Judgment

36

A few minutes before the morning’s court session was to begin, her mobile phone rang.

“Judge Brody, this is Trooper Markowski from the Attorney General’s office. A couple things have come up, some things we’d like to talk to you about.”

Her stomach seized. “Happy to talk.”

“Does this afternoon work for you?”

“I’m in court until four.”

“We can come by your office at four.”

“I have a meeting at my son’s school. Let me get back to you in a few minutes about my schedule.”

“Sounds good.”

She hit End, glanced at her watch — so she’d keep the courtroom waiting a minute or two — and hit Martha Connolly’s number.

“Martie,” she said, “the AG’s investigator wants to talk to me again. They have some follow-up questions.”

“That’s not good. But remember, you don’t have to talk to them.”

“I’m not talking to them without a lawyer.”

“Who’re you going to use?”

“You,” Juliana said.

There was a pause. Juliana wondered if Martie was taken aback.

“Let them know they are welcome to talk to you in my home,” Martie said. “And let me give you a warning I used to give all my clients, which I heard from an old Boston political boss: ‘Never write if you can speak, never speak if you can nod, never nod if you can wink.’”

“And never put it in e-mail,” Juliana added.

During lunch a large envelope had been hand-delivered to her lobby by a courier for Wheelz’s lawyer, Harlan Madden. Inside were a DVD and a short document. As soon as she glanced at the document she understood what it was. The two parties had been in the middle of depositions, with Rachel Meyers being questioned by Madden, when a dispute broke out. She looked at the paper. It was an emergency motion filed by Harlan Madden “to compel answers to deposition questions and to preclude counsel from improper coaching.” He said they were going to have to come back for a second day of deposing Ms. Meyers and wanted the plaintiff to cover the costs. She skimmed the rest of the motion, then put the DVD into her computer’s disk drive.

She hit Play. A wispy blond woman in her early thirties, Rachel Meyers, was sitting nervously at a conference table, looking directly at the camera. A male voice off-camera was asking her questions. That was Madden.

She couldn’t help but think about Trooper Markowski and what might possibly have “come up.” What the hell else could they have found? But at the same time she had to pay attention, because what she was doing was important. And there was nothing she could do about Trooper Markowski until later.

She fast-forwarded to a couple of minutes before the point in the time code where the controversy erupted. The offscreen voice asked, “Ms. Meyers, have you had a lot of boyfriends?”

Rachel Meyers looked to one side, probably at her lawyer, and said, “A lot? No.”

“How many, would you say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep a count.”

“More than ten?”

“No.”

“Twenty?”

“Much less.”

“Then how many?”

“Maybe four or five.”

“And are you seeing someone at the present time?”

“No.”

“And, Ms. Meyers, are you a member of any online dating sites?”

“Yes.”

“Which ones?”

“Uh, OkCupid and Bumble.”

“Have you had many dates as a result of these online dating sites?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, can you give me your best estimate? Would you say fifty?”

“Fifty? No way. Maybe five or six.”

“Ms. Meyers, Devin Allerdyce is the CEO of Wheelz, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did he invite you to dinner?”

“No—”

“No? When he said to you over chat, ‘OK if we meet at Madrigal at seven,’ were you aware that Madrigal is a restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“An invitation to a restaurant at seven o’clock in the evening is not a dinner invitation?”

“Well, I mean, it was supposed to be a business meeting. He said he wanted to talk about the Carras case.”

“A business meeting at the most expensive restaurant in Boston?”

“No, at first he asked me to come by his office. Later he changed it to Madrigal.”

“Ms. Meyers, did you know that Devin Allerdyce was single?”

She seemed to hesitate. “I think I’d heard that, but I don’t remember.”

“Ms. Meyers, when a single man invites you to dinner at an expensive, romantic restaurant like Madrigal, wouldn’t you assume that was a date?”

A female voice broke in: “Objection! This is ridiculous; this is improper and totally irrelevant and intending to harass the witness.”

Madden said, “Counsel, are you instructing the witness not to answer the question?”

“No, I’m not instructing her not to answer, but this is a highly inappropriate line of questioning. You can answer the question, Rachel.”

Rachel Meyers’s eyes slid from one side to the other, from her lawyer to Madden. “No, I did not assume it was a date,” she said. “He’s the CEO of the company. I thought it was business.”

“Ms. Meyers, is it true that you changed your clothes before dinner?”

A pause. “Yes.”

“What did you change into?”

“I... I don’t remember.”

“Have you been to Madrigal many times?”

“No, just that one time.”

“And you can’t remember what you wore that night?”

Glenda Craft’s voice broke in again. “Objection, this is completely irrelevant. How is the fact that she changed her clothes relevant? This was almost two years ago! How would she remember what she was wearing on one night two years ago?”

“Objection,” said Harlan Madden. “Coaching the witness.”

“Go ahead and answer, Rachel,” said Craft.

“I don’t remember,” Rachel said.

“Thank you,” Madden said. “Ms. Meyers, did you order wine at dinner?”

“He did.”

“Did you drink wine?”

“Yes.”

“How many glasses of wine did you drink?”

“The waiter kept filling my glass. I don’t know.”

“Really? Do you think it was at least two glasses?”

“Probably.”

“More?”

“Possibly.”

“Three glasses?”

“I don’t know.”

Another pause. “Ms. Meyers, were you intoxicated at your dinner with Devin Allerdyce at Madrigal?”

“That’s it!” Glenda Craft, loud and angry. “Time-out. We’re taking a break.”

“We’re not taking a break until I finish this line of questioning.”

“No, we need a break, and we’re taking one right now!”

“I’m not going to allow you to take a break and go off the record until I finish this line of inquiry.”

“Come on, Rachel, let’s go.”

Rachel looked uncertainly at her lawyer and slowly got up, walking off to the left of the camera. Now all Juliana could see was an empty side of the conference table and a white wall. The time code kept racing along.

Madden raised his voice. “If you guys get up now, I’m going to suspend the deposition, and I’m going to go to court and file a motion.”

Craft: “Do what you want. Come on, Rachel, let’s confer out in the hall.”

Madden: “I am suspending this deposition based on improper conduct by the plaintiff’s counsel, and I intend to file a motion to ask the court to intervene and instruct the plaintiff’s lawyer to allow me to conduct this deposition as I’m allowed under our rules of civil procedure, without improper coaching and interruptions.”

The blank table, the white wall stayed on-screen for another ten seconds, and then it went dark.

She understood why the defense lawyer was pissed off: he was on a roll, he’d gotten the plaintiff in a corner and wanted to keep her there. And the plaintiff’s lawyer, Glenda Craft, had in fact been coaching the witness. In her objection to Madden’s question, about what Rachel wore that night at Madrigal, she’d all but supplied Rachel’s answer. On the other hand, she shouldn’t have interrupted the deposition, taking a break while a question was pending and meeting with her client. You didn’t do that.

Juliana figured she’d wait for the plaintiff’s lawyer to submit her opposition, and then she’d make a ruling quickly, which meant within the week.

She ejected the disk and packed up her files. She had a meeting at Jake’s school to get to. Her regular life went on.

Duncan picked her up outside the courthouse for the conference with Jake’s math teacher. They’d decided to go together.

She got in, said, “Hi.” Wary.

Duncan said, “Hi.” Same.

They avoided each other’s eyes. Juliana watched the road.

Duncan’s 2014 Prius was littered with coffee cups and empty Diet Coke cans. The cans rattled around, sliding front to back and side to side as he drove. For a long time, she listened to the uneven clatter. Once again she was distracted by that obsessive part of her brain that kept cycling. She kept seeing the dead body of Matías Sanchez. The man with the shaved head and the steel-rim glasses: Greaves, and his terrifying threats. Trooper Markowski and — what was his name, she’d forgotten. What would happen to that video that Matías had shown her, the blackmail video?

“Doing okay?” Duncan said.

“I’m okay,” she said. She was grateful he asked about her.

“Do we have a strategy here?”

“I don’t even know what’s going on with Jake in math. Did he tell you? He wouldn’t tell me. He said he didn’t know how he’s doing.”

“Oh, he knows.”

“Does he?”

“I’m sure. But he won’t tell me either.”

“Wild guess: not so good.”

A long silence passed. She started thinking again about the police and what they wanted. She hated being this scattered and willed herself to think about Jake and his damned math class. “Has he been doing his homework?” she asked.

“I assume so. He goes upstairs to his room and puts on his headphones and taps away at the keyboard. Sometimes I hear him talking on the phone.”

Another long silence.

Then she said, “He hasn’t stopped vaping, has he?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t smell pot, but you wouldn’t, with a vape pen, right?”

“That’s right.”

Another pause.

“So our son is vaping to take the edge off, and lo and behold, he’s flunking math. I guess that’s taking the edge off, all right.”

Duncan rolled his eyes.

Sometimes, she thought, Duncan acted more like his son’s pal than his father. But he was a warm and loving father, and that was the most important thing. He was born and bred to it: he came from a big and loving Italian family, where (at least as she imagined it) there was always a pot of marinara bubbling on the stove. He and his brothers and sisters bickered constantly but always came through for one another.

The Espositos could not have been more different from the Brodys. Her mother practically mainlined her martinis after work every night. Her father was what today you’d call emotionally unavailable. He was an articulate man, a brilliant teacher, but he rarely spoke at home except to complain about the administration at the school where he taught. A general fug of disappointment always surrounded him. He was always working on his novel, which no one ever saw. It was never published, and as far as Juliana knew, it was never completed. All he’d say about it was that it was “literary.” He was recessive, a shrinking violet: always removed, always distracted. He was barely even there. He emerged from his shell only to grouse about something. Follow his rules and leave him alone.

Her mother only drank at home, never at work, or so she insisted. But she drank a lot at home. To the extent that dinner would usually burn in the oven. Twice she’d almost burned down the house. It got so bad that Juliana started making dinner. Then, since her mother always slept late, Juliana had to start making Calvin’s lunches every morning. She remembered putting in those little red boxes of raisins for him instead of the fun-size Kit Kat bars left over from Halloween, being the responsible mom-type figure; she also remembered Calvin’s howls of protest. There were plenty of times when she wanted to go into a sulk, to throw a fit, to act like a kid. To be a moody adolescent. But that felt like a luxury she couldn’t afford. That they couldn’t afford.

Everything in the Brody house went unsaid; everything was distant and swaddled in batting. She’d grown used to the silences.

She’d looked at her parents’ lives and thought: I want no part of that. Her dad, desperately unhappy and unloved in his job. Her mom, living in a world of pretend. And then if you rebelled against them, like Calvin, you got yourself killed.

So it was Duncan’s family-centric warmth that had really attracted her to him, even more than his brown eyes and his long lashes and his perfect butt. More than his passion, his intellectual stubbornness. In a way, it came down to how much he loved his mother.

Jake’s math teacher, Mr. Wertheim, was a clumsy, overweight man in his late twenties with thick glasses and an inability to look you in the face. Juliana had forgotten what his first name was. He was just Mr. Wertheim. He opened the door to the classroom with a surprised look that implied that he’d forgotten they were coming. The classroom was otherwise empty. They sat in chairs with tablet arm desks, facing one another. Mr. Wertheim cleared his throat and looked down at the desktop. He wore a green tartan plaid shirt. His big belly barely fit behind the desk. He traced a figure eight on the desk with his index finger and cleared his throat and said, “Um, I think Jake is a really smart kid with a lot of potential, but he’s failing math.”

“Failing?” Juliana said.

“The last three tests he’s gotten an F. And he hasn’t turned in the last six homework assignments.”

Juliana looked at Duncan, who looked rattled. “What can he do about it?” Duncan said, ever the optimist.

“That’s the thing. I don’t know. I’ve offered to stay after school to work with him, but he has yet to take me up on it. I figured he’d have time after school since he’s quit the soccer team.”

As they left the classroom, Juliana said, “He quit soccer?”

“I’m stunned. Jesus.”

“Wow. So what’s he doing after school every day?”

He was silent for a beat. “Not his math homework, clearly.” He laughed painfully.

They walked for a while in silence. Outside the building they said hi to Jake’s history teacher, Ms. Howland. Juliana wondered whether he was flunking history too. She looked at her watch. “We’re fifteen minutes early to pick him up. From whatever he’s doing. You want to wait with me?”

“I do. Thanks.”

They sat on the wooden bench outside the main entrance, where kids waited for their parents.

She said, “Our son’s flunking math, and we’re flunking parenthood.”

After a long silence, they both started talking at the same time. “You know,” Duncan said as she said, “Can I say something?” and then “Go ahead.”

Finally Duncan collected himself. “I’m not ready for you to come home yet,” he said. “We built something together — it’s not me and it’s not you, it’s something else, and maybe we have a responsibility to it. Now, I’m not the perfect husband, I know that. This isn’t all on you.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But it kinda is.”

He hesitated. “Yeah, it kinda is,” he said, and he smiled. A pause. “So we’ll talk to him?”

“Whatever good that does. He keeps telling me soccer is ‘fine,’ and he doesn’t elaborate, but that’s sort of typical of the way he is these days, with me anyway.”

A few minutes later, her phone rang. It was Martie Connolly. “I just got a heads-up,” she said. “The two police detectives are on their way. When do you think you’ll be back?”

Her stomach knotted. “Give me half an hour,” she said.

Jake showed up a while later, his heavy backpack looped over his right shoulder, his big headphones around his neck.

“How was soccer?” Juliana and Duncan said in unison, unintentionally.

Jake looked from one to the other, realizing something was up. “I didn’t go to soccer,” he admitted.

Gently, Juliana said, “What’d you do, Jake?”

“I worked in the library.”

“Uh-huh.” She didn’t persist, because she was fairly certain he was lying.

They were all getting much too good at that.

“We need to talk,” Juliana said.