The Tenth Justice (18 page)

“Ober.”

Closing his eyes, Ben spoke in a calm voice. “Nothing happened between me and Eric. We just had a small argument. That’s it. We’ll make up later tonight.”

“Just remember what I said to you when you left for college: ‘There’s nothing like childhood friends.’”

“That’s great, Mom. Thanks for sharing that for the eighty-fourth time. Can I go now?”

“So Lisa is coming to Thanksgiving?”

“Yes, Mom. Thanks to your meddling, she’ll be there.”

“Wonderful. I’ll call you later. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Say hi to Dad.” Hanging up, Ben turned to Lisa. “You really think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, guess again, missy, because you just made the biggest mistake of your life. In your infinite wisdom, you’ve just gotten yourself invited to the seventeenth circle of hell—my house for dinner.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Hold on,” Ben said, pulling out a small pad from his top drawer. “I have to write this one down.” As he scribbled on the little pad, he announced, “On Friday, November twenty-first, Lisa Marie Schulman said ‘I can’t wait,’ as she referred to her upcoming meal of death.”

“It’ll be fun,” she said.

“‘It’ll be fun,’” Ben said as he added that phrase to the pad. “I think that’s what Napoleon said right before he went to Waterloo.”

“Ben, my family is still impressed with the Lava lamp. How much worse can your family be?”

“I’d say a great deal worse. A world of worse. Maybe a whole universe of worse.”

“Just stop it already.”

“Lisa, I’m not exaggerating. My parents are mutants. They’re sick, bizarro freaks who were spawned to bring guilt and angst to all the innocent children of Earth.”

“Well, I can’t wait to meet them. They sound like wonderful people.”

“‘They sound like wonderful people,’” Ben said as he resumed his writing on the pad of paper. “Ho, boy, I can’t wait until you eat these words.”

“Whatever you say,” Lisa said, opening up one of the many brown folders on her desk. “Meanwhile, have you finished with the
Russell
opinion? You said you’d have it done two days ago.”

“Don’t rush me. It needs more work.” Ben returned the pad to his desk. “And by the way, can we meet at your house tonight? I want to go over my meeting with Rick before tomorrow.”

“Absolutely. Oh, and Ben? I don’t mean to be a dick, but I really do need the
Russell
decision.”

“Lisa, I said I’d get it to you. What do you want?”

“I want you to finish it. I believe you when you say you’re working on it, but you’ve been doing the first draft for over two weeks now.”

“Well, I’m sorry I had a busy week, but my life’s been a bit chaotic lately.”

“Don’t pull that with me,” Lisa scolded. “You know I completely sympathize with everything you’ve had to deal with. All I’m saying is that you have to do your best to ignore it all. Like it or not, this Court is more important than whatever’s going on in your life.”

Ben was seething as he turned to a clean page of his legal pad. “Fine. I understand. Let me get to work now.”

“Ben, stop it. What do you want me to do?”

“How about being a bit more understanding!” he shouted. “It’s easy for you to be diligent, but I’m the one who’s chasing the psychopath. Every time my mom calls, I’m terrified he’s contacted my family. On top of all that, my friend betrayed me and the Marshals Office is threatening me—and the week’s not over yet.”

“Y’know, for one second, I wish you could see things from another perspective besides your own.”

“And I suppose your perspective is the optimum one?”

“I’m serious,” Lisa said. “Hollis knows I always go over the decisions before he sees them, so he’s gotten used to asking me for them. For the past week, he’s been asking me, and I’ve been making up excuses. On Tuesday, I said we were working on a few points. On Wednesday, I said we still hadn’t resolved them. Yesterday, I avoided him completely. I don’t know what to tell him today. We’re in this together, and I don’t mind taking the fall with you, but this is stupid.
Russell
is a nonsense procedural issue. Hollis told us exactly how he saw this one, but we’re dragging our feet on it. Just finish it and give it to me. Even if you’re halfway done, give it to me and I’ll touch it up. I just have to hand him something by the end of today. I’m sorry if that means I have to ride you, but at this point it’s the only way you’ll take me seriously.”

Ben stared at his legal pad. “I’m sorry,” he said coldly. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll have it for you before lunch.”

“Ben, I—”

“No explanation’s necessary. You’re right. If I couldn’t get it done on time I should’ve passed it to you.”

“That’s all I was trying to say.”

“Are you ready for tomorrow?”

Looking in the mirror, Rick pulled his tie into a perfect knot. “Of course I’m ready. The real question is: Will Ben be ready?”

“You know he’s plotting against you.”

Dissatisfied with the length of his tie, Rick undid the knot and started over. “He can do whatever he wants. I’m not worried.”

“How can you be so confident?”

Rick turned away from the mirror. “Because I understand Ben. After that disaster with Eric, he’s going to have a hard time saying no to my offer.”

At a quarter to one, Lisa returned to the office carrying a small brown bag. She pulled out two cups of coffee, a bran muffin, and a chocolate croissant. “Lunchtime. Eat up,” she said, handing Ben the croissant and one of the coffees.

Twenty minutes later, Ben still hadn’t touched the coffee or the croissant. A half hour after that, he finally looked up from his computer screen. “One Supreme Court decision coming up,” he announced as the laser printer started to hum.

“Great,” Lisa said as she walked to the printer. When she had picked up all seventeen pages, she returned to her desk and pulled out her red pen. As Ben watched her expression from his desk, Lisa read the decision, her red pen primed for corrections. Slowly and meticulously, she scrutinized each page, placing it facedown on her desk. After fifteen minutes, she turned over the final page and looked up at Ben.

“So?” Ben asked, picking at his croissant. “What’d you think?”

“Ben, this is a phenomenal job,” Lisa said as she turned over the pile and shuffled the pages. “Usually, I hack your first drafts up. My pen only touched the paper twice.”

“Three times, actually,” he said. Walking over to Lisa’s desk, he grabbed the small pile of paper and searched for her corrections.

“It was just grammatical stuff.” Lisa leaned back in her chair. “I’m amazed, though. This first draft is like one of our third drafts.”

“Well, this time I was trying.”

“Why the hell don’t you try like that the rest of the time? Usually you do an excellent job, but this is a finished product. You probably saved us a whole extra day of work.”

“It was an easy case,” Ben said. “It’s not that big a deal. I just work well under pressure.”

“I should get pissed off more often.” Lisa got out of her seat, took the pages back from Ben, and put them in one of Hollis’s brown folders. “I’m going to walk this over to Hollis as is. Hopefully we can be done with it by this afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” Ben said, pulling his black overcoat from the closet. “I have to run to the restaurant, but I’ll be back within an hour.”

“Planning for tomorrow?” Lisa asked.

“Absolutely,” he said. “At this point, I’m not leaving anything to chance.”

At three-thirty, Lisa returned to the office. “That’s it. We’re done with
Russell
,” she announced as she tossed the seventeen-page document on Ben’s desk.

“He liked it?”

“Did he like it? Let’s put it this way. At one point I had to wipe away the drool that was hanging off his lower lip.”

“Be serious.”

“I’m not joking,” she said. “Hollis loved it. He said it was well argued, and organized exactly the way he wanted. He especially liked the conclusion, where you called the dissent ‘an attempt to empty the endless ocean of logic with a thimble.’”

“He’s keeping that? I thought for sure he would cut it. He always cuts my metaphors-as-insults.”

“Well, he liked this one. Apparently he thinks Osterman is out of his mind in the dissent.”

“Damn,” Ben said, slapping the desk. “If I’d known he was going to be open to wordplay, I’d have come up with something even better. I was thinking of saying that the dissent is ‘trying to piss on the inferno of common sense.’”

“I don’t think that one would have flown,” Lisa suggested.

“Why not?” Ben asked. “You don’t think he’d agree with the parallel I’m drawing between common sense and fire?”

“I don’t think Hollis wants to go down in history as being the first justice to ever use the word ‘piss’ in one of his opinions. He’s crazy like that.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Ben said, flipping through the seventeen-page document. “So tell me what else Hollis said.”

“Nothing really. He’s happy we’re done with
Russell
because he says that
Grinnell
will almost definitely be decided tonight.”

“How does he know it’ll be assigned to him?”

“He already spoke to Moloch and Kovacs, and they don’t want to touch it. Whether he’s in the majority or the dissent, Hollis’ll be the most senior justice who wants to write the decision.”

“Any word yet on whether Veidt has hopped the fence?”

“They’ll know tomorrow. Hollis said Veidt is having dinner with Osterman and Blake tonight.”

“Ah, another Supreme Court case is going to be decided based on how hard one justice schmoozes another.”

“Welcome to Washington.”

“Gee, thanks,” Ben said. “You’re so politically astute.
Now
I know how this town works. And all along I foolishly thought it was democracy that ran our nation.”

“Listen, when I first got to law school, I always used to say that if the Supreme Court was really about true justice, then every issue, no matter who was on the Court, would come out with the same result. If
Roe
v.
Wade
granted abortion rights in 1973, then the decision shouldn’t be overturned just because some conservative justices came onto the Court. But over time, I’ve realized that that’s the beauty of the law. We decide each case individually. No fact pattern is exactly the same, and every justice takes all the different facts into account. If we wanted the same decision every time, we wouldn’t need judges—we’d get robots we could plug the facts into, who could reach the same cold, logical decision. But who the hell wants a robot deciding their life?”

“That depends—are they conservative or liberal robots?”

“That’s exactly my point. Stop seeing everything in black and white. No two people see anything exactly the same way. That’s what makes it great. We sacrifice ourselves to people’s particular mores, but we gain an individualized judicial system. I mean, would you really want to live in a world where there were no Ostermans or Veidts?”

“Actually, I probably would,” Ben said. “But I guess that would also mean that the entire madras golf pants market would crash.”

“Ben, be serious.”

“I know, I know,” he said, picking at the hardened remains of his croissant. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed when a case is decided on personal politics.”

“No, you should definitely be annoyed. But just realize that the personal side of the judicial process also provides a lot of benefits that ensure democracy as we know it.”

“That’s wonderful, General Washington. I’ll keep that in mind every time I tell the story of how Veidt sold his vote away.”

LATER THAT EVENING, BEN AND LISA RETURNED
to Lisa’s apartment, where they found Ober and Nathan waiting outside. “Where the hell were you guys?” Ober asked, running in place. “We’re freezing out here.”

“Why didn’t you wait in the lobby?” Lisa asked.

“Because the asshole doorman wouldn’t let us. He said if our host wasn’t here, we had to wait outside.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Lisa stormed into the building and approached the smiling doorman. “Why the hell do you have my guests waiting outside?”

“Ma’am, their party was not here.”

“I’m their party,” she proclaimed. “And if I’m five minutes late, I don’t want my friends waiting out in the cold.”

“Ma’am, you may be their host, but we do have rules in this building, and no guests are admitted without their host’s approval. As doorman, it is my job to ensure that there is no loitering in our lobby.”

“Oh, it is?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” the doorman barked. “The tenants’ association has given me full authority to remove loiterers, vagrants, and other criminal characters from this vicinity.”

“Are you sure about that?” Lisa asked.

“Oh, no,” Ben said, peeking through his fingers. “This is about to get ugly.”

“Let me tell you a few things,” Lisa said, her finger pointed in the doorman’s face. “First, I don’t care who you are, but the moment you have my guests in this building, they become your guests. And if you think you’re authorized to let guests stand out in the cold, you’ve got your head up your ass. This may not be the frozen tundra, but it’s still cold out there. Second, general loitering laws are illegal, since they allow mall cops like you to randomly discriminate against whomever you like. So if you don’t have solid, real reasons to suspect my friends, I suggest you keep your mouth shut. Finally, if you are calling my friends vagrants or criminals, I’ll haul you into court on defamation charges just to piss you off. I won’t win the case, but I’ll have a great time wasting your time and money as you argue your way out of it. Now, unless you have anything else to say, I’m going to go upstairs. Have I made myself clear?”

“Certainly,” the doorman said, flustered. Turning to Nathan and Ober, he added, “And I apologize for any misunderstanding.”

“I accept your apology,” Ober said as the friends walked into the elevator.

“Was that really necessary?” Ben asked.

“That was fantastic!” Ober yelled.

“He pisses me off,” Lisa said. “You give guys like him a tiny bit of authority, and they think they’re dictators.”