Nashville: The Mood (Part 2), Page 4

  After-hours in a courtroom can be deathly quiet. After everyone is gone home from whatever case is in progress, and even the janitors have cleaned up and left, or before they get in for their late-night shift, the room has a certain stillness to it, similar to a large, empty university classroom in the middle of the night, with the lights all on. Dim the lights, and it seems even quieter, even more like a world away.

  Judge Everett Wilkinson had been on the bench some twenty years. He had been a lawyer in private practice not long after graduating from law school almost forty years earlier, but he had never made a successful go of it. He didn’t have a knack for dealing with people, he didn’t know how to ask for money, and the truth be told, he didn’t really do a good job of representing his clients, so there was bad word of mouth about him. Along the way, he had gotten out of private practice, working as a county prosecutor in three or four different counties around Nashville, changing jobs often because his work performance was deemed substandard. At a certain point, he switched to being the counsel for various governmental agencies, and had slowly, over a ten-year period of time, used a growing political talent to ingratiate himself with important people. Those people, if they ever knew of his earlier lackluster performance, slowly forgot about it. His connections became a useful tool, and he seemed to do well at playing that role.

  Approximately twenty years ago, a sitting judge had passed away, and Wilkinson was able to secure an appointment for the remaining portion of the term. He ran for re-election, after carefully gathering enough support to discourage any opposition, and had served on the bench for a number of full terms. His only close race had come eight years before, when a story had developed that he had solicited a bribe from an accused criminal appearing before his court. The allegation was that, for the right amount of money, he would deliver a lighter sentence in an armed robbery case. The story had been aired fully, and there had been an investigation, but no tangible evidence had been produced, and no one tended to believe the accuser, or those associated with him, and the judge had survived the scandal.

  Having put that scandal behind him, he continued without much publicity to the present. He was generally known as a stern judge, one who imposed rather severe sentences even for lesser crimes, but who had never imposed a death penalty. His opposition to the death penalty in Nashville had given him somewhat of an air of independence, since a majority of people favored it. His liberalism on that issue, however, was outweighed by his generally conservative stance on sentencing across the board.

  Wilkinson was not the only judge who appeared at the court building at night, after all official business was finished for the day, but to any alert janitor, he would have been the one most likely to be found there during that unusual time. However, since he appeared irregularly, and at differing hours, it is doubtful that many noticed. There were only a handful of after-hours personnel in the building, spread over different floors, and they generally changed over time. Still, no other judge was there as regularly at eight or nine o’clock in the evening, or even sometimes after midnight.

  One janitor in particular, Reginald King, had worked in the building for more than thirty years. He had held other jobs, across the board, including working as a janitor in other buildings in the downtown area, busing tables in a restaurant, even working as a bellman in some of the hotels just below the luxury level downtown. But he had always used the janitorial job in the courthouse building as an anchor.

  Reginald King had noticed that Judge Wilkinson was in the courthouse building late at night more often than other judges. In fact, King would have struggled to remember any judge that he had seen more than once during the after-hours period, whereas he had seen Wilkinson at least a dozen times over the years, even at some very odd hours indeed. King had once been very late for work after an early evening encounter with a lady friend that had gone on several hours longer than he intended, and had arrived at the courthouse around two o’clock in the morning. He was startled to meet Judge Wilkinson coming down the hallway as King entered the floor where Wilkinson’s office was located. The judge had seemed startled, as well, and the two men of different class and status surveyed each other briefly, each trying to avoid giving the impression that he was startled.

  That incident had occurred almost five years before. Tonight, Reginald King was working. He had arrived around eight forty-five, and his duties took him to several floors in the building. He intended to be there until at least after midnight. He had had a good day, making a lot of tips at a restaurant where he was working, and he had gotten home in time to get a good rest before he came to his janitorial duties. As of eleven-thirty in the evening, he was still feeling very energetic, very upbeat, even whistling while he worked from time to time. Reginald King was thinking that life was good, and looked good heading forward.

  Just before midnight, he approached the door of a courtroom on the east side of the building. It was primarily a vacant courtroom, used on special occasions. A new courtroom facility was being built several blocks away, and this older building was being gradually phased out. This particular courtroom had been used for many years in the past, but had been vacant for almost three years now. King hardly ever had occasion to go into that room, but the building superintendent had left him a note about emptying some trash cans there, and giving the room a general cleaning, just to keep it up. That particular duty, which the superintendent assigned once a month or so, was rotated among the janitorial personnel, and it was by chance that King happened to draw the duty this night.

  He thought he heard voices even before he approached the door. He wasn’t sure, however, so he stopped briefly outside the door and listened. He thought he could hear a murmur of sorts, but he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, or if he was really hearing it. He pushed open the door, gently. The room was completely dark. The shades were drawn, and no night light was coming in from outside. As soon as he opened the door and stepped in the room, though, he had the sense that someone who had been talking had now quit talking. He stood there, listening, trying to let his eyes get accustomed to the darkness. He thought he sensed a presence in the room, but he knew his imagination was on high alert by this time. He strained, listening as hard as he could. When he didn’t hear anything, he began feeling with his hand on a portion of the wall to his right.

  King flipped the light switch on, and a bright overhead light came on. Across the room, he saw two men looking at him. One of them was Judge Wilkinson, and the other man seemed familiar to him as well, although he couldn’t place him. Judge Wilkinson was totally grey-headed, somewhat slender in build, about sixty-five years old. The man with him was bald-headed, probably in his forties, and wearing a purple knit shirt. King tried to think of where he had seen him before, but he couldn’t recall.

  Judge Wilkinson wore a dark suit, which seemed strange at this time of night, although it was probably similar to what he wore on any normal day. He was seated in the judge’s bench, and the man with him was seated in the witness chair nearby. The two men appeared to have stopped their conversation before King got into the room, and had concentrated their attention on him as soon as they had seen the light shine in from the doorway.

  “Can we help you with something?” The judge’s voice was serious, yet calm and soft.

  “Oh, no, sir, I was just going to clean the room…I can just come back later on.”

  “Would you like us to vacate the premises and let you do that now?”

  “Oh, no, sir. How long do you think you’ll be here?”

  “It may be at least another hour, maybe more.”

  “That’s okay, sir. I’ve got somewhere else I can go.”

  King left the room, and slowly made his way to another area of the building. He thought the situation strange, but he didn’t think much about it beyond that. He recalled the time he had seen the judge in the building in the middle of the night, and even another occasion or two he had seen him there at odd hours, but it had been a while sin
ce that had happened, so he didn’t think any more about it.

  As soon as King had left the room, the bald-headed man thought of a question he had already asked Wilkinson several times over the years: Why are we meeting in a courtroom instead of in your office? Wilkinson had always explained that he thought his office was bugged, and his telephone there wiretapped, and he thought it was safer to meet in an old, abandoned courtroom that hadn’t been used in a number of years. He said he thought it was probably unlikely that a courtroom would be bugged to start with; it was too large, and one could always go to an isolated corner, and besides, it would look bad if the Federal government were actually caught bugging an entire courtroom. That never had made too much sense to the bald-headed man; he assumed the authorities could bug and wiretap anything they wanted to. But the judge had reassured him, and they had always met in a courtroom, although not always the same one.

  “What do you think?” Wilkinson leaned back in his chair, his eyes occasionally glancing at the door, as well as at the other man’s face.

  The bald-headed man shook his head. “I don’t know that he’s going to want to pay that much. I don’t think he has it.”

  The judge shook his head, as well, and this time his tone seemed a bit impatient. “This is a capital offense. He’d better think a long time before he turns this offer downBesides, it’s not really that much in the scheme of thingsHe will just have to raise it somehow. Or his lawyers will”

  “Well, you’re preaching to the choir here, of course. But that’s the feeling I’m getting.”

  “Well, let’s wrap this thing up,” the judge said. “It’s getting late even by my standards. You just get back to him and make an impression that I’m dead serious about this. That’s the amount, and he’ll just have to do whatever it takes to get that amount. He’s the one asking, don’t forget that.”