Final Appeal Page 5

  It knows if anyone came into chambers and saw Armen and me together. And it knows who they are.

  7

  His breast pocket bears a plastic plate that says R. ARRINGTON over the shiny five-star badge of the marshal service. His frame is brawny in its official blue blazer, and his dark skin is slightly pitted up close. “Lunchtime!” I say to him, making an overstuffed tuna hoagie do the cha-cha with a chilly bottle of Snapple lemonade. “All this can be yours.”

  He does not look impressed. “No can do, Grace.”

  The hoagie and the lemonade jump up and down in frustration. “All I want is two minutes. I look at the monitors, then I’m outta there.”

  “There’s twenty monitors, Grace,” he says, sighing deeply. Maryellen, the cashier in the building’s snack shop, cocks her head in our direction. She may be blind, but she’s not deaf. I decide to be more quiet.

  “Come on, Ray. You said only one monitor shows our hallway. How long can it take to look at a monitor?”

  He folds his thick arms. “Maybe if you tell me why this matters.”

  I glance at the jurors behind us buying newspapers, gum, and fountain soda. The ice machine spits chunks into a tall paper cup, and a juror plays mix-and-match to find the right size lid. He’ll never find it; I never can, and I have a J.D. “Let’s just say I want to check security.”

  “Come clean, Rossi.”

  I consider this. Ray is one of the few marshals who liked Armen; he’s also one of the few African Americans, which I suspect is no coincidence. “Tell you what. Get me in. If it pays off, I’ll tell you why.”

  “What am I supposed to tell the marshals?”

  “What marshals? You’re the marshal.”

  “I’m a CSO, technically. A court security officer. I mean the marshals watching the monitors.”

  “Tell ’em I’m checking security, that I’m the administrative law clerk to the chief judge.”

  “Grace.” His somber expression reminds me of something I’d rather not dwell on. Armen is gone.

  “Forget it, I’ll tell them something. I’ll handle it. Just get me in, I’ll owe you. Big-time.”

  Suddenly he snaps his fingers. “I know what you can do for me.”

  “Anything.”

  “You can introduce me to your fine friend, the lovely Eletha Staples.”

  “Eletha? Don’t you know her?”

  “I’ve been workin’ here as long as she has, but she won’t give me the time of day. She seein’ anybody?”

  I think of Leon, Eletha’s boyfriend, who gives her nothing but grief. “No.”

  “Hot dog!” He rubs his hands together; it makes a dry sound. “Lunch. I’ll start with lunch, take it nice and easy. Can you set it up?”

  “Deal.” I set the tuna hoagie and Snapple on the counter in front of Maryellen. At the last minute, Ray tosses in two packs of chocolate Tastykakes.

  “What are you having today, Grace?” Maryellen says. Her cloudy eyes veer wildly around the room.

  “Thanksgiving dinner,” I say to her and she laughs.

  After we leave the snack bar, Ray leads me through a labyrinth of hallways to the core of a secured part of the courthouse. It would have been impossible to find this myself, and when I reach the barred entrance I understand why.

  It’s a prison.

  Sixteen floors from where I work, in the same building. It gives me the creeps. The sign on the barred door says: ONLY COUNSEL MAY VISIT PRISONERS.

  We head down another hall, past a room with a number of empty desks in it, and open a door onto a small room, brightly lit by a ceiling of fluorescents. A wall of TV screens dominates the room, giving it a futuristic feel. There must be twenty-five black-and-white TV screens here, trained everywhere throughout the courthouse.

  The monitors in the left bank flash on the stairwells at each floor of the building, and the large screens in the middle offer an ever-changing peek into the courtrooms. In 12-A there’s a young woman crying on the witness stand. In 13-A an older man is being sentenced. In 14-A a little boy is testifying.

  “It’s like a soap opera, huh, Worrell?” Ray says amiably to the stony-faced marshal watching the screens. He’s a stocky middle-aged man in a black T-shirt that says UNITED STATES MARSHAL SERVICE. It looks more like a get-up for Hell’s Angels, but I do not remark this aloud.

  “Ugh,” the man says, his attention focused on the TV pictures of prison cells on the far right. Each cell is numbered and occupied by a man in street clothes, probably awaiting trial. They sit slumped or asleep in their cells; one is a black teenager in an oversized sweatshirt, just a kid. I think of Hightower.

  “This is Grace Rossi, Worrell. She’s a lawyer, works for the appeals court. She wants to see—”

  “I want to see the monitors,” I say with faux authority. “It’s a security check for the new chief judge.”

  Worrell begins to laugh at one of the prisoners, a Muslim crouched over in prayer. “Say it loud, brother. You’re gonna need it.” Ray looks sideways at the monitor.

  “Where’s the screen for the eighteenth floor?” I ask.

  “That one.” He points to one of the screens. The bottom of the screen reads 16-B. In the high-resolution picture, a young secretary pauses to tug up her slip. Worrell chuckles. “They forget Big Brother’s watching.”

  Of course they forget; I did. So did whoever came into our chambers, if anyone. I watch the picture flicker to 17-B. It’s a view of the hallway outside the judges’ elevator on the seventeenth floor. On the wall hangs a fake parchment copy of the Constitution. Our floor is next.

  “Yeow!” Ray hoots as soon as the scene changes. Eletha is photocopying at the Xerox machine, her back to the camera. Her skirt clings softly to her curves, and with her back turned you can’t see how haggard she looks today. “Now ain’t that pretty?” he says, in a tone men usually reserve for touchdown passes and vintage Corvettes.

  Worrell grunts. “She’s all right.”

  Ray gives him a solid shove. “Listen to you, ‘She’s all right.’ Shit, man! She’s more than all right, she’s fine. And she’s mine, all mine. Right, Grace? Grace?”

  “Right,” I say, preoccupied by the scene on the TV screen, which shows Eletha walking down the hall and into chambers. Bingo. The camera would have seen whoever came into chambers last night, wherever they came from. “Where’s the tape?”

  Worrell looks at me blankly. “What tape?”

  “The tape. The tape of what the camera saw last night.”

  “We don’t tape.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no tape, lady.”

  “I don’t understand.” I look at Ray for confirmation.

  “I coulda told you that, Grace,” he says.

  I don’t believe this. “At the MAC machine they tape. Even in the Seven-Eleven they tape.”

  “Seven-Eleven’s got the money. This is the U.S. government. You’re lucky we got the goddamn judges.”

  Ray looks embarrassed. “Downstairs we tape. The monitors at the security desk, they tape the stairwell and the judges’ garage. Just not here.”

  “But somebody watches the monitors at night, don’t they?”

  Worrell leans back in the creaky chair, plainly amused. “Guess again.”

  “Maybe we should go,” Ray says.

  “Hold on. There’s no night shift?” I hear myself sounding like an outraged customer.

  “We got a fella walks around the halls,” Worrell says, “but that’s it. One marshal. The government don’t have the money for somebody to watch TV all night.” His face slackens as he returns to the screens.

  “All right. Who was the marshal last night, walking the halls?”

  “McLean, I think.”

  “McLean? Is he the big one with the mustache?” The Mutt of the Mutt-and-Jeff marshals I see in the mornings.

  Worrell nods. “Don’t you guys got some work to do?”

  “Let’s go, Grace,” Ray says.

  “Sure. Thanks,”
I say, disappointed. So much for the short answer. We start toward the door but Worrell erupts into raucous laughter.

  “Holy shit, what a case this one is.”

  Ray glances at the monitor, then scowls. “I’d love a piece of that guy. He’s not crazy, he knows just what he’s doin.’ Jerkin’ us around.”

  I look back. One of the prisoners is smack in the middle of cell seven, standing on his head. “Jesus.”

  “What a country,” Worrell says. “That jerk’s gettin’ a nice bed for the night, and you know who’s gonna pay for it? You and me. The taxpayers. For him they got the money. For us, no. You talk to your boss about that, okay, lady?”

  But I don’t answer. I recognize the man in the cell. “Ray, let’s go.”

  8

  “Shake and Bake is in jail?” Artie says, shocked.

  “Show me where, Grace.”

  “You can’t visit him.”

  “What do you mean I can’t visit him?”

  Eletha looks over wearily, dead on her feet against the bookcase in the law clerks’ office. “That lunatic is the last thing you should be worried about today.”

  “Grace,” Sarah calls from her desk, “what were you doing in the security office?”

  “I wanted to see the cameras.”

  “What cameras?”

  “You know, the ones in the hallways. I wanted to see who’s on the other side.”

  “Why?”

  “I was curious. I wanted to know if they saw anything peculiar.”

  “Is this about the noise?” Sarah asks.

  Ben looks up from the newspaper accounts of Armen’s death. “What noise?”

  “I heard a noise last night, so I wanted to see the tapes, only—”

  “Tapes?” Sarah asks. “You mean of what they see in the cameras?” She flushes slightly, and I play a hunch I didn’t even know I had.

  “Yes. They tape everything, for security reasons. Like at Seven-Eleven.”

  “They do?”

  “Sure.” I look at Eletha. “Right, El? They tape from those cameras.”

  “If you say so,” Eletha says, playing along. “They keep the tapes?”

  Thanks, El. “Yep, in a vault. They said they’d show me tomorrow.”

  Ben presses a button on his computer keyboard. The modem sings a computer song as he logs on to Lexis, the legal research database. “Surprised the government has the money.”

  “Safer, what the fuck are you doing?” Artie asks. “Are you working? Today?”

  “I’m going on Nexis, that okay with you?”

  “What’s Nexis?” Eletha asks, as Sarah suddenly busies herself making a full-fledged tea ceremony out of a single bag of Constant Comment. She has to be the one I heard last night, and she should never play poker.

  “Anybody gonna answer me? What’s Nexis?” Eletha plops into a chair like a much heavier woman. Her chin falls into her hand. “Forget it. Who gives a shit?”

  “Nexis is a database of newspapers,” I say. “It has magazines, newspapers, wire services. Everything.”

  “How do you like that?” Ben says, in his own world as he reads his computer screen. “We’re under HOTTOP. Hightower and the Chief.”

  “Christ, Safer!” Artie says.

  “I need a translation,” Eletha says.

  “HOTTOP stands for hot topics in the news,” I say, the words sour in my mouth. Without thinking twice, I cross to Ben’s computer and press the power switch to OFF. The powerful unit crackles in protest, then fizzles out. “Show some respect, Ben. A man is dead.” I feel a wrenching inside my chest and turn my back on Ben’s surprised expression.

  “Way to go, Grace!” Artie says, bursting into applause.

  “She’s right,” Eletha says. She stands up and smooths out her skirt. “I don’t even know what we’re still doin’ here. We should all go home. The packing can wait.”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” Sarah says, standing at the coffeemaker. The only sound is the hot water spurting into the glass pot. Sarah removes the pot a little too soon and the last drops dance across the searing griddle like St. Vitus.

  “Let’s not get maudlin, please,” Ben says.

  Artie looks as if he’s about to snap, then his brow knits in alarm. “Wait a minute. Grace, does Shake and Bake know about Armen?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh, fuck. I have to get in to see him. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he hears. Where’s the prison?”

  “On the second floor, but they won’t let you in.”

  “The hell they won’t. He has a right to counsel, doesn’t he? I’m counsel.” Artie bounds over to the coat rack and tears Ben’s jacket from a wooden hanger, leaving it swinging.

  “That’s my best jacket, Weiss,” Ben says.

  “I know, dude. Thanks.” He yanks the jacket over his chest. “Sar, lend me your briefcase.”

  “You really want to do this?” Sarah hands him a flowered canvas briefcase but Artie pushes it back at her.

  “Give me a pad instead. Where’d you say they’re taking him, Grace?”

  “Courtroom Fourteen-A, before Katzmann. They’re trying to charge him with trespassing on federal property.”

  Artie shakes his head. “I tell ya, these kids today, in and out of trouble. Where did I go wrong, Mom?”

  “Don’t ask me, pal.”

  “I gave him everything. Summers in Montauk, winters in Miami Beach.” He gives the jacket a reckless tug and Ben flinches.

  “Will you at least take it easy?” Ben says.

  Eletha covers her eyes. “I didn’t see this. This is not happening.”

  “How do I look, Mom?” Artie says to me. He sticks out his arms, and the sleeves ride up to his elbows. “Hot?”

  “Smokin’.”

  “Excellent.” He sticks a legal pad under his arm and runs out of the clerks’ office. I hear the heavy pounding of his feet as he heads for the outer door. My eyes meet Sarah’s, but she looks down into her steaming mug of tea.

  “You okay, Sar?” I ask her. Flush her out. Isn’t that what detectives do?

  “Sure.” She takes a quick sip of tea, avoiding my gaze. “Who’s Hightower been reassigned to, Ben?” she asks.

  “What makes you think I know?”

  “You know Galanter’s clerks. The buzz-cut boys.”

  The telephone rings at Eletha’s desk. “Shit,” she says. “Thing’s been ringing all day.” Before I can offer to get it, she kicks off her heels and is padding to her desk.

  Ben flicks on the power switch, animating the machine. “Grace, hate me if you must, but I’m logging on again.”

  “Tell us who got Hightower, Safer,” Sarah says, but I hold up my hand.

  “Sarah, think a minute. Who’s even more conservative than Galanter?”

  “Adolf Hitler.”

  “On our court, I mean.”

  “Judge Foudy.”

  “Right. And Galanter would pick somebody to vote with him, now that Armen’s gone. He’d want to stack the deck. Change the result.”

  She blinks. “Could he do that?”

  “Sure. He’s the chief judge. In an emergency, he picks the panels.”

  Ben pounds the keys. “I neither confirm nor deny.”

  He doesn’t have to, I know it. Galanter has shifted the majority to himself, blocking Hightower in. No matter which way Robbins goes, it’ll be two votes to one for death. Poor Armen; he didn’t save Hightower’s life after all. I stand up, wanting suddenly to be alone.

  “Look at this item,” Ben says, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “What a nice gesture from Senator Susan, and how like a Democrat.”

  “What?” Sarah says, and I stop at the doorway.

  “From The Washington Post. Says here that Susan tried to donate Bernice to a group called Service Dogs for the Handicapped. I can almost hear the wheelchairs plowing into each other, can’t you?” He laughs so hard he coughs: kack-kack-kack.

  “Very funny,” Sarah says.
r />   “Bernice is gone?” I say, surprised to feel a twinge inside.

  “Gone but not forgotten,” Ben says, recovering enough to hit another key. “They didn’t want her, evidently. They only take puppies.”

  “So where is she?” I ask from the doorway, only half wanting to know.

  Ben hits the key again. “It doesn’t say.”

  “I know,” Eletha says. She walks into the room, waving a yellow Post-it on her finger. “They just called.”

  “Who did?”

  She holds the paper in front of my face. On it is a phone number I don’t recognize. “I voted for Susan, but I’ll never forgive myself.”

  9

  “She’s too big, Mom,” Maddie says, shuddering in her nightgown. “Look at her teeth.”

  Bernice strains against her red collar, which still says A. GREGORIAN; her wagging tail swats my thigh with each beat.

  “But I’m holding her, honey. She won’t hurt you, she can’t. Just come over and let her sniff you. She’s all clean now.” I bathed Bernice right after I bathed Maddie, using green flea shampoo they sold me at the dog pound, along with a leash, two steel bowls, and a thirty-dollar trowel for shoveling a megaton of dogshit.

  “Rrronononr,” Bernice grumbles, a guttural noise that makes Maddie’s blue eyes widen in fear.

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s talking to you, honey. She wants you to love her.”

  “But I don’t love her. I don’t even like her.” Maddie tugs anxiously at the end of a damp strand of hair; her hair looks brown when it’s wet, more like my mother’s original russet color than her own blazing red.

  “Aw, can’t you just give her a little pat on the head? Her hair’s washed too.” I scratch Bernice’s newly coiffed crown and she looks back gratefully, her tongue lolling out. “See? Look how happy she is to be with us.”

  “But why did we have to take her?”

  “Because nobody else would. They all have apartments that don’t allow pets. We’re the only ones with a house who could have a pet.”

  “They could move.”

  “No. Now come closer.”

  She doesn’t budge. “Why couldn’t you just leave her there? In the dog pound.”