shows up in Regent but my mother. She's got a little red dot in the middle of her forehead, like they wear in India and shit, she'd told me she wasn't coming to the trial, it was too painful, they were going to try and say her baby Duane did those awful things, and I know my baby Duane didn't do them, and she puts her two hands together like she's praying, and she says, Call me Shehnaz. In a pig's ass I'll call her Shehnaz. Alex says I should call her Dot for that little red dot. It was the Roshi, she said, who'd sent her to Regent. Roshi Gurjanwaia, or however the fuck you pronounce it. She said she was so happy at Amritsar University, remaking her life according to the Roshi's five principles, and I say, What principles are they? And she says the Roshi's five precepts for living are to abstain from killing, stealing, lying, and intoxicants. And I say to her, That's four, what's the fifth? And she says to abstain from all sexual activity, and I said to her, You got to be fucking kidding, and she says to me, bowing and pressing her hands together and closing her eyes, like she's praying and shit, I am here on a mission from the Roshi, and the Roshi asks if you would make a small pledge to Amritsar University, and I said, What kind of pledge, and she said, A small fraction, and I said a small fraction of what, and she says, Life has been good to you. Then I get it, and I said, It hasn't been all that good, and no matter how good it is, I'm not dumb enough to get hustled by some Roshi with his mitts out, thinking I'm going to shake the money tree in his direction. You are an ungrateful child, she said, and I said, You better believe it, and while you're at it, you can take you and your red dot back to Amritsar and abstain from balling.

Anyway, so I get in to see Duane after my mom leaves. I'm feeling kind of bad we had this fight and stuff, so I say I'll go see Duane, I'll leave out the Shehnaz part. My fucking lawyer doesn't want me to go, and I say to her, Listen, you're here on my tab, don't you forget it. I know all about prisons, I was at Riker's Island, you know, doing that Prada shoot that all the assholes got so pissed off about, prison's not so bad, they had some good-looking dudes at the Prada shoot, you know black guys and Spanish guys, Alex could speak Spanish to them,
Quien sabe
and stuff like that. There was this guy at Riker's, Alex knew his brother, him and the brother had gone to school, he'd been shot or something, by the cops or something, or another dealer, they thought Alex was great, these guys. Anyway, Duane comes in, and I say, Hi, Duane, but shit, I thought he'd look like those guys at the Riker's shoot, but he's like he crawled out from under a rock, he's got this breath, I nearly fainted. I had some Binaca, and I tried to give him the Binaca, and this guard takes it away from me. You can't pass contraband to the prisoner, he says, and I say it's not contraband, it's fucking Binaca, and he says, He'll drink it. I felt so sorry for him, and he tells me his story, it's the other dude that did it, what's-his-name, Gover, well, you know what happened, everyone knows it, how the fuck was I supposed to know. No one else did either.

That first day in court, everyone was ganging up on me, right from the start. I'm waving at Duane, you know, during jury selection, and I say, Hi, Duane, and he's giving me an over-the-shoulder wave, he's got these chains and shit around his ankles and he can't turn around, and Alex has this little camera, it's about the size of a goober, and he's snapping away, great pictures, you've seen them, when this fat guy in a uniform, he's some kind of bailiff or shit, whatever the fuck a bailiff is, he says I can't wave at the prisoner. And I say that's my brother, and he says, real smart, Well, that's your tough luck, isn't it. Sweetie? Fuck him, I bet he doesn't make a hundred thousand dollars a year even. Then that midget judge, she wouldn't let me use my beeper in the courtroom, it rings with the first few beats of the Jacquot commercial, you know da, da, da-da-da, it's really cute, Alex's Jacquot video won the Eddie Award, and when I accepted it with him, the strap on my dress broke, the Jean-Paul Gaultier print, and I showed a little tit on the tube, but it was only cable, so it didn't matter that much. Anyway, the beeper goes off that first day, I want to keep in touch, keep my dates straight, I got Milan coming up, and I want to do Giorgio and Donatella, but they overlap you know, Giorgio wants my hair one way, Donatella wants it another, we have to work that out, and this judge, she's got a mustache, she goes nuts, she asks whose beeper it is, and I'm not going to tell her, no way. So she closes the courtroom, she won't let anyone out, and there's this stink of sweat and shit, everyone in the courtroom could use a shot of Jacquot Skin Pearls, you ask me, and she has this spade sheriff and his fucking deputies pat everyone down, like it's some kind of big criminal deal your beeper going off.

So that's how I met Jocko. He's one of the deputies working the courtroom, and he comes up to me, he's about the size of the
Intrepid,
you know that aircraft carrier on the West Side Highway, I did a shoot there once, some pansy French photographer, not Alex, I got him fired, this frog, he thought out of focus was arty, and I said to him, Get lost, go back to France, where you from Nancy, that's a town in France, I bet you didn't know that. Anyway, Jocko brings me outside in the corridor, and he says to me, Put your arms over your head and let me pat you down, a real Mr. Smooth act, and I say, No fucking way are you going to touch me. And he says, Well, give me the beeper then, and I say, How do you know it was my beeper, and he says, Come on, everybody in the courtroom knows, the people around you were pointing at you, just go up and tell the judge you thought it was turned off, fuck her over a little bit, Your Honor this, Your Honor that, my brother's on trial for his life, I am so upset, she'll give you a warning, she'll take the beeper, make it the property of the court, don't worry, I'll get it back for you, she'll never even know it's gone. So to make a long story short, Brutus, that big black sheriff, he makes Jocko my bodyguard, it's part of the community service he was doing, like there was so many people around when I was shooting, and Jocko, he was like a one-man crowd control, no one's going to fucking mess with him, and those pals of his, Tater and Bobo and the rest, and I get to ride around in his air-conditioned Benz, he had this red light he puts on the roof, he even had a siren in it, he comes to a light or a stop sign, forget it, the siren is blaring, the red light is going round and round, he is the law. Jocko. His name sounds exactly like my cosmetics line, Jocko, Jacquot, it's so cute, I thought it was, like, fate. Some fucking fate.

CHAPTER TWO

MAX

I talked earlier about the rich seam of chance that governs events.

The coinage of coincidence.

Or is it a skein? Or does it matter what you call it?

So much happened that first day in the Loomis County Courthouse, so much that seemed at the time no more than the commonplace maneuverings of the judicial system. Whatever else one calls coincidence, call it implacable.

Begin with Harvey Niland. Gray, ectoplasmic, failed Harvey Niland.

Harvey Niland was originally meant to be J.J.'s number two. He was safe, he would not open his mouth, he knew the case law, he would take care of the errands and the menial assignments without obvious complaint, and most importantly he would not pull focus away from J.J. But then, mirabile dictu, the Committee on Judicial Appointments, after a decade of waffling and passing him over, graded Harvey as “very qualified” for the bench (“very qualified” means that anything above traffic court is a stretch for the nominee), and the judgeship that Harvey so devoutly desired was at last his. I would guess that the committee took his age into consideration—Harvey was within three years of mandatory retirement—and could view his accession as a kind of tombstone promotion to a position where he could do no real harm.

This is where it began to get complicated. J.J. wanted to pick a younger assistant prosecutor from the Homicide Bureau to be his backup, but Gerry Wormwold insisted he use Patsy Feiffer; she had worked with Maurice Dodd on the case before he died, she was familiar with the details, and she had been present when Maurice debriefed Bryant Gover. All sound arguments. The only case J.J. could make was that Patsy was both bone-stupid and legally inert. It was a case, however, he declined to make. He knew the Worm could not be budged, and he knew why. It was Poppy. Poppy McClure had let it be known that whenever the press of business in Washington allowed her to do so, she would attend the trial. Poppy's capacity for agitation could not be underestimated. She had not yet declared if she would challenge the A.G. in the Republican gubernatorial primary, but she knew her presence in Regent would make him jumpy. Hence the Worm's intransigence about Patsy Feiffer. He wanted someone in Regent who would report to him on every detail of what happened in and out of the courtroom, and Patsy was too much a creature of ambition, however limited her talents, not to provide this service.

Duane Lajoie arrived from Cap City shortly after sunup, a ninety-minute trip in a high-security unmarked police van, wearing leg irons and handcuffs and guarded by two marshals. I had seen him for a moment in the holding cell adjacent to the courtroom, and ignored his imprecations about my Jew faggotry while Brutus Mayes oversaw the exchange of the orange jumpsuit Duane wore at the Correction Center for a white shirt, khaki pants, and sandals without socks. Every evening during the trial, he would change back into his jumpsuit and his leg irons and be returned to Capital City. Bryant Gover, when he was called to testify, would travel in a second van from Durango Avenue. They would occupy cells on different floors of the courthouse, and when Gover took the stand, Duane Lajoie would be shackled in his chair and guarded by two deputy sheriffs so that he could not try to wreak physical vengeance on the witness. These security arrangements had been negotiated by Maurice Dodd and Duane's previous attorney and there was nothing Teresa or I could do to change them.

The press was everywhere; satellite trucks had taken every available parking space around the courthouse. There were rumors that Jamaal Jefferson was on his way, and a bailiff told me he had heard that Jack Nicholson was in town to get the feel of the courtroom. Lorna Dun and Alicia Barbara were making do with Eugene Hicks and Marjorie Hudnut, in her Sunday best, until Jamaal and Jack and Carlyle and Poppy showed up. On the courthouse lawn, special correspondents once more recounted the hideous scene off County Road 21, milking every shocking detail with all the attendant pieties on how the murder of Edgar Parlance had forced a reconsideration of the unresolved role played by race in the heartland. I had taken samplings on the black-and-white TV set in the tiny office Teresa and I had been assigned in the courthouse basement. In the absence of real news, everything was fodder: the crop-management and weed-control pamphlets in the wire racks on the ground floor of the courthouse, the plaque honoring Loomis County's war dead—sixty from World War II, five each from Korea and Vietnam, the promotional brochure published by the Regent Economic Board that said, “The crime rate is low, the standard of living high.” Arched eyebrow and sign-off: From the Loomis County Courthouse in Regent, this is Brent Baker, Acme 1, all news, all day, every day.

“Hello, Max,” J.J. McClure said when I walked into the courtroom and placed a legal pad and three pencils at my place at the defense table. Some lawyers are neat, others are always scurrying through documents and transcripts, looking busy. I was one of the neat ones. I thought the busy bees tended to distract the jury when they should be concentrating on the witness being examined. J.J. smiled, the kind of smile that did not affect the laugh lines, but he did not offer his hand. “Long time.”

“I've been around.”

“So I've heard.”

I looked at the
Courthouse Square
cameras set up at either end of the jury box. Technicians with earphones linking them to a mobile unit outside were trying to synchronize their movements. “Is Poppy going to be here?”

“You know Poppy. Last in, first out.” The edge in his voice was almost but not quite imperceptible.

As if via a conjuror's trick, Patsy Feiffer suddenly materialized at J.J.'s side, bustling with efficiency, her dusty rose courtroom suit perfectly complemented by a cream-colored blouse. Ostentatiously not acknowledging my presence, she began to ask J.J. a question about the demographic analysis of the jury pool.

“You used to pick the first twelve that came out of the box, J.J.,” I said. “Having a confidence problem?”

J.J. hesitated for a moment, then said, “You know my number two, Patsy Feiffer, Patsy worked with your friend Maurice.”

Patsy Feiffer stared at me as if I were unclean, which I suppose by her lights I was. I had been fired by the A.G. and I was a homosexual. It was the second time that morning that what some would call my sexual irregularity had been questioned, this time implicitly.

“I've seen you around the courthouse in Cap City. Always on the run. I'm told you're J.J.'s eyes and ears.” After a moment I added, “Or someone's.”

Her expression did not change. “J.J., Judge Tracy's here, she's going to want to meet counsel in chambers before court opens.”

J.J. nodded, and when he seemed disinclined to respond further, Patsy Feiffer disappeared as if the conjuror had waved his wand a second time.

“That wasn't necessary, Max,” J.J. said.

“It was fun though, wasn't it?”

“Patsy forgets everything except a grudge.”

“Forewarned.”

“Where's your boss?”

He was trying to see if he could rankle me, but Teresa
was
my boss, and I had signed on knowing she would be. “Taking care of some business.”

In fact, I did not know where she was. We had checked in to the Motel DeLuxor the day before, and I could see the look of distaste as she surveyed the gloomy rooms that would be our headquarters for the duration of the trial. I found the Motel DeLuxor invigorating, or to be more accurate, I found the prospect of what I hoped might be a vacation from Stanley invigorating. The grudging largesse of Alice Todt had allowed us to take over more rooms than we had originally planned. We had computers with passwords (“Northampton” was hers, “Lemberg” was mine, for the Galician railhead where the Kleinbaums began to evolve into Klein and then Cline), and e-mail and a fax and a printer and a shredder, all those things that in my pre-Teresa life as a defense attorney I found at Kinko's. We had a secretary to answer the telephones we had installed independent of the motel switchboard (the calls to my office in Cap City were referred to the DeLuxor), an answering machine, a legal typist on call, and a retired deputy sheriff from Albion County to serve both as part-time driver and nighttime security. It was not that our files were at risk, but with the interest in the case high, Teresa thought it best to have a line of defense against the curious, or the malicious. That morning, she had woken me at six and said she was going jogging, and would meet me at the courthouse. I think she only wanted to be alone, to get her thoughts in order, like an officer in the trenches before he led his troops over the top in a hopeless and unwinnable battle.

“Tracy hates tardy lawyers.”

“I do remember that, J.J.”

Ellen Tracy. Another knot in the skein.

She had not become a lawyer until she was forty, and she ran a tight no-nonsense courtroom. Alice Todt was right. She did have a mustache. She was tiny and she wore huge white square glasses that drew attention to the shadow of hair clearly visible on her upper lip. She had been brought up poor in a hamlet called Dead Center, because it was in fact the dead center of the state of South Midland. When she was sixteen, she married a hitchhiker passing through Dead Center, and forty-three years later, they were still together, the former hitchhiker now a mid-level construction manager in the state Department of Roads. They had a son and a daughter, both now over forty, and when the children married, Ellen Tracy, who had never graduated from high school, took a GED and applied to SMU Law School, where she finished in the top ten percent of her class. For seven years, she was a prosecutor in Kiowa County, then spent the three years before her appointment to the bench in the Kiowa public defender's office. She had seen everything, was not swayed by sentiment, and with her abundance of hard-earned common sense easily climbed the judicial ladder to senior-judge status. She ruled, she moved to the next order of business, always decisively, never ratcheted by doubt. Any decision was better than indecision. She did not tolerate delay, showboating, or imprecision in examination; a contempt citation was something she would promise once, and order without hesitation a second time. When she was assigned the Parlance trials, she immediately ruled that the difficulty in finding an impartial jury in a jurisdiction as small as Loomis County, where everyone seemed to know or be related to everyone else, mandated that the jurors and their alternates be selected from the larger pool available in Kiowa County. A panel of potential jurors would be bused to Regent, and those finally chosen would not be sequestered until the start of deliberations, although, Judge Tracy suggested, people used to the bright lights of Kiowa might consider having the freedom of Regent a form of sequestration.

For Ellen Tracy, that passed as humor.

“You're late, counsel,” Ellen Tracy said when Teresa knocked on her door and entered the judge's chambers. Teresa was carrying her briefcase and a large orange-and-white shopping bag with cord handles. A not auspicious start.

“I apologize, Your Honor. There was a demonstration outside the . . .”

Ellen Tracy interrupted. “Then you should have made allowances for it, Miss Kean. This is not New York, it's not Washington, where I think you are used to practicing. Here you run on my schedule, and my schedule is meeting in chambers if necessary at eight-thirty, court opens at nine, it ends at four.” She ran the words on together, one long sentence without pausing for punctuation. Stop. Breathe. And then the example she expected the attorneys to follow, always somewhat self-serving. “I got here at six-thirty.” Having driven herself down from Kiowa, listening to a Great Book on tape. I don't think Tracy had actually read a book in forty years, but she was famous throughout the legal community for having listened to most of the prominent works of modern literature on the high-end audio system in her Land Rover as she dashed around to the various state circuit courts, and she was not above sneaking in a quote or two without attribution if she thought it appropriate to a situation at hand. Happy families are all alike, she might say without a trace of irony, or Isn't it pretty to think so, and only the better-read members of the state bar would know that the obiter dictum was a literary reference. Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled, she once said to a callow young attorney who was appearing against me, and it was meant as a rebuke as much to me as it was to him. I knew she had not thought that up herself, and I finally found the remark in a book of quotations. It would have been madness to suggest to her that I was not aware of her affinity for Samuel Johnson; that I found it was victory enough.

Teresa was still in her sights, a target of opportunity. She pointed to the shopping bag at Teresa's feet. “Are you planning a shopping expedition at the end of the court day, Miss Kean? Are you going to take her to the mall, Mr. Cline?”

“I'm not sure there is a mall in Regent, Your Honor.”

“Don't get smart with me, Mr. Cline.”

“I beg the judge's pardon.”

A smirk creased Patsy Feiffer's lips. Tracy was on her in a flash, fresh prey. “You, what's your name?”

“Patsy Feiffer, Your Honor.” Her voice was tremulous. “Appearing with . . .”

Judge Tracy cut her off. “I know who you're appearing with. Your given name is actually Patsy?” Incredulity was just another arrow in Tracy's quiver. “Your parents had the effrontery to christen you Patsy? Patsy must have stuck in the minister's throat.”

“My given name is Patience, Your Honor.”

Judge Tracy considered the name. “Patience.” Her head rocked back and forth. “Well, Miss Feiffer, you smirk in my courtroom and I will lose whatever patience I have allotted to give you, and that is not much.”

J.J. tented his fingers and stared at Judge Tracy expressionlessly. Even had he been so inclined, which I doubt, he would not have come to Patsy Feiffer's defense. This was a rite of fire, he had seen it before, as had I, it was something to survive. Like a lioness marking her territory, Tracy was staking out the perimeters of her authority, and woe unto anyone who violated her space.