The Judge

EPILOGUE

It was the final irony, that in the struggle for their lives, unwilling to part with the evidence of Kline’s crime, Lenore had performed her own sleight of hand: an exchange of one of her earrings for his gold cuff link. It was the earring I saw, which she had thrown onto the tracks that night, and that Kline had pursued to his death.

More than a week has passed, and Radovich has declared a mistrial in Acosta’s case. The newspapers are now filled each day with new revelations: the mounting evidence that Kline killed Brittany Hall. From pictures shown to her by police, Kimberly has finally identified Kline as the man she had seen with her mother the night of the murder. It was the reason Kline absented himself during her testimony both times in court: fear that the little girl would identify him.

The attorney general has stepped in, and two days ago announced that based on evidence he now has, charges against Acosta have been dismissed. The judge is a free man.

Armando and Lili came by the office yesterday and we talked. There is still no admission of Lili’s presence in Hall’s apartment that day. Some things are better left unsaid.

This morning Lenore and I are at the house. We are both exhausted, looking for a rest. Harry has agreed to hold down the fort for a week, so we are packing the car, taking the kids, Sarah and Lenore’s two girls, into the mountains for a few days to camp. Sarah has loaded the car with her fuzzy stuffed animals so that we may all have to ride on the roof.

“Will we need this?” Lenore is holding up the box containing the camp stove.

“If we want to eat,” I tell her.

“I thought we’d just call out for Chinese.” I’m getting the idea that tents and sleeping bags are not Lenore’s notion of a rest. Still, we will decompress in the clear mountain air with no television or phones, or reporters to hound us.

While there are still questions, Tony Arguillo has filled in some of the blanks, both to investigators who have questioned him, and in private to Lenore.

In pillow talk, Hall told him about her affair with Kline, which by that time had gone sour. She was making noises of sexual harassment. Some are saying that he refused to give her a job. Lenore thinks it is something more. Woman’s intuition.

Lenore says Kline would have given Hall a job in a minute. “With a staff of a hundred, positions in his office were a dime a dozen,” she says.

“So what do you think?” I ask.

“My guess? Hall was after the gold ring. She wanted him to leave his wife, but it was his wife’s money that fueled his career.”

Caught between the two jaws of this particular vice, a wife with money and a mistress charging sexual harassment, Kline cracked. In the heat of passion, anger flashed like powder in a pan at her apartment that night. The rest we know.

Lenore is cryptic. She gives me an arched eyebrow, like a woman would know, leaving me with a grain of doubt; perhaps Kline was right. Had Hall said something to her that day that may have given a clue? Or is this just hindsight? I will never know.

It was only a guess, but I had pieced bits of it in my head following Kimberly’s examination on the stand. Why, after going to the trouble of trying a high-profile case, would you turn on your heels and allow a subordinate to examine the most sympathetic witness, the survivor, the little child Kimberly? Unless, that is, you had something to fear. It was Kline’s uncertainty as to whether she saw him that night that made him such a reluctant player. And then there was the look on his face from the back of the courtroom that day, mystified, as she fed jelly beans to the little bear, the light in his eyes, as it finally dawned, the final piece to the puzzle: what happened to the missing cuff link. For a time, I suspect that he thought Lenore had it, that she had found it that night when she left her fingerprint on the door to Hall’s apartment. Perhaps he thought she was just one more scheming female, waiting for the right moment to use it, to extract the maximum advantage. There was a great deal that was cryptic in his conversation with me that evening at the fund-raiser: that Lenore knew something, that perhaps she had something.

And then there was Kline’s obsession about Lenore’s interview with Hall. Why? Unless perhaps he thought Hall had told Lenore something about a relationship that was souring. Hall was a social gadfly and a professional climber. I could not help but notice when the letter K turned up missing from her directory. We still do not know if this was fortuitous, the work of Tony on behalf of another. Or if Kline did it himself.

Hall’s apartment that night was like Grand Central Station. It was a measure of the woman and her aspirations that nearly everyone involved in the subsequent trial was there, though not at the same moment-Lili, and Tony, Lenore and I, and Kline.

In fact the only one not to make a visit that night was Gus Lano, though he was in her phone book, and is now in jail.

The reason Harry could be so certain that Lano would return early from his trip was that he never left. Lano had an appointment at the airport with Customs that he could not anticipate, an anonymous phone call, a tip that he was packing nearly a kilo of cocaine in one of his bags.

After the raid at my home, I’d given this to Harry to dispose of, I assumed down some toilet. Harry’s idea of a convenient commode was one of Lano’s unguarded bags in the clerk’s office that last day. When I questioned him about this, he called it “recycling”: Harry’s notion of environmental activism. With Lano running through the airport clamoring to catch his plane, federal agents shagged him.

All debts are now paid, questions answered, the story full circle-poetry in motion.