The Hanging Judge (7 page)

The voice of the large man in uniform was in her ear, almost kind, “We’re gonna frisk you now, okay? Got any needles on you, lady? Any firearms in the room?”

A new voice, southern, from the doorway: “Basement’s clear, not another soul in the joint.”

Yet another voice, female, from down near her feet: “Jesus, Alex, where’s she going to put any needles?”

And still another from the doorway, commanding and angry: “Get upstairs. Check the neighbor.” The order was punctuated with a sneeze, like an exclamation point.

“You do her then. Half these assholes are HIV,” the cop named Alex replied.

Sandra realized the shrieking wasn’t coming from Grace, after all, but from her neighbor’s hyperactive grandchild, Tyler, upstairs. Thank God! But what was happening in Grace’s room? Another hard bump reverberated on the wall. She felt the vibration of heavy feet through the floor and heard the mobile over Grace’s crib jingling crazily. In the kitchen, cabinet doors were clanging, and something—the juice pitcher?—hit the floor with a sharp crash.

“Can I please get my baby?” Sandra asked the almost-kind voice. She could see nothing but boots and shoes on the gray-green rug.

“Let her see the baby.” Moon’s voice.

“Shut the fuck up,” said a hard, high-pitched voice from the other side of the bed.

“In a minute.” This was the female voice, bending over her now, intimately close to her ear. “We need to know, okay? Is there a firearm anywhere in the room, ma’am? Any kind of weapon? Anyone else in the apartment?”

The high-pitched voice was speaking quickly from Moon’s side of the bed.

“You have a right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Fuck, I dropped the card. Jimmy, grab that card. It’s … never mind, give me yours.”

“No guns,” Sandra said. Every time she inhaled, her breasts hurt.

“Okay, I’m going to pat you down a little,” the woman said. “No needles, right?”

“What?”

Sandra was aware of many, many feet tramping through the house, and now, lifting her chin slightly, she noticed blue lights dancing off the walls from several angles. The whole neighborhood would be up. Another hard thump from the baby’s room struck her worse than a slap, and the urgency of her desire to get to Grace was nearly unbearable. Soon she would not be able to keep herself from screaming, and then what would happen?

“Let her get the kid,” a voice said from somewhere above her.

“Just a sec.”

The fast voice resumed from the other side of the bed.

“You have a right to a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you. If you begin to make a statement, you can stop at any time. Do you understand these rights as I gave them to you?”

“Yes.” It was Moon’s voice again, but changed—dumb and obedient.

“Having understood these rights, do you now wish to speak with me?”

“No.”

“Stand him up. Christ, get some pants on him.”

“Hey, Allie, you ever seen this guy before?”

“Shut up, Jimmy,” the deep voice in the doorway broke in again. “Go help in the kitchen.”

“Okay, ma’am.” It was the heavyset cop, Alex, again. But the woman was still there, too, one hand on Sandra’s shoulder, tight, the other on the small of her back.

“Sergeant Cramer and I are going to help you up now. We’re going to sit you on the bed, okay? Easy does it. Upsy-daisy.”

“Díaz, give him his … Wait a minute.” There was another explosive sneeze. “Give him his rights in Spanish.” Someone was blowing his nose.

“I don’t think he speaks Spanish, Lieutenant,” a voice replied from the closet area. “Hey, buddy,
habla español
?”

“No,” Moon said in his new, flat voice.

Sandra was lifted off the floor up into a world that had changed completely. She felt like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz,
except that this time the tornado had worked in reverse, taking her happy, brightly colored world and plunging it into grim black and white. She gasped as they dropped her down farther than she expected. The mattress was gone, and she was placed on the hard box spring. Sitting so low, with her hands cuffed tightly behind her back, she felt tiny. What she saw—with her darting eyes, not daring to turn her head—sickened her.

Their small bedroom, their daisy field, was crowded with enormous, jostling, dirty-footed people. The sheets and blankets had been pushed off onto the floor. Two men had the mattress on its end and were running their hands carefully along its underside. A third officer had pulled out the top drawer of their oak bureau, a wedding gift from her parents, and was dumping its contents onto the floor. The bottom two drawers were already leaning against the wall on a pile of underwear. A uniformed Latino cop—Díaz apparently—was at the closet, throwing shirts and pants over his shoulder carelessly. A black officer and a big white guy in uniform were standing next to Moon, who was completely naked with his hands cuffed behind his back. They were helping him step into a pair of jeans. Most horrifying of all, a stream of blood ran down the side of Moon’s face and onto his shoulder.

“Moon, you’re hurt!”

“It’s okay.”

The white cop in the doorway pointed. “Hey, if you don’t want to talk, shut up!”

All their belongings, their clothing, their sheets and blankets, even their precious framed wedding pictures, already knocked off the bureau and broken, were being stepped on as people passed in and out of the room.

“Hola!”
Díaz cried jubilantly. He was pulling a shoebox out of Moon’s closet, holding the top in one hand. Several officers looked over at him.

“Looks like maybe five, six ounces of pot, bagged for sale, and a shitload of cash here, Lieutenant.” He peered into the box and looked up with a happy grin, like a boy with a trick-or-treat bag.

“Don’t touch anything, for Christ’s sake. Put it back and get the video cam.”

“What do they pay you for an ounce of weed these days, Clarence?” the black cop on the other side of the bed asked.

“That’s not ours,” Sandra exclaimed. “Moon, what is that?”

“Whoa,” said the southern voice in the doorway. It was a man in plainclothes with a raid jacket, looking over the lieutenant’s shoulder at Sandra with a pleased, lazy smile. “I believe we just heard an excited utterance, admissible in a court of law.”

“Baby, hush now,” Moon said sharply, and his face made Sandra’s stomach plunge. She saw him look quickly over at her and then down at the floor, as if he were ashamed. This was the worst shock yet. Who had she married?

“Somebody might just want to scribble Miz Hudson’s remark down somewhere.”

Grace did begin to bleat faintly now. The sound expanded in Sandra’s mind and pushed its way through everything, one clear, irresistible call in this mass of confusion.

“Get her out of here,” the lieutenant said, waving his hand at Sandra. “Let her get the kid. She’s okay. What?” He twisted around to speak to someone in the living room, then turned again to look at Sandra in her nightgown and sheet. He seemed frazzled, and he gazed on her with distaste. “Take the cuffs off, Al. She’s okay. Seems like King sniffed out more goodies in the basement.” He blew his nose into a wrinkled handkerchief.

As Al, or Alex, unlocked the cuffs, Sandra heard the lieutenant mutter to the man in plainclothes, “Holy Mother of Christ, with the kid here and everything.” They looked away as she passed. A few seconds later, sleepwalking through the shattered living room, Sandra heard the lieutenant’s voice behind her.

“Jimmy, give Mrs. Hudson a copy of the warrant. It must be on the floor there somewhere, by the table. Anybody run across any Tylenol?”

In the baby’s room, Grace stopped crying the instant Sandra picked her up. The infant began to smack her lips and peer around eagerly with her beautiful almond-shaped eyes, watching the mobile with its dancing figures of Tigger, Kanga, and baby Roo. She’d be wailing for breakfast soon. Back in their bedroom, Moon’s deep, submissive voice was audible.

“What’s all this for? The weed?”

There was a dead silence and then a disgusted snort.

“Sure thing, Clarence,” someone said. “Pull that sweatshirt over him and stick his ass in the cruiser. Grab his sneakers.”

“Sean Daley’s on the porch,” the lieutenant said. “Let him have a good look.”

The female officer, heavyset with short, curly hair, came up to Sandra in the baby’s room, stepping over a strewn pile of Luvs and crib sheets. She spoke in a hard, automatic voice. “Is there any place you could take the baby, ma’am? How about your neighbor upstairs? We’re gonna be here awhile.”

Ten minutes later, having tossed a few baby supplies into a grocery bag, Sandra dragged herself up the stairs, bracing Grace awkwardly against her side. Her neighbor Spanky, an enormous woman in a fuchsia housedress as big as a tent, stood on the landing reaching out toward Sandra with flabby arms, a dreamlike figure at the end of a dark tunnel.

8

D
avid and Claire were sitting in the driveway outside David’s garage, with rain streaming sideways across the windshield and the car rocking in the gusts of wind. The moment had come, David told himself, either to step off the high-dive or head back down the ladder. The last time he could remember being in this position was with Faye in the back of a school bus, getting up the nerve to hold hands.

He’d been stalling with apologies for his law rant at the dinner table.

“Oh, pooh!” Claire poked his shoulder. “Gerry plays one note—politics—and he always has to be the smartest guy in the room. Your ignoring him for so long was hysterical. I bet he’s plotting his revenge at this very moment.” A cracking noise made her glance up into the thrashing trees. “Assuming he and his ingenue du jour aren’t otherwise occupied.”

David began fiddling with the knob on the glove compartment.

“I always end up feeling … I don’t know …”

“Constipated, sure. But there are things you have to tiptoe around, right? Like, obviously, if someone asks your opinion of the death penalty, you go all peculiar and distant.”

“Not distant,” David said. The glove compartment flopped open, and he reached down between his feet to retrieve a pencil. “Definitely peculiar.”

“Okay, not distant.” Claire nodded. “Just fencing your garden.”

She had beautifully even, very white teeth and a mouth that seemed always about to break into a smile.

“I understand,” she continued. “We medievalists have our secrets, too, you know.”

“Really? Like what?”

“I can’t tell you. That’s the point.”

“What sort of secrets then?”

“Well …” She drew the word out. “One example. After you make full professor, they tell you who murdered the little princes in the Tower of London in 1483.”

“Wow! Was it really Richard III? I’ve always thought he was framed.”

“Like I said, I can’t tell you.”

David shook his head and muttered, “That is so much better than any of my secrets.”

The wind died down, and their black leatherette world went very quiet as he looked into Claire’s eyes. Just the purr of the idling engine, the thud of the wipers, and the tap of sleet on the glass. Faint scent of vanilla. He felt slightly dizzy, as though the back end of the car were lifting off the ground. This was when he was supposed to do something.

Claire turned to David and put her hand on his shoulder. He had an insane thought that she might reach down, unzip his fly, and propose oral sex. People did that these days, didn’t they?

“How about this?” She dropped her voice. “I’ll tell you one of my secrets, if you tell me one of yours.”

“Uh,” David began, but they kissed before he could continue, and his field of consciousness contracted to tongue, lips, and nose, the taste of her mouth, and the need to make spaces to breathe. After a life-transforming interval, they broke, and David said, “I don’t know about that.”

“I figured.”

They resumed kissing, maneuvering as well as they could in the cramped interior. Claire slipped her arms up inside David’s jacket, cupping her hands over his shoulder blades and down his long back, pulling him to her. The competence of her touch was as thrilling to David as her tenderness. This was a woman who might be, in the best sense, very easy.

“Okay,” Claire whispered, very close, “here’s the deal.” She kissed him. “I’ll tell you one of my secrets for free.” She kissed him again, longer this time. “And you can decide if you want to reciprocate.”

“I don’t … I don’t know.”

Claire’s breath played over his face. “You mustn’t tell a soul.” She put her finger on the tip of his nose and looked into his eyes solemnly. “William the Conqueror had three testicles.”

They burst out laughing and fell onto each other with even more appetite. David let his hands slide along the splendid curve of Claire’s waist, up over her ribs, brushing up over her breasts and around to the trailing archipelago of her vertebrae. Small things nipped at the edges of his mind—the gearshift and the painful hand brake, the cold nudge of the rearview mirror against his temple, the fact that he badly needed to go to the bathroom—but he was so engulfed in pleasure and amazed at Claire’s eagerness that he barely noticed. Even when a sad chill brushed him, the ghost of Faye melting into the back of his mind, he did not pause or, for the moment, even care very much.

On the other side of infinity, they took a break, clinging and breathing contentedly.

“Okay,” David said. He laid his nose on the side of Claire’s head and breathed in deeply. Distant scent of coconut. “Here’s mine. Personally, I don’t care much for death.”

“Egad. Let me get a pencil.”

“Very funny. I mean, for the death penalty. Too much strain on the system.”

“The legal system or your system?”

“Everybody’s system. The doubts about whether the defendant did it, the pressure to conduct a perfect trial, everything.” He sniffed and drew himself up from Claire’s head. The air was cool. “Then, to tell the truth, I’m about sick to death of death. We’re all going to get there some day. No need to hurry things.”

Claire tilted her face up to him, and he kissed her eyelids, then the wings of her nose and her chin. As he put his hands over her breasts again, she moaned softly, cleared her throat, and spoke over his shoulder, slowing things down.