Limitations

19

George Mason has known Cassandra Oakey all her life. He held her no more than a month after she was born, and he retains a clear memory of playing Go Fish with her for an entire afternoon when she was seven and had come to the office with Harrison on a school holiday while George was in the life-suspended state that always set in when he was waiting for a jury. Harry, ever the cheerleader, dragged George to several of Cassie’s high school tennis matches, when she played number two on a conference championship team. She lacked quickness, but she was a determined and powerful player, with a serve like a mortar.

But Cassie Oakey can-and does-walk in and out of the judge’s chambers with impunity, and among his staff, she would approach George’s personal computer with the least natural trepidation. Far more telling, Cassie Oakey was the only staff member with him at the Hotel Gresham when his cell phone disappeared. And Cassie is leaving in two weeks, apparently with a sense of unrelieved injury.

“It has to be somebody who works in chambers,” George explains to Patrice as they eat dinner in the kitchen, picking over the leftovers of a restaurant meal from two plastic containers. “It’s not realistic that anyone else would be able to steal on to my computer twice in the same day when I wasn’t around. Cassie’s office is right there. Who else could get in and out so quickly?”

“I don’t believe it,” says Patrice.

“I don’t believe it of any of them. Dineesha?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Banion’s been with me nearly nine years. Marcus-I mean people can surprise you, but if Marcus is a computer whiz-”

“No,” Patrice says definitively about George’s hoary bailiff.

“No.” He had reached the same conclusion about Cassie while he was speaking to Marina at Area 2 but wanted time to disprove it to himself. Her motive remains elusive. Harrison is often a practical joker, and George wonders if perhaps this started as some kind of prank, which she could not acknowledge when it turned out that no one saw the humor. “It’s got to be some psychiatric mishmash. Don’t you think? Some issue with her father? It just makes no sense.”

Patrice groans then. “What will you say to Harry and Miranda?”

In response, he emits a similar sound. But the judge will have to confront his clerk, if for no other reason than to save her from herself. The threat to Nathan Koll means that George cannot quietly excuse this escapade on his own. Besides, Marina is going to review her notes tonight and realize that only Cassie was with him at the luncheon. His clerk will have to resign tomorrow to avoid Marina’s inquisition and to gain control of events that could ultimately imperil her law license. Always the defense lawyer, George is already thinking how he can smooth this over if Cassie fesses up quickly. He’ll need Rusty’s help, which is not guaranteed. We all run true to form, and Rusty, after all, started as a prosecutor.

George calls Cassie at home a little after 8:30 P.M. Something urgent, he says. Can she meet him for breakfast at 8:00?

Predictably, she more or less insists on knowing what this is about. “Is it Warnovits? Have you finally made up your mind?”

“Well, that’s one thing,” he says. Since his conversation with Lolly this afternoon, the case, for the first time in weeks, seems less like his own dose of iodine-131, beaming destructive rays through his body. “I’ve decided I want to write a draft myself. A matter like this probably justifies being a little more expansive.” George’s opinions normally run lean. His ingrained view of judging is to decide only what needs to be resolved and with as few words as possible.

“What did I mess up?” she asks at once. “Is it the limitations stuff?”

“Your work was as good as always. I’m sure I’ll use a lot of it, and ask for your help. I just want to lay my own hand on this to start.” It occurs to him that this is a pointless discussion. Cassie is going to be gone from chambers by tomorrow afternoon.

“So what else do you want to talk about?”

“It will be better in person.”

She sighs with her characteristic absence of deference, indicating that George is being a pain.

“Where?”

He gave that question some thought before picking up the phone and had an inspiration.

“How about the Hotel Gresham?” If Cassie has a conscience, and he remains confident she does, she’ll be uneasy there, perhaps quicker to admit what she’s done. Predictably, she objects that the hotel is too far from chambers.

“The only place in town I eat bacon,” George says. “Hand-cut and Virginia-cured. When you sin, Cassandra, you always go back to your roots.”

George does not think about his security convoy until he wakes. Police protection is unneeded now, since there’s no evidence that Cassie is engaged in anything other than psychological warfare. Nevertheless, somebody will probably show up. Marina figures to be slow to admit things were not as she suspected. And then again, there’s the practical problem that George needs a ride to work. He leaves a voice message for Marina saying that he’ll make his own way to the courthouse and calls a taxi, arriving at the Hotel Gresham by half past seven. He stands in the gaudy lobby, a remnant of the Gilded Age, with marble columns the size of sequoias and a ceiling encrusted with gilt and cherubim, while he tries to recall the whereabouts of the Salon, where breakfast is served.

A plump, amiable security guard in a blazer, with a white earpiece peeking under her hairdo, approaches to offer help.

“You’re the judge, right? I saw you on TV the other night. How you doin’?”

In the last twenty-four hours, he has frequently found himself the object of staring, a distinctly uncomfortable experience. His father always disapproved of calling attention to oneself.

“I think the arm’s a lot better this morning.”

“Glad to hear that. We all were talking about you yesterday. I was sure when I heard that on the news, I knew you. You’re the judge who lost his cell phone here last month, right?”

When he nods, she lights up, pleased by the potency of her memory.

“You got it back now, don’t you?”

“Nope. It never showed up.”

“Now how can that be? I thought for sure somebody from your office got over here to pick it up after Lucas found it there near the ballroom. Isn’t that right?”

He has actually said ‘Nope’ a second time before he recognizes that she’s speaking from knowledge. She escorts him to her chief’s office, a glorified closet whose door is concealed artfully in the dark paneling, where they wait for her boss, Emilio, to dig the paperwork out of the file. What he presents to the judge is a pink copy of the triplicate returned property form that’s used for items retrieved from Lost and Found. On May 26, the day after George’s cell phone turned up missing, John Banion signed for it.

George has already asked the doorman to call a taxi when he remembers Cassie and dashes back to the Salon. A huge brandy snifter of orange juice sits in front of her on the formal china.

He does not trust Cassie’s discretion-she has virtually none-but he’s mortified to think he suspected her, and the best excuse for meeting here is offered by the returned property form, which George, with some art, suggests he expected to be picking up.

“Huh,” Cassie says as she studies it. “I thought it might be John.”

“You did?”

“Only since yesterday afternoon. Marina came in to impound your computer.”

“She didn’t mention that,” the judge says sourly, although in fairness to Marina, she probably regarded the need to seize the machine for evidence as obvious.

“John actually came in to ask her what she was doing and why. I thought that was strange. Stranger.” She gives her short blond hair a toss. “Frankly, George, I always wondered if the guy might be a secret ax murderer.”

“Did you? I just assumed he was terribly lonely, Cassie.”

She shrugs. The misfit, ungainly people of the world are not so much beneath her as incomprehensible. But George has faith in Cassie. She has infinite sympathy for the deprived. In time, she will recognize that suffering has many faces.

“I wonder if you have a clue what motivated him,” George asks.

“He’s not crazy about me.”

“You’re leaving.”

“Right.” She shrugs again. “I mean it’s a crappy thing, George. But a guy like John-I wonder if he really can grab hold of how scary this was for you. You know, you’re this judge, this mountain. I don’t think he gets it.”

The server puts their plates down before them. The food and the sad truth about Banion plunge them into silence.

As they start to eat, Cassie abruptly says, “I should know you well enough to realize you didn’t mean that stuff about an appetite for old sins.” His heart squeezes at the prospect of her coming rebuke for his lack of faith in her, but instead she points at his plate. “No bacon,” she says.