The Laws of our Fathers (25 page)

  'And, Ms Campbell, wasn't it only after your meeting with Mr Turtle that you suddenly disavowed this portion of your statement, where you said that Hardcore told you this was being done for Nile?'

    'I don't understand what you saying now neither.' 'I'm saying you're lying.'

    'Nn-uh,' says Lovinia. 'This here, what I be sayin now, this the swore truth. And I ain never been sayin nothin gainst Nile.'

    'Didn't you say again yesterday, Ms Campbell, in the presence of Mr Singh and Detective Montague and myself, when I met with you at the Juvenile Hall, didn't you in fact say
again
that you now recalled Hardcore saying this was being done on account of Nile?'

    'Is that when you-all was trippin on me, how I tricked on you and I was gone away for M-1?' Murder one.

    Tommy stands still in the middle of the courtroom with his eyes closed. The trial lawyer's bad dream: major witness giddyap and gone. At the defense table, Hobie is making notes madly. Behind him, his goofy client remains fixed on the girl with the same erratic grin. Bug, in this idle moment, becomes aware of Nile's attention and again looks toward her shoes.

    'Lunch?' I ask Molto.

    With evident gratitude, he nods.

    Annie knocks her gavel once to announce the recess and the spectators rise, voices racing with the trial's first taste of excitement. I stay on the bench to write a few more notes in the bench book about Bug, not certain yet what I think of her or the way the attorneys have dueled over her testimony. Marietta appears with the files on two new custodies, both State Defender cases. They are scheduled for bond hearings at 2 p.m., but Gina Devore has grabbed Rudy Singh in the hopes of doing them now. She has a suppression hearing before Judge Noland this afternoon. I oblige Gina, and the keys rattle and doors clank as the transport deputies head back to retrieve the prisoners.

    

    We immediately reach the Crime of the Day. Rogita Robbins slouches out of the lockup, small and overweight, with orangish hair and many black marks on her face. I am almost sick listening to a description of this case. Rogita and her man, Fedell, are Gangster Outlaws from Fielder's Green. They had a date with their homegirl, Tawnya, who was safekeeping the night's entertainment, multiple doses of dust. When they arrived at Tawnya's apartment, Fedell found both Tawnya and their PCP gone, and in reprisal exorcised his fury by sodomizing Tawnya's children, a boy eight and a girl nine. Fedell was apprehended months ago. Nailed on DNA and fingerprints, he pled out for sixty years before Judge Simone, whose call I inherited when he transferred to Chancery. Rogita has been at large, and was taken into custody on a shoplift. She will probably not deal, Gina and Rudy explain, since the state is light on her. The PAs have only the boy and girl to testify against Rogita. A mother of two, Rogita aided Fedell by holding both children down.

    'A million full cash,' I say.

    Gina looks at me. $100,000 would keep Rogita behind bars. 'Full,' I repeat.

    She gives her wavy high-school hairdo a churlish toss, but I doubt if we changed places the ruling would be different. I like Gina. She's a tiny, athletic woman, a gymnast at one point, if memory serves. It's always impressive to see her, barely five feet, even in her big high heels, standing in the lockup, reading out her clients, who hulk over her. Yet last month she cried in my chambers. She'd spent hours she didn't have cobbling together bail for Timfony Washington, a decent young man being held for setting fire to the back porch of his girl's apartment. Gina talked the contractor who employed Tim as a laborer into making a $1,500 cash advance on some overdue workmen's compensation benefits and, late Friday, handed the money to Timfony's mother and sisters with instructions to post bond at the jail at 8 a.m. Monday morning. Instead, it was gone after the weekend - spent, stolen, disappeared, you could guess whatever you liked based on the four or five different stories the family told. In the jailhouse, Timfony accused Gina of ripping him off, and became so abusive he had to be restrained.

    By the time we are done, the courtroom is largely empty. A few stragglers, elderly buffs with no place to rush to, are gossiping behind the glass, while Seth has remained at the near end of the jury box. He's preoccupied, looking toward his lap, his hands moving furtively. Idling on the question that finally came home to me after overhearing Dubinsky and him yesterday, I drift his way.

    'What in the world?' I ask, when I first see the needle in his left hand. Then I realize he's sewing a button back on his sport coat. He's made a terrible hash of it. Thread is going everywhere. It looks less like a button than a leak.

'You can see why I gave up a career in surgery.' He bites off the thread between his teeth. ‘I thought we weren't talking,' he says.

    'We're not.'

    'Ah.'

    'There's just one question I've been meaning to ask you.'

    ‘I figured you would. The answer is, I truly don't know. That's straight up.' His eyes, a dense, greenish-grey, narrow mysteriously. I haven't a clue what he means. 'Forget it,' he says. ‘I need some work on my Carnak routine.' He raises a hand, inviting my question.

    'I couldn't help noticing you sitting here every day with Stew Dubinsky. I wondered how well you know him.'

    'Stew? Only since kindergarten. We all grew up in U. Park together.'

    'All of you? You mean Stew and Hobie and you?' I didn't have the remotest idea how I was going to broach this subject as I moseyed over, but I've done a decent-enough job. I sound casually curious. Life is full of these funny little connections.

    'Hobie wasn't there in grade school. He went to St Bernard's?'

    'St Bernard's,' I say, simply to fill airtime. When I was in fourth grade, my mother made the first of her periodic out-of-town journeys, living for three months in North Carolina while she attempted to organize a stamping plant. In the interval my Aunt Hen put me in St Rita's down the block. I was already developing, well ahead of everyone else, and my skin had become awful. I was delighted by the uniform and the opportunity to look like all the other girls. By comparison, the discipline, the catechism, the nuns smacking their rulers on the desktops seemed unimportant. When Zora came back, though, she had a fit.
Catholic
school? Had Henrietta lost her mind? 'Hobie's Catholic?' I ask, still being somewhat diversionary.

    'Just his mother, but Loretta's pretty religious. He got a full dose. I remember, when I was first getting to know him, in sixth grade we had this phenomenal argument because he refused to believe his parents had intercourse in order to conceive him.' Seth laughs at the memory. 'I actually made him cry.'

    'But you guys all went to high school together, you and Hobie and Stew?'

    'U. High,' he says, 'in the fabled days when U. High was a question, not a place.'

    A little buzz passes through me, the naughty satisfaction of the old prosecutor vindicating her suspicions. Stew and Hobie are old pals. Hoping to remain unobtrusive, I smile at Seth's joke.

    'If you stick around for Narcotics Court,' I say, 'you'll find those days aren't over. I live in the neighborhood. They have undercover cops in the high school now.'

    'Yeah,' he says. 'That's a good column, you know. I write it three times a year. Being the first generation to take a dose of our own medicine. "Listen, kids, Daddy really didn't mean what he was saying about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." '

    'And turn down the record player when I speak to you.'

    'The CD player.'

    'The CD. So, thanks,' I say.

    'That's it? Jeez, don't run away. So what's the deal with Stew?'

    'Nothing to talk about. Something struck me while I was on the bench.' He'll mention my question to Stew, I know, even perhaps to Hobie. Which is fine. If it's what I fear, then I want them to realize I'm on to them.

    'No, really,' Seth says. 'Take the load off your feet. Tell me what I've missed in the last twenty-five years. Anything dramatic?'

    The courtroom is empty now and quiet. One of the stout Polish cleaners, friendly, mute, and virtually
  

*