Judgment Read online

  “Excuse me,” she said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that back!”

  “A precious thing, a family,” he said.

  “Please,” she said quietly. Her heart hammered. “Put it down.”

  “A lot of things are more fragile than you realize, Judge. It’s so much easier to break things than to put them back together.”

  “What the hell do you want?” she said desperately.

  “I know people like you; you think you can just turn the page, not be haunted by the past. What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago, right? But maybe that’s not how it really works.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Some people say who we are is the sum of everything we’ve ever done. In other words, no backsies. No hitting the Delete key in life, right? All you have is what you’ve done and what you’re gonna do. When you make one rash decision, the only way out is to make a smart one. You ready to make the smart choice?”

  He tossed the frame toward her, casually. She surprised herself by snatching it out of the air, a perfect catch.

  “Is there a problem?” he said in a soft voice.

  Her heart was pounding wildly. She set down the frame carefully on her desk.

  “I’d like to know if we have a problem.”

  She just looked at him. He pointed at the broken glass strewn on the floor. He began to sweep it up. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “That’ll all be gone in a minute.” He swept the jagged pieces into one neat pile. “You have a decision to make,” he said. “You don’t want to make the wrong one.”

  22

  For a long while after the man left, she sat at her desk, heart racing, adrenaline pulsing through her body, as the sound of the janitor’s bucket thumped along the hallway, one squeaky wheel, faded away. She felt light-headed. She wondered whether the man had intended to go through her office, her files, after hours, when she was usually gone. Had they sent someone to go through her files and notes at home too? Or had he come here just to threaten her? Because if that’s all it was, it had worked perfectly. The guy hadn’t needed to pick up the picture frame; she’d gotten the message. They could go after her family. No longer was the threat just her public shaming, discrediting, through the release of a video. Now her family was in the crosshairs too.

  She waited for her heart rate to steady, then picked up her phone, texted Duncan.

  Just checking in. All good here, you?

  She waited, staring at the phone, for the three little dots that meant he was typing a reply. A long time went by, but no return text.

  Then she called Duncan’s phone.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he answered.

  She exhaled, long and hard. “Just checking in,” she said. “Everything good?”

  “Sure, just making dinner.”

  “Okay. See you soon.”

  “Okay.”

  She hit Philip Hersh’s number.

  He answered after a few rings: “Judge Brody.”

  She heard loud noises in the background, the cacophony of a crowd. “Can you run fingerprints?” she said.

  “It’s not something I usually do, but theoretically I can. I’ve got a buddy on the police force. Why, what do you have?”

  “A picture frame,” she said. “Some guy just threatened me. Threatened my family. If I don’t make the right decision.” Just telling him brought it back to her. It was starting to sink in, what had happened. She could almost see the man: the steel-framed glasses, the shaved head, the ropy muscles. Is there a problem?

  “Physically?”

  “Sort of. I mean, he didn’t touch me, but he could have. He broke some glass. Point is, they’re escalating, whoever these people are. Now it’s not just some video. It’s— I don’t know, you just—”

  “Hey, Judge,” Hersh said quietly. “I’m here, okay? I’ll do anything I can.”

  For a moment she thought she might burst into tears from the tenderness in his voice. “Thank you, Philip.”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “Did you find out anything about Mayfair Paragon?”

  “No. No trace of it online. You say it’s, what, a company?”

  “Must be. Wheelz’s general counsel said she needed ‘accredited investor forms,’ whatever they are, on something called Mayfair Paragon. But she kept getting turned down. Something about those documents she wasn’t allowed to see.”

  “So it’s an investor in Wheelz?”

  “I assume so, yes.”

  “There’s no mention of Mayfair Paragon in any of the business databases, nothing in social media, nothing. Nada.”

  “That’s not possible. There has to be a record of it somewhere.”

  “Here’s what I know,” he said. “Five years ago Wheelz almost went out of business. Ran out of money. People talked about Uber, about Lyft, but no one ever mentioned Wheelz, because it was never a real competitor. Not even an also-ran. It was a company on its deathbed. Then three years ago, all of a sudden, everything turns around for Wheelz. Suddenly they’re loaded. Some British firm sinks a billion dollars into it in exchange for fifty-one percent of the company.”

  “Which British firm?”

  “It’s called Harrogate Capital Partners. A venture capital firm.”

  “So they own Wheelz.”

  “Right. Most of it.”

  “And who are they? I want to know who they are. These people who are threatening my family.”

  “Understood, Judge. I’m on it.”

  Her phone chimed a text-alert sound. “I need to go,” she said. “Thank you, Philip.” After she ended the call, she looked at the text. It was from Duncan:

  Don’t pick up J, he’s at home.

  She was confused: the SAT prep class went on for another half hour. She called Duncan.

  “Where are you?” he said when he answered.

  “Courthouse. I forgot something. What’s going on with Jake—did the class end early?”

  “Jake bailed.”

  “Bailed?”

  “He took an Uber home. Just showed up here. He says he doesn’t want to sit through it anymore.”

  “He can’t—just do that.”

  “I don’t know how we force him to take it.”

  She sighed into the phone. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Half an hour later she arrived home, put down her stuff, then went up to Jake’s bedroom. She stood for a moment outside his closed door and tried to focus. She was distracted and tense and kept thinking about the man who’d threatened her. Is there a problem? How bizarre was her life, she thought, that she had to cope with such different problems at the same time, problems of such different scale. Jake and his apathy, whatever he was going through—and now a threat to her family, a matter of life and death.

  But at the same time, she knew she could never just stop caring about her kids, no matter what. She was determined to focus on what was in front of her, even if it was a struggle. Focus, she told herself. On your family. On what matters.

  She could hear him talking. She waited a moment, couldn’t make out what he was saying, then knocked. She waited, then knocked again, harder. She heard him say, “Oh, shit.” Finally he opened the door.

  “Yeah?”

  He stood there, headphones around his neck, a look on his face somewhere between ashamed and defiant.

  “What happened to SAT class?”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Excellent sheep, I got it.” She paused. “You don’t think the class is helping?” she said, as reasonably as she could. “It’s supposed to be the best prep class you can take.”

  “I’m talking about the SAT. It’s a scam. It doesn’t predict how well you’ll do in college. It just measures how good you are at taking the S
AT!” He appeared to be primed for an argument, but she didn’t want to give it to him.

  Juliana sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Do your homework. Your dad and I have to talk.”

  She closed the door and headed downstairs. She wanted to tell Duncan about what had happened earlier, the intruder at the courthouse, but of course she couldn’t. That would involve telling him about Chicago, and that was out of the question.

  He was downstairs watching Game of Thrones. Everyone in the world had seen it, it seemed, except her. She had no interest. He was sparing her.

  When he saw her, he paused the show—someone was being decapitated—and looked up. “You talk to him yet?”

  “Just did, a little. Honey, what are we going to do?”

  “Like I said, we can’t force him to take the course.”

  “So we just let him blow off the SATs?”

  “If that’s what he wants to do . . .” He shrugged.

  She came over to the couch and sat next to him. “Did you see that e-mail from Mr. Wertheim?”

  He nodded. Mr. Wertheim was Jake’s despised math teacher. “He flunked the big test.”

  “It’s the damned marijuana.”

  “He’s just rebelling.”

  “Against us?”

  “Against Mr. Wertheim, against high school, college, the whole thing. It’s a goddamned pressure cooker.”

  She shook her head, heaved a sigh. “Excellent sheep.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It feels like he’s just throwing away his chance to go to a good school.”

  “He’ll get in somewhere. Some place that’s right for him, where he belongs. With other kids who don’t believe that perfect SAT scores are the holy grail. Maybe he’s enjoying life. It’s like Baba Ram Dass said—‘Be here now.’”

  She gave a tight smile. “He can be here now as soon as he gets into college.”

  Be here now. That had a double meaning, didn’t it? That was what it meant to keep living. You might know there was an asteroid hurtling toward your neighborhood. That didn’t mean you didn’t have to floss. Maybe the asteroid would veer off course. Maybe it wouldn’t. Life was about handling different threats on different scales. She remembered how scared her mother had been after receiving her breast-cancer diagnosis. But an hour later, Rosalind was on the phone with the carpet-and-tile shop, pestering them about a delivery date.

  “He’s almost an adult,” Duncan said. “In some societies, he is an adult. We can’t control him. Maybe you can control what happens in your courtroom, what happens in your life, but we can’t control him.”

  Control? she thought. Her life had spun out of control and all because of that night in Chicago. And that second drink. One slip, she thought. One mistake. Nobody got points for walking a tightrope with a little detour into thin air.

  Maybe he was right; maybe she was trying to control Jake because she couldn’t control what was happening to her and she didn’t know what to do about it.

  “You okay, Jules?” Duncan said. “You seem really distracted. Anything wrong?”

  “Me? No, I’m fine. Just—worried about Jakie.” She stood up. “Okay, I have some reading to do. Enjoy the decapitation.”

  23

  While Duncan was downstairs watching TV, Juliana went to the bedroom to read more of the Wheelz chats. She’d closed the door so she couldn’t hear the TV. She needed to be in her own head.

  She had a pile of the documents on her lap, and at first she just skimmed through the chats, dipping in here and there in no particular order. But soon she found herself in the zone, focused, and she started reading them in chronological order. She was following Rachel Meyers’s short career at Wheelz.

  She was surprised to see that barely two weeks or so after starting at Wheelz, Rachel was already in conversation with the CEO. Their first exchange began with an invitation by Allerdyce.

  ALLERDYCE: rachel it’s devin a.

  MEYERS: oh hi!

  ALLERDYCE: settling in OK?

  MEYERS: Yes, thanks!

  ALLERDYCE: we’re different from most companies—don’t worry if it takes you a while to get up to speed

  MEYERS: OK, good to know.

  ALLERDYCE: i’m here to help, whatever you need. why don’t you come by my office sometime and we can talk about the carras lawsuit

  MEYERS: sure

  ALLERDYCE: come by at 5 today

  MEYERS: great, see you at 5!

  No surprise that the CEO wanted to talk with his new general counsel. But a couple of hours later Allerdyce contacted her again to change the plan.

  ALLERDYCE: OK if we meet at madrigal at 7 instead?

  MEYERS: OK, cool.

  Madrigal was famous, the most expensive restaurant in Boston. Juliana had been there once and remembered their copper menus and the superpricey wine list. Madrigal was a major change in venue—from a meeting in his office to a meeting over dinner at an over-the-top restaurant. That altered the dynamic of the meeting quite a bit, and Rachel must have known it.

  An hour later he messaged her to change the time.

  ALLERDYCE: moved our rez to 8pm—busy till then

  MEYERS: Fine, see you then.

  The next exchange between Allerdyce and Rachel came the next morning. Clearly something had happened between the two of them, something awkward.

  ALLERDYCE: hey sorry if we got our signals crossed

  MEYERS: No problem.

  ALLERDYCE: ok cool

  Whatever had transpired between the two of them, it was never mentioned again, as far as she could see in the chats. “No problem,” she’d told him, after whatever had happened the night before. Words that would no doubt come back to haunt her if they went to trial. Though she probably had said “no problem” because she was talking to the CEO of the company, no matter how she really felt.

  Then she found a chat between Rachel Meyers and someone in the company named Karen Heraty, who was probably a friend.

  MEYERS: Devin hit on me again

  HERATY: Another dinner at Madrigal?

  MEYERS: No, we were at the 4 Seasons in Palo Alto last night—road trip to meet with Silver Lake and Elevation. he asked me to come to his room for a meeting and when i got there he was in his bathrobe!

  HERATY: !!!!! what did you do???

  MEYERS: told him I wasn’t comfortable meeting with him in that situation and left.

  HERATY: this the 2d time he hit on you?

  MEYERS: basically he hasn’t stopped.

  HERATY: you gotta do something. Report to HR?

  MEYERS: not going to help

  HERATY: who’s your boss? Andy Westerfield?

  MEYERS: right. But Andy was in Devin’s frat!—he’s not going to stand up to DA

  HERATY: maybe. but worth a try I think.

  She thought about the powerlessness that Rachel Meyers must have felt, the relentlessness of her boss’s boss. The arrogance of the guy, the sense of privilege, assuming his beautiful new general counsel would be interested in him sexually—or would at least relent—because he was the founder, the boss.

  Well, that sure as hell wasn’t new. She’d had to deal with all kinds of crap when she started working as a lawyer. She would never be sure why, for instance, she didn’t get that associate job at the law firm where she interned one summer, where Spence Murchison, a senior partner, kept hitting on her until he gave up, embittered. “My boyfriend wouldn’t like it,” she’d deflected with a fake smile. But her heart was pounding, and her face was hot. She didn’t have a boyfriend.

  The firm didn’t hire her, and she’d never know why. Were the other applicants just stronger? Maybe. Or did Spence Murchison decide it would be too uncomfortable to have her around?

  She just took it for granted that you had to deal with all that crap. Her male colleagues never had
to.

  Juliana put down the stack of documents. So far nothing she’d read gave her any indication of who might be blackmailing her, who it was who so badly wanted to keep the chats from being made public.

  She switched off her bedside lamp, and the bedroom went black. I’m in the dark, she thought. I’m still in the dark.

  24

  No matter what stresses had intruded into her life—the struggles with Jake, the terror of the impostor janitor threatening her, the blackmail threat from Matías Sanchez—visitors to her courtroom would have thought everything was going on as normal. The parties in Meyers v. Wheelz were off doing depositions, which freed some afternoons to write. The malpractice trial was coming to an end, and Juliana had to write instructions for the jury.

  She’d woken up that morning feeling as though the incident with the janitor was a terrible dream. It wasn’t as if things were returning to normal. Maybe they never would. But the terror she’d felt, that awful sense of powerlessness: that had dwindled. In its place was a low-level buzz of anxiety that wouldn’t go away.

  She pulled up a set of jury instructions and began to edit, make changes.

  By the time she finished revising, her jury charge began:

  Members of the Jury, you are about to begin your final duty, which is to decide the fact issues in this case. Before you do that, I will instruct you on the law. These instructions are in three parts . . .

  Some of it was basic stuff, Jury 101. You must follow the law as I give it to you whether you agree with it or not. That’s not just because I’m the judge. It’s because every person who comes before the court for trial is equal and is subject to the same law.

  She even threw in some country music. Don’t outsmart your common sense. (Lee Brice.) And she was done.

  At two thirty there was a knock on the door.

  “Come on in.”

  Kaitlyn Hemming entered. “There’s a call for you on line two—it’s both counsel on the Meyers case.”

  “What’s it about?”