Limitations

18

George stands on the sidewalk outside Area 2 with Marina and Abel, trying to gather himself. It’s shift change, and the black-and-whites are double-parked in the small lot behind the station while uniformed officers, usually in pairs, stroll in and out in the declining light of a mild late-spring evening. Across the street, in a ragged park, a few flowering trees remain in bloom on a lawn that is littered and unmowed. George’s arm is bothering him. He needs more ibuprofen.

“My computer?” he asks. “The first message came from my computer?”

“Yes, sir,” Marina answers. “They finally got around to running the forensic software and reconstructing your hard drive, so they could see everything that had been on it. I mean, it’s an obvious thought that a message returned to your computer came from there. But since the rest of the e-mails went through the open relay, the Bureau techies pretty much crossed that off. They only ran the forensic software to double-check on your copy of the message Koll received, to see if there was something about it they hadn’t noticed, but as long as they were doing it, the techs poked around to look at the very first e-mail-the one you thought you’d deleted?-and when they reconstructed the message, it was like, ‘Whoa!’ It was from your IP address, through the courthouse server. That seemed pretty weird because there was no copy in your Sent file. They figured it was a super-sophisticated spoof, and then one of them suggested reconstructing the Sent file too, and there it was. It’d been deleted.”

“And what about the other e-mails I got?”

“Nope. The Bureau says the first is the only one sent from your machine. The rest just mimicked your address-there’s no sign of them on your hard drive.”

“So what’s the thinking, Marina? I’ve been threatening myself?”

Marina’s mouth rolls around. “Are you asking me or are you asking the Bureau?” she answers finally.

“Oh, for Chrissake” is all George can say.

“I mean, Judge. It wouldn’t be the first time some attention-seeking meatball threatened himself. It happens all the time.”

That’s why the Bureau ran the forensic software. Because it dawned on someone that they hadn’t crossed the first logical suspect off the list. Even in his irritation, George realizes that, as a perpetrator, he probably makes more sense than Corazon.

“Marina, I was sitting there with John Banion when one of those early messages arrived. The one where we called you? I couldn’t have sent it to myself.”

She hitches a shoulder. “It can be twenty minutes, Judge, from sending to receipt.”

“And what’s my motive?” But that’s clear, when he reflects for an instant. He’s running for retention, after all, and can benefit from appearing a hero to the public. “Do they figure I arranged to get my arm broken too?”

“It’s a theory, Judge. You think I’d be talking to you like this if I believed it?”

Ten count, he thinks, and recites each number to himself slowly.

“But let’s figure out who it is,” she says, “and leave present company aside. We’re looking for somebody who had access to your computer.”

“No one has access to my computer. Seriously, Marina. Anybody who sat down in my chair and started typing would have a lot of questions to answer.”

“It wouldn’t take thirty seconds to type out ‘You’ll pay,’ when you’d stepped out.”

Trying to unscramble all of this, George thinks back to the initial messages.

“So if I understand,” he says, “the first e-mail, the one that says ‘You’ll pay,’ comes from my computer. And then someone sends me the identical message twice the same day from another computer?”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Obviously, to get your attention.”

“No. I mean why use my computer in the first place? Were we supposed to have noticed this a long time ago? Is it like the messages to my cell phone? Or my home? Number One showing how easily he can invade my space?”

An eyebrow flares. “What messages to your home?”

“Just one,” George says, but for a second he’s afraid she’s going to slap him.

“You are a lousy, lousy patient,” Marina says finally.

“Duly noted.”

She takes another instant to calm down. Now they are more or less even, both aggravated and trying to put it aside.

“Well,” she says finally, “if you were supposed to notice that the e-mail came from your computer, Judge, why would somebody delete it? The techs say both copies-the received message and the retained copy of what was sent-were removed simultaneously. About six hours after it initially went out.”

“Meaning it wasn’t deleted by accident?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“I’m lost,” George says.

“Okay,” Marina says, “but let’s work this through. We’re talking about somebody who could walk into your chambers when you weren’t there and not be noticed. Twice that day. You tell me who that is.”

“Do they know the timing on all of this?”

Marina’s little notebook is in the pocket of her khaki sport coat.

“Sent 9:42 A.M. And then it gets deleted from both files a little before four.”

“So there are definitely other people around chambers both times?”

“Seems likely. Does anybody besides you know the password on your computer?”

“Dineesha.”

“Just Dineesha?”

The truth lands on him like something from the sky. Zeke. Zeke after all. It’s a proven fact that he freely rifles his mother’s things. She has the password written somewhere, and Zeke found it. The judge speaks his name.

“Great minds,” says Marina. “That was what hit me when I heard from the Bureau. But that first message, that was sent on a Friday. When Zeke was supposed to be down in St. Louis. And we just called the company to confirm he was there. He’s clear.”

Clear, but also unemployed, George thinks. Zeke’s employer in St. Louis won’t keep him a day after receiving questions from the FBI. So it goes for Zeke. This is the other side of his story. But, as always, it’s Zeke’s mother George feels for the most.

“All right,” he says. “Where were we?”

“Password on your computer? Only Dineesha has it.”

“Right.” He thinks. “But if I’d been using the computer and went down the hall for a minute, the security screen wouldn’t cycle back on for what, fifteen minutes?”

“Should be ten,” Marina says. “So let’s say it’s somebody who walked in at that point and typed for just a second. Who could that be?”

“Anybody on my staff.”

“Okay. That’s got to be our priority group. Because of the timing. Who else could just go cruising in there?”

“Sometimes another judge comes by to drop off a draft. These days we usually e-mail, but now and then there’s an issue to talk over, and one of my brethren will hand-carry his or her opinion to me. I suppose if I was out the first time, she or he would have an excuse to come back.”

“And can we figure out which judges you were working with?”

“It’s end of term, Marina. In the last month, I’ve probably exchanged drafts with every member of the court from the Chief on down.”

“Okay. So we rule in your staff. The judges. And?”

“Maybe their clerks. It’s possible. But if we’re talking about somebody who could just walk past Dineesha, then we’d have to include people from your shop. Murph and you.”

“We’ll put me on the suspect list right behind you. Who else?”

“IS. Maintenance. That’s about it.”

“Okay. So where do we start?”

“Start what?”

“Well, I’d like to question your staff.”

George knows what that will be like. Bare-knuckles interrogation. Dineesha, John, Cassie, Marcus. They’ll be hot-boxed, accused. He doesn’t like the idea at all and says so.

“Do you have a best guess, Judge? Somebody who should be first?”

“Can I think about it overnight?”

Marina agrees. Abel will drive George back to the courthouse, then home. They have reached the van when George snaps his fingers and trots back into the station to see Grissom.

“I forgot,” he says. “Where’s my car?”

It’s at the pound, in the hands of the evidence techs. Even expediting everything-lifts, vacuuming, photographs-it will be a few days before the P.A.’s office signs off on the release.

Grissom gives him a little smile. “Besides, you’re not thinking of driving now, Judge, are you? Not before you get that arm out of a sling.”

“Law enforcement,” George says to Abel when he climbs into the van.

In chambers, he finds that Banion, ever faithful, has left papers on his chair, printouts from a periodical database. It’s a moment before George fathoms the point. It’s a listing of articles by authors named Lolly or Viccino. On the bottom of page one, there are four entries from quilting journals by somebody named Lolly Viccino Gardner. John has used another search engine to find a phone and an address in Livermore, California, which he’s written in the margin in his tidy hand.

George checks his watch. Two hours earlier there.

“I’ll be a few minutes, Abel,” he calls. Lounged on the green sofa and engrossed in a paperback novel about cops, Abel merely waves as George closes the door.

Why? he asks himself. But he’s already dialing. It rings four times, and whoever says hello sounds a bit breathless, as if she ran.

“My name is George Mason. Judge George Mason. I’m hoping to speak to a woman named Lolly Viccino-or who used to go by that name.”

Time passes. “Speaking.”

“And are you the Lolly Viccino who attended Columa College in 1964?” he asks, although he knows he’s found her from the little wrinkle of a Tidewater accent in the lone word she’s uttered.

Lolly Viccino, in the meantime, is engaged in calculations of her own.

“Is this about money? Are you raising money for that place? Because, brother, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“No, ma’am,” he answers, realizing that he himself sounds a little as he might have forty years ago. “Hardly that. No.”

“And you say you’re a judge?”

He repeats his title. “In DuSable.”

“DuSable. I’ve never been there. Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

“No, no,” he says. “This isn’t official business.”

“Oh,” she says. “I hoped you were calling to tell me I’d inherited a fortune from a long-lost relative.” She laughs then, a little trick of sound raveled by bitterness.

“Afraid not,” he says.

“Well, why then?”

He finally says he’d been an undergrad at Charlottesville.

“And did I know you?” she asks.

“I think so.”

“Did we go out? I’m not sure I dated anybody there.”

“No,” he agrees.

“How was it we met?”

So here he is. There’s no way he can get the words out of his mouth. And it would be cruel to remind her of something she’s stored away, whether conveniently or with some measure of pain. Even the day after the event, he wasn’t sure how much she’d retained. He never answers.

“Because I don’t think about any of that,” she adds then. “I never go back to that part of the world. Do you?”

He doesn’t actually. Not since his parents died. Both his sisters are in Connecticut. He has surrendered his Virginia citizenship, as it were. And so has Lolly Viccino.

“It’s all so old there,” she says. “I’m just happy to be gone. I don’t talk to any of them from home, to tell you the truth. And how did you say I know you?”

“I just have a memory,” he says, “of bumping into you. During Party Weekend in the fall. And I’ve been thinking about some things that happened back then.”

“Well, I’m sure I wouldn’t remember. I can’t even picture anything from that time. I hated all of it.”

“Oh,” he says.

“So I’m afraid I can’t help you, Judge. Mason?”

“Yes.”

She lingers then. Of course, she thinks she knows the name. Which she does. You can’t grow up in Virginia without hearing of George Mason. They named a university for him, and roads. Saving that, George is certain she would have hung up moments ago.

“I suppose,” he says, “I suppose I’ve been curious about how your life turned out.”

“Really? And why is that? How did your life turn out?”

“Pretty well,” he responds instantly. “Very well.” That, in fact, has been the unvoiced question of the last few months, and this, he realizes, is his answer. He has most of what he ever wanted. He’s been able to say that for quite some time, especially since he reached the Court of Appeals. His family’s always been A minus to A plus, depending on the moment. Judge Mason gets up most mornings knowing that life worked out better for him than for most people.

“I can’t say that,” she says. “I get by. I’ve gotten by. But I’m here, you know? One day at a time. That’s how it is for everybody, right? It’s not easy for anybody, Judge, is it?”

“Well, I’m sorry for anything I did to make it harder,” he replies. If you had pressed him for an answer when he lifted the phone, he would have said that he was calling her to help decide a case. He thought he might have been searching for Lolly to see how much damage had been done, and how angry she remained four decades later. Or to try to confirm his current interpretations. Did she think she had been trying to punish or debase herself when she hooked up with Hugh Brierly and his roommate, or had she simply suffered from one of those boundless, youthful misapprehensions of what might be fun? Had she been deceived somehow? Or even coerced? Or was it possible, if he were being unsparing, that the incident did not stand alone? But it turns out that his greatest desire is to address her as someone who has profited from his life and now knows better. Who looks back with regret. Who wishes he made something sweet, rather than cruel, out of what was inevitably a momentous instant in his life, for his sake, first, and also for hers. And to tell her that.

“Oh, brother,” Lolly Viccino says in response. “Get in line. Are you in AA?”

“No.”

“Because those people always want you to get hold of somebody you haven’t seen since Noah and tell them you’re sorry. That’s why I quit,” she says. “I didn’t see the sense of that. Who forgives me for all the stupid crap I did? Nobody. That’s for sure. Just go on. That’s what you have to do. You can’t change the past, right, Judge? Am I right? So forget it. That’s my attitude.”

“I see,” he says.

“That’s how some people are. That’s how I am. So I’m afraid I can’t help you. Whatever it is, it’s all ancient history.”

“Of course.”

“So thank you for calling, Judge.” Now that she has reaffirmed the motto she lives by, she seems determined to get away before he can remind her of anything else. Then someone speaks behind her, a woman whose arrival only seems to hasten Lolly’s desire to end the conversation. The last word he hears from her as the phone is going down is “Strange.”