Judgment

22

For a long while after the man left, she sat at her desk, heart racing, adrenaline pulsing through her body, as the sound of the janitor’s bucket thumped along the hallway, one squeaky wheel, faded away. She felt light-headed. She wondered whether the man had intended to go through her office, her files, after hours, when she was usually gone. Had they sent someone to go through her files and notes at home too? Or had he come here just to threaten her? Because if that’s all it was, it had worked perfectly. The guy hadn’t needed to pick up the picture frame; she’d gotten the message. They could go after her family. No longer was the threat just her public shaming, discrediting, through the release of a video. Now her family was in the crosshairs too.

She waited for her heart rate to steady, then picked up her phone, texted Duncan.

She waited, staring at the phone, for the three little dots that meant he was typing a reply. A long time went by, but no return text.

Then she called Duncan’s phone.

“Hey, what’s up?” he answered.

She exhaled, long and hard. “Just checking in,” she said. “Everything good?”

“Sure, just making dinner.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

“Okay.”

She hit Philip Hersh’s number.

He answered after a few rings: “Judge Brody.”

She heard loud noises in the background, the cacophony of a crowd. “Can you run fingerprints?” she said.

“It’s not something I usually do, but theoretically I can. I’ve got a buddy on the police force. Why, what do you have?”

“A picture frame,” she said. “Some guy just threatened me. Threatened my family. If I don’t make the right decision.” Just telling him brought it back to her. It was starting to sink in, what had happened. She could almost see the man: the steel-framed glasses, the shaved head, the ropy muscles. Is there a problem?

“Physically?”

“Sort of. I mean, he didn’t touch me, but he could have. He broke some glass. Point is, they’re escalating, whoever these people are. Now it’s not just some video. It’s— I don’t know, you just—”

“Hey, Judge,” Hersh said quietly. “I’m here, okay? I’ll do anything I can.”

For a moment she thought she might burst into tears from the tenderness in his voice. “Thank you, Philip.”

He said nothing.

She said, “Did you find out anything about Mayfair Paragon?”

“No. No trace of it online. You say it’s, what, a company?”

“Must be. Wheelz’s general counsel said she needed ‘accredited investor forms,’ whatever they are, on something called Mayfair Paragon. But she kept getting turned down. Something about those documents she wasn’t allowed to see.”

“So it’s an investor in Wheelz?”

“I assume so, yes.”

“There’s no mention of Mayfair Paragon in any of the business databases, nothing in social media, nothing. Nada.”

“That’s not possible. There has to be a record of it somewhere.”

“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Five years ago Wheelz almost went out of business. Ran out of money. People talked about Uber, about Lyft, but no one ever mentioned Wheelz, because it was never a real competitor. Not even an also-ran. It was a company on its deathbed. Then three years ago, all of a sudden, everything turns around for Wheelz. Suddenly they’re loaded. Some British firm sinks a billion dollars into it in exchange for fifty-one percent of the company.”

“Which British firm?”

“It’s called Harrogate Capital Partners. A venture capital firm.”

“So they own Wheelz.”

“Right. Most of it.”

“And who are they? I want to know who they are. These people who are threatening my family.”

“Understood, Judge. I’m on it.”

Her phone chimed a text-alert sound. “I need to go,” she said. “Thank you, Philip.” After she ended the call, she looked at the text. It was from Duncan:

She was confused: the SAT prep class went on for another half hour. She called Duncan.

“Where are you?” he said when he answered.

“Courthouse. I forgot something. What’s going on with Jake — did the class end early?”

“Jake bailed.”

“Bailed?”

“He took an Uber home. Just showed up here. He says he doesn’t want to sit through it anymore.”

“He can’t — just do that.”

“I don’t know how we force him to take it.”

She sighed into the phone. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

Half an hour later she arrived home, put down her stuff, then went up to Jake’s bedroom. She stood for a moment outside his closed door and tried to focus. She was distracted and tense and kept thinking about the man who’d threatened her. Is there a problem? How bizarre was her life, she thought, that she had to cope with such different problems at the same time, problems of such different scale. Jake and his apathy, whatever he was going through — and now a threat to her family, a matter of life and death.

But at the same time, she knew she could never just stop caring about her kids, no matter what. She was determined to focus on what was in front of her, even if it was a struggle. Focus, she told herself. On your family. On what matters.

She could hear him talking. She waited a moment, couldn’t make out what he was saying, then knocked. She waited, then knocked again, harder. She heard him say, “Oh, shit.” Finally he opened the door.

“Yeah?”

He stood there, headphones around his neck, a look on his face somewhere between ashamed and defiant.

“What happened to SAT class?”

“It’s bullshit.”

“Excellent sheep, I got it.” She paused. “You don’t think the class is helping?” she said, as reasonably as she could. “It’s supposed to be the best prep class you can take.”

“I’m talking about the SAT. It’s a scam. It doesn’t predict how well you’ll do in college. It just measures how good you are at taking the SAT!” He appeared to be primed for an argument, but she didn’t want to give it to him.

Juliana sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Do your homework. Your dad and I have to talk.”

She closed the door and headed downstairs. She wanted to tell Duncan about what had happened earlier, the intruder at the courthouse, but of course she couldn’t. That would involve telling him about Chicago, and that was out of the question.

He was downstairs watching Game of Thrones. Everyone in the world had seen it, it seemed, except her. She had no interest. He was sparing her.

When he saw her, he paused the show — someone was being decapitated — and looked up. “You talk to him yet?”

“Just did, a little. Honey, what are we going to do?”

“Like I said, we can’t force him to take the course.”

“So we just let him blow off the SATs?”

“If that’s what he wants to do...” He shrugged.

She came over to the couch and sat next to him. “Did you see that e-mail from Mr. Wertheim?”

He nodded. Mr. Wertheim was Jake’s despised math teacher. “He flunked the big test.”

“It’s the damned marijuana.”

“He’s just rebelling.”

“Against us?”

“Against Mr. Wertheim, against high school, college, the whole thing. It’s a goddamned pressure cooker.”

She shook her head, heaved a sigh. “Excellent sheep.”

“Exactly.”

“It feels like he’s just throwing away his chance to go to a good school.”

“He’ll get in somewhere. Some place that’s right for him, where he belongs. With other kids who don’t believe that perfect SAT scores are the holy grail. Maybe he’s enjoying life. It’s like Baba Ram Dass said — ‘Be here now.’”

She gave a tight smile. “He can be here now as soon as he gets into college.”

Be here now. That had a double meaning, didn’t it? That was what it meant to keep living. You might know there was an asteroid hurtling toward your neighborhood. That didn’t mean you didn’t have to floss. Maybe the asteroid would veer off course. Maybe it wouldn’t. Life was about handling different threats on different scales. She remembered how scared her mother had been after receiving her breast-cancer diagnosis. But an hour later, Rosalind was on the phone with the carpet-and-tile shop, pestering them about a delivery date.

“He’s almost an adult,” Duncan said. “In some societies, he is an adult. We can’t control him. Maybe you can control what happens in your courtroom, what happens in your life, but we can’t control him.”

Control? she thought. Her life had spun out of control and all because of that night in Chicago. And that second drink. One slip, she thought. One mistake. Nobody got points for walking a tightrope with a little detour into thin air.

Maybe he was right; maybe she was trying to control Jake because she couldn’t control what was happening to her and she didn’t know what to do about it.

“You okay, Jules?” Duncan said. “You seem really distracted. Anything wrong?”

“Me? No, I’m fine. Just... worried about Jakie.” She stood up. “Okay, I have some reading to do. Enjoy the decapitation.”