The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [139]
This morning, he left the office without explanation and drove himself south and west along a trio of expressways—Congress to the Dan Ryan to the Stevenson—and quietly waited in line with all the other jurors, defendants, spectators, and lawyers. He passed through security with hardly anyone but the courthouse regulars taking notice. Back at the office, Kate no doubt wondered silently if he was headed for some hotel rendezvous.
Better she think me an adulterer than what I really am, he thought.
Like most of the courtrooms at Twenty-sixth and California, this one was a distant relation to the oak-paneled theater upstairs where Solomon Gold had been tried. The walls were crudely whitewashed, the confines cramped. The judge and jury and prosecutors and defense lawyers and defendants were all in such close quarters that one Cook County judge had famously decreed that anyone sitting in his courtroom had to apply deodorant before entering, and he kept a case of miniature travel roll-ons in the jury room just in case. Today’s hearing would benefit from such a mandate, Reggie thought.
Derek Liu was seated on the other side of the partition, his head bowed until it almost touched the defendant’s table. One of Reggie’s associates sat next to him, hand on his back in empty reassurance. Prosecutors were relaxed and professional. This hearing would be short. The judge would decide on a bond and a date for the next court appearance and then this defendant would be escorted out and the next one escorted in.
Reggie nodded at the bailiff who opened the door to the fishbowl courtroom. A handful of reporters and gawkers, dispersed throughout the glass-walled gallery like flies trapped in a windowsill, gasped.
“Jesusmary,” the judge whispered.
Reggie handed a thin folder with an appearance form to the clerk, who stamped it. Reggie then took a step backward and came to a full stop before saying, “Your Honor, Derek Liu is my client and I request a moment to confer with him.”
One of Bradley Spelling’s prosecutors jumped like a cricket. He was watching a routine day at the courthouse topped off by drinks at the Brehon Pub spiral down the toilet. “Oh bullshit, Reggie. I’d like to see those invoices.” There was muffled laughter from the gallery and the judge let the expletive slide. “We’re all very honored that Reggie Vallentine has decided to join us on a routine hearing. But, Your Honor, the city is in crisis—a state of emergency even. Desperate people are living in their cars and in the parks. Neighborhoods are literally burning to the ground. This hearing has already been delayed. We have no time for Mr. Vallentine’s drama.”
The judge sighed. “No, Mr. Downs, we don’t have time. None of us has the time.” He turned to Reggie. “Counsel, this is just a bond hearing, not a trial.” He took a drink of water and woke his laptop keyboard with a swipe of his finger. “But you may confer with your client. And we’ll wait.”
52
“LIKE AN INVADING FORCE of well-groomed zombies, they shuffled into the park, hundreds of them with pillows and blankets, bottled water and flashlights, battery radios and air mattresses, winding alarm clocks and golden retrievers. With high-rise water pumps no longer functioning, the inhabitants of expensive parkside apartments—now oven-hot and bone-dry—have retreated to the slightly less stifling outdoors….”
Bobby was sitting at a police desk for the first time in a week, listening to a newscaster describe the scene in Lincoln Park on a small flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be there, but technically the city was in the middle of a full-blown crisis, and if anybody cared that Bobby was violating the terms of his