A change of gravity Read online

  A change of gravity

  George V Higgins

  George V Higgins

  A change of gravity

  ONE

  On the afternoon of the second Thursday in November, US District Court Judge Barrie Foote as she preferred ate her lunch alone, reading her New York Times. She sat at the head of the long polished mahogany table in the library of her chambers in the courthouse on Main Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, luxuriating in her daily forty minutes of silence. When she had finished eating tuna fish with fat-free mayonnaise, shredded lettuce and tomato chunks in a pita pocket; Diet Coke; large coffee, black she picked up the telephone handset and said,

  "Ask Sandy to come in, please."

  She gathered up the waxed paper, flimsy paper napkins and unused packets of salt and pepper that had come with the sandwich and stuffed them back into the bag along with the hollow red plastic straw that Spiro, the counterman at Dino's Deli always included, so that she might stir into her coffee either the two packets of sugar or the two packets of Sweet 'n Low that she also never used and lobbed the parcel with her left hand in a low arc over the table, applying a little backspin, faultlessly thunking it into the metal wastebasket in the corner. "It's a three, my friends, an' nothin' but net," she said softly. "Crowd in this place's goin' wild."

  Two years before, during the interval between her appointment by President Clinton and congressional confirmation and her swearing-in, she had told an interviewer from the Springfield Union News that she thought 'nurture outweighs nature in the makeup of the adult animal it's supposed to, anyway. If you're born lucky, and you pay attention, it does. Overlook either one, odds are you're dead meat.

  "Nature first. We're born with what our parents' genes give us. They couldn't do much about what they gave us to inherit. So that made me then a light-skinned African-American female infant. But a lucky one.

  I came into the kind of upper-middle-class world that your daddy can afford to give you if he could bring the ball up on the right like nobody's business, back when he was in his prime. His best years out on the floor in the NBA were over before the big money really started raining down, but the front office always treated him well, before and after he retired. My father's had a good life. And my mom didn't do too bad either."

  The interviewer identified her parents: Reginald Carpenter, point guard for the Fort Wayne Pistons in the late '40s and early '50s, and Evelyn Field, the Northern Thrush, a regular headliner at the Drake, Palmer House, and Ambassador West grills well into the mid-to-late '60s, 'her signature song a slow, torchy arrangement of "You Belong to Me" done especially for her by Mel Tome."

  "Which in turn made the odds pretty good that if I didn't get sick, or hurt in a car crash or something, I would grow up, and if I did I'd be a light-skinned black woman, and in fact that's what I did.

  "Because my father and my mother were comparatively well-off, in the course of growing up I got a good education, private schools, music lessons and so forth. Which meant that when I met my future first husband, we were both in college. Headed, we expected, for professional careers. When I graduated from Brown back in Nineteen-sixty-five Ray was two years ahead of me; Providence, Sixty-three if you had that respectable kind of life in mind you did things by the book. And that was especially true if your skin didn't happen to be white. If you knew what was good for you, anyway and Ray and I both did. Fourteen years later when we parted company, I'd built my whole legal career and reputation as Barrie Foote, not Carpenter, so when we got divorced I was willing enough to let Raymond loose but not to let go my share of his name. I kept the education that my parents gave to me, and I kept Ray's last name as well, 'cause that's how and what I became what I am now.

  "Professionally, that is, as a partner at Butler and Corey, first female black lawyer they ever hired. Also the first black to ever make partner. Both of those events in my life without doubt have left deep imprints on me. I'm certainly not the same woman I was when I came east to Brown; not the same as the one who came out of Georgetown Law so long ago, needing a job where her husband was, which happened to be here in Springfield.

  "Ray'd gone to work at Valley Bank right out of the Wharton School. And I was able to get a very good job here, not only because Ray'd made his share of contacts around town but also because I had one of my own. I knew Bob Pooler from Georgetown. He laid the groundwork for me at Butler, Corey. The firm didn't hire me because I'd known Bob in law school he was two years ahead of me but the fact that I knew Bob had a lot to do with how I got the first interview.

  "So that's what I mean about nurture. Everything that's happened to me's made an impact on me, made me a different person from the one I used to be. I think at least I hope I've become a better one. One who got that way because she learns from experience. What I've learned and the people I've known are parts of what I am today, because of the way I grew up."

  The interview had taken place in the dramatically modern soaring field stone-and-redwood home Foote shared with her second husband, the internationally known artist, Eric Hedges. It was set on a ledge off a private road off South Street near Tillotson Hill overlooking the Cobble Hill Reservoir in Blandford. "Eric and I first met at a solo show of his at the Ainsworth Gallery in Boston, seems like it must've been a hundred years ago. Ray'd gotten involved with a group of businessmen and banking people here and down in Boston who were trying to buy a dilapidated old racetrack out in Hancock. There'd been a big scandal. Word went around the New York Mafia was behind the original deal. Some people went to jail, and those who didn't, the people who'd originally built the track, ended up going into bankruptcy. No one could find a buyer, so it ended up the town took the property for unpaid taxes. And there it sat, weeds growing all over, buildings falling apart.

  "Ray and the people he was with were convinced it still could be a money maker. So their idea was to buy it cheap, rebuild it, and tiien either sell it to someone else or else reopen it and run it themselves.

  Warren Corey, one of the senior partners at Butler, Corey, was involved with the group, and that year I was working for him. All of us were in Boston for something connected with it, licensing hearings or something, and after the hearing I went to the gallery. I'd always admired Eric's work, and that's how we met. I'm the only one who gained anything from that racetrack project. The deal itself fell through.

  "Now Eric, he looks at things from the artist's perspective, and that's had an influence on me, affected how I see the world. And again, that's what I mean. About how we're the sum of our experience; what we are."

  The text of the interview was illustrated by several photographs, one of her in a judicial robe, another of her at her desk in her new chambers, three showing her at home, casually dressed in a tawny cowled sweater and fitted jeans, her black hair in a shiny page-boy framing her slightly feline face. Eric had said she'd done a good job and should be very pleased, and she had said: "The photographer did a good job; I grant you that. But I don't think I did. Do I really talk like that, say famous things like that, to people I don't know? Cripes, I sound like such a phony there, like the way Ray used to, accepting one of his semi-annual awards for being such a wonderful house nigger."

  "It does the job, though," Eric had said, and he had been correct. The profile made her seem to deserve the distinction she had achieved.

  Sandy Robey opened the door and came in, a file folder in his hand, deducing from the thunk, the fact she was still seated at the table and the pleased expression on her face what she'd just done with the lunch bag "You know, Judge, you really should let us get you one of those wastebasket-backboards," he said.

  Robey tried hard to be cheerful; preparing to turn forty was a sour portion for him. He believed that at one-six
ty-five he was about twelve or fifteen pounds overweight. His wife disagreed — much too gaily, he thought saying he ought to lose closer to twenty. The Rogaine with minoxidil that Foote had encouraged him to obtain and apply two weeks before had not visibly arrested, much less reversed, the gradual but alarming recession of his coarse reddish hair. His dentist had admonished him to 'see a periodontist for attention to what he diagnosed as advancing gum disease that otherwise would leave him toothless before fifty, 'unless I have the good sense to die first."

  "Backboard, huh," she said, 'what do I need with a backboard?

  Swishers're all I put up. Now what kind of nonsense you bringin' here that's gonna get us all distracted this fine autumn afternoon from already-pressin' business?"

  Robey had put the folder on the table, sat down and tapped it once.

  "Just one small matter, Your Honor," he said. "Shouldn't take much time at all. US Attorney's got a balky witness. This grand-jury, corruption investigation he's only been hinting at discreetly to the papers for about a year or so. Guy's lawyer says if they bring his client in, he's going to tell him to claim he'll incriminate himself if he talks. The US Attorney's granted him Use immunity but he says that isn't good enough. Says if it's not Transactional, the US Attorney'll use the testimony to get leads to other evidence, then turn around and use that to cut his client's head off. So the US Attorney the assistant's Mister Warmth, Arnie Bissell wants you to give him and his guy a hearing, tell them the USA doesn't lie to people and so Use is good enough and his guy has gotta talk."

  "Bissell wants me to tell this lawyer and his client that the US Attorney's office never fibs?" she said, widening her eyes. "I do that and God'll surely strike me dead."

  Robey laughed. "Bissell says it shouldn't take long ten minutes at the most."

  "Ten minutes7." she said. "Why should it take any minutes? Just do it like always. Have him send up a written order and I'll sign the thing on the spot. Then have him threaten the guy. If he stays coy, then we'll have a hearing. What you and I want to do here this afternoon is get back to the late Mister Nick Hardigrew's Really Lousy Last Weekend."

  "Mind telling me what you thought of what got put in this morning?"

  Robey said. "When the girl said he had his hands folded in front of him, and his head down, like he's saying grace? And he stayed that way, all the way down?"

  "I don't know," the judge said. "Either he was saying his prayers or else he'd gone into some kind of trance. Blissed-out completely. Or maybe he was paralyzed; panicked and froze when he realized what was happening. He had to've known it when his chute didn't open. And to've known what he had to do next. This wasn't his first jump. Why didn't he pop the back-up? I suppose at that velocity it's pretty hard to hear what somebody else's yelling at you, "Pull the reserve chute, for God's sake." So maybe he couldn't hear the others. But she said that she could hear them yelling — that's why she didn't yell herself.

  Makes it seem as though he should've heard them too."

  "Unless he didn't want to," Robey said. "Maybe what happened was what he intended to have happen. Nobody we've heard yet seems to really want to come right out and say it, but isn't that where they're leading us? That the reason why the main chute didn't open when it should've, when he was clear of the plane, was that he'd made sure it wouldn't.

  That there wasn't anything wrong with the job the packers at the jump-center did. The reason it didn't open was that sometime between the time that they packed it and checked it and said it was fine was that he'd done something to it himself. Sabotaged it. So he knew it wasn't going to open. He'd made sure of it. All he had to do was just have the will-power to keep his hands together until the ground came up and hit him. Unless he'd sabotoged the reserve too, of. course, but we've got no evidence of that either."

  "Suicide," she said, reflectively. "He meant it to happen. Not an accident at all. This whole on-and-off romance he'd been having with sky-diving, for how many years was it now, two or three? My notes're out on the bench."

  "I think it was three," Robey said. "Which was another thing that didn't add up. He seems to've been sort of casual about it. The testimony Tuesday, didn't one of the witnesses from the jump-center testify this would've been his eighth or ninth jump? Seven or eight of them uneventful, before the one that killed him. Not that many, really, considering how long he'd been at it. It wasn't an obsession with him, like it usually seems to be with people who come back after the first time they try it."

  "Yeah," she said, 'the fellow did say that. The majority never jump twice. They're thrill-seekers, kind of people who dare each other to do things, usually while they're having several beers. Young, most of them. Try it once and say "Oh-kay, that's it; now I've been there and done that." And then never do it again. The real sky-divers're the ones that get hooked and stay with it, like skiers. Jump every chance they get, ten or twenty times a year. Our absent party doesn't fit either profile.

  "But still, he's qualified; he's allowed to jump without a buddy close enough to try to save him in mid-air. Which he has to be able to do if he's going to be able to kill himself. The day the chute didn't open just happened to be the day that he picked to do what he had in mind all the time.

  "All right, find me a motive. Why make it look like an accident? There was no incentive in his insurance. Million-dollar policy for accidental death; isn't small-change, no, but his coverage'd been in effect for over twenty years. Suicide-exemption clause expired eighteen years ago. No motive there to fake an accident.

  "Did he have some kind of horrible disease? If he did he was the only one who knew about it. Family didn't; doctor didn't; none of his friends did either.

  "A scandal about to break, he chooses death over disgrace? Possible, I suppose, but we've got no evidence of one.

  "His business was in good shape. Nurserymen and people in the landscaping business probably felt it just about the same as everybody else does when the economy was flat, few years ago, but his seems to've come through it okay.

  "So the only reason he could possibly've had to do it then would've been chronic, severe depression. Unipolar mental illness.

  "You could infer that here, I guess. I suppose in any case of suicide, you almost have to think the poor bastard must've been miserably depressed. Literally out of his mind. But if Hardigrew was that far gone, wouldn't he've shown it in some way? Started drinking too much?

  Become withdrawn? You'd think so, but he didn't. He spent years in a bottomless Hell, getting ready to do this unspeakable thing, and during all that time none of the people who knew him and had known him for years: not a single one of them, had the slightest hint of what he was going through?

  "It doesn't make sense. So depressed you want to kill yourself, and finally you do it, but not so depressed that anyone who loves you, or sees you every day, even notices?"

  "I don't know," Robey said, 'but it does seem like that's what the defense's driving at."

  "Well, they've still got a lot of work ahead of them," she said. "Far as I'm concerned anyway. There would've been a clue. Something you could look at now and say: "Hey that was kind of strange. Someone should've noticed that. Taken his car keys away from him. Had him put away, or at least put him to bed. Given him some mood-elevators; jacked him up on feel-good pills."

  "There is no such clue. He got up that morning down in Suffield, self-destruction on his mind, showered and dressed like he always did; had a good breakfast after that. Again: just like he always did. Man's almost fifty, same age I am now. By the time you've reached this stage in life, made something of yourself — this is a successful man here, came from modest circumstances and did pretty well for himself you've developed a full set of habits. A lot of the things that we do are repetitive, have to be done again every day, over and over again.

  Habits simplify your life. You know what to do, it's automatic. Don't have to do so much thinking.

  "That's what our Nicholas did that last day; he followed his regular habits. He seemed to
be in good spirits. Showers and gets dressed and eats. He goes out of his ten-room house on an acre-plus of prime land, so we're told, got to be worth at least three or four hundred thousand dollars, in the neighborhood it's in. This looks like one happy guy.

  He gets into his bright-yellow Saab convertible, drives himself up to Barnes Airport in Westfield; he's signed up for a gorgeous summer Sunday of sky-diving. Several times before he's done this without any mishap whatsoever, not even a sprained ankle. But this time it's going to be different. Today he's going to kill himself.

  "If you think that, then there wasn't any accident or any negligence involved here. When he stepped out of that airplane, in his mind he was doing a perfectly normal, rational thing.

  "I can't believe it. Why go to all this trouble? There're plenty of places you can drive to and walk up to and jump off and kill yourself, if that's what you want to do. Don't need any training to do that. All the lessons; the classroom instruction; the tethered training jumps from that steel tower they've got up there: what is it, three or four hundred feet off the ground, and they take you up there and you jump7.

  Forget it. I'm finished right there. I wouldn't dare to climb that high, never mind jump off. You want me to conclude he did it all in order to kill himself in style? All the supervised practice jumps with the instructors: everything was preliminary to the big day when Nick Hardigrew got himself killed? Nobody was negligent? No one failed to exercise due care? It wasn't anyone's fault?"

  "Well, maybe," she said. "I suppose we never know what hell people could be going through behind their eyes where we can't see it. What they might do to stop the pain they're in." She shook her head. "I can tell you one thing though: The more I hear of this one, the gladder I am it didn't go jury-waived. Let those good people figure it out. I don't envy them for a minute." Then she said: "Well, 're we ready to go now? Tell them to bring down the jury."