Limitations (11 page)

“Marina, I realize you don’t know Patrice all that well. So let me explain. She’s one of those people who go rock climbing and then come home and throw the dead bolt and set the burglar alarm. She designs houses. She thinks everybody is entitled to a safe private space. This would upset her at the best of times. And it’s not the best of times.”

“I understand, Your Honor. Only-” She stops.

“What?”

“You know, not to get in the middle, Judge, but maybe we can work out security arrangements that wouldn’t alarm Mrs. Mason. Might even make her more comfortable. Because I really think it’d be better for everyone, including the two of you, if she knew what was going on.”

His efforts at self-control prove futile.

“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” he says before clicking off the connection.

In chambers, the judge meets midmorning with John Banion to discuss his draft of an opinion in a preliminary injunction case the court took on an emergency appeal. It concerns a dispute between a theater chain and a movie distributor about box-office receipts and upcoming features.

“We need to toughen up the section on remedies,” George tells his clerk. Banion sits before the judge’s desk, nodding obediently. The contrast in character between George’s two clerks could hardly be more striking. With five minutes’ acquaintance, Cassie is likely to tell you the state of her dental work, the amount of her phone bill, and her pointed reflections on the many young men pursuing her. John speaks very little, in a somewhat precious hush, and remains perpetually aloof.

Educated in Pennsylvania, John Banion returned here a decade ago to care for, then bury, his elderly parents. He is a highly capable lawyer, and for several years after the judge first hired him, he feared that Banion would give notice and move on to a better-paid job in private practice. But in George’s lifetime that world has grown cruel to persons like John, able but uneasy with people and, thus, unlikely to charm clients. When George started out, those ‘back room lawyers’ were the foundation of large law firms. These days they are increasingly hired hands, who work crushing hours until they are replaced by younger versions of themselves. John is apparently content with his life here. He works from eight to five, earns enough, reads obsessively, and takes several trips each year to hike alone in wilderness areas.

Solitariness, however, is a motif. Since his parents’ passing, John has slid into an increasingly reclusive and eccentric middle-aged bachelorhood. He retains a smooth, innocent face, but his brownish hair is departing quickly, and John has rounded noticeably in the last couple of years. Along the way, he seems to have lost most use for other people. It is routine to see him by himself in the courthouse cafeteria at lunch, his nose stuck in a book-usually a heavy philosophical tome-or pecking away on his laptop, while dozens of folks he has known for years and could easily join chat at tables nearby. John never mentions any social engagements, and the common assumption seems to be that he’s gay. George, who does not regard himself as especially well attuned on that subject, still tends to doubt it. Aren’t there genuine bachelors, unable to accommodate themselves to intimacy with anyone, who sink into the embrace of their own peculiarities?

But his oddness makes John in some ways a hero to his boss. The judge has often speculated that if he could put a probe in Banion’s brain, he’d enter a world more colorful than some $200 million Hollywood epic. But John has found a bridge to the rest of the world in the law. He functions in the hermetic zone of the appellate court, as a valued professional. In George’s judgment, John Banion is about as good as a law clerk gets. Precise. Talented. Unobtrusive.

“John,” the judge says, as the clerk stands to have another go at the opinion, “Cassie tells me you don’t mind if she does the drafts in Warnovits. I want to be certain she’s not elbowing you out of the way.”

“Hardly, Judge.” He looks at the carpet and mutters, “If she wants to deal with all that stuff, let her. I’ve had enough of those boys.” From John this is what passes as outspokenness. Generally, he embodies the selflessness to which the law aspires in the ideal. After nine years working with John, George still cannot tell whether he favors the prosecution or the defense, corporate interests or the little guy. He undertakes his work with the apparent disinterest of a shoemaker. Nonetheless, the judge has a brief, paralyzing thought of the comments Harry Oakey, Cassie’s father and George’s friend, might pass if he ever learned about his daughter’s newest assignment, which will require her to study that videotape. Not the sort of education Harry had in mind when he sent his daughter to George’s chambers.

The judge asks Banion to give Cassie the bench memos John prepared before the oral argument and to tell her she can start work.

“Still two drafts? Affirming and reversing?” John avoids a direct look, reluctant to confront the judge about his indecision, but it dawns on George that he is starting to make a fool of himself in his own chambers.

“It’s a hard case, John. On the law. I seem to be stuck on the limitations issue. But whichever way I go, there will be a dissent. Koll wants the case reversed because the videotape couldn’t be used, and Purfoyle’s strictly for affirmance. I need to get my ducks in a row.”

John departs, but with the discussion, George’s thoughts drift back to Warnovits. The case, when he can bring himself to contemplate it, remains welded to his memories of Lolly Viccino. Eventually, as he kept her company in the dormitory library, he realized that her ragged look was due in part to having had no chance to bathe. Late in the afternoon, he stood guard outside the men’s room so that Lolly could shower. It was there Grigson found him.

‘She’s still here?’ Grigson asked.

George told the dorm proctor her story.

‘Well. I’m very sorry to hear that, Mason, but if her own people won’t take her in, what are we to do? She can’t stay.’

George stood the only ground he could. ‘I’m not telling her.’

‘Well, you don’t have to,’ Grigson said. ‘You just move along, George Mason. I’ll deal with this. Go on.’ The dorm proctor waved the back of his hand. From the mettle that had come into him, George realized that the proctor had heard about the goings-on the night before. Franklin Grigson was going to enjoy turning out the likes of Lolly Viccino.

So, George thinks at his desk, he actually failed Lolly Viccino twice. He made no further protest on her behalf nor, more practically, did he escort her from the dorm to one of the local rooming houses, where he probably could have financed a leisurely stay for her after a frank chat with Hugh Brierly about the ‘rent’ he’d collected the night before. Instead, George did what kids do in tough situations-he hid. Visiting the library an hour later, he found the only remnant of Lolly’s stay was the dirty plate from the canteen heaped with cigarette butts. George fingered one or two, overcome by things he could not explain. And yet he knew that, much as he had hoped the night before, some fundamental transition had begun for him.

For a second, George’s guilt feels like a dagger point against his heart. How could he have made no effort to find out what had become of her? To see if she had even lived out the day safely? Or to determine what mark all this had left on her?

Banion knocks and returns from the small clerks’ chambers with a draft of three new paragraphs to be inserted in the movie theater opinion.

“John, if I wanted to locate somebody I knew forty years ago in Virginia, is there any way to go about that?” His clerk can research anything on the Internet.

“What’s the name, Your Honor?”

As soon as George gives it, he realizes this is an impossible task, even for John. Assuming the average course of events, she married and, as was usually the case with women from Virginia of his age, had given up Viccino. And Lolly could not have been the name on her birth certificate. Not to mention the fact that George has no idea of precisely where or when she was born. The judge shakes his head at length to show he’s had second thoughts.

“It’s a personal matter, John. Don’t waste your time with this. I may poke around myself some evening. I just wondered how to go about it.”

Banion has scratched out the names of a few Web sites on a pad, but the notion that the matter is personal is as good as crashing down a gate. John permits himself little, if any, inquiry into the lives of others and thus seems to have no clue how curious everyone is about him. This winter, he was down for days with a serious bronchial infection. Working from home, he had reluctantly asked Dineesha to bring him a set of briefs he needed. She is the one person in chambers with whom he holds any semblance of a personal relationship- they exchange small gifts at Christmas-but even she had never been to his house. When she returned, there was a palpable atmosphere of suspense. Cassie; the clerks from the adjoining chambers; Marcus, the elderly courtroom bailiff; and the judge himself-everyone awaited some description of what Dineesha had found. She was far too dignified to indulge them, but the next day, when she fetched in a messenger delivery, the judge said to her, ‘Dare I ask?’

After gently closing the door, Dineesha rendered a brief but vivid portrait. The stucco bungalow, in which John’s parents had raised him, had visible cracks in the outer walls and a patch of shingles missing from the roof. But the true bedlam was inside. It was not dirty, Dineesha said, but so dense with piles that she could barely get into the front hallway. It was as if he had a recycling center in the house. He did not appear to have thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last ten years. They were piled in columns to the ceiling in the living room, where there was also a virtual fortification of books, in eight-foot ramparts as if to form a bunker. Under the load, the hardwood floor had literally begun to sag. Two parakeets flew free throughout the house and made a squeaking racket.

George is taken from these thoughts by a buzz arising somewhere in the room. The unfamiliar sound spooks him a bit until he realizes it’s Patrice’s cell groaning intermittently as it vibrates. Fishing it from the suit jacket that hangs behind him, the judge sees letters on the gray screen. A text message, his first ever. He’s mildly pleased to have caught up with the times, until he reads what’s there.

“Number One,” he murmurs, “you are starting to get on my nerves.” But he cannot kid himself. It’s the first moment that requires a conscious effort to contain his fears. It’s not so much the words-‘Will get u’-that scare him. The threat is nothing new. What’s frightening is the number from which the message comes. It’s his, George’s. Number one has the judge’s missing cell phone.

At 3:00 P.M., Marina, who’s been working with the phone company for several hours, arrives with one of her deputies, Nora Ortega, a thin, dark, silent woman whom Marina has brought along on a few occasions in the past to take notes. George makes it a point to offer Marina his hand, and she exerts her entire boxy form as she shakes.

“That was over the top, Judge, putting that tail on without telling you. Sorry.”

He apologizes too, using the term ‘grouchy old man.’ They settle in familiar poses, George behind his desk, Marina in the black wooden armchair in front of it.

“So what did we learn about number 1?” he asks. “Anything good?”

“We’ve got some idea where he was. Which basically comes down to Center City.”

They’ve assumed all along that George’s tormentor is local, but this is the first proof. Nonetheless, the new information seems sparse compared with what he expected.

“I thought they could position a cell phone better than that.”

“If it’s turned on, Judge. But not if the phone is off. Which yours is, of course. It was probably off as soon as you got that text message.”

“So how can they tell he was in Center City?”

“My guy over there wouldn’t get very specific. They’ve got the government on one side and the ACLU on the other. He sort of explained all this by humming. But how I think this may go is that a cell phone actually puts out signals on two channels, and the company has a record of the second one, what’s called control channel data, which includes the location of the cell your phone connects to. The best they can do is tell us that the message went through the tower in the steeple at St. Margaret’s. He could have been anywhere within two square miles of there.”

“So you’ve narrowed it down to about two hundred thousand suspects?”

“Exactly.” Marina smiles. “We’ll have them all interviewed by morning.”

George is relieved that she has recovered her sense of humor with him. In the meantime, she holds up Patrice’s spare cell phone, which she’s brought back after getting all the info from it the telephone company needed.

“What I’m wondering is how he got this number.”

“Because I was nice enough to give it to him,” says George. “I was trying to find the phone I lost. So I called it. Made sense to me. When I got voice mail, I left a message. ‘This is Judge George Mason. If you’ve picked up this cell phone, please call me at the following number.’ I tried a few times.”

“And how would he have gotten into your voice mail without your password?”

“The whole sequence is programmed into the phone when you hold down the one key. Obviously he figured it out.”

“Obviously,” answers Marina.

“Any idea who else he called? Did he give himself up in some way?”

“Not really. The company says there’s no detail in the last two weeks.”

“Meaning?”

“If he used the phone, the calls are free under your plan. Voice mail. Stuff like that. He’s smart,” she says. “But we already knew that.”

Next, she wants to replay how George’s cell turned up missing and the steps his staff and he took to find it. After some talk, it makes more sense to include in the conversation everyone who had a role in the search, and George summons them. Dineesha and Cassie take places on the gray sofa beside Nora. Marcus, tall and bearded, stands at the door, working over a toothpick. Not to be overlooked, Abel wanders in last and with much effort puts himself down on a low colonial boot bench, next to John Banion.