Personal injuries

MARCH
CHAPTER 15

"There are dead men," said Robbie Feaver, "who are not as dumb as Barnett Skolnick. You stand before the bench, you think, God, how did this ox ever pass the bar exam? Then you realize he didn't. Knuckles, his brother, fixed it."

Knuckles, long gone now, was said to have fixed much more in his time than the bar exam. An associate of Toots Nuccio, he drew on the same wellsprings of influence, political clout enhanced by substantial mob ties. His nickname referred to his right hand, misshapen as the result of an infamous racial brawl at Trappers Field in the 1940s. He had been a downtown party committeeman, and the proprietor of a vast insurance agency that enjoyed uncanny success in underwriting municipal agencies.

"As the story goes," Robbie told us, "Knuckles had to put Barney on the bench because he was too dim to practice. The guy can't zip his fly without an instruction book. These days, at least, he looks like a judge. Beautiful head of white hair. But he just sort of sits there with this sweet, terrified expression. `Gosh, I like you all, please don't ask me any hard questions.' Rules of evidence? This schmo's been on the bench twenty-six years and he couldn't guess what hearsay is if you gave him multiple-choice. God only knows what Brendan owed Knuckles. Skolnick's been here since Brendan became Presiding Judge."

It was late afternoon. The sun was dying with style, looking, in its descent, as if it might burn a hole in the river. We sat with pretzels and soft drinks in the conference room while Robbie went on. By now all of the UCAs would make it a point to crowd into the room for Robbie's debriefings, extended adventures, as they were, in the oral tradition. With his shirtsleeves rolled and his hands flowing through the air, Robbie worked his audience with care, aiming some gesture of connection-a deft smile, a decisive nod-at every person. Watching, I often thought about how magical he must have been before a jury.

"For all of it, it's still hard to hate Barney. I know you'll never believe this, Stan, but he's a sweet guy. Doesn't want to hurt a soul. Honest to God, he takes the money because his big brother told him to. They even tell a story about Skolnick, Lord knows if it's true, but it's a great tale. About twenty years ago, he's sitting in Divorce, not long after he first came on the bench. I can't remember who the lawyers were, two of the gods over there, guys who can talk to the judges. Well, apparently Skolnick's getting ready to start trial, and all the sudden he calls the attorneys back into chambers, just them, and he gets the two into the far corner and in this iddy-biddy little voice he says, `Just so you know, the dough is even, so I gotta decide this straight."'

According to Robbie, Skolnick had been bagged for several years by his court reporter, a Hasidic Jew by the name of Pincus Lebovic. Blue-eyed and foxy-looking behind the dense brown growth of his beard and pais, Pincus in his dark, outdated suits presided over the courtroom in a style bordering on tyrannical. He was cold-blooded and peremptory. It was even said that, on occasion, Pincus would halt proceedings, purportedly to change the paper in his stenographic machine, but actually to take the judge back to chambers to give him directions or, even, a scolding. The recognized brains of the team, Pincus handled all arrangements with the lawyers who `talked' to the judge.

Then, last spring, Pincus's seventh child, his first son, was struck with encephalitis. Like a body on a bier, the boy floated toward the gates of death and lingered there for days. Pincus and his wife and their daughters sat beside the boy's hospital bed, singing to him, praying over the small, somnolent form, and begging the boy, whenever he could be roused, not to leave them. He did not. No one knew exactly what the terms were of the bargain Pincus had struck with the Almighty, but he was a changed person. He grew almost affable, and was unpleasant only when approached in his role as intermediary. He was now adamant in his refusal to take part in any further ugliness.

For some months there was, in effect, a corruption embargo in Skolnick's courtroom. Skolnick was far too kindhearted to dismiss his court reporter and not quite certain anyway what Pincus, in his reformed state of godliness, might say when questioned about the reasons for his departure by the likes of Stew Dubinsky, who covered the courthouse for the Trib. For a few weeks, the judge succeeded in convincing his secretary, Eleanor McTierney, to handle the envelopes, but Eleanor's husband was a police lieutenant, whose scruples stretched no further than to live and let live. At sixty-eight, Skolnick might have simply gone without, but that would have meant cutting off Tuohey as well. As a result, Skolnick would have had to accept demotion to a less esteemed courtroom-Housing Court or, worse, the ultimate hellhole, Juvenile-the kind of ego blow that Barney, like most victims of justifiable self-doubt, would have found devastating. Thus, in desperation, Skolnick began dealing hand to hand with a few well-accepted insiders, Robbie among them.

Skolnick, at least, had the sense not to allow money to pass within the courthouse. Instead, he established a schmaltzy routine in which the briber-to-be left a message from `tomorrow's luncheon committee.' The next day, at 12:30 p.m. sharp, the attorney would take a position curbside, right in front of the Temple, possessed of a cash filled envelope and a vexed expression. Skolnick, in his Lincoln, would tool by and, noting a familiar face, pull over, inquiring if there was a problem. The lawyer would then impart a tale of automotive woe-car wouldn't start, had been towed, stolen, sideswiped-and Judge Skolnick would offer emergency transportation. Skolnick would then circle through the Center City, while the lawyer in the passenger seat stuffed the envelope into the breach between the red calfskin backrest and the front bench.

Robbie had done this once last September, not long before Stan and his companions from the IRS had arrived on the flagstone stoop of his home. Feaver was due for another visit with Skolnick now, in early March, because Skolnick had ruled in Robbie's favor only a day or two after the case reassigned from Judge Sullivan had arrived on his docket. In that matter, Hall v. Sentinel Repair, Skolnick had ruled that Robbie's client, a driver paralyzed when the brakes failed on his truck, was eligible to receive punitive damages from the repair service that had found the vehicle roadworthy. Unlike Malatesta, Skolnick had dealt with the matter summarily, issuing a brief written order. Bobbie would now tell the judge that the case had been settled favorably and would leave the envelope behind in appreciation.

Sennett was under increasing pressure from D.C. to justify the expense of the Project by scoring against one of the primary targets. Given that, and the fact that this would be Petros's first direct payoff to a judge, Sennett wanted it in Technicolor. The afternoon before Robbie was scheduled to see Skolnick, Klecker visited the section reserved for judges' cars on the first floor of the Temple parking garage, the same building where Robbie and Walter had met. With local agents covering Alf from all sides, he drove an ice pick through three of Judge Skolnick's tires. When Skolnick trudged out of the courthouse for the day, in an old rabbit hat and a lumpy muffler knitted by his granddaughter, the agents had him under surveillance. They radioed Alf, and just as Skolnick reached the lamed automobile, Klecker came ripping down the concrete ramp in a tow truck with a huge smoking engine. He jumped on the brake and leaped from the vehicle in a greasy jumpsuit and a seed cap. Alf had a bridge, a memento of his years as a high school ice hockey player in Minnesota, and he had removed his front teeth as part of his disguise. The agents said that when he talked he was pretty much a dead ringer for Sylvester, the puddy-tat.

"Got you too?" asked Alf.

"Hah?" replied Skolnick. He was still shaking his head in embittered wonderment at the sight of the flats.

Alf related that miscreant youths had apparently gone through the parking garage popping tires on a number of cars. He offered to tow Skolnick's Lincoln. Given the hour, he could not return it that night, but he promised to drive the car back to the judge's house by eight the next morning. He'd give Skolnick a great price on tires and would even reduce the towing fee, assuming the judge wouldn't forget Alf next time he needed to talk to somebody with a little pull in the courthouse when one of his guys got in a scrape on a repo.

When the vehicle was returned to Skolnick, it was somewhat enhanced. As promised, it had three fresh Dunlop X80s. It also sported a new rearview mirror, a one-way, into which a fiber-optic lens and a mike had been inserted. The input devices were wired to a 2.4 GHz cordless sound camera resting on the ribs of the auto's ceiling. Leads ran down from the roof, through the hollow temple beside the windshield, to an existing junction box under the hood, so that the car's battery powered the camera.

"Fry the guy with his own juice." Alf beamed at his achievements. He described the apparatus to Robbie when we met at McManis's about eleven-thirty on the morning of March 5 to prepare for the encounter with Skolnick. The camera, which was turned on and off by remote, operated much like a cordless phone. It emitted a black-and-white video signal over four channels. Along with the audio output, the impulse could be picked up from a surveillance van as far away as four hundred feet. The transmission was admittedly subject to occasional interference, and as a backup, Robbie was also wired with the recording component of the FoxBlte. It was Velcroed today to the small of his back in order to avoid any revealing bulges at the thigh when Feaver sat with the judge on the lipstick-red leather seat of the Lincoln.

Along with Sennett and McManis, I had my reserved spot in the surveillance van. We circled in front of the Temple, waiting for Skolnick to pick up Feaver. Amid the thick electrical odors, Klecker crawled around on the van floor in a snake pit of cables. A small monitor with a twelveinch screen and a VCR had been added atop the pyramid of equipment that had been there the day Robbie paid off Walter.

"We're going," Joe Amari called from the front, meaning that Skolnick had arrived and Robbie was on board. Joe's responsibility on Petros was surveillance. Sennett had allowed him to put together a select group of local agents from the Kindle County Division to help. As he weaved through the traffic, he made hand signals to the other cars. He wore a radio headset with a mike, which dented his smooth hairdo, but Klecker wanted him to stay off the air, if possible, to avoid disrupting the camera's signal, the same reason he'd removed the broadcasting component from the FoxBlte.

For the moment, Joe's assignment was to pull close enough to Skolnick that the camera could be activated by way of the remote Klecker held. Although the camera functioned from some distance, the infrared remote that controlled it worked only within thirty feet. It was plain from the tense instructions Stan issued to both Alf and Joe that he'd had some trouble convincing Moira Winchell, Chief Judge of the Federal District Court, to sign the warrant authorizing installation of the camera. The nature of the intrusion had seemingly mortified her, inasmuch as Moira was both a judge and a car owner. Stan had reminded the agents that Judge Winchell had directed that the camera could be turned on only when Feaver was seen with Skolnick in the auto.

"Hit it," Amari yelled out now. The small black-andwhite monitor sprang to life, and we all canted forward in anticipation, while Klecker activated the VCR.

The bribery of judges is eternal. At common law, before there were statutes and codes, the word `bribe' meant only this: a benefit conferred to influence a judge. It began as soon as King John signed Magna Carta and set up the courts. Probably before. Probably when Adam tried to reason with God about Eve, the first man offered Him something on the side. What we were there to see held the fierce primal attraction of any elemental wrong.

The initial picture was unfocused, a Hadean scene in which Robbie and Skolnick were reduced to images as indistinct as smoke. Klecker called directions to Amari, while Alf frantically squeezed buttons on the tiny remote. As al ways, the picture got worse before it got better, and then Skolnick detoured through Lower River, a covered roadway where the light was poor. But when he emerged, a relatively crisp image appeared, Feaver and Skolnick each slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens. If we fell farther behind, the digital imagery became weirdly aligned, so that little pieces of Robbie and Skolnick slid off the screen. But when Amari was able to stay within seven or eight car lengths, there was good reception.

The two men started out with warm greetings and ranged companionably over a number of topics. At McManis's instruction, Robbie also complained about having had his tires punctured yesterday in the courthouse garage, and he and Skolnick bemoaned their shared misfortune and the deterioration of society.

"These kids! What momzerim," said Skolnick and held up a thick finger. "They're almost as bad as we were!" He laughed, very much the genial, bovine creature Robbie had described. He was portly and florid, with a large broad nose, and that majestic spume of pure white hair cresting in a high old-fashioned pompadour. Skolnick asked after Mort, whose father he apparently knew from some shared affiliation with a Jewish organization, and then, more gently, about Robbie's wife.

"Ay, Robbie," he said after Feaver finished his matterof-fact rundown on the crushing grip of the disease. "My heart goes out. Truly. You've been a rock for this girl."

"Not me, Judge. She's the one who's amazing. I look in her eyes every night and it's solid courage." Robbie's voice curled around the edges, and Skolnick, while driving-and in the very center of the broadcast image-briefly touched Feaver's hand. Watching across from me, Sennett scowled, apparently contemplating the effect of Skolnick's tenderness on a jury.

Shaking off despair, Robbie reached into his briefcase and circumspectly removed the envelope the agents had prepared. Knowing the sight line of the camera in advance, he held the package against his chest so it was fully visible. Then with the stylized rigmarole these scenes apparently required, he let the envelope slip from his fingers to the seat and, not quite on camera, jammed it into the crevice under the backrest. Skolnick, who was supposed to remain blind to these maneuvers in order to have deniability later, predictably forgot his role. At one point he actually turned from the road to watch Feaver, although he was wise enough to avoid any direct comment.

"So, Robbie, what's doing?" he asked neutrally. "I haven't seen you in a while. I was surprised to see you called."

"New case, Judge," he answered, and described the matter which Kosic had transferred from Malatesta. Stan insisted Robbie had to ask for a favor now on that matter. If Robbie simply delivered a payoff on the first case, the one concerning the truck driver that had passed to Skolnick from Gillian Sullivan, a defense lawyer might attempt to characterize the payment as akin to a gift, inasmuch as Robbie had never spoken to Skolnick about the trucker's lawsuit. Thus, Stan wanted to make sure that money changing hands was linked to a request for favorable action, albeit on another matter. Robbie told the story of the painter with cancer movingly. But he made it plain he was hoping to bamboozle his opponent.

"See, Judge, I gotta get a stay of discovery. The defense, this lump McManis, they've got no idea about the c.a., the cancer? If we start with deps and medical records, then boom bang bing, they find out. After that, the lostwages component in my case? Out the window. `Sorry for your disability, but you're gonna be dead anyway.' So I need the stay, while I try to hondle with McManis. And the worst part, Judge, this poor bird's a widower. So if I don't bring home the bacon, we got three kids with no mother, no father, and not even a pot to pee in."

"Oy vay," said Skolnick. "How old, the kinder?"

"The oldest is eight," said Robbie.

"tray iz mir," said Skolnick.

Sennett winced again at the last part. Robbie was making this up as he went, lying with his customary eclat, but by painting a bleak picture of the consequences to the family, Robbie was lending an element of humane justification to the misconduct he was requesting. Skolnick, in fact, was quick to explain that from his perspective the whole matter was rather routine.

"In my courtroom, Robbie, you know how it is, somebody makes a motion to dismiss, a motion for summary judgment, something that can dispose of the whole case, I stay discovery. Everybody else, these days, they want litigation to be like an express train. Who cares what it costs, so long as it moves fast? But I stay discovery. That's my practice for twenty-six years. So you make a motion, say, for judgment on the pleadings, I stay discovery. That's how it is. Nu?" Skolnick shrugged as if it was all quite beyond his control. "Now you want help with your judgment on the pleadings? Don't talk to me. My angina will act up." The judge quivered with laughter. A judgment on the pleadings would have declared victory for Robbie on the sole basis of his complaint and McManis's answer, something that rarely occurred. Across from me, Sennett's frown had deepened, as the judge had cheerfully outlined the bounds of propriety. Skolnick was suggesting he wouldn't really do anything wrong.

"I hope that's not why you're monkeying with the seat." Skolnick added. "Cause of this new case."

Robbie was briefly drawn up short by the unexpected reference to the money. All of us were.

"No, Judge. That's Hall. We got a great result after you stuffed them on their motion to strike my claim for punitives. I mean, that's why I'm here." In shadowy terms, Bobbie reminded Skolnick of the first case about the injured truck driver whose brakes had failed. Skolnick searched his memory, his eyes thick with the effort. He concluded with a robust shake of his head.

"Neh, that's Gillian, Robbie. She'd drawn the order when I got the case. We just filed it. You oughta see her, poor thing." He gossiped sympathetically about Judge Sullivan's battle with drink. Adroitly, Robbie promised Skolnick that he'd visit Sullivan, too, but Skolnick continued vigorously revolving his head. "Neh," he said again, "take that there"-he dared to motion in the direction of the envelope-"take it home."

"Oh fuck!" Sennett shouted. His scream shot through the van. Up front, Amari pounded the brake and jerked around to see what was wrong. Stan waved him ahead, but it was too late. We'd missed the next light. As Robbie and Skolnick cruised on, we watched the small screen waver and flicker and finally dissolve to snow. Then the sound began to break up, too, sizzling into static. Kiecker spun the dials futilely as Sennett cursed, his hands and face twisted in anguish.

By the time Amari raced back into range, Robbie and Skolnick's business was completed. There was no further reference to the envelope. Until he dropped Robbie off on a corner near the LeSueur, Skolnick instead regaled Bobbie with a series of Jewish jokes. The best was about Yankel the farmer, who, years ago in the old country, went to buy a dairy cow. Two were for sale. One, the seller explained, was from Pinsk and would breed an entire herd; it cost one hundred rubles. The other, from Minsk, cost ten rubles but could be expected to bear only one calf. If anything, the cheaper Minsk cow looked better to Yankel than the Pinsk cow and Yankel decided to save his money. He bred the Minsk cow successfully once, but subsequently she kicked and bucked savagely whenever a bull tried to mount her. Baffled, Yankel went to consult the shtetl's wise rabbi, who had something to offer in almost any situation.

`This cow,' asked the rabbi, 'is it by any chance from Minsk?'

Yankel was astounded at the rabbi's perspicacity. How did he know? The rabbi stroked his beard at length.

'My wife,' he said, `is from Minsk.'

Alf couldn't restrain his laughter, but he popped a hand over his mouth in deference to Sennett. On his little folddown seat, Stan was brittle with disappointment and rage. After Robbie had disembarked from Skolnick's red Lincoln, Stan pointed at McManis and demanded to know how the hell Joe could have just stopped. No one was willing even to look in Stan's direction. Sennett let his eyes close in their bruised-looking orbits and suddenly held up a hand which settled on his own chest.

"My fault," he said. "All my fault." He repeated that several more times. After close to thirty years, I knew Stan's demands on others were second to what he required of himself. It would take him days to recover from screwing up. Frozen on the narrow seat, Sennett was what he became most rarely and least wished to be-someone for whom everybody felt sorry.

Because Feaver was going to return to the LeSueur Building first, Evon had been assigned to await him in McManis's office so she could turn off the FoxBlte. She sat there, knocking her thumbnail against her teeth, irritated by the suspense, until Shirley Nagle, the undercover agent who posed as the office receptionist, put a call in to the conference room from Jim. He was on the secure phone in the van and explained what had gone wrong. Amari had lagged behind Skolnick in the traffic, taking his time before getting close enough to turn off the camera, hoping that in the interval they might see Skolnick retrieve the envelope. But that hadn't happened, suggesting-at least to a defense lawyer-that the money was no longer there.

"Don't let Feaver know what's wrong," McManis instructed her. "But before you deactivate, you have to get him to describe in detail what went on. Then frisk him carefully. If he says Skolnick took the money, that'll be our only corroboration."

Feaver sailed into the conference room a few moments later. When Evon asked how it, had gone, he raised both thumbs in his cabretta gloves, but signaled toward his back, where the recorder was still rolling. One of the protocols Feaver attempted to follow with mixed success was to avoid idle chatter while wired. Even the most innocuous remark could come back to bite him on cross-examination.

"Today we need to talk." Evon promised to explain later.

Robbie said he had simply waved off Skolnick's suggestion to take back the money. There had been a few quarreling gestures between them, but in time Skolnick had succumbed with an elaborate shrug.

She then asked him to stand. "I have to frisk you."

His eyes narrowed with an odd light, veering between disbelief and lechery, but he came to his feet with his arms thrown wide. All yours.

She had frisked men before, of course. Regs didn't favor it. But when you were first to the subject on an arrest, you didn't twiddle your thumbs waiting to see if he'd pull a six-inch switchblade. But she'd never frisked someone she knew. It was strange. As when they'd wrestled, he seemed larger and more solid than she imagined. She squeezed her way up his pants legs, turned out his pockets, and passed as quickly as she could over the crotch. She had a sudden fear he'd try something awful, hold her hand there or boost his hips forward. At that moment, she realized she should have asked Shirley to be here. But Robbie did not react. He had enough stage sense to realize how bad he could make both of them sound on the recording. She was the one who was tense. She turned him around and repeated the procedure from behind. At the end, she searched his briefcase and his overcoat, then described all her findings, before grabbing the remote and turning off the FoxBlte.

"Was it as good for you as it was for me?" he asked then.

"Listen, buster, I nearly said I found absolutely nothing in this boy's trousers."

He clutched his heart but he was smiling. The insinuations, the joking. She knew he felt he had her going his way.

He had figured out by now that the camera had not worked. McManis had asked her to listen immediately to what the FoxBlte had captured and to let them know in the van. Robbie pulled the mike back through his buttonhole and removed his shirt, and happily unhitched the unit. His back was sore from sitting against it. Klecker by then had left instructions with Shirley about how to load the recording magazines in the computer. Shirley, a curlyheaded woman in her late forties, helped, and the three of them listened together. At the critical point, as Feaver and the judge had exchanged their dueling gestures about the envelope, there were a few words-both of them, in fact, said "Come on"-but nothing clearly indicated what had become of the money. The only direct proof that Skolnick had accepted would be Robbie's word. From the start, Sennett had known that an admitted felon against a judge was a losing contest before most juries.

"Figures," said McManis, when Evon called him. "Everything that can go wrong will." He asked to speak to Bobbie so he could tell him he'd done a great job.

Afterwards, Feaver, who'd draped his shirt unbuttoned around himself, took it off again and asked for Evon's help removing the FoxBIte harness. It had been secured with yards of tape circling his abdomen.

"Pull the tape fast," he told her. "It's going to hurt like a bastard." He was right about that. Unruly black hair stretched densely over his upper body, gathering to the thickness of a pelt across his chest and down the medial line of his stomach. He looked like a lemur or something else you might want to pet. Klecker had suggested shaving, but McManis said no, it could lead to too many questions at the haberdasher's, or the doctor's office, or the locker room of the health club where Robbie still appeared occasionally on weekends.

"I lived my life pulling off adhesive tape," she told him. She cut through it with scissors, then peeled back the ends, making an opening right over his hipbones where the flesh became soft. She was standing inches from him, close enough to take in all his cosmetic scents and his body heat and his size, the coarse feel of all that hair on his upper body. Beautiful people-women and men-knew it. Pride, a sense of attention, and confidence in his effect radiated off Robbie Feaver at all times. With him half-unclothed, it was as if some lead vest containing that emanation had been removed.

"Ready?" she asked.

He put his hands on her shoulders to brace himself. "Tell me you're not going to enjoy this."

"Mommy brought me up not to lie. Hold tight." She squared her knees against his for leverage. There was a pulse of something at that moment. Perhaps he shuddered, or his grip on her shoulders tightened. It lasted only a second and she avoided his eye. Then she pulled off the front layers with a single heave, amazed by the vigor, the sheer wildness of the laughter that raced through her as he emitted a half-stifled outcry of pain.