Bad News

16

Judge T. Wallace Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in this life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity.

Joe Doakes steals a car, drives it to his girlfriend’s house, leaves the engine running while he goes inside to have a loud argument with his girlfriend, causing a neighbor to call the police, who arrive to quiet a domestic dispute but then leave with a car thief, who eventually appears before Judge T. Wallace Higbee, who gives him two to five in Dannemora. For what? Car theft? No; stupidity.

Bobby Doakes, high on various illegal substances, decides he’s thirsty and needs a beer, but it’s four in the morning and the convenience store is closed, so he breaks in the back door, drinks several beers, falls asleep in the storeroom, is found there in the morning, and Judge Higbee gives him four to eight for stupidity.

Jane Doakes steals a neighbor’s checkbook, kites checks at a supermarket and a drugstore, doesn’t think about putting the checkbook back until two days later, by which time the neighbor has discovered the theft and reported it and is on watch, and catches Jane in the act. Two to five for stupidity.

Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake their heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only true crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.

Which made the people like Marjorie Dawson so useful. Not the brightest bulb on the legal marquee, she was nevertheless marginally smarter than the clients she accompanied into Judge Higbee’s court. She knew the proceedings, she knew the drill, she knew how to move the defendants through the routine without letting them make excess trouble through even greater displays of stupidity, and she did it all without complaint and with the acceptance of the rather miserable stipend offered court-appointed attorneys by the state. She did not make trouble. She did not herself perform overt acts of stupidity.

So why was she in Judge Higbee’s chambers this morning, saying this Farraff woman required a hearing? Required? A hearing? Shirley Ann Farraff, an over-the-hill showgirl from Las Vegas, tries an old scam on the proprietors of the Silver Chasm Casino, presenting herself as a nuisance to be bought off, and instead is turned in. It being a first offense, and the proprietors of the casino not wishing to be unduly harsh—nor to receive undue publicity—Judge Higbee acknowledges this particular stupidity with a pass, so long as the defendant agrees to perform all her future acts of stupidity in some other jurisdiction.

So what’s the problem? “Tell me, Marjorie,” the judge said, lowering his several pounds of white eyebrows in Marjorie’s direction, where she sat on the opposite side of the crowded desk, “tell me, what’s the problem?”

“She insists,” Marjorie said, “that what she said in the letter is true.”

“Marjorie, Marjorie,” the judge said, “they all insist their fantasies are true. After a while, they come to believe they actually were afraid they were coming down with appendicitis and needed desperately to get to the hospital, and that’s why they were driving at one hundred miles an hour in an uninsured vehicle with an expired driver’s license at two in the morning.”

Marjorie nodded. “Yes, I remember that one,” she said. “But Your Honor, this one’s different. I’m afraid she really is.”

“Do you believe her story, Marjorie?”

“I don’t believe anybody’s story, Judge,” Marjorie told him, “that’s not my job. My job is to get them the best deal I can and make them understand it really is the best deal they can get and make them agree to it.”

“And?”

“This one won’t agree to it.”

“You mean she won’t sign the quitclaim,” the judge said.

“That’s right, Your Honor.”

Judge Higbee was a large man, large all over, getting a little larger every decade. When he frowned, as now, whole great reaches of him bunched and puckered, and his eyes became twin blue sunrises over a mountain range in winter. “I don’t like this, Marjorie,” he said.

“I knew you wouldn’t, Your Honor,” she told him.

“Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda have filed a complaint,” the judge pointed out, “and they want the problem dealt with. If this damn young woman signs the quitclaim, I can dispose of the matter this morning and have her on the road before lunch, saving the taxpayers close to two dollars. If she refuses to sign, I’ll have to hold her over for trial.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I don’t believe Roger and Frank would be happy to have to come to town to testify against this young woman,” the judge said, “but I don’t see what else could be done, once the complaint has been filed. They’re not going to pay her off, you know.”

“I don’t think she wants to be bought off,” Marjorie said. “Not like that at least. She doesn’t want to just take some money and disappear. She wants to be here.”

“Marjorie,” the judge told her, “I truly don’t want her here.”

“I know that, Your Honor. But she won’t listen to me. She might listen to you.”

“You want me to see her.”

“One way or another, Your Honor, you’re going to have to see her, either here in your chambers or out there in session. I told her yesterday that I would try to arrange an appointment with you this morning in chambers.”

Judge Higbee brooded. In the long march of stupidity that rolled past his eyes day by day, there was rarely anything that required him actually to stop and think, and he didn’t like the experience. He found it discomfiting.

Marjorie said, “Your Honor, if we go before Your Honor in court, she’ll have to be formally charged, I’ll have to apply for a bail hearing, and we’ll have to begin a very long process that does not end. As you know, Your Honor.”

The judge looked at the calendar of the day’s events, placed on the desk close to his right hand. “In an hour,” he said. “Ten-thirty.”

She did not impress. At first glance, anyway, she did not impress, but then she did impress, but not in the right way. She was a very good-looking woman, Judge Higbee supposed, with strong Indian cheekbones and thick black Indian hair, but also with the kind of brassy, aggressive style the judge associated with the phrase “Las Vegas showgirl.” There was a hardness about her he found unappealing, not only in the toughness of her look but in the very way she walked, sat, turned her head. The judge judged her to be trouble.

He hadn’t spoken when she first walked in, accompanied by Marjorie, because he wanted to observe her before making up his mind. No shrinking violet, that was clear; neither the office nor he himself intimidated her. And her night in detention didn’t seem to have had much effect on her.

Marjorie murmured to the young woman, showing her where to sit—in the chair across the desk from the judge. Marjorie herself moved to the second chair, off to the young woman’s right.

Judge Higbee let the silence extend a few more seconds. The young woman met his probing eyes without a flinch, gaze for gaze. He suspected she was very angry about something, but holding it in. She did not have the skulking posture that the stupid always present, betraying their guilt while they declare their innocence. She did not blurt into speech, but waited for him.

What, he wondered, without joy, do we have here?

Very well. He began: “Ms. Farraff, Ms. Dawson tells me—”

“My name,” she said, quiet but forceful, “is Little Feather Redcorn. That’s the name I was born with. Later, when my mama left the reservation and moved in with Frank Farraff, she said I had to have a name like the other people around there or I’d be laughed at, so she changed my name, and that’s the name I’ve lived with ever since. But now I’m going back to my first name.”

Quite a statement. She’d probably been rehearsing that for hours, in the detention cell. Well, he had given her time to get it all out, so now was the time to close down this little drama. Almost gently, he said, “And do you have your birth certificate with you, with that name?”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have any birth certificate, and I don’t know how to get one, because I don’t know exactly where I was born.”

“There wouldn’t be a birth certificate somewhere, would there, that says your father was Frank Farraff?”

“My mama didn’t meet Frank Faraff until I was three or four years old,” she said, “when we moved off the reservation and into town, because there wasn’t any work on the reservation.”

With a frosty smile, he said, “There’s not much work for a three-year-old anywhere, is there?” Making a joke, because of course he knew she’d meant work for her mother.

But the damn woman said, “There was some. They had me weeding. Sat me down in the rows of beans, told me to pull up those but leave those alone. I remember I was pretty good at it.”

Judge Higbee leaned back. That wasn’t stupidity, that was truth. How could this young woman possibly be different from the endless army of morons who marched past his uncaring eye? And yet, the three-year-old child set out to weed among the bean plants was a picture he believed.

Very well. She’d mixed some of her true history into this folderol. But the underlying fact remained the same: She was an inept scam artist, to be summarily dealt with and sent on her way. He said, “You have no birth certificate.”

“All I know is,” she said, “I was born on the reservation.”

“And you are certain, are you, we won’t be stumbling across a birth certificate in the name of Shirley Ann Farraff?”

“If you find anything like that,” she said, completely unfazed, “you can lock me up and throw away the key.”

The judge had a copy of the young woman’s letter on his desk. Now he scanned it, then said, “You say your mother—Doeface, is that it?”

“That’s right, that’s my mama, Doeface Redcorn.”

“You say,” the judge persisted, “that your mother told you your history, that you are of the Pottaknobbee tribe, and these people you name here are your forebears, is that right?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and he noticed the ‘sir,’ and he knew what it meant. So long as he behaved properly toward her, she would behave properly toward him.

Well, fair enough. He could see now that this actually was a more complicated situation than he was used to. God knows, he didn’t want to have to deal with an interesting case, but this just might be one. He said, “Do you have any documentation at all to confirm your story?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why should you be believed?”

“Because it’s true.”

He frowned at the letter some more, then said, “I understand you’ve been living at Whispering Pines, is that right?”

“Yes, sir, in my motor home.”

“And how long have you been there?”

“Four, five days. Five days.”

“And how long had you been away?”

She looked blank. “From where?”

“From here.”

She smiled, which softened her face, though not enough, and said, “I’ve never been around here before in my life. My mama left here when she was a little girl, with her mama, like it says in my letter. I’m coming home for the first time in my life.”

He picked up a pencil to point its eraser at her. “Be very careful, Ms. Farraff.”

“Redcorn.”

“That has not been established. The only documentation I have on you indicates your name is Farraff. Until you demonstrate to my satisfaction that you should be referred to by some other name, I shall continue to call you by the name on your documents, your Social Security card, your driver’s license, and so on. Is that clear?”

She shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “But once you give up trying to get rid of me, I want to hear you call me Ms. Redcorn a lot.”

“If and when the time comes,” he assured her, “I’ll be happy to. Now, where was I?”

Marjorie said, “You asked how long Ms. Farraff had been away from this area.” And the faint smirk with which she said it showed that Marjorie, too, had been subjected to the name game and was taking advantage of the judge’s victory.

Fine. “Thank you, Marjorie,” he said, and returned to Ms. Farraff. “If you have never been in this area before,” he said, “and I suppose we can document that by your work history and so on, establishing your whereabouts over the past, say, two years . . .”

“I’ll give you my tax returns,” she offered.

“That may not be necessary,” he told her, nettled, thinking, by God, she’s sure of herself. Tapping the letter, he said, “So I must ask you this: Where did you get these names that you claim are the names of Pottaknobbee Native Americans?”

“From my mama,” the young woman said. “Only she called them Indians.”

“Did she. If there are no Pottaknobbees left in this world, and the evidence seems to indicate there are none,” the judge told her, “then there are unlikely to be any methods by which you could prove that any of these people ever existed.”

“Well,” Ms. Farraff said, “there’s my grandfather Bearpaw, who went down with his ship in the U.S. Navy in World War Two. Wouldn’t the government have a record of that?”

“Possibly,” the judge said. He found that answer had made him grumpy. “But I notice,” he went on, tapping the eraser end of the pencil against the letter, “that not one of these people even has a grave that could be looked at, to see what name is on the stone. Your mother and grandmother both disappeared, your grandfather was lost at sea.”

“That’s what happens,” Ms. Farraff said.

Marjorie said, “Your Honor, in fact, in my discussion with Ms. Farraff yesterday, she did mention one more supposed forebear. Your great-grandfather, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” she said, with a very cool nod in Marjorie’s direction. Don’t get along, those two, the judge thought.

“Ms. Farraff tells me,” Marjorie said, “that her great-grandfather worked in construction in—”

“Steelworker.”

“Yes, thank you, steelworker in New York City, and worked on the Empire State Building, and was killed in a fall there.”

“My mama,” Ms. Farraff interjected, “said the family always believed the Mohawks pushed him, so I believe it, too.”

The judge pulled his pad closer. “Presumably, then,” he said, “this particular ancestor is buried where one could take a look at his gravestone, or at least at the record of who is to be found in the grave.”

That didn’t seem to call for an answer; at least, neither woman answered him. Which gave him time for a further thought. He said, “Do we know this person’s name?”

“Joseph Redcorn,” Ms. Farraff said, as though she’d been waiting years to say that.

The judge wrote it, and echoed it: “Joseph Redcorn. Very good. Now, it seems to me, someone falling off the Empire State Building, there might be some remembrance of that, record of it among the tribes. Let me just call Frank Oglanda.”

They let him call, but when he got through to Frank’s secretary, Olga, she said, “I’m sorry, Judge, Frank isn’t in yet this morning.”

“There’s a name I’m trying to track down, Olga,” the judge told her. “Someone from seventy years ago or so, who may have been a Pottaknobbee.”

“Oh, Judge,” she said, “I don’t think we have that kind of record here in the casino.”

“No, this would be a special case,” he told her. “The story is, he was a steelworker in the old days, and was killed while working on the Empire State Building. An event like that, it seemed to—”

“Oh, I know who you mean!” she said.

He blinked. “You do?”

“Yes, I’m trying to remember his name. The plaque is in the other room. I could—”

“Plaque?”

“Well, apparently, at the time, it was a real scandal, and a lot of people around here thought the Mohawks had pushed this man off the girder, and the Mohawks tried to make peace and say they didn’t do it and all, and they presented the Three Tribes with a plaque to honor his memory. You know, it was beaten copper, with a representation of the Empire State Building and his name and his dates, and it was dedicated by the Mohawk Nation to his memory. But people still thought the Mohawks pushed him.”

“And you have this plaque.”

“Yes, sir, Your Honor, it’s in the next room. I could go look at it. May I put you on hold?”

“One minute, Olga. You say ‘the next room.’ Is this a public space?”

“Oh, no, sir, it’s the Three Tribes conference room, the public never gets in there.”

So Ms. Farraff hasn’t seen the plaque, he thought, and wondered if she even knew of its existence.

“Your Honor? Shall I go take a look at it? I’ll have to put you on hold.”

“Yes, fine, Olga, thank you.”

While on hold, he listened to Sonny and Cher sing, “The Beat Goes On.” He closed his eyes. He knew now that this day was just going to get more complicated and more complicated, and then maybe even more complicated.

“Your Honor?”

“Yes, Olga, here I am.” Sonny and Cher had gone away.

“I’m in the conference room,” the pleasant, efficient voice said in his ear. “Here it is. Yes. ‘Joseph Redcorn, July 12, 1907, November 7, 1930. With loving respect to a fallen brave from his comrades, the Mohawk Nation.’ Does that help, Judge?”

“Oh, immeasurably,” he said. “Thank you, Olga.”

He hung up the telephone. He looked at the young woman, and she was smiling, but she was also showing her teeth. “I think, Judge,” she said, “it’s time for you to start calling me Ms. Redcorn.”