Past Due

Chapter 24

WHERE SIT THE honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court?

Any place they want to.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a lovely chamber in the statehouse in Harrisburg, with fine leather chairs and murals on the walls and a great stained-glass dome, but who the hell wants to sit in Harrisburg? So there is a courtroom in Philadelphia and a courtroom in Pittsburgh and satellite chambers in each of those cities, and the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court can pretty much work anyplace they choose. Which is why Justice Jackson Straczynski spent most of his time in his hometown of Philadelphia.

It’s not a bad life, the State Supreme Court life, the pay is high, the perks many, and the justices get to wear those boss robes. A lot of lawyers have their eyes on that particular prize and there is only one small requirement for getting your very own seat: enough votes. Aye, there’s the rub. It takes not merit to rise to Pennsylvania’s highest court, just politics.

What do you get when you mix justice and politics?

The Marx Brothers starring in Duck Soup.

I don’t mean to paint the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as a bunch of vaudeville clowns honking horns and making wisecracks to Margaret Dumont, but then I don’t have to, they do a good enough job themselves. And I’m even not talking here of their legal decisions, which are generally considered boneheaded at best and venal at worst. The court is infamous for charges of ethical violations, countercharges of case fixing, vulgar insults hurled from justice to justice in the public press. One guy got impeached for sending his employees out to buy Valium and jockstraps. I’m not making this up. He used the subterfuge so his enemies wouldn’t suspect he was crazy. They suspected him anyway when he wore the jockstrap on his head. No, the honorable justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have not covered themselves with glory. All except for Justice Jackson Straczynski.

Justice Straczynski was the most respected jurist to ever sit on that court, a brilliant legal scholar who used economic theory to slice through the Gordian knots of the most difficult legal problems. His great legal treatise, The Economic Laws of Constitutional Interpretation, once a fixture only on the bookshelves of the most conservative law student and right wing legal activist, had become, with the rightward tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court, a staple desktop reference for every constitutional scholar in the country.

After a stint making policy at the Department of Justice for Ronald Reagan, and a period teaching law at the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, Straczynski was tapped by the Republican Party to run for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. He wasn’t much of a campaigner, his speaking style was likened to that of an aardvark on Quaaludes, but it just so happened that during the campaign he published a much-publicized article interpreting the Second Amendment to protect the unequivocal right to buy and bear anything with a trigger. Two things are wildly popular in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, guns and funnel cakes, both are tasty, both are deadly, but if the state’s denizens had to pick one, well, you can’t kill an eight-point buck with a funnel cake, now can you? Straczynski won his election in a walk and now he sat on the state’s highest court, writing uncompromising decisions of uncompromised brilliance and waiting for that call from Washington. The pundits all said it was coming.

“So we agree, right, Kimberly,” I said, as we sat side by side on the beige couch in the justice’s wood-lined waiting room, “I’ll do all the questioning, you’ll just sit quiet and watch the show.”

“Whatever.”

Kimberly glanced at the stern-eyed secretary with the high gray hair manning the desk in the middle of the room. “But remember,” Kimberly said in a hushed voice, “Mr. D definitely wants his name kept out of this.”

“Mr. D?”

“Sure. He was very clear about it.”

“Okay.”

She sat for a moment, something obviously bothering her. “What if a question sort of pops out of my mouth on its own?”

“Gosh, I hope it doesn’t. He might not want to tell us his favorite boy band.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed like quite the career woman, so long as the career was taking place in the early 1960s, bright green faux-Chanel business suit, matching heels, and small clutch.

“You look like a bowl of Jell-O in that getup,” I said.

“We’re visiting a judge, right? This is my government outfit. Mint green, get it?”

She gave a little smile, but the way she bit her lower lip with nervousness made me feel like a jerk. She had that way, did Kimberly.

“Okay,” I said. “Ask what you want. But my advice would be to say as little as possible to this guy. He’s not your usual drunken frat boy.”

Just as I said that a tall man in a black suit came into the waiting room. “Mr. Carl, Ms. Blue,” he said, his voice gilded with an Island lilt. “My name is Curtis Lobban,” said the man. “I am Justice Straczynski’s file clerk.”

Curtis Lobban stood straight and tall, with the deep voice and dignified manner of a dignitary, his dark suit, broad shoulders, and the gray at his temples all added mightily to the effect. He held in himself the same hush of serious purpose that pervaded the entire suite of offices and he looked down at me with a gaze of thinly veiled contempt that made me feel every inch the two-bit hustler invading some grand temple of the law. I jumped to standing at the sight of him, fighting the urge to salute.

“Pleased to meet you, Curtis,” I said. “We talked on the phone, I believe.”

“Yes, we did,” he said slowly.

I reached out a hand to shake, but Curtis Lobban, his face as somber as his outfit, refused the proffer. Pleased to meet me too, obviously.

“The justice, he is sorry to have kept you both waiting and is ready to see you now. Follow me, please.”

He turned and led us out of the waiting area into a large library, its walls lined with huge sets of law books. State reporters, federal reporters, U.S. Supreme Court reporters, digests of all sorts. Two young lawyers, a man and a woman, were hard at work at a conference table, books piled around them, legal pads thick with notes. Gnawing at the pylons supporting the Bill of Rights like hungry termites, I figured. They both gave Kimberly a long look. Kimberly always drew long looks, especially dressed in mint green, but the clerks barely noticed my presence, and why should they? Only the best and brightest clerked for Justice Jackson Straczynski, and I was neither. They only paid me enough notice to wonder what the hell I was doing there. What the hell indeed?

It’s not so easy to get close to a Supreme Court justice, even a State Supreme Court justice, so I hadn’t expected much when I called that morning before running off to seize Manley’s Eldorado. I mentioned my name, I mentioned Tommy Greeley, I waited on the phone a bit. And then it was this Curtis Lobban who came on the line. “What is the purpose of the inquiry?” he asked in his deep somber voice. “It is personal and I can’t say anymore,” I said. “Hold on for a moment please,” he said. I waited, and when he came back on the phone I was told, shockingly, that the justice would see me that very afternoon.

So here we were, Kimberly and I, passing by the serious young law clerks, headed for a visit with their august boss, Tommy Greeley’s old college pal.

“Right through here,” said Curtis Lobban, courteously holding open a door at the far end of the library. We stepped through the doorway and into a Moorish fantasy.

Most judges go for the tree and tome look for their offices, you know what I mean, dark wood paneling, bookshelves filled with thick legal texts, tree and tome, all designed to give the office a sheen of serious scholarship so often lacking in the robe’s wearer. But Justice Straczynski’s office was nothing of the kind. The walls were a rich red, pillars of golden fabric fell from iron pikes, the ceiling was patterned with octagonal indentations painted in a riot of colors. Ornate arches rose above each window, the arches covered with intricate paintings of vines and flowers, and the wooden floor was covered with piles of oriental carpets. Dark wooden furniture scattered across the room was accessorized with plush pillows, maroon and gold, intricate geometric shapes in the weave. The justice’s desk was less a workplace than a fantastically carved piece of oriental sculpture straight from the Ottoman Empire. The whole place, scented lightly with sandalwood, was like the official chamber of a pasha’s grand vizier.

The justice was hunched over at his desk, his back turned, on the phone, and so I took the opportunity to examine his strangely exotic office. I walked around, dazed by the beauty and strangeness of the room. There was no ego wall in the office, no pictures of the justice with presidents and senators and movie stars. But there was, carved into one corner, a series of shelves with ceremonial objects. Tiny Japanese statuettes carved of ivory and jade, fertility fetishes from India, masks from Africa. There was a frame made out of Mayan slate surrounding a picture of a very young woman taken from the neck up, a lovely woman with a heart-shaped face, downcast eyes, and shy smile, her shoulders bare, her head held in an overly dramatic pose. And something out of place among the splendors of the distant world, a garish and tall fencing trophy with a golden swordsman on top captured in the midst of a lunge.

“When was this?” said the justice, still on the phone. His voice was deep, sharp, and slow. Like, well, like an aardvark on Quaaludes. “And what did he take?”

Something moved beside me. I backed away. There was a long dark divan covered with pillows by the shelves and in the space beneath the divan crouched a cat, purely white. It stared at me for a long moment and then stepped arrogantly past me. In the darkness behind the first cat, two green eyes glittered.

“Yes. I see. I will do what I can. But you knew this could happen.”

In front of his desk were two chairs with brilliant golden upholstery. I joined Kimberly standing behind them and waited.

“Be patient. I will talk to him and try to find out what is happening, but calm down. Getting so upset doesn’t help anything.”

He turned around, saw us, startled for a moment at the sight of Kimberly, and then smoothed the features of his face back to his basic bland. He motioned us to sit in the chairs and we did. He was a thin, elegant man, wearing his suit coat even in his office. His hair was blond and wispy, his face was round and youthful, though slightly askew.

“I know you’re angry and scared,” he said, still on the phone. “So am I. But we have to deal with this the right way. Now I have some people in my office. Yes. Of course. I’ll talk to you later. Don’t do anything hasty that you will later regret. Yes. Bye now.”

He hung up the phone and gave us an awkward, almost embarrassed smile, as if he had been caught at something. “My mother,” he said. “She’s been complaining of dizziness so she went to the doctor. Now she’s complaining about all the tests the doctor has taken and about his communication skills. And when he tells her she is perfectly healthy she’ll be complaining about that too.”

“This office is like, oh my God,” said Kimberly.

“My wife designed it.” He raised his brows, the time-honored dismissal of a wife’s eccentricities. “I gave her carte blanche and as usual she exceeded her limit. I believe I recognize you, Mr. Carl. Have you been before the Court?”

“I’ve never had the honor, no. But some of my cases have been notorious. Maybe you’ve seen me on the local news.”

“I don’t watch television,” he said. “Do you perhaps have artistic talent?”

“None,” I said, cheerfully. “Not a lick. I am as artistic as a brick.”

“That’s a relief. My wife seems to collect artists. I am inundated with artists. So we haven’t met?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Just as well. And you, Miss Blue” – he paused and examined her closely for a moment – “are you a lawyer too?”

“No. Please. I’m a vice president.”

“Really? Excellent. Is there perhaps a school for vice presidents at the University of Pennsylvania? I didn’t know. Did you get a graduate degree in vice presidenting?”

“Not really. They just sort of hired me.”

“Who hired you?”

Kimberly didn’t answer.

“What’s the matter, Miss Blue? You’re suddenly silent.”

Just then the white cat jumped atop an ash can and then the desk. It strolled across the desktop and dropped into the justice’s lap. The justice curled one of his arms around it and bowed his neck as he stroked its head. The cat stretched its back and gave me a victorious sneer.

“Did you eat Miss Blue’s tongue, Marshall,” he said to the cat. “Naughty boy. Give it back.” He laughed a high, ugly laugh.

Kimberly blushed. I wondered how he had known she had gone to Penn.

“Miss Blue works for a client, which wishes to remain anonymous at this point,” I said.

“Of course it does,” said the justice. “Do you like cats, Mr. Carl?”

“Not especially.”

“You’re a dog person then.”

“I prefer fish. With a beurre blanc and a glass of Chablis.”

He glanced up at me in disapproval and then back to his cat. “I like cats. I like their softness, their independence. Their discretion. I like that they don’t crap all over the place. Shall we now discuss the weather, or maybe sports? Do you want to discuss baseball, Mr. Carl?”

“Let’s assume that the formalities have been completed,” I said.

“Grand.” He turned his attention from the cat and stared at me for a long moment. “On the phone you mentioned Tommy Greeley.”

“Yes,” I said. “Right. I did. I’m trying to learn what I can about what happened to him twenty years ago. I was told that you were his closest friend in both college and law school.”

“We were friends, yes.”

“Close friends?”

“For a time. We were on the fencing team together. But eventually we drifted apart. We had different interests.”

“Such as?”

“I’m curious from where this interest in Tommy Greeley arrives. Tell me, Miss Blue, why does your employer care about ancient history?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” said Kimberly.

“I have time. I like stories.”

He scratched the cat’s neck for a long moment and then pushed it off his lap. The cat jumped down and stalked back to the divan. The justice arched his hands on the desk, leaned forward.

“No story, Miss Blue? What a shame. I took the liberty of looking you up in Martindale-Hubble, Mr. Carl. And I asked around. I hope you don’t mind. It’s not often I get a query about Tommy Greeley. You do criminal work, isn’t that right?”

“Primarily.”

“And you have no obvious political affiliations.”

“Not anymore. I used to take it more seriously but then I stopped seeing the humor in the jokes that kept getting elected.”

“Including me?”

“I wouldn’t presume-”

“But you just did. So, if this isn’t a cause of the heart, then you are a hired gun, isn’t that right, Mr. Carl?”

“That’s what a lawyer is, Mr. Justice.”

“And so who has done the hiring? Which organization has asked you to dig into my past.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, let’s treat it like a game. Let me guess. Is it the ACLU? Or is it perhaps the AFL-CIO? Or maybe the NAACP? What about the ADL? That might be up your alley. Or the AARP? Greenpeace? The Sierra Club? Have you gone to work for the UFW or the Teamsters? Public Citizen? Common Cause? Corporate Watch? The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force? Americans United for Affirmative Action? Or maybe the harridans at NOW? Is that it, Miss Blue, are you an aspiring Gloria Steinem? Which of the instruments of the left have hired you as their Torquemada, Mr. Carl?”

“I think you have a wrong-”

“Isn’t it a little unseemly to wallow in the mire of the distant past in order to scuttle a nomination while the nine Justices in Washington are still hale and hearty?”

“I have no intention of-”

“You should be made aware, Mr. Carl, that I will not sit idly by while you attempt to ruin my reputation. I am not without means. The great right wing conspiracy almost took down a president. Think of what it can do to a milquetoast like you.”

“You are under a misapprehension, Mr. Justice.”

He tilted his head, surprised, I think, at the amusement that I let twist the edges of my mouth. “Then educate me, Mr. Carl.”

“This might shock you, Mr. Justice, but I don’t give a whit about your chances to rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m like the rest of America, more concerned with my own bowel movements than the lofty progress of your career. But I had hoped you’d be able to tell me about Tommy Greeley’s college life, his other friends, his girlfriend. I had hoped you’d be able to help me figure out what happened to him in the end. In fact, being a friend, I expected you’d be anxious to help. But we come here in good faith and suddenly you give us the third degree and start laying on threats. Now is that polite, Mr. Justice?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know who set up Tommy Greeley’s murder?”

“We don’t know Tommy was murdered,” said the justice. “He only disappeared. He might have run away.”

“He was murdered.”

“Have they found his body?”

“No.”

“Then how are you so sure?”

“One of the killers told me.”

“Jesus, God. Who?”

“He’s dead also, Mr. Justice, his throat slashed and his body dumped beside a shipping container on one of the piers along the riverfront.”

The justice’s face tightened and grew more lopsided. “When was this?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“The police don’t yet know. It could be anything. But twenty years ago he had been hired to beat up Tommy Greeley. He got carried away. That’s why Tommy disappeared. The man with the slit throat was a client of mine; I’m now representing his mother in a wrongful death action. To that end, I’m trying to learn who hired him to beat up your friend Tommy Greeley in the first place.”

The justice stood from his desk, placed his arms behind his back, and strolled around me toward the shelves above the divan. He reached for the fencing trophy, held it with one hand as he tested the tip of the statuette’s foil with his thumb.

“Do you remember a nominee to the court named Douglas Ginsburg,” he said. “A stellar judge, nominated by Reagan. Reports came out that, while a professor at Harvard, he was at parties where marihuana was smoked. Can you imagine parties at Harvard where marihuana wasn’t smoked in those days? Still, it was enough to scuttle his nomination.”

“And that’s the danger for you represented by Tommy Greeley?”

“He was my friend. He was a drug dealer. It won’t take much for the Neanderthals on the left, sitting back stoned on their couches, to make their insinuations.”

Even as he said it I thought of an organization the justice missed in his litany of opponents, TPAC, the Telushkin Political Action Committee, membership one. I could see him now, Jeffrey Telushkin, sitting on his chair, clapping his hands with glee as I sat here asking Jackson Straczynski about his former friend, now dead, who might be used to sully his reputation and sink his chance for the big seat. The image turned my stomach.

“I really am not here to hurt you or your chances, Mr. Justice. I just want to learn what you can tell me about Tommy.”

“I entered college in the seventies,” he said, without the venom his voice had carried before. “Drugs were everywhere, at every party, in every dormitory hallway. It was impossible to avoid, and many had no desire to avoid it. Tommy Greeley was one of those. We both went out for the fencing team. I liked him from the first. He was smart, rebellious, entrepreneurial, an innovative young man and a brilliant fencer. We both started with the sport at Penn, were well behind the rest who had fenced in prep school, but Tommy was a natural. Other than fencing, I was interested in art, literature, culture. I was something of an aesthete. Dorian Gray. An embarrassment now, but the way it was. Tommy, other than fencing, was like the rest of my generation, interested only in getting high and getting laid. I told you we had divergent interests. That was where we diverged.”

“You didn’t use drugs at all?” said Kimberly.

“What’s next, Miss Blue, boxers or briefs? Let’s just say it is an improper question and leave it at that. I won’t answer it here, or in the Senate if I get the opportunity. But I will tell you this. I had a younger brother named Benjamin who lost his way. Speed turned him crazy, truly, and his craziness got him killed. I saw first hand with my brother a drug’s insidious power to destroy.”

“When did Tommy start selling?” I said.

“Early on. At first it was only marihuana, just enough to keep himself supplied. Then he fell into a crowd that was selling more and, with his entrepreneurial bent, he quickly took it over. He teamed up with a man, short and thick with a scarred face – Prod I think his name was, Cooper Prod – and together they began selling far beyond the confines of the university. This was now his junior year or so. I met my wife at about the same time, fell deeply in love, moved off campus to live with her. Eventually, even before I graduated, we married. But Tommy had found something perfectly suited to his talents. And even as he ran his enterprise, he still received excellent grades, enough to get him into law school. Later, during law school, I heard he had moved up to cocaine. Less product, more profit. There were even a few law students who had gone in with him. But by then I had pretty much cut him out of my life, for understandable reasons. Occasionally we would have dinner, the four of us, talk about law school, our futures. But he never mentioned his business and I never let him. He knew what was happening to my brother, knew how I felt about it. That was it, the extent of our relationship.”

“You said the four of us.”

“My wife and I. Tommy and his girlfriend, Sylvia. Sylvia Steinberg.”

“Was Tommy seeing anyone other than this Sylvia?”

“Why?”

“The police report on the missing persons complaint filed by Mrs. Greeley seemed to indicate that he and Ms. Steinberg had broken up.”

“All I knew for certain was Sylvia. But it was a difficult time. There was an FBI investigation, there were indictments. It was a huge scandal at the law school. The people he was working with, they all went to jail. When he disappeared we figured he had run away from everything.”

“Do you have any idea why anyone might have wanted Tommy hurt or killed?”

He put the fencing trophy back on the shelf but didn’t turn around to face us. And as he spoke the following words, his sharp voice grew sharper and his tall elegant frame seemed to contract upon itself, to deform itself, to hunch itself into a taut knot.

“The truth is, he was dealing with dangerous people, Mr. Carl. Maybe he didn’t know how dangerous. He was greedy, he always wanted more. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his poison, he had a beautiful girlfriend, he had the whole world at his feet, but it wasn’t enough. Tommy Greeley was hungry, ravenous, he wanted everything he could lay his grasping little hands upon and finally he took too much and paid the price.”

“Too much of what?” I said.

But before he could answer the door burst open and a green-eyed woman stepped into the office, stuck out her hip, flung her arms up to the sky like a showgirl jumping out of a cake. She was tall and slim, energetic, she was dressed like a gypsy with hoop earrings and a bandanna over her hair. Red gloves came down to her elbows, her frilly skirt came down to her ankles. In one raised hand was a bottle of champagne, in the other were two champagne flutes.

“Darling,” she said. “I have wondrous news. We simply must celebrate.”

I recognized her. She was the woman with the shy smile whose picture was in the slate frame, older now by a couple decades, but still her smile was bright, her face was all glittering angles, her eyes so glowed with vivacity and spirit it was as if she vibrated with some fierce energy. The proprietary way she stood in the doorway, the way she perfectly matched the exotic decor, stated without a doubt that she was the justice’s wife. But as he turned to her, still in that strange hunched posture, as he turned to gaze, startled, at his wife, his face held not the arrogance it had showed to us, or the bored, overfamiliar visage of the long married. No, as if one of the masks on his shelf had been pulled from his features to show the reality behind, his face was seething with emotion. There was passion, there was fascination and fear and disgust. And most of all there was love, pure and painful, innocent and imprisoning, a love that was strangely sad, perversely lonely, and absolutely abject.

His expression recovered quickly, the mask was replaced, the swirl of emotions that had flooded his features for a brief second disappeared as suddenly as it had come. And it was only later that I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, in the powerful stream of emotions that hunched the justice’s posture and distorted his features, there lay not just a glimpse into the painful depths of a troubled marriage but also the seeds of a motive that might have cost Tommy Greeley and, yes, Joey Parma their lives.