When they entered, Alastair was wearing a black robe and sitting in a director’s chair behind a monitor, sipping from a teacup and holding court, a dozen people hanging on his anecdote. It was hard to mark his age: the creases on his face suggested he was pushing sixty, but his thick, still-chestnut hair suggested a much younger man. It added up to an arresting elegance. “So the two of us are at my country home in Cheshire, drinking absinthe, and several snifters in I decide: this is the night I’m going to teach Stevie Wonder how to drive.” Everyone laughed. Alastair added, “. . . my Bentley,” and they laughed harder. “And that it would be most entertaining to let him motor about the lawn with me outside the car, trying to dodge it!” They laughed harder still.
Waldo noted a couple of people at the edges of Alastair’s audience surreptitiously checking their watches, probably producers responsible for keeping the show moving. Maybe this was some kind of official break, but more likely not: the camera guys looked like they were waiting by their cameras and the other actors seemed to be holding their places too.
A prop man carried a bottle of Stoli onto the set and Waldo wondered how vodka would fit into a courtroom scene. The prop man stepped onto the raised platform where the judge would sit and poured most of the Stoli into the judge’s water pitcher, then left the set, taking the bottle with him. Oh, Waldo thought, that’s how.
Alastair paused his story to drink a bit more from the teacup. One of the watch checkers gave a surreptitious but imploring head tip to a young production assistant in a miniskirt and leggings, who obeyed by approaching Alastair with a subservient smile. “Ready to shoot, Mr. Pinch.”
Alastair handed her his cup and saucer, said, “Thanks, love,” and sauntered onto the set. He stumbled on the steps to his bench and everyone pretended not to notice until he turned to a crew guy and said, “Fix that, would you?” and everybody laughed again. Alastair adjusted his robes, settled into his judge’s chair, then poured himself a tall glass of “water” and downed it in two gulps.
Waldo noticed the girl in the miniskirt beside him and he took the teacup from her hand and sniffed it. Waldo asked Sikorsky, “Is he shit-faced?”
“Come on,” Sikorsky said, “does he look shit-faced?” Waldo watched Alastair refill his glass from the same pitcher, hands steady, not spilling a drop, not looking shit-faced at all.
An assistant director bellowed, “Last looks!” apparently a signal for the hair and makeup people to rush over and fuss at the actor.
Sikorsky said to Waldo, “Watch the scene on the monitor; you can appreciate his work better. How much he does with so little. It’s a treat, being on this set. Greatest actor since fucking Brando—guy’s got so many Shakespeare Awards he keeps them in a bedroom closet—and I’ve got him Wednesday nights after Jessica Alba.”
Waldo took a spot where he could see the monitors, one for each of the two cameras, both trained on Alastair, one close and one wider. He stood behind and just to the left of a handsome and slightly familiar-looking man of about fifty, maybe a former character actor, weathered face and graying temples, who seemed like he might be battling some sort of compulsive disorder, twitching and picking at a cuticle. The man called out, “Are you ready, Alastair?” and, after Alastair nodded, said, “We’ll go from Michael’s objection, all right?” and Waldo figured that he must be the director. He called, “Action!” and the lawyer-actor at one table looked at Alastair and said, “Objection!” and the lawyer-actress at the other table said to Alastair, “Your Honor, the defense needs to be able to . . . ,” but sort of let her line dissolve into the air when Alastair stretched with a monstrous yawn.
Alastair looked away from his fellow actors and over at the director. “Must I listen to this drivel?”
The director twitched and worked his cuticle and said, “Cut.” He took a deep, slow breath and walked onto the set, to the spot in front of the bench where lawyers on TV stand when a judge gets irritated. Waldo edged closer to listen. The director looked up at Alastair and said, softly and carefully, “We do need your reactions to the other actors’ lines.”
Alastair spoke to him as to a child. “Yes, but I’m not on camera with them, am I, love. Simply tell me the reactions you want, and I’ll give them to you.”
The director twitched some more but decided not to fight it and nodded to his crew. “Let’s go again,” he said and went back to his seat while Alastair downed what was in his glass and refilled it again.
The director called, “Action!” one more time and then said, “Skepticism.” Alastair tilted his head and looked skeptical. “Irritation,” said the director. Alastair did irritated, basically the same look he’d given the director moments before. “Infinite patience.” Alastair gave him infinite patience.
Sikorsky leaned over to Waldo and whispered, “Brilliant, huh?”
The director called to Alastair, “We do have some lines—would it be all right if Jodi called them out to you?”
Alastair gestured, bring them on, and the script supervisor called out, “‘No, I’ll hear that.’”
Alastair took a moment, considering, in character, then said, as if his own thought, “No, I’ll heah-uh that,” with a perfect Alabama drawl.
The script supervisor called, “We need one ‘Overruled’ and three ‘Sustaineds.’”
Alastair said, “Overruled,” then “Sustained,” then a different “Sustained,” and finally a much more emphatic “Sustained!”
The script supervisor said, “Now we’ve got the big speech. ‘Let me tell you—’”
“I know this one,” Alastair snapped. Alastair closed his eyes and kept them closed for so long that Waldo, watching on the monitor, wondered if all the vodka had put him to sleep. But when he opened them again he seemed to have found a new clarity. “Let me tell you a story from when Ah was just a tyke in Tuscaloosa. Mah granddaddy Raymond Forbishaw, he was a jurist himself. Fam’ly couht.” Waldo found himself leaning in to listen more closely. “Granddaddy Raymond, he used to set me on his knee and say, ‘Johnny, foh ninety-nine days a judge’s job is me’h’ely to be that blahndfold on the statue of Lady Justice, to make ce’htain that neithuh prejudice noh predisposition interfe-uh with each sahd havin’ its say. Foh ninety-nine days, do that, and justice in its own natural wisdom will fahnd its way. But, Johnny,’ he’d say, ‘on the one hundredth day, a great judge knows that he needs to be justice.’” Judge Johnny looked down with a tiny smile, recalling something special and private about his grandfather . . .
. . . or at least that was what Waldo thought Judge Johnny was recalling, until Waldo reminded himself that Judge Johnny wasn’t a person at all but a make-believe character, and was struck that even he, Charlie Waldo, Detective III, who’d made a career of seeing through people, had been fooled for the briefest moment into believing that there actually was a Judge Johnny and that Judge Johnny had an actual grandfather and a lifetime of memories. Waldo didn’t know anything about acting but he could tell Alastair was doing something intrinsically different from what he’d done with those artificial “overruleds” and “sustaineds.”
“Now, Ah wouldn’t be so bold as to call mahself a great judge,” Alastair/Johnny continued and sipped from his glass—drained it, actually—“but Ah do know that as Ah sit here today Ah’m thinkin’ ’bout mah granddaddy Raymond. And that’s why Ah’m goin’ to direct this vuhdict, and find this heah-uh defendant . . . guilty.”
A moment passed, and then the director leaped from his chair shouting, “Cut! Alastair, that was terrific! Terrific!”
Alastair snapped back to his British self. “Terrific? It was bloody genius! We’re not going to top that one, are we. I’ll see you all tomorrow, then.” Having decided to dismiss himself for the day, he started to take off his robe.
But at the monitors, right in front of Waldo, Jodi the script supervisor leaned over to the director, ashen. “He’s supposed to say, ‘Not guilty.’” The director looked at her, not getting it at first. She made it clear: “He said, ‘Guilty.’”
The director ran a hand through what was left of his hair and said, “Couldn’t you just tell me I have ass cancer?”
“I’m sorry.”
The actor had already handed his robe to a wardrobe assistant when the director reached him. “Um, Alastair, I hate to do this to you, but we need one more.”
“Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it, love, because you’re not getting it.”
“We need it.”
“Good God, why?”
“The last line is ‘Not guilty.’”
“So?”
“So . . . you said, ‘Guilty.’”
“The fuck I did.”
“Please, Alastair. One more.”
“I know what I said. It wouldn’t make sense to say ‘Guilty.’ Why would I say that?”
“If you want, we could look at the playback—”
But Alastair wasn’t listening anymore, distracted by someone across the stage who’d apparently been observing the exchange in a way Alastair didn’t appreciate. “What are you smirking at?” he said, then brushed past the director and accosted a ruggedly handsome young camera assistant, a kid a quarter century Alastair’s junior and at the opposite rung of the Hollywood food chain.
The kid, all innocence, said, “What? I didn’t do anything.”
But Alastair was having none of it, face reddening, nostrils flaring, a taunted bull. “You think it’s easy to carry this bloody piece of shit on my shoulders week after week? You think I need a twat like you standing there hoping I’ll cock it up? How long have you worked on this show?” Alastair was nose to nose with him now.
“It’s my first week.”
“Your first week,” Alastair said, shaking his head. “Your first bloody week.” He seemed about to turn away in disgust, but instead reared back and bushwhacked the assistant with a head butt. Blood from the kid’s brow spattered the soundstage floor.
Waldo took a step toward them, but Sikorsky halted him with a gentle hand on his arm.
Before the assistant could process the shock, Alastair followed with a high roundhouse that caught him square. The kid, having had enough, shoved the actor backward, then came at him with a couple of body shots, but Alastair, clearly no stranger to fisticuffs, answered with an ambidextrous flurry and capped it with a haymaker that sent the kid tripping over a camera wire and careening into the props table, which he toppled before landing amid briefcases and fake legal briefs and the near-empty vodka bottle.
Alastair stood over him, ready to dish out some more if the kid dared to get up. But he didn’t. He’d had enough.
The fight was over, and nobody had moved a muscle to stop it. Waldo, astounded by the crew’s lack of response, tried to make eye contact with Sikorsky, the director, anyone. But everyone was clinging tight to neutral, disinterested looks, no one wanting to risk being the next to antagonize the star.
“All right,” Alastair said, clapping his hands together and restoring order to the production day. “Let’s do this.” He stomped back to the set and let the wardrobe assistant help him into his robe.
The director turned to his assistant director and said, “Roll. Just roll.” The AD confirmed it for the camera and sound people with a hand gesture.
Alastair, settling into his judge’s chair, said, “Do we need the whole speech, or can we do a pickup?”
The director quickly answered, “Pickup’s fine.”
“All right, then.” Alastair called it himself: “Action!” Waldo didn’t know an actor was allowed to do that. Alastair composed himself, then, matching perfectly his position and inflection from the end of the speech from the previous take, said, “Ah’m goin’ to direct this vuhdict, and find this heah-uh defendant,” and paused before bellowing the final words at full volume, “not . . . guilty!” Then he said, “Cut. Cheers, mates,” and made tracks for the soundstage exit, this time not bothering to remove his robe.
Sikorsky said to no one in particular, “Now, that’s badass,” and to Waldo, “Come on, I’ll introduce you,” and started toward the same exit. Fontella told Waldo that she needed to get to the CNN building and made tracks in the other direction.
Waldo considered the scene outside the scene: his would-be client was a blackout drunk whose wife died from a blow to the head, who sucked down vodka on the job and punched out coworkers, and everybody let him.
The assistant director watched until Alastair had safely cleared the door, then hollered, “That’s a wrap!” Waldo watched the crew go about the technical business of shutting down the set for the day. The director had already found a paper cup and was heading for the water pitcher on Judge Johnny’s bench.