Limitations

  “I can’t say that,” she says. “I get by. I’ve gotten by. But I’m here, you know? One day at a time. That’s how it is for everybody, right? It’s not easy for anybody, Judge, is it?”

  “Well, I’m sorry for anything I did to make it harder,” he replies. If you had pressed him for an answer when he lifted the phone, he would have said that he was calling her to help decide a case. He thought he might have been searching for Lolly to see how much damage had been done, and how angry she remained four decades later. Or to try to confirm his current interpretations. Did she think she had been trying to punish or debase herself when she hooked up with Hugh Brierly and his roommate, or had she simply suffered from one of those boundless, youthful misapprehensions of what might be fun? Had she been deceived somehow? Or even coerced? Or was it possible, if he were being unsparing, that the incident did not stand alone? But it turns out that his greatest desire is to address her as someone who has profited from his life and now knows better. Who looks back with regret. Who wishes he made something sweet, rather than cruel, out of what was inevitably a momentous instant in his life, for his sake, first, and also for hers. And to tell her that.

  “Oh, brother,” Lolly Viccino says in response. “Get in line. Are you in AA?”

  “No.”

  “Because those people always want you to get hold of somebody you haven’t seen since Noah and tell them you’re sorry. That’s why I quit,” she says. “I didn’t see the sense of that. Who forgives me for all the stupid crap I did? Nobody. That’s for sure. Just go on. That’s what you have to do. You can’t change the past, right, Judge? Am I right? So forget it. That’s my attitude.”

  “I see,” he says.

  “That’s how some people are. That’s how I am. So I’m afraid I can’t help you. Whatever it is, it’s all ancient history.”

  “Of course.”

  “So thank you for calling, Judge.” Now that she has reaffirmed the motto she lives by, she seems determined to get away before he can remind her of anything else. Then someone speaks behind her, a woman whose arrival only seems to hasten Lolly’s desire to end the conversation. The last word he hears from her as the phone is going down is “Strange.”

  19

  CASSIE

  GEORGE MASON has known Cassandra Oakey all her life. He held her no more than a month after she was born, and he retains a clear memory of playing Go Fish with her for an entire afternoon when she was seven and had come to the office with Harrison on a school holiday while George was in the life-suspended state that always set in when he was waiting for a jury. Harry, ever the cheerleader, dragged George to several of Cassie’s high school tennis matches, when she played number two on a conference championship team. She lacked quickness, but she was a determined and powerful player, with a serve like a mortar.

  But Cassie Oakey can—and does—walk in and out of the judge’s chambers with impunity, and among his staff, she would approach George’s personal computer with the least natural trepidation. Far more telling, Cassie Oakey was the only staff member with him at the Hotel Gresham when his cell phone disappeared. And Cassie is leaving in two weeks, apparently with a sense of unrelieved injury.

  “It has to be somebody who works in chambers,” George explains to Patrice as they eat dinner in the kitchen, picking over the leftovers of a restaurant meal from two plastic containers. “It’s not realistic that anyone else would be able to steal on to my computer twice in the same day when I wasn’t around. Cassie’s office is right there. Who else could get in and out so quickly?”

  “I don’t believe it,” says Patrice.

  “I don’t believe it of any of them. Dineesha?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Banion’s been with me nearly nine years. Marcus—I mean people can surprise you, but if Marcus is a computer whiz—”

  “No,” Patrice says definitively about George’s hoary bailiff.

  “No.” He had reached the same conclusion about Cassie while he was speaking to Marina at Area 2 but wanted time to disprove it to himself. Her motive remains elusive. Harrison is often a practical joker, and George wonders if perhaps this started as some kind of prank, which she could not acknowledge when it turned out that no one saw the humor. “It’s got to be some psychiatric mishmash. Don’t you think? Some issue with her father? It just makes no sense.”

  Patrice groans then. “What will you say to Harry and Miranda?”

  In response, he emits a similar sound. But the judge will have to confront his clerk, if for no other reason than to save her from herself. The threat to Nathan Koll means that George cannot quietly excuse this escapade on his own. Besides, Marina is going to review her notes tonight and realize that only Cassie was with him at the luncheon. His clerk will have to resign tomorrow to avoid Marina’s inquisition and to gain control of events that could ultimately imperil her law license. Always the defense lawyer, George is already thinking how he can smooth this over if Cassie fesses up quickly. He’ll need Rusty’s help, which is not guaranteed. We all run true to form, and Rusty, after all, started as a prosecutor.

  George calls Cassie at home a little after 8:30 P.M. Something urgent, he says. Can she meet him for breakfast at 8:00?

  Predictably, she more or less insists on knowing what this is about. “Is it Warnovits? Have you finally made up your mind?”

  “Well, that’s one thing,” he says. Since his conversation with Lolly this afternoon, the case, for the first time in weeks, seems less like his own dose of iodine-131, beaming destructive rays through his body. “I’ve decided I want to write a draft myself. A matter like this probably justifies being a little more expansive.” George’s opinions normally run lean. His ingrained view of judging is to decide only what needs to be resolved and with as few words as possible.

  “What did I mess up?” she asks at once. “Is it the limitations stuff?”

  “Your work was as good as always. I’m sure I’ll use a lot of it, and ask for your help. I just want to lay my own hand on this to start.” It occurs to him that this is a pointless discussion. Cassie is going to be gone from chambers by tomorrow afternoon.

  “So what else do you want to talk about?”

  “It will be better in person.”

  She sighs with her characteristic absence of deference, indicating that George is being a pain.

  “Where?”

  He gave that question some thought before picking up the phone and had an inspiration.

  “How about the Hotel Gresham?” If Cassie has a conscience, and he remains confident she does, she’ll be uneasy there, perhaps quicker to admit what she’s done. Predictably, she objects that the hotel is too far from chambers.

  “The only place in town I eat bacon,” George says. “Hand-cut and Virginia-cured. When you sin, Cassandra, you always go back to your roots.”

  * * *

  George does not think about his security convoy until he wakes. Police protection is unneeded now, since there’s no evidence that Cassie is engaged in anything other than psychological warfare. Nevertheless, somebody will probably show up. Marina figures to be slow to admit things were not as she suspected. And then again, there’s the practical problem that George needs a ride to work. He leaves a voice message for Marina saying that he’ll make his own way to the courthouse and calls a taxi, arriving at the Hotel Gresham by half past seven. He stands in the gaudy lobby, a remnant of the Gilded Age, with marble columns the size of sequoias and a ceiling encrusted with gilt and cherubim, while he tries to recall the whereabouts of the Salon, where breakfast is served.

  A plump, amiable security guard in a blazer, with a white earpiece peeking under her hairdo, approaches to offer help.

  “You’re the judge, right? I saw you on TV the other night. How you doin’?”

  In the last twenty-four hours, he has frequently found himself the object of staring, a distinctly uncomfortable experience. His father always disapproved of calling attention to oneself.

  “I t
hink the arm’s a lot better this morning.”

  “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

  FORGIVEN

  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. Bu
t 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.

  “How could you do that to me?” John is more or less shouting. That too is a novelty. “You didn’t make her do it. But me? You didn’t even ask if I’d mind. And you told me to watch it again and again.” ‘Her’ is Cassie, of course. And Banion is right—right about a lot.

  George drops his face into his hands for some time before finally turning to the window and peering down to the canopy of treetops in the parkway five floors below. No matter how equable and kind he aspires to be, how Christ-like in the way his father taught, he knows himself well enough to have predicted that his reaction to John was going to be anger. Worse, outrage. The sad man weeping in that chair betrayed the judge’s trust, including by revealing himself as an outrageous nut. And he also committed a serious crime, wreaking havoc in George’s life at a time when he was already on his heels.

  But he feels very little of that. Instead, still his father’s son, he finds he is chastening himself. Because he failed mightily. He was too upset by his own secret crisis to consider anything besides escape. Knowing the profoundly disturbing quality of those images, he inflicted them on John without a second thought about the consequences. And the judge sees that his failures are not without their harsher ironies either. Pivoting under the weight of the bad old past, he nonetheless remained its captive; it was vestiges of old-fashioned chivalry that made him put aside any thought of asking Cassie to take on the task. And the truth, as John has clearly sensed, is that Cassie would have been far better equipped for the job. She might not have buffed her nails or microwaved a bag of popcorn while she watched, yet Cassie at some level is the worldliest person in these chambers when it comes to the subject of women and men. The tape would have infuriated her, fed her certainty about the proper outcome in the case. But she would have handled the tape far more calmly than John for one overriding reason: it would not have told her anything she had long tried to avoid knowing about the human universe—or herself.