The Hanging Judge (35 page)

He took a seat behind his desk and began writing “Rivera Instruction” on a yellow pad. But Frank, curse him, would not leave.

“The sheriff’s going to evict her tomorrow at noon, Judge. She’s filed a motion for a temporary restraining order, and she’s requesting an immediate hearing. It has to be today.”

“What possible jurisdictional basis is there to challenge a routine eviction in federal court? I’m very sorry for whatever pickle she’s gotten herself into, but frankly I’ve had it with Mrs. Abercrombie.” He turned his attention to the wording of the cautionary instruction.

Frank was nodding as Norcross spoke, rocking on his heels and scratching with his free hand at the end of his mustache.

“I know. I know, Judge. She’s dreamed up some nutty theory under the Truth in Lending Act. The finance company says she hasn’t paid her mortgage for a year and a half now.”

“Give me the papers.”

Mrs. Abercrombie’s documents were immediately recognizable—hand-pecked on an old-fashioned typewriter with copious Wite-Outs and impenetrable paragraphs that rambled on, single-spaced, for eight or ten pages without the relief of an indentation or subheading. As usual, her pleadings also featured many exclamation marks, often double or triple, and whole pages capitalized and underlined in red ballpoint.

“Lord help us,” Norcross said. “Is there anything here?”

“I’m almost positive there isn’t. The Truth in Lending Act won’t help her, that’s for sure. But I feel bad. She’s lived in the same house for forty-two years. She says she mortgaged the property because she needed the money for her lawsuits. It’s horrible.”

There was a knock on the door, and Ruby stuck her head in.

“Jury’s ready anytime.”

“Thanks.” Norcross took his fountain pen out of the drawer.

Frank cleared his throat and added, “And the First Circuit affirmed your dismissal of her utility suit this morning.”

“Big surprise.” He bent over the papers. “The only mercy I can give her today is a quick decision. Maybe she can get some help in state court. That’s where the case belongs, if anywhere.”

He turned Mrs. Abercrombie’s motion for a temporary restraining order sideways and wrote in the margin, in large black letters: “DENIED, for failure to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits. David S. Norcross, U.S.D.J.”

“I feel terrible for her,” Frank said.

“Well, you’re still new to this world.” Norcross looked up at his child-obsessed clerk, and his mind wound back to when, during his wife’s pregnancy, he and Faye used to watch
Sesame Street
, getting warmed up for Jessica. Wasn’t there a frog?

Norcross handed Frank the papers. “It isn’t easy being green.”

48

A
s the weeks of trial continued to unfold, Alex Torricelli got more used to the courtroom. He picked up a new, lightweight suit and, for the first time in his life, spent twenty bucks on a haircut. Lydia Gomez-Larsen gave him a yellow pad and a felt-tip pen so he could jot notes during the testimony. His scribbles were mostly useless, but note taking gave him something to do with his hands, and Lydia said it would impress the jury.

The hours passed more quickly. Alex’s picture appeared in the newspaper, and when the reporters came up to him after a day in court, he had the pleasure of telling them that, unfortunately, he could not comment. None of this was doing him much good with Janice—he was mighty tired of the guest bedroom—but at least the workday was more bearable.

The best thing was that they had Redpath and his man Hudson on the ropes. Pepe Rivera came through with stars, and even the kid from UMass, a true punk, told his story about buying drugs from Hudson—full of details about location, time, weight, packaging, even the clothes Hudson was wearing—in a way that felt convincing. You could see the foreman eating it up like cheese popcorn.

This particular afternoon’s testimony from Alex’s pal, the tailor Marco Deluviani, was turning out to be another high point. When Deluviani described the scar on the arm of the man running down the alley, and Lydia got Norcross to make Hudson show his gouged forearm to the jury, the dead silence that followed the defendant back to his seat might as well have been the final bell.

“May I have a moment, Your Honor?” Lydia was wrapping up with Deluviani, but, as with all her witnesses, she made a display of checking one last time with Alex. She leaned forward to keep her whisper private: “Okay,
amigo
, did I miss anything?”

Alex frowned down at his notes. They contained two short phrases from the tailor’s testimony, the words
WAR HERO!!
with a 3-D box around them, a doodled lightning bolt, and the rough draft of a limerick whose first line was “Nymphomaniacal Jill …”

Alex made a show of reviewing the page carefully, then nodded. “Looks like you’ve covered everything.”

“You know,” Lydia dropped her voice to a barely audible murmur, “you’re good. You’re very good.”

Alex spoke without moving his lips.

“Kiss my butt, Lydia.”

The prosecutor’s stride was brisk as she returned to the podium and retrieved her binder.

“No further questions at this time, Your Honor.”

Norcross nodded at defense counsel. “Mr. Redpath, you may cross-examine.”

Throughout this pause, Deluviani sat in the witness box looking straight ahead, a perfect image of barely contained irritation. His curly toupee and twisted face made him look as though he’d dropped into the trial out of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Who could ever believe a Rumplestiltskin like him would lie?

One more tap and down the son of a bitch goes,
Alex thought. He drew a double line on the page and wrote “MARCO CROSS” in large black letters above it. Even the slow, tough-guy way Hudson had walked over to the jury rail to show his arm made him look guilty. Who’d want to meet a character like that in a dark alley?

“Just a few questions,” Redpath said. He locked his eyes on the witness as he approached the podium. Deluviani stared back with a sour face.

“Your injury in Vietnam, Mr. Deluviani, resulted in burns to your face, correct?”

“Other places got it worse, but they don’t show.”

“And there was some injury to your eyes?”

Deluviani scratched one of his front teeth. “Not really.”

Redpath stepped to the side of the podium, resting his hand on it. “You received severe burn injuries to your face, among other areas? Can we agree on that?”

“Yep.”

“And your injuries affected your eyesight, didn’t they?”

Again, the witness paused. He cocked his head and nodded.

“My eyesight, yes, not my eyes. I was bandaged up a long time.”

“You need glasses for distance now?”

“Right. For anything close-up, I’m fine.”

“When you’re working, for example, you don’t need glasses?”

“Right.”

“I notice you’re not wearing glasses now.”

“I have them here.” Deluviani slipped a pair of black frames partway out of his shirt pocket and dropped them back in.

“You don’t wear them normally?”

“What do you mean ‘normally’?”

“As a matter of routine, or habit. For example, you don’t have them on now.”

“Correct. I’m not wearing my glasses right now.”

Alex had the pleasure of hearing a couple of the jurors snigger.

“Mmm-hmm. Would you put your glasses on please?”

Deluviani cast an impatient look up at Norcross. The judge nodded down at him.

“Oh-kay.” The witness drawled the word out. He slid the glasses onto his face. They were off-kilter, with a safety pin securing the right earpiece to the frame—all of which made him look even more like a kook.

“Now,” Redpath raised his voice and turned to the jury. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Deluviani, that you can see me at least somewhat better now, with your glasses on, than you could a minute ago, when you weren’t wearing your glasses?”

“Okay. Somewhat.”

“And, for the record, what would you estimate is the distance between the two of us?”

Deluviani peered over the witness box.

“Maybe twelve, fifteen feet.”

“All right. Please feel free to remove your glasses now, if you’d prefer.”

Deluviani took the glasses off and put them back in his pocket.

“Now on the morning you say you saw the man with the scar, before you say you saw him, you’d been doing work, am I right?”

“Yep.”

“Tailoring work.”

“That’s the only kind I do.”

“And you don’t need your glasses to see close-up?”

“Nope.”

“So you were not wearing your glasses.”

“Probably had them in my pocket, same as I do now.”

Alex felt a tap on his arm and looked over to see Lydia shifting her pad toward him. In three neat lines, she’d written: “Stop looking so sweaty!! You’ll spook the jury. This is only the usual B.S.”

Alex, keeping a straight face, scribbled “Sorry!” on her pad. Redpath’s questions had, in fact, been making him uncomfortable. The lawyer’s pushy tone felt, somehow, like cheating.

The questioning moved into another area.

“Before you say you saw this gentleman with the scar,” Redpath continued, “you were working, as you said, correct?”

“Yep.”

“No question you were working.”

“No question.”

“You were at your machine toward the rear of your shop.”

“No.”

“You weren’t? Didn’t you just say that you were working, just ten seconds ago?”

Deluviani shifted in his seat and, for the first time, looked off-balance. “Well, I was at work, but I’d stopped working at the machine.”

“Wait now. Let’s be sure I understand you, sir. Were you working, or weren’t you?”

“I was at work, okay? I wasn’t home having a beer. I wasn’t on the can. I was working, but I wasn’t, like, at my machine working. I was in the front of the store, paying bills or taking a break or something. Answering the phone. I forget what.”

“So your testimony now is you weren’t working.”

“I wasn’t in the back at the machine. I know that.” He hesitated and added in a lower voice, “I couldn’t have seen anything from back there.”

“Exactly!” Redpath said. “If you’d actually been working, as you said you were a minute ago, there was absolutely no way, from where you would have been sitting, that you could have seen something like a scar on the arm of a man running past, especially since you would not have been wearing your glasses. Isn’t that right?”

“Objection.” Lydia stood, unruffled, speaking more in sadness than in anger.

“I never said I was in the back,” Deluviani broke in.

“I don’t mind if counsel wants to …” Lydia continued.

“I’d like an answer to my question!” Redpath said.

“Objection is sustained,” Norcross said, raising his voice slightly and tapping his pen on his microphone. “That’s a multiple. Break the question up, please.”

Redpath gave the judge a long look and then nodded. He took a while to consult his notes, letting the silence grow in the courtroom. Deluviani shifted and cleared his throat.

Lydia shoved her pad over to Alex again.

“I like this,” she’d written. “Nod at me a little.”

Alex looked over at Lydia and nodded, projecting a very good impression of a man who had just been reminded of something highly significant. His peripheral vision picked up the eyes of several of the jurors wandering over to him. Everything was going fine.

At that moment, the door at the side of the bench opened, and a woman entered the courtroom. She glanced nervously out into the gallery, approached Norcross, and handed him up a note. The judge looked at the note; a frown flickered, and then he leaned toward the jury rearranging his face into an easy smile.

“Good news,” he said. “I’m going to give you a short unscheduled break. Something has come up that I have to deal with.” He put down his pen and rubbed his hands together. “Please don’t speculate about what this may be. Just relax, stretch yourselves, and we’ll see you again in about fifteen minutes. I admonish you, as I have already so many times, not to discuss the case or anything about it with one another. Keep an open mind. We’ll pick up with the continued cross of this witness in just a few minutes, then roll right on to the end of the day. You’re excused for fifteen minutes.”

49

T
he note Lucille handed up to the bench read: “Tom D. needs to see you ASAP. Bomb in the building.”

Judge Norcross still had the slip of paper in his hand when he got back to his chambers and found the court security officer, Tom Dickinson, waiting in the chair facing his desk, looking agitated. Dickinson, portly and silver-haired, was a retired Amherst police officer and, Norcross had learned, a distant relative of the town’s famous poet Emily Dickinson. He’d been a CSO for several years before Norcross took the bench.

“So, what’s up?” Norcross asked as he slipped off his robe.

“Clerk’s office got an anonymous call ten minutes ago, Judge, reporting a bomb in the building. Sounded like a female, they said, possibly elderly.”

“So it’s a bomb threat, not an actual bomb so far.”

“Right.”

Norcross laid his robe over the back of his sofa. “Anybody notice anything funny this morning when you were screening people?”

“No, sir.”

The window next to Norcross’s desk had a good view down to the plaza in front of the courthouse. It was a pretty spring day, with bright flowers dancing in the planters along the Jersey barriers. Norcross dropped into his chair, pulled a yellow pad in front of him, and wrote “Bomb” at the top with the date and time. Silly, but it helped him think.

“Did Sheba alert to anything?” Norcross was very fond of Sheba, a bomb-sniffing dog assigned to the court for the trial. She was totally no-nonsense. Whenever the judge patted her, she would wag her tail exactly three times and then sit.

“No, sir. We swept the building as usual during lunch. Not a whimper.”

Norcross peered up at the sky through the window. A few high horsetails, fair weather clouds. He turned back to Dickinson. “It’s a hoax.”

“Probably.”

Suspending the trial was one way to go, to give the security staff time to search the building, but given how badly Deluviani had mauled the defense on direct, Norcross preferred not to interrupt cross if he could help it. Redpath’s questions seemed to be building up to something.