“Where’s Vaden?” I asked.
“Second row, over there.” Ray pointed. “Just sitting off by himself.”
Roger Vaden, I thought, had probably not seen the inside of a criminal courtroom since field trips in law school. He looked completely forlorn, lost, befuddled.
“This is not an encouraging sign,” I whispered.
“No shit.”
“This is just the preliminary hearing,” I said. “It’s boilerplate for now. F. Lee Bailey probably couldn’t get him off at this point.”
The door to the judge’s chambers bounced open and a flurry of black robe entered the room and took the stairs up to the judge’s bench two at a time. The court officer jumped out of his chair.
“All rise,” he shouted. There was a commotion of noise and movement as everybody stood up. “Hear ye, hear ye, all persons having business before this honorable court are instructed …” Blah blah blah. “… Judge Alvin Rosenthal presiding.” The court officer finished his spiel and sat down.
God, I thought, remembering my days in Boston as an undergraduate, only in the South would a good Jewish couple name their son Alvin.
Judge Rosenthal banged his gavel. “Before we get started, I want to address the spectators here. Now y’all listen. This is a courtroom, and the bench is going to conduct business with decorum and dignity. I want no outbursts, no talking aloud, no interference with the business of this court in any fashion.
“And, sir-” Judge Rosenthal pointed to a man in the front row of the spectator’s gallery and lowered his voice half an octave. “If you don’t get that Co-cola out of my courtroom in about ten seconds, you’re going to spend the next two days as my guest in the county jail. Understood?”
Some poor sucker in a denim sport coat, hair draped across his shoulders, two earrings in his left ear, hopped up and scampered through the crowd with his hand wrapped tightly around a can of diet Coke. A young woman quickly slid into the seat he vacated.
“Now we’ve got a lot of business to conduct this morning, and we’re going to go through this docket quickly and in the order in which the cases are listed. Is the District Attorney’s Office ready?”
Two fresh young law-school graduates-one male, one female, both in pinstripes-stood up at the table to the judge’s left.
“We are, Your Honor,” the male half of the team announced.
“The officer will read the docket,” Judge Rosenthal ordered.
A suited, dark-eyed woman at a table next to the court reporter stood up from behind two stacks of file folders, each about two feet high. “Case number 02-4597-346J,” she rattled off. “Willie J. Smith, Willful Destruction of Private Property, Public Intoxication, Carrying a Weapon for the Purpose of Going Armed.”
“Who’s for the defendant?” the judge asked.
Another suit stood up from the gallery on the side. “Scott Webster, Your Honor, Public Defender’s Office.”
I turned to Ray. “This could go on for hours.”
“You mean they’re going to work all those folders in this morning?” he asked.
“Yep,” I answered.
“He ain’t going to do Slim first?”
“The last time I saw a high-profile murder like this, the judge wouldn’t do the big case first because he didn’t want the news media to think they could push him around. Figured he’d make them wait all day. After about an hour, though, he got tired of the crowd and bumped the big case up to get rid of everybody.”
“Send in the defendant,” Judge Rosenthal said.
Two marshals, a couple of beefy black guys in cheap suits with badges hanging out of their front coat pockets, left the courtroom by way of a door next to the one leading into the judge’s chambers. A moment later they stepped back in with a rail-thin black teenager between them. He wore the orange jumpsuit provided to him by the Davidson County Sheriff’s Department. His head was shaved, and he looked completely in awe of the crowd and the commotion.
“Read the charges again,” the judge said.
The woman with the file folders spoke up and read the numbers and charges one more time in her machine-gun voice. The judge turned back to the assistant DAs, and their voices soon melded into an audio blur as I thought first of Marsha, then of Slim in jail, and finally of Rebecca Gibson’s sweet voice and how I’d never hear her sing again.
Up front, the judge was moving them through one after the other. A string of orange-suited prisoners-mostly black, mostly young, mostly up on petty charges, all defended by the PD-filed before the justice system to begin the process. I wondered if the judge or the prosecutor or, for that matter, the defense attorneys ever remembered one face or one name from another.
A couple of times, the background din from the spectator gallery drew a gavel bang from the bench, and yet another warning to clear the courtroom if things didn’t quiet down. Tension seemed to rise one small notch at a time as the long line of orange proceeded through the room. The observers sat, or in my case stood, for over an hour. My legs were tired. My back hurt. And I was sleepy from the stuffy air and the heat of a room packed with bodies.
“How much longer?” Ray whispered.
“Beats me. As long as it takes.”
There was another murmur as someone in the crowd grew impatient and shuffled loudly out of the room. The judge watched the scene with an irritated look etched on his face as the woman assistant DA argued a case in front of him.
The attorneys sat down as the latest defendant was led out of the courtroom.
“Attorneys, approach the bench,” the judge ordered.
The DAs stood up, along with a few of the PDs, and walked up to the bench. Judge Rosenthal leaned over and whispered something to the gathered suits. One of the PDs shrugged, shook his head, then pointed to Roger Vaden, who still sat quietly on a bench in the corner.
“Sir.” Judge Rosenthal’s voice rose. “Who are you here to represent?”
“This is it,” I whispered. “The judge just got enough.”
Ray stiffened next to me. “You think so?”
“Just watch.”
Roger stood up, his six-feet-two, skinny frame clutching his briefcase nervously. “Defendant Randall Gibson, Your Honor.”
“Approach the bench, please, sir.”
Roger stepped around the railing and made his way through the maze of desks. Whispered consultations followed, then the judge rapped his gavel.
“Five-minute recess,” he announced as he stepped off the bench in a billow of black cloth.
“What’s going on?” Ray asked.
“Slim’s downstairs in a holding cell. They’ve gone to get him.”
The noise level rose in the courtroom as Roger Vaden moved behind the defense table and people picked up on what was happening. People jockeyed for position while others skipped out for smoke or bathroom breaks. Some even took the opportunity to do a little schmoozing and backslapping.
Since no judge in the entire history of jurisprudence has ever kept a five-minute recess to five minutes, we stood there another quarter hour. Finally, as my thighs were about to go completely numb, the judge entered the courtroom and gaveled everything to order. A couple of minutes of preliminary tap dancing went on, and then the marshals escorted Slim into the courtroom.
My psyche took a header right into the toilet. Jeez, I felt miserable for the guy. The orange jumpsuit was about two sizes too large, which gave him the appearance of having shrunk since I’d last seen him. His cheeks were hollow, and great purplish bags hung under his eyes. I doubted he’d slept much; anyone who’s ever been on the inside of a jail knows they’re not conducive to a good night’s sleep. I imagine the chow didn’t set too well with him either. But mostly he had that thousand-yard stare that most people get when they encounter the criminal justice system for the first time. There’s nothing that can prepare a person for the experience of incarceration. No other human experience is like it, at least not the first time.