Courting Death Page 13

  “So, no fifteen-year-old girls?”

  “Just me acting like one …”

  They both had more questions, and each story led them deeper into each other’s lives. It took them hours to make their way back to the house, and when they finally approached it, they found the party going full force on the bottom deck.

  They were greeted by a chorus of wolf whistles and cat calls from the tipsy lawyers. Suzanne had fended off Grover’s advances on the beer run by bragging about her boyfriend, and Grover, taking a mild revenge, had passed this on to Phil, April, and Glenn, who spontaneously erupted with the sort of razzing heard from sixth graders seeing two of their classmates emerge together from the broom closet.

  Even in the dark, Arthur could see Suzanne redden, but he accepted the hooting graciously and strode up the steps, waving to the crowd like a baseball player called out of the dugout after hitting a game-winning home run. As they sat down, Arthur ordered Grover to get them a couple of glasses of wine. He complied graciously and served them with a respectful bow.

  The company was pleasant, and they lingered outside until four a.m., when April offered to treat everyone to an early breakfast at the Waffle House. Only Glenn accepted the invitation, and the rest slipped off to bed. Arthur followed Suzanne up the interior stairway with his hands on the small of her back, luxuriating in the swish and sway of her hips as she climbed. She sent him to his room while she went to check on Maria.

  He stripped to his boxers and lay down exhausted, head propped up on two pillows, window cracked just enough to fill the room with the gentle pounding of the surf. Before long, he heard the click of the door knob and turned to see Suzanne in a new camisole, crawling panther-like across his bed. Luckily, the lingerie stayed mostly intact, because Maria woke them up three hours later confused to find her mommy sleeping back-to-back with Mr. Hughes in his bed. While he played possum, Suzanne yawned and stretched as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “Goodness, what am I doing here?” she queried convincingly. “Let’s go downstairs and make some pancakes, little girl.”

  He didn’t roll over until he heard the door close behind them. He marveled at Suzanne’s finessing of Maria, and as the sun streamed through the curtains, he wondered whether they could so smoothly negotiate the future. During their walk, he had promised Suzanne that he would do some interviewing in Atlanta and Clarkeston, promises he fully intended to keep, but he knew that no job could keep him in Georgia. The call of Washington and the opportunity to right big wrongs was simply too powerful. He made the promise to her in good faith, but with the sort of misgivings a diaphragm-toting Roman Catholic has when she promises her priest to be open to the possibility of children blessing her marriage.

  XVI.

  WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

  Melanie digested Phil’s summary of Thanksgiving on the beach with interest. Post-turkey chest pains had put her father in the hospital over the holiday weekend and scuttled the proposed trip to Florida. As they sat in the library on Monday morning, she complimented Phil on his detective work and bemoaned her inability to ask April follow-up questions about Carolyn Bastaigne.

  “Just call her,” he suggested.

  “Wouldn’t that be kind of weird?”

  “Nah, she’s really nice, and she thinks the accident is as suspicious as you do.” He laughed and then put his pinky to his mouth and his thumb to his ear. “Hello, could I speak to Ms. Marple? This is Nancy Drew.”

  “Shut up!”

  “‘I’m working on The Case of the Clumsy Clerk.”

  “Careful, or you’ll be working on The Case of the Neutered Smart-Ass.” She threw a Post-it pad at him. “Maybe I will call her. There might be something going on if she’s suspicious too.”

  Melanie worked the rest of the day on a bench memo in a tedious search and seizure case. Drug cases not only make bad law, she decided, but dull reading too. She worked until late afternoon, fighting the urge to call April. When she finally gave in, it was 2:30 p.m. in Denver, a good time to find a lawyer in her office.

  “I’m sorry you never made it down to the beach,” April said cheerfully after her assistant connected her. “It was nice to meet Phil, though. What a sweetheart!”

  “He really is, and he said it would be okay to call you about Carolyn Bastaigne. I know it sounds stupid, but I’m really curious about how she died.”

  “It was pretty strange.”

  She paused for a moment, and Melanie reached over for a pad of legal paper and a pen.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I’m not really sure,” Melanie replied. “One new bit that Phil mentioned was this connection to Judge Meyers’ chambers. I really haven’t heard much about him.”

  “He was a district court judge, totally unreconstructed southern conservative, but very well-connected politically, Clarkeston Country Club and all that jazz. The Judge must have reversed him in civil rights cases about a dozen times over the years.”

  Melanie could hear the sound of a cigarette being lit and waited until April took a deep drag.

  “What was really galling to Meyers,” April continued, “was when the Judge transformed from pariah to hero. Meyers was the darling of the local social scene in the fifties and sixties. By the late seventies, he was an anachronism. That was probably hard for him to take.”

  “You don’t think he might have …”

  April laughed so loud that Melanie had to push the receiver from her ear. “No way. He was a harmless old twit. It’s amazing how nice a hard-core racist can be in person. Anyway, he was very frail. I can’t see him pushing Carolyn down the stairs with his walker.”

  “What about this friend she had in Myers’s chambers?”

  “Jennifer Huffman? She’s at Cravath in New York, where Carolyn was going to go.” April paused for a moment. “They were buddies, but I never understood why. Carolyn was loud and obnoxious and lazier than a depressed sloth. Jennifer was real bright and energetic. They were pretty much Mutt and Jeff. Quite frankly, I preferred Jennifer.”

  “Did you ever suspect her of anything?”

  “No, but I never really suspected anybody of anything. Carolyn probably just tripped. I don’t know why anybody would want to do her any harm. You could call Jennifer, if you’re really desperate.” She gave an audible exhalation of disgust. “The two of them were pretty obnoxious together, like they were still in middle school or something, whispering and note passing … It was less than a perfect year, I have to say.”

  “Well, thanks anyway. I’m really sorry we didn’t get to meet last week.”

  “Me too! Maybe I’ll see you next time.”

  Melanie hung up and wondered what to do next. She was at a dead end. Ms. Bastaigne had not called back, so the threat to the Judge’s reputation seemed remote, and her wild fantasy of uncovering a murder and becoming a chambers legend seemed more and more delusional. She decided to pass along April’s greeting to Phil and get back to work.

  Melanie peeked in the library and found him working quietly across the conference table from Arthur.

  “April says hello. She’s says you’re a ‘real sweetie.’”

  Phil blushed. He really was a sweetie.

  “Well, did you two solve the great mystery?” Phil asked.

  “What mystery?” Arthur reached for his mug of coffee and looked up at the two amateur detectives.

  “The Case of the Clumsy Clerk.” Phil smiled at Melanie.

  “Are you guys still talking about that?”

  “I’m just Melanie’s sounding board. She’s been doing all the sleuthing.”

  “Hey! You interrogated April in Florida.”

  “Fair enough,” he said as he grabbed his own coffee. “But it’s kinda fun. I don’t think she was murdered, but what happened is still pretty odd.”

  “I suppose.” Arthur looked down at the file he was reading. “It’s got to be more fun working on fake murder than the real thing.”

  Melanie thou
ght he was going to say more, but Phil interrupted. “I believe it. The Gottlieb case wasn’t much of a whodunit, was it?”

  “Nope. No mystery there.” Arthur traced a pattern with his pencil on the scared surface of the conference table. “It’s strange, though. You write on a piece of paper saying someone should die, then you read about it in the newspaper the next day. You look over your shoulder and you realize that no one’s going to punish you for it. In fact, there’s people on television cheering.”

  Introspection quite became Arthur, Melanie thought.

  “Arthur?” Phil said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You need a beer.”

  Melanie nodded enthusiastically, and she saw Arthur smile.

  * * *

  Arthur wanted to walk alone to the Wild Boar, so he pleaded a fictional errand and left before the others had finished work. Hands in his pockets, he strolled slowly past the storefronts on Court Street, turned left down College Avenue, then crossed the river onto the grounds of Clarkeston College. At the top of the bluff marking the edge of the campus, the entrance road forked to divert traffic around its east and west perimeters. Rather than follow one of the branches, he crossed the road and entered the north quadrangle of the college through an enormous wrought iron gate. The Wild Boar lay on the far side of the college, where the split road reconnected.

  The main quad exposed the architectural impoverishment of Arthur’s undergraduate years at a Midwestern school consisting of mismatched concrete buildings squatting uncomfortably on former cornfields. The north part of Clarkeston College was encompassed by a harmonious ring of red brick, ivy-covered buildings sheltering a generous expanse of tree-lined sidewalks and a thick, carefully manicured lawn. Arched porticos connected the buildings, enabling students to make a complete circuit during bad weather without getting wet.

  Arthur wandered along a shaded sidewalk, sneaking the occasional peek into the first-floor classrooms and offices. The quad was deserted except for some students reading on the concrete benches that lined the recessed areas of the cloister. Squirrels traveled overhead, leaping from branch to branch, from one side of the quad to the other without touching the ground. Oaks predominated, but dogwoods and redbuds had been planted alongside the buildings and a huge cedar of Lebanon guarded the pathway alongside the Music Building portico that led to the next quadrangle.

  As he followed the sidewalk past the cedar, he turned to take one last look at the library and was surprised to hear the pure focused sound of women’s voices coming from inside the music building. At least a dozen sopranos sang in unison, holding one clear sustained note on Lux … They were then joined by the altos, tenors, and basses divided beneath them, one measure behind, Lux aeterna luceat eis, luceat domine … Arthur knew the English text: Light eternal shine upon them Lord. The Fauré requiem mass was his mother’s favorite choral work. He had sung it twice in her large church choir in high school but had not heard it since.

  He was drawn through the open door of the building and sat down on a bench just outside the rehearsal room. The choir continued, voices in harmony singing the Latin mass for the dead, Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius, pius es. They repeated the line, swelling to an ecstatic cadence. As the singers rested, the accompanist continued as tears filled Arthur’s eyes.

  He squeezed them hard, recovering his composure until the voices swelled again, Requiem aeternam. Pause. Dona eis Domine. Pause. Et lux perpetua, a piercing plea for eternal light that resonated to the corners of his soul and transported him back to his childhood and the green cornfields swaying behind his house. For a moment in the Clarkeston College Music Building, he regained his innocence and sat breathless and longing, outside himself, filled completely with the raw spirit of life.

  He leaned his head back against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths, realizing just in time that rehearsal was now over and the choir had started to leave. He turned away, walked a couple of paces farther down the hall, and drank deeply at a stained ceramic water fountain.

  He was surprised at his own sentimentality. Weddings and dead kittens on the side of the road left him completely dry-eyed, but something inherently spiritual in good music could creep up on him when he least expected it, filling him with awe and driving out tears he had not known he had been collecting. He had been moved to his core, but whether what he heard was a secular or divine absolution or simply the foreknowledge of grief, he could not say. By the time he walked back down the hall, the last of the singers were filing out, and he regained his composure enough to stick his head in the door.

  A tall woman with a steel-gray bun pulled tightly back behind her head was shuffling papers behind the podium.

  “That was wonderful,” he called from the door.

  She turned and squinted, dark eyebrows furrowed, an indelicate face rendered more severe by her expression. “You’re not a tenor, are you?”

  “I’m a lawyer actually—not practicing, though. I’m working downtown for the Judge.” She doesn’t need to know that, he told himself, but he rushed on, “I was just walking past when I heard the Fauré so I wandered in.”

  She looked disappointed and went back to shuffling her papers.

  “When is the performance?”

  “We’ll be doing it two weeks from Friday in the main music building auditorium.” She paused and squinted again as she gathered up her load. “You certainly sound like a tenor.”

  “Yes, ma’am. My mom’s a choir director, and I help her out at Christmas and Easter, but I haven’t sung with a group since high school.” He turned and began to walk out of the rehearsal room.

  “You know,” her voice grabbed him from behind, “I sometimes let people from the community people sing with the college chorus.” She picked up her scores and walked toward him. “I’ve got so many holes in the tenor section right now that the second altos are singing the first tenor line half the time. If you’re interested in singing spring quarter, why don’t you set up an audition at the beginning of January?” She stuck out her hand for him to shake. “My name is Dorothy Henderson.”

  “I’d love to, but I don’t think that I’ll have the time.” He frowned slightly and strode into the late-summer afternoon. “Thank you anyway!”

  * * *

  By the following afternoon, Phil’s hangover had worn off, and he was starting work on a continuing class action suit that had first appeared in chambers three years earlier. Ms. Stillwater pointed him to an enormous box of documents stored in a corner of the photocopy room.

  “What are these?” he asked her. “Trial exhibits and stuff?”

  “No,” she said slowly, her voice carrying a hint of pity, “those are just the appellate pleadings that have been filed over the years. I’ll bet the trial materials take up a whole file room in the Atlanta District Court.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Don’t worry. This was Mr. Grover’s case last year, and he just read the old bench memos written on it. He said it was a lot easier than plowing through all the pleadings.”

  “Old bench memos? Do we have those?” Before the Judge heard the oral argument in any case, one of the clerks was assigned to write a memo summarizing the facts and law relevant to every issue presented by the parties. Phil’s own work had varied in length from five to thirty-five pages.

  “Of course! Didn’t I show them to you the first day?”

  Phil shook his head, and she marched him to the Judge’s office. She rapped hard once with the back of her knuckles and charged into the room before getting a response.

  “Goddamn it, Stillwater! What if I had been in the bathroom?” the Judge bellowed from behind his desk.

  “Well, if you’d shut the door when you’re in there, you won’t have to worry about it, would you! I’m showing Phillip where you keep the old bench memos.” She walked to the far side of the room to a small alcove lined with bookshelves. Every square inch was lined with small black binders crammed with yellowing memoranda. The date of the judic
ial term was printed neatly on a square of white paper taped to the spine. “They’re only indexed by year, so you’ll have flip through them to find the ones written about your case. Just go back three years and you should have them all.”

  “Thanks!” He grabbed the last three volumes off the shelf and carried them past the Judge’s glower into the library. After fifteen minutes of skimming through the memos, Melanie sat down with several volumes of the Federal Reporter.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Old bench memos.” He stood one up on its end to show her the typed pages in the binder.

  “They save them?”

  “There’s a whole collection in the Judge’s office, thank God. I’ve got a massive class action where I can read the old memos instead of four boxes of pleadings.” He flipped through the pages. “It’s kind of interesting to see the different writing styles of old clerks.”

  “How far back do they go?”

  “All way, I think. It sure looked like thirty-five years’ worth of binders in there.” Melanie’s mouth curled up in an intrigued smile.

  “So, I could read all of Carolyn Bastaigne’s memoranda to the Judge?”

  “If you wanted to.” He gave her a quizzical look. “What would you expect to find?”

  “Well,” she mused, “what if she worked on an organized crime case and recommended to the Judge that some mafia boss’s sentence be affirmed and then someone ordered a hit?”

  “Wouldn’t they hit the Judge?” He gave her a skeptical look. “I mean, who would know who wrote the memo?”

  “I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “What if someone tried to bribe her to get someone out of jail in a habeas case and she refused?” She waited in vain for an answer. “What do you think?”

  “I think you need to move to Hollywood.” He put down his head and started to work. “Look, if you want to read her stuff, go ahead. I’ll tell you what though, most of these are pretty boring … but I guess we knew that already!”

  * * *

  Melanie waited until everyone had gone home for the day before she opened the top drawer of Ms. Stillwater’s desk and took out the spare key to the Judge’s office. She had seen the secretary use it several times to access his space while he was away at a hearing. In the uncomfortable emptiness of the chambers, she hesitated to use it, but rationalized that she was doing nothing that she couldn’t do in full view of the Judge. The memos were not secret; they were meant to be accessible to the clerking descendants of those that wrote them. Nonetheless, she fumbled with the key in the door and cast a furtive glance over her shoulder when it opened with a loud squeak.