Necessity Read online

  “But you’re not nervous, self-conscious?” she asked, just to be sure. “Never?”

  “Never. One time only. Today, when I looked at you.”

  “Liar!”

  “I wish I was lying. My knees went weak. I was helpless, astonished I could still speak,” I went on, enjoying in all its gleeful extravagance what, at the heart of it, was the simple truth of it. “I thought I was going to pass out; my head felt dizzy. My heartbeat was so loud, I thought that Evelyn Patterson, hearing it, would stare daggers at me for the disruption. I was—”

  “You were telling me about her, how she likes being a trial court judge.”

  “There is a line I heard, years ago, about another judge. ‘No one likes her; everyone respects her.’ That’s not a bad description, and, when you think about it, rather high praise for a trial court judge. You were there. She didn’t like what Donahue was doing. She didn’t wait for St. John, she asked the questions she had decided the witness should answer. No one does that, almost no one does that. She’s more like a British judge than an American one. She never lets things get off track, and if she seems to give one side a little more latitude than the other, it’s because the other side has broken one of her rules and she is trying to right the balance.”

  The candle on the table flickered in the cool night air. Shadows threw a mask over Tangerine’s lovely face, but her eyes, left uncovered, held me close in their eager and excited curiosity. She wanted to know everything.

  “Everyone respects her, but no one likes her?”

  “It’s just a line, easy to remember, convenient to use. I’m sure she has friends. But she isn’t someone who allows the two things to mix. You see it more in women than you do in men. Women are better this way. She doesn’t go play golf on weekends with other judges, or with lawyers. She keeps her two lives separate. When she’s a judge, that’s all she does, that is all she knows. But when she is with her family, or her friends, she probably never talks about what she does, and never about any trial over which she is presiding. If I ran into her in the supermarket or at a restaurant, she would be polite but distant, ask me how I was, tell me it was nice to see me, and with a smile and a nod be on her way. There is nothing imprecise about her.”

  “Imprecise? How do you mean?”

  “Everything is structured, organized, everything made to fit.” I raised my eyebrow at a sudden thought. “But who knows, really; maybe she is so strictly tied to her own self-imposed demands, her expectations of how she has to live, that she’ll have a breakdown and end up in an asylum. But I doubt it. Her mind is too good; she has too much depth. Before the trial started, I filed a few motions. It’s something you almost always do in a criminal case: move to suppress evidence, more to limit testimony—and you almost always lose. You know that, but you do it anyway because that way, if the verdict goes against you at trial, you have some issues of law on which to base an appeal. Most trial court judges just deny the motion. Evelyn Patterson denied the motion, but she wrote an opinion listing seventeen different points of law to support the denial. She’s that thorough; she’s that good.”

  Tangerine got up from the table, went inside and came back with a light gray cashmere sweater thrown over her shoulders. She filled our glasses for the second time.

  “And what about the prosecutor, Raymond St. John? What can you tell me about him? He seems very polished, distinguished, never, it seems, thrown off, never out of control. What you were saying about people always looking like they’re so calm, so much in command of themselves, when they’re really nervous wrecks—he doesn’t give the impression that he has ever been nervous about anything.”

  I searched her eyes, waiting for the spark of recognition that I knew would be there in a moment.

  “He was an alcoholic? Like my father? But he stopped drinking, he’s a recovering alcoholic? Good for him. It’s hard not to like someone who has managed to do that.” Staring out into the night, a wistful smile moved slowly across her mouth as she remembered. “It’s the way he does everything; the slow, measured way he goes from one thing to the next, concentrating on each thing in its turn. And in that way,” she added with a sad, knowing, lost look in her eyes, “ignore the need.” She shook her head, banishing for a moment the memory of her father. “I can see that now. How long has it been? Quite a long time, I would imagine.”

  “Albert has told me stories about St. John, back in the day when he was still drinking. He always managed to get to court; always, somehow, managed to do his job. But weekends! Unbelievable, some of the things he and some of his friends would do. They loved to scare hell out of tourists, and anyone else who happened to be around. One time, St. John himself, according to what became the local legend, went down to Fisherman’s Wharf and waited until the ferry was just pulling out. It was a Saturday afternoon, there were crowds everywhere. From out of nowhere, here comes St. John, running as fast he could, clutching a straw hat on his head, shouting for the ferry to wait, that he has to get on board. The ferry doesn’t stop, it keeps moving. It’s probably twenty, thirty feet away, and St. John, running at top speed, makes a jump for it. Of course, he misses, misses by a mile, and while the ferry chugs away and hundreds of people stare, horrified at what they just witnessed, St. John disappears under the water. Everyone is leaning over the railing, shouting for someone to do something, to save him, but St. John doesn’t come up, only that straw hat he was wearing floats to the surface, the sure sign St. John has drowned. The police come, everyone comes, divers search the water, but they can’t find anything. His body must have washed out to sea. No one knows it was St. John, no one knows who it was, just some screaming fool who thought he could catch the ferry by setting a world record in the long jump. No one had noticed that St. John had swum underwater to the other side of the pier where his drunk buddies had whisked him away in a car.”

  I was laughing by the time I got to the end of Raymond St. John’s legend making antic. We both were, laughing at the craziness with which so many people we had known had tried to forget their broken dreams, the tragedy of their existence, in the drunken inspiration of joyful mischief.

  “The good times ended at three o’clock one morning when he came home and his daughter, confined all her life to a wheelchair, told him what he had become.”

  I told her the whole, sad story, and then I told her that faced with the same situation I was not sure I would not have done much worse.

  “Raymond St. John was a great athlete, a football player, a running back recruited by dozens of colleges. He went to UCLA, led the nation in rushing yards his junior year, and would have played in the pros and made a lot of money, but he hurt his knee his senior year. That’s when he decided to go to law school. He wasn’t just some jock, a guy who took the kind of classes where, if you’re an athlete, you don’t have to do anything. He was a serious student. He went to law school at Cal—Boalt Hall—and finished near the top of his class. He could have joined one of the better firms in the city, but he did not want to shuffle papers, draft contracts, negotiate complicated business transactions. He was an athlete, he wanted to play in front of a crowd, or at least an audience, make decisions on the instant, when they had to be made, the kind were there were no second chances, when everything you did had consequences, where, like the games you excelled at, someone always won and someone always lost. He became a prosecutor, and when he was sober, and ever since he stopped drinking altogether, one of the best ones around.

  “That’s all I can tell you about Raymond St. John, and all I can tell you about Evelyn Patterson. There isn’t anything I can tell you about the defendant—anything I’m allowed to tell—you don’t already know better than I do.”

  She stood up and came around to my side of the table and laid her soft hand on my shoulder.

  “I never knew anyone named Kevin Fitzgerald; I’ve never known anyone until I met you. And I’ll never know anyone else.”

  “For at least a week, if I remember what you said.”

>   “Yes, that’s what I said, Joseph Antonelli. But each week is renewable, if you want it to be,” she said over her shoulder as she walked away.

  I cleared the dishes from the table. Tangerine insisted that I turn on the television in the living room while she cleaned up the kitchen. I refused.

  “I never do that. I never watch what they’re saying on television about a trial I’m in.”

  “Don’t be so vain,” she said with a laugh. “They might actually be talking about something else—sports, or the weather. But I’m lying. It’s the only reason I would turn it on: to see what they’re saying about how brilliant you were today in court.”

  “Not a chance,” I replied. “It’s better if you don’t find out you’re the only one who thinks so.”

  We were still arguing the point when my cell phone rang. It was Albert Craven.

  “Albert, you’re up late. It’s almost midnight. Is something—”

  I felt my throat go dry, and for a moment my eyes went dark.

  “What is it?” asked Tangerine, alarmed and a little frightened at my reaction.

  “Evelyn Patterson. She’s been murdered.”

  “YOU WON’T BE testifying tomorrow. The trial has been delayed.”

  Kevin Fitzgerald looked like he had not slept. His eyes were raw, reddish. He had not shaved.

  “They woke me up last night to tell me. The judge…Evelyn Patterson,” he said, pronouncing her name in the deliberate way of someone who wants to keep the memory alive. “Murdered! Unbelievable! It’s what I was afraid of, what I knew would happen; what’s been happening ever since Bridges got elected. Before that, really—all this hatred, all the violence, out there.”

  He sat at the plain wooden table. The endless scribbled notes, the half-finished attempts at an outline of everything he planned to say when he was called as a witness, had been stacked neatly on the far corner. He had done everything he could to prepare himself.

  “Do you know what happened?” His mouth pulled back at the corners, tightening in the grim certitude of a tragedy that should have been foreseen. “It must have been what she did yesterday, when she put Donahue in his place. That would have been enough.” He glanced at the windows, high up on the wall. “That’s why they put me in here instead of a regular jail cell. There isn’t anyone else near enough to get to me, and no direct line of sight. But I can hear it, when they bring me back from court—there must be thousands of them out in the streets, the ones who think I’m a hero, and all the others who think the trial is a waste of time, that I should just be taken out and shot. There are fights all the time. I’ve seen some of it from the police van taking me back and forth.”

  For the only time since I first met him, he seemed to lose all that bright, shining confidence of his, that belief he had that when the trial was over, when the truth had finally come out, there would be no end to what he could do. In ways I had not been able to understand, he had treated the death—the murder, the assassination—of Walter Bridges almost as an abstraction, the way others might think of the violent death of someone they had read about in a history book or a novel. It had never seemed quite real, perhaps because, for Fitzgerald, it had become merely the necessary piece in a puzzle he had made it his business to unravel, perhaps for other, less obvious reasons, but in any event, nothing more than a part of a larger story. There was a reason for what had happened. The death of Evelyn Patterson, on the other hand, was senseless, the mindless act of some deluded vigilante who no doubt thought himself a patriot for acting against the impartiality of a court in a case that, like so many of those who had thought Walter Bridges right to attack the government he had been elected to lead, no right thinking person could doubt the outcome.

  “It’s what I meant when I told you that it might already be too late. There is a civil war going on,” he remarked with profound assurance, “between those who think the country has to change and those who think the country is being stolen from them; between those, mainly in my party, who think everyone has the right to be whatever they want to be, and those who insist we are sacrificing all the old standards to inexcusable self-indulgence. Everyone talks about the great and growing disparity between the rich and everyone else; you would not have that disparity if we still had the kind of agreement we used to have on what the country is supposed to be.”

  There was a depth to him I had not seen before, a willingness to stare straight into the face of things I had not suspected.

  “What is going to happen now? How long will the trial be delayed?”

  “I’m on my way to court now. A new judge has to be assigned. That shouldn’t take long. The trial is too important to delay it more than a day or two. Even if it was not, when something like this happens, the murder of a judge, no one is going to let anyone think that this court, that any court, can be intimidated. There will be more security than before, a show of force.”

  I told him I would come back later in the day after I knew more about what was going to happen, and then went directly to the courthouse where everything was bedlam. The police had established a line in front, officers standing shoulder to shoulder in full riot gear, feet spread shoulder width apart. I gave my name, showed my identification, and waited while the officer in charge checked me off the list that had been prepared of those allowed to enter. He told me they were waiting for me in the chambers of the chief judge, Leonard Silverman.

  “She was one of the good ones,” said the officer, a heavy set black man in his early fifties. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Antonelli?”

  The courthouse hallway was full of people huddled together outside their offices, some of them in tears, commiserating with each other, trying, and failing, to find a reason why something like this could happen. Three different times someone stopped me to insist that I not change anything in what I was doing, that we all had to do that because it was what Judge Patterson would have wanted.

  “No one ever dared disrupt a trial of hers,” someone remembered, and the others who heard it all agreed.

  When I reached Judge Silverman’s office, his clerk, holding a handkerchief to her mouth, shook her head to apologize for her sudden inability to speak. She opened the door to the judge’s chambers and with her eyes alone told me to go in.

  Raymond St. John was already there, sitting in one of two simple wooden chairs in front of Silverman’s desk. The judge was standing up, his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him, staring out the window. He heard me enter and, without looking around, told me to take the chair next to St. John. For what seemed a long time, but probably was not more than a minute or so, he continued to peer out the window and not say anything. The window faced north and you could see in the distance sail boats on the bay under a cloudless autumn sky. The world went on. Nothing, not even a judge’s murder in the most important trial anyone could remember, stopped people from going on with their lives. The tourists still filled the streets, the stores and hotels and restaurants were still crowded, the sailboats still bent sideways to the wind on the bay far below.

  “Evelyn Patterson was as fine a person, and as good a judge, as I ever knew,” announced Silverman in a steady, understated voice. “Her death will change a great many things—she can never be replaced. But one thing it will not change is this,” he insisted as he turned to face us. “This trial, these proceedings.”

  He looked at each of us in turn, making certain that we both understood, and then with a brisk, quick movement sat down in his black leather chair.

  Leonard Silverman was five feet seven or five feet eight, slight of build, with a small, ascetic mouth and eyes you would swear could look right through you when he was sufficiently interested in what you were saying not to ignore you entirely. He had that kind of intelligence. He was always interested in learning something worth learning, which was to say something serious and directly connected with the subject under discussion. He had no time for fools, and no patience for the endless digressions with which too many people generally,
and too many lawyers in particular, tried to fill out the vacuity of their thought. He would think you garrulous for using four words if you needed only three.

  “I’ve decided to take the case. Starting tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, I’ll preside. I’ve asked the court reporter to type up the transcript of what has happened up to now. I should be able to get through it before tomorrow. The first question is whether either one of you, the prosecution or the defense, have any objection to my stepping in.”

  If Evelyn Patterson had been all business, ruling her courtroom with an iron hand, Silverman had the lighter touch that came with a mind that moved so quickly that, sometimes, almost before you had realized you were about to make an objection, he was ready with a ruling. You might get no more than the first syllable out of your mouth when you heard, in that sharp and clear, but always gentle, voice, his one-word decision. In his courtroom, everything ran on clean, straight lines. He had never been known to become angry, no matter the provocation. A lawyer who must have been from out of town once became so incensed when Silverman ruled against him on a motion that he threw the law book from which he had quoted some lines from what he thought a parallel case so hard on the table you could hear the echo in the hallway outside. Silverman looked at him with his small, efficient smile and said, “I knew you could be brief if you put your mind to it.”

  Neither St. John nor I objected. He turned to St. John.

  “Before I let you go, what can you tell me, and Mr. Antonelli, about what happened? All I know is that she was shot to death last night when she was leaving the building.”

  With his elbows on the arms of the chair, St. John held his fingers to his mouth. His eyes, full of anguish, were close to tears.