With Teri’s last remark, it was apparent he was losing his sense of humor with her.
“Knock it off, Aunt Teri. It’s not Dad’s money, it’s mine. I’ve made twice what he did.”
Even Teri knew she’d gone too far. She threw a wrist and her bangles at him but said nothing more. Instead she thumped her cane on the floor and tried to pull herself to her feet. Hal, ever loyal, clambered up to grab her by the elbow. Her hand groped in the air until she caught him by the cheek and kissed him, leaving a vivid imprint.
“You’re a good boy, Hal. My number one nephew.” An old joke, of course. She had no other nephew. She reached after Evon. “Here. You walk me out. He’s too important.” Evon substituted her arm for Hal’s, despite his mild protests.
They were no more than thirty feet from Hal’s door when the old lady stopped. She averted her face, trying to find the little fragment of sight she retained so she could see Evon.
“You have to make him stop this. This will come to grief for everyone.”
“Ms. Kronon, I’m an employee. No one tells your nephew what to do.”
“So you say, but he likes you. He values your judgment.”
“Well, so far, there’s been more to his suspicions than I would have guessed. I have no basis to tell him to stop at this point.”
Authoritative as always, Teri said, “Paul had nothing to do with killing Dita. Aphrodite wasn’t just Hal’s sister. She was my niece and I loved her. Don’t you think I’d be the first to want Paul punished, if he had any hand in her murder?”
Evon walked Teri to the ZP reception area, where German, who served as both her caregiver and her butler, was waiting. When the elevator arrived, he stepped inside and held the door for Teri, but she didn’t move, angling her head again to see Evon.
“You’re the lesbian, aren’t you?”
Evon still didn’t like being known that way. It said both too much and too little. But Teri was an old lady. Evon managed a polite nod. Teri stared a second and took a step closer, so that Evon noticed how thick the powder was in the channels engraved in Teri’s face.
“Wish I’d been born in your time,” she said quietly, then felt with the crook to make her way into the elevator.
13
Du Bois Lands had been hired in the PA’s office about three years after Paul, and ended up as the junior prosecutor in the courtroom where Paul held the first trial chair. D.B. was a good lawyer-exact in his thinking, a better writer than most of the deputy prosecutors, and a passionate and charming courtroom advocate. Paul and he enjoyed working together, and spent time outside the office. Sofia was particularly fond of Du Bois’s wife, Margo, a pediatrician, and even after Paul left the PA’s office, the couples saw each other once or twice a year.
Then in 1993, D.B.’s uncle, Sherman Crowthers, had been indicted for extracting bribes as a judge in the Common Pleas section of the Superior Court, where personal-injury lawsuits were heard. Judge Crowthers was an American tragedy. An all-Mid Ten tight end at the U, who had grown up picking walnuts on a plantation in Georgia, he became one of the Tri-Cities’ premier criminal defense lawyers and a leading figure in the civil rights movement. His first triumph was successfully representing Dr. King, who was arrested here after leading open housing marches in 1965.
No one ever really understood why Sherm had fallen under the venal spell of the chief judge in Common Pleas, Brendan Tuohey. Sherm lived high-the black nouveau riche thing, not much different from the Greek nouveau riche thing Paul saw growing up-but he’d made his fortune before going on the bench. One friend said Sherm’s explanation was twisted but simple: ‘Mama didn’t raise no fool.’ He refused to be a black man who got less while many of the white judges around him turned their seats on the bench into ATMs.
As a plaintiff’s lawyer who made his living in those courtrooms, Paul had heard the same tales as everyone else. Appearing before certain judges said to be part of Tuohey’s ring, Paul worried that the defense lawyers might slip something into the judge’s drawer, but he figured he would be OK if he got to a jury. And he was-more than OK. He got good cases, usually through his Easton Law School classmates in big firms who wouldn’t soil themselves with contingency matters, worked the files carefully and rang the bell hard, several times.
In 1991, Paul won his first big verdict, eighteen million dollars in a trial before Sherm Crowthers. Paul represented a concert violinist who lost an arm on the light-rail when the doors closed on his Stradivarius and dragged the musician several hundred yards down the track. Days after the jury had come back, Paul was in the courthouse and bumped into Sherm, who more or less steered Paul, with an arm like a tree branch, into the private corridor outside his chambers. Post-trial motions were still pending, in which the defense was trying to overturn the verdict, but Paul assumed that the judge wanted no more than to offer congratulations on a job well done, until he pushed Paul into the small clerk’s alcove in his chambers and closed the door. Sherm was huge, six foot six and well over three hundred pounds by now, with a storm of overgrown gray eyebrows and intense yellowed eyes.
‘Motherfucker,’ he said to Paul, ‘you don’t seem to understand what’s goin on here.’
Paul, who didn’t think he scared easily any more, was too terrified by what was happening to answer. The judge then told Paul that he had to try the food at Crowthers’s sister’s restaurant in the North End.
Quietly asking around afterward, Paul learned that Judith Crowthers reputedly bagged for her brother, tending the cash register at her thriving soul food restaurant in her abundant purple eye shadow and dangling earrings, and accepting without comment the envelopes certain lawyers handed over as they paid their lunch checks. Paul had no thought of dealing with something like this without talking it over with Cass. They met two days later in one of the tiny whitewashed attorneys’ rooms at the Hillcrest Correctional Facility. By now, Paul understood the grim operating mode of the whole corrupt system in Common Pleas. His fee on the case was close to four million dollars-the ten or twenty thousand he was expected to hand over was next to nothing. If he refused, he had no doubt Crowthers would set aside the verdict, reversing key evidentiary rulings, and order another trial, which Paul almost surely would lose. If he reported Sherm to the authorities, it would be Paul’s word against the judge’s, who would claim he had done no more than recommend his sister’s restaurant. Worse, Paul would be a marked man whom Chief Tuohey and his cabal would do their best to drive out of the courthouse.
‘Fuck him anyway,’ Cass concluded. After years in Hillcrest, they both knew the perils of kowtowing to bullies. It never ended. You stood up. But didn’t snitch.
Paul filed a motion the next day, asking Judge Crowthers to disqualify himself from presiding further on the case, because of ‘inappropriate ex parte contact,’ which went otherwise unexplained. There were half a dozen people who’d seen the judge with his arm around Paul, drawing him toward his chambers. If it came to a showdown, Paul would get some backing. Rather than go through that, Crowthers withdrew from the case, but for the next two years, whenever Paul’s firm filed a new lawsuit in the Common Pleas section, it ended up before one of Tuohey’s judges who, without exception, granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss the complaint. Eventually, they referred out any new matters in Kindle County and began trying to develop their practice in the outlying counties.