Courting Death Read online

  “Look,” Arthur said, finding it increasingly difficult to be patient. “Save the poetic language and theological debate for the Wild Boar. If Gottlieb ends up in the electric chair, please feel free to blame the law or even blame the Judge, but leave me out of it. I’ve got work to do.”

  Phil nodded, and Arthur got up and walked to the door.

  “Be careful, Art.”

  * * *

  Arthur sat alone in the library, insulated from the din of the outside world by thick volumes containing two hundred years of federal court cases. The refuge slowly worked its magic, and eventually he was able to focus on Gottlieb’s successful petition of two years earlier. It provided few new facts, but made for a compelling follow-up to his conversation with Phil. Once Gottlieb had quietly slipped away from Wisconsin, he had gone to Jacksonville, Florida, where over the next five years, he killed twelve young blond-haired women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven.

  The most extraordinary aspect of Gottlieb’s sojourn there had been his relationship with Nicole Thompson, a technician whom he met while purchasing glasses. They dated steadily during his last two years in Jacksonville and were engaged to be married just before the frenzy of killing that led to his ultimate capture. Thompson had no inkling of Gottlieb’s criminal activities. He had successfully hidden the dark side of his personality from her. Yet, apart from his tendency to discuss his role in the killings in the third person, he had never shown any clinical signs of schizophrenia.

  The end of Gottlieb’s career as an anonymous killer began late one October night when he brought his Louisville Slugger to a Burger King at closing time and brutally murdered a seventeen-year old high school girl and her thirty-year-old manager. Fingerprints left at the scene identified Gottlieb as the perpetrator, and when several of Gottlieb’s coworkers identified him from pictures shown on television, the hunt was on.

  Gottlieb’s frantic flight from Jacksonville in Nicole Thompson’s car bore no resemblance to his careful escape from Madison. He killed a night janitor behind a school in a South Georgia town and made off with thirty-five dollars from the unfortunate man’s pocket. Stopping for gas only a block away, he inexplicably paid by credit card and put the police on a trail that eventually led them to Atlanta.

  Gottlieb laid low in Atlanta three days before leaving brutal proof of his presence—four young women bludgeoned beyond recognition in a small rental house in the Buckhead neighborhood. Narrowly escaping being caught at the scene, Gottlieb led Georgia law enforcement officials on a furious six-hour chase down I-75 and various back roads to Macon where he allegedly killed his final victim, a twelve-year-old girl. Unshaven and barely coherent, the former MBA student was pulled from the car at a state police roadblock without a struggle. At the time, Gottlieb was twenty-eight years old and arguably the most infamous mass murderer in American history.

  Be careful, indeed.

  VII.

  SUSPICIOUS MINDS

  The next afternoon Melanie was in the library in the Judge’s chambers, slogging through a district court opinion challenged by an appeal from a radio station that had been blocked from transferring its license to a potential buyer. She had a hard time getting excited about the intricacies of Federal Communications Commission law and kept gazing longingly at the police brutality case next on her docket. Phil worked across from her, seemingly content to plow through whatever the Judge threw at him. He and Arthur were both like furniture in the library, comfortable and at home in midst of musty legal history. She preferred to be writing motions and briefs, not just checking what the old Fifth Circuit had opined in some ancient precedent. Looking out the fourth-floor window onto downtown Clarkeston, she could see the post office where a group of Freedom Riders had sought refuge from an angry mob in 1961.

  As she got back to her reading, the clanging of a telephone startled her out of the tiny print of the Federal Reporter (2.d). She spotted an old fashioned circular dialer by the doorway and reached it before her co-clerk had a chance to get out of his chair. Funny, she had not known the phone was there until it started jangling the shelf where it was squeezed in between a row of books. She picked it up and a moment later gave an alarmed look to Phil.

  “No, you can’t speak with him; he’s not here.” She held the phone several inches from her ear and winced. “Would you like to talk to Ms. Stillwater—”

  “She most certainly is not!” Melanie said indignantly. “And you should—” She forced herself to listen for a while longer, started to speak, and then gave the phone a hard look and put it back on the receiver. “What the fuck!”

  “What is it?” Phil pushed his yellow pad to the side. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know … I think maybe I should talk to the Judge first.” She looked back at the phone as if it might jump off the shelf on its own. This was not exactly the excitement she had been daydreaming about. “This woman called Ms. Stillwater a ‘conspiring bitch.’”

  “A what? Who did?”

  “A conspiring bitch! She said that Stillwater was part of a plot, along with the Judge and half the courthouse.”

  “What plot?”

  Melanie considered whether she should say anything more. The level of anger and hysteria on the other end of the phone line had been unnerving. “A conspiracy to cover up the murder of her daughter. She said that her daughter clerked here five years ago and that someone killed her. She said a shitload more vile stuff, but that was the gist of it.”

  “Here? You mean clerked for the Judge?”

  “That’s what she said.” She tapped her pencil impatiently on the table. “I wish he wasn’t in Atlanta.”

  “It’s probably just a crank call.”

  “It was totally a crank call, but we need to tell him anyway. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know if someone was slandering you?”

  “I suppose.” Phil ran his fingers through his thick blond hair, and she wondered for the third time that day why she was not more attracted to him. Just a little too handsome, she supposed. Nobody has the right to be that nice and that cute. More likely her lukewarm response was a sensible defense mechanism against what would undoubtedly be a ruinous office romance.

  “I’m sure the Judge has gotten a lot of crank calls in his day.” He continued, “Didn’t the governor of Georgia once call and tell him to give himself a barbed wire enema?” He gave her a thoughtful look. “Let’s ask Ms. Stillwater. Maybe she’s talked to your friend before.” She nodded and followed him to the alcove outside the Judge’s office. The secretary looked up from her typewriter and smiled when they came in.

  “You two are looking very industrious today. Have you got something for me to type up?” Her efficiency was legendary. Even with three clerks dedicated to the nonstop production of paperwork, she never fell behind and was constantly asking them for their next round of revisions on memos and draft opinions.

  “Uh … I just got a really strange phone call, and we wanted to ask you about it.”

  “Ms. Stillwater,” Melanie lowered her voice, “did one of the Judge’s clerks die five years ago?”

  “Oh Lord, you didn’t get a call from Shirley Bastaigne, did you?” Ms. Stillwater’s face turned pink with embarrassment. “It’s been a couple of years since she called, so I didn’t think I needed to warn you. What did that horrible woman say?”

  “Well, mainly that you, the Judge, and the rest of the courthouse were engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the murder of her daughter.” Melanie crossed her arms and then shrugged. “She was pretty hysterical.”

  “She usually is. Sit down, and let me tell you the story. I’m afraid this is my fault for not saying anything before.” She sighed, embarrassed to be relating anything negative about the Judge’s chambers.

  Melanie remembered a similar look on her mother’s face when she revealed somberly that one of her unmarried cousins had gotten pregnant.

  “I don’t really know where to begin. Carolyn Bastaigne clerked here about five years ago. A mo
nth before she was supposed to leave for New York and start a job at Cravath, Something & Something–”

  “—Cravath, Swaine, & Moore?” Melanie completed the name of the famous New York City sweat shop.

  “That’s it.” The secretary folded her hands penitentially on her desk. “Well, Carolyn worked late one evening and fell down the stairs after she left the office. A janitor found her lying with her neck broken at the bottom of the stairwell.” She shook her head and sighed again. “Poor girl. She was probably the laziest clerk who ever worked here, but I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. She had her whole life in front of her.” Melanie nodded, eager to get more information about the tragedy. “That’s it really. A horrible unfortunate accident.”

  “So where does the murder conspiracy part come in?” Melanie asked, remembering the hard marble of the stairwell she had climbed just the day before. “I’ve walked down those stairs. It’s not too hard to imagine what would happen if someone tripped.”

  “And why’s she so mad at you?” Phil added.

  “Well, I suppose she’s angry with me because I shield her from the Judge. After her first nasty talk with him, he told me never to put her through or give him her messages. I guess that makes me part of the conspiracy.”

  “But why does she blame the Judge?” Melanie asked.

  “You’ll have to ask him. I mentioned it to him once, and he growled at me to mind my own business.” She paused and smoothed out the top of her skirt on her lap. “But if I were you, I’d just let sleeping dogs lie. I think he’d rather forget that it ever happened.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Phil said as he got up. “Thanks for the heads up, though …and the story.” He grinned broadly and winked at Melanie. “If we get another call, we’ll be sure to put her straight through to you.”

  Ms. Stillwater rolled her eyes and shoo’d the two clerks out of her office.

  They walked in silence to the library and sat back down in front of their work. Melanie flipped through a case report, looked up, and frowned. The afternoon sun suffused the room with a yellow light, setting dust motes dancing in the air. For some reason the story of the ancient accident seemed more compelling to her than the appeal she was supposed to be working on. She had never been this distractable in law school.

  “I wonder why Mrs. Bastaigne is still so emotional after all this time?” she wondered aloud.

  “Some people never get over their grief,” Phil replied. “Losing a child is a really hard.”

  “Of course, but why blame the Judge?” As someone who had admired him since childhood, she found any attitude other than hero worship hard to understand.

  “Maybe she didn’t want her daughter working for him in the first place. You saw that movie last year with the crowd lynching him in effigy. Maybe she’s a racist who blames him and federal government for everything wrong in the world.”

  “Maybe,” Melanie said doubtfully, “but you wouldn’t think that a paranoid racist would raise a child who would go to an elite law school and then clerk for the Judge.”

  “Maybe Carolyn was a rebel? And who says she went to an elite law school? The Judge went to Mercer and hires Mercer clerks sometimes.”

  “Hmm … look, it’s four thirty, and I need a little break.” She gave her co-clerk a mischievous smile. “Let’s go down to the main courthouse library on the second floor and find the story in the newspaper. The death must have been pretty big news in a town this small.”

  “Sorry,” Phil replied with a gesture to the legal pad in front of him. “I’ve got to knock out this draft out by tomorrow. You go down and tell me what you find.”

  Melanie fetched the keys from her office in case she returned after Ms. Stillwater had locked the doors for the night and then walked down the dark, empty corridor to the elevator. She pushed the down arrow but curiosity drew her farther down the hall to the stairwell door. After a moment’s hesitation, she pulled the handle and found herself standing where Carolyn Bastaigne must have passed just before she fell. The faint echo of footfalls drifted up toward her. Melanie grabbed the worn brass handrail firmly as she headed down, slightly tippy as her heels searched for a purchase on the smooth marble steps. She paused on the cold terrazzo of the third-floor landing. In the afternoon, little sunlight penetrated the eastward-facing windows, and she gave an involuntary shiver. Ms. Stillwater had not said exactly where Carolyn had been found; perhaps this was where the janitor discovered her.

  At the second-floor exit, she slipped through a metal door into the brightly painted space where the communal resources of the courthouse were located. The office of the Clerk of the Court, the main library, a small vending machine room, and lounge occupied most of the space, and it was here, on neutral ground, that the law clerks from different chambers met and gossiped. The Judge hardly had the building to himself. He shared it with two district court judges, two magistrates, and another appellate judge who had retired but still was on active “senior” status. Each of these Judges had one or two law clerks. Although clerks sometimes visited other chambers, most of the socializing occurred in the library or the lounge. The judges shared an obsession with confidentiality and got grumpy if outside clerks spent too much time in chambers. Melanie thought they were all being a bit paranoid.

  She sat down at the microfiche reader and inserted the card listed Clarkesville Chronicle, 1984. Ms. Stillwater had said that Carolyn Bastaigne had died just before her clerkship was over, so Melanie guessed that the accident must have occurred in June or July, the months when old clerks were most likely to rotate out of chambers. After a few minutes of scrolling, she found a page-three story, dated June 27.

  FEDERAL LAW CLERK FOUND DEAD IN COURTHOUSE STAIRWELL

  Carolyn Bastaigne, a law clerk working in the federal building on Court Street, was found by a janitor early Thursday morning in a stairwell landing between the third and fourth floors. The initial police report lists the cause of death as “broken neck.” In a brief interview, a janitor, who asked that his name not be used, also described facial injuries caused by the fall. Bastaigne was seen by a courthouse employee leaving the office where she worked at 6:30 p.m. Police place the time of the accident shortly thereafter. Ms. Bastaigne, a native of New York City, was a graduate of Columbia College and Yale University Law School. She was finishing a one-year clerkship and had planned to return to New York to practice law.

  Melanie read through the article twice and frowned at its lack of details. After looking at it one more time, she scrolled ahead looking for a follow-up story. In the June 30 issue, she found a report of the coroner’s inquest.

  INQUEST FINDS LAW CLERK DEATH ACCIDENTAL

  A federal official today ruled that the death of Carolyn Bastaigne, a native New Yorker and an employee of the US Federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, was accidental. No evidence of foul play was found and a brief statement issued noted that the accident occurred in a secure building more than ninety minutes after it closed.

  Both stories were filed by a local reporter named Sidney Dumont. Melanie skimmed through later issues of the newspaper but found no follow-up. She leaned back in the chair and contemplated the story. The death of Carolyn Bastaigne had barely caused a ripple in the Clarkeston news scene. Odd, given that very morning the Chronicle had considered the expansion of the animal shelter front page material.

  She flicked off the microfiche reader and smiled. Now, here was a research project you could get your teeth into. In law school, she had enjoyed working in the clinic, meeting with real clients, asking them questions and trying to figure out legal strategies that might work. She liked the front end of the legal process, the fact-finding and the little mysteries. Working for an appellate judge and never seeing the actual parties to the case seemed too much an extension of her time editing the student law journal.

  A few minutes later, she knocked on Phil’s office door and summarized the slim set of facts for him as she sat down. “So many things bug me about the newspaper story t
hat I don’t know where to begin. First, why wasn’t there more coverage? I read the Chronicle. You’d think that a mysterious death in the federal courthouse would warrant a hell of a lot more ink.”

  “Must be part of the conspiracy that Mrs. Bastaigne was talking about,” Phil teased.

  “You laugh,” she said with a smile, “but it’s just the sort of thing to fuel a mother’s paranoia. Not to mention that the article never says which judge she worked for. Given the headlines he’s made over the years, you’d think that the Judge would be mentioned. About the accident itself, I hate to be Sherlocky—”

  “–more like Ms. Marple.”

  “Give me V. I. Warshawski at least!” She snagged Phil’s wastebasket with her left leg and balanced a foot on its edge. “Anyway, why was she going home down the stairs? Have you ever been tempted to go down those stairs at night?”

  Phil shook his head and Melanie continued.

  “They come out on the wrong side of the building from the parking lot for one thing. And didn’t Stillwater say that she was lazy? Sounds like an elevator person to me.”

  “Sounds like someone threw her lazy butt down the stairs to me!” Phil grinned.

  “Will you be serious for a second? I also wonder about this ‘courthouse employee’ who saw her at six thirty. Apart from clerks working late, this place is empty as Ronald Reagan’s cranium by five fifteen. Neither the Judge nor Ms. Stillwater would be here after six thirty.”

  “It was probably some janitor or security guard.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anyway, we should tell Arthur something in the morning, in case the crazy lady calls back,” she added with a hint of an eye roll. “He’ll be sure to have an opinion on all this.”