Dead Winter (26 page)

“So happy Groundhog Day,” he said.

“You too.”

“My favorite holiday,” he said. “Never thought it was right to sit in session on Groundhog Day. You figure the little bugger’s gonna see his shadow today?”

“Punxsutawney Phil? No way. It’s been raining all day.”

“Sun’s probably shining down there in Pennsylvania, scare him back into his hole for six weeks. God, I hate New England winters.”

“Me too,” he said. “Well, hey. Congratulations, Pops.”

He spooned another glob of white gunk from the container into his mouth and rolled his eyes in distaste. “Thanks. You heard.”

I gave him a frown. “Had to read about it in Norma Nathan’s column. You’d think, your own lawyer…”

He waved his hand. “It only just happened, Brady. I think old Norma knew before I did.”

“Well, Federal District Court. That’s nice.”

He nodded. “What I been waiting for. Assuming I pass muster with the Bureau and the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate.”

“No reason why you shouldn’t.”

“Provided our esteemed senior senator, who submitted my name, hasn’t pissed off too many of his colleagues, which he probably has, and assuming that he has, that his colleagues don’t decide to use me as some kind of lever to sock it to him. Which they probably will.” He shrugged. “You want some coffee?”

I shook my head. “All you ever have is instant. I can’t stand instant.”

“I stopped drinking the stuff, myself,” he said. “Goes right through me. As it is I gotta take about three piss recesses a morning. Damn prostate. I go to this urologist at Mass General, he pokes his finger up there and massages the thing. Most uncomfortable sensation you can imagine. He tells me my problem is I’m not getting it regular. I tell him, hell, Doc, I get it regular. Once a month, like clockwork.”

I smiled. “So how is Marilee?”

He took another mouthful. “In Sarasota right now, working on her tan. Her face is getting to look like an old penny loafer. I tell her she’s gonna get skin cancer, never mind ugly.” He shrugged. “You eaten?”

I shook my head. “This is my lunch hour. You summoned me.”

He held the cardboard container to me. “Want some of this?”

“What is it?”

“Cottage cheese with little pieces of pineapple in it. I also got a Baggie with carrot sticks and celery. Nice glass of Belmont Springs water. Power lunch.”

“I’ll pass.” I reached into my shirt pocket and took out a pack of Winstons. “Mind if I smoke?”

He shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“I mean, there’s signs all over the place, corridors, men’s room, elevators, no smoking in this building. Hell, what I understand, you can’t smoke in the entire city of Cambridge these days.”

Pops waved his hand around the room. “No signs in here. Judge’s chambers, you can smoke. I’m the law in here.”

I lit a cigarette.

“Happy Candlemas Day, too,” he said.

“Huh?”

“February the second. It’s been Candlemas Day in England since something like the fifth century. You know what Candlemas Day is?”

“No. I suspect I’m going to find out.”

He waved his spoon. “I’ll spare you the details. Ancient Christian celebration. The blessing of the candles. Properly blessed candles presumably warded off bad fortune. Folks burned blessed candles when somebody got sick, or during a storm, or whatever. Upshot of it is, there’s this myth that goes along with Candlemas Day, which is the same day that we celebrate Groundhog Day, which probably explains our heathen faith in the little brown critter reacting to his own shadow. There’s a rhyme. Want to hear it?”

I puffed on my cigarette and smiled. “Oh, please.”

He grinned. “Goes like this. ‘If Candlemas be fair and bright, / Come, Winter, have another flight; / If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, / Go, Winter, and come not again.’”

I had been Chester Popowski’s lawyer for about fifteen years. Even judges need lawyers. Pops had been a classmate of mine at Yale Law. He was several years older than I. He ran around with Charlie McDevitt and me for a while in New Haven. Charlie and I used to hold open house most weekends at our big old rented Victorian by the water, and Pops usually showed up. But he always seemed a little self-conscious about what Charlie and I considered fun. Pops had served two stints in Vietnam between college and law school. He managed to make me feel deprived by not having been to war. In the presence of Chet Popowski, I felt immature and trivial. Pops had always seemed serious and strait-laced. Uptight, Charlie used to call him. After he met Marilee, Pops came to the bacchanalia Charlie and I sponsored with less frequency and, it seemed to me, even greater discomfort.

After law school Pops became an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, in East Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from my office in Copley Square. He had come back from Indochina with that great shock of prematurely white hair. Photogenic as hell on his tall, athletic frame. And Pops had a beautiful voice and beautiful teeth and a penchant for winning tough cases. Governor Sargent soon appointed him to the District Court bench, and a few years later he was elevated to Superior Court.

Now he had been nominated for Federal District Court, and I assumed he wanted to discuss it with me.

I looked around for someplace to drop the ash from my cigarette, and Pops produced a glass ashtray from a drawer in his desk. “You want to talk about the appointment?” I said “That why you summoned me?”

He dropped the cardboard container and the plastic spoon into the wastebasket beside his desk, pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his hands and mouth, and shook his head. “Wanted to show you something,” he said.

He gathered up the sections of newspaper that had served as his tablecloth and dropped them onto the floor. Tucked into the blotter on the desk was a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me.

It was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of white paper. Twenty-pound bond. I felt the tiny serrations along the edges with my fingertips. Computer paper. Printed on it in dot matrix was this message:

I KNOW ABOUT KAREN LAVOIE.

There was no signature, no date, nothing else on the piece of paper.

I looked at Pops. “What’s this?” I said.

He shrugged. “Came in the mail three days ago.”

“Who sent it?”

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Who the hell is Karen Lavoie?”

His eyes wandered to the bank of tall narrow windows in his corner room that looked out over the squat flat buildings and chimneys of East Cambridge ten stories below. The Bunker Hill Monument poked up in the distance. Beyond that arched the Tobin Bridge. Sooty smoke and steam rose straight up from the stacks and chimneys into the sullen gray February overcast. Pops didn’t speak for several moments. Finally his eyes swung back to mine. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

I stared at him. “Bullshit,” I said.

“I’m not exactly—shit, okay, so I’m worried. Hell, I want this appointment. Something wrong with that?”

“So who’s Karen Lavoie, Pops?”

“Now don’t get huffy, Brady. Believe me. I know the FBI and all Teddy’s enemies are going to do their damnedest to dig up dirt on me. This does not intimidate me. I’ve promptly paid every parking ticket I ever got. All those times in New Haven, I never put my lips around a stick of cannabis. I spent four celibate years in Southeast Asia. There’s nothing in my bank accounts I haven’t got records of. The only people I owe money to are bankers. I’ve never set foot in a gay bar. My judicial record is, as far as I can see, impeccable. I have managed to avoid pissing off women and blacks and gays. I’ve sent bad guys up for long stretches. I’ve never visited a shrink. I know all about the things that screw up appointments. I’ve been in this racket a long time. Should I be worried?”

I cocked my head and looked at him. Then I tapped the single sheet of paper with the dot-matrix message on it.

“Evidently,” I said.

He gazed down at the top of his desk and smiled. When he looked back up at me, he was no longer smiling. He removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is politics,” he said. “This is big-time politics, now. A federal seat. I want it very badly. I’ve been aiming toward this. I wouldn’t mind, five, ten years from now, maybe they think of old Chester Y. Popowski when one of the nine old men kicks off, either. Be a nice move for some future president, putting a second-generation Pole into the Supreme Court. Best job in the world for a lawyer, Supreme Court Justice. Be pretty nice. A Pole in the Vatican, a Pole on the Court. So, yeah, I’m worried. It’s my nature to worry. I worry about all kinds of stuff. Phyllis gets an F on a French test, I worry she’s gonna get kicked out of Mount Holyoke. Patty goes to the movies with that Tommy kid, the linebacker with that souped up Datsun that’s shaped like a torpedo whose tires squeal around the corner, I worry I’m gonna get a phone call from the cops some night. I worry about bombs when Marilee flies to Sarasota. I worry I screwed up and they nail me on appeals. I worry about cholesterol. I worry I don’t get enough fiber. I worry Marilee’s gonna find a lump in her breast. I worry about her nightly headaches. It’s why I gotta eat cottage cheese and yogurt and have my prostate massaged. Because I worry. It’s also why I’m a good judge. Worrying keeps you sharp. Look for bad stuff. Head it off. So, yeah, you could say I’m worried. I’m always worried.”

“So I repeat. Who the hell is Karen Lavoie? What is this all about, Pops? Come on. This is me, your lawyer here.”

“Okay, just listen for a minute,” he said, holding up his hand. “I got a phone call this morning while I was sitting in the kitchen eating a slice of dry toast and worrying about why the oil burner wouldn’t shut off. Fella who sent me this cryptic message.” He tapped the dot-matrix words on the computer paper. “Wanted to have a conversation.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not.”

“What’d he want to talk about?”

He put his finger on the piece of paper. “Her.”

“Karen Lavoie.”

He nodded.

“And?”

“And I told him he could shove it.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“He wanted to meet me in a bar, for crissake.”

“But you’re not going.”

“He said he’d be there waiting for me. I told him he could wait six weeks for all I cared, see if the groundhog’s prediction turned out to be accurate. He laughed. He said he’d be there, waiting, and if I knew what was good for me I’d be there. Then he hung up on me.”

“You think that’s a good idea, Pops?”

“What?”

“Standing him up?”

“What else could I do? Last thing I need is to be seen in some bar being hassled and threatened by some sleazebag who wants to muck around in my past. Christ, everybody in the city knows me.”

I nodded. “You’re probably right. On the other hand…”

“I know,” he said. “Not going suggests certain problems, too.”

I leaned back and smiled at him. “Pops, why’d you want to see me?”

He shrugged. “You’re my lawyer. I can tell you anything. Our relationship is privileged. You give me good advice. You’re my friend. I’ve got this little problem here.”

“Look,” I said. “I’ve got an idea. Suppose I go.”

“What are you saying, Brady?”

“I’ll go to the bar. I’ll listen to the guy.”

He shook his head. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t. I offered.”

“That’s not what lawyers are for.”

I shrugged. “It’s what friends are for, Pops.”

Pops reached across the desk and put his hand on my wrist. “If you could just find out what his agenda is…”

“The guy didn’t introduce himself?”

“No.”

“Didn’t say what he wanted?”

“Just to talk.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Nine o’clock.”

“Where?”

“Skeeter’s.”

“And this guy insisted on a face-to-face meeting?”

“Yes.”

“You figure blackmail, huh?”

He nodded.

“I won’t be party to blackmail, you know,” I said.

“Believe me, I have no intention of paying him a cent. I have no reason to.”

“Okay. I’ll go. But you’ve got to tell me all about this Karen Lavoie.”

He peered at me for a minute. His eyes wandered away, then swung back to meet mine. “Karen…” he began. Then he stopped.

I arched my eyebrows. He nodded slowly.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m disillusioned,” I said.

“Come off it, Brady. This isn’t easy.”

“Sorry. What happened?”

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. It happened. I’m not proud of it. But it’s got nothing to do with anything.”

“Hey, Pops—”

“Honest, Brady. Leave it there, okay?”

“Like hell.”

He sighed. “Do I have to spell it out?”

“Any reason you shouldn’t?”

He shook his head slowly back and forth. “No, not really. Mainly, it’s embarrassing. A fucking cliché. What do they call it nowadays—the Jennifer Complex? She was young, I wasn’t. What can I say? It lasted, oh, a month, maybe, before I realized what I was doing. It wasn’t easy to live with myself, believe me.”

“If Marilee found out…”

“Hell,” he said, “I knew, and that was bad enough. I ended it. It was a huge relief. I think maybe I’m a better man for it. Showed me my weakness. I’m ashamed to this day.” He shrugged. “And that’s the whole story. The thing is, Brady, there aren’t any juicy details or anything. One of those things that happens.”

“One of those things that gets nominations rejected,” I said.

He bowed his head and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Aside from your prurient interest, there’s nothing for you to know here. Nothing for anybody to know. It happened a long time ago. A moment of weakness. So I’m human. Should that disqualify me?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned. But I’m not responsible for making a federal judge out of you.”

“Brady, it’s an old story, that’s all. It’s embarrassing. My main concern is Marilee and the girls, here, not the appointment. There’s nothing that should disqualify me from being a federal judge. Maybe from being president or something, but not judge. It could, but it shouldn’t. But if this business ever got back to Marilee—well, I don’t need to tell you that the qualifications for being a husband are sometimes more stringent than those for being a judge. Can we leave it at that?”