“Glad to hear that. We all were talking about you yesterday. I was sure when I heard that on the news, I knew you. You’re the judge who lost his cell phone here last month, right?”
When he nods, she lights up, pleased by the potency of her memory.
“You got it back now, don’t you?”
“Nope. It never showed up.”
“Now how can that be? I thought for sure somebody from your office got over here to pick it up after Lucas found it there near the ballroom. Isn’t that right?”
He has actually said ‘Nope’ a second time before he recognizes that she’s speaking from knowledge. She escorts him to her chief’s office, a glorified closet whose door is concealed artfully in the dark paneling, where they wait for her boss, Emilio, to dig the paperwork out of the file. What he presents to the judge is a pink copy of the triplicate returned property form that’s used for items retrieved from Lost and Found. On May 26, the day after George’s cell phone turned up missing, John Banion signed for it.
George has already asked the doorman to call a taxi when he remembers Cassie and dashes back to the Salon. A huge brandy snifter of orange juice sits in front of her on the formal china.
He does not trust Cassie’s discretion-she has virtually none-but he’s mortified to think he suspected her, and the best excuse for meeting here is offered by the returned property form, which George, with some art, suggests he expected to be picking up.
“Huh,” Cassie says as she studies it. “I thought it might be John.”
“You did?”
“Only since yesterday afternoon. Marina came in to impound your computer.”
“She didn’t mention that,” the judge says sourly, although in fairness to Marina, she probably regarded the need to seize the machine for evidence as obvious.
“John actually came in to ask her what she was doing and why. I thought that was strange. Stranger.” She gives her short blond hair a toss. “Frankly, George, I always wondered if the guy might be a secret ax murderer.”
“Did you? I just assumed he was terribly lonely, Cassie.”
She shrugs. The misfit, ungainly people of the world are not so much beneath her as incomprehensible. But George has faith in Cassie. She has infinite sympathy for the deprived. In time, she will recognize that suffering has many faces.
“I wonder if you have a clue what motivated him,” George asks.
“He’s not crazy about me.”
“You’re leaving.”
“Right.” She shrugs again. “I mean it’s a crappy thing, George. But a guy like John-I wonder if he really can grab hold of how scary this was for you. You know, you’re this judge, this mountain. I don’t think he gets it.”
The server puts their plates down before them. The food and the sad truth about Banion plunge them into silence.
As they start to eat, Cassie abruptly says, “I should know you well enough to realize you didn’t mean that stuff about an appetite for old sins.” His heart squeezes at the prospect of her coming rebuke for his lack of faith in her, but instead she points at his plate. “No bacon,” she says.
20
When the Judge and Cassie arrive at chambers a little after nine, there are two problems. The first is that he has no computer. The second is that John, who is always at work by eight, has not appeared.
A technician from Information Services eventually comes up with what she swears is a clone of the judge’s machine. Predictably, it freezes the moment the young woman is gone. George is still cursing when Dineesha announces John’s arrival.
George doubts that Dineesha knows exactly what’s going on-he’s sworn Cassie to silence, a vow that even she could not forsake so quickly-but Dineesha is intuitive enough to sense the disruption in the tiny universe of their chambers, especially since the judge has asked about Banion several times. In an oddly formal gesture, she ushers John in, her round face grave.
Banion, characteristically, cannot quite bring his eyes to the judge’s. Instead he extends an envelope.
“What’s this?” George asks.
“I’ve decided to resign, Your Honor. At the end of the term.”
George hesitates to reach forward, realizing that he’s been harboring some fragmentary hope that his conclusions about John would prove as unmerited as his suspicions of Cassie, one more misperception to be added to a list that has lately been growing impressively. But the meaning of John’s desire to leave seems unambiguous: the search for #1 is over. Between them, silence lingers. It could be called meaningful, except that George has always experienced such moments with his clerk. In John’s company, the question of who is supposed to speak next frequently seems to be a mystery to rival the beginnings of time.
“That’s very disappointing, John. Sit down, please,” the judge says. Banion has more or less lagged the letter onto George’s desk and actually taken a step in the other direction. “What have you got lined up for yourself?”
At breakfast, George told Cassie that he wanted to handle things with John himself before involving Marina. But in the event, he’s not sure what he means to accomplish. He has never been positive that confession by itself is good for the soul. Certainly, without a quid pro quo, it’s seldom advantageous in the world of law-so many of George’s clients ended up worse off for unburdening themselves by admitting what they’d done as soon as they were arrested. Nor does he have the heart to badger the truth from Banion. Cassie put her finger on it. It’s a virtual certainty that John’s actions were the product of his isolation, his inability to grasp the significance of his deeds to anybody but himself. That, of course, is the emotional synopsis of every crime. Which is why every crime, at its core, is marked by an element of pathos.
“I don’t have anything, Judge. Not yet. There’s a job as a staff clerk on the Alaska Supreme Court that’s been advertised. I might try for that.”
“Alaska? Could you get any farther from here? Are you running away from somebody?”
Every trial lawyer tends to believe at moments that he is an actor worthy of Broadway, but George discovered in the courtroom that he has a limited range-quiet contempt for liars, an appealing dignity when beseeching juries to acquit. But he was never any good at broadcasting emotions he does not actually feel, and he has failed again now. He doesn’t manage a convincing smile with the last words. Instead they emerge with a steely undertone of accusation, and that is all John needs. The soft face of forty-two-year-old John Banion crumples in upon itself like a rotting apple; he grows flush and, just like George’s sons twenty-five years ago, begins to sob without control, initiating the same guilty, flustered moment when George is suddenly beyond his comfort zone in the world of adult justice.
“It’s not me,” John says then. “It’s not me.”
Against all reason, George finds his heart lighting up.
“Who then?” he asks. But John is crying too hard to hear him.
“It’s not me to do something like this, Judge. It really isn’t. It isn’t.”
John must repeat those words twenty times, continuing even after George has finally taken all this in and said more than once, “I know.
“I just don’t understand why, John.”
Banion gasps then. “That’s why,” he says and wails again.
“What’s ‘why’?”
“Because you didn’t understand.”
“What didn’t I understand?”
“You made me watch!” John cries, stiffening in his vehemence. “You made me watch that awful, disgusting tape. You couldn’t stand to see it, and so you made me watch it. Me! Ten times, twenty times, so I could describe all the most horrible things. It was disgusting!” Banion utters the last word with such fury he spits. Collapsed in the black wooden armchair in front of the judge’s desk, he is a spitting, shaking, weeping mess. His skin is the color of a sunrise, and his face is wet all the way down to his chin. But he is a new man in George’s eyes, not because he’s crying-you couldn’t deal with John without sensing sorrow. It’s the depths of his anger that are shocking.