Later that afternoon I drove over to the courthouse. Superior court for Middlesex County was a complex of large granite and limestone buildings, in the oldest of which Daniel Webster had argued cases. They were in the neoclassical style that in an earlier century gave dignity and formality to the proceedings that went on there. Now—who knew? In the late afternoon sunlight, though, they still possessed a kind of majesty. I passed through the metal detectors and let a sloe-eyed county employee massage me with an electronic wand. No bells went off, so I guessed it wasn’t love. It was after 4:00 PM. and formal sessions were done for the day, giving the vast lobby an echoey emptiness. There was an office locator on the wall beside the large center staircase, and I looked for and found Judge Martin Travani’s hearing room on the second floor. Outside the room, I whispered to a uniformed court officer that I was there to see Attorney Meecham. He opened the door for me and motioned me in. Meecham and the prosecutor, Gus Deemys, were at the front of the room, talking with the judge. They all glanced my way as I entered, and I tiptoed forward and slid in on an oak bench four rows back. Deemys, who had been speaking, frowned, cleared his throat, and resumed.
“My argument, Your Honor, is based on the hard fact that the man
has no known ties to the city—or to much else that I can determine. By the very nature of his work and personal life, he’s a vagabond. With due respect to Attorney Meecham, I would suggest that Mr. Pepper poses a high risk to flee.”
Travani, who was a sober-looking, vaguely boyish man in his early sixties, with a round head of close-cropped gray hair, had his steel-framed glasses in his hand, twirling them by one of the bow pieces. He didn’t look impressed with anything he’d been hearing. “Come on, Mr. Deemys, a vagabond? He’s held steady employment with the carnival for some time, hasn’t he?”
“Less than six months, Your Honor. But you’re right, not a vagabond. I misspoke. It’s fair to say, however, that his work and life have been itinerant.” It wasn’t the way I remembered Deemys talking on the job.
The judge turned to Meecham. “Counselor?”
“May I confer with my investigator?”
Travani looked at me, regarding me a moment; Deemys did, too, as if I were an interloper into their cozy fraternity of Juris Doctors. I gave a little wave and went forward, where Fred Meecham drew me aside.
“Good timing,” he whispered. “I’m not going to get bail, or at least not anything anyone is going to be able to afford. But I want to get some things on the record. Have you got anything I should add?”
I told him what I picked up from some of Pepper’s coworkers, especially from Warren Sonders, and he went back while I resumed my seat. “We believe that Mr. Pepper is very unlikely to flee, and that the carnival staff are like a large extended family, wherein certain social sanctions obtain, and that flight would put them all in legal jeopardy.”
“Oh, bull!” Deemys exploded with exasperation. “You’re talking about a group of carnies. Social sanctions? How about social diseases? It’s in their nature to rove, for Christ’s sake.” That was the Gus Deemys I remembered.
Meecham and Deemys duked on awhile, raising additional points, each trying to buttress his own side of the argument while battering his opponent’s. It was fun to watch, but the clock was running. I raised my hand. “May I say something, Your Honor?”
Travani put on his glasses and motioned me to stand. “What is it?”
“The city licensing office has decided that the carnival shouldn’t be allowed to leave.”
The judge glanced at the DA, who shook his head, and at Meecham, who did the same. “I hadn’t heard that,” Travani said.
“Evidently the discussion is ongoing, but that was the word when I spoke with the carnival boss a few hours ago.”
The judge glanced at his watch. “If there’s nothing more, I’m going to rule. Owing to the serious nature of the crime, and granting Mr. Deemys’s point that there is a risk of flight, I am going to deny bail at this time. However, as I said at the arraignment this morning, I want to move forward with the case quickly. I want no needless delays on either side. Understood?”
And that was that.
Outside, as Meecham and I walked together to our cars, he told me how things stood. It seemed the killing had struck a nerve with a lot of people, and the cries for swift justice were loud. The court was responding to that. We agreed to huddle in the morning. At the rapid march-step of feet, I turned and saw Gus Deemys coming our way, carrying a bloated briefcase, his tasseled lifts tapping the pavement. He pretended not to see us, but as he neared he murmured from the side of his mouth, “I tot I taw a pwivate eye.”
I looked at Meecham. “Who’s Tweety Bird?”
Deemys stopped and gave me a slow grin. “You know what? Holding this guy without bail is just the start. His sorry ass is grass. I’m going to eat you and your jailbird up. See you in court.” He pressed a little car alarm deactivator, which answered with a chirp, and he marched over to a smoke gray Lincoln Navigator and pulled himself up onto the running board and in. All five-foot-four of him in a two-and-a-half-ton truck.
Back at my house, I gave some thought to unpacking a few more of the boxes that were still piled in the front room and in the kitchen, but I let it remain thought, untainted by action. The house was small but big enough, the way the place Lauren and I had on Paige Street downtown had been, our first apartment together. We listened to the Beatles and Erik Satie and drank wine and made love. We’d have been happy in a packing
crate. But I was here now, I reminded myself. I’d finally gotten off memory lane.
I put on water for pasta. I poured a premixed salad out of one of those cellophane bags—the Mediterranean special—and heated marinara sauce out of a jar. I switched on the TV for the local news, which carried a clip on Troy Pepper’s arraignment earlier that day, including footage of him being led out of court in handcuffs and looking hangdog. There was also coverage of a conviction in a gang killing in the city, with the teenage defendant, tried as an adult, being whisked off to begin the rest of his life at Cedar Junction. The pairing of the stories bothered me. As had Gus Deemys’s righteous anger. When I tried to analyze why, I didn’t have a good answer. A community’s outrage at a killing was justified, even welcome, but wasn’t it part of the legal system’s duty to put the brakes on a little? To give reason a chance to prevail? Or was I just being oversensitive because of where my checks were coming from?
I popped a can of beer. The weather radar showed a whirling tropical storm, Francine, which had heated up the Caribbean for a few days but was now just a lot of wind. The meteorologist went on at length about hurricane season and the prospects for anything making its way north. Meanwhile, kudos to a tropical depression that got upgraded to storm. They were calling it Gus. I shut off the tube and raised my beer. Gus. I had to love it.
Fortunately I was able to locate a colander in one of the boxes before I found a tennis racket, so didn’t have to drain the pasta the way Jack Lemmon had in The Apartment. The meal wasn’t Jacques Pepin, but it ate just fine.