I shouldn’t be thinking about my own problems. I know that. But as I take my seat at the counsel table for Jeffrey Baltrim’s bail hearing, I’m not savoring my first courtroom moment as an almost-lawyer. I’m wondering if my marriage will survive my summer job. Jack’s “Be careful what you choose” crack last night had been so intentionally hurtful that I’d gasped after he said it, almost in physical pain. Then Jack did the last thing I’d expected. He’d started laughing.
“Kidding,” he’d said. “Sweetheart, I’m kidding.”
Kidding again. I’d tried to be a good sport about it, even though to me it hadn’t sounded one bit like kidding. But Jack, persuasively conciliatory, went on to insist he’d understood about the so-called celebration and the lateness. Even the wine. Even “my relationship” with “that manipulative” Martha Gardiner. And, as he drew me onto his lap, he admitted he’d simply been worried about me. When he hadn’t heard from me, he’d feared the worst, that I was in a car accident or some disaster.
“Forgive me, honey,” he’d whispered, his breath in my ear. He’d smoothed back my hair, the way he always does. I felt his chest rise and fall, so familiar and—almost—reassuring. “I know I’m not funny. I’m incredibly sorry. But if something happened to you, Rach, I’d never be happy again.”
So all in all, I’d spent yesterday morning with a SWAT team, a butterfly-chasing little boy, and a murder suspect. The afternoon with a triumphant prosecutor. And the night with a darling but unpredictable husband. This morning Jack had sent me off with a sweetly promising kiss. “Knock ’em dead, kiddo,” he’d said.
So, except for my emotional whiplash, I guess everything is fine. Like yesterday morning at the office, today I was the first one to arrive at Newton District Court. The court officer, a battleship in a blue uniform, had unlocked the door to courtroom A when I showed him my Harvard ID.
“One of Gardiner’s new crop of interns, huh? Rachel?” He’d handed me back the laminated card, then pointed to the plastic name badge on his broad chest. “I’m Morris. Good luck to ya. You’ll need it.”
Everybody’s kidding these days, I’d thought. But no one is funny. Maybe it’s me. I pull a yellow legal pad and two pens from my briefcase, and stash the case under the table. I hope the rest of my internship is less complicated.
The Middlesex County courthouse for Newton is mid-century brick on the outside and pure movie set on the inside. Gutted and renovated a few years ago, the resulting new interior looks like someone’s cost-cutting idea of intimidating. Elaborate velvet curtains, scrolled woodwork moldings, and imposing chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. The audience sits on churchlike wooden pews, designed, it looks like, to keep people uncomfortable. The place doesn’t need to be inviting, I suppose, since many people who come here are hoping to leave as fast as they can. Especially the defendants.
I hear the courtroom door open.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Morris is saying. “Your intern’s already here. Your guy’s here too, stashed in the basement. He’s not a happy camper.”
“They never are, Morris, they never are,” Martha Gardiner says. “And he’ll be even less happy when this hearing’s over.”
Gardiner almost smiles, almost, when she sees me at the table. The “basement” Morris referred to is two flights of stairs beneath us, the belowground holding cells. I imagine they’re grim. Jeff Baltrim will be escorted into the bright lights of the courtroom by way of a glass-encased stairway, and he’ll face the music sitting by his attorney at the defense-counsel table. I know Jack’s gotten many a client released on bail at these hearings. But it’s rare in a murder case.
“Ready for this, Ms. North? Your first bail hearing? Or not, correct? Not that there’ll be bail.” Gardiner, in icy green silk today, waves me to my chair, then clicks open her hard-sided leather briefcase. A shiny gold rectangle under the clasp is monogrammed with her initials. Inside it is a stack of manila folders. Gardiner selects the one on top. It has a handwritten label: Baltrim, Jeffrey P.—Murder.
Before I can parse what she meant by “or not,” the courtroom door opens again, this time with a murmur of voices. A scrabble-haired twenty-something with a pen behind his ear enters, followed by a young woman with a chunky metal tripod over one shoulder and lugging a video camera, then an elegantly suited woman carrying a bulging tote bag. I recognize Clea Rourke, the reporter who’d mimed You owe me to Gardiner at the Tassie Lyle crime scene Wednesday. The tripod thuds onto the carpeted floor, then the photographer clicks her camera into place.
Gardiner gives them a quick appraising look, then shoots me a covert thumbs-up. “Coverage,” she whispers. “One camera, but Clea’s pool reporter. So every station will get this.” She opens the file and pages through the records, tracing down each document with a forefinger.
I know what Jack would say about “coverage.” Jack would say Screw ’em. Every damn reporter buys the DA party line. Plus, the “evidence” Gardiner will present in court is public, and the most damning parts we have, so far, will be described to the judge in the most lurid detail possible. And then reported, by people like Clea, as gospel. The defense attorney, whoever that’ll be, will say only “not guilty.” The Cleas will dutifully report that, too. As if anyone believes “not guilty” could possibly be true.
It’s five till ten. Court stars at ten. The courtroom is almost full now. A low whisper from the audience—press and spectators and lawyers and, probably, family members of defendants to come—accentuates the solemnity and the stakes of this morning’s proceedings.
Because of the way our discussion devolved last night, I didn’t mention this morning’s assignment to Jack. I’ll tell him when I get home. Morris, now stationed at a narrow desk by the defendant’s dock, is looking at his chunky watch. A red light flashes on his desk landline. He picks up the receiver.
“Here we go,” Gardiner says.
Morris hangs up the phone. The light changes in the glassed-in basement stairway. The audience chatter silences. The court clerk, a messy-haired woman in a bagging dark blue suit, steps behind the desk that’s positioned beneath the judge’s bench and places a stack of overstuffed accordion files in front of her. I hear the click and swish of the courtroom door opening behind us again. The almost-late arrival coughs. The cough sounds familiar.
I turn to look.
Jack.