A change of gravity

TWO

That he'd done the right thing and given her everything she asked for, so she wouldn't raise such a stink that he'd have to leave town maybe along with a lot of other people. Bad enough he was washed-up in politics; if he let that stuff hit the fan he would've had to forget the college job, too."

He paused. "I think Geoff Cohen might've even had that case."

"He did," the judge said. "Sam Evans from our shop represented Dan.

Sam was the divorce specialist. He was extremely good at it. Up until that case, consensus was he was the very best around He couldn't make divorce fun, but if you had to go through one and you could get Sam Evans, at least you could relax a little knew you were in good hands.

Top-notch negotiator; meticulous about details; scrupulously honest and a complete gentleman to boot.

"After the Hilliard case was over, Sam was almost inconsolable He said with all the sexual misconduct Hilliard had against him there'd been nothing he could do; he'd never had a chance The only hope that he'd had was that Geoff d make the kind of dumb mistake young lawyers sometimes make out of inexperience, and give Sam something he could use.

"Didn't happen. Sam said Geoff d known exactly what he had to work with; played his cards perfectly; made no mistakes at all and as a result ended up cleaning Sam's clock for him. After that in this part of the world there were two "best divorce lawyers around." In fact what Sam said about Geoff was what made me hire him. Sam'd gotten close to Ray during that racetrack deal-I thought it'd be too hard for him."

Then she frowned. "Who's the poor guy they're trying to make sink Dancin' Dan? Anyone else I might know?"

"I don't know," Robey said, 'you might. His name's Ambrose Merrion.

Canterbury District Court clerk. Ever got a speeding ticket on the way north to ski on something steeper than you've got right where you live?"

"I don't ski," she said. "People fall down doing that. Break their legs and stuff."

"Not if they know what they're doing," Robey said. "Anyway that's how I met him. Trooper wrote me up for eighty on Route Three-ninety-one in Cumberland. The other way to meet him's being active in politics. All the real Democratic insiders around here, all the way up to the state, even national, level: all of them would know him, know him very well. I doubt any one of them's ever paid a ticket in Amby's district."

"Did you pay yours?" the judge said.

"Truthfully? No, I didn't," Robey said. "It went, away. But not because of my secret life as a Democratic honcho. And not because I tried to fix it, either. The time when I got stopped up there for being in a big hurry, Marie and I were on our way to Montreal. Some friends from when she was at McGill; she hadn't seen most of them since she'd graduated, so naturally she was all keyed up. But I was excited too. This was going to be the best vacation wed ever had. Couldn't wait to get there's why I was driving so fast. I told the cop that in fact I hadn't realized how fast I had been going. Either he didn't believe me or that wasn't a good-enough excuse he wrote me up.

"I probably put being stopped completely out of my mind before we even crossed the state line into Vermont. And when we got home from those two-glorious-weeks-of-packed-powder, I didn't have the ticket. It was gone. I don't know what I did with it. I may've figured I'd get a summons in the mail; when it came I'd pay the ticket. But the summons never came. And of course I didn't notice because who thinks about a bill that never came? Then about, I dunno, three or four years ago, 'fore I started working for you, I got stopped again. On the Mass Pike on the way to Worcester. Paul McCartney concert at the Centrum:

Marie's a big fan of his. We're running late, as usual, so I was speeding, as usual. Got bagged for eighty-five. Suddenly it all comes back to me. Cop's back in the cruiser with my license, registration, punching his computer, and I'm thinking: "Oh my God, I never paid the one I got going up to Montreal. This cop's going to see there's a warrant out on me and he's going to put me in jail."

"But it didn't happen. Except for the fact I was getting another ticket costing me about a hundred-fifty bucks, and now we're really late for Paul McCartney, everything's perfectly fine.

"I couldn't understand it. The next day I called up the court in Canterbuaf and asked about it. Not that I like paying speeding tickets so much I go out looking for 'em when they get lost, but I was worried.

I didn't want it hanging over me.

"I gave my name, not what I do, and the woman asked me to wait while she got Mister Merrion. He came on and I told him the reason for my call, and he said: "Oh, yeah, of course, Judge Folkard's clerk. Forget it. It went away." '"Went away?" I said. "What do you mean?" '"I disappeared it," he said. He sounded like it was routine.

'"But why?" I said. "You don't know me. Did someone call you or something?" "Cause Judge Folkard'd been known to do that a few times, when his daughter got caught flying low coming home from New York. He was from the Old School, back when people did those things and didn't think a thing about it. I thought I maybe mentioned it and he'd taken care of it for me, and then forgotten to tell me. He's just that kind of guy."

"He'd better not be that kind of guy where people can see what he's doing nowadays," she said. "You can't do that stuff any more. People get angry. First thing you know, you're in disgrace."

"I know," Robey said, 'but that wasn't it. "Oh no," says Merrion,

"nothing like that. Professional courtesy's all. I know that stretch of road where Trooper Dacey busted you, and I know Dacey pretty well too. I don't like him. He's tucked it to me more'n once onna road. My tickets I hafta pay or he'll raise some kinda stink. But other people, he can't connect to me, their tickets're different matters. I don't think eighty's too fast where you were, when you were there, and therefore I didn't think Dacey should've grabbed you for doing it. So I dismissed it. "Substantial justice': that's our aim in this court."

"Naturally I thank him, but I'm also a little bit uncomfortable with all of this, so I say to him: "Well, I appreciate that. But you realize of course, it doesn't mean…"

"He cut me off. "Oh, calm down," he said, "for cryin' out loud. If I get a speeding ticket driving too fast onna federal reservation, I promise you I'll pay it. I wont call you up and say to you: "Hey, you gotta fix this for me. On account of I dumped one for you." This's between me and Dacey. It's a case of requited dislike. Every chance I get, I give him a shot. You're just an innocent bystander here. This isn't a serious matter."

"Year or so later I ran into him at a wedding. Bride's father's a honcho in the state Democratic party. He introduced us. Amby said the name was familiar, and I reminded him the reason. "I got a Dacey ticket, and you bagged it for me," I said. Offered to buy him a drink, which he accepted; said it'd probably get him indicted for taking a bribe for fixing tickets, but what the hell, he'd risk it. Joined us at our table. Got started telling stories and stayed for the rest of the day.

"Marie didn't like him; I did. Same with the other wives 'nd their husbands. Men liked him, women didn't. He used a lot of profanity, which I suppose was partly because we were all having lots to drink and everybody tends to cuss more when they're drinking. Marie and the other wives're dropping a few effs of their own every now and then, by the time we all called it a day, but… I don't know if you ever notice this, but women who hear every single cuss-word a man says, even if he says it under his breath, they never seem to be able to hear all the ones they use themselves."

"Can't say as I have," the judge said.

"Yeah," Robey said, 'well anyway, I've run into him a few times since then, conferences and so forth; had a few drinks and some meals. I enjoy his company. We're not buddies, never will be; age difference's too big. But I like him. I like his attitude toward the poor bastards who go through his court. He seems like he really does all he can to help them. No bleeding heart, I don't mean that, but he seems like a compassionate guy. Like he'd give you a break if he thought you deserved one and no one'd know it'd happened. He seems like he cares what happens to people, and if a rule has to get bent or some facts get overlooked so things turn out better for some poor bastard who made a mistake, but nobody really got hurt, well, I think he would bend the rule."

"The name's not familiar," she said. "Eric may've run into him, but I wouldn't know about that. He doesn't tell me anymore when he gets stopped. I give him too much grief. He's convinced his Range Rover's invisible; cops can't see it when it goes by at ninety. Pays all the tickets by mail. First I hear of it's when I 'get the insurance bill on my car and it's gone up again because he's a listed driver and he's gotten some more points. He says he likes to drive fast. If that's what it costs, so be it; he'll pay it. Says he doesn't want any redneck cop getting it into his head that his wife, the federal judge, fixes tickets for him."

"Probably a good idea," Robey said. "But anyway, that's who Amby is.

An all-right type of guy. Not a bad fella at all. Big, under six feet but fairly wide. White curly hair. Face's kind of red; he could lose a few pounds if he wanted, without doing himself any harm. He looks like what he is: he's a pol. He's been a pol all of his life. Been pals with Dan Hilliard since I don't know when; thirty years, probably more. Danny's the guy that got him appointed. From what Bissell feels he can let me in on, apparently Merrion's been repaying Danny for the favor ever since. Not paying him kickbacks, anything like that just giving him lots of nice presents."

"GratitudeV the judge said. "They're indicting people for gratitude now? Do they think it does some kind of damage or something? When did they make that against the law? Not that I ever saw much evidence of it actually taking place around these parts. Matter of fact, I wouldn't think there's ever been enough of it to warrant prosecution."

Robey laughed. "Yeah," he said, 'but apparently, what Bissell says, Amby's really grateful. This's the kind of appreciation that gives gratitude a bad name. What he did was he bought Hilliard a membership in the Grey Hills Country Club. Also bought himself one."

"The Chief belonged to that," she said. "He used to talk about it, now and then, when I first joined the firm. Pooler's father, too, I think;

Lee Pooler was a member, unless I'm mistaken. That's the high-rent district."

"That it is," Robey said. "And they're the type of people Grey Hills used to be for. Very exclusive. But then about, oh I don't know, twenty-five, thirty years ago, the club ran into some kind of a financial emergency. What you and I would call "strapped for cash."

Had to open up the membership and let some new blood in to fatten up the treasury. "New money" would've been more like it. Big rebuilding project or something. The very exclusive people like the Coreys and the Poolers couldn't see their way clear to footing the bill by their elegant selves, so the only alternative was to open the doors and let some of the better-heeled riffraff in.

"Most likely joining then didn't cost Merrion anywhere near what it'd cost today, if you could even get inI don't think they're accepting new members now. But still, as you say, it wasn't small change. And on top of that, since then apparently what he's been doing is paying the dues for both of them, too. That isn't petty cash either. Bissell thinks maybe three-four grand a year. I bet it's more like eight thousand apiece. Split the difference and call it, six grand a year.

Twenty years of that go by, it begins to mount up. Bissell thinks over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars by now, Merrion's paid in for his pal Danny. That's fairly serious money."

"Cowa'bunga," she said. "On the salary a clerk makes? You've got to be kidding. How on earth could he possibly do that? How much are we paying district court clerks these days?"

"It depends on where you're the clerk," Robey said. "The statute doesn't actually come right out and give any specific numbers. It's this very complicated formula that of course the legislators made just as hard to figure out as they possibly could when they wrote the salary statute. Sixty or seventy grand, I would say, by and large. Some of them probably get around eighty. And since Merrion's Hilliard's pal, and Hilliard used to have mucho clout, Merrion's probably one of those.

Say eighty thousand a year."

"Well, that's not too shabby," she said. "But still, I wouldn't think it was country-club country for him and a friend. Not Grey Hills level, at least."

"Well," Robey said. "Bissell sort of seems to think that what he gets for salary isn't all he makes, result of being clerk. Seems to think he's got some other source of income. I assume it isn't bribes if it was, Bissell'd have him keeping his room tidy at Club Fed by now, down in Allentown PA. But what it could be I can't imagine. He didn't come from big money. His father was a car salesman up at Valley Ford in Holyoke. Nice guy. Everyone liked him, but he wasn't rich and he died young. His mother worked in a bakery. I don't think he's moonlighting at anything, either.

"Still, his overhead's always been low. He's never been married, so he's never been divorced. If he's had any children he's had to support and send to school, no one seems to know about it. His mother's in a nursing home; I assume she's on Medicare. I assume he supports her, whatever else she needs. When she had to go into the home, he sold his condo up at Hampton Pond and moved back to the house he grew up in. So really, I don't know how he could afford Grey Hills either, when he first did it or now. It's a mystery to me."

"Maybe he's teaching law," the judge said. "Nights or something? At Western New England."

"I don't think he's a lawyer," Robey said. "He may be, but I don't think he is. If he had've been, I don't think he'd be doing what he is now, being a district court clerk. I think Hilliard would've gotten him a judgeship."

"Yeah," she said, nodding, 'he probably would've at that. Well, I don't know Danny all that well, but what I know I've always liked. And now this pretty picture starts to unfold before us. I wont say I can hardly wait."

"I can't say I'm looking forward to it much myself," Robey said. "My mother's father opened the Armstrong Tile store over in West Springfield after World War Two. Bigelow Carpet line was later. My father ran the business after Grumpy died, 'til it was his turn to retire. Your family's been living in an area, really not that large a one, doing business fifty years, going into people's homes, time and time again; whenever something like this happens you're bound to know some of the people affected by it. Not that they're friends of yours, exactly; they're just people you've been on good terms with, part of the landscape, the same social fabric. Hate to see them fall and get disgraced, get their lives destroyed like that, torn apart in public.

In a way it's happening to you."

"Although not saying that I think, for one instant, mind you," the judge said, 'that Dan Hilliard never did anything wrong. Something most other people probably also would've done, but still very much against the law? Sure, of course he did. He had balls. He would've done lots of slightly illegal things; shady, questionable things.

Probably hundreds of them, over the course of the years."

She paused and then chuckled. "Like everybody else in his line of work back then, when he was still in it. It was the custom and usage of the trade, the good old political trade. No one ever got too badly hurt."

She reflected. "Come right down to it," she said, "I guess what I'm really saying is that I don't want to see the guy caught. Must be about sixty by now; a small living legend around here by now so I would think, anyway. Living legends should be more careful. Stay out of these little schemes and scrapes they always seem to be getting into, and then getting hurt by. Avoid doing things that'll wreck their careers, if they get caught doing them. And if they can't manage to do that for themselves, then we should look out for them, as though they were endangered species. Can't have our legends becoming extinct."

She hesitated. "Like you say, it's funny how it hits you. Almost like you were somehow involved in whatever they had going on up there in Canterbury, and now what's happening to them is also happening to you."

"Yeah," Robey said, 'but Cohen still wants his hearing, so I've got to call him and tell him: When do I tell him to come in?"

She sighed. "Ahhh," she said, 'tomorrow, I guess. Tomorrow afternoon.

Quarter of two. And this one we'll do here, in chambers. If the US Attorney wants to showboat this thing now, making public speeches and calling for Dan's head, first let him get an indictment."

Two.

From the very beginning Janet LeClerc, then twenty-nine, had felt threatened by Merrion. "The guy," she would say abruptly to the impersonally cheerful cashier at Dineen's Convenient where she bought her cigarettes and coffee, '1 forget his name. You know him, the one I mean; big white-haired guy down there, the courthouse; not the judge, the other one." This happened Friday mornings following the third Thursday afternoons when Corinne (pronounced "Kreen' by her fellow workers), 'the switchboard woman' called to remind Janet soothingly that she must report on Saturday for her monthly conference. "Because we know that sometimes, you, well, sometimes people who're scheduled to report, forget. These things. Everybody does they're not part of their routine."

"I don't know what he wants me to say. And I need to do that, don't I, say what he wants me to say he could have me put in jail." Therefore every time she had to see him she told him she did her best 'to have a regular routine, you know. That's what I do." Because from what Corinne said to her, that seemed to be what they wanted. But because it never seemed to satisfy him" It like he don't believe me or he doesn't want to listen' she felt anxious each time as she did it, wanting him to believe her. Then afterwards she wasn't sure she remembered doing it.

So at their eleventh conference in the clerk-magistrate's office of the saddeningly rundown Canterbury District Courthouse, on the morning of the third Saturday in August, she once more earnestly described to Merrion her trust in routine as a pathway to the virtuous life she believed he wanted her to lead. "I think that's how I can do, you know, like you said for me to do: to see if I can just stay out of trouble. For a year. So that other thing I did there, you can make it disappear. You know: like you said you would."

The courthouse, closed on Saturday, was quiet. "Not so much distraction," Merrion explained to Hilliard. "Man can actually hear himself think in there if he wants to, on a Saturday. Not so many fuckin' people always callin' you, the phone, bumpin' into you and stoppin' you, asking' things and sayin' things, getting' in your way.

"S why whenever me and Lennie decide we're gonna take on another one our projects stay outta trouble a year and we drop the charges on 'em I always see them Saturdays, when there's a chance I can think straight."

Mornings Mondays through Fridays the beige rubber-tiled corridors and stairwells, eight feet wide, were fetidly overcrowded. The ventilation system became overloaded by nine' fifteen each day. Too little air rebreathed too often by too many nervous, sweating people became warm and moist.

Describing his work-day environment at the shag end of a winter day to Hilliard in the dark-panelled grill room of the clubhouse at Grey Hills, the room lightly touched with the aroma of maple logs burning on the hearth, Merrion said: "When I first got into it, over Chicopee, I wasn't ready for it. Mobs of people, day after day, smelling like meat that went bad. When I was doing the substitute teaching; when I was with you and we're out campaigning, meetings and rallies, conventions and so forth: there were people around us, and they weren't all always our friends; sometimes they hated our guts. But at least you could go toe-to-toe with 'em, stand there and fight with the bastards, th out turnin' your stomach and suddenly thinkin': "Jesus, I'm gonna throw up."

He stared morosely through the mullioned bay window at the orchard of fruit trees bare and black in snow behind the clubhouse at the base of Mount Wolf, the remaining blue light darkening into violet and black in the late afternoon. The maple wood snapped in the fire and the bartender made the bottles clink as he removed and replaced them one by one on the shelves, wiping dust from their collars and shoulders.

"Most of the people who come to the courthouse 'cause they're in trouble: The way they stink, they deserve it. You should get in trouble for smelling like they do. They don't wash themselves or brush their teeth or even use some mouthwash. They don't change their underwear and socks, or their other clothes either. And lots of times you'd swear the person that you're talking to's never figured out why the stalls in public toilets always seem to have those rolls of paper in them. So as a result they look dirty and they stink. Their breath's foul, and it seems like there's armies of the bastards. Day after day after day they keep comin', an ill wind that blows through the world."

"When we talk about democracy," Hilliard replied, 'they're who we mean.

They're exercising the fifth freedom. Freedom of speech; freedom to worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear; freedom to smell like a wet bear."

On the weekdays, worried-looking men between twenty-five and sixty, some heavily muscled, as many of them white as black or Hispanic, struggled front ally through the crowds of young people, using their shoulders and observably restraining strong impulses to shove others out of their way. They wore rumpled dusty suits that did not fit, under stained tan and gray raincoats with crumpled, button-tab collars that stood away from their necks at odd angles. Or they wore baseball caps and windbreakers or nylon parkas, open on plaid flannel shirts; plain tee-shirts; tee-shirts with messages extolling naked coed sports; chino pants or jeans or corduroys or warm-up pants; scuffed loafers broken-down at the counters, steel-toed yellowish-tan construction boots or heavily soiled white training shoes. They carried cardboard containers of coffee and folded newspapers, and if they were not on the way to report to Probation Intake, the room with the big gold-lettered brown sign on the right as they came in, they asked people in uniforms or men and women in civilian clothes who seemed to be at home in the surroundings how to find Room 7, 8 or 11.

Three assistant clerk-magistrates, two men and a woman, presided in those airless eight-by-twelve-foot rooms as though they had been built-in, permanent fixtures installed along with the electrical wiring and the brown vinyl mop boards during construction of the pitted ivory-painted cinder-block walls. The first assistant, Robert Cooke, nephew of the late Most Rev. Edmund Mackintosh, auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Springfield, was a thin, dour white man in his early fifties who became hostile when he knew or suspected that the person talking to him favored legal access to abortion. His wife, Mimi, had at last convinced him after many years first not to start conversations on the subject, and second not to try to attempt subtly to ascertain how others viewed the matter, because when they differed with him he became either sullen or scornful, depending on whether he considered them his superiors or inferiors. "And it hurts you, Bob, it really does. It hurts you at the courthouse and it's why almost no one wants to see us or be friends with us except people who agree with you, and so when we go out that's all we ever talk about, and that's no fun at all."

Tyrone Thomas was the third assistant clerk, an amiable black man in his early thirties who wanted no trouble and tried to make none. In his teens he had become the protege of a basketball coach at Cambridge Rindge amp; Latin School in Cambridge who'd gone on to a second career as a state senator. Thomas avoided prejudice by ignoring it if possible and by avoiding aggressive individuals who made ignorance impossible.

People who knew him and his wife, Carol, a tall and beautiful light-skinned black woman who worked as a field-audit supervisor for the Internal Revenue Service, believed he had married well above his station and wondered what she saw in him. He tried not to share that puzzlement and pretended not to notice or be hurt when he sensed it unexpressed or inferred it when implied.

The second assistant was a somewhat-overweight thirty-eight-year-old white woman, Jeanne Flagg. Her father, Archie Oakschott, after eighteen years on the bench had taken senior status as a judge of the Norfolk County Probate Court in Dedham, near Westwood where she had grown up. She continued to wear the cotton and wool, light blue, light grey and light green suits she had purchased when she had gotten the job four years before she became accustomed to the court-house-ritual morning coffee breaks with pastry in the snack bar. No longer somewhat underweight, she was therefore uncomfortable in her clothes, moving carefully and slowly, aware that each change of position tested the seams to the limits.

The assistant clerk-magistrates had to decide whether there were sufficient grounds to recommend to the judge that orders should be issued under Chapter 209A, Massachusetts General Laws, restraining the men who came before them from getting near enough to the people whom they had claimed to love, in order to harm them again. Usually the victims were their wives or girlfriends, but sometimes the men had beaten their children, or hurt their defenseless parents (men accused of sexually molesting children were processed differently). The assistant clerks grimly tried with squinting eyes to see things that could not be seen, hoping to reduce by means of narrow wariness the unreliability of the guesses that they made about whether the particular man under scrutiny was likely to lay rough hands in most instances, again on his female sexual partner; whether he would benefit from still another chance either to control his use of beverage alcohol or quit taking the illegal drugs that he thought licensed him to commit violence. Or whether instead he would soon steal away back into his addictions like a furtive animal skulking back to its kill to feed the rage that made him use his hands on her — and might some day if continued come to involve a gun or knife or club.

Each of the visitors knew what would happen to him if the clerk-magistrate decided that he was either unable or lying to conceal his refusal to stop hitting the woman who had angered him by attempting to influence some aspect of his behavior by means other than prompt oral, vaginal or anal attention to his sexual requirements. He would have to go before a judge who would reason that he must be put in jail.

Otherwise the judge would think himself at risk that the man who this time had beaten the living shit out of the woman he considered his chattel would kill her the next time he got riled up. If he did that then the judge would get reamed out on TV and in the papers. The men knew: that judges did not feature getting reamed out; that they themselves did not want to go to jail; and that the clerk-magistrates could seldom be appeased more than once by signs of contrition and remorse. But they also knew that if they were placed under orders restraining them from having anything to do with their scared women, or put in jail for having violated such an order, the next chance they got to get drunk or stoned each of them would know first who was to blame for putting him into this desperate, humiliating, probably hopeless, situation: the woman who had either called the cops or made enough noise while he'd been hitting her so that a neighbor had called them.

And that secondly in that red anger each of them would know uncontrollably that she must be punished for it, more severely than before, so that she would not do it again, not ever. And each of them also would know already and exactly what form the punishment must take.

This gave them a dim sense of inexorably advancing doom that threatened them with despair so bleak their minds cried out for a drink or a dime bag that would make it go away.

So the men who had hit their women, filled with resentment as they were, did not try at all to hide the fact that they felt troubled and dejected and very often severely hungover, as well. Trying to conceal the resentment, they exerted themselves to appear even sadder and more miserable than they felt, forcing themselves to grovel abjectly thus making themselves feel even worse.

The clerk-magistrates and the other people who worked in the courthouse were well aware of this tactic and its practice, and the vengeful feelings it was meant, but failed, to conceal, so they treated the batterers differently from other defendants, discounting their displays of woe, sadness, regret and remorse by sixty to seventy percent. This made it difficult for the personnel to conduct themselves in their customary courteous professional manner, dealing with the men who had hit women. The only way they could do it was by acting as though they didn't know why it was the men had come before them. This was harder for the women workers in the courthouse than it was for the men, because they had to hide fear as well as anger and contempt for the defendants. The men who had hit women found the pretense unconvincing and knew very well that the courthouse people did know that was what they had done, and scorned and despised them for doing it. The men tended to be fairly quiet, but still visibly resentful of this additional injustice they perceived against them.

Most of the time most of the people who worked in the courthouse tried to seem sympathetic and be polite to everyone who was there because they had gotten in some kind of trouble. The defendants often found their professional solicitude condescending, and sneered at it to demonstrate contempt, but in that, too, they were mistaken; it was not feigned. The personnel felt real empathy with hard-working men and women who had never been in court until the morning after the night they had had too much to drink and had gotten stopped driving home at two in the morning, doing fifteen miles an hour in the middle of the road, steering by the yellow lines, had blown.18 on the Breathalyzer, ten points over the legal state of drunkenness, and had fallen down when ordered to stand on one foot. "There but for the grace of God' was a phrase they often murmured as the Driving-Unders begged futilely to retain their licenses in disregard of punitive statutes mandating revocation. When they were convinced that an injured defendant, accused of resisting arrest, had in fact been unsuccessfully attempting to defend himself against a police officer gone out of control, they saw to it that the judge handling the case became aware of the relevant facts, even if no evidence of them was offered in open court. They also often felt real pity for aimless early teenagers from dysfunctional homes whose undifferentiated fear and pent-up hostility enabled them to commit their first serious criminal offenses on the apparent basis of mere evil impulse (new personnel speedily acquired and inexpertly used the diagnostic jargon of psychology as a handy means of mental self-defense, reflexively learning early that they needed it to explain behavior they would otherwise find frighteningly incomprehensible).

The majority of the young people crowding the stairwells and the hallways were repeat offenders, but experience did not enable them to foresee whether they would have to go into the courtroom, perhaps emerging from it with their wrists in manacles. They had been ordered to report for interviews with other courthouse personnel, either adult probation officers or Department of Youth Services caseworkers. Until the public address system raspily summoned them by name to report to Rooms 17, 18, 18A or 20, they beached themselves in the halls and clustered in the stairwells, obstructing the passageways. Some were morosely silent, but most talked, elliptically, ceaselessly asking each other for predictions that none of them could make, repeating questions none of them could answer, now and then casting wild glances outside the groups of people whom they knew, wishing to discover somewhere in the hallways someone their age who looked just like them and who therefore could be trusted but knew the answers to their questions; could tell them what was going to happen to them when the judge went on the bench.

Even those who had been most boisterously demonstrative in the corridors spoke cryptically and softly, never assertively, once alone in those conferences. Averting their eyes from the persons pressing questions on them, they shook their heads a lot, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes; saying "Myunoh' for "Mmm, I don't know' to indicate they lacked sufficient information to say where they had gotten the narcotics or the stolen property the police had found on them, or when they were asked to account for the whereabouts of some fugitive habitual associate or the gunshot wound of some hostile competitor.

If the person talking to them was a probation officer they evaded answering because they believed their only hope of deliverance from jail lay in preservation of the officer's considerable ignorance of what they had been up to. The hazard for those under questioning by DYS caseworkers was similar: removal from the street and commitment to DYS custody. So they too were uncommunicative. The probation and DYS officers knew this and it frustrated them. When the recalcitrance of their clients prevented them from deciding with assurance whether the young person could be safely left at liberty or should be locked up usually, again their annoyance at being thwarted and the same perception of risk that made judges uneasy about letting batterers go free prejudiced the officers in favor of commitment.

Young offenders conferring with counsel appointed to defend them, mistrusting their free lawyers' willingness, ability and intention to do a good job for them, accordingly felt entirely free to mislead them or lie to them, as suited their moods. Knowing this, and having a great many cases, the Mass. Defenders therefore tried to ascertain as efficiently as possible whether this client like virtually all their others was unable or refusing to assist in his own defense, and therefore must be pleaded-out to the best deal the defender could get.

The defenders customarily did not ask their clients to say whether they were innocent; attorneys and clients alike proceeded on the tacit understanding that the defendant in question, no matter how many times he might ritually, vehemently deny it, had in fact committed the offense alleged against him.

Most of the clients were black or Hispanic, either undersized, short and gaunt, or broad and grossly overweight, but of average height. The frowning or tearful brusied young mothers with pacifier-sucking infants in their arms or small children riding on their vast hips seldom seemed to be comforted by what went on in the courthouse, but the young males in unguarded moments often appeared at least cheerful, if not actually happy, at ease, hanging out among friends in familiar, shabby surroundings.

From time to time this insouciance bothered the judge. "It's almost as though this's their real goddamn home," Judge Leonard Cavanaugh mused one day to Merrion at the bench, having gavel led the courtroom quiet for the fourth time that morning. He was almost keening, cupping his left hand over the microphone that rose up on the flexible gooseneck to capture what he said for the recorder that preserved everything it was allowed to hear in the courtroom.

Later in the judge's chambers, Merrion demurred. "More like their real school," he said, 'not so much their real home. When we were about the same age as these little maggots are now, we weren't doing drugs and ambushing other kids we didn't like. We were driving teachers nuts; we were driving our parents nuts. The principals of our schools called us "You-again." But we were not bugging the cops all the time, and the people who worked in the courthouses then never laid their eyes on us.

Most of us didn't know where it was."

"Yeah, well, it's not that way any more," Cavanaugh said. "It's not as though it's someplace they should never have to come; their parents're gonna kill 'em when they get home. They're not afraid or embarrassed. This's normal for them, just an ordinary thing; that's what's so frightening. Get collared selling drugs or breaking in or stealing cars; get yourself arrested; this's where you come. Routine.

Just another stop on their regular routes, another place where they go.

They actually live part of their lives here. Where they validate them, really authenticate their existences. It's really frightening."

The young people expanded, seeming somehow to take up more room than had been enclosed by the roof, cellar hole and exterior walls of the courthouse. On weekdays especially Mondays, when the mornings yielded up the weekends' ripe harvests of police operations in Hampton Pond, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the other towns within the Canterbury jurisdiction they sat and stood along the walls, sat and crouched upon the stairs, hunkered in the corners and bunched up on all the maple benches. Endlessly but slowly they went into and came out of the elevator that plied up and down between the basement and the first and second floors, distributing them among the corridors leading to the offices and conference rooms and courtrooms; never coming to rest even when standing still or seated and admonished to be silent in one of the three trial sessions. As they moved about they had much to say to one another about the inexhaustible variety of things to do in the great tempting, yielding, wide world outside; before, after, during or instead of, days and weeks and months and years spent or to be spent in the other spacious world inside, in jail, together or with absent friends or strangers. They had so much to talk about that they never seemed to finish saying it, and so were never quiet. They held endless discussions at their normal outdoor-hailing conversational volumes that accumulated, reverberating and combining to make a ceaseless, unintelligible, unrelenting din like the noise of an assembly line building heavy machinery; noise that broke like surf against the walls and surged along the floors, echoing against the ceilings of the corridors and stairwells and restrooms, booming, wearing and abrading and eroding the tender surface of the mind and nerves.

Most of the young people left the courthouse each day before noon. Those not led away tearfully or broodingly in handcuffs trooped out the side door (the ceremonially wide front doors at the top of the broad crumbling concrete steps Barrows Construction having used too much sand in the mix, sand being cheaper than calcined clay and limestone being locked and blocked for reasons of security), shuckin' and jivin'; genially menacing; waiting for the twilight and the dark to come; untied black and white high-top basketball, cross-training and workout shoes flapping, a hundred, two hundred dollars a pair; oversized black pants billowing, unfastened and un zippered black sweatshirts and hooded jackets sliding off their shoulders, jostling and shoving one another as they passed the metal-detector archway that had screened their entrances.

But noon was too late to soothe Merrion's mind; by the end of each morning it had become raw and inflamed, so that by the middle of any weekday while he would have been willing to concede that calm reflection and assessment might once more be possible, he would be in no mood to attempt it. Once during his ninth or tenth year on the job, by then as first assistant, Richie Hammond had said to him after a brutal day: This's an awful job, you know, a really awful job." And he had said to Richie, slowly and distinctly, meaning every single word:

"There are days when this can be the worst fucking job in the world."

It had passed into standard usage in the Canterbury courthouse. "Okay, altogether now, kids: what kind of job is it today?" "The worst fuckin' job in the world." And then everybody would laugh, and think to themselves that this laugh in defiance of the fact that there was absolutely nothing to laugh about would be what would get them all through the day on the job.

Except when he was being truthful, as he did not often allow himself to be once or twice with Cavanaugh, who looked incredulous, suspicious that Merrion was putting him on; several times with Hilliard after a good round of golf, a dinner and some drinks Merrion always led that cheer and acted convincingly as though he believed it. But on those other occasions he said: "But I guess in fact I don't, really, believe that. As silly as I know this sounds, Dan, except maybe to you, there have been times in that courthouse when I think I may've done someone some good.

I'm not saying now I think I've saved people. Nobody saves other people. Only idiots think they can do that; only bleeding-heart assholes'd even try. But maybe I've managed to actually grab some poor kid or some poor strugglin' bastard and help him pull himself up out of the mud. Give him a break, maybe first one he's had, see if he gets just that one break, maybe he can save himself.

"More'n a few of 'em have, Danny-boy, and that as you say, 's a true fact. Some nights I get reckless, I can't get to sleep, I got too many things on my mind, something I'm worried about. And then when that happens, that's when I start thinking: "Hey, why can't I sleep? What the hell am I worried about? If I wake up tomorrow and I find out I'm dead, I did some good things, I was here. I figure I rescued a person a year, each year I been on the job; that's over eighteen people by now, otherwise might've ruined their lives. Not that these've been real dramatic cases; not saying that at all. Just saying that some fairly ordinary people that you've never even heard of managed to get themselves straightened out, so they've had quiet, ordinary, maybe even fairly happy, lives. Instead of the exciting kind you would've heard about if they hadn't turned themselves around, because they would've been in big trouble. They would've been making headlines.

"And that's what I've always figured's really been the kind of thing that down on the ground is what the two of us've been doing all these years in politics. What we've always thought the whole thing has been about, getting you elected, getting me into my job. Making it so that when something good needed doing down in Boston, or in the courthouse out here, there'd be someone there who would see the need and make sure it got done. And so that's what I think I can say I have done. So I usually sleep pretty good."

Merrion required quiet to encourage contemplation and reflection. Then he could enjoy intellection, and think he did it well. Silently reveling therefore in the Saturday luxury of it, he pondered what Janet had said about routine. As he had on several previous occasions, he once again concluded he completely believed her, and knew her to be sincere.

Nevertheless, Merrion was not encouraged. He did not share Janet's confidence in routine as a safeguard of virtue, and he knew dolefully that Janet's best effort to do anything was unlikely to be very good.

He gazed steadily at her but did not make any comment.

The quiet did not soothe Janet LeClerc as it comforted Merrion. So to fill it she told him again that she had devised her routine on the basis of deductions that she made from her observations that many of the other residents of the eighteen-unit building where she lived appeared to have routines. "Not that I'm minding their business," she said, 'or anything like that. I wouldn't do nothing like that. But you know how it is: When you're around all day long, you see things.

Can't help it."

She said that from what she had seen, most of them were single, as she was. She presented her data earnestly, as though she had been commissioned to carry out a poll producing the results. Merrion thought: Survey figures released today show that fifty-nine percent of those living in the same building with]anet have daily routines. The remainder said either that they have no opinion or else they don't give a shit. That was television; it had taught her that if she noticed something in her idleness it meant something data must mean something; the mass had been collected, hadn't it? People wouldn't go to all the trouble of finding out all of this stuff and then putting it on TV if it wasn't important. Janet believed in TV. All the TV that she watched, day after day, when she'd had nothing to do: she didn't like many of the things she saw and heard on it, but TV itself as pure will and idea enjoyed her full and complete confidence.

"Sort of between marriages. It seems like they've probably been married, most of them, one time or another. They're all really that young, you know? Like most of the people are who've never been married, usually are. Just looking around, for somebody else, somebody else to be with. They're exactly like me, marking time. Except they've already all got their routines, the same ones they had back when they were married. It's not like they got divorced from their jobs, when they got divorced from their wives. Or their husbands, either. They just used to be married in the morning, when they went to work, but now they aren't that anymore."

Janet had never been married. Merrion knew she wanted very much to be married, or at least to get married, so that then, if it didn't work out, then at least she would have been married. "Because that way it would be better. It would seem more like normal, you know? Like everything was normal. Because lots of people've been married, and then they got divorced, and so people understand that. So they're used to that, and they don't think it's so strange."

She had told him all about it the second or third time he'd called her in for a conference, back when they were first getting acquainted back around the turn of the century, it seemed like, when he was still only just beginning to find out she was another one, still able to resist the unpleasant discovery that he'd gone and done it again, let himself in for it once more, in the early autumn of 1994. "Always been a big ambition of mine, to get married," she'd told him, looking down at the ring finger embarrassingly naked on her left hand in her lap, twisting the skin of the knuckle with her right thumb and first two fingers. "I think most people do, expect it'll happen, think they'll get married some day. It wasn't the only thing that I thought I'd like to do, but it was the big one."

He reported that conversation to Louella Daggett in the regional office of the Commonwealth's Department of Social Services. Daggett was a short stocky black woman in her early sixties. She had arthritis in her knees that made it very difficult for her to get around. She cited it to justify her irritable disposition, but Merrion had known her years before she'd ever mentioned arthritis and she'd always had a lousy disposition. Merrion thought it was probably attributable to the kind of people and problems she encountered in her work. But believing that frustration made her irascible did not impel him to tolerate her surliness; their discussions about individuals whose behavior had attracted the attention of the court as well as DSS tended to be acrimonious.

Louella had been Janet's caseworker since she had gone on welfare in 1986. She said 'when Janet first came on the reason that she gave us was that she'd had a husband and he'd left her, run away. We took it at face-value, we always do, their stories, but we also check them out.

We couldn't find no husband. There'd never been one. The husband who'd left her, "Wayne" she said his name was: he'd never existed.

"Harvey," we called him, "Harvey, the bastard." She was apparently the only living person who'd ever been able to see him. No one else ever had. Deserted by a phantom husband; can you beat it? Wish-fulfillment, but a lousy job of it. Here she'd gone and dreamed the guy up, gone to all that trouble, and then he turns out to be no good. You'd think if you made up your own husband, well, he might not be a good provider but at least you'd think he'd be a fairly faithful companion, at least around when you needed him. Not Janet's make-believe husband. Janet couldn't lay sod right-side up.

"Completely serious about it, though. Couldn't talk her out of it.

Claimed she'd actually been married not divorced, just married and the only reason that she had to be on welfare was that her no-good husband'd run off someplace no one could find him and make him pay support. Fact there was no marriage license in the records in Springfield didn't faze her a bit; maybe it was Chicopee, or maybe Holyoke. Couldn't find a record of her marriage there, either. We checked with the State House, Secretary, State. No record there. We told her that.

"Didn't miss a beat. "Then it must've been somewhere else. Maybe we went to Vermont and got married. My memory's never been good. It was all quite a few years ago." Could not talk her out of it, no matter how you tried.

"This went on for two or three years. Then after a while she stopped remembering him. Harvey went off the screen, disappeared without leaving a trace. My guess is she thought she had to be a deserted wife in order to get a check and then someone convinced her she didn't. Or maybe she just finally forgot it. She's not all there, you know, poor thing. In addition to never having been what you'd call extremely bright, she does not have all her marbles."

He could remember how Janet had looked when she had first talked about marriage. She had shaken her head, making the dark tendrils of the dull, dark-brown pageboy-haircut she was wearing then flick around her ears and the corners of her eyes. Daggett snickered at Merrion when he'd suggested that maybe she could persuade Janet to 'get herself cleaned up some, you know? Do something with herself? Wash her goddamned greasy hair, for starters. No one's going to hire her back, only thing she knows how to do, wipe tables up in restaurants, clean up the cafeteria in some hospital or school, if we send her up and she comes in looking like she does now, needs a wiping-down herself."

"You're still sort of new at this, aren't you," Louella'd said to him.

"Been at it now, what, only twenny, thirty years? And you still haven't quite got the hang of it. You courthouse guys, you make me laugh. You're all alike. You're all so cut-and-dried. You all think it's all so simple. All you political types. You trip over one of these people like Janet and you think the reason she's miserable's because no one else ever noticed her before, took a hand in her life.

If you'd run into her six months or ten years ago you'd've gotten her all straightened out long before this — but never mind; you'll take care of it now.

"Nuts. You know why it says in the Bible that we'll always have the poor with us? Because it's true: we always have and we always will.

You court guys don't seem to know this. You've all been spoiled rotten, is what. "Do this. Do that. Do it right now," is what you tell them. "That'll fix it." And then, of course, they do it, and it happens. It gets fixed. Until you turn around and they see you're not looking their direction anymore. Then it gets unfixed again, just like it was before.

"You guys got jail to offer. That's how come what you say goes. A person don't do what you tell him? His ass goes to jail. A person don't do what I tell her? Well, what'm I gonna do? Cut her money off?

Sure, take her check away. And then you know what happens next? I'll tell you what happens, aw'toh-mat-tick-lee. Her ass goes right out on the street, because that's where she takes it, for sale for twenty dollars. And when she offers, suck off an undercover cop, and gets herself arrested, she tells the first judge she sees how it's all my fault. I cut her welfare off. What's a poor girl supposed to do? Is she supposed to starve7. And when that shit makes the papers, boy, and gets on the TV, guess whose ass goes on the line. M31 ass goes in the deli sheer. J come out cold cuts.

"Now your Janet project, all right? I know you got a good heart, Amby, probably a generous one. But that don't make you smart. You just lemme tell you something, here, what you're up against. I told that girl, two hundred times, to get her self shaped up. And she tells me, two hundred times, she'll get to it right off. She will surely get to that. And the next time that I see her, what is it I see? Same old thing I saw before, looks just like she always did. Like she got left out in the rain all night or something'. Hell, not all night all year.

You haven't got a project here; you got a career."

"And I don't see why I can't do it, do this thing." Janet in the August morning was talking again about marriage. "People do it every day. In the paper all the time, I used to see it there, when I got the Sunday paper. All these people, getting married. So then, why can't I? Look at my mother. Jesus, look what she did, what my damned mother did to me. Went off and left me by myself? Nobody to fall back on?

All by myself in this thing. But that didn't stop her. No, not at all. She could still get married, damn her. Sure, she could get married, if she wanted to. And she was no good at all. Well, so, I don't see why then I can't."

Merrion could not respond without giving her some kind of reaction, but he did not want to lie to her or tell her what he thought. He knew from years of dealing with people like Janet how important hope was to the hopeless. His experience came mostly from dealing with hapless men, usually between twenty-five and forty-five; generally still hungover, unshaven and dirty after still another night in the familiar surroundings of the holding tank. Disgusted cops wearing rubber gloves had thrown them in there bodily after they had pissed in the street in broad daylight, again: yelled something obscene at a cop, again; vomited on a display-window, again; slid their filthy hands under the sneeze-baffle to rummage in the lettuce-tray in the McDonald's salad-bar, again; or insulted some woman, again.

They weren't going to be improved much by the fresh thirty days in jail they now had to serve, again. He knew it and they knew it. But tradition nullified knowledge and established that they still must be exhorted, assured with ardent forcefulness that they must and therefore would emerge reformed. Almost all of them were traditionalists too, made so by repetition of the ritual. Just as drearily convinced by much experience as their exhorters were that miraculous transformation wasn't going to happen this time either, once again they summoned up the strength to reject the certainty, once more trying very hard to believe what they knew to be untrue.

The few who didn't make the effort were the ones who no longer gave a shit. In a way their resignation was a farewell present to Merrion, a kind of dreadful peace; once he could see that one of his regulars had given up hope entirely, he knew he was not going to have the sad duty of seeing him many more times. He resettled himself in his excellent chair and reminded himself that whatever the merits of the matter might be, he was still smarter than Janet. He did not say anything.

Satisfied by his silence that if she'd been in danger, she'd escaped from it, Janet veered back to the subject of routine. "They live mostly by themselves, most of the time, you know? Like sometimes they might have someone stay over, a Friday night or for the weekend, or something. Sometimes for longer. But they live by themselves most of the time."

She stopped again, craftily, and waited, to see if he would speak. She was still waiting, but now not very confidently, for Merrion to say something that would give her an idea about why he had asked her to come to his office in the courthouse at 9:15 on a Saturday in August, when she would have assumed it would be closed. When he didn't she talked some more, to fill up the dead air. When she was alone, she prepared for such occasions by talking to herself. Wherever she might be on her way to the store every day; out taking a walk; sitting on a bench in the park; exploring the supermarket again Janet talked to herself, a low, unceasing mutter people did look at her funny sometimes, the bastards, but she tried to pay no attention to them.

When she was by herself there were none of those official silences she really didn't like. She was nicer than most of the people who had called her in over the years: when she asked a question, she was polite enough to acknowledge it, at least with a shrug.

Merrion gazed at Janet and wondered idly where the two of them fitted among the planets and the stars onto the infinite curve of the universe, and why it had become necessary that from time to time they occupy adjoining places.

"My front window," Janet said. "You just can't help it, noticing things, you've got a window like that." Her third-floor unit, number 14, sitting atop number 7 on the second floor, number 1 on the first one bedroom, bathtub with shower, small kitchen, living-room dining-room combo had a picture window over-looking Eisenhower Boulevard. "Sixteen-ninety-two Eisenhower Boulevard."

She said it somewhat ruefully but defiantly, too, almost proudly, as though aware that the address conveyed a kind of raffish distinction Merrion would recognize. "You must know something about where I live.

You got me in there, didn't you? Right? I've got that part right, haven't I?"

She had it right. "I got you in there," he said. "I called the super for you, what, almost a year ago now. Lucky for you, that one unit was open and the guy owed me a favor, something I did for his kid."

That was all true. Merrion had sidetracked Steve Brody's damned kid safely away from a crack-cocaine prosecution into a private, long-term, residential drug-rehab program run under a state contract in Stowe, thus sparing the kid a criminal record (for the time being, anyway, Merrion'd thought, not expecting much more than that) and opening up the apartment where Mark'd been living with a girlfriend as useless as he was. But it wasn't all of the truth. Among the many other things Merrion knew about that building was the fact that the Town of Canterbury on the last business day of every month by check drawn on the Canterbury Trust Co. disbursed $385 in public funds payable to Valley Better Residences, co Canterbury Trust Co." Canterbury, Massachusetts, in full payment for the coming month's rental of that apartment to Janet LeClerc (until the town had changed over to direct deposit of payments to vendors via electronic transfer, the cancelled checks were returned to the town every month stamped on the back by the bank 'credit to account of Fourmen's Realty Trust Valley Better Residences').

Merrion's familiarity with the location went back almost a quarter of the century. The building was still new when he first visited it late in 1970, completed earlier that year. F.D. Barrows Construction, the same low-bidding jerry-builders that had constructed the new district courthouse thirteen years before, had put it up. The low-grade bricks were un weathered The cheap mortar of the pointing was neat, regular and even. The newness concealed the shabbiness for a while, but Merrion, cursorily inspecting it as he went in and out of it, once or twice a week three or four times if Larry had been having a bad stretch — week after week, looked on as the weather wore the mask off.

Larry had gone to the cheap brand-new place to die. The whole world itselfd been pretty new then, as far as Merrion'd been concerned. He contemplated it and he saw that it was good. It looked to have been much better built than 1692 Ike, and at the age of thirty he had reason to believe he was soon going to have it on a string.