Temporary Sanity (17 page)

The Kydd grabs Stanley by one elbow and spins him around. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“He was the only one here.” Stanley’s answer isn’t directed toward the Kydd. He’s speaking to Geraldine and Sergeant Briggs, no one else.

The Kydd doesn’t take kindly to being ignored. He inserts himself in the center of the law enforcement trio. “What do you mean?” He gestures to the crowd. “There are a hundred people in this room.”

Stanley shakes his big head, his forehead vein working overtime again. “Early this morning,” he says, still addressing Geraldine and Sergeant Briggs, “I found him sitting on this bench in the darkness when I arrived. Alone. He was alone with the judge-the same judge who told him to bring his toothbrush, I might add-and now the judge has been murdered.”

I’m surprised to hear Stanley mention the toothbrush. He was paying more attention yesterday than I thought. “Judge Long isn’t dead,” I repeat. Still, no one seems to hear.

Stanley wheels back toward Nicky, pointing again. “You don’t have it, do you? You don’t have the twenty-two thousand dollars. Judge Long was going to put you away and you knew it.”

Nicky shakes his head and parts his lips, but no sound comes out.

The Kydd raises both hands to cut him off. “Shut up,” the Kydd orders. “Don’t say a word.”

Nicky’s face says there’s no danger of that.

The Kydd towers over Stanley. “That’s ridiculous,” he says, looking down at Stanley’s comb-over. “Even you can’t believe that.” The Kydd’s drawl is more pronounced than usual. “If he’d murdered the judge, he’d have gotten the hell out of here. He wouldn’t have sat on the front bench waiting for the rest of us to find the body.”

I consider announcing again that Judge Long isn’t dead, but it seems futile.

Stanley doesn’t look at the Kydd. He faces the uniforms surrounding Nicky, his eyes darting from one cop to the next. “What are you waiting for? Didn’t you hear me?”

Stanley points at Nicky yet again, as if he thinks the officers don’t know who he’s talking about. “I just told you people that this man attacked a Superior Court judge. Arrest him. Now.”

Nicky gapes at the cops. The cops stare at Sergeant Briggs. The sergeant turns a questioning eye toward Geraldine. No one’s taking orders from Stanley.

“You people,” Stanley says to no one in particular, folding his thick arms across his chest.

Geraldine remains silent for a moment, staring at Nicky. She presses two fingers against her lips, no doubt wishing there were a cigarette between them. Finally, she takes a deep breath and returns Sergeant Briggs’s stare. “Take him in,” she says.

“You can’t be serious.” The Kydd faces Geraldine, his eyes wide. This is his first battle with our former boss, but he and I have both seen Geraldine at war. It’d be easier to take on the armed forces of a medium-sized country.

Geraldine stares up at him and almost smiles before she narrows her green eyes. “Your client had motive, Mr. Kydd.”

The Kydd’s eyes open even wider. Geraldine never called him “mister” when he worked for her.

“He had opportunity. And his opportunity was exclusive.” Geraldine turns to Nicky, who’s now cuffed, then looks back at the Kydd. “I’m quite serious, Mr. Kydd. Quite.”

Judge Beatrice Nolan was appointed to the Superior Court bench fifteen years ago. She brought along a fiery temper. And it’s not just lawyers and litigants who bear the brunt of her outbursts. She abuses her courtroom staff as well.

Beatrice Nolan is a narrow woman-truly. Her shoulder-length, dark gray hair is the texture of steel wool. Severe features-pinched eyes and anemic lips-punctuate her long face. Her complexion, though, is uncommonly smooth for a woman her age. Not a laugh line in sight.

The chief judge called upon Beatrice this morning to preside over the remainder of
Commonwealth versus Hammond
. He postponed a civil suit that was scheduled to begin in her courtroom today. I’m certain she didn’t appreciate his meddling with her schedule. There’s one thing every lawyer in the county knows about Beatrice Nolan. She doesn’t like criminal cases. They’re messy.

The chief judge gave Beatrice our trial briefs and the list of exhibits already admitted into evidence. He asked her to spend the balance of the morning reviewing them. Then he directed the court reporter to begin printing the transcript of the testimony received so far. And he told the rest of us to stay put. I didn’t, though.

Harry stayed behind to oversee the transition while I ran through the parking lot in the snow to the House of Correction. I wanted to check on Sonia Baker, find out how her meeting went with Prudence Nelson. One look at Sonia answered the question. It didn’t go well.

“What a bitch!” Sonia shouted into the telephone.

“She can help you,” I countered.

“I don’t care.” Sonia was as worked up as I’d ever seen her. “I don’t want her help. I don’t want to answer any more of her nosy questions. I don’t want to listen to any more of her arrogant lectures. I don’t want to see her again-not ever. She’s a condescending bitch.”

I stayed with Sonia for almost an hour, trying to calm her, trying to convince her to meet with the doctor again, to give it another shot. She refused. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Prudence Nelson isn’t known for her bedside manner.

I returned to the Superior Courthouse, searching my brain for an alternate expert on battered woman’s syndrome, but I came up empty. Then I began searching my brain for a way to convince Sonia to change her mind. Prudence isn’t the only Massachusetts psychiatrist well versed in battered woman’s syndrome, and I don’t particularly like her myself. But as expert witnesses go, she’s the best.

When I got back to the courthouse, Harry assured me I hadn’t missed a thing. He’d spent the time pacing the hallway, he said, phoning Cape Cod Hospital more often than he should have. The exasperated unit secretary gave him the same message each time: The judge is in surgery and won’t be out anytime soon; no word yet on his condition.

When he wasn’t busy bothering hospital personnel, Harry was lamenting the appointment of Judge Leon Long’s replacement. Judge Beatrice Nolan is bad news. She’s especially bad news for Harry.

After lunch the chief judge moved our entourage, TV cameras and all, into Judge Nolan’s cramped courtroom. It’s a former storage area, windowless and dank, at the back of the first floor. The only real courtroom in the building-the main one upstairs-is off-limits because it’s a crime scene.

Stanley, of course, rolled his TV table into our new venue at once. He positioned his star witness against the judge’s bench, facing the jury box, front and center in the dingy room. Stanley can barely wait to show his videotape again. He actually patted the box when he was done-stroked it-as if it were a pet.

Judge Nolan emerges from chambers in a huff, and her bird eyes dart around the room before settling on our table. They confirm what Harry and I already know. She’s not happy about her new assignment. And she knows we’re not, either.

Harry and Beatrice have a history.

When young Harry Madigan arrived in Barnstable County fresh out of law school, Beatrice Nolan took notice. That was twenty years ago. Beatrice was already ten years into her private practice. She offered to take the young Harry under her wing. Give him guidance. Show him the ropes.

The problem-one of them, anyway-was that Harry had been hired by the Barnstable County Public Defender’s office. From day one, he was a criminal defense lawyer. Beatrice Nolan’s practice was limited to trusts and estates. The only ropes she could show him, the civil side of the law, had nothing to do with Harry’s job.

Besides, Harry says, she scared the daylights out of him. Even then, when her hair was brown.

Turns out the ropes Beatrice wanted to show Harry had nothing to do with the practice of law, civil or criminal. She began cornering him at County Bar Association meetings. She started monopolizing him at the local watering hole, the Jailhouse. She stood too close, Harry says, touched him too often. She draped her arm across the back of his chair, set her hand on his knee on one occasion.

Twenty-six-year-old Harry Madigan was mature about it, of course. He hid.

Harry quit going to County Bar Association meetings, even though he’d barely begun. At the Jailhouse, he switched chairs as soon as Beatrice sat down. He stood if he couldn’t see both of her hands. One night, he says, he jumped up so fast he knocked the table over, and a half dozen people lost appetizers and drinks.

But Beatrice Nolan was not deterred. She left messages with his secretary, proposing coffee, lunch. She began parking her car next to his in the courthouse lot. She plastered notes on his windshield, suggesting after-work cocktails, a movie, perhaps. Her phone number, Harry says, turned up in the damnedest places.

He admits he panicked. And not only because Beatrice scared him. He was having difficulty meeting anyone else. Younger women fled, he says, when Beatrice made a beeline for him. She scared the daylights out of them, too.

Harry also admits-most of the time-that he didn’t handle it very well in the end.

He went to the Jailhouse one night after a long day in trial, looking for nothing more than a cold beer and a burger. He scanned the place for Beatrice, as he always did then, before he went in. He didn’t see her. So he settled on a stool at the bar.

Another newly graduated attorney, a young woman Harry had noticed around the courthouse more than once, sat a few stools away. She smiled at him when he arrived, then looked down at her glass of wine. He was planning his opening line-and it would have been brilliant, he swears-when Beatrice approached from behind. He didn’t hear her coming.

Beatrice latched on to his shoulders and massaged, Harry says, until he squirmed off the stool and out from under her grasp. The young attorney who had smiled at him left her stool too, then, and disappeared into the crowd.

That’s when he lost it.

Harry claims not to remember his exact words, but he’s pretty sure they were graphic. In essence, he says, he told Beatrice Nolan to keep her hands to herself. Then he told her to get lost-for good. And he wasn’t quiet about it. The bar crowd hushed. Beatrice froze. He blasted her.

And she hasn’t spoken a civil word to him since.

There aren’t many people who’ve worked at the County Complex for twenty years. Most county employees don’t know anything about the scene at the Jailhouse or the events leading up to it. Even the old-timers-the few who were around back then-have long since forgotten about it.

But Beatrice hasn’t.

Members of the courthouse staff comment frequently on the open animosity Judge Nolan shows toward Harry Madigan. No one can figure it out. When I first started working at the DA’s office, my coworkers routinely-and nonchalantly-referred to Harry as “that big guy Judge Nolan throws in jail all the time.” I didn’t believe it. Not until I saw it for myself.

Beatrice has always done her best to steer clear of criminal cases, but no judge in Barnstable County can avoid them entirely. During my decade of prosecuting, I tried a half dozen cases before her. In half of them, Harry Madigan was my opponent. All three times, he landed in jail.

Any criminal defense attorney worth his salt spends some time in lockup. But Harry has served far more hours than most, the vast majority at the behest of Judge Beatrice Nolan. “Insubordinate,” she calls him.

I wonder if she knows what he calls her.

Judge Nolan signals the bailiff and he leaves to summon the jury. We’re stuck. Beatrice Nolan is our judge. Worse, she’s Buck Hammond’s judge. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Harry stares up at her for just a moment before setting his jaw and turning back to Buck and me. “Damn,” he mutters, “I wish I’d packed.”

Judge Nolan issued a stern greeting to our jurors as they took their seats and looked around the room, surveying their new surroundings. She told them Judge Leon Long had fallen ill and would be unable to continue the trial. Their faces registered concern for Judge Long, disappointment for themselves. The atmosphere in this courtroom is decidedly darker than that in Judge Long’s. And it’s not only because the room has no windows.

Stanley could barely wait to begin. He’s downright ebullient about today’s personnel change. Beatrice Nolan is his kind of judge, a courtroom drill sergeant. She consistently handles criminal defendants by the book. And then she throws it at them.

The meat of Stanley’s case came into evidence yesterday. He got all he needed to establish the elements of first-degree murder: A man is dead. The defendant killed him. The killing was premeditated. Stanley also got a rare prosecutorial bonus: it all happened on TV.

Today Stanley needed to establish one final element: sanity.

Because we’ve raised the issue, it’s incumbent upon the Commonwealth to prove that Buck Hammond was sane at the moment he pulled the trigger. Stanley closed his case this afternoon with two expert witnesses who said exactly that.

The first was Malcolm Post, a Johns Hopkins-educated psychologist who’s been in private practice for more than twenty years. Dr. Post testified that he examined Buck Hammond for competency and criminal responsibility on June 22, the day after the shooting. The doctor conducted a forty-five-minute interview, during which Buck denied suffering hallucinations or delusions. Buck told the doctor he had never been treated for a mental disorder and had never sought help from any mental health professional.

Dr. Post told the panel that Buck’s answers to questions were “straightforward, not rambling, not confused.” The doctor testified in a relaxed, nonconfrontational manner, using simple terms; no showy words, no scientific jargon. The jurors seemed to like him.

Next Stanley called Dr. Sheldon Turner, Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical School. Dr. Turner testified that he examined Buck for almost three hours on October 25, about four months after the shooting. Before the examination, Dr. Turner reviewed police reports and other court documents, including our expert psychiatrist’s written evaluation. He also watched the videotape, of course.