The Hanging Judge (29 page)

After ten buzzing seconds, Tony dropped his shoulders and waved in surrender. “Okay, fine, you win. We won’t talk about the fucking trial.” He folded his hands and put them in his lap. “We’ll just talk about me.”

“Right. Everybody’s favorite topic.”

“
Grazie tante,
little brother,” Tony said, but he broke off again and ran his hands back through his hair. “Okay, one more touchdown for you. I admit, I deserved that.”

Tony wiped his mouth with his napkin and dabbed at the corners of his eyes. Alex looked on warily. Part of this performance was an act, no question, but how much?

Tony stared off into space for a few seconds and shook his head. “I’m trying to think of a way to make this sound funny and cute, but I can’t do it. It sucks too much. Fact is, I’ve got our South End pals down on my neck again.”

“Tony, for crying out loud.”

For the past ten years, Alex’s brother had been through one idiotic jam after another with his addiction to illegal sports gambling. He played using betting cards, or he placed wagers over the telephone with bookies linked to Springfield’s local crime syndicate. Various rumors swirled around about the group, including a claim that it was controlled by a branch of the Mafia headquartered in Providence. Whatever the truth might be, Alex knew these were not guys you jerked around.

“It’s bad this time.”

“Tony, when are you going to … ?”

“I know, I know. I’m an asshole.” He paused, then burst out, “but, Jesus, who ever thought UConn would get knocked out so early? They were supposed to take the whole thing, and then … Fuck.” He shook his head angrily.

“How much?”

“I could have wiped out the entire tab if they’d won just two more rounds. I was that close. Two fucking rounds.”

“How much this time?”

“Sixty. Sixty-five grand.”

“Fucking hell, Tony! They let you get in that deep? They didn’t cut you off?”

“I yanked them around a little.” Tony chuckled. “Using different names, betting with different guys once one guy snipped me.” He took in Alex’s horrified expression. “Hey! That’s how it works! Sometimes the only way you get out of a hole is to dig deeper.” He glared up at the beer steins displayed along the walls. “UConn! Those pussies!” He sighed and scratched his forehead. “Actually, I think it’s over seventy with the juice. Things are getting pretty ugly.”

“No kidding!”

“I mean, it’s worse than you think. This time, somebody paid a visit to Mom and Dad.”

“Who? Who did?”

“I’m not even going to tell you. You might do something silly.”

“I might do something silly. That’s hilarious, Tony. The sons of bitches!”

“Calm down. It was just the usual bullshit. Everything nicey-nice. No threats. They were doing it out of friendship. I owed money to some bad people who might, you know, do something to me. I was too embarrassed to talk about it, they were only coming forward out of respect for the family, yada, yada, yada—you know the drill. Now Mom’s in hysterics, and Dad’s talking to the bank about”—Tony put his hands over his face again and breathed carefully—“about taking out a mortgage on the house again. Jesus, I feel like such a piece of garbage!”

Alex remembered the six-course dinner his mother had laid out two years ago for the whole family, when she and his dad had finally made the last payment on their little three-bedroom place in Agawam. Unchained, after thirty years, with nothing but the taxes to cover in retirement, and with a small piece of this earth to pass on to their sons free and clear! What a celebration. Then he imagined going to Janice, in her current mood, and trying to explain the grimy corner Tony had boxed himself into this time. If they maxed out all their credit cards and took a second mortgage on the house, they might just about come up with it. His brother, he knew, had zip.

And Alex did know the drill: They’d catch Tony in some parking lot at night and beat him up until he pissed in his pants, making sure there were a few nasty cuts and bruises for him to explain to everyone later, maybe a tooth missing or a broken bone. One dose would do the trick. The family would come up with the cash somehow.

“It was a few weeks ago,” Tony was saying. “I told Dad it was just a misunderstanding, everything was fine, and I think he believed me. Course, somebody could drop by again anytime.”

Tony plunged on, and Alex, too sickened by what he was hearing, did not stop him.

“Anyway, remember I was talking the other night about our friends from the South End? Turns out one of the guys who calls the shots now played hockey in high school with Bobbie Daley, Ginger O’Connor’s brother, and he’s still real close to the family. I guess he thought a lot of Ginger.”

A puff of memory caused Tony’s mind to shift. He broke off and stared into the middle distance dreamily.

“Last year, I paid a couple visits to Bobbie’s old girlfriend, Candace. Funny how porking the same girl gives you the fuzzies about a guy, kind of like being frat brothers.”

“Stick to the point, okay?”

“Right. Anyway Bobbie’s friend heard the scuttlebutt about problems with your trial, and he says if I do him a favor he might talk to my friends about knocking the tab down. Give me time to work something out.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the favor?”

“He thinks I can deliver you.”

“Deliver me? What am I, a baby?”

“I was drunk! We’re at the White Horse, watching the girls, and I start bragging about my famous little brother, and how I could make sure that spook Hudson gets what he deserves. I know, Allie, this makes three times now, I’m an asshole. But, all of a sudden, these guys are all smiles. The one in charge has his arm around my shoulder, and I’m everybody’s best friend. So we made our bargain: You put the seal on Hudson, who everybody knows is guilty anyway, and there’s no more visits to Mom and Dad.”

Alex said nothing.

“For Christ’s sake,” Tony said. “It’s not as though I’m asking for much. It’s such a little thing. Jesus! It’s nothing.”

38

U
nlike Lydia Gomez-Larsen, Bill Redpath used the court’s portable lectern as he addressed the jury; it served as a place to rest his yellow pad. Now, he stood next to it with his hands folded in front of him, looking at the floor. Redpath’s big, shambling body, draped in a slightly wrinkled charcoal suit, presented a dramatic contrast with Gomez-Larsen’s well-brushed composure. His broad chest rose and fell. Then he began, in a voice that seemed so low, at first, that three of the jurors leaned forward to catch it. Yet, at the same time, the big man’s resonant tones carried easily to the farthest corners of the packed courtroom.

“It’s so easy to point a finger,” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s so easy to point at a man, when he can’t answer back, and make him look bad. Imagine how that must feel! Imagine yourself, or anyone you know, having to sit here in this room, while someone stood there and kept pointing and pointing at you like that, and you couldn’t say a word.”

Redpath shifted and stared over at Gomez-Larsen for the same three-count she had used. Gomez-Larsen returned his stare coolly, and Redpath turned back to the jury.

“Let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, that finger-pointing is nothing but an old prosecutor’s trick, used to put someone on the spot. If we had an angel in this courtroom, or an innocent child, or any one of you, and someone pointed and began making accusations, then that angel, that child, or even any one of you, would find it hard not to squirm. It’s just human nature. The prosecutor knows that, which is why she did it.”

He held up his hands. “I have fingers. I could point, if I wanted to, I suppose. If I were going to point, I would point at Ms. Gomez-Larsen right now, and say, ‘There she sits, the prosecutor, representing the full power of the United States of America, brought down against this one man.’ And if I were to do that, maybe I could make even a very clever prosecutor like Ms. Gomez-Larsen squirm a little. Just the same way she tried to make Moon Hudson look bad by pointing her finger at him again and again this morning.”

He stepped behind the lectern, adjusted the yellow pad, and leaned toward the jury.

“I’m Bill Redpath, and I’m also very proud—very proud and very honored to be here representing Moon Hudson this morning. I’m going to call him Moon, because that’s what his wife, his family, and his friends have always called him. We heard that ‘aka’ business a lot from the prosecutor, as though it’s some scary thing. But Moon has been called Moon since he was a little baby, an infant just about the same age his own little girl, his daughter, Grace, is now. There’s nothing scary about it.

“Before I get too far there’s something I need to spell out in big capital letters. You probably remember it, because His Honor went over it so carefully, but I need to be sure.” He nodded toward counsel table. “Please stand up, Moon.”

Moon Hudson rose slowly to his feet, a broad-shouldered, handsome, very dark man in a blazer and open-collared pale-blue shirt. He looked at the jury and then at Redpath.

“This man is presumed innocent. As he stands there, this man—now, I’m pointing, too, for heaven’s sake. See how easy it is?”

Several of the jurors thawed out to various degrees; some even smiled and looked a little more relaxed. Moon did not smile, which was good, but his face softened, and he gazed tolerantly at his attorney.

“Sorry, Moon. Have a seat.” Redpath drew out the moment, looking down at his notes and scratching his ear. Then he continued, dropping his voice again.

“Moon Hudson is as innocent as anyone in this courtroom. He is as innocent as any of you, as me, as the prosecutor, and even, with all due respect, as innocent as Judge Norcross himself sitting up there on the bench. He can only be found guilty if the evidence—believable, trustworthy evidence, not finger-pointing and ‘aka’ malarkey—convinces you beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty.

“I’m going to review with you, in just a moment, the evidence that the government says it will offer in its case, piece by piece. Before I do that, though, I want to point out two places, two examples of places, where the prosecutor misspoke. That’s a polite way of saying that she said something that’s just plain false.

“First, she said, toward the end there, sort of in passing, that Moon was living with his girlfriend.” He turned and nodded to the front row of the gallery. “Would you stand please, Sandy? I promise not to point.” Sandra Hudson stood, slim and serious, nodded and quickly sat down. “That is Sandra Hudson, Moon’s wife and the woman he was living with. Sandy Hudson, who is a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, and Moon were married two years ago in an Episcopal ceremony right here in Springfield, married by Sandy’s uncle, who happens to be the chaplain at Syracuse University over in upstate New York. Moon Hudson is a married man, with a full-time job, a wife, and a daughter. He’s not living with any girlfriend.”

In his peripheral vision, Redpath could see Judge Norcross turn his head and cast a serious, hopefully disapproving, look toward the government’s table. He drew this “gotcha” moment out before continuing.

“Sandra will testify that her husband was home with her at the time these despicable crimes were committed. I submit to you that her testimony will be entirely credible and persuasive, but if you conclude that what she says even
might
be true, this case becomes very easy. You must acquit Moon Hudson.” He looked up at the ceiling and scratched at the loose skin under his chin.

“The second false, flatly false statement made by the prosecutor was much, much more serious. She said, if I heard her correctly, that Alex Torricelli, the officer sitting with her over there, will testify that he saw Moon Hudson leave the Nissan Stanza that Pepe Rivera was driving that October morning, and run down an alley immediately after the shooting, carrying some version of that assault rifle she kept waving in front of you, hugged up against his chest, like this.”

After a pause, Redpath unfolded his arms, stepped from around the lectern, and took half a step toward the jury box.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I will make a promise to you right now. And I ask you to hold me to this promise.”

He held up his finger and increased his volume.

“Alex Torricelli will
never
say that! Never. He will testify that he saw
someone
, someone
probably Hispanic
, run down that alley, carrying something, an object that I agree was almost certainly the weapon used by the killer to commit these terrible murders. Moon Hudson is not Hispanic. The man who ran down that alley was
not
Moon. That man was the real murderer, a Hispanic man who was a member of the gang La Bandera. I submit to you that the evidence will show that the man running down that alley was almost certainly Carlos Arcera himself, Pepe Rivera’s uncle, who you heard so much about from the prosecutor. Based on Officer Torricelli’s own testimony, the man he saw running down that alley could
not
have been Moon Hudson. For the government to make that suggestion is outrageous. It is absolutely false and reveals just what a bag of broken bottles its whole case against Moon really is.”

For the next five minutes, Redpath described Moon’s background, how he got the nickname Moon from his uncle Thad while he was still in the cradle, his meeting with Sandy at the university, and his job as a warehouse foreman. Redpath returned once more to Grace, lingering to make Moon show some emotion and was pleased to notice two of the jurors glancing his client’s way with expressions approaching sympathy. It was a good moment for another dart at the prosecutor.

“And before I leave the topic of the Hudson family, I ought to mention one thing Ms. Gomez-Larsen tried to put such a sinister spin on—this terrible inositol, this so-called drug dilutant.” Redpath paused to suppress a smile and shake his head. “The prosecutor gave you the fancy name, inositol, but she never mentioned what it really is, to ordinary folks. It’s baby formula, ladies and gentlemen. They mix it with water to make up a bottle for the baby, so Moon can feed Grace on the nights when Sandra needs a little extra sleep. So much for that.”