Limitations (2 page)

“But only on the grounds that some elements were unduly prejudicial?”

Sapperstein has been in enough courtrooms to sense a trap of some kind, but his evasions only intensify Koll’s efforts to steamroll him.

Enough, George thinks. He looks to the clerks’ table. There John Banion, the judge’s other law clerk, has his finger on the buttons that control the three tiny warning lights atop the lectern, which indicate how much time for argument a lawyer has left. Currently, the orange lamp in the middle is aglow in front of Sapperstein. Banion, a doughy figure in his early forties, is often referred to behind his back by the other law clerks as ‘the Droid’ because he is remote as a hermit. But for years John has proven perfectly attuned to the judge’s professional needs, and George drops his chin no more than an inch before John snaps on the red light signaling that Sapperstein’s time is up.

“Thank you, Mr. Sapperstein,” George says, cutting him off midsentence.

At the farther counsel table, nearer the clerks, the acting Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, Tommy Molto, rises with a mess of papers in his hands to respond for the state. Asking for a second, George covers his microphone, a black bud on a black stalk, so he can confer privately first with Purfoyle, then Koll. Koll can’t quite summon an agreeable expression but, like Purfoyle, grants George, as the presiding judge, the courtesy of a half-hour reprieve before the conference that normally would immediately follow the last argument. There the three judges will decide the cases they have heard this morning and assign among themselves the writing of the court’s opinions.

“Tell Dineesha I’ll see Marina,” the judge says to Cassie after waving her up. In a crouch beside the judge’s tall leather chair, Cassie is ready to depart, but George detains her. “What did number 1 say?”

Her brown eyes shift, and she gives her straight blond Dutch boy cut a toss in the interval.

“Just the same junk,” she finally whispers.

“More wishes for my health and happiness?” George asks, wondering if the joke sounds brave or foolhardy.

“Really,” she says.

But her reluctance about the message is provocative, and he circles his hand, asking for more.

“He, she, it, they-whoever it is sent a link,” Cassie responds.

“A link?”

“To a Web site.”

“What Web site?”

Cassie openly frowns. “It’s called Death Watch,” she answers.

Judge George Mason is in the final year of a decade-long term on the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District, an area principally composed of Kindle County. The chance to run for the appellate court had unexpectedly arisen only a year after he had been elected a Superior Court judge, presiding over a criminal courtroom downstairs in this same building, the Central Branch Courthouse. Many friends had discouraged him from considering the higher court, predicting he would find this life isolated and passive after a career on the front lines of trial combat, but the job-hearing arguments, reflecting on briefs and precedents, writing opinions-has suited him. To George Mason, the law has always posed the fundamental riddles life has asked him to solve.

In Virginia, law had been a family tradition, going back to his great namesake, the fabled American founder George Mason IV-the real George Mason, as the judge will always think of him. During George’s years as an undergraduate in Charlottesville, a legal career was yet another of the many ponderous expectations his parents had placed upon him that he was determined to escape. With his degree in hand, he fled here, spending two years as an ordinary seaman on a coal freighter, a job that provided an alternative to Vietnam. His vessel sailed up the river Kindle and around the Great Lakes, and in his solitary hours on watch, when duty required him to contemplate the limitless waters as vast as the adult life that lay before him, he was shocked to find himself preoccupied with the intense questions of right and wrong, justice and power that had been parsed each night at his father’s dinner table. At the end of his tour, he was eager to enroll at Easton Law School here, becoming a Deputy State Defender after graduation. He loved the ragged extremes of crime, which took him so far from what he had been born to, and yet it was the patina of the Southern gentleman that abetted his success. With his gold-buttoned blazer, penny loafers, and gentle drawl, he seemed to cast a spell over the courtroom, as if his presence assured everyone-cops and judges and prosecutors and court personnel-that none of them belonged to the world of hurt and rage and ignorance that propelled these crimes. He alone knew that his performance was a parody.

So he had continued, not quite of this place yet surely not of the one he’d left. Popular with colleagues, he was elected President of the Kindle County Bar Association in the late 1980s. He remained successful and respected, but never the ultimate lawyer of choice in this town, where his friend Sandy Stern would forever be called first in a complicated criminal case. As George had wearied of practice, he found himself idly attracted to the ambition that had eluded his father: to be a judge. It was a wan hope, given the open disdain he’d always shown for the oily dealings of the party leaders who controlled such matters. He assumed he had damned himself forever when he agreed late in 1992 to represent a lawyer turned federal witness whose secret tape recordings led to the conviction of six judges and nine attorneys in a bribery scandal that burned through the Kindle County Superior Court. Instead, in one of those demonstrations of life’s perpetual defiance of expectations, George found himself regarded as the very emblem of lawyerly independence, begged to run by the party powers, who were desperate to meet the outcry for reform. He led the judicial ballot in 1994, a success that leapfrogged him over dozens of more experienced candidates when a seat opened on the appellate court for the 1996 election.

Assuming George wants to keep his job, a yes-no question will appear this November on the County ballot: “Should George Thomson Mason be retained for another ten-year term as a justice of the appellate court?” Now and then, reading the record of a trial, he yearns to pick apart a weaseling witness again on cross-examination, and he frequently regrets the restrictions of a public salary. Occasionally, there are moments-when he longs to curse out the umps at Trappers Park or must respond stone-faced to certain jokes-that he feels caged by the proprieties of the role he’s taken on. Yet until Patrice’s illness, he had no doubt that he would stand for retention, which he is nearly certain to win. His candidacy papers are due in a matter of weeks, but he has been waiting to file, just in case life deals out more surprises.

Now, with his robe across his arm, George sweeps into his chambers, a baronial space of high ceilings and dark crown moldings. The oral argument in Warnovits came to an unsettling conclusion, with Nathan Koll engaged in more grandstanding. The judge is just as happy to escape for half an hour before confronting his colleagues in conference.

In the outer office, Dineesha, the judge’s assistant, is at work at her large desk. She hands him several phone message slips-most requests that George add a ceremonial presence to various public events-but there is only one communication of interest to him at the moment.

“So what did my favorite correspondent have to say for himself this morning?” he asks.

Since this business with #1 started about three weeks ago, Dineesha has taken to screening his email, so that Court Security can be alerted as quickly as possible about new developments. Calm and dignified, Dineesha has been attending to George in his professional life for close to twenty years, selflessly following him to the public sector from the plummier confines of private practice. Now she wobbles her stiff jet hairdo, a daily monument to the tensile strength of the polymers in her hair spray.

“Judge, you don’t need to bother with this. With number 1,” says Dineesha quietly, “it’s all number two.” Humor, especially anything remotely off-color, is uncharacteristic, and he takes her contained smile as a sign of outrage on his behalf.

Nobody in chambers has known how to refer to whoever is trying to unsettle the judge. ‘The stalker’ was George’s initial term, but that gave too much credit to someone who really has no physical manifestation. Avenger. Nemesis. The Crank or The Crackpot. Irony became the default position. The message writer was referred to as the judge’s #1 fan, and soon after that simply as #1.

George does not know if he is exhibiting strength of character by examining these messages or just irresistible curiosity. His excuse to himself is that sooner or later something will clue him to the sender’s identity. Dineesha makes a face but opens today’s e-mail while George leans over her shoulder.

Like all the communications before, this one appears to be George’s own message that has been returned. The sender shows up as ‘System Administrator,’ while ‘Undeliverable Message’ appears in the subject line. Embedded, after the nondelivery notice and a few lines of code, is the communication George supposedly sent, consisting of a few words and a Web link. At the judge’s instruction, Dineesha clicks on the blue words. The site name, ‘Death Watch,’ in heavy black characters, springs onto the screen, accompanied by a line drawing of a wreath-covered coffin and a pointed inquiry: ‘Have you ever asked yourself when you’ll die? Or how?’ A lengthy questionnaire follows, seeking age, health history, and occupational information, but George pages back to the message #1 somehow had directed to the judge’s computer. It says, ‘I know the answer.’

Beginning with his time as a State Defender after law school, George Mason has received his share of hate mail, which he has duly ignored. Criminal defendants, despite six eyewitnesses and security photos of them committing the stickup, have a notorious ability, after several months in the penitentiary, to explain to themselves that they would be free if they’d had a ‘real’ lawyer, instead of one receiving a paycheck from the same government that employed the prosecutor. The better-heeled crooks George represented in private practice also grew cantankerous sometimes, especially when they found that all the money they’d paid had merely paved the way to prison. In his current position, unhappy litigants occasionally vent too. None of these vitriolic communications has ever culminated in anything worse than a couple of manacled ex-clients, glowering at him across a courtroom, where they were appearing after a new arrest.

But the cool intelligence of #1’s messages makes them more difficult to discount. They are unsigned, unlike most of the threatening correspondence George has received over the years, its erratic authors always eager for him to recall exactly whom he wronged. And, of course, recent events in Cincinnati, where a state court trial judge and his family were found murdered, have left everyone wearing a robe feeling more at risk.

The first returned message had simply said: ‘You’ll pay.’ George had taken it as a mistake and apparently deleted it. But there was a second and a third with the same words within hours. George imagined they were spam. You’ll pay-less. For car insurance. Mortgage payments. Viagra. Two days later, another followed: ‘I said you’ll pay. You will.’ Since then there have been several more, each adding a new phrase making their meaning unambiguous. ‘You’ll pay. With blood.’ And then: ‘Your blood.’ Then, ‘You’ll bleed.’ At last, ‘You’ll die.’ His permanent law clerk, John Banion, had just entered the judge’s chambers when the message mentioning death popped up on George’s screen, and he’d asked John to take a look. Banion appeared far more shaken than his boss and insisted on calling Court Security.

Court Security has arrived again now, in the person of its good-natured chief, Marina Giornale, who barrels into the reception area while George is still behind Dineesha. Less than five one, Marina makes up for size in energy. She issues greetings to the accompaniment of her raucous, rattling smoker’s laugh and applies her usual robust handshake. She sports a black mullet, and no cosmetics. With the long khaki jacket that’s part of her uniform and a wide black belt circumscribing her middle, she has the hefty look of a freezer in a packing crate.

“Is ‘Death Watch’ a real Web site?” the judge asks, as he shows her into his large private chambers. George closes both doors, one leading to the reception area, the other to the small adjoining office shared by his two law clerks.

“Oh, yeah. I was on the phone with the webmaster all morning. He keeps telling me it’s a free country.” George Mason IV was one of the driving forces behind the Bill of Rights, and the judge often amuses himself by wondering how many hours it would take in today’s America before his famous forebearer gave up on the First Amendment. There is no liberty that is not also the pathway to vice. The Internet has bred defiant communities of lunatics who once huddled in shamed isolation with their unsettling obsessions.

“So what did the Bureau say?” George asks when he’s behind his large desk. Marina has taken a wooden armchair in front of him.

“They’re going to run forensic software on your drive,” she says, “when they get a chance, but they figure they have ninety-nine percent of what they’ll find from capturing the e-mail headers.”

“Which is?”

“Long short, there’s no way to tell who’s doing this.”

“Great,” George says.

“How much do you know about tracing e-mails, Your Honor?”

“Not a thing.”

“Me neither,” she says. “But I take good notes.” With another hacking laugh, Marina fishes a small notebook from her jacket pocket. Marina is a cousin of the legendary and long dead Kindle County boss, Augustine Bolcarro. Nepotism being what it is, George had once assumed she was overmatched by her job. He was wrong. A former Kindle County police detective and the daughter of another dick, Marina has the crafty intuitions of somebody tutored over a lifetime. She has responded personally whenever he calls and, even more admirably, realized that her own staff, stretched thin by constant County budget cuts, will require assistance. She’s involved the FBI, who are willing to help out since use of the interstate wires makes the threats to George a federal matter. Two silent technicians were in here for a day last week, imaging the judge’s hard drive.