Final Appeal

Lisa Scottoline

Final Appeal

To all my parents, and to Kiki

1

At times like this I realize I’m too old to be starting over, working with law clerks. I own pantyhose with more mileage than these kids, and better judgment. For example, two of the clerks, Ben Safer and Artie Weiss, are bickering as we speak; never mind that they’re making a scene in an otherwise quiet appellate courtroom, in front of the most expensive members of the Philadelphia bar.

“No arguing in the courtroom,” I tell them, in the same tone I use on my six-year-old. Not that it works with her either.

“He started it, Grace,” Ben says in a firm stage whisper, standing before the bank of leather chairs against the wall. “He told me he’d save me a seat and he didn’t. Now there’s no seats left.”

“Will you move, geek? You’re blocking my sun,” Artie says, not bothering to look up from the sports page. He rarely overexerts himself; he’s sauntered through life to date, relying on his golden-boy good looks, native intelligence, and uncanny jump shot. He throws one strong leg over the other and turns the page, confident he’ll win this argument even if it runs into overtime. Artie, in short, is a winner.

But so is Ben in his own way; he was number two at Chicago Law School, meat grinder of the Midwest. “You told me you’d save me a seat, Weiss,” he says, “so you owe me one. Yours. Get up.”

“Eat me,” Artie says, loud enough to distract the lawyers conferring at the counsel table like a bouquet of bald spots. They’d give him a dirty look if he were anyone else, but because he works for the chief judge they flash capped smiles; you never know which clerk’s got your case on his desk.

“Get up. Now, Weiss.”

“Separate, you two,” I say. “Ben, go sit in the back. Argument’s going to start any minute.”

“Out of the question. I won’t sit in public seating. He said he’d save me a seat, he owes me a seat.”

“It’s not a contract, Ben,” I advise him. For free.

“I understand that. But he should be the one who moves, not me.” He straightens the knot on his tie, already at tourniquet tension; between the squeeze on his neck and the one on his sphincter, the kid’s twisted shut at both ends like a skinny piece of saltwater taffy. “I have a case being argued.”

“So do I, jizzbag,” Artie says, flipping the page.

I like Artie, but the problem with the Artie Weisses of the world is they have no limits. “Artie, did you tell him you’d save him a seat?”

“Why would I do that? Then I’d have to sit next to him.” He gives Ben the finger behind the tent of newspaper.

I draw the line. “Artie, put your finger away.”

“Ooooh, spank me, Grace. Spank me hard. Pull my wittle pants down and throw me over your gorgeous knees.”

“You couldn’t handle it, big guy.”

“Try me.” He leans over with a broad grin.

“I mean it, Artie. You’re on notice.” He doesn’t know I haven’t had sex since my marriage ended three years ago. Nobody’s in the market for a single mother, even a decent-looking one with improved brown hair, authentic blue eyes, and a body that’s staying the course, at least as we speak.

“Come on, sugar,” Artie says, nuzzling my shoulder. “Live the dream.”

“Cut it out.”

“You read the book, now see the movie.”

I turn toward Ben to avoid laughing; it’s not good to laugh when you’re setting limits. “Ben, you know he’s not going to move. The judges will be out any minute. Go find a seat in the back.”

Ben scans the back row where the courthouse groupies sit; it’s a lineup that includes retired men, the truly lunatic, even the homeless. Ben, looking them over, makes no effort to hide his disdain; you’d think he’d been asked to skinny-dip in the Ganges. He turns to me, vaguely desperate. “Let me have your seat, Grace. I’ll take notes for you.”

“No.”

“But my notes are like transcripts. I used to sell them at school.”

“I can take my own notes, thank you.” Ten years as a trial lawyer, I can handle taking notes; taking notes is mostly what I do now as the assistant to the chief judge. I take notes while real lawyers argue, then I go to the library and draft an opinion that real lawyers cite in their next argument. But I’m not complaining. I took this job because it was part-time and I’m not as good a juggler as Joan Lunden, Paula Zahn, and other circus performers.

“How about you, Sarah?” Ben asks the third law clerk, Sarah Whittemore, sitting on my other side. “You don’t have a case this morning. You can sit in the back.”

Fat chance. Sarah smooths a strand of cool blond hair away from her face, revealing a nose so diminutive it’s a wonder she gets any oxygen at all. “Sorry, I need this seat,” she says.

I could have told him that. Sarah wants to represent the downtrodden, not mingle with them.

A paneled door opens near the dais and the court crier, a compact man with a competent air, begins a last-minute check on the microphones at the dais and podium. Ben glances at the back row with dismay. “I can’t sit back there with those people. One of them has a plastic hat on, for God’s sake.”

Artie looks over the top of his paper. “A plastic hat? Where?”

“There.” Ben jerks his thumb toward a bearded man sporting a crinkled cellophane rain bonnet and a black raincoat buttoned to the neck. The man’s collar is flipped up, ready for monsoon season, but it’s not raining in the courtroom today.

“It’s Shake and Bake! He came!” Artie says. His face lights up and he waves at the man with his newspaper. “Go sit with him, Safer, he’s all right.”

“You know that guy, Artie?” I ask, sitting straighter to get a better look. The bearded man grins in a loopy way at the massive gold seal of the United States courts mounted behind the dais, his grubby face tilted to the disk like a black-eyed Susan to the sun.

“Sure. He hangs out at the Y, plays ball with me and Armen. You oughta see his spin move, it’s awesome when he’s not zoned out. I told him to stop by and see the judge on the bench.”

Ben’s dark eyes widen. “You invited that kook to oral argument? How could you do that?”

I don’t say it, but for the first time I agree with Ben. I am becoming a geek, a superannuated geek.

“Why shouldn’t he come to court?” Artie says. “It’s a free country. He’s got rights.” He stands up and signals wildly, as ill-mannered as a golden retriever puppy; Artie’s the pick of the litter out of Harvard, where they evidently do not teach common sense.

The lawyers in the first three rows of the courtroom crane their necks at him, and I tug at the rough khaki of his sport coat. “Artie, don’t embarrass me,” I say.

Sarah leans over. “Artie, you’re crazier than he is. Sit down.”

“He’s not crazy,” Artie says, still signaling.

“He’s wearing Saran Wrap,” I point out.

“He always does. It’s Shake and Bake, man. You gotta love it.”

“Fine,” Ben says. “You like him so much, you go sit with him.”

“Don’t mind if I do. Party on, Safer.” Artie claps Ben on the back and walks toward the back row.

“Please rise!” shouts the crier, standing behind a desk at the side of the dais. “The Honorable Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.”

A concealed door to the left of the dais swings open, and the judges parade out, resplendent in their swishing black robes. The federal courts decide appeals in three-judge panels, inviting comparison to the three wise men or the three stooges, depending on whether you win or lose. First comes the Honorable Phillip Galanter, tall, thin, and Aryan, with slack jowls like Ed Meese used to have and blond hair thinning to gray. He’s followed by a wizened senior judge, the Honorable Morris Townsend, shuffling slowly along, and finally the Very Honorable and Terribly Handsome Chief Judge Armen Gregorian, my boss.

“Armen looks good up there, doesn’t he?” Sarah says, crossing her legs under the skirt of her sleek slate-gray suit.

He sure as hell does. Towering over the two of them, Armen grins down at the crowd in an easy way. His complexion is tinged with olive; his oversized teeth remind me of an exotic JFK. There are precious few perks in working for the judicial branch, and a boss who looks like a sultan is one of them. I lean near Sarah’s perfumed neck and whisper, “I got first dibs.”

“In your dreams.”

“But you’re too young for him.”

She smirks. “Too young? Is there such a thing?”

“Bitch.” I elbow her in the ovary.

“Oyez! Oyez!” calls the crier. “All persons having business with the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for this court is now in session. God save the United States and this honorable court. Be seated, please.”

The panel sits down and the first appeal begins. Ben takes notes on the argument by the appellant’s lawyer, who had his civil case dismissed by the district court ten floors below us. The young lawyer has been granted ten minutes without questions from the judges to present his argument, but he’s blowing them fast. Armen’s forehead wrinkles with concern; he wants to cut to the chase, but this poor guy can’t get out of the garage.

“A Third Circuit virgin,” Ben says, with the superior snicker of someone who has never done it. I fail to see the humor. I know what it’s like to stand before a judge when the words you memorized don’t seem to come and the ones that do roll down backward through your gullet and tumble out your butt.

“I guess my time is up,” the lawyer says, obviously relieved to see the Christmas light on the podium blink from yellow to red. He thinks the hard part’s over, but he’s dead wrong. The light turns green again. Go!

“Who wants the first question?” Armen says, looking over his colleagues on the panel. He flicks a silky black forelock out of his eyes; he always needs a haircut, it’s part of his sex appeal. “Judge Galanter?”

“Counsel,” Judge Galanter says quickly, “your appeal concerns the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, but I wonder if you understand why the statute at issue was enacted by Congress.”

“It was passed because of organized crime, Your Honor.”

“The statute was aimed at extortionists, murderers, and loan sharks. The typical organized criminals, correct?”

The young lawyer looks puzzled. “Yes, Judge Galanter.”

“It prohibits a pattern of racketeering activity, the so-called predicate acts, does it not?”

“Yes, sir.”

Armen shifts in his high-backed chair.

“But your client isn’t suing mobsters under RICO, is he, counsel?” Galanter says.

“With all due respect, Your Honor, I think this appeal presents a matter of national importance. It involves the manipulation of—”

“Flower peddlers, isn’t that right, counsel? Not mobsters, not extortionists, not killers. Florists. The ad says, Nothing but the Best for Your Wedding or Bar Mitzvah.” He chuckles, as does the gallery. They have to, he’s an Article III judge, as in Article III of the Constitution; if you don’t laugh, the FBI shows up at your door.

“Yes, the defendants are floral vendors.”

Galanter’s thin lips part in an approximation of a smile and he arches an eyebrow so blond it’s almost invisible. “Floral vendors? Is that a term of art, counsel?”

The gallery laughs again.

“Florists,” the lawyer concedes.

“Thank you. Now, carnations are the bulk of your client’s business, is that correct?” Galanter flips through the appendix with assurance and reads aloud. “‘Pink ones, red ones, even the sprayed ones,’ according to your client’s affidavit. Although I see sweetheart roses did well in February.” He pauses to look significantly at Judge Townsend, but Townsend’s eyes are closed; God knows which way he’ll go on this case. He thinks people enter his dreams to have sex with him, so it’s impossible to tell right now if he’s pondering RICO law or watching lesbians frolic.

“They’re a group of florists. A network of florists.”

“Oh, I see, a ring of florists. Do you think Congress intended even a ring of florists to be covered by this racketeering statute?”

Armen hunches over his microphone. “Counsel, does it really matter what they sell?”

“Go get ’em, boss,” I say under my breath.

“Sir?” says the lawyer. He grabs the side of the podium like a kid stowed away on a sinking ship.

“It wouldn’t make sense to have a rule of law that turned on the occupation of the defendant, would it?”

“No, sir,” says the lawyer, shaking his head.

Armen leans forward, his eyes dark as Turkish coffee. “In fact, after what the Supreme Court said in Scheidler, even a group of abortion protestors can be subject to RICO, isn’t that right, Mr. Noble?”

Galanter glances over at Armen like a jockey on a Thoroughbred. “But Chief Justice Rehnquist made clear in Scheidler that there was a pattern of extortion, of federal crimes. Where’s the federal crimes with the floral conspiracy? Florists wielding pruning shears? Gimme that money or I snip the orchid?” Galanter shudders comically and the gallery laughs on cue.

“But they do threaten society,” the lawyer says, fumbling for the rigging. “Mr. Canavan signed a contract, and they didn’t send him any orders. They intended to drive Canavan Flowers into bankruptcy. It was part of a plan.”

“Your client did file for Chapter Eleven protection, didn’t he?” Armen says.

Suddenly Judge Townsend emits a noisy snort that sounds like an ancient steamboat chugging to life. Armen and Galanter look over as Judge Townsend’s heavy-lidded eyes creak open. “If I may, I have a question,” he says, smacking his dry lips.

“Go right ahead,” Armen says. Galanter forces a well-bred smile.

“Thank you, Chief Judge Gregorian,” Judge Townsend says. He nods graciously. “Now, counselor, why are you letting my colleagues badger you?”

The smile on Galanter’s face freezes in place. The gallery laughs uncertainly.

“Sir?” the lawyer says.

Judge Townsend snorts again and lists gently to the starboard side. “As I see it, the question with this new statute is always the same.”

Ben whispers, “New? RICO was passed in the seventies.”

“The question is always, How is this case different from a case of garden variety fraud? How is it different from other injuries to one’s business, which we decide under the common law?” Judge Townsend waves his wrinkled hand in the air; it cuts a jagged swath. “In other words, have you got some precedent for us? A case to hang your hat on?”

The lawyer reads his notes. “Wait a minute, Your Honor.”

Judge Townsend blinks once, then again. Galanter smooths back the few hairs he has left. The lawyers in the gallery glance at one another. They’re all thinking the same thing: Nobody tells the Third Circuit to wait a minute. The answers are supposed to roll off your tongue. The case is supposed to be at your fingertips. Better you should pee on the counsel table.

“Way to go, Einstein,” Ben says.

“I know I have the case somewhere,” says the attorney, nervously riffling through his legal pad. He should be nervous; the circuit court is the last stop before the Supreme Court, which takes fewer appeals each year. It’s all those speaking engagements.

“Armen’s upset,” Sarah whispers, and I follow her eyes. Armen is looking down, worried about the appeal. The only sound in the tense courtroom is a frantic rustling as the lawyer ransacks the podium. A yellow page sails to the rich navy carpet.

The silence seems to intensify.

Galanter glares at the lawyer’s bent head.

A sound shatters the silence—ticktickticktickticktick—from the back of the courtroom.

The back rows of the gallery turn around. The sound is loud, unmistakable.

Ticktickticktickticktick.

Row after row looks back in disbelief, then in alarm.

Ticktickticktickticktick.

“It’s a bomb!” one of the lawyers shouts.

“A bomb!” yells an older lawyer. “No!”

Ticktickticktickticktick.

The crowded courtroom bursts into chaos. The gallery surges to its feet in confusion and fear. Lawyers grab their briefcases and files. People slam into each other in panic, trying to escape to the exit doors.

“No!” someone shouts. “Stay calm!”

I look wildly toward the back row where Artie was sitting. I can’t see him at all. The mob at the back is pushing and shouting.

Tickticktickticktickticktick.

Ben and other law clerks run for the judges’ exit next to the dais. My heart begins to thunder. Time is slowed, stretched out.

“Artie’s back there!” I shout.

Sarah grabs my arm. “Armen!”

I look back at the dais. Armen stands at the center, shielding his eyes from the overhead lights, squinting into the back row. Judge Townsend is stalled at his chair.

Galanter snatches Armen’s gavel and pounds it on the dais: boom boom boom! “Order! Order, I say!” he bellows, red-faced. He slams the chief judge’s gavel again and again. “Order!”

“Oh, my God,” Armen says, when he realizes what’s happening. “It can’t be.”

2

“Are you saying it was Shake and Bake?” I ask, incredulous.

“Yes. I’m busted. Totally,” Artie says. He flops into his chair in the small law library that serves as the clerks’ office, having been grilled behind closed doors by Armen and an assortment of bureaucrats. “It took the poor guy an hour to stop crying. He was worried he got Armen in trouble, can you believe that?”

“Yes,” Ben says, typing nimbly at his computer keyboard.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Did he have a bomb?”

“No. He had a shot clock.”

“A what?”

“Actually, he was the shot clock.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I,” Sarah says.

“I do, but I don’t care,” Ben says, gulping down his third cup of coffee. He gets in at seven and guzzles the stuff like a thirsty vampire. “The whole thing’s absurd.”

“No, it isn’t,” Artie says. “Not if you think like Shake and Bake.”

“Like a paranoid schizophrenic?” I say.

“Look, Shake and Bake was watching the argument. He knew the lawyer had to answer a question and he thought time was running out, like in basketball. He figured the guy had twenty-four seconds to shoot. It got all crossed up in his head.”

I try not to laugh. “So he starts ticking.”

“Yeah, with his mouth. He was counting off the time.” Artie yanks the knot on his cotton tie from side to side to loosen it.

“That’s ridiculous,” Sarah says.

“Not to a paranoid schizophrenic who loves basketball,” I say, a quick study.

“Right, Grace.” Artie nods and tosses the tie on the briefs scattered across his desk.

“Told you. Absurd,” Ben says, tapping away.

“Is he really schizophrenic?” Sarah leans over the Diet Coke and soft pretzel that constitute her breakfast. These kids eat trash; it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

“I don’t think so,” Artie says, unbuttoning the collar of his work shirt. “He’s like a little kid. Harmless.”

I smile. I own a little kid. They’re not harmless.

“Why do you say he’s harmless?” Sarah asks. “He’s obviously not.”

“Come on, Sar. He’s fine. Shake and Bake can’t even do his laundry. You think he can blow up a building?”

“I do, Weiss,” says a dry voice at the door to the clerks’ office. It’s Eletha Staples, the judge’s Secretary for Life, a willowy, elegant black woman. Prone to drama, Eletha pauses dramatically in the doorway.

“Yo,” Artie says.

“Right, bro. Yo.” Eletha rolls her eyes as she walks into the room, trailing expensive perfume. Her glossy hair is pulled back into a neat bun at the nape of a slim neck. In her trim camel suit she looks more like a judge than a secretary, and the day black women get to be federal appellate judges, she’ll be mistaken for one. “Who you invitin’ next, Charlie Manson?”

“That’s not funny, El.”

Eletha stops in the center of the office and puts a hand on her hip; a quintet of clawlike polka-dotted fingernails stand out on her otherwise classy look. “It’s not funny, bro?”

“No.”

“It’s not funny when you invite a crazy man to court? It’s not funny that some nut boy endangers Armen’s life? Endangers the lives of us all?”

Artie fiddles glumly with his Magic Eight Ball, one of the many toys on his desk. “He’d never hurt any of us, he idolizes Armen. And he’s not a nut boy.”

“He ticks, Artie,” I remind him.

Eletha looks crazed, but she crazes easily. “What are you tellin’ me, he’s not a nut? The man thinks he’s a friggin’ Timex! Why they let him in the courthouse I’ll never know.”

“They have to,” Sarah says. “He has a right to access. It’s in the Constitution.”

“The hell it is,” Ben says, without looking away from his monitor.

“He’s not a nut.” Artie pouts.

Eletha puts a hand to her chest and begins Lamaze breathing to calm herself. I first saw this routine three months ago when she had to interview me for my job, because Armen had gotten stuck in Washington. After she calmed down, we spent an hour swapping ex-husband stories. I touch her arm. “El, keep breathing. Don’t push, it’s too soon.”

She looks down at me, her face suddenly grave. “That’s not the worst of it. Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“They filed the appeal in the death penalty case this morning. Hightower. The death warrant expires in a week.” Her words hang in the air for a moment.

“Oh, no.” I sink deeper into the leather chair next to Artie’s desk. I better not get this case. I’m a working mother now; I have enough guilt for an entire hemisphere.

“A week?” Ben says, shaking his neat head. “Of course Hightower waited until the last minute. Wait till the bitter end to file and hope the warrant expires. It’s a game with them.”

Sarah looks over sharply. “It’s only his first appeal.”

“Fine. Let’s make it his last.”

“Ben, he even tried to kill himself. He thought he deserved to die.”

“He did.”

Eletha’s soft brown eyes linger on Ben’s face, but her thoughts are clearly elsewhere. “This case is gonna be a real bitch. The law clerk’s gonna be up all night, Armen’s gonna be up all night, and I’ll be up all night. Last time, I didn’t tell Malcolm why.” Malcolm is Eletha’s son, whose picture she keeps on her desk; he’s an intelligent-looking boy with lightish skin and glasses. “Some things kids don’t have to know.”

I wonder how I’d tell Maddie. What would I say? Honey, Mommy works for a man who decides whether another man should live or die. No, Mommy’s boss is not God, he just looks like him.

“Has Armen served on many death panels?” Sarah asks.

Eletha rubs her forehead. “Too many.”

“Three,” Ben says. “All dissents. The proverbial voice in the wilderness.”

Eletha glances at him. “They were from Delaware, I think. None from Jersey. And we haven’t executed in Pennsylvania since I don’t know when.”

“About thirty years.” Ben pops the SAVE button with an index finger. “Elmo Smith, for the rape-murder of a Catholic high school girl. But I can’t recall the method.” He pauses just a nanosecond, his mind working as rapidly as the microprocessor. “Pennsylvania executes by lethal injection now, but then—”

“Christ, what difference does it make?” Sarah says, making tea on the spare desk. “Move to Texas, you can watch it on pay-per-view.”

Ben snaps his fingers. “Electrocution, that’s right!”

“Death penalty for twenty, Alex,” Artie says, and Eletha starts to breathe in and out, in and out.

“The death penalty is revenge masquerading as justice,” Sarah says, unwilling to let the grisly subject go. I like Sarah but am coming to understand that not letting anything go is an avocation of hers. It served her well last November; she worked on Armen’s wife’s campaign for the Senate, in which the feminist lawyer came from behind to win by a turned-up nose.

“When we talk about justice,” Ben says, “we shirk thinking in legal terms.”

“I’m impressed, Ben. Did you make that up all by yourself?”

“No. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it.”

Sarah looks nonplussed.

“Played for the Knicks,” Artie says. He launches the Magic Eight Ball on an imaginary trajectory through that great basketball hoop in the sky, that one all men can find when they don’t have a real ball. The air guitar principle.

“It’s irrelevant what happens at this level anyway,” Ben says. “It’s going up to the Court.”

“And what’ll that do to your chances, Safer?” Artie says.

Ben hits a key but says nothing.

“Chances for what?” I say.

“Didn’t you know, Grace? Ben is waiting for a phone call from Justice Scalia. He’s this close to a Supreme Court clerkship.” Artie squints at his forefinger and thumb, held a half-inch apart. “Maybe even this close, am I right, Ben? This close?” He makes his fingers touch.

“Ask the Eight Ball,” Sarah says.

“The Eight Ball! Excellent!” Artie shakes the ball and turns it upside down to read it. “Oh, my God, Ben,” he says in mock horror. “‘Better not tell you now.’ Very mysterious.”

I look at Ben, reading his monitor screen. “Ben, did you really get an interview with Scalia?”

“Yes,” Ben replies, without looking away from the monitor.

“But Grace, Ben has a big problem,” Artie says ominously. “If Armen decides Hightower and the guy don’t fry, we got trouble. Big trouble, right, Ben?”

Ben types away. “Of course not, Weiss. I still have the credentials.”

“You mean like clerking for Armen the Armenian? Husband of Senator Susan, another flamer?” Artie winks slyly at Sarah, and she smiles back. I wonder if they’re sleeping together, and how Sarah squares it with her lust for Armen. Not to mention her alleged allegiance to Armen’s wife.

“The chief has sent clerks to the Court,” Ben says. “He’s very well regarded by the Justices.”

“By the conservative Justices?”

“Depends on what you mean by conservative.”

“Anybody not on life support.”

Ben’s mouth twitches, and I can tell Artie’s hit a nerve. I hold up my hand like a traffic cop. “That’s enough outta you, Weiss. Don’t make me come over there.”

“Who else is on the panel in Hightower?” Sarah says.

Eletha looks at a piece of paper in her hands. She doesn’t notice Ben reading the paper upside down, but I do; Ben spends more time reading upside down than right side up. “Here it is. Gregorian, Robbins, and Galanter.”

“Awesome!” Artie says. “That means Hightower walks. Armen writes the opinion, Robbins joins it, and Galanter pounds sand. Two to one.”

Sarah looks less certain. “Galanter’s a Federalist, but Robbins can go either way on this one.”

“What’s a Federalist?” I ask.

“Fascists. Nazis.”

“Republicans with boners,” Artie adds.

Ben clears his throat. “It’s a conservative organization, Grace. Of which I was an officer in law school, as a matter of fact.”

Suddenly, the door to Armen’s office opens and men talk in low, governmental tones as Armen walks them to the main door of chambers. Artie strains to listen and Ben inhales what’s left of his coffee. Eletha turns around just in time to catch Bernice.

“Roarf! Roarf!” Bernice, a huge Bernese mountain dog, bounds through the door. Yes, Armen brings his shaggy black doggie to work, all hundred pounds of her. He’s the chief judge, so who’s gonna tell him he can’t? Me? You? “Roarf!”

“No! Don’t jump up!” Eletha barks back. The sharp noise stops Bernice in her tracks. Her bushy black tail, white at the tip, switches back and forth; she sneezes with the vigor of a Clydesdale.

“Sit, Bernice. Sit!” Armen says, coming up behind the dog.

Bernice wiggles her wavy hindquarters in response. Her eyes roll around in a white mask that ends in rust-colored markings on her muzzle. Bushy rust eyebrows give her a permanently confused look; appearances are not always deceiving.

“She never sits, Armen,” Eletha says. “I don’t know why you even bother.”

“She used to, she just forgets,” Armen says. “Right, girl?” He scratches the plume of raggy hair behind Bernice’s ears and looks at Artie. “So, Weiss, you shitting bricks?”

Artie sets the Eight Ball down. “Enough to build a house, coach. I’m really sorry.”

“Can’t you grovel better than that? I’m disappointed.”

“Really sorry, coach. I am not worthy.” Artie bends over and touches his forehead to the briefs on his desk. “It’ll never happen again,” he says, his voice muffled.

Armen smiles. “Good enough. Shake and Bake can come to the games, but he has to stay away from the courthouse. If he doesn’t, the marshals will shoot him on sight. Plus I got you out of jail free, so you owe me a beer.”

Artie looks up, relieved. “After the game next week. At Keeton’s.”

“Fine.” Armen’s gaze falls on the papers in Eletha’s hands and his smile fades. “Is that Hightower?”

“Yes.”

He takes the papers and begins to read the first page. His brow wrinkles deeply; I notice that the dark wells under his eyes look even darker today. He’s given to occasional black moods; something will set him off and he’ll brood for a day. It makes you want to comfort him. In bed.

“Chief,” Ben says, “the defendant killed two sisters.”

Armen seems not to hear him. His broad shoulders slump slightly as he reads.

“One was a little girl and one was a teenager, very popular in the town.”

Armen looks up from the memo and his eyes find me. “It’s yours, lady,” he says.

I hear myself suck wind. “Mine?”

“You’re Grace Rossi, right? It’s got your name all over it.”

“Me, on a death penalty case? But I’m part-time.”

“I’ll give you time off later, and don’t whine.”

“But I don’t want to get involved,” I whine.

He half smiles. “Get involved. Somebody’s life is at stake.”

“But why me?”

“I need a lawyer on this one.”

Sarah freezes as she looks at Armen. I can almost hear the squeak of a hinge as her perfect mouth drops open.

3

Empty coffee cups dot the surface of Armen’s conference table, along with sheaves of curly faxes, photocopied cases, and trial transcripts from the Hightower record. We worked straight through dinner and into the night, reading cases and talking through the opinion. Then Armen began to tap out an outline on his laptop and I picked up the habeas petition to check our facts.

It says that Thomas Hightower was seventeen when he cut school to go drinking with a fast crowd, which got him drunk and dared him to kiss the prettiest girl in school. Hightower went to her farm, where he found Sherri Gilpin in the shed. He asked her out, and she laughed at him.

“Date a nigger?” she said. Allegedly.

In a drunken rage, Hightower slapped her and she fell off balance, cracking her skull against a tractor. He tried to give her CPR, at which point her little sister Sally came in and began to cry. Hightower says he panicked. He couldn’t leave witnesses; it would have killed his mother. So he throttled the child, then, full of shame, he got back into his car and drove himself into a tree. Enter the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which saved his life, reserving for itself the honor of putting him on trial. For death.

Hightower couldn’t afford a lawyer, not that one in the small coal-mining town would represent him anyway. The county judge appointed a kid barely out of night law school to the case, and the jury convicted Hightower of capital murder. During the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides life or death, Hightower’s lawyer argued from the wrong death penalty statute, one that had been ruled unconstitutional three years earlier by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Somehow he had missed that.

The obsolete death statute, the only one presented to this predominantly white jury, said nothing about the fact that a jury could consider Hightower’s youth, his diminished capacity because of alcohol, his lack of a prior criminal record, and the remorse that he demonstrated by his suicide attempt as “mitigating circumstances” in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. The jury took only fifteen minutes to reach its decision. Death.

I set the papers down and look out the huge windows that make up the fourth wall of the office. It’s the dead of night. Orangey streetlamps stretch toward the Delaware River in ribbons. White lights dot the suspension cables on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Traffic signals blink on and off: red, yellow, green. The lights remind me of jewels, twinkling in the black night. I watch them shimmer outside the window and turn the legal issues over in my mind.

The question is whether Hightower’s lawyer was so ineffective that the trial was unfair. Strictly as a legal matter, Hightower probably deserves a new trial; what he deserves as a matter of justice is another matter. This is why I practiced commercial litigation. It has nothing to do with life or death; the questions are black and white, and the right answer is always green.

“Well,” Armen says to himself. “Well, well, well.” He stops typing and reads the last page of his draft. The office is quiet now that Bernice has stopped snoring. I feel like we’re the only people awake, high in the night sky over the twinkly city.

“Well what?”

“I think we’re going to save this kid’s life. What do you think?”

The question takes me aback. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way.”

“I do.” He smiles wearily, wrinkling the crows’ feet that make him look older than he is. “I wouldn’t stop if I didn’t think so.”

“Was that your goal?”

“It had to be. His lawyer was incompetent. Anybody else would have gotten him life in prison, instead he’s scheduled to die. They set him up.” He leans back in the chair. Fatigue has stripped something from him: his defenses, maybe, or the professional distance between us. He seems open to me in a way he hasn’t before.

“I didn’t think of it as saving his life. I thought of it as a legal issue.”

“I know that, Grace. That’s why I wanted you on this case. You narrowed your focus to the legalities, divorced yourself from the morality of the thing.”

It stings. “Do you fault me? It’s a legal question, not a moral one.”

“Really? Who said?”

“Holmes.”

“Fuck Holmes,” he says, stretching luxuriously in a blue oxford shirt. His shirtsleeves are bunched at his elbows; his tie is loose. He’s so close I can pick up a trace of his aftershave. “It’s both those things, Grace, law and morality. You can’t separate law from justice. You shouldn’t want to.”

“But then it’s your view of justice, and that varies from judge to judge.”

“I can live with that, it’s in my job description. Judges are supposed to judge. When I read the Eighth Amendment, I think the framers were telling us that government should not torture and kill. That’s the ultimate evil, isn’t it, and it’s impossible to check.” His face darkens.

“I don’t understand,” I say, but I do in part. Armen’s culture is written all over his olive-skinned features, as well as his chambers: the framed documents in a squiggly alphabet on the walls, the picture of Mount Ararat over his desk chair, the oddly ornate lamp bases and brocaded pillows.

“It started piecemeal with the Armenians,” he says, leaning forward. “Our right to speak our own language was taken away. Then our right to worship as Christians. By 1915, they had taken our lives. We were starved, hanged, tortured. Beaten to death, most of us, with that.” He points at a rough-hewn wooden cudgel mounted over the bookshelf.

“I didn’t know.”

“Not many do. Half my people were killed. Half a million of us, wiped out by the Turkish government. All my family, except for my mother.” A flicker of pain furrows his brow.

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes it off. “The point is, government cannot kill its own citizens, not with my help. I know Hightower did a terrible thing. He killed, but I won’t kill him to prove it’s wrong. He should be locked up forever so he never hurts another child. He will be, if I have any say in it.” He seems to catch himself in mid-lecture; then his expression softens. “So thank you, for getting involved.”

“Did I have a choice?”

“No.” He relaxes in the leather chair. “You are involved, you know,” he says quietly.

I see the city lights glowing softly behind him and feel, more than I can understand, that we aren’t talking about the case anymore. “I don’t know—”

“Yes, you do. I’m involved too, Grace. Very involved, as a matter of fact.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I feel my heart start to pound softly. “We can’t do anything about it.”

“Yes, we can. Give me your hand.” He holds out his hand to me.

I look at it, suspended between us, at once a question and an answer. This situation is supposed to be black and white, but it doesn’t feel that way inside.

“Stop thinking. Take it.”

So I do, and it feels strong and warm. He pulls me in to him, as naturally as if we’ve done this a million times before, and in a second I feel myself in his arms and his kiss, gentle on my mouth. Suddenly I hear a noise outside the office and push myself away from his chest. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“There was a noise. Maybe the door?”

“Everything’s all right,” he says. He kisses me again and shifts his weight up underneath me but I press him away.

“Wait. Stop. We can’t.”

“Why not?”

There are rules, aren’t there? “You’re married, for starters.”

He smooths my hair back from my forehead and looks everywhere on my face. “Not anymore,” he says. “My marriage is over.”

It’s a shock. “What? How?”

“It was over a long time ago. Susan asked me to stay with her until the election was over, and I did. She’s coming in the morning to sign the papers. We file tomorrow.”

“For divorce?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“It’s true.” He touches my face. “So you’re not in love? Have I been reading you wrong?”

So much for hiding my emotions. “I don’t know. I mean, I think about you, but it’s been so long.”

“How long?”

“Too long to admit.”

“That’s long enough, don’t you think,” he says, kissing me deeply. Before I can object I find myself responding, and then I don’t want to object anymore. I lose myself in his kiss, in his warmth. His hands find their way to my breasts, caressing them as we kiss, arousing me. He begins to unfasten the buttons of my blouse, and I feel a skittishness rise, a sort of shame.

“You sure no one’s out there, in the office?” I say.

“No one.” He undoes the button above my breasts, exposing the string of pearls inside my blouse. I stop his hand and his eyes meet mine, uncomprehending. “I won’t hurt you, Grace,” he says softly. “Let me. Let me love you a little.”

“But I—”

“Shhh. I dream about this, about doing this with you.”

“Armen—”

“Let me. You have to.” He smiles and moves my hands away, placing each one on the armrests of the heavy chair. “Keep your hands there. We’re going to take this slow.”

I feel myself breathing hard, excited and scared. “We can’t do this, not here.”

“Hush.” He unfastens the next button, then the next. “Look at yourself, you’re so beautiful.”

I look down and see a flash of pearls tumbling between my breasts. The scalloped cup of a bra. My skirt hiked way up, past the opaque ivory at the top of my pantyhose. I can’t stand it, being undone like this. I look away, out the window. I expect to see the night sky, but the wall of plate glass reflects a dark-haired man and a lighter-haired woman astride him.

Strangely, it’s easier to bear this way, like in a mirror. I can watch it as if it were happening to someone else.

“It’s all right now,” he whispers.

I watch him slip the silk blouse from my shoulders, freeing one arm and the other, then reaching around and unhooking my bra. I feel my breath stop as he tugs my bra down slowly, as if he’s unveiling something precious and pure. He takes a breast in each hand and teases the nipples, and I feel an exquisite tingle as each one contracts under his thumbs. I encircle his head, this head of too-long hair that I know so well, and he burrows happily between my breasts, nuzzling one and then the other.

I hear myself moan and wrap my legs more tightly around him. He responds, rocking me against the hardness growing in his lap, sucking at one nipple and then the other. I feel wetness where he’s suckled and then a slight chill as he suddenly lifts me up and lays me gently back on his arms across the table. My legs lock around his waist and my hands reach for the edge of the table. My pearls fall to the side, the Hightower papers flutter to the floor, and God knows what else slides off the desk.

Poised over me, he stops suddenly. “You’re not looking at me. Look at me, Grace.”

I watch him in the reflection. I can’t do what he’s asking.

He turns my face to his, and his expression mingles concern and pleasure. “Why won’t you look at me?”

“Is your marriage really over?”

“Yes.”

“You swear it?”

“On my life.” He bends over and kisses me gently, pressing between my legs. “Now let it go, Grace. Let go.”

I close my eyes as my body responds to him. And then my heart.

4

The ringing of a telephone shatters a deep, lovely slumber. I hear it, half in and half out of sleep, not sure whether it’s real.

PPPRRRRRRINNNGGG!

I open my eyes a crack and peer at the clock. Its digital numbers read 7:26 A.M.; I’ve been asleep for two hours. I have four whole minutes left. The phone call is a bad dream.

PPPRRRINNNGGG!

It’s real, not a dream. Who the hell could be calling at this hour? Then I remember: Armen. I feel a rush of warmth and stumble to my bureau, cursing the fact that I don’t have an extension close to the bed like everybody else in America. I wish I could just roll over and hear his voice.

“Honey?” says the voice on the line. It’s not Armen, it’s my mother. “Are you up?”

“Of course not. You know how late I got in, you were baby-sitting. What do you want?”

“I’ve been watching the TV news.” I picture her parked in front of her ancient Zenith, with a glass mug of coffee in one hand and a skinny cigarette in the other.

“Mom, it’s seven-thirty. Did you call to chat?” I flop backward onto my quilt.

“I have news.”

I’m sure. You would not believe the things my mother considers news. Liz Taylor gained weight. Liz Taylor lost weight. “What, Ma?”

“Your boss, Judge Gregorian? He committed suicide this morning.”

I sit bolt upright, as if I’ve been electrocuted. I can’t speak.

“They found him at his townhouse in Society Hill. I didn’t know he lived in Society Hill. They said his house is on the National Register of Historic Places.”

I’m stunned.

“He was at his desk, reading papers in that death penalty case.”

“How—”

“He shot himself.”

No. I close my eyes to the mental picture forming like cancer in my brain.

“There was no suicide note,” she continues. “They called somebody named Judge Galanter, who lives in Rosemont. This Galanter gets to be chief judge now, eh?”

I shake my head. There must be some mistake. “My God,” is all I can say.

“Judge Galanter says the court will continue with its operations as before.”

I think of Galanter, taking over. Then Armen, dead. This can’t be happening.

“Galanter said the Hightower case will be reassigned to another judge. Wasn’t that the case you stayed late on?”

“Who found him?”

“His wife, when she got in from Washington. She’s the one who called the police.”

“Susan found him? Did she say anything? Did they interview her?”

Her response is an abrupt laugh; I imagine a puff of smoke erupting from her mouth. “She’s holding a press conference this morning.”

Susan. A press conference. What is going on? Why would Armen do such a thing? I close my eyes, breathing him in, feeling him still. Just hours ago, he was with me. Inside me.

“Are you there?” my mother asks.

I want to say, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure where I am at all.

5

I pack Maddie off to school in record time and barrel down the expressway into Center City, rattling in my VW station wagon past far more able cars. KYW news radio confirms over and over that Armen committed suicide. I swallow the pain welling up inside and tromp on the gas.

I can’t get to the courthouse doors because of the press, newly arrived to feast on the news. Reporters are everywhere, the TV newspeople waiting around in apricot-colored pancake. Cameramen thread black cables through a group of demonstrators, also new to the scene. There must be forty pickets, walking in a silent circle, saying nothing. I look up at their signs, screaming for justice against a searing blue sky: HIGHTOWER.

But I have to get inside.

“Would you like one?” asks an older man in a checked short-sleeved shirt. He holds a pink flyer in a hand missing a thumb; his face is weatherbeaten like a farmer’s. “It tells about my daughters.”

“Your daughters?” I look up in surprise.

He nods. “Do you have children?”

“Yes. A daughter.”

“How old?”

“Six.” I don’t want to talk to him. I can’t think about Hightower now. I want to get inside.

“Does she like Barney?”

“No, she likes Madeline. The doll.”

The deep creases at his eyes soften into laugh lines. “My little one, Sally? She liked dolls. She had a Barbie, and Barbie’s sister, too. What was the name of that sister doll?” He looks down at a pair of shiny brown shoes and scratches his head between grayish slats of hair. “My wife would know,” he says, his voice trailing off.

“Skipper.”

“Right!” He laughs thickly, a smoker. “That’s right. Skipper. Skipper, that’s the one.”

I seize the moment. “Well, I should go.”

“Sure thing. You hafta get to work.” He thrusts the flyer into my hand. On it is a black-and-white photograph of two pretty girls sitting on a split wooden rail. The typed caption says SHERRI AND SALLY GILPIN. I glance at it, stunned for a second. I knew the way they died, but I didn’t know the way they lived. The younger one, Sally, has a meandering part in her hair like Maddie’s, a giveaway that she hated to have her hair brushed. I can’t take my eyes from the little girl; she was strangled, the life choked out of her. What did Armen say last night? We saved a life.

“You better go, we don’t want you to get fired on our account,” says the man. “God bless you now.”

I nod, rattled, and make my way through the crowd with difficulty. Several of the women in line look at me: solid, sturdy women, their faces plain, without makeup. I avoid them and push open the heavy glass doors to the bustling courthouse lobby. I slip the flyer into my purse and flash a laminated court ID at the marshals at the security desk in front of the elevator bank. Two minutes later, I plow through the heavy door to chambers.

Eletha is sitting at her desk, staring at a blue monitor with a stick-figure rendering of a courthouse made by one of the programmer’s kids. Underneath the picture it says: ORDER IN THE COURT! WELCOME TO THE THIRD CIRCUIT COURT WORD PROCESSING SYSTEM! The door closes behind me, but Eletha doesn’t seem to hear it.

“El?”

She swivels slowly in her chair. Her eyes are puffy, and she rises unsteadily when she sees me. “Grace.”

I go over to her, and she almost collapses into my arms, her bony frame caving in like a rickety house. “It’s okay, Eletha. It’s gonna be okay,” I say, feeling just the opposite.

I rub her back, and her body shakes with highpitched, wrenching cries. “No, no, no,” is all she says, over and over, and I hold her steady through her weeping. I feel oddly remote in the face of her obvious grief, and realize with a chill I’m acting like my mother did when my father disappeared; nothing has changed, pass the salt.

I ease Eletha into her chair and snatch her some tissues from a flowered box. “Here you go.”

“This is terrible. Just terrible. Armen, God.” She presses the Kleenex into her watery eyes.

“I know.”

“I can’t believe it.”

Neither can I. I don’t say anything.

“I was going to call you when I came in, but I couldn’t.” Her eyes brim over again.

“It’s okay now.”

“Susan called me. This morning. Then the police. Then Galanter. God, how I hate that man!”

“It was Susan who found Armen, right?”

“She came in from Washington and there he was.”

“When did she come in, right before dawn?”

“I guess. I don’t know.” She blows her nose loudly.

“Who told Galanter?”

“I don’t know, why?”

“I don’t understand. I was with Armen until five.”

“So you two worked late.”

“Right.” I avoid her eye; Eletha left at two o’clock. Then I think of the noise I heard, or thought I heard. What time was that? “Eletha, last night after you left, did you come back to the office?”

“No, why?”

“When I was with Armen, I thought I heard somebody out here.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t they come into Armen’s office?”

“No. Not that I saw.”

She shakes her head; she’s not wearing any makeup today. “The clerk’s office, the staff attorneys, they got work to do on a death penalty case. Maybe it was one of them, dropping off papers.”

Just then the chambers door opens and in walk Sarah and Artie. They both look like they’ve been crying; I recognize Sarah’s anguished expression as the one I saw in the mirror this morning. She breaks away from Artie and storms into the room.

“Is Ben here?” she shouts, pounding past us to the law clerks’ office, her short cardigan flying. “Where the fuck is Ben?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Eletha, do you?”

“He hasn’t called.”

Sarah punches the doorjamb with a clenched fist. “Damn it! I want to see him, the little prick!”

“Sar, stop,” Artie says. He walks numbly over to Eletha and puts his arm around her. “It’s not going to bring Armen back.”

Sarah strides to the phone on Eletha’s desk and punches in seven numbers without looking at anyone. “I’ve been calling that asshole all morning. Pick it up, you little prick!”

“Relax, Sarah,” I say.

Her blue eyes turn cold. “What do you mean, relax?” She slams down the phone.

“Look, we’re all hurting.”

“Ben’s not, he caused it. He pressured Armen about Hightower so he could get that fucking clerkship. He even showed him that newspaper article, the one about victim’s rights. He knew it would bother Armen. He didn’t care how much.”

“You’re talkin’ crazy,” Eletha says, between sniffles.

Sarah looks from her to me. “Grace, you saw him last night. Was he upset?”

“No,” I say, wanting to change the subject. “I thought I heard a noise—”

“What?” Sarah says. “What kind of noise?”

“I don’t know, a noise. Like someone was here, outside his office. Maybe around three o’clock or later.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.”

“So what if you heard a noise?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Unless it was you or Artie. Was it?”

Artie snorts. “At three? We were asleep.” Then he catches himself. “Oh, shit.”

Sarah glares at him. “Nice move, Weiss.”

So it’s true about them. I don’t understand Sarah; sleeping with Artie, but crazy about Armen. And Artie and Armen are so close. Were so close.

“Oh, what’s the difference now?” Artie says. “I don’t care if everybody knows, it’s not like we’re doing anything wrong.” He looks at me and Eletha, his eyes full of pain. “I love her, okay? We fuck like bunnies, okay? Is that okay with you?”

“Sure,” I say. Eletha nods uncertainly.

“See, Sar, the world didn’t end.”

Sarah ignores him and presses REDIAL. “The important thing is to find Ben.”

I walk away from the tense group. I want to see Armen’s office before they do. Alone. I stop in the doorway, bracing myself. Still, I feel a sharp pang at the sight. My gaze wanders over the exotic brocade, the strange-looking documents, and the Armenian books in their paper dust jackets, frayed at the top. The place smells of him still; I can almost feel his presence. I can’t believe he would kill himself. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I see it coming?

I enter the room and finger the papers on the conference table. Everything is the way I remember it, except that some of the Hightower papers are gone, the ones he was working on at home. The cases are scattered over the table; the laptop is at the edge. Even the dog hairs on the prayer rug are the same. It reminds me of Bernice. Where was she last night when he killed himself? Where was I, sound asleep?

Suddenly I hear a commotion in the outer office, then shouting. I rush to the door and see Artie shove Ben up against the wall, rattling a group portrait of the appeals court.

“Artie, stop it!” I shout, but Eletha’s already on the spot. She steps in front of Ben, shielding him with her body.

“He deserves it!” Artie says, his chest heaving in a thick sweatshirt. He stands over Ben, who begins to kack-kack-kack in his old man cough, rubbing his head where it hit the wall.

“Back off!” Eletha says, in a voice resonant with authority. A sense of order returns for a moment; Eletha is in charge and we are in chambers. The king is dead, long live the queen. Then it passes.

“Where have you been?” Sarah shouts at Ben, who struggles to his feet, hiding almost comically behind Eletha.

“Go to hell, Sarah. I pulled an all-nighter, so I slept in. Do I need your permission?”

“You worked all night? On what?”

“Germantown Savings. I wanted to finish it.”

“You didn’t hear the phone?”

“No.”

“The fuck you didn’t!” Sarah looks like she’s about to pick up where Artie left off and Eletha wilts between them, her strength spent.

“Okay, Sarah,” I say, “cool it. You want to talk to Ben, do it when you’re calmer.”

Her eyes flash with anger. “Playing Mommy again?”

“Yes, it comes naturally. Now go to your room. Time out until the press conference.” I point to the clerk’s office.

“Press conference?” Eletha says. “Who’s givin’ a press conference?”

I check the clock above the chambers door. “Susan is, in fifteen minutes.”

Eletha’s eyes threaten to tear up again. “How can she? Before Armen’s body is even cold.”

“It’s not like it’s so easy for her,” Sarah says defensively, “but she feels the need to explain. The public has the right to know.”

I feel my heart beat faster. “She’s going to explain why he committed suicide?”

“That’s what she told me on the phone.”

“It’s his business, not the public’s,” Ben says, smoothing his tie.

Eletha looks as surprised as I do. “But how does she know? There was no note.”

“She’s his wife, Eletha,” Sarah says.

His wife. The word digs at me inside. If he hadn’t died, they’d have filed for divorce. Today.

We gather around the old plastic television in the law clerks’ office, watching Senator Susan Waterman take her place at the podium. I suppress a twinge of jealousy and scan her face for a clue about what she’s going to say. Her stoic expression reveals nothing. She looks like a wan version of her academic image; her straight dark-blond hair, unfashionably long, is swept into a loose topknot, and her small, even features are pale, a telegenic contrast to the inky blackness of a knit suit.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says. She glances up from the podium, unaffected by the barrage of electronic flashes. “My husband, Chief Judge Armen Gregorian of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, died this morning by his own hand, here in Philadelphia. He loved this city, even though it had not always been kind to him. Even though the press had not always been kind to him, and especially of late.” She glares collectively at the press, which dubbed the fierce expression “Susan’s stare” during her campaign.

“They’re all pricks,” Sarah says, but even she sounds spent.

Susan takes a sip of water. “My husband did not leave a note to explain his actions, but it is no mystery to me. Some are already saying he did it because of the press’s criticism of his liberal views, but I assure you that was not the reason. Armen was made of sterner stuff.” She manages a tight smile at the crowded room, having reprimanded and absolved them in one blow.

“I’ve heard others say it was because of the death penalty case he had to decide, and the stress and strain it may have caused him. It would break anyone, but not Armen Gregorian. He was made of sterner stuff.” She lifts her head higher, in tacit tribute. Eletha, in the chair next to me, squeezes my hand.

“On the surface, my husband had everything to live for,” Susan says. “He was the chief judge, and we had a wonderful, happy marriage that was a solid source of comfort and support to us both.”

What is she saying? They were on the brink of divorce.

“But my husband was Armenian. The genocide of the Armenian people is called the forgotten genocide. Most of his family was murdered. His mother survived, only to commit suicide herself. This month—April—is when Armenians remember their tragic history.” She looks around the room. “Like the Holocaust survivors who later died by their own hand, my husband was a victim of hate. Let us pause for a moment of silence to remember Armen Gregorian and to remember that the power of hate can destroy us if we do not fight against it.” The camera lingers on her bowed head.

Sarah begins to sob, and Artie hugs her close.

I lean back in my chair, as if pressed there by a gigantic weight. Armen told me about the genocide, though he didn’t tell me about his mother. But still, would he commit suicide because of it? That night? The genocide was on his mind, but so was Hightower. And me. I feel like crying, but the tears won’t come.

Neither will Ben’s. He looks knowingly at Sarah and Artie, cuddled together.

His dark eyes are bone dry.

6

Judge Galanter’s breath carries the harsh tang of Binaca. Cigar smoke clings to the fine wool of his double-breasted suit. His movements are deliberate and his speech formal, as if he were trying to control each syllable. I know as sure as he’s standing before us, flushed slightly in front of Armen’s desk, that Galanter has been drinking. It evokes another memory of my father, flitting like a ghost across my mind.

“You law clerks can stay on for a week or two,” he says.

“We hadn’t even thought about it,” Artie snaps from the doorway.

“I’ll attribute that crack to your extreme emotional distress, Mr. Weiss.”

Artie looks away from Galanter, out the window. The courthouse flag flies at half mast, flapping in the wind that gusts off the Delaware River.

“Finish up the cases you’re working on. Draft the bench memos as before and hand them in to me. Argued cases will have to be reargued.” Galanter slides a gleaming Mont Blanc from his breast pocket and makes a check in a leather Filofax he’s holding like a missal. I can imagine what it says.

Things to do: Take over. Before noon.

“Next order of business. The office will have to be packed up. How much time will you need, Eletha?”

Eletha sits at the end of the conference table, fuming. “I would have to talk to Susan about that,” she says, crossing her slender arms across her chest.

“Senator Waterman? Already spoke with her. She said it’s up to you. Box the stuff and ship it to the house, she’ll go through it there. How long will it take you? I have to plan my own move.”

“You mean you’re takin’ this office?” Eletha asks.

Galanter jerks his chin upward, as if the folds of his turkey neck were pinched in his collar. “Of course, it’s the chief judge’s. I’d like to be in in two weeks. By the way, I understand the staff attorneys need an extra secretary, so there’s room for you there. Talk to Peter about that.” He makes another check in his Filofax, and Eletha breathes in and out, in and out.

“Judge,” I say. “I was wondering—”

“Of course. I forgot about you. They may need an extra staff attorney downstairs. You should apply. Part-time will be a problem, you’ll have to step up to a normal work week.”

“No. I wanted to ask about Hightower.”

He purses his thin lips. “I’ve reassigned it. The death warrant expires Monday, but we’ll have it decided well in advance.”

“Who was it reassigned to?”

“That information is strictly need-to-know. Did I mention the memorial service?” He shoots a questioning look at Ben, who’s standing against the bookshelves. Ben shakes his head discreetly.

“Not a high priority,” Artie says.

Galanter points at Artie with his pen. “Don’t test me, young man. I’ve just about had it with your lack of respect.”

“Respect?” Artie explodes. “Who are you to talk about respect? Armen just died and you can’t wait to take his office. Can’t wait!”

“Artie,” Sarah says nervously.

“Listen, you,” Galanter says, raising his voice. “This court has to maintain operations. We have a public trust.”

“Fuck you!” Artie shouts, almost in tears. He storms out of the room into his office and slams the door.

“I’ve never seen such conduct in a law clerk! Ever!” Galanter says.

“Judge Galanter.” I start talking, almost reflexively. “Artie and Armen were close. This is hard for him. For us all.” I hear an involuntary catch in my voice, but Galanter’s gaze is fixed in the direction of the clerks’ office. I feel a shiver of fear inside, from somewhere deep, but press it away. “You were saying, Judge, about the memorial service?”

Galanter looks down at me, still lost in his own anger. “What did you say?”

“The memorial service.”

“The memorial service? Oh, yes.” He exhales sharply, regaining control, and returns the pen to his breast pocket. “Memorial service. The day after tomorrow, Thursday. In the ceremonial courtroom. The time’s not fixed yet.”

“Have you heard about the funeral arrangements?”

“No idea. Senator Waterman said she’d call about that. Eletha, get me that memo I sent you.”

Eletha doesn’t move a muscle. “Memo? What memo, Judge?”

Galanter hasn’t drunk enough to miss the challenge in her manner. He tilts his head ever so slightly. “The one about the new sitting schedule. I sent it this morning, on E-mail.”

“I was busy this morning.”

“So was I. Get it now,” he says, staccato.

Eletha leaves the room. In a second she’s slamming her desk drawers unnecessarily.

Galanter hands me some papers from his book. “Xerox these for me and come right back.”

I take the papers and leave the office. When I open the door to the hallway, Eletha’s giving the finger to the wall.

I read the papers on the way to the Xerox machine. It’s a complete sitting schedule, with Armen’s initials crossed out next to his cases and a new judge’s written in. All of Armen’s cases, reassigned so fast it’d make your head spin.

READY TO COPY, the photocopier says. I open the heavy lid, slap the paper onto the glass, and hit the button. The light from the machine rolls calcium white across my face.

Suicide? I don’t understand. They were going to file for divorce, if what Armen said was true. I feel a pang of doubt; would Armen lie? Of course not. Afterward we talked for a long time, holding each other on the couch. He was an honest man, a wonderful man.

READY TO COPY. I hit the button. You don’t kill yourself just because you’re Armenian. Armen was a survivor. And he hated guns, was against keeping them in the house. Where did he get the gun?

READY TO COPY, says the machine again, but I’m not ready to copy. So much has happened. We found and lost each other in one night. I stare at the glass over the shadowy innards of the machine; all I see is my own confused reflection. What was that noise last night, and does it matter?

I turn around and look down the hall, but it’s empty. There are only two occupied judges’ chambers on this whole floor, ours and Galanter’s; the rest are vacant, the chambers of judges who sit nearer their homes in Wilmington and northern New Jersey. Only eleven people work on the entire floor.

Now it’s ten.

A boxy file cabinet sits against the wall next to the judges’ elevator. A few paces to the left is the door to the law clerks’ office. To the right, down the hall, are Galanter’s chambers.

Everything looks perfectly normal.

I step away from the machine and peer at the government-spec brown carpet. There’s nothing on the rug, no trace of anything. I straighten up, feeling stupid. What am I looking for, muddy footprints? Clothing fibers? What am I thinking? I shake my head and turn back to the Xerox machine.

ADD PAPER, it says. The words blink red, like the old pinball machines that go tilt.

Damn it. Why am I the only one who refills this thing? I look in the cabinet next to the machine for a ream of paper, but it’s empty except for the torn wrapper. The law clerks never pick up after themselves. I slam the cabinet door and walk down the hallway back to chambers.

Bbbzzzzzz goes the security camera, as I tramp angrily by.

Then it hits me. I do an about-face and look up at the camera. It’s black and boxy, and looks back at me like a mechanical vulture perched above the judges’ elevator.

The camera’s on all the time, monitored by the federal marshals. It saw everything that happened in the hall last night and probably recorded it, like at ATM machines.

It knows if anyone came into chambers and saw Armen and me together. And it knows who they are.

7

His breast pocket bears a plastic plate that says R. ARRINGTON over the shiny five-star badge of the marshal service. His frame is brawny in its official blue blazer, and his dark skin is slightly pitted up close. “Lunchtime!” I say to him, making an overstuffed tuna hoagie do the cha-cha with a chilly bottle of Snapple lemonade. “All this can be yours.”

He does not look impressed. “No can do, Grace.”

The hoagie and the lemonade jump up and down in frustration. “All I want is two minutes. I look at the monitors, then I’m outta there.”

“There’s twenty monitors, Grace,” he says, sighing deeply. Maryellen, the cashier in the building’s snack shop, cocks her head in our direction. She may be blind, but she’s not deaf. I decide to be more quiet.

“Come on, Ray. You said only one monitor shows our hallway. How long can it take to look at a monitor?”

He folds his thick arms. “Maybe if you tell me why this matters.”

I glance at the jurors behind us buying newspapers, gum, and fountain soda. The ice machine spits chunks into a tall paper cup, and a juror plays mix-and-match to find the right size lid. He’ll never find it; I never can, and I have a J.D. “Let’s just say I want to check security.”

“Come clean, Rossi.”

I consider this. Ray is one of the few marshals who liked Armen; he’s also one of the few African Americans, which I suspect is no coincidence. “Tell you what. Get me in. If it pays off, I’ll tell you why.”

“What am I supposed to tell the marshals?”

“What marshals? You’re the marshal.”

“I’m a CSO, technically. A court security officer. I mean the marshals watching the monitors.”

“Tell ’em I’m checking security, that I’m the administrative law clerk to the chief judge.”

“Grace.” His somber expression reminds me of something I’d rather not dwell on. Armen is gone.

“Forget it, I’ll tell them something. I’ll handle it. Just get me in, I’ll owe you. Big-time.”

Suddenly he snaps his fingers. “I know what you can do for me.”

“Anything.”

“You can introduce me to your fine friend, the lovely Eletha Staples.”

“Eletha? Don’t you know her?”

“I’ve been workin’ here as long as she has, but she won’t give me the time of day. She seein’ anybody?”

I think of Leon, Eletha’s boyfriend, who gives her nothing but grief. “No.”

“Hot dog!” He rubs his hands together; it makes a dry sound. “Lunch. I’ll start with lunch, take it nice and easy. Can you set it up?”

“Deal.” I set the tuna hoagie and Snapple on the counter in front of Maryellen. At the last minute, Ray tosses in two packs of chocolate Tastykakes.

“What are you having today, Grace?” Maryellen says. Her cloudy eyes veer wildly around the room.

“Thanksgiving dinner,” I say to her and she laughs.

After we leave the snack bar, Ray leads me through a labyrinth of hallways to the core of a secured part of the courthouse. It would have been impossible to find this myself, and when I reach the barred entrance I understand why.

It’s a prison.

Sixteen floors from where I work, in the same building. It gives me the creeps. The sign on the barred door says: ONLY COUNSEL MAY VISIT PRISONERS.

We head down another hall, past a room with a number of empty desks in it, and open a door onto a small room, brightly lit by a ceiling of fluorescents. A wall of TV screens dominates the room, giving it a futuristic feel. There must be twenty-five black-and-white TV screens here, trained everywhere throughout the courthouse.

The monitors in the left bank flash on the stairwells at each floor of the building, and the large screens in the middle offer an ever-changing peek into the courtrooms. In 12-A there’s a young woman crying on the witness stand. In 13-A an older man is being sentenced. In 14-A a little boy is testifying.

“It’s like a soap opera, huh, Worrell?” Ray says amiably to the stony-faced marshal watching the screens. He’s a stocky middle-aged man in a black T-shirt that says UNITED STATES MARSHAL SERVICE. It looks more like a get-up for Hell’s Angels, but I do not remark this aloud.

“Ugh,” the man says, his attention focused on the TV pictures of prison cells on the far right. Each cell is numbered and occupied by a man in street clothes, probably awaiting trial. They sit slumped or asleep in their cells; one is a black teenager in an oversized sweatshirt, just a kid. I think of Hightower.

“This is Grace Rossi, Worrell. She’s a lawyer, works for the appeals court. She wants to see—”

“I want to see the monitors,” I say with faux authority. “It’s a security check for the new chief judge.”

Worrell begins to laugh at one of the prisoners, a Muslim crouched over in prayer. “Say it loud, brother. You’re gonna need it.” Ray looks sideways at the monitor.

“Where’s the screen for the eighteenth floor?” I ask.

“That one.” He points to one of the screens. The bottom of the screen reads 16-B. In the high-resolution picture, a young secretary pauses to tug up her slip. Worrell chuckles. “They forget Big Brother’s watching.”

Of course they forget; I did. So did whoever came into our chambers, if anyone. I watch the picture flicker to 17-B. It’s a view of the hallway outside the judges’ elevator on the seventeenth floor. On the wall hangs a fake parchment copy of the Constitution. Our floor is next.

“Yeow!” Ray hoots as soon as the scene changes. Eletha is photocopying at the Xerox machine, her back to the camera. Her skirt clings softly to her curves, and with her back turned you can’t see how haggard she looks today. “Now ain’t that pretty?” he says, in a tone men usually reserve for touchdown passes and vintage Corvettes.

Worrell grunts. “She’s all right.”

Ray gives him a solid shove. “Listen to you, ‘She’s all right.’ Shit, man! She’s more than all right, she’s fine. And she’s mine, all mine. Right, Grace? Grace?”

“Right,” I say, preoccupied by the scene on the TV screen, which shows Eletha walking down the hall and into chambers. Bingo. The camera would have seen whoever came into chambers last night, wherever they came from. “Where’s the tape?”

Worrell looks at me blankly. “What tape?”

“The tape. The tape of what the camera saw last night.”

“We don’t tape.”

“What?”

“There’s no tape, lady.”

“I don’t understand.” I look at Ray for confirmation.

“I coulda told you that, Grace,” he says.

I don’t believe this. “At the MAC machine they tape. Even in the Seven-Eleven they tape.”

“Seven-Eleven’s got the money. This is the U.S. government. You’re lucky we got the goddamn judges.”

Ray looks embarrassed. “Downstairs we tape. The monitors at the security desk, they tape the stairwell and the judges’ garage. Just not here.”

“But somebody watches the monitors at night, don’t they?”

Worrell leans back in the creaky chair, plainly amused. “Guess again.”

“Maybe we should go,” Ray says.

“Hold on. There’s no night shift?” I hear myself sounding like an outraged customer.

“We got a fella walks around the halls,” Worrell says, “but that’s it. One marshal. The government don’t have the money for somebody to watch TV all night.” His face slackens as he returns to the screens.

“All right. Who was the marshal last night, walking the halls?”

“McLean, I think.”

“McLean? Is he the big one with the mustache?” The Mutt of the Mutt-and-Jeff marshals I see in the mornings.

Worrell nods. “Don’t you guys got some work to do?”

“Let’s go, Grace,” Ray says.

“Sure. Thanks,” I say, disappointed. So much for the short answer. We start toward the door but Worrell erupts into raucous laughter.

“Holy shit, what a case this one is.”

Ray glances at the monitor, then scowls. “I’d love a piece of that guy. He’s not crazy, he knows just what he’s doin.’ Jerkin’ us around.”

I look back. One of the prisoners is smack in the middle of cell seven, standing on his head. “Jesus.”

“What a country,” Worrell says. “That jerk’s gettin’ a nice bed for the night, and you know who’s gonna pay for it? You and me. The taxpayers. For him they got the money. For us, no. You talk to your boss about that, okay, lady?”

But I don’t answer. I recognize the man in the cell. “Ray, let’s go.”

8

“Shake and Bake is in jail?” Artie says, shocked.

“Show me where, Grace.”

“You can’t visit him.”

“What do you mean I can’t visit him?”

Eletha looks over wearily, dead on her feet against the bookcase in the law clerks’ office. “That lunatic is the last thing you should be worried about today.”

“Grace,” Sarah calls from her desk, “what were you doing in the security office?”

“I wanted to see the cameras.”

“What cameras?”

“You know, the ones in the hallways. I wanted to see who’s on the other side.”

“Why?”

“I was curious. I wanted to know if they saw anything peculiar.”

“Is this about the noise?” Sarah asks.

Ben looks up from the newspaper accounts of Armen’s death. “What noise?”

“I heard a noise last night, so I wanted to see the tapes, only—”

“Tapes?” Sarah asks. “You mean of what they see in the cameras?” She flushes slightly, and I play a hunch I didn’t even know I had.

“Yes. They tape everything, for security reasons. Like at Seven-Eleven.”

“They do?”

“Sure.” I look at Eletha. “Right, El? They tape from those cameras.”

“If you say so,” Eletha says, playing along. “They keep the tapes?”

Thanks, El. “Yep, in a vault. They said they’d show me tomorrow.”

Ben presses a button on his computer keyboard. The modem sings a computer song as he logs on to Lexis, the legal research database. “Surprised the government has the money.”

“Safer, what the fuck are you doing?” Artie asks. “Are you working? Today?”

“I’m going on Nexis, that okay with you?”

“What’s Nexis?” Eletha asks, as Sarah suddenly busies herself making a full-fledged tea ceremony out of a single bag of Constant Comment. She has to be the one I heard last night, and she should never play poker.

“Anybody gonna answer me? What’s Nexis?” Eletha plops into a chair like a much heavier woman. Her chin falls into her hand. “Forget it. Who gives a shit?”

“Nexis is a database of newspapers,” I say. “It has magazines, newspapers, wire services. Everything.”

“How do you like that?” Ben says, in his own world as he reads his computer screen. “We’re under HOTTOP. Hightower and the Chief.”

“Christ, Safer!” Artie says.

“I need a translation,” Eletha says.

“HOTTOP stands for hot topics in the news,” I say, the words sour in my mouth. Without thinking twice, I cross to Ben’s computer and press the power switch to OFF. The powerful unit crackles in protest, then fizzles out. “Show some respect, Ben. A man is dead.” I feel a wrenching inside my chest and turn my back on Ben’s surprised expression.

“Way to go, Grace!” Artie says, bursting into applause.

“She’s right,” Eletha says. She stands up and smooths out her skirt. “I don’t even know what we’re still doin’ here. We should all go home. The packing can wait.”

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Sarah says, standing at the coffeemaker. The only sound is the hot water spurting into the glass pot. Sarah removes the pot a little too soon and the last drops dance across the searing griddle like St. Vitus.

“Let’s not get maudlin, please,” Ben says.

Artie looks as if he’s about to snap, then his brow knits in alarm. “Wait a minute. Grace, does Shake and Bake know about Armen?”

“I have no idea.”

“Oh, fuck. I have to get in to see him. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he hears. Where’s the prison?”

“On the second floor, but they won’t let you in.”

“The hell they won’t. He has a right to counsel, doesn’t he? I’m counsel.” Artie bounds over to the coat rack and tears Ben’s jacket from a wooden hanger, leaving it swinging.

“That’s my best jacket, Weiss,” Ben says.

“I know, dude. Thanks.” He yanks the jacket over his chest. “Sar, lend me your briefcase.”

“You really want to do this?” Sarah hands him a flowered canvas briefcase but Artie pushes it back at her.

“Give me a pad instead. Where’d you say they’re taking him, Grace?”

“Courtroom Fourteen-A, before Katzmann. They’re trying to charge him with trespassing on federal property.”

Artie shakes his head. “I tell ya, these kids today, in and out of trouble. Where did I go wrong, Mom?”

“Don’t ask me, pal.”

“I gave him everything. Summers in Montauk, winters in Miami Beach.” He gives the jacket a reckless tug and Ben flinches.

“Will you at least take it easy?” Ben says.

Eletha covers her eyes. “I didn’t see this. This is not happening.”

“How do I look, Mom?” Artie says to me. He sticks out his arms, and the sleeves ride up to his elbows. “Hot?”

“Smokin’.”

“Excellent.” He sticks a legal pad under his arm and runs out of the clerks’ office. I hear the heavy pounding of his feet as he heads for the outer door. My eyes meet Sarah’s, but she looks down into her steaming mug of tea.

“You okay, Sar?” I ask her. Flush her out. Isn’t that what detectives do?

“Sure.” She takes a quick sip of tea, avoiding my gaze. “Who’s Hightower been reassigned to, Ben?” she asks.

“What makes you think I know?”

“You know Galanter’s clerks. The buzz-cut boys.”

The telephone rings at Eletha’s desk. “Shit,” she says. “Thing’s been ringing all day.” Before I can offer to get it, she kicks off her heels and is padding to her desk.

Ben flicks on the power switch, animating the machine. “Grace, hate me if you must, but I’m logging on again.”

“Tell us who got Hightower, Safer,” Sarah says, but I hold up my hand.

“Sarah, think a minute. Who’s even more conservative than Galanter?”

“Adolf Hitler.”

“On our court, I mean.”

“Judge Foudy.”

“Right. And Galanter would pick somebody to vote with him, now that Armen’s gone. He’d want to stack the deck. Change the result.”

She blinks. “Could he do that?”

“Sure. He’s the chief judge. In an emergency, he picks the panels.”

Ben pounds the keys. “I neither confirm nor deny.”

He doesn’t have to, I know it. Galanter has shifted the majority to himself, blocking Hightower in. No matter which way Robbins goes, it’ll be two votes to one for death. Poor Armen; he didn’t save Hightower’s life after all. I stand up, wanting suddenly to be alone.

“Look at this item,” Ben says, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “What a nice gesture from Senator Susan, and how like a Democrat.”

“What?” Sarah says, and I stop at the doorway.

“From The Washington Post. Says here that Susan tried to donate Bernice to a group called Service Dogs for the Handicapped. I can almost hear the wheelchairs plowing into each other, can’t you?” He laughs so hard he coughs: kack-kack-kack.

“Very funny,” Sarah says.

“Bernice is gone?” I say, surprised to feel a twinge inside.

“Gone but not forgotten,” Ben says, recovering enough to hit another key. “They didn’t want her, evidently. They only take puppies.”

“So where is she?” I ask from the doorway, only half wanting to know.

Ben hits the key again. “It doesn’t say.”

“I know,” Eletha says. She walks into the room, waving a yellow Post-it on her finger. “They just called.”

“Who did?”

She holds the paper in front of my face. On it is a phone number I don’t recognize. “I voted for Susan, but I’ll never forgive myself.”

9

“She’s too big, Mom,” Maddie says, shuddering in her nightgown. “Look at her teeth.”

Bernice strains against her red collar, which still says A. GREGORIAN; her wagging tail swats my thigh with each beat.

“But I’m holding her, honey. She won’t hurt you, she can’t. Just come over and let her sniff you. She’s all clean now.” I bathed Bernice right after I bathed Maddie, using green flea shampoo they sold me at the dog pound, along with a leash, two steel bowls, and a thirty-dollar trowel for shoveling a megaton of dogshit.

“Rrronononr,” Bernice grumbles, a guttural noise that makes Maddie’s blue eyes widen in fear.

“What’s that?”

“She’s talking to you, honey. She wants you to love her.”

“But I don’t love her. I don’t even like her.” Maddie tugs anxiously at the end of a damp strand of hair; her hair looks brown when it’s wet, more like my mother’s original russet color than her own blazing red.

“Aw, can’t you just give her a little pat on the head? Her hair’s washed too.” I scratch Bernice’s newly coiffed crown and she looks back gratefully, her tongue lolling out. “See? Look how happy she is to be with us.”

“But why did we have to take her?”

“Because nobody else would. They all have apartments that don’t allow pets. We’re the only ones with a house who could have a pet.”

“They could move.”

“No. Now come closer.”

She doesn’t budge. “Why couldn’t you just leave her there? In the dog pound.”

“You know what would happen to her. You saw Lady and the Tramp.”

“They don’t do that right away, Mom. They wait about six or five weeks.”

“No, they don’t wait that long.”

“Somebody else could have adopted her.”

“I don’t think anybody would have. You should have seen her in the cage.” I flash on the scene at the pound; Bernice penned by herself, barking frantically next to a streetwise pit bull. “Nobody would have taken her, Maddie. Most people like puppies, not dogs.”

“I like puppies. Little puppies.”

I sigh. I got my second wind when I washed Bernice, but the day’s awful events and my own fatigue are catching up with me.

“It’s not my fault, Mom.” Maddie pouts. “She’s scary.”

“I know, you’re being very brave. How about you go up to bed now? You look tired.”

“I’m not tired. You always say I’m tired when I’m not.”

“All right, you’re not tired, but I am. Go up to bed, and I’ll be right up.”

She makes a wide arc around Bernice, then scurries upstairs, and I take the disappointed dog into the kitchen and put her behind an old plastic baby gate. She whimpers behind the fence, but I don’t look back. I reach Maddie’s room just as she turns off the light and hops into bed. “She’s so big, Mom,” she says, a small voice in the dark.

I sit down at the edge of the narrow bunk bed and let my weariness wash over me. I smooth Maddie’s damp bangs back over the uneven part in her hair. It reminds me of Sally Gilpin, and I feel grateful to have my daughter with me, however terrified she is of big dogs. That much is right in the world. “I understand, baby.”

“Where will she sleep?” Maddie says, digging in her mouth with a finger, worrying a loose tooth from its moorings.

A good question, only one of the hundred I haven’t answered. “I have it all figured out.”

“Mom, look,” she says with difficulty, owing to the fist in her mouth. Her eyes glitter in the dim light from the hallway. Huge round eyes, like Sam’s; my color but his shape. Across the bridge of her nose is a constellation of tiny freckles too faint to see in the dark.

“Look at what?”

“Look.” She moves her hand, pointing at one of her front teeth, which has been wrenched to the left.

“Gross, Maddie. It’s not ready. Put it back the way it was, please.”

“Everyone else has their teeth out. My whole class.”

“But you’re younger, remember? Because of when your birthday is.”

“Duh, Mom.”

“Duh, Mads.”

She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.

“Stop, Maddie.”

“You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”

“Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”

“Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”

“You’ll give yourself an infection.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”

She giggles.

“You think that’s funny?”

She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.

“But you love to be tickled.”

“No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”

I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother. When I gave Maddie the doll at age three, they became inseparable. “You really do look like Madeline, you know?” I say. “Except for the hat.”

“No, I don’t. She looks like me. I look like myself.”

I laugh. “You’re right.” I lean over and give her a quick kiss. Her breath smells of peanut butter. “Did you brush?” I ask, second-rate sleuth that I am.

“I don’t have to brush if I don’t want to.”

“Oh, really? Who said?”

“Daddy. He told me it was my decision.” Her tone elides into the adolescent sneer that comes prematurely to six-year-old girls.

“Don’t be fresh.”

“Don’t be fresh. Don’t be fresh. Daddy says you can break the rules sometimes.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Easy for Sam to say. After his highly suspect charitable deductions, fidelity was the second rule he broke. Sam is a high-powered lawyer who lost interest in me at about the same time I became a mother and quit being a high-powered lawyer myself; ironically, I thought that was just when I was getting interesting.

“Gretchen says that if your tooth comes out too soon, you have to wait a long time for a new tooth to grow.” She twists a hank of Madeline’s yarn hair around her finger.

“Is Gretchen a girl in your class?”

“Gretchen knows about bugs and gerbils. She knows about why it’s a hamster and not a gerbil. She has three teeth out. Madeline likes her.”

“Then she must be nice.”

“She is. She has long hair, really long. Down to here.” She makes a chop at her upper arm. “She wears a jumper.”

Like Madeline. “Do you eat lunch with her?”

“Sometimes. Not usually. Usually I’m alone.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that much people, so nobody ever sits next to me.”

I try to remember what I read in that parenting book. Talk so your kid will listen, listen so your kid will talk; it’s catchy, but it means nothing. “What can we do about that?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs.

I forget what the book says to do when they shrug. “Would you like to have Gretchen over? Maybe one of the days I’m off from work?”

“She won’t come.”

“You don’t know that unless you ask.”

“But I don’t know her exactly as a best friend, okay?”

“But, honey, that’s how you get to know someone.”

“Mom, I already told you!” She turns away.

I am at a loss. There is no chapter on your child having no friends. I even spied on her at recess last month after I went food shopping. The other first graders swung from monkey bars and chased each other; Maddie played by herself, digging with a stick in the hard dirt. Her Madeline doll was propped up against a nearby tree. I found myself thinking, If she’s digging a grave for the doll, I’m phoning a shrink. Instead I telephoned her teacher that night.

“She’ll be fine,” she said. “Give her time.”

“But it’s March already. I’m doing everything I can. I help out in the classroom. I did the plant sale and the bake sale.”

“Have you set up any play dates for her?”

“Every time I suggest that, she bursts into tears.”

“Keep at it.”

“But isn’t there anything else I can do?”

“Let it run its course. She’s on the young side.”

“But she was fine last year, in kindergarten. She was even younger.”

“Weren’t you home then?”

Ouch. Then my alimony ran out and almost all my savings; with child support, I can swing part-time. “Yes, I only work three days a week, and she has her grandmother in the afternoon. It’s not like she’s with a stranger.”

“She’s just having some trouble with the adjustment.”

Well, duh, I thought to myself.

But I didn’t say it.

Bernice’s ears prick up at the sound of a soft knock at the front door and she takes off, barking away, back paws skidding on the hardwood floor. In a minute, there’s the chatter of a key in the lock; it has to be Ricki Steinmetz, my best friend. She’s the only one with a key besides my mother.

“Rick, wait!” I shout, but it’s too late.

The door swings open and Bernice bounds onto Ricki’s shoulders. “Aaaiieee!” Ricki screams in surprise.

“Bernice, no!” I yank the dog from Ricki’s beige linen suit, leaving distinct rake marks in the shoulder pads, and hustle Ricki and Bernice inside before my neighbors call the landlord.

“Is that a dog?” Ricki says, backing up.

I hold a finger to my lips and listen upstairs to hear if Bernice’s barking woke Maddie. Ricki understands and shuts up, her mouth setting into a disapproving dash of burgundy lipstick. There’s no sound from Maddie’s room. Bernice chuffs loudly on Ricki’s cordovan mules.

Ricki gasps. “Did you see that? She threw up on my shoes!”

“She just sneezed.”

“These are Joan and David!”

“Come in the kitchen, would you?” I take Bernice by the collar and walk her like Quasimodo into the kitchen. “What are you doing here? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

Ricki snatches a paper napkin from the holder on the dining room table and follows me into the kitchen. “Didn’t your mother tell you I called? I wanted to come over and see how you were, after what happened,” she says, wiping her shoe. Ricki is a family therapist who takes clothing as seriously as codependency. She still looks put together even after a day of seeing clients; her white silk T-shirt remains unwrinkled, her lips lined. In fact, she’d look perfect if she didn’t have those rake marks on her shoulders and that goober on her shoes.

“It’ll dry.”

“Disgusting.” She slips on the shoe. “It’s the judge’s dog, isn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Tell me you’re taking it to the pound.”

“Nope. I own it. Her.”

She stands stock-still. “You’re kidding me.”

“Don’t start with the dog. I heard it from my mother, I heard it from my daughter. You came over to be supportive, so start being supportive.” I sit down on one of the pine stools at the counter in my makeshift eat-in kitchen, and Bernice stands beside me, tail wagging. I scratch her head.

“Sorry. You want some coffee, on you?”

“I’ll make it.” I start to get up, but Ricki presses me onto the stool with a firm hand.

“Sit!” she says.

Instantly, Bernice plops her curly-coated rump onto the floor.

“Wow,” I say, astonished. “I never saw her do that.”

Bernice pants happily, her long tongue unrolling like a rug.

“Cute,” Ricki says.

“And pedigreed, too. When can I drop her off?”

“No way.” She opens the freezer.

“But you have more room than I do. You need a Swiss dog. Think of the boys, if they get lost in the mall.”

“I’m ignoring you.” She rummages through the boxes of frozen vegetables. “Where’s the coffee?”

“On the door.” I give up and watch my new dog lie down at the foot of my stool, shifting once, then again, to get comfortable on the tile floor. She needs a dog bed, but I’ll be damned if I’ll buy that, too.

“What happened to that cappuccino decaf I gave you?” Ricki shouts from inside the freezer. Icy clouds billow around her chic wedge of thick brown hair.

“It’s gone. Use the Chock Full O’ Nuts.”

“You don’t have flavored?”

“I have coffee-flavored. Now close the door.”

She grabs a can and shuts the door. “I’m going to understand your crummy mood because you’re entitled to it. You have a good reason to feel crummy.”

“Is this the supportive part?”

“Yes. I’m validating you.”

“Like parking, you stamp my ticket?”

“Just like that.” She pries the plastic lid off the can and spoons the coffee into the basket, then pours the water into the coffeemaker. I watch her as if I’ve never seen this done, my brain stuck in a sort of stasis. The red light on the Krups blinks on: a machine, highly reliable and predictable. People are not machines, and so they do unpredictable things. Things that strike like a bolt from the heavens, stunning you where you stand.

“You okay?” Ricki asks.

I watch the coffee dribble into the glass pot. “I still can’t believe it.”

“I know.” Ricki puts her arm around me, but I don’t feel her touch, not really. A spring storm howls outside, rattling the loose storm windows. These things seem like they’re happening around me, and not really to me. “It’s a shock,” she says.

I think of Armen. His hand in my hair. How easily he lifted me to the couch. The weight of his body, the strength of it. He was lovely. “It’s just not possible.”

“I know,” she says, stroking my hair.

He was happy. I know he was. “He didn’t even own a gun.”

“I read it was registered to his wife.”

Susan. She’s the one who found him. He was going to tell her about us. “She put Bernice in a dog pound, Rick. What kind of a woman does that to her husband’s pet?”

Ricki glances at Bernice, comatose on the floor. “I can see it.”

“They had a terrible marriage, no matter what she says. They were going to divorce.”

“How do you know all this?”

“He told me.”

“He told you about his marriage? Since when?”

“And Sarah, one of the law clerks, worked on Susan’s campaign. I think she came by chambers late at night. She got nervous when I told her about the tapes.”

“Tapes?”

“It was a bluff, but it worked.” I hear myself sounding slightly hyper. “Then there’s Galanter.”

“Galawho?” Ricki steps away from me, concerned.

“Judge Galanter, who becomes chief now, for the next seven years. He’d never have gotten to be chief if Armen hadn’t died. He would have been too old to be eligible, past sixty-five. I wonder if he drinks.”

“A judge, drinking? A federal appellate judge?”

“What, it’s confined to the trades?” I experience it again, as a flash of insight: the fighting, a woman’s fists pounding futilely against a man’s bulky shoulders. My mother and my father. I can’t remember any more than that. I was six when he left.

“Grace, you’re losing it.” She looks at me like I’m crazy, and maybe I am. I feel it welling up inside of me.

“Is it possible that he didn’t commit suicide? Is it possible that he was murdered?”

“What?” she says.

I tell her the whole story, about Armen and me. She looks drained when I’m done, but still caring, and I imagine that’s what she looks like after a session with one of her flakier clients. She sets down her empty coffee mug with finality. “I’m worried about you, Grace. You’ve lost a man you cared for, and not for the first time. There was Sam.”

“What’s Sam have to do with it?”

“It’s a loss.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s not a loss when you lose someone who doesn’t want you. Happily ever after, just not together.”

Ricki crosses her arms. “You don’t mean that.”

“I sure do. You may not think my life turned out so great, but I do. I’m okay. At least I was until this happened.”

“Maybe Armen’s death is kicking up a lot of stuff for you.”

“What stuff?”

“Abandonment. Loss. Think of your father.”

“My father?” I almost laugh. I hate it when she turns into a shrink. “How do you guys make these connections? My father was a drunk. Armen was wonderful.”

“But they both left you. It makes sense that you’re having trouble accepting it.”

He left you. It hurts to hear her say it; that much is true. “I don’t think that’s it. I can accept that he’s gone, Ricki. What I can’t accept right now is that he committed suicide. At least I can’t accept it without question, like the rest of the world. I don’t understand it, okay? Not yet, anyway.”

She holds up two neatly manicured hands. “Okay. Okay. I’ll shut up. After all, you’re the cop here.”

“What’d you say?”

“You heard me.”

But she’s right. I did, and it gives me an idea.

10

EXECUTIVE PARKING LOT, says the sign on the steel racks of Samsonite briefcases. It’s the only spark of humor in the grim police station, from the aging alcoholic asleep in the lobby to the battleship-gray paint peeling off the cinder-block walls. Detective Ruscinjki blends in here, with his gray hair and gray eyes. He folds his furry arms behind an ancient typewriter in the bustling Central Detectives’ office and looks up at me. “You sure you’re not with the media?” he asks.

“No.”

A black detective in shirtsleeves and shoulder holster walks by, ignoring us.

He looks unconvinced. “We got lots of calls from the media on this case. Print media. Electronic media. They’d say anything to get past the desk, anything to get the gory details.”

“I’m not a reporter. I told you, I worked for Judge Gregorian. I have court ID if you want.”

He leans back in his chair at a long table in the common room. “All right, Miss Rossi, so you’re not with the media. You’re not his lawyer, either, or a member of the family. That means I tell you what I tell the reporters. The case is closed. We have no reason to believe that the judge’s death was anything other than a suicide.” A lineup of battered file cabinets sits behind him, solid as the stone wall he’s putting up for my benefit. Or detriment.

“I was just wondering how you can be so sure. Is there some physical evidence you found?”

“Not that I intend to discuss with you. Trust me, it was a suicide. I saw it.”

I feel my mouth open. “What? You saw Armen?”

He frowns, confused for a moment. “The judge? I was on the squad Monday night, I got the call. That’s why you asked the desk man for me, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t ask anybody for you. I just said I needed to talk to one of the detectives about Judge Gregorian.”

He takes one look at me and seems to sense there was something between Armen and me; he’s not a detective for nothing. “I’m sorry,” he says, softening. “Sit down.”

So I do, in a stiff-backed metal chair catty-corner to him.

“Listen to me,” he says, leaning on the typewriter. “I’ve been a detective for nine years now, spent twelve years on the force before that. I don’t rule it a suicide unless I’m one hundred percent. On this one, I was one hundred percent. So was the ME.”

“ME?”

“Medical examiner. He was there himself, since the judge was so prominent, husband of the senator and all. They’ll have the toxicology reports in a month, and the autopsy results. But I tell you, we agreed on the scene, him and me.”

A medical examiner; an autopsy. I can’t even think about it, not now anyway. “What was the evidence?”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t tell you that even if I wanted to.”

“I read a lot about it in the newspapers. They seemed to have plenty of information.”

“An important man, a case like this, the papers will know a lot. We may have a leak or two, there’s nothin’ I can do about that. But none of it comes from me.”

“I read in the paper that the gunshot wound was to the right temple. Armen—the judge—was right-handed. Is that the type of evidence you look for?”

“One of the things.”

“The papers said the gun was his wife’s.”

“She kept it in the desk. Felt very bad he used it that way. Cried a river.”

“The paper also said the doors and windows were locked. So that’s something you look for too, right? In a suicide.”

“Yes. Generally.”

“In the Daily News they said it was a contact wound. What does that mean? Like you said, ‘generally’?”

“Miss Rossi, I’m not going to tell you about this case. I can’t.”

“Just generally, not in this case. Does it mean a wound where the gun makes contact?”

Ruscinjki purses his lips; they’re as flat as the rest of his features, and his receding hairline is a gentle gray roll, like a wave.

“How can you tell that it made contact?”

“I can’t say—”

“I’m just asking a question. Not in this case or anything. Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically?” A faint smile appears.

“Yes. If I were to say to you, How can you tell if something is a contact wound, what would you say?”

“How we know it’s a contact wound is the gunpowder residue. If it’s a contact shot it sprays out like a little star. A shot from a coupla inches away, the gunpowder sprays all over.”

I try not to think about the gunpowder star. “Okay. What else do you see with a typical suicide? Educate me.” I imagine I’m taking a deposition of a reluctant witness, and I’m not far wrong.

“Gunpowder residue on the hand, and blowback.”

“Blowback?”

“Blood on the hand that held the gun. Blood on the gun, too.”

I try not to wince. “Okay. Anything else?”

“Cadaverous spasm.”

“And that is?”

“The body’s reaction to the pain of the blast, the shock of it.”

“How does the body react? Generally?”

“The hand grips around the gun and stays that way. After death.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No. That’s mostly all of it.”

“I see. Now. If you don’t have this type of evidence, the three things you mentioned, the case is not one hundred percent. Is that right?”

“Right. In a case where there’s no note.”

I almost forgot. “Is it odd there was no note? I mean, in the typical case do you see a note?”

“Most times there is a note. Most suicides lately are your AIDS people, people who know they’re going to die. They leave a note. They prepare.”

“So if there’s not a note, does that tell you it’s not a suicide?”

“Not at all. It doesn’t tell me anything, one way or the other. Lots of suicides leave their notes way in advance—depression, preoccupation, withdrawal.” His tone grows thoughtful, more relaxed; he’d rather talk psychology than pathology. So would I.

“But Judge Gregorian wasn’t depressed.”

“According to the secretary, he did become depressed about this time of year. Something about Armenians.” He brushes dust off the typewriter keys. “The press was all over him because of that death penalty appeal. Not that I’m talking about the actual case.” The sly smile reappears, then fades.

“But he seemed to handle that fine.”

“The senator said his mother committed suicide. It runs in families, you know.”

“But it’s not inherited.”

“They get the idea. All of a sudden it becomes a possibility. It’s like kids in high school, they come in clusters.” He looks sad for a moment. “People kill themselves all the time, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Who can understand something like that, anyway?”

I consider this and say nothing, sickened by the image of Armen slumped over, his lifeblood seeping out. A lethal black star on his temple. His own blood spattered on his hand.

“The judge had a watchdog, too. A good watchdog.”

Bernice. “What about his dog? Did you see her that night?”

He laughs. “I would say so, it tried to take my arm off. We had to lock it in the bathroom, wouldn’t let us near him. I read the wife donated it to the Boys Club.”

So much for his detective work; Bernice is in my wagon out front, she fussed so much I decided to take her with me to work. “So you figure that in, right? The dog would have attacked a stranger.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“But not someone she knew.”

He shrugs. “So?”

“So if he was killed, the killer was someone he knew.”

“He wasn’t killed. All the evidence is consistent with him killing himself.”

“It’s only consistent with him putting a gun to his right temple. What if someone made him do it?”

He shakes his head. “There would be signs of a struggle, or a forced entry, and there aren’t any.”

“But it’s possible.”

“I doubt it.”

“But is it possible? Hypothetically?”

He gets up with an audible sigh, pushing down on his thighs like a much older man. “You know, there are support groups.”

Support groups. Therapy. He sounds like Ricki.

“Listen, Miss Rossi. You may never understand it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

I meet his cool eye. He’s a detective, an experienced one. Maybe he is right about Armen. Still, maybe he’s not.

I leave the police station and walk to my wagon, parked at a meter across the street. Bernice has escaped from the cargo area and is nestled officially in the driver’s seat, but she doesn’t notice me coming toward her. She’s watching a thick-set man get into a black boxy car a couple down the line.

Odd, he looks like someone I saw yesterday in my neighborhood.

I watch the car pull out quickly. A new car, American-made. The license plate is from Virginia.

Strange.

“Roarf!” Bernice says, startling me.

“Get back, beast,” I say to her through the car window.

You’re no fun, say her eyes.

Christ. I fish in my blazer pocket for my car keys, but they come out with a folded strip of legal paper. I figure it’s an old shopping list until I open it up:

Grace—

This is only the beginning for us. I love you.

Armen

P.S. I hope you find this before your dry cleaner.

I look at the note in disbelief. I read it again. Armen.

I love you. My God. I feel a wrenching inside my chest.

It’s his handwriting; it always looked like he was writing in Armenian, even when he wasn’t. How did this get here? When did he write it?

Of course.

The last time I wore this jacket was Monday, the night we were together. It was slung over the back of my chair.

I check the other pockets, but they’re empty. When did Armen leave this note? Then I remember. I used his bathroom before we left. My jacket was at the conference table.

This is only the beginning for us.

I shake my head. Not the sentiment of a man intending to kill himself. Not at all.

“Roarf!” Bernice barks again, trying to stand in the seat. Her slobber has smeared up the window.

I look back at the police station and consider running back inside. No. I’d have to tell the detective everything, and he’d find a way to dismiss it anyway. He’s one hundred percent, he said.

I look down at the note in my hand, feeling a surge of pain inside, and with it, a certainty. Armen didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered. I know it now. I’m holding proof positive. Exhibit A.

Unaccountably, I think of the black car. I look down the street, but it’s long gone.

Someone’s life is at stake, Armen had said. Get involved.

I put the note back in my pocket and slip my car key in the door. There’s going to be an investigation, but it’ll have to be my own. Because I’m involved, starting now.

As soon as I can get into the driver’s seat.

The intercom buzzes on my telephone as soon as I get to my desk in the vacant clerks’ office of the judge who lives in North Jersey. It’s lined with case reports and lawbooks, and furnished in a cheap utilitarian way, with a wooden desk, side table, and chair. “Yes?”

“Grace? I’ve been calling you at home, it’s your day off, isn’t it?” It’s Sarah. My heart gives a little jump.

“Yes, but I’ll be in every day for a while, and today I have to look at that marshals’ tape.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ll be right over.”

My heart pounds as we hang up. Jesus, is she going to confess to murder? What will I do? I open my desk drawer, and a gleaming pair of scissors glints from a logjam of yellow pencils. I put the scissors near my right hand on the desktop, feeling idiotic for arming myself against a baby lawyer from Yale.

“Knock knock,” Sarah says. She leans confidently against the doorjamb. A filmy skirt billows around her freckled ankles; a melon sweater complements her hair.

“That was fast.”

“We need to talk, you and I.”

I let my hand linger near the scissors. “I’m listening.”

She slides into the hard leather chair across from my desk and crosses her long legs in the drapey skirt. “You might as well say it. You know I’m on the tape.”

“I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know that. Why don’t you tell me what I’m going to see?”

She tosses her hair back. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you tell me what I saw that night in Armen’s office? On the conference table and the couch, as I recall.”

I feel myself stop breathing. I love you. “What you saw was none of your business. You were spying.”

“You were fucking your boss.”

I rise to my feet involuntarily behind the desk. “What were you doing there?”

She doesn’t bat an eye. “What’s the difference what I was doing there? You were fucking him, Grace.”

The mouth on this child. “Stop saying that.”

“You two were having an affair, I knew it all along. That’s why he wanted you on Hightower. When he told you he wouldn’t marry you, you threatened to blackmail him. Tell the papers, ruin his reputation. You and Ben put so much pressure on him that he killed himself the same night.”

I look at her in astonishment. “That’s ridiculous, all of it. Where did you get that from?”

“I figured it out.”

Typical Yale grad; totally impractical—or smart enough to know that the best defense is a good offense. “It’s crazy.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says. Her voice rises in anger, but I can’t tell if it’s an act or not.

“Wait a minute, Sarah, what were you doing in chambers in the middle of the night? You were supposed to be in bed with Artie.”

“I knew Armen would be working late. I was bringing him a sandwich.”

“You left Artie to bring another man something to eat?”

“Artie wouldn’t mind. He loves Armen.”

“So you told him?”

She looks uncertain. “Not exactly.”

“Of course you didn’t. You didn’t care if Armen was hungry, Sarah, you knew I’d be working late with him, and you wanted to see if anything was happening that shouldn’t be. If he was cheating on Susan, your friend.”

“Are you kidding?” She laughs abruptly. “I knew their marriage was over.”

Part of it is true, leaving me dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”

“I practically ran her campaign, remember? I’ll be her chief aide after this job. She tells me everything.”

“Then why were you so worried about the tapes?”

“Because I knew I was on them.”

It doesn’t square. “So why is that a problem, if you have nothing to hide? A tape of you with a sandwich, so what?”

Her blue eyes freeze like ice. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you accusing me of?”

I don’t even know, but she’s getting angrier, so I spin a plausible argument out of the meager facts I’ve been dealt, making something out of nothing, like any good lawyer. “All right, how’s this? You come to the office and see Armen and me on the couch. You’re so enraged you can’t sleep. You go to his house, and he lets you in. Even Bernice is happy to see you, so she doesn’t make a fuss.”

“Ridiculous.”

My hand inches over to the scissors. “You scream at him, lose control, like you did the other morning with Ben. He tells you he loves me and you go even crazier.”

“Why would I do all that?”

“Because you’re in love with him.”

Sarah’s mouth drops open, and before I can stop her she’s lunging right at me. I feel the sting of a hard slap across my cheek and stagger backward, the scissors slipping from my hand. She comes at me again, her face contorted with uncontrollable rage. I know that expression, have seen it before on someone else, and for the first time in my life I realize I’ve been slapped before, with that much force. I slide down against the bookshelf, then am caught by strong arms. My father’s. Sarah’s.

“Grace!” Sarah yells. “Oh, God, are you all right?”

Grace, are you all right? Are you all right?

The room is spinning, and fear runs cold in my stomach. “No, no,” I hear myself saying.

“God, Grace, I’m so sorry! Here, wait,” I hear Sarah saying, as if through a fog. The next thing I feel is a warm splash on my face. Wetness dribbles down my cheeks and onto my blouse. Sarah comes into hazy focus as a familiar odor brings me around. “Are you okay? Are you conscious?” she asks.

I wipe my face, then smell my wet hand. “Is this coffee?”

“Yes. Here, sit up.” She helps me to a sitting position against the bookshelf and kneels on the rug opposite me.

“Why did you throw coffee at me?” Dazed, I watch as a full cup sets into a brown Rorschach blotch on my white blouse.

“I thought you were going to pass out. It was the only thing around. Not that you didn’t deserve it,” she adds, a trace of resentment wreathing her voice.

“I deserved it?”

“You shouldn’t have said I loved him.”

“You did, didn’t you?” I wipe my cheeks on my sleeve; the blouse is a goner anyway.

“Don’t say that, it would hurt Artie so much. And what you said, about me killing Armen, that was awful.”

“I didn’t say you killed him.”

“You were about to.” Her eyes well up as suddenly as Maddie’s. In all her bravado, inside she is a child. A sheltered, spoiled child. “I would never kill Armen. I would never kill anyone. It’s inconceivable.”

I consider this. “I do think Armen was murdered,” I say, hearing it out loud; it sounds right and horrible, at the same time.

“Do you really?” She blinks back her tears.

“You know Susan, right? If she came in from Washington and he told her about me, could she have killed him, in a jealous rage? A crime of passion?”

“Never. Never in a million years. She’s not like that, emotional like that.” She shakes her head.

“I want to talk to her.”

“She’s leaving for a fact-finding mission.”

“Fact-finding? When?”

“Any day now, she’s not sure.”

“Where?”

“Eastern Europe, Bosnia. Investigating the genocide there.”

A regular genocide hobbyist, that woman. “Don’t you think it’s odd for her to leave the country right now?”

“No. I think it’s good for her. She needs to get away.”

Suddenly I hear Bernice barking loudly, a fierce, threatening bark, one I haven’t heard before. Someone shouts in the hallway; then a louder voice, Eletha’s, screams, “No! No!”

“What’s that?” Sarah says, alarmed.

“Trouble.” I scramble to my feet. Sarah’s right behind me as we tear toward chambers.

11

“Bernice, no!” I shout, but she pays even less attention than usual. Driven by instinct, her brown eyes lock onto her quarry, whose pin-striped back is quite literally against the wall.

“Somebody get this animal!” Galanter bellows, jowls flapping, arms splayed out like the Antichrist. A half cigar smolders between his fingers.

“Bernice, no!” I shout again, but her glistening black lips retract to display a lethal set of canines, only three feet from Galanter’s belt buckle. She growls, and I feel a bolt of fear inside. She has the power to tear him to pieces and, apparently, good cause.

“Rossi, control this animal! Now!” Galanter sputters, his face a hot red.

“Just relax, Judge,” I say, approaching Bernice slowly from behind. I have no idea if she’ll bite me if I try to stop her.

I call to her softly, but she growls again and drops her head to crotch height. Galanter’s blue eyes flare open in fear, and Artie begins to laugh.

“Hold still, dude,” he says. “You got nothing to lose. She won’t even find it.”

“You’re out of a job, mister!” Galanter says.

“Tell me about it,” Artie says. “Grace, be careful now.”

“Bernice won’t hurt me. Will you, Bernice? You wouldn’t hurt your mommy.” I reach her glossy hindquarters with my fingertips and stroke my way up her back to her collar.

She growls again, baring more of her canines.

“She’s going to jump!” Galanter shouts.

“No, she won’t.” My hand inches up to Bernice’s neck and I grab the red leather collar securely in my hand. “Don’t move yet, Judge.”

“Hold her!” Galanter screams, slipping away from in front of Bernice.

“No, wait!” I yell, as Bernice lurches after the fleeing judge. My arms almost tear loose from their sockets and my heels skid along the carpet. Sarah throws her arms around my waist as Bernice thrashes in my grip, torquing her enormous body left and right in desperation. Her frantic barking reverberates in the tight corridor. I bury my face in a mountain of fur and hold on for dear life.

“SuperJew to the rescue!” Artie shouts. He tackles Bernice in midair, and she yelps in pain and frustration.

Galanter scrambles down the hall, pant legs flapping. He reaches his chambers and slams the door.

I release my grip on the dog, and so do Artie and Sarah. Bernice explodes out of the pileup and races to Galanter’s chambers. She leaps onto the closed door and barks wildly.

“Jesus.” I collapse next to Sarah and Artie, both flat on their backs on the carpet. I can’t catch my breath; the coffee stain heaves up and down. Bernice has never acted that way before, and you don’t have to be Oliver Wendell Holmes to figure out why.

“Can you believe that?” Eletha says.

“It’s his aftershave,” Artie says. “Or his personality.”

Sarah rolls over and looks at me grimly. “What do you think, Grace?”

What do I think? I think I may not be able to complete my fact-finding mission on Susan, but I know where to find Galanter. I think the new chief judge will be needing an assistant. With experience.

“How do you know all this?” I ask Ben at the end of the day, in Armen’s darkening office.

“That’s what I’ve been wonderin’ too,” Eletha says, without looking up from the folders she’s been filing. On the cardboard box it says DEAD FILES. “Why does Mr. Safer here know every damn thing before I do?”

“One of Judge Galanter’s clerks told me, the only one who’s still speaking to us after what Bernice did.” Ben casts a cold eye at the dog, sleeping soundly where Armen’s area rug used to be.

“But how can they hold phone argument in Hightower?” I ask. “You use the phone for status conferences, little things like that. Not for argument on a death case.”

“Why not?” He crosses his arms, his oxford shirt a crisp white.

“Death is different, that’s why not.”

He looks up at the ceiling, searching the recessed lights like other people gaze at the stars. “Where have I heard that before?”

“Anthony Amsterdam, when he argued before the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia,” Eletha says. “‘Death is final. Death is irremediable. Death is unknowable; it goes beyond this world.’”

“How did you know that, Eletha?” Ben says with obvious surprise.

“Oh, I been workin’ in de big house for a while now, Mr. Ben.” She laughs naughtily. “It was in one of Armen’s articles. I typed it and I never forgot it.” Her smile fades and she returns to the box. “Hand those folders to me, Grace, the ones in front of you.”

I slide the case files and appendices along the smooth tabletop. “Ben, when are they going to hold this phone argument?”

“Tonight at seven.” He checks his watch. “An hour and a half.”

“After the close of business?” Curiouser and curiouser.

“They have to do it tonight, to leave time for the Supreme Court to decide the appeal. It’s Hightower’s fault. He caused it by waiting until the last minute.”

Now I understand. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the timing or the Supreme Court. Galanter doesn’t want argument during regular business hours because that would be public.”

“Not necessarily.”

“No? You think the newspapers would let the panel hold a closed argument in this case? The first death case here in decades? They’d be upstairs with motion papers before you could say First Amendment.”

“As is their wont, but—”

“Galanter won’t have that, so he calls a phone conference when the evening news is over. When the newspapers are sold out. Everybody will be watching Home Improvement.”

“You’ve become quite the cynic, Grace.” Ben unrolls a shirtsleeve and twists the cuff button closed expertly. “In fact, I heard the most outlandish thing about you today.”

“What?”

“It’s so absurd I can barely bring myself to repeat it.” He sets to work on the other shirtsleeve, unfolding one three-inch panel after the next. “I heard you think the chief was murdered.”

Eletha looks over at me in surprise.

“I do. Call me crazy.”

“You’re crazy,” Eletha says. She lets the file slip into the box, where it lands with a tick.

“I thought you had more sense than that.” Ben fastens the button at the cuff, then holds both arms out and inspects them. “Well, I have to go. I’ll leave you to your conspiracy theories.”

“I didn’t say it was a conspiracy.”

Ben gasps in a theatrical way. “Maybe it is. Maybe the entire federal judiciary is in on it. Maybe they all conspired to kill him because he was—tall!” He turns on his heels, laughing, and walks out of the room. I watch him head into the clerks’ office where he turns off his computer, then the lights. I listen for the sound of the door closing as he leaves. I know Eletha well enough to know she’s waiting too.

“What the fuck you doin’?” she says, as soon as the chambers door clicks shut.

“Don’t be shy, Eletha.”

“Are you serious about this?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what was goin’ on with those marshal tapes yesterday?”

“Yep.”

“They don’t tape, do they?”

“Nope.”

She shakes her head. “So what are you up to?”

“It doesn’t make sense that he would kill himself.”

“What are you sayin’?”

So I tell her, leaving out the most important part, the part about Armen and me. When I’m finished, she leans on the file box and looks directly at me. “Look, Grace, I knew he was in love with you. I knew about it before you did. He told me.”

I feel my face redden. “You did? He did?”

“Mm-hm.” She nods. “I have to admit, I told him not to get involved because you two work together. You know what he said? He told me he didn’t give a good goddamn.”

I smile. It warms me inside.

“So I know why you’re thinkin’ what you’re thinkin’.”

“Then why’d you tell me I was crazy?”

“Because Ben was here.”

“What a good liar you are. Jeez, Eletha.”

“Thank you, thank you.” She curtsies prettily, then straightens up, rubbing her lower back. “Ow. Damn, I’m gettin’ old.”

“So what do you think? You knew him longer than any of us. Would he commit suicide?”

She sighs. “I worked for Armen for thirteen years, but I can’t figure it out. It’s hard to believe I wouldn’t have seen something like that comin’. Like a sign.”

“But the police say you said—”

“How do you know what the police say?”

“I went there this morning. They’re sure it’s a suicide. The detective was quoting you, things you said.”

An angry frown contorts her features. “They didn’t listen to me. That white cop askin’ me those questions? He knew what he thought and he didn’t want to hear anything different.”

“I wanted to ask them about Susan. It was her gun.”

“I can’t get over what she did to Bernice. Dang, that woman’s cold!”

“Do you think she would’ve—”

“Possible. It’s possible. I wouldn’t put it past her.” She nods.

“And today with Galanter, that was wild.”

“You mean Bernice? She shoulda bit it off. I’d put it down the garbage disposal myself.”

I smile. “Has Bernice ever done that before?”

“Are you kidding? That dog is a doll baby.” She shakes her head. “So you workin’ with the police or something? They gonna reopen the case?”

“No. I’m on my own. Single Moms, Inc.”

“You’re talkin’ about murder? Accusing a senator? Galanter? Shit, Grace.”

“Not accusing, just asking questions. Developing theories. Being a lawyer.”

She sighs and stretches backward with a tiny grunt. “Oh, my back.”

“You all right?”

“It hurts. The lifting doesn’t help.”

I feel a pang of guilt. She’s been packing by herself since Armen died; the office is littered with boxes, some taped closed, some still open. A lifetime of paper stored away; his whole career. It makes me sad, and it has to be hard on her, too. “I should have helped you. I’m sorry.”

“Nah, s’all right. It’s a lot of stuff, though. He saved everything, I swear.” She points to the back of the office, to the long mahogany credenza behind Armen’s desk. “We got all the personal stuff back there, the articles and stuff. Then we got the academic stuff and old case files against the side wall.”

“Why don’t you go home? I’ll finish the box.”

“Why you pushin’ me out, girlfriend? You wanna look around?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that, but it’s a good idea.”

She picks her sweater off the back of the chair. “All right, don’t stay too late. Tomorrow, baby.” She knocks hard on the wood, and Bernice wakes up with a startled bark. We both laugh.

“Dog almost ate a judge,” I say.

“Smartest thing she ever did.”

“Second smartest.”

She pauses at the doorway and smiles softly. She knows the first: loving Armen. I suppress a stab of pain as I listen to her lock up her desk and gather her handbag and newspaper.

“By the way, El, have I got a man for you,” I call out to her.

“You know I’m seein’ Leon.”

“Time for a change,” I say, but she’s out the door. It closes harshly, accentuating the stillness of the suddenly empty office.

I look around at the boxes and files filling the room. The brocade throws are folded into neat squares and stacked on a chair for packing. I never asked Armen where he got them or even what they were. Most of the other Armenian artifacts have been wrapped in bubble paper. I step between the boxes to his desk and find myself running my finger along its surface, leaving a wake in the dust like a light snow. I laugh to myself. A wonderful man, but not a neat man.

I look at Armen’s chair and try to imagine him sitting in it again. It’s so hard to believe he’s gone. Murdered. It tears at me inside. Maybe there are clues here. Something. Anything.

I look over from the chair to the credenza beyond. None of its doors are open; Eletha hasn’t started on it yet. What had she said was in there? The personal stuff. I walk around the desk and kneel on the carpet in front of the cabinet.

You were raised better, says my mother’s voice, stopping my hand on the gold-toned knob.

“No, I wasn’t,” I say. I slide open the thin door and take the first paper off the top of the stack. Its typeface is faded and old-fashioned, from the days of Smith-Coronas.

TOWARD AN ARMENIAN IDENTITY

by Armen Gregorian

I brush the dust away. He wasn’t a judge yet; it doesn’t say if it was published. I sit down and skim the short article. Well-written, heartfelt. I reach for the next paper in the cabinet, but as I slide it out, a pack of old check registers falls to the carpet, bound by a dirty rubber band. I slip one out, skimming the entries: Food Fare $33.00, Harvard Coop $11.27, Haig $6.00 (for Chinese food). Judging from the sums, it was a long time ago, though Armen didn’t bother to date the entries or keep a running tab of the balance.

Typical. It would have driven me crazy over time, but time is something we didn’t have. Time was taken from us. From him.

I feel a lump in my throat and slip the register hastily back under the rubber band. I shove it next to another checkbook. It looks newer than the other papers in the cabinet, so I pull that one out.

It’s a maroon plastic checkbook, fake alligator on the front and back. At the lower right corner it says PHILADELPHIA CASH RESERVE in gilt-stamped script. The checkbook looks brand new. I snap it open, anxious without knowing why.

The balance is staggering: $650,000. I had no idea. I look at the name and address and hear myself gasp.

Greg Armen. The address is an apartment in West Philadelphia.

What apartment is this? Armen lived in Society Hill, in a townhouse he owned with Susan. I look again at the name on the checks. Greg Armen. Obviously an alias. But why?

I hear my mother’s voice inside my head: Come on, kid. A judge with a secret bank account? A false address? An alias?

A bribe.

Impossible. I push the voice away and flip through the checkbook. There are no entries since the initial one, which is undated.

Was Armen involved in something? Does it have anything to do with his death?

I swallow hard and think twice before committing theft. Well, once maybe. Then I take the checkbook and close the cabinet.

12

Only an hour later I have crossed the threshold into another world. A scented, serene world, where the colors are chalky washes of pastels and the air carries the scent of primrose. Is it heaven? In a way. It’s the Laura Ashley shop at the King of Prussia mall. I called Ricki to discuss the checkbook and she agreed to meet me here. I trail in reluctantly behind her, holding her bags like a pack animal. “So what do you think?”

“I told you what I think. I think you should go straight to the police. Show them the note from Armen and the checkbook.” She plucks a frilly blouse off the rack and holds it against her chest. “You like?”

“For you or for me?”

“I don’t need blouses, you do. That coffee stain is so attractive.”

I tug my blazer over the brown blotch. “I have enough blouses.”

“No you don’t. You have the yellow one you wear over and and over, and the blue.” She slips the blouse back onto the rack. “But it is a lot of money.”

“The blouse or the bank account?”

“The blouse.”

“So’s the account.”

“I wonder if he declared it, the crook.”

“Don’t say that.” I look around the small store, but it’s empty. Nobody can afford this stuff, not even in King of Prussia. “He’s not a crook.”

“You sound like Richard Nixon.”

I set the bags down beside the rack. “I bet it has something to do with his murder.”

“Murder? You’re losing it, Grace. I told you. The checkbook doesn’t mean he was murdered. Maybe he committed suicide in regret over taking a bribe.” She snatches a blouse from the rack and her hazel eyes come alive; it’s off-white, with billowy sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. She hoists it proudly into the air. “This is perfect.”

“For what? Punting on the Thames?”

Ricki puts the blouse back onto the rack. “You have a bad attitude, you know that?”

“But we don’t know it’s a bribe, Rick. All we know is that it’s a checking account of some kind.”

“A boatload of money under an alias? Come on.” Her concentration refocuses, laserlike, on the next ruffled blouse on the rack. She picks it up and appraises it. “This is nice.”

“What about the note?”

“What about the blouse?”

“Where am I going to wear it, Rick? Tara?”

She slaps it back onto the rack. “Maybe we’ll have better luck with the dresses.” She turns smartly away and heads over to a lineup of dresses whose skirts are so voluminous they puff out like parachutes. Ricki extracts one with an expertise born of practice and waves it at me from across the store. “Very appropriate, don’t you think?” she says.

I pick up the bags and follow her. “No feathers? I want feathers. And a headpiece.”

A young saleswoman, more like a saleschild, perks up from behind a counter littered with fragrant notecards and stationery. She looks like Alice in Wonderland in a black velvet headband and a white pinafore. “That’s one of our most popular styles,” she says.

“I hate it,” I whisper.

Ricki looks daggers at me. “Give it a chance, Sherlock.”

“No.”

The saleschild’s face falls.

Ricki slaps the dress back in place. “You are so stubborn. So stubborn.”

“Rick, listen.”

“You said you wanted me to help you.”

“This isn’t what I meant.”

“Why do I bother? You call me up and I come. My one night without clients and here I am. I should have gone food shopping. There’s no milk in the house.” She puts her hands on her hips and glares at me.

There’s no milk in the house. The all-time low watermark of motherhood.

I put my hands on my hips and we face off at opposite ends of the dress rack, the High Noon of Mothers. No milk in the house, and Ricki is the most organized of women; it must gnaw at her conscience like an overdue library book. I feel the first pang of guilt, which means she’s quicker on the draw. “Give me the goddamn dress,” I say.

“Good.” She plucks it from the rack and pushes it at me.

“I’m not promising anything.”

“Fine.”

The saleschild comes over. “Can I help you?” she says brightly. Too brightly for minimum wage.

“Yes,” Ricki says. “My friend needs dresses. With her eyes, I think a royal blue would be nice.”

“Rick, I’m standing here. I can speak.”

The saleschild looks from Ricki to me.

“I don’t want anything fancy,” I say.

“Not fancy?” The saleschild looks puzzled; fancy is all they sell. They have a monopoly in fancy.

“She doesn’t mean fancy,” Ricki says, “she means fussy.”

“No, I mean fancy. Empire waistline, hem to the floor. I’m too old for puffed sleeves.”

“Fussy,” Ricki says again.

The saleschild looks at Ricki, then at me. The poor girl’s getting dizzy. I hand her the dress for balance.

“Where are the business-y dresses?” Ricki asks.

“I’m out of a job, Rick.”

“Then you need interview clothes.”

“Follow me,” says the saleschild. She pads in ballet slippers to a rack of dresses and takes three from the rack. Any one of them would work at my coronation, but Ricki badgers me to try one on. We squeeze together into the flowered dressing room. Ricki always comes into dressing rooms with me; she doesn’t realize this was okay when we were in high school but now that we’re almost forty, is a bit odd.

“Are we having fun yet?” I mutter, stepping into the billowing dress.

“Let me zip it up for you,” Ricki says.

“It’s the least you can do.”

She zips the dress more roughly than necessary and I regard myself in the mirror. The style makes me look tall and thin, which must be some sort of optical illusion. Still, all I can see is that my eyes look too small and my nose looks too big; my father’s Sicilian blood, acid-etched into my features. I look terrible.

“You look stunning!” Ricki says from behind me.

“Uncanny. That’s just what I was thinking.”

“The neckline is so pretty.”

I look down at my chest and catch sight of the scalloped bra, barely covered by the dress. It reminds me of Armen, of that night. This is the beginning for us. I love you. “What about the note he wrote me, Rick?”

But she’s busy picking up a flowered scarf and tossing it around my neck. She’s caught brain fever from the shopping, like early man, blood-lusting after the kill. She found the right dress, now the whole village can eat. “Here, if you’re not in love with the neckline.”

“Rick, what do you think about the note?”

“What note?” She drapes the scarf to the left, then squinches up her nose.

“The one I found in my pocket.”

She rearranges the scarf over my shoulder. “Are we talking about that again?”

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to take your mind off your official police duties, but you’re not letting me.”

“Just tell me where the note fits in, huh? Is that the act of a man who would kill himself a few hours later? You’re a shrink, you tell me. You must have handled suicide in your practice.”

“Only one, thank God.” She crosses herself quickly even though she’s Jewish.

“But depressed people, right? You must see tons of depressed people.”

“Oh, they ship ’em in.”

“Rick, will you help me? You may actually know something here.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You know what I mean.”

She ties the scarf around my neck. “Okay, so you’re asking me? Professionally?”

“Yes.”

She pats the knot and steps back, squinting at my costume like a movie director. “I think your friend the judge was a very interesting personality, and I think his behavior was totally consistent with suicide. Even the note.”

“But how?”

“Let me ask you this. How well did you know this man?”

“Armen? I knew him well.”

“You worked for him for three months. Part-time.”

“We worked closely together. I knew him well.”

“Think about it,” she says. “You didn’t know he loved you. You didn’t know he was sitting on a pile of money. You didn’t know he had an apartment.”

“But I knew what mattered, what kind of man he was. Everybody knew that. And what’s this have to do with psychology anyway?”

“Everything. He was a very important judge, a powerful judge, and the husband of a United States senator. On top of that, he’s a macher in the Armenian community. A hero, right?”

“Yes.” I feel vaguely like I’m being led where I don’t want to go.

“So people like that, they’re managing constantly under the pressure to live up to very high standards. The standards of others, of the community. It’s tough to keep that veneer perfect, to keep up appearances. They begin to keep secrets, like he did, and pretty soon what they know about themselves grows further and further away from what the world thinks of them. In the right circumstances, a person like that falls apart. The veneer cracks, and so do they.”

“But it wasn’t a veneer. He really was—”

“Perfect?”

I feel it inside. “Yes. In a way. He believed in things. He cared, really cared, and he fought hard.”

“Don’t you think you’re idealizing him, Grace?”

“No, I’m not idealizing him.” My throat tightens, but it could be the scarf. “Take this frigging thing off. I feel like a boy scout in drag.”

She avoids my eye and unties the scarf. “You worked for him for a short time. You had a business relationship with him until one night. Now you’re charging around, going to the police, ransacking his office for clues.”

“I wasn’t ransacking.”

“You’re acting like it was a fifteen-year relationship, like he was your husband. But he wasn’t. In fact, he was somebody else’s.”

Ouch. “That’s beside the point. The man was murdered, Ricki.”

“You don’t know that. It’s not your job to investigate it, even if it is true. If you were my client, I’d ask you why you’re doing all this. What would happen if you didn’t?”

“His killer would go free.”

“And what’s the matter with that?”

I look wildly around the frilly dressing room. “What’s the matter with murder? It’s very bad manners, for starters.”

“Don’t be snide, I mean it.”

“But what kind of question is that, What’s the matter with murder?” I hear my voice growing louder.

“No, the question is, Why does it matter if his killer goes free?”

I hold back my snidehood. “It’s terrible. It’s unfair.”

“Then it’s the unfairness that strikes you.”

“Yes, of course.”

She purses her lips. “You’re a person who’s been treated unfairly. By your father, then by Sam. You had a baby, he wanted out. He broke the contract.”

I feel a churning inside. “Yeah, so?”

“So maybe it’s not this unfairness you’re fighting about, maybe it’s unfairnesses in your past. Ones you can’t do anything about.”

“Oh please, Ricki.”

“Think about it. Keep an open mind.”

“The man is dead, Rick. Am I just supposed to ignore that?”

She folds her arms calmly, like she always does when I get upset. Therapists never have emotions; that’s why they want to hear ours. “How long have we known each other?” she asks.

I boil over. “Too damn long.”

“Well, that’s a very nice thing to say.”

“If you wouldn’t analyze me at every turn—”

“You asked me to.”

“I asked you to analyze him, not me.”

“Why do you need me to analyze him if you know him so goddamn well? Hmm?”

I have no immediate answer. The word uncle comes immediately to mind, but I push it away.

“Well?” A triumphant smile steals across her face. “I should’ve been a lawyer, right?”

Right. Or a personal shopper.

The red-lighted numbers on the clock radio say 4:13 A.M.; they’re oddly disjointed, constructed like toothpicks laid end to end. It flips to 4:14.

The house sleeps silently. The dishwasher stopped cranking at 1:10, leaving only the clothes dryer in the basement. A wet bathroom rug thudded against the sides of the drum, keeping me awake until 2:23. Since then I have no excuse except for my own feelings, tumbling as crazily as the rug in the dryer. The fury, grief, and confusion cycle: it comes right after spin-dry.

Maddie’s in the next room, her door closed against Bernice, who sleeps in my bed like a mountain range bordering my right side and curling under my feet. This must be why they call them mountain dogs. I shove her over, but she doesn’t budge. My thoughts circle back to Armen.

He said he loved me, but there’s obviously much he didn’t say. A secret bank account. An alias. I sit up and shake two powdery generic aspirins from the bottle, then swallow them with some flat seltzer from a bottle on my night table. I flop back in bed and stare up at the white ceiling with its cracked paint, trying to put away my emotions.

But I’m having less success than usual. Anxiety makes my chest feel tight. I wonder vaguely if they have a drug for that, and then I remember that they do.

Alcohol.

The thought warms me like brandy. I throw off the covers, slip on a terry bathrobe, and tiptoe down the creaky stair. Bernice looks up but doesn’t follow; she won’t go in the kitchen now unless she’s dragged into it.

I flick on the kitchen light and dim it down, then open up the tall kitchen cabinet that was built into the wall sixty years ago. My landlord let me strip the old paint away, and underneath was a fine bare pine, which I scrubbed and pickled white. I love this cabinet, a true old-fashioned larder, which finds room for every grocery I buy on its five shelves. The liquor is at the top, like a penthouse above the stories of oversized cereal boxes, cans of soup, and baked beans.

I grab a stool, climb up on it, and pull down a thick shot glass, one of the multitude my mother gave me a long time ago. Half I threw out and half I stowed in the basement until Maddie found them. I eventually had to sneak them away from her, finding something unseemly about a child’s tea party with shot glasses and a steel jigger. I hid them up here, where they line up like pawns guarding the liquor bottles.

I peer at the dusty bottles and try to make a decision. What shall I treat myself to? It’s all left over from my wedding, the last time I had more than two drinks. Alcohol goes right to my head, but that’s suddenly what I want.

A bottle of Crown Royal stands like a king behind the pawns. The lattice blown into its glass catches even the dim light. I pick the bottle up by its gold plastic crown and climb down from the shelf.

I am going to get drunk. This strikes me as a daring and powerful act, something a man would do. I am going to have myself a drink, yessir, I am going to tie one on. I put the bottle on the counter and crack open the cap, which sticks slightly. The bottle’s almost full. I take a whiff.

Fragrant. Sweet. Tangy. Strong.

I remember this smell, and it brings a memory down on my head. My parents fighting again, shouting. My father, lurching out the door. My mother, crying alone. A bottle of Crown Royal sitting in the center of a kitchen table, eye level with me: It’s so majestic, glinting like gold. A regal beacon in a world where Daddy is gone and the future is a mystery.

I pour myself a shot.

13

My head buzzes with liquor from the night before; my stomach gurgles like a polluted stream. Getting drunk isn’t as manly as I thought it would be. At least not the next morning.

You don’t have to be hung over to be seeing double. Even triple. There are judges everywhere in the grand ceremonial courtroom: circuit judges, district judges, bankruptcy judges, magistrate judges. They gather like ravens in ebony robes on either side of the dais and in the reserved section in front of it. Twenty representative judges from the circuit and district courts fill the dais in two tiers. Crows on the power lines.

The audience, relegated to the back rows, is standing room only. Lawyers, academics, and reporters clog the courtroom. Standing in the back are older men in shabby overcoats, the courtroom junkies dressed up. Shake and Bake isn’t here, but one of them, in a dark overcoat, looks familiar. Thick and bulky, like a thug. I try to think where I’ve seen him before.

Outside the police station? Maybe the man in the black car with Virginia plates.

I crane my neck to see him better, but he disappears behind a group of Armen’s closest friends, the Armenian men in his dinner club; they cleave together, olive-skinned and outnumbered. Susan has been doing what she can to cut them and everybody else out, flying Armen’s body to Washington for a funeral tomorrow. Meanwhile she sits dry-eyed in the front row, sucking up all the attention by saying nothing, like a vacuum.

Does she know about Greg Armen?

It makes me sick to my stomach. Everything does.

Ben has joined Galanter’s clerks, up front. Artie sits with Eletha, comforting her before the service begins, but he looks like he needs comforting himself. He’s more unkempt than usual, his hair uncombed and his rep tie wrinkled. Sarah is next to me in the row behind them; she and Artie don’t exchange a word during the ceremony. Is there trouble in Paradise? I haven’t been paying attention.

Chief Judge Galanter begins the memorial service from the coveted center seat. His statement is ruthlessly generic, and over as soon as it starts. A few of the other judges make short speeches, their words shaky, their sentences halting. They mourn, but it’s a peculiar sort of mourning, characterized by bewilderment. One of their own, a suicide. Only Judge Robbins says the word, his eyes red-rimmed behind rimless spectacles. I close my mind until the service is over, hoping my head will stop thundering.

When it’s over the judges adjourn to the robing room, and some of Armen’s Armenian friends linger near the dais, waiting for a chance to talk to Susan. At the periphery of the crowd are reporters, interested in the same thing. Susan doesn’t seem to mind talking to anyone and doesn’t shed a tear. Her own husband’s memorial service. What had the detective said? Cried a river?

A wild-haired reporter with a day’s stubble gets close to her and says, “Senator, just clear up one thing for me. Senator, over here.”

She looks up, but her smile vanishes when she seems to recognize him. “One question, Sandy. That’s it.”

“Is it true that you and the judge were having marital problems?”

Shocked, the well-wishers turn and look at him.

Susan’s mouth sets into a thin line. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” Instantly, a tall, preppy aide in expensive eyeglasses takes her elbow and hustles her through the crowd to the robing room door.

“Have some decency!” an older lawyer says to the reporter, who takes off through the crowd after Susan. Two marshals, Mutt and Jeff, head after him; the big one, McLean, takes the lead.

“What an asshole,” Sarah says, but I watch the reporter until I lose him in the crowd. “Let’s go.”

Sarah and I bobble together in the mass of people leaving the ceremony. I whisper to her, “How do you think he knew?”

“Lucky guess. He’s been hustling since the campaign, trying to get a real job.”

I consider this, but it hurts my head to think. I keep seeing the checkbook, hidden now in my underwear drawer.

We pour out of the courtroom doors into the marble walkway that connects the north half of the federal building to the courthouse. I let the crowd carry me past the plant-filled atrium on the right, which the court employees use to smoke in. A hunchbacked man sweeps up the discarded cigarette butts with a broom.

“You’d think we could find him something better to do,” says a man’s voice beside Sarah. The wild-haired reporter. Up close, he looks sweaty and his curls are permed. “Remember me, Miss Whittemore?”

“What happened to the marshals?” Sarah says, and picks up the pace next to me.

“I’m Sandy Faber. I write for a lot of newspapers in the city.”

“Where do you get off asking a question like that?” Sarah says, barreling ahead.

The reporter falls into her brisk stride. “Did I upset your client, Miss Whittemore?”

“I don’t have any clients, and you don’t fool me for one minute. You’re the one who wrote that victim’s rights story. You called Armen a killer.”

“I didn’t call him a killer, I merely quoted—”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

The reporter scrambles over to me and grabs my arm. “Ms. Rossi, it’ll just take a minute. I know you cared about the judge.”

“We all did,” I say, wresting my arm back.

“Somebody didn’t. The person who killed him.”

It stuns me in my tracks, but Sarah reacts instantly. “How dare you!” she says. “You want me to call the marshals?”

“Take a look at your co-counsel here, Miss Whittemore. She’s not so sure it’s a suicide either.”

I feel my gorge rising, only partly from the alcohol. I look past the crowd for the ladies’ room and spot it at the end of the gleaming hall. “I have to go.”

“Grace, are you all right?” Sarah asks.

I wave her off. “See you upstairs.”

“Ms. Rossi?” calls the reporter, who takes off after me, opening his skinny steno pad as we walk. “You were close to Judge Gregorian, weren’t you?”

Does he suspect anything about me and Armen? I hurry past the crowd. The rapid motion makes me seasick. I’ll never drink again; I don’t know how my father stood it.

“Did you know that the judge and his wife were having marital problems?”

I try to ignore him and make my way through the crowd to the ladies’ room. I zigzag left and right, like a sunfish trying to tack in a hurricane.

“Can you shed some light on that, Ms. Rossi? Ms. Rossi?”

I reach the door and pull its stainless steel handle with all my might, but the reporter stops it with his hand. He’s breathing heavily; he smells like cigarettes.

“Grace, are you gonna let somebody get away with murder?”

I look into his face with its sheen of sweat. I feel a stab of confusion and nausea. I yank on the door. “I have to go.”

“Is that the way it’s gonna be? Is it?” he calls after me, as the heavy door closes between us.

I lurch into an empty stall, lock it, and drop on to the seat until the wave of nausea passes. I hang my head, examining the speckles in the floor tile; gray, black, and white fragments tumble together like a kaleidoscope. Between each tile is a steel line where the grout would be, but it wiggles from time to time. I right myself and wrestle with the oversized dispenser for a square of toilet paper.

Are you gonna let somebody get away with murder?

I wipe my face with the thin square and decide to stay there until the earthquake stops. I listen to other women flush the toilets, wash their hands, and leave. I wait until all the hands are washed and all the women have gone. In time, the voices outside the bathroom diminish, then disappear altogether.

I think of the checkbook. I think of Armen. I’m not sure if I can’t move or won’t. I stay a long, long time at the bottom of the tall, glistening courthouse, sitting on the john in silence, thinking about my murdered lover. The judge with the alias.

What does that reporter know?

I hear the bathroom door open.

Shit. Who’s coming into my bathroom? I feel intruded upon. I hate to share a public bathroom with the public, especially when my stomach is barely parallel to the floor.

Whoever it is walks farther into the bathroom. There’s no sound of pumps on the floor; she must be wearing flats. I lean over and squint through the slit where the door meets the jamb, but I can’t see anybody.

I know someone is there, but she’s not going into a stall. She doesn’t turn on the water, either, or strike a match for an illicit smoke. Maybe she came in to fix her makeup or brush her hair. I listen for the sounds, but nobody’s fumbling in a handbag.

Still, someone is there. I heard the door. I feel a presence. I squint through the slits but see nothing.

Then I hear the faintest sound, of human breathing.

Someone is standing right in front of my door.

Panic floods my throat. I rise involuntarily.

There’s a shuffling outside the stall as the presence moves closer in response. I lean next to the door, every nerve taut, straining to listen.

I hear the breathing, louder now.

I look underneath the door to my stall.

Planted there is a pair of large black shoes.

A man’s.

14

“Who’s there?” I shout, terrified.

“Are you all right?” says the man. Concerned, professional. “You’ve been in there awhile.”

“Is that you, Faber?”

“No, I’m a special agent with the FBI.”

“In a ladies’ room?” My voice clatters off the tile walls. “Go away or I’ll scream, I mean it! Right now!”

“Wait, relax. I swear to you, I am an FBI agent. Our office is here in the building. Seventh floor.”

“Anybody would know that. It’s on the directory.”

“I’m with the agency for ten years now. I trained at Quantico. Eighteen months, not counting in-service training.”

“Quantico, Virginia?” I think of the man at the memorial service, the car with the Virginia plates.

“Yes. Listen, I don’t have much time. Here’s my ID.” A hand materializes above the shoes, carrying a card-size plastic wallet.

I start to reach for it, then draw back. What if he grabs my wrist? “Drop it. Near the toilet. Now.” I sound ridiculous, even to myself.

“All right, all right.” He tosses the wallet into the stall like a Frisbee; it banks against the toilet and settles at my feet. I’m not close enough to the door for his hand to reach under, so I pick it up. My hands have stopped trembling. So has my stomach. I open the billfold like a tiny book. On one leaf is a photo of Tom Cruise and on the other is a Pennsylvania driver’s license.

“What is this, a joke? Where’s your FBI badge?”

“I can’t carry my creds, I’m undercover.”

“Sure you are. You a friend of Tom’s, too?”

“It goes with my cover. Look at the license, at least you’ll see who I am.”

I look at the driver’s license. His features are nondescript in the state-sponsored mug shot, and it says that he’s six feet one, 185 pounds. His hair is dark brown, eyes blue. It could be the man with the Virginia plates, but I had only a glimpse of him. “What’s your name?” I ask.

“It’s right on the license.”

“Maybe you stole the license. What’s your name?”

“Oh, a test. I get it. Abe Lincoln.”

“You think this is funny? You scared the shit out of me. If this is standard FBI procedure—”

“It isn’t, believe me. They’d have my ass. I wouldn’t do it unless I were absolutely desperate.”

That rings true. “So what’s your name, desperate?”

“Thaddeus Colwin.”

I strain to read the name on the driver’s license. Thaddeus Colwin III. “Thaddeus?”

“It’s Quaker.”

“A Quaker cop?”

“A good cop, a bad Quaker. Call me Winn anyway. Thaddeus is my father.”

“Wait a minute, if you’re undercover, why are you carrying around your real license?”

“I knew I’d be contacting you after the service, and I knew you’d bust my chops.”

“How’d you know that?”

“You’re a lawyer. Duh.”

Hmmm. “Do you have kids?”

“No, and my favorite color is yellow. This is getting kind of personal, isn’t it? We just met.”

A comedian. “What’s your address?”

He sighs. “Twenty-one thirty-three Adams Street, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania.”

“Social security number?”

“What?”

“Tell me your social security number or I scream.”

“What is it with you?” he says, amused no longer.

“I’m somebody’s mother, that’s what it is with me. If you kill me, my daughter’s stuck with a dog. For a father.”

“166-28-2810.”

It matches the driver’s license. Maybe he is for real. “What do you want anyway?”

“Can you come out? I need to talk to you. I don’t have much time. Somebody could’ve seen me come in here.”

“Why do I have to come out? Why can’t we talk like this?”

A huge sigh. “Artie told me you were like this.”

“Artie? Artie who?”

“Weiss. The law clerk.”

“You know Artie? How?”

“We play ball.”

“Where?”

“At the Y. Now I have three minutes left. Will you please open the goddamn door?”

“Where did Artie go to school, if you know him so well?”

“That’s a no-brainer, it’s the first thing he tells anybody. Now open the door, I’m backing up against the wall. See?”

I look through the slit but see only the dark edge of a coat. “Go over to the sink and turn the water on. Keep pressing on the faucet top, so I know you’re at the other end of the room, away from the door.”

“Very clever. You go to Harvard too?” I hear the sound of footsteps, then the water being turned on.

“Are you pushing the top?”

“What?” he shouts. “You know I can’t hear you when the water’s running.”

I’m beginning to hate this guy. I open the thumbscrew and peek out of the door. I freeze on the spot. I can’t believe my eyes.

It’s Shake and Bake. He’s standing at the faucet in the ladies’ room, complete with beard, cellophane rain bonnet, and black raincoat.

My God. A paranoid schizophrenic. I slam the door closed and bolt it. He must have stolen the driver’s license. “Get out! You’re not supposed to be in the courthouse! I’m going to scream!”

“Fuck!” I hear him shout. I look through the crack and watch him release the faucet in disgust, then slap it. “Fucking fuck!”

“You’re not allowed in here!”

He turns toward the closed door. “It is me, I’m with the FBI,” he says, in a voice as cultivated as someone named Thaddeus Colwin III would have. “Look, I ran the water, didn’t I? Would a crazed killer do that? Open the door. Please.”

“You? Shake and Bake? A federal agent?” I watch him through the crack.

“Open the door,” he says. He slips the rain bonnet off the back of his head like a major leaguer after a strikeout. “Please.”

“If you’re an FBI agent, why did you make that scene at the oral argument, with the bomb?”

“It was part of my ingenious master plan.”

I can’t tell if he’s kidding. “What plan?”

“Trust me, I’m smarter than I look.”

“Smart? It got you banished from the courthouse.”

“But it got me in good with the reporters, and that’s very useful to me right now. Please come out. We don’t have much time.”

“We?”

“Please.”

I open the door a bit. “So you’re a federal agent or a schizophrenic impersonating a Quaker.”

His expression settles into businesslike lines behind the grimy beard. “You were close to Armen, right?”

I can’t get over the incongruity of such an educated voice coming out of a bag man. “A reporter just asked me that.”

“Were you close to him?”

“Wait a minute. Does Artie know about you?”

“No. No one does, except you.”

“Why me?”

“Because I need you.”

“What for?”

His eyes look slightly bloodshot in the harsh overhead lights. “This is confidential. All of it.”

“Fine. What?”

“Are you going to work for Judge Galanter?”

“Possibly. How did you know that?”

“You told Sarah, Sarah told Artie, Artie told me.”

“They teach you that at Quantico? Whisper down the lane?”

“Hey, whatever works. It’s the only rule in this game.” He breaks into a crooked grin, but I don’t like his insouciance. Or his scummy teeth.

“You know, Artie really likes you. He worried about you when you were in jail.”

“I know.”

“He risked his career pretending to be your lawyer.”

He purses his authentically parched lips. “Don’t worry about me and Artie, okay? I have a job to do, he’ll understand.”

“Oh, I see. Manly men, ye be. So what’s the story?”

“I’m undercover in an investigation supervised by the Justice Department. I can’t tell you the details, I shouldn’t even be meeting with you myself. All I can tell you is that it concerns charges of official corruption.”

I feel my nausea resurge. “Corruption?”

“In the judiciary.”

I think of the checkbook nestled in my Carter’s at home. Armen’s checkbook. “What kind of corruption?”

“Bribery, obstruction of justice.”

Oh, God. “A federal appellate judge? Those are impeachable offenses.”

“They’re also crimes, so I couldn’t care less if he loses his job. I need you to help me look for certain evidence.”

“What’s the matter with a search warrant?”

“I don’t have enough for probable cause, not yet.” His face grows tense. “What time is it anyway? I can’t wear a watch on this job.”

I glance at my wrist. “Noon.”

“Shit. I have to be at the shelter, otherwise they run out of sandwiches. If you’d come out of the goddamn stall earlier—”

“What kind of evidence are you talking about?” I say, but he’s busy yanking out the bottom of a ratty T-shirt so that it shows under his faded WHITE WATER KINGDOM sweatshirt.

“Do I look pathetic enough? I only made seven bucks yesterday. All this bullshit about not encouraging us.”

“Tell me more about the investigation. Is Galanter the only suspect?”

“No, and that’s all you need to know. Don’t tell anybody we talked. Give me back Tom Cruise.” He slips on his rain bonnet and ties it under his chin like a babushka. “After all, I’m the Rain Man.”

“I get it.” I hand him the wallet, which he slips into a pocket sewn into the folds of his trousers. “What if I want to call you?”

“You can’t. I’m homeless, remember?” He pushes his pants down around his hips and starts to leave the bathroom. “I have to go. I’ll explain it all later.”

“Do you think Armen was murdered?”

His face falls suddenly behind its hobo’s mask. “Why do you ask?”

“Why don’t you answer?”

“Maybe.”

I feel my heart pounding. “Do you think it has to do with your investigation?”

“Maybe.”

I think of Armen, lying face forward on his desk. Did he really take money for a case? There are so many questions, and only one thing is clear. It hurts inside.

“I miss him too,” the agent says. Then he opens the ladies’ room door and slouches out.

15

Maddie’s gone outside to play, and my mother hands me her dinner dish for rinsing. The child left more peas than I thought. Puckered now, they careen randomly on the surface of the dish. “Let’s talk about Dad,” I say, taking the plate.

“Let’s not,” my mother says. She walks back into the dining room without meeting my eye. I watch her receding form, soft and shapeless in a pink acrylic sweatsuit. The back says NUMBER ONE GRANDMA. She bought it for herself.

“Why not?” I call after her.

“It’s not that time of year yet.”

At least she’s in a good mood. “What do you mean?” I maneuver Maddie’s plate into the wire dishwasher rack. Bernice, standing at her now-customary place at the dishwasher door, sniffs the plate, disappointed to find it clean already.

“You’re early,” my mother says, returning with my messy plate of waxy mashed potatoes. “You usually don’t start with those questions till Christmas.” Her mouth is a tight smile; wrinkles radiate like tiny scars from the edges of her lips.

“I could be late, did you ever think of it that way? I mean, is the glass half empty or half full?” I take the plate and she turns silently on her heel. “Depends on your perspective, Ma, right?” I watch the water splash harmlessly off an insoluble potato mound, then stow the dish in the rack to let Bernice finish the job.

My mother comes back as Bernice is in mid-meal. “Don’t let the dog do that, Grace! It’s unsanitary. We eat off those dishes. Shoo, shoo!” She bangs a glass down on the counter and takes a swipe at Bernice, who backs up, confused.

“It’s all right, Ma. It’s going into the dishwasher.”

“They’re not even cheap dishes, they’re expensive dishes. It’s unhealthy. The germs.”

“The hot water kills the germs.”

Her frown deepens as she eyes Bernice, who’s licking her chops sheepishly. “When I sit at your table, I don’t like to think I’m eating off a dog dish.”

“It’s not like I feed her from the dish.”

“It’s the same thing. You’re lucky my mother can’t see this. You know what she would do? She would set your place at the table with the dog’s dish.”

She never talks about her childhood. “Your mother would do that?”

“She sure would. My mother was spiteful. She’d explain it to you this way. If your dish is good enough to feed the animal, then you don’t mind eating out of the dog’s dish. Believe me, Grace, she would.” She shakes her head and walks into the dining room. “It’s so common.”

I would remind her that we’re common, that she manicured nails to support us, but this is family history long since revised; she tells people she was in the beauty industry, whatever that is. “Is the table clear, Ma?” Bernice trots back to the dishwasher, but I wave her off.

“One left.” She comes back in and hands me her own plate. It doesn’t need rinsing; you would never know anybody ate off it.

“Tell me about my father.”

Her frown is replaced by a cynical smile. “What do you have to know? He had dark hair, he wore it slicked back. He was Sicilian, he might as well have been black. He was younger than me, so I should have known. End of story.”

“Do you miss him ever?”

Her smile, weak to start out with, now fades completely. “No.”

“Were you ever happy?”

“No.”

“Not even before he started drinking?”

“He always drank. He drank from the beginning.”

“So tell me—”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Tell me about his drinking, then. It’s hard to remember.”

“Good. It’s better you don’t.” She does an about-face and heads out of the room. I brace myself as she returns with another glass.

“I remember that he drank Crown Royal.”

Her face reddens but her expression remains rigid. She sets the glass down. “He drank everything. Beer. Wine. Whiskey. Cough syrup.” She pushes back a steel-colored curl. “You know all this. Why do we have to go over and over it?”

“I remembered something about Crown Royal. It used to come in a purple sack with gold letters.”

Her eyelids flutter. “It still does. You know that from now, not before.”

“He gave me the sacks for purses,” I say, the sentence popping out of my mouth of its own force, a memory I didn’t know I had until this very moment. “For dress-up.” I scan her face for verification, but it’s a perfect blank. “Remember?”

“No.”

“The purses? The gold braid on the side?”

“No.”

“There was a drawstring.”

She turns to go, but I grab her arm. My grasp is rougher than I intended, and in the half second she looks back I catch a fleeting expression on her face. This one I can read: fear. She’s afraid I’m going to hit her. Suddenly I understand.

“Did he hit you, Mom?” I ask, horrified. Outraged.

“Why are you doing this?” Her forehead creases with anxiety. She tries to wrench her arm free but I hold her tighter, almost involuntarily.

“I have to know. Did he hit you?”

“It’s my business.” She yanks her arm from my grasp and backs unsteadily away from me toward the refrigerator door. Behind her is a jumble of crayon rainbows and happy-face suns. Maddie’s drawings. “My business.”

“It’s my business, too!”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Mom, there’s no shame in it. It’s not your fault.”

“None of this is your concern.”

“I knew he left us, I never knew why. Is that why? Did you throw him out because he beat you? I’m not blaming you, I just want to know.”

“Stop! Stop it right now!” She holds up a veined hand, her finger pads curled over like the tines on a hand rake. Years of nicotine, the doctor told her.

“Ma—”

“You let me be!” She hurries out of the room but I follow her, almost panicky. To make it better, to make it worse, I don’t even know.

“Ma, it’s just that I’ve been wondering—”

She whirls around and silences me with a crooked index finger. Her face, for the first time in my memory, is full of pain, and she fights for control. “Let it drop. What’s done is done. Going over it doesn’t do me any good, doesn’t do anybody any good.”

“Did he hit me too, Ma?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something happened the other day at the office, and I remembered.”

Her chest heaves like a boxer’s under the silly sweatshirt. “Grace Deasey—”

“Grace Deasey Rossi, Mom. I had a father, and I would like to know what he did to me. That is my business.”

She snatches her purse from a chair and almost runs to the front door. “You’re out of your mind. You’ll drive me out of mine if I let you. But I won’t let you.”

“Ma—”

“No,” she says simply and walks out.

NUMBER ONE GRANDMA winks at me as the door slams closed behind her.

16

“Let’s do it,” Eletha says grimly as we encounter the first wave of reporters along the wall of the outer lobby to the courthouse.

“Grace! Grace Rossi!” one of them shouts.

Shocked, I turn toward the voice. It’s the reporter from the day before, Sandy Faber. He’s wearing the same sport jacket and more stubble. “Remember what I said, Ms. Rossi?”

“Which judge does she work for?” one of the women reporters asks. He ignores her, so she shouts at me. “Who do you work for, Ms. Rossi? Do you have any comment on Hightower? Why did it take so long to get the transcripts of the oral argument?”

“Holy shit,” I hear Eletha mutter beside me.

I push forward away from the reporters, but the lunchtime crowd is barely trickling out the narrow courthouse doors.

“Come on, Ms. Rossi!” Faber shouts. “You gonna talk to me? Come on. Gimme a break here.”

The heads of three other reporters snap in my direction. I feel Eletha’s hand on my forearm.

“Who do you work for, Judge Meyerson? Judge Redd?” the woman shouts at me. “I can find out, you know.”

“No comment,” I say.

“Aw,” the woman says, “just tell me who you work for. It’s Simmons, right? That’s who? Simmons?”

I feel Eletha’s talons dig into my arm; she seems shaken. I press ahead, pushing in line for the first time in my life as a good girl. It works. The crowd surges forward, and Eletha and I squeeze out the door and into the crowd outside the courthouse.

“You all right?” I say to Eletha, but she can’t hear me over the Hightower supporters to our left. “No justice, no peace!” they chant. Their signs read: DEATH PENALTY=GENOCIDE OF AFRICAN AMERICANS! ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY! SUPREME COURT ADMITS “DISCREPANCY CORRELATES WITH RACE!”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Eletha says.

“I’m trying, El.” One of the signs is a picture of a young black teenager with smooth clear skin and a shy smile. He wears a red varsity football jacket. Hightower. The sound of the chanting resounds in my head.

At the front line of the swelling Hightower contingent is a prominent black city councilman and members of the black clergy. An older black woman standing next to one of the clergymen catches my eye; she’s heavyset but dignified in an old-fashioned cotton dress, a calm eye at the center of a media hurricane. I recognize her from TV: Hightower’s mother, Mrs. Stevens.

“Are you surprised by the amount of support that’s being shown for your son?” a TV reporter says to her, thrusting a bubble-headed microphone in front of her face.

Mrs. Stevens looks startled, then the black councilman steps closer to the microphone, obstructing her from view. “We are going to hold a round-the-clock vigil to protest the death penalty, to show that it has always been racist in this country,” the councilman says. “The Baldus study shows that African Americans are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites.”

“Push, Grace,” Eletha says.

“Okay, okay,” I say. I force my way past the man in front of me, but find myself face-to-face with Mr. Gilpin, who’s standing in my path. Even in the midst of the hubbub, his face relaxes into a smile.

“Hello there, my friend,” he says, loud enough to be heard over the din. “Is this pretty lady a friend of yours?”

A tall black man in an X baseball cap chants over his shoulder, and behind him is the TV reporter and the black councilman. Gilpin acts like none of this is happening, as if it’s a squabble over a suburban fence, not an incipient race war.

“Mr. Gilpin, this is Eletha Staples,” I say.

Eletha extends a hand reluctantly. “Hello, Mr. Gilpin.”

“Call me Bill, Eletha. You girls goin’ out to lunch?”

“No justice, no peace!” booms a clear voice behind him, and the crowd begins to shove me aside.

“We’d better go, we’re blocking the way,” I say. I edge forward, but Eletha gets jammed between one of the Hightower supporters and a TV technician.

Gilpin grabs her arm and pulls her lightly to her feet. “Are you all right?” he says.

“Get me out of here, please. I hate crowds.” She places a hand to her chest and starts breathing in and out. I’m worried she’s going to hyperventilate and Gilpin must see it too, because in one swift movement he scoops us up by the elbows and drives through the mob. He deposits us at the curb and brushes back a pomaded hank of hair. “I played football in high school,” he says.

Eletha tugs a handkerchief from the sleeve of her sweater and dabs at her forehead. “Thanks a lot.”

Gilpin’s eyes skim the crowd unhappily. “We started this, I know. But it’ll be over soon.”

Which is when it occurs to me. The politics of the new Hightower panel is all over the newspapers; Galanter and Foudy aren’t closet conservatives. Gilpin must realize that Hightower’s going to lose, and he’s about to see his daughters’ murder avenged. I wonder if Gilpin is happy that Armen was killed. Suddenly I like him less. “We’d better be going,” I say.

He nods. “Sure enough.”

“Thanks again,” Eletha says, recovering.

We cross Market Street and the chanting trails off into the noontime traffic, making me suddenly aware of Eletha’s stone silence. She chugs along the sidewalk like a locomotive and I tense up, feeling like a curtain has fallen between us: white on one side, black on the other. We come to the corner of Sixth and Chestnut and she squints up at the light. An executive takes a second look at her, then stares right at my breasts. My tension, pent up, bubbles over. “They’re a B-cup, okay?” I spit at him. “Any other questions?”

The man hurries past us, and Eletha bursts into startled laughter. “I can’t believe you said that!” she says.

“Neither can I. It felt great. Absolutely great.” I laugh, suddenly lighthearted. “I’ve been wanting to do that all my life.”

“So have I.”

I meet her eye. “Are you mad at me, girlfriend?”

She shakes her head, still smiling. “I’m getting over it.” The traffic light turns green and we cross Chestnut.

“It’s not my fault I’m white.”

She laughs again. “It’s not that. It’s that I can’t believe you’re messin’ with Gilpin. You know better than that.”

“I’m not messin’ with him. He talked to me the first day.”

“You shoulda walked away.”

“I couldn’t walk away, he’s a person.”

She holds up a hand. “I don’t want to know he’s a person, and I don’t want to know Hightower’s a person. These are names on a caption, not people. If you start thinkin’ they’re people, you won’t be able to do your job. Look what happened to Armen.”

“What?” We stop in front of Meyer’s Deli, the only place she’ll eat; Eletha’s not Jewish, but she practically keeps kosher. “What do you mean by that, about Armen?”

She looks warily at the lunchtime crowd. “Let’s talk inside, okay?”

We head into the noisy deli, with its old-time octagonal tile floor and embossed tin roof. Meyer’s is always mobbed, but the line moves quickly because everybody inhales their food; the clientele consists almost exclusively of hyperactive trial lawyers. The hostess accosts us at the door and hustles us to an orange plastic booth against the wall. Our waitress, Marlene, appears at our table from nowhere. “You havin’ the tuna fish?” she says to me, already writing down #12 on her pad.

“Only if you call me ‘honey,’” I tell her. “I want someone to call me ‘honey,’ and not just for my body.”

Eletha smiles. “Do what she says, Mar. She just attacked a man on the street.”

“Okay, honey,” Marlene says mirthlessly. She tears off the check and puts it face down, like we’re at the Ritz-Carlton. “You havin’ the whitefish on bagel, Eletha?” she says, scribbling on the order pad.

“Yes,” Eletha says.

“What’s goin’ on at the courthouse, girls?” Marlene says. She rips Eletha’s check off the pad and slaps it face down on the table. “They gonna kill that kid?”

Jesus. “We have no comment,” I say.

Marlene scowls as she slips the ballpoint into her apron pocket. “I’m sick of the whole thing anyway,” she says and vanishes.

Eletha leans forward. “So. I’ve been thinkin’ about what you said, about Armen. About him being murdered.”

“What?”

“Just accept that he’s gone, Grace. That’s hard enough. Anything else is a waste of time.”

“I don’t understand. You don’t think he was murdered?”

“I’m not so sure.”

Now I really don’t understand. “Since when? That’s not what you said yesterday.”

“I know what I said. But last night I tried to quit school, and they told me Armen paid already, in advance.”

“What are you talking about? You go to school?”

“Night school, at the community college. I got two more years left, and I’ve had it up to here.” She draws a line across her throat.

Marlene materializes with our food. “Enjoy,” she barks and takes off again.

“Eletha, I didn’t know you went to school.”

“I thought Armen might’ve told you.” She picks up a bagel half and spackles it with whitefish salad.

“He didn’t, but why didn’t you?”

“It’s a secret.” She bites into her sandwich, but I’m still too surprised to start mine. “In case I flunk out.”

“You won’t flunk out.”

“You never know. The whole damn thing was Armen’s idea. Now he’s gone.”

“But I think it’s wonderful, Eletha.”

“You don’t have to do it, girl. Three nights a week I get home at eleven o’clock. I gotta take two buses, then transfer to the subway. Malcolm’s in bed, I don’t even get to see him. If I’m lucky, I got an hour left to fight with Leon. I figured if I got an associate’s degree, maybe I could transfer the credits and go on to college, then who knows.”