The Judge

CHAPTER 32

We wait for nearly two hours for things to quiet. A team of janitors have completed their chores on this floor, and a security guard has done his rounds, so that we have now timed his comings and goings.

The guard rattles the outside door to the courtroom and disappears down the broad public corridor. I can hear the bell as the elevator arrives, then the hushed silence as it whisks him to another floor.

Lenore and I make for the back door and the private hallway that leads to Radovich’s courtroom. The corridor itself is well-lit, a wall of windows on one side that look out on the street. It is devoid of any furnishings, antiseptic white walls and light vinyl floors punctuated by periodic doors leading into the various courtrooms. Each door is identified by its department number, painted in large green numerals.

Lenore has given me the keys, so I lead the way. We do not have far to travel. A single complex of rooms separates us from Radovich’s court.

“Don’t look now, but we’re being watched,” says Lenore.

“Hmm?”

“The ceiling.”

I glance up and see it, a recessed security camera.

“Smile and talk,” she says. “Just two people working late. Just us little beavers rifling evidence.”

I have brought along a small flashlight and one of Nikki’s old crochet hooks for this purpose, something with which to deftly probe the belly of the bear. If I find anything I will leave it, recall Kimberly to the stand, and ask specifically what she fed to the bear the night of the murder, laying a foundation for a more thorough examination of the evidence, this time before the jury.

We pass under the fixed camera which is now aimed in the direction over our heads and behind us. Off screen for the moment, we stop.

The door to Radovich’s chambers is forty feet down the corridor near another camera in the ceiling.

“One thing’s for certain,” she says, “we’re going to be on film.”

“Let’s just hope they’re not watching the screens right now.”

Either way we will have to chance it.

“No furtive gestures, look natural,” I tell her. “We have legitimate business, authority to be here,” I say.

“Fine. If we get caught, you do the talking,” she says.

“If we get caught, we’ll leave that to our lawyer.”

“You really know how to calm a girl’s fears.”

We close the distance to the door, Lenore talking all the while, a nervous monologue in my ear, so that it’s not necessary for me to respond.

When we get to the door she is between me and the camera, masking for an instant my action with the keys in the lock. It takes me several tries until I find the right one, then it turns in the cylinder. The door clicks open, and in a breath we are inside; it closes quietly behind us.

Here it is dimly lit, the only illumination the scant light cast by the red glow of an Exit sign over our heads on the door, and a couple of canister lights left on for security in the outer courtroom.

I motion for her to take a peek out into the public area. She does it and comes back.

“All clear.”

“Is there a separate key for the clerk’s office?” I ask her.

A stark look from Lenore. We have never considered this.

“Try the master,” she says.

What is clear is that we only get one shot. If we have no key we are out of luck. Neither of us has the moxie to jimmy the lock. At the moment my own knees are Jell-O.

I slide the key soundlessly into the lock and twist. Smooth as silk it turns. The door pops open.

My heart nearly seizes up. Lead in every vein.

“Aw, shit.” Lenore actually says this as soon as she sees him.

In the muted blue light of a computer screen, Coleman Kline stands peering back at us from the center of the room. His feet are braced wide apart, hands coupled behind his back, he’s rocking on his heels like a cop on the beat, waiting for us, the cold frontal assault.

“Mind telling me what you’re doing here?” he says. The voice of authority, he directs this at Lenore.

She recoils, gets behind me, whispers up close, reminders that I was going to do the talking.

“Ah, Mr. Madriani. You’re acting as mouthpiece tonight? And you, Ms. Goya, lost your tongue, have you? Well, that is a first, isn’t it?” He puffs out the shoulders of his suit coat, sucking up authority like a blowfish sucks water, the officious prosecutor with a bone to pick.

“We might ask you the same thing.” Lenore is the first to find words for this, though she says them from behind me. “What are you doing here?”

“I have a key,” he says. “Entrusted to me by the county. Where did you get yours?” It’s not exactly an answer, but it’s better than ours if he presses Lenore on the subject.

All the while my eyes travel up and down him, until on their second trip they reach bottom, at his shoes. Around his feet are small tufts, cottonlike and white with what looks like remnants of frayed wool. On the carpet is a dime and a jelly bean. I scan around his feet with my eyes, and then I see it. Last in, first out: a small, pink, heart-shaped button.

I stand listening, seemingly mesmerized by his harangue, a dull look on my face, until it settles on me. We are minds on a parallel course, Kline and I. Radovich left instructions to lock up the evidence tomorrow morning. I had never considered the possibility that the killer might come for it himself tonight.

Kline follows my gaze. He glances down and suddenly sees what I’m looking at. He stops speaking in midsyllable.

Then it strikes me that his hands are not coupled behind his back. He is holding something.

“Well, I don’t know about the two of you,” says Lenore, “but if we’re going to stand here and argue I’d like to feel like something other than a lounge lizard. If you don’t mind I’m going to turn on some lights.”

Before I can stop her, she steps around me toward the light switch that is on the far wall behind Kline.

“No!” I reach out but it’s too late.

He is faster than I would have credited, his hand roughly on her shoulder, he spins her in place. Lenore suddenly finds her back braced against his body, Kline’s left arm tight across her chest, his right hand holding a knife, a four-inch blade to her throat. In his left hand are the tattered remnants of Kimberly’s bear, its front slit by the razor-sharp knife. Always the quick study, Kline had acquitted himself well when we barged in on him, taking the offense, bluster and bullshit. He’d nearly talked his way clear.

Lenore struggles but his grip is firm. He presses the needle-sharp point of the knife to her throat and the fight goes out of her.

“You have been a real pain in the ass, lady.” He says this to her up close in her ear. “Damn inquisitive mind, asking all the wrong questions. You and Hall behind closed doors. My worst nightmare.”

I lean forward on my toes, looking for an opening, and he presses the knife more firmly; a drop of blood forms at the tip.

“Ahh. No. No,” he says. “Nothing personal. I don’t want to hurt her. But if you force me …”

“Easy,” I tell him.

“Back up,” he says.

I retreat a step.

“This is stupid,” I tell him. “It’s over.”

He says nothing but studies me with a look I have not seen before, something between mischief and madness: a whole new side to Kline, like the professional suddenly gone playboy.

“You’re not going to kill her,” I tell him. “You know it and I know it.”

“At this point I might consider skinning her to be a good sport. Payback for the aggravation,” he says. “I could mount the hide over my desk.”

I sidle a few steps sideways, but not enough for him to get past.

“The evidence.” I nod toward the tattered toy. “Was it a ring?”

Lenore gives me an expression like this is no time for conversation, the lawyer’s dozen.

Kline doesn’t answer, his hands full at the moment.

Then I see them, exposed by his outstretched arms around Lenore, starched linen nearly to the elbows, and punctuating each wrist, engraved with his initials, Kline’s trademark, the gold cuff links.

“Of course.”

It is the reason he had to get it back, his engraved initials along with the tool marks, the scratches from the table. I finally understand his obsession with Lenore. When the missing cuff link did not show among the items of evidence, he had to wonder. And when her fingerprint was found on the door it filled in the blank, but with the wrong information. Kline thought that Lenore had found his cuff link.

“Over further,” he tells me.

“Where do you think you’re going to go? How far can you run?”

“What makes you think I have to go anywhere?”

“What about us?” says Lenore.

“What about you? Move over,” he tells me.

I inch a few more steps to one side, but not enough for him to chance it, to step by me.

“We know about it,” says Lenore.

“And who’s going to believe you?” he says. “A bitter opponent in a capital case, and a former employee I had to fire for misconduct in office, her fingerprints all over the victim’s front door. Not a lot of credibility in that.”

Kline is right. Without the incriminating piece of jewelry, we have nothing. With the tool marks, his initials, and Kimberly to identify it as the treasure she gathered that night from the floor near her mother and fed to her bear, Kline had reason for concern.

“All that has to happen,” he says, “is for this to disappear, and we all go on about our lives.”

Everyone except Acosta, who, it seems, is expected to take the fall.

Lenore struggles in his arms. For an instant I think he is going to slice her throat like a melon. But all he manages is to shake what is left of Kimberly’s bear, like a dead carcass that has been gutted. Some of the stuffing from its innards drops to the floor, and with it a few of Kimberly’s treasures, which scatter when they hit.

He looks, darting, greedy eyes over Lenore’s shoulder.

There, on the floor between us, at her feet, glistening in the muted light, is the object of his search. But Kline can’t get it, not without letting go of Lenore. If he does he knows I will jump him.

He looks at me, then back to the cuff link on the floor.

“Back up,” he tells me. “Back!”

I don’t comply.

“You wanna see her die?”

I take another step back.

“More,” he says.

Another couple of grudging inches, baby steps each one.

“Get it,” he tells Lenore. “Be easy about it.”

He nudges her forward with a knee and the knife to her jugular.

“If I move you’re gonna cut my throat with that thing,” she says.

“Don’t tempt me,” he tells her. “I’m gonna relax my grip. Try anything and I’ll cut you,” he says. “I mean it.”

“I don’t doubt you,” she says.

He releases his grip just a little, his eyes constantly on me. He withdraws the knife a few inches.

Lenore stoops. She snatches the shiny gold object from the carpet.

“Give it to me,” he says.

With her right arm fully extended, grasping the cuff link in her closed fist, she makes a single explosive move.

“Sure.” Her sharp elbow thrusts back like the push-rod on a locomotive. It catches Kline full force under the ribs. His cough of pain echoes through the room. In the instant that he doubles over, she is clear of him.

I push her toward the door. She falls on her hands and knees, and I get between them.

“Go! Go! Get out!”

As I turn Kline slashes with the knife, catching the sleeve of my coat. Frayed threads and blood mingle but I have no sense of pain. Then an instant later, a burning sensation races through my forearm, finally reaching my brain.

He draws his arm back for another swipe. I step away, grab a lamp off the desk, and use it to fend off the blow, metal on metal; a third thrust slashes through the lamp shade.

Lenore is still standing there, seemingly in shock, unwilling to leave me here alone.

I swing at him with the lamp, catch him on the arm, ripping the lamp’s cord from the outlet.

“Get out!” I tell her. By now I am swinging the lamp wildly in a giant arc, windmill fashion, standing between Lenore and Kline, keeping him at bay.

Realizing that with the object in her hand he will lose interest in me, Lenore finally turns and runs. Kline looks away for an instant, distraction. I send the lamp flying on an arc that catches him high on the cheek. This sends him reeling backward against a chair and the wall.

Lenore is through the door. A second later I hear the clatter of her heels on the vinyl floor in the corridor outside as she runs toward the other end of the building, then nothing, as if perhaps she has somehow run onto carpet.

Suddenly I realize that I have the keys. She cannot get into any of the courtrooms along the hallway.

Kline makes a move toward the door, and I cut him off. I am now casting objects from the clerk’s desk in his direction, like a kid pitching balls at cans in an amusement park. A heavy stapler catches him in the chest dead center, and he groans. This is followed by a cellophane tape holder that must weigh two pounds.

Now he’s angry. He starts returning in kind. He grabs a floor lamp and throws it at me full force. I duck, but a portion of it nails me on the shoulder.

I am just recovering from this, coming out of a crouch, when I see it out of the corner of one eye, a small potted plant sailing through the air like a satellite in orbit. This catches me above the right eye, the last thing I see before I find myself on the carpeted floor. Kline steps on the back of my knee going over me, and then the sound of the door as it opens and closes.

I am dazed, wobbling on hands and knees, with drops of warm blood trickling onto the back of one hand. I reach up and feel slick, smooth wetness on my head above the eye.

Then I think: Lenore.

It takes me a moment to steady myself on my feet, grasping the edge of the desk. I turn and stumble toward the door, into the hallway beyond, and out into the long white corridor. Twenty feet down this hall I discover the reason for Lenore’s soundless footfalls, what I thought was carpet. Her heeled shoes discarded, one here, the other ten feet farther down, as if they were flung from her feet as she ran.

Then I hear it, the clatter of the emergency exit at the far end, the door slamming closed. I run, my legs like water, at one point careening off the wall. I make my way down the corridor, around a corner. There, ahead of me, is the double metal door. I push the fire bar and find myself inside a concrete stairwell, the clatter of feet on the metal stairs descending below me. I follow the sound.

By the time I reach the third floor I hear a cavernous slam somewhere in the bowels below me, the door to the street closing, hard leather pounding pavement. I can only assume Kline’s made an exit, chasing Lenore.

It takes me another thirty seconds to make my way to the ground level. I open the door to the cold, dark night, look one way, then the other.

A block and a half away, running diagonally across the street, under the halo of a vapor lamp, I see a feline-like form, shoeless, running, then turning to look. She stops. Lenore. I scan the sidewalk ahead for Kline but cannot see him; the path is obscured by the shadows of thick-rooted trees, giant elms lining the walkway.

Suddenly Lenore starts to run; something has set her to flight like a frightened doe.

I pick up my feet. Heart pounding, I make it to the corner. There, under a streetlight a block ahead, I see a figure: a masculine form running, a solid stride. He cuts across the sidewalk into the street.

By the time she reaches the mall, Kline has cut the distance to Lenore by half. I am still more than a block away, running at open throttle.

The mall is a wide boulevard, pedestrians only, with light rail tracks running down the middle for five blocks. Tonight it has its own facade, aglitter with Yuletide color, flickering minilights; white, red, and green adorn the trees. But under them are an assorted legion of winos, homeless, and other vagrants. The downtown at night is abandoned by the working middle class.

A block from the plaza, there’s a throng of kids, mostly teenagers vying for space on the portable ice rink that the city erects each year. Lenore suddenly sees this and makes a beeline. Safety in numbers.

I am hoofing it, my breath forming clouds before me.

Suddenly I realize that I’ve lost sight of Kline, up ahead. He seems to have dodged somewhere off the street as I was watching Lenore. The hair on my neck rises and I begin to wonder if somehow I have run by him, that he is now behind me. I turn and look: nothing but cold, still darkness.

I scan the mall for a cop, anything in uniform, not that this would do much good with Kline. He is silver-tongued and no doubt would have Lenore and me jailed in an instant, searched and stripped of the one piece of evidence that does not lie. Cops on a beat don’t question an elected D.A., and private security would genuflect in his presence.

I am walking at a good clip by the time I make it under the treed lights of the mall. Lenore has disappeared into the crowd by the rink, the jubilant kids skidding on ice. They are lined three deep along the outside fence waiting their turn, “Jingle Bell Rock” blasting forth from a sound system to wake the dead.

I draw up to a phone booth near one of the light rail stops. For a moment I think I could call for help. But who? I’m a hundred feet from the rink, winos circling for change. Anything at night in a suit is fair game. One of them touches my arm and I shake him off, move away, scanning for Lenore. I see shimmering dark hair and a dark top, her back to me twenty feet away. I look for Kline in the crowd. Nothing.

I close on Lenore and grab her shoulder. She turns, a pimple-faced teen, chomping on gum.

“Hey! Whadda ya doin’?”

Some guy standing next to her, matching her pimple for pimple.

“Hey, Jeannie’s got some new squeeze,” he says.

“Hey, dude wants to cop a feel.” One of his friends.

“Hey, can we have one?” Some kid behind me, six-five, with chin whiskers like Fu Manchu.

“Sorry. Thought you were somebody else,” I tell her.

“Yeah. Sure. Get lost,” she says.

“Get lost, asshole.” Two of her girlfriends turn on me, and I melt into the crowd, thankful for the loud music.

I’ve gone no more than five steps when I see her. Across the rink, looking this way, against the railing: Lenore, wary eyes scanning the crowd.

I wave but she misses me. Then, like a camera focusing for depth, I see a tall figure closing on her from behind. My eyes lock on his like radar. Kline has seen her. He is no more than twenty feet away, pushing his way through bodies like an icebreaker.

I cut and run, nearly knocking over some kid. Out of the crowd, around the rink, I am sprinting, dodging in and out, searching the crowd for her. All around is the blare of music, the clatter of some mindless electronic bell, the hush of wheels on steel.

And then I see them, wrestling in the middle of the street. Lenore, her arm outstretched, fist tight, holding the object, Kline’s gold cuff link engraved with his initials and scribed with the incriminating tool marks like fingerprints in metal. Lenore is struggling, trying to pull away. Kline behind her, grappling, clawing at her outstretched arm.

I race.

Out of the corner of my eye I see it, the sleek metallic white and blue, glistening windows, five cars of light rail speeding up the street toward the tight turn onto the mall. Around the angle the operator cannot see Lenore and Kline wrestling on the tracks.

Then, in an instant, she reaches with one arm, a feeble toss, and the glint of gold in the air, the object of their struggle from here only a blur: Kline’s gold cuff link. It travels five feet on a dying arc, bounces twice, and lands in the crevice formed by the track and the street.

I am still twenty feet away.

The train is closing. Through the flat glass the operator finally sees them, but it’s too late. Steel grinding on steel, sliding, the physics of speed and momentum.

Kline has her from behind, one arm around her as he struggles to pull them both toward the object in the tracks, toward the oncoming train.

I lower my shoulder. With all the force my body can propel, I slide in front of Kline, nailing Lenore between hip and thigh, my arms closing around her, my legs driving. The impact of my body striking hers peels Lenore from his grasp. The impetus carries us across the tracks, tumbling on the concrete like Jack and Jill.

It seems my only functioning faculties at this instant are those receiving sound and vibration: the dead thud of metal hitting flesh and the stone silence of the crowd in the fleeting moment that follows.

We lay sprawled on the street, Lenore and I, pain finally filling in the voids.

The train slides for nearly half a block before coming to a stop, the last car finally passing us. Kids clamoring for a look stampede like wildebeests.

There is an effusion of blood, an explosion like a Dali painting on the concrete at the point of impact twelve feet away. A single shoe shot from its owner by the force rests between the rails; like some morbid fashion statement, comets of blood shine across its toe.

Lenore is shaking, stunned, all the symptoms of shock. In a daze I remove my coat and put it around her.

I crawl on my hands and knees, surveying the tracks as I go. The thought that the county’s chief prosecutor now lies dead, a spectacle for a horde of teeming youths, and that we have no evidence floats through my brain like a dark cloud. The cuff link is gone.

Lenore comes up behind me.

I wonder aloud at the obsession that could cause a man to take on thirty tons of speeding steel and glass.

“What in the world could have gone through his head?” I ask.

“Probably his ass,” she says.

As I look up at Lenore quivering in the cold behind me she has an expression that is something between a grimace and a smile. Her cold humor in the face of Kline’s death is the final edge of enmity in a bad relationship.

I turn back toward the chore at hand, my search along the gleaming rail.

“I can’t find it,” I tell her. I’m combing the crevice with my fingers, a foot at a time, grease and grime, looking for the missing cuff link.

“Are you sure?” she says.

“Yes. It’s not here.” Panic beginning to set in. What we will tell authorities in the absence of evidence I do not know.

For a moment I feel her presence leaning over my shoulder as she joins in the search. “Damn it,” she says. “They were my favorite pair, too.”

I stop and look up at her shivering form under the tinseled lights.

Standing there, she is holding a single gold earring in the open palm of one hand, and for an instant I don’t get it. I study her face, which wears the mask of an enigmatic smile, until she opens the palm of her other hand. In it is Kline’s gold cuff link.