Page 43 of Fifty-Fifty

Harper and I stopped with just a few people ahead of us in the crowd.

‘I’ve been a dishwasher, short-order cook, paperboy, the youngest African American Captain in the United States Military, a law clerk, a lawyer and a judge. If anything, my career has been going backwards for fifty years. The best job I ever had was washing those dishes in Rocko’s All American Diner. I was

thirteen when I got that job. I learned everything I needed to know about it in under thirty seconds. Plates would come into the kitchen dirty, and it was my job to make sure there were enough clean plates to go back out. There was no room for ambiguity. The plates were clean, or they were not. As a lawyer my job got more complicated, and when I took a seat on the bench it got worse still.’

I looked around the room. What had begun as polite laughter, believing Harry was making a joke, petered out. There were now a lot of stern faces among the

audience of lawyers and judges, staring back at Harry. Some in disgust. Some in disbelief.

And one, in anger.

Judge Stone had stepped off the small stage, and he now stood beside Wesley Dreyer, Assistant DA. Dreyer watched Judge Stone closely, as if he was reading

his every gesture, sensing his emotion. Like a card player in a poker game. With lawyers like Dreyer, every conversation is a game – and the only thing at stake was what he could get out of it. And you didn’t need to be a cold reader to spot the disdain and the rising aggression in Stone’s expression.

‘As Judge Stone takes my place on the bench I have some advice for him,’

said Harry, turning now and looking at Stone directly.

‘I have tried to be fair, to uphold the law and the constitution and discharge my duty to the people of this city. I’ve done my time. And now it feels like getting out of jail. I want you, Judge Stone, to be better than me, and I mean that.

We all need to do better. The people of New York deserve no less. Thank you all for being here. I’ll see you in the bar.’

Harry stepped away from the podium to staggered applause. It was a strange speech. I’d been to one retirement party before, for Harry’s old buddy Judge Folcher. It had been filled with congratulatory talk, war stories and much back-slapping. Harry wasn’t like that. He carried the weight of his responsibility like he’d carried injured GIs to safety in the last year of the Vietnam conflict. Harry had one quality that didn’t sit well with judicial office – he cared. He cared about the victims of crime, and the defendant. Very few people in this world are truly, irredeemably bad. They’ve been messed up, by drugs or alcohol or life. Harry saw almost everyone in his court as a victim. That shit sticks to parts of your soul. It adheres and lingers no matter how hard you try to chip it away with rules, professional ethics or better still – bourbon.

Harry spotted me and Harper, shook hands briefly with well wishers as he passed through the crowd headed for us. Before he made it across the room, we

were joined by unwelcome company.

‘Unusual speech,’ said a voice beside me. I turned and saw Judge Stone.

Dreyer stood next to him, both men wearing game faces. If Harry carried compassion and humanity with him in every decision he made on the bench, Stone provided the justice system with the balance some say it needed. He was not a merciful man. He’d been a judge for ten plus years, but his first case was still talked about. He’d refused to accept the plea agreement the DA had arranged, and sent a homeless mother of five to jail for six months. Her crime was snatching a hotdog from a street vendor. Her kids were all in the social services system, and she had been trying desperately to get an apartment and a

job so she could get them back. When she stole the hotdog she hadn’t eaten for

three days. It was her first offense. Under the plea deal she would’ve been sentenced to time served (twenty-one hours in custody from time of arrest) plus probation.

She hung herself in her cell, on the second night of the six-month sentence Stone handed down.

Stone came into court the next day, and while in his chambers he told his clerk he’d read the news reports on the woman’s suicide. He said, ‘That’s one less cockroach in the world.’ Clerks talk. Every judge knows this. Stone was a cold, racist prick and God help you if you had to appear in his court, and he wanted

everyone to know it. The clerk told the story and word got around.

He had a long, pale face with dry skin that always looked as if it was coated in a fine powder. His pink lips, by contrast, appeared constantly wet and shiny, and they hid his small rat-like teeth. He had eyes that could’ve been black pearls, and he gave off an odor that I couldn’t put my finger on. It was chemical, but not clean. Like a stink that he’d tried to mask with dead flowers.

He looked at me expecting a response. I turned away.

‘I said it was an unusual speech,’ said Stone, again.

‘I heard you the first time,’ I said. ‘I was being polite by not arguing with you.

It was honest. Harry’s devoted a lot of time to this job. He doesn’t want his work to be unraveled when you take over.’

Dreyer took a step closer, a look of anticipation on his face – like he was about to watch a car crash and he couldn’t wait to see the blood and carnage.

‘Do you think I’m not a worthy successor?’ said Stone.

He took some pleasure in his question – a smug look hung around his little black eyes.