The Hanging Judge (20 page)

“So,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

“Well, Lucas, right now I’m going to change this skunky diaper.”

Grace was gurgling sleepily as Sandra wiped her bottom. It was not a yucky one. She glanced back over her shoulder at her brother, trying to size him up and get some idea of why he was there. Their parents had headed off to bed an hour ago.

Yes, he looked real fine. His law firm’s health club membership was keeping him trim. He was certainly careful about what he ate, trying to avoid their father’s chronic high blood pressure. A South Beach type. And she’d noticed a squash racquet on the backseat of his immaculate car.

“Can I come in?” He nodded at the floor. Growing up, they’d had rules about each other’s rooms, laid down mostly by Lucas.

“I don’t know. Wait a minute.” Taped at the corners, Grace’s used Luv made a warm, grapefruit-size package.

“Catch.” She tossed him the stinky wad, hoping he might dodge out of the way, but he caught the little bundle easily in one hand.

“Nice throw.” He held the balled-up diaper at arm’s length, grimacing. “What am I supposed to do with it now?”

“Stick it in your briefcase.”

“Right.”

“Blue bucket in the bathroom. Next to the clothes hamper.”

Sandra watched her brother disappear down the hall, a highly intelligent, well-connected man, with his gold wire rims and neatly trimmed mustache. You’d hire him in a minute and figure he was doing you a favor at $550 an hour. She loved him, but, God, what a pain he was.

Having disposed of the diaper, he returned to the doorway. Grace was already falling asleep, pudgy arms gone limp, as Sandra snapped up the back of her jammies. It was after eleven; she’d be hungry again by four.

Sandra waved Lucas toward the far end of the long room, where a window seat and a frayed easy chair with a half squashed footstool made a den she’d once named Homework Hollow.

By the time they got settled—Lucas on the window seat, sitting upright with his legs crossed and his fingers laced over his knee, and Sandra sunk into the chair—Grace was already purring like a distant Evinrude.

“So,” Lucas said awkwardly, “how’s my baby sister getting on?”

Sandra breathed deeply and closed her eyes. “I’m pretty tired, Lucas.”

“Right,” Lucas said. “I guess you’ll have your jury one of these days. What are you planning to do?”

“What do you mean ‘what am I planning to do?’ ” She kept her eyes closed, staying calm.

“Are you going to be testifying?”

“I guess so. Moon’s lawyer thinks I should.”

“Redpath.” He paused. “I figured.” He uncrossed his legs and braced his hands on the window seat. “About Moon being with you when it happened?”

“Correct.”

The silence that followed her answer drew itself out so long that Sandra opened her eyes and was annoyed to catch Lucas with that maddening look of brotherly love he got, as though she were a pigeon with a broken wing.

“What?”

“You need to be really careful this time, Sandy.” He slumped back against the window frame. “There’s a problem here, and I’m trying to think of a way to talk about it without having you tell me to go eat shit or something.”

“Just say what you’re worried about, Lucas. I promise not to yell.” Sandra stretched out her leg and poked her brother’s knee with her toe. “You’re still my big brother, no matter how trashy you act.”

But Lucas drew out the infuriating look, until she glared back at him and made a face. He looked away and pinched his lower lip.

“Okay. Here’s how it is. There’s this woman, this person I know. A sort of friend, never mind who, at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He sighed and shook his head. “Anyway. Here’s what she says. The whole office is sure you’re going to lie, to protect Moon.”

“Oh great.” Sandra flopped back into the chair. “Big surprise. Should I tell you how much I wish your sort-of-friend at the U.S. Attorney’s Office would go to hell? And all her sort-of-friends with her?”

“I’m not saying you’re going to lie, Sandy, but that’s what they think. And they also think they can prove you’re lying, somehow. And if you do lie, Sandy, and they catch you, this person I know says Hogan is definitely planning to come down on you for perjury. They already have an intern doing the research.”

“Does that worry you, Lucas, having a perjurer for a sister? A criminal?”

“Right. Fuck you, too.”

“Well, then what are you telling me this for? What’s your point?”

He stood up abruptly and bent toward her. His wire rims caught the light and gave him, fleetingly, the face of a blank-orbed alien.

“Because I’m not sure you wouldn’t lie, Sandy. In fact, I’m pretty sure you would.”

“Hush, hush, hush.” She gestured toward the crib. “Sit down, please.”

But Lucas only leaned back against the wall, facing her with his arms folded. His voice dropped to a whisper but hissed out of him with an even greater intensity.

“I bet you would lie. I might lie myself in your shoes. And if you do lie, and that troglodyte Hogan indicts you for it—which I don’t doubt for one minute he will do, Sandy, I know his type, I have to deal with his kind of puffed-up white boy every single day—what’s going to happen to that little girl of yours over there?” He flapped his arm toward the crib.

Sandra just looked at him.

“You think Mom and Dad will take care of her while you do two or three years in Danbury? With Dad’s heart?” He tapped his chest and looked down at her fiercely. “You want Mom to quit her job? Is that the plan? Because you know that’s what she’ll do, and you know what she went through to get where she is. Think about it, and ask yourself whether it’s worth it, that’s all. You’re my sister and I love you, Sandy, but do us all a favor this time, will you? For once in your life, just try taking a damn look before you leap.”

24

M
oon Hudson was sitting at the end of a table in the C-pod rec area trying to read a copy of a memorandum Redpath had sent him. The original was going to their judge, to try to convince him to throw out the pot and coke the Holyoke cops had turned up at his apartment.

It was hard to concentrate. Two strangers had drifted in and were playing Ping-Pong a few feet away, keeping an eye on him in a way he didn’t like. Then, and much worse, three more inmates came through the doorway and headed toward him. These men were well known to him—Walnut Street Posse thugs from South Holyoke, all doing short bids for crack. He immediately recognized one of them as a cousin of Breeze, the man he’d killed. Moon set his papers to one side, sat up straighter, and placed his hands on the table. Stay calm.

He shifted his eyes toward the corrections officer up in his pod. He’d get on his radio first, and then it would be over.

“Don’t be looking up there, bro,” the biggest one of the trio said. “Old Teeters ain’t going to get his hands dirty saving your ass.” He looked over his shoulder at the two men behind him. “ ’Sides, we’re just talking.”

One of the men snickered, showing a gold front tooth. “That’s it, man. For now.” Breeze’s cousin stood at the back. His face, turned down at Moon, was a mask of hatred.

“You ever seen this boy?” The big one slapped a color photo down on the table, a fresh-faced black kid, grinning in his high-school graduation getup, purple-and-gold gown, cap, and mortar. Sweet Breeze, with all his cares behind him.

There was a long silence, and finally Breeze’s cousin leaned forward and said, “I think he wants us to think he don’t know him.” He reached in, picked up the three-by-five and put it in his pocket. “That’s my cousin, little Henry. Knucklehead liked to call himself Breeze. I promised his momma I’d look out for him, and I didn’t do my job and now he’s … Don’t you know him? We all thought you did.”

The one with the gold tooth said, “Oh, he knew him. Put Peach and that white nurse down, too. That’s three for him. Nigger’s bad news.”

“At least three,” Breeze’s cousin said. “Isn’t that right, bro? Hey, you awake?”

Moon, holding himself very still, said. “I’m awake.”

Moon’s half-brother, Monroe, had been gang-raped in prison, then strangled with a coat hanger. He never got to see his twin boys.

The door at the end of the hall banged open, and a large, heavily muscled man strode in. It was Rashid, Satan’s lieutenant, whom Moon had met during the fracas with Pinball. Rashid waved up to the corrections officer, smiled, and pointed to where Moon sat with the three men bending over him. Breeze’s cousin glanced back at Rashid and spoke quickly, pointing down at Moon. “We pick the time and place, motherfucker. You be done before you see it coming.”

“Everybody playin’ nice here?” Rashid said, elbowing in and sitting down across from Moon.

“Just talkin’,” one of the men muttered.

“Talkin’s good.” Rashid smiled and looked around. “Everybody enjoys that.”

The three men turned with blank faces and stalked off. The two Ping-Pong players put down their paddles and followed without saying a word.

“Hey, man,” Rashid called after them. “Who won?”

As they disappeared, Rashid folded his hands and looked down as though he were giving thanks before a meal. After a while he peeped up, looking at Moon without lifting his head or unclasping his hands. He spoke softly. “Seems to me, friend, it’s time to choose up.” He cleared his throat. “We’re the good guys. Those were the bad guys. Giving you a howdy-doody. Next time … I don’t know.” He opened his hands and held them out to Moon. “Satan and me’d sure like to know what happened with Peach and that nurse.”

The room had gone silent, just the sound of Moon taking deep breaths through his nose. He pressed his lips together and stared with narrowed eyes into the shadowy hallway where the five men had left. Then he whispered to Rashid, very low. “Never shot fully automatic before.” He looked down at the floor. “Fucking gun jumping all over the place. Blew out the back window.” He looked up at Rashid, his face full of disgust. “You got the whole story, okay? You got my stones. Now get my back.”

25

A
lex Torricelli’s marriage was still on the rocks. One Friday, after a short, frosty explanation, Janice took the baby and drove off to her parents’ house in Billerica again. She had some things to think about, she said. She’d be back Sunday night.

Janice’s departure stung, which was probably what she’d intended. Alex’s schedule as a patrolman had him working four days on and two days off, and this particular Saturday had rotated around as one of his free weekend days. They could have lined up a sitter and maybe hit a movie. It was depressing as hell to be all alone like this. Tony was bugging him for a boys-only lunch, but Alex was not that desperate yet.

After sleeping late and mooching around the house all morning, Alex decided to kill some time pretending to be a detective. His duties in the uniformed division did not generally include investigative work, but a crisis was brewing, and it looked like somebody had to do something. The trial of Clarence Hudson, according to Lydia, was threatening to bust through the guardrails and over a cliff. She hated the crop of jurors they were getting, and Deadly Delores, it turned out, had screwed up the search warrant paperwork. Norcross might use this as an excuse to keep all the drugs they had found during the search of Hudson’s apartment out of the trial. On top of this, although Alex had had no contact with Pepe—other than punching him in the face a few times at their first meeting—the word was the kid had a snootful of attitude, a lousy memory, and a different story for every day of the week. Their case against Hudson had holes big enough for any defense lawyer to drive his powder-blue Lincoln through.

Alex threw a couple of his dad’s old extra-wide ties onto the passenger seat of his car and began retracing the route he’d been following the day of the shootings.

He recalled a tiny store, just a hole in the wall fronting on the alley where he saw the passenger jump out of the Nissan that morning. The shop, called Pins and Needles, apparently belonged to a tailor. Its name, and the fact that ties hung in the window, were about all Alex could remember from his glance in that direction on the fatal morning.

On the door of the shop, a handwritten card, yellow and curling at the edges, read
OPEN,
and Alex stepped out of the freezing winter air into the musty, overheated space. The front of the shop was crowded with clothing hanging along the walls, so close his stocky frame brushed them as he shouldered his way forward. A few feet past the entry, a desk with some slips of paper and one of those old-fashioned calculators with a crank, blocked his progress. In the shadows at the rear a small figure was hunched over a whirring machine, accompanied by the faint sound of opera. The music sounded Italian, which was maybe a good sign.

“Hello?” Alex called out. He couldn’t see if the person was male or female.

“Gimme a second,” the person said. The tone was mildly irked, certainly not welcoming. Probably male. The vigorous little machine picked up speed, and the soprano began to sing with heartbreaking passion.

After a full minute, the tailor rose and limped slowly toward the desk, sighing and dragging a foot behind him awkwardly.

“Yeah?”

He was a small man, maybe five five, horribly scarred along the left side of his face. The skin covering that cheek, and spreading over his ear and up toward the crown of his head on the one side, was shiny and stretched, and left him half bald. The tautness of the ravaged area pulled the left corner of his mouth into a permanent half grimace.

“Got some fat ties here that need to lose weight,” Alex said, tossing his dad’s old neckwear onto the counter.

“Oh yeah?” the tailor said. He didn’t look at the ties. His left eyelid drooped, but the eye itself darted alertly, sizing Alex up.

Giving me time to get a good look-see,
Alex thought.
I know how he feels.

“Yep,” Alex said. “Fat guys shouldn’t wear fat ties.”

“That right?”

The tailor balanced on his right leg and picked up the ties to look them over.

“You’re not so fat,” he said. “What happened to your ear? It’s sticking out like a mailbox lid.”