A change of gravity Page 5

  You court guys don't seem to know this. You've all been spoiled rotten, is what. "Do this. Do that. Do it right now," is what you tell them. "That'll fix it." And then, of course, they do it, and it happens. It gets fixed. Until you turn around and they see you're not looking their direction anymore. Then it gets unfixed again, just like it was before.

  "You guys got jail to offer. That's how come what you say goes. A person don't do what you tell him? His ass goes to jail. A person don't do what I tell her? Well, what'm I gonna do? Cut her money off?

  Sure, take her check away. And then you know what happens next? I'll tell you what happens, aw'toh-mat-tick-lee. Her ass goes right out on the street, because that's where she takes it, for sale for twenty dollars. And when she offers, suck off an undercover cop, and gets herself arrested, she tells the first judge she sees how it's all my fault. I cut her welfare off. What's a poor girl supposed to do? Is she supposed to starve7. And when that shit makes the papers, boy, and gets on the TV, guess whose ass goes on the line. M31 ass goes in the deli sheer. J come out cold cuts.

  "Now your Janet project, all right? I know you got a good heart, Amby, probably a generous one. But that don't make you smart. You just lemme tell you something, here, what you're up against. I told that girl, two hundred times, to get her self shaped up. And she tells me, two hundred times, she'll get to it right off. She will surely get to that. And the next time that I see her, what is it I see? Same old thing I saw before, looks just like she always did. Like she got left out in the rain all night or something'. Hell, not all night all year.

  You haven't got a project here; you got a career."

  "And I don't see why I can't do it, do this thing." Janet in the August morning was talking again about marriage. "People do it every day. In the paper all the time, I used to see it there, when I got the Sunday paper. All these people, getting married. So then, why can't I? Look at my mother. Jesus, look what she did, what my damned mother did to me. Went off and left me by myself? Nobody to fall back on?

  All by myself in this thing. But that didn't stop her. No, not at all. She could still get married, damn her. Sure, she could get married, if she wanted to. And she was no good at all. Well, so, I don't see why then I can't."

  Merrion could not respond without giving her some kind of reaction, but he did not want to lie to her or tell her what he thought. He knew from years of dealing with people like Janet how important hope was to the hopeless. His experience came mostly from dealing with hapless men, usually between twenty-five and forty-five; generally still hungover, unshaven and dirty after still another night in the familiar surroundings of the holding tank. Disgusted cops wearing rubber gloves had thrown them in there bodily after they had pissed in the street in broad daylight, again: yelled something obscene at a cop, again; vomited on a display-window, again; slid their filthy hands under the sneeze-baffle to rummage in the lettuce-tray in the McDonald's salad-bar, again; or insulted some woman, again.

  They weren't going to be improved much by the fresh thirty days in jail they now had to serve, again. He knew it and they knew it. But tradition nullified knowledge and established that they still must be exhorted, assured with ardent forcefulness that they must and therefore would emerge reformed. Almost all of them were traditionalists too, made so by repetition of the ritual. Just as drearily convinced by much experience as their exhorters were that miraculous transformation wasn't going to happen this time either, once again they summoned up the strength to reject the certainty, once more trying very hard to believe what they knew to be untrue.

  The few who didn't make the effort were the ones who no longer gave a shit. In a way their resignation was a farewell present to Merrion, a kind of dreadful peace; once he could see that one of his regulars had given up hope entirely, he knew he was not going to have the sad duty of seeing him many more times. He resettled himself in his excellent chair and reminded himself that whatever the merits of the matter might be, he was still smarter than Janet. He did not say anything.

  Satisfied by his silence that if she'd been in danger, she'd escaped from it, Janet veered back to the subject of routine. "They live mostly by themselves, most of the time, you know? Like sometimes they might have someone stay over, a Friday night or for the weekend, or something. Sometimes for longer. But they live by themselves most of the time."

  She stopped again, craftily, and waited, to see if he would speak. She was still waiting, but now not very confidently, for Merrion to say something that would give her an idea about why he had asked her to come to his office in the courthouse at 9:15 on a Saturday in August, when she would have assumed it would be closed. When he didn't she talked some more, to fill up the dead air. When she was alone, she prepared for such occasions by talking to herself. Wherever she might be on her way to the store every day; out taking a walk; sitting on a bench in the park; exploring the supermarket again Janet talked to herself, a low, unceasing mutter people did look at her funny sometimes, the bastards, but she tried to pay no attention to them.

  When she was by herself there were none of those official silences she really didn't like. She was nicer than most of the people who had called her in over the years: when she asked a question, she was polite enough to acknowledge it, at least with a shrug.

  Merrion gazed at Janet and wondered idly where the two of them fitted among the planets and the stars onto the infinite curve of the universe, and why it had become necessary that from time to time they occupy adjoining places.

  "My front window," Janet said. "You just can't help it, noticing things, you've got a window like that." Her third-floor unit, number 14, sitting atop number 7 on the second floor, number 1 on the first one bedroom, bathtub with shower, small kitchen, living-room dining-room combo had a picture window over-looking Eisenhower Boulevard. "Sixteen-ninety-two Eisenhower Boulevard."

  She said it somewhat ruefully but defiantly, too, almost proudly, as though aware that the address conveyed a kind of raffish distinction Merrion would recognize. "You must know something about where I live.

  You got me in there, didn't you? Right? I've got that part right, haven't I?"

  She had it right. "I got you in there," he said. "I called the super for you, what, almost a year ago now. Lucky for you, that one unit was open and the guy owed me a favor, something I did for his kid."

  That was all true. Merrion had sidetracked Steve Brody's damned kid safely away from a crack-cocaine prosecution into a private, long-term, residential drug-rehab program run under a state contract in Stowe, thus sparing the kid a criminal record (for the time being, anyway, Merrion'd thought, not expecting much more than that) and opening up the apartment where Mark'd been living with a girlfriend as useless as he was. But it wasn't all of the truth. Among the many other things Merrion knew about that building was the fact that the Town of Canterbury on the last business day of every month by check drawn on the Canterbury Trust Co. disbursed $385 in public funds payable to Valley Better Residences, co Canterbury Trust Co." Canterbury, Massachusetts, in full payment for the coming month's rental of that apartment to Janet LeClerc (until the town had changed over to direct deposit of payments to vendors via electronic transfer, the cancelled checks were returned to the town every month stamped on the back by the bank 'credit to account of Fourmen's Realty Trust Valley Better Residences').

  Merrion's familiarity with the location went back almost a quarter of the century. The building was still new when he first visited it late in 1970, completed earlier that year. F.D. Barrows Construction, the same low-bidding jerry-builders that had constructed the new district courthouse thirteen years before, had put it up. The low-grade bricks were un weathered The cheap mortar of the pointing was neat, regular and even. The newness concealed the shabbiness for a while, but Merrion, cursorily inspecting it as he went in and out of it, once or twice a week three or four times if Larry had been having a bad stretch — week after week, looked on as the weather wore the mask off.

  Larry had gone to the che
ap brand-new place to die. The whole world itselfd been pretty new then, as far as Merrion'd been concerned. He contemplated it and he saw that it was good. It looked to have been much better built than 1692 Ike, and at the age of thirty he had reason to believe he was soon going to have it on a string.

  THREE

  Merrion visited Lane the first time on Saturday, the day after Christmas, bringing a holiday fifth of Old Granddad. It was one of three Christmas bottles from lawyers allocated to each of the three assistants by Richie Hammond. He reserved both big baskets of fruit from abstemious attorneys balancing their strong beliefs in temperance against their disinclination to lose their ready access to continuances of cases for which clients had not paid and forgiveness for late filings and the other nine jugs for himself. Protesting the injustice to Hammond by reminding him that Lane had split the take evenly, Merrion had learned by chance that Larry was living alone. "Yeah,"

  Hammond said with satisfaction, locking up the office at 2:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve and collecting the last of his gift parcels from the oak bench beside the door. "Thought being generous one day a year'd make people forget what a bastard he was all the rest of it. And what did it get him? Not much. Now he's up there by himself on the boulevard, all by his lonesome, gone and forgotten as well."

  "What the hell're you talking about?" Merrion said. "Larry's got a big family, six or eight kids. He lives with his wife down in Indian Orchard in the same little house they raised all those kids in. "One bathroom and ten people trying to get in it."

  "Well, his family got wise to him," Hammond said gaily. "Told him either he hadda lay off a the grog, or go live by himself somewhere else. Serves the prick right, you ask me."

  Merrion had felt sharply embarrassed not to have found out earlier. He had not made any effort to contact Lane in the month that had passed since Larry, having no choice in the face of Carries family power, had turned the chief clerk's job over to Richie, going on what was called terminal leave the week after the four-day Thanksgiving break. He thought it strange that Larry had not telephoned him either, but knew guiltily that did not excuse his own omission. Initially suspicious, as he was of everyone, Larry after a year or two of daily scrutiny had accepted Merrion as 'a fairly decent guy, once you get to know the kid, make allowances for him," and made him his office protege, teaching him what the job really meant and entailed, grooming him someday to take it. To Hilliard Merrion admitted: "I owe Larry. I should've shown more respect."

  When the court had opened with Larry as its first clerk, the title of magistrate was not included in the statutory definition of the office that he held. But that was in fact the job he had soon begun to do, years before the law was changed. He had started exercising magisterial powers when he and Charles Spring, the first judge to preside in Canterbury, soon after taking office deduced that Spring's job would become a lot simpler and less time-consuming if the judge informally ceded to his more-than-willing clerk and comp licit fellow-investor enough actual power to decide de facto Small Claims civil matters applications for summary process brought by landlords, tradesmen and public utilities against people who had failed to pay their bills. Lane began to hold what he and the judge called 'preliminary screening hearings," putatively to enable the judge to conduct 'official sessions' more expeditiously, 'saving everybody's time."

  The bill-collectors immediately perceived that this procedure was by far the quickest, surest and most efficient way to get judgments against stubborn debtors. They learned to agree to allow "Judge Spring to decide the case and sign the judgment on the basis of the memo I'll write up of this session, and then after you've seen his ruling, if you have no objection, he will sign a judgment. If you do have an objection, all you'll have to do is state it and he'll hear the case."

  If within three days neither party entered an objection to Lane's memo, a judgment tracking the content of the memo was entered on the docket, carrying the "Chas. Spring' signature Lane had expertly forged.

  When there was an objection, experience soon demonstrated, the judge, after rather brusquely holding the full hearing requested by a disappointed litigant tended to decide the case against that party, disappointing him again. As that understanding gained currency, the formal debt-collection process became even speedier in the Canterbury District Court. The grateful lawyers thought it fitting to be openly generous at Christmas and eager to pick up bar-tabs when they saw Lane in The Tavern after a hard day on the job.

  From the beginning Lane was publicly forthright about the civil powers he'd annexed as well the power to dispose of minor criminal matters; experience on the civil side revealed to the legally savvy the meritorious economies of time and expense of the Lane approach and led to its adaptation for quick and quiet resolution of minor criminal matters especially motor vehicle violations, but no one involved saw any need to publicize that. "Phone bills; oil bills; light bills; gas bills: most people've got no idea what a mountain of chickenshit we get every day in this building," Larry said. "Until he took the judgeship, Chassy was one of them."

  Spring as a somewhat-affected teenager had formed the lifetime habit of abbreviating his given name as "Chas.," when he signed it in black ink with a gold-nib bed Waterman fountain pen, copying the steel-point signature reproduced as attestation of ironclad security on the cover of every policy issued by the company his namesake grandfather had founded in 1884, Pioneer Valley Insurance. His seventh-grade teacher, amused by the mannerism, had taken it at face-value, applying the durable nickname.

  "Chassy'd always been a rich kid; what'd he know? Bills came into his house and went out the next day, paid. His daddy never had to go to court and have a judge yell at him, tell he'd better pay Ralph at the Gulf station down in Ingleside for the rebuilt engine in his car; fifteen bucks out of his paycheck every week until he paid the whole three hundred. Tell him if he didn't do it, Ralph was gonna get the car. If the engine in Chassy's father's car started burning oil, Chassy's daddy knew what to do. Nothing to it: he went down to DeSaulnier Chrysler-Plymouth, picked out a nice new Imperial hardtop and wrote out a company check. When Chassy finished law school and came home to practice law, he didn't have to run himself ragged, finding a job, get himself all tuckered out. He went to work where Dad worked, in the general counsel's office of the insurance company Dad'd inherited from Granddad.

  "So, when Chassy became a district court judge he was shocked by what he discovered. Up 'til then he'd thought a civil matter was something that you did in superior or federal court. You hated to, but you had no choice. Major borrower'd begun defaulting on six-figure construction-bond payments. You had to protect your investors. It wasn't something that happened to you, because you'd gotten more than two months in arrears on your TV installment payments. "And anyway, what the hell are these things, these "installment payments"? Don't people have to pay for what they get in your store before you let 'em take it home?"

  "Chassy just had no idea how many people there were who didn't pay their bills for the plain and simple reason that they couldn't. They didn't make enough money to buy all the things they thought they really oughta have, but they'd gone out and bought them anyway. The first month or so we're in business here he thought the reason that we had such a volume of Small Claims business was that Arthur and Roy Carnes'd been telling the truth when they talked their buddies in the legislature into setting up this court for their very own. It was true: the four towns had really needed it. But since he thought it was all backlog, pent-up demand, he assumed in time wed clear it up. Then when we didn't, because it wasn't, he didn't know which way was up.

  "Instead of getting less, we got more. Once the plaintiffs and their lawyers finally found out we were here. It was like the tide coming in. Chassy finally realized something new hadda be done.

  "It isn't easy to do something new in any courthouse, this one especially. A lot of the people in here: once they got to know Chassy a little, they decided they probably were never going to like him.

  There were da
ys when I was one of 'em. He could be a fussy bastard, really get on your nerves. And he treated Lennie Judge Cavanaugh, when he first came aboard, awful young but still and all, he was another judge like he was shit. Naturally Lennie didn't like him very much, and he had company. That was why when Chassy wanted to get something done in his courthouse, it could take a pretty long time. Even when everybody else could see it was a good idea, as his ideas generally were, they were in no hurry to see it get done.

  "So we had to fix the problem with Small Claims by ourselves no help from anyone else. We decided that in the afternoons I'd become a junior judge. I'd hear all the petty civil cases. That'd free up about three or four hours every day for Chassy after lunch to do what he really liked to do, and was good at doing, too: watching the stock-ticker, following the market, picking out what stocks he thought we should be investing in with all this money we now had. Which me and Fiddle and Roy naturally wanted him to be doing with his time, just as much as he did. Much better having him out there making us richer'n to have him sittin' on his ass here in the court all afternoon, hollering at a buncha poor dead-beats whose chief money problem was they didn't make enough to pay their bills.

  "So what we would do was have the normal sessions in the morning, until noon or as long's it took. Then unless we had a criminal matter go to trial, the afternoon and we all tried very hard around here to make sure we wouldn't; we had those police prosecutors and the defense lawyers beltin' out plea-bargains left and right as soon as we broke for lunch Chassy'd grab his coat-n'-hat and run out the door, jump in his Chrysler and high-tail it down to the brokers in Springfield. The rest of the day that's where he'd be, happy as a pig in shit at Tucker, Anthony and R. L. Day, down there on State Street; in his element. It was home to him there; he belonged. His daddy'd started taking him there when he was a little boy. And because he was happy, and also outta here, everybody in the courthouse who didn't like him was happy too. Me especially, of course, because he was making me money."