Hardscrabble Road(100)
“What about if the person was committing a crime with the full knowledge of the judge whose order he was violating?”
“Wait now. Are you talking about a crime, or a court order?”
“Both.”
“They’re different things,” Russ said. “The court order brings in that friend-of-the-court thing. And the judge couldn’t be in on it.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he was, there would be no violation. Judges have broad discretion in their own courtrooms. Absent something like a mandatory minimums law, they can pretty much do what they want. I’ve seen murderers walk away with nothing but probation in my time, which is how we got mandatory minimums to begin with.”
“What if the judge said one thing in the courtroom on record and something else in chambers in private?”
“Doesn’t matter much, as long as you can prove what was said in chambers. Like I said, he’s got broad discretion to do what he wants. He’s supposed to. You write laws for the general rule, but you try particular cases, and they’ve all got quirks. I don’t like mandatory minimums, myself. They’re—”
“—Do you like Bruce Williamson?”
“Oh God,” Russ said.
“Oh God?”
“Some of us would like to see Judge Williamson go to Hollywood, get an agent, and enter the acting profession legitimately. The man is a disaster, Gregor. He’s never met a celebrity he doesn’t have an excuse for, and he doesn’t care what it is the excuse is needed to cover. Every defense lawyer with a prominent client in the city of Philadelphia does cartwheels trying to get Bruce Williamson on the case, and the worst of it is that when the person involved isn’t a celebrity, Williamson is the next best thing to a hanging judge. Is all this about Bruce Williamson? Because if it is, good luck.”
“No,” Gregor said, “it isn’t really about Bruce Williamson. It just starts there. Well, no, it starts with Drew Harrigan’s drug problem, I’d guess. Williamson isn’t the only one who has a celebrity fixation, is he?”
“You mean some of the uniformed police officers do? Yeah, they do. But that’s minor, compared to the havoc a judge can wreak.”
“It starts with Drew Harrigan’s drug problem,” Gregor said, “but I think it only gets to the point where a murder is imminent once Harrigan was arrested and brought in front of Williamson. And even then it would have been all right if Williamson had been another kind of judge.”
“You do realize you’re making no sense,” Russ said. “I’m making sense to myself,” Gregor said. “The problem with situations like this is that they look like puzzles, and they really aren’t. Not in the sense we usually use the term.”
“A mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Russ intoned.
Gregor picked up his fork and started in on dinner. “I met a very interesting person today,” he said. “Her name is Dr. Alison Standish, and she knows Tibor.”
FOUR
1
Ray Dean Ballard had heard the rumor in dozens of places over the years, and read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so when he started out that morning he had the feeling of doing something so rational, and so sure of success, it gave him no more worry than brushing his teeth. He didn’t bother to buy a map and work out the bus routes. He would have, ordinarily, but over the past week or so the whole charade he had been putting on for work had seemed more shallow and less necessary than ever. It shouldn’t be a requirement for employment, anywhere, or friendship, ever, to pretend to be something you are not. Exactly how he would go about being what he was, or even how he’d know that if he saw it, he wasn’t sure. It had been years since he had thought all this through. Even then, working it out on page after page of a narrow-ruled legal pad on the desk in his dorm room at Vanderbilt, he hadn’t come to any hard-and-fast conclusions. He was not the kind of person who found solace in revolutionary posturing. He wasn’t about to turn vocal Communist wannabe just because his father was the icon of global capitalism. He didn’t want to show up on the evening news with a Kalashnikov and a beret and declare the overthrow of oppression to be right around the corner. God only knew he didn’t want to plunge himself into that half-world of unhappy resentments populated by rich-girl socialist independent filmmakers and rich-boy volunteers for the Cuban Harvest. Hadn’t there been a time, somewhere back there, when it was possible to want to do good in the world just because you were unhappy that so many of your fellow citizens were doing badly? Hadn’t there been a time when everything, even the food you ate, wasn’t politics?