Deadlock

  Deadlock

  James Scott Bell

  In this legal thriller for the evangelical Christian market, former trial lawyer- turned-novelist Bell imagines what would happen if a prochoice, atheistic Supreme Court Justice suddenly became a born-again believer. A near brush with death and the sudden loss of her mother leaves 52-year-old liberal Justice Millicent "Millie" Hollander pondering eternity and considering faith. When she becomes chief justice, Millie discovers that the belief she has embraced excites a firestorm of confusion and anger from her former supporters. A case involving a separation of religion and state opens up a huge rift in the Court, and the media soon turns the whole affair into a three-ring circus. Alarmed about Millie's potentially conservative positions, the president and stereotypically hard-drinking, womanizing Sen. Sam Levering plot her impeachment and possibly her death. A weak subplot concerns a teen's abortion and subsequent lawsuit against the clinic where it was performed, which rather unconvincingly intersects with Millie's story toward the close of the novel. Portions of the plot aren't completely fresh Angela Elwell Hunt's recent The Justice ably tackled the same general topic for the same audience. But Bell's take on the idea of a Supreme Court justice making a religious about-face offers some unique spins, including a curveball plot development that will blindside most readers. Laudably, most characters are multidimensional, and even the senator's evil troubleshooter, Anne Deveraux, becomes worthy of pity. Evangelical prolife fiction aficionados should appreciate this addition to the CBA thriller genre.

  James Scott Bell

  Deadlock

  Copyright © 2002 by James Scott Bell

  This book is for

  Tracie Peterson

  PROLOGUE

  The girl heard herself scream.

  Oh, God, don’t let them do it!

  Her words were only in her mind. Her mouth was open, but only sputtering gasps came out, issuing an awful ak ak ak sound.

  Her eyes felt puffy, raw. Where was she?

  A bed. She was in a bed. Hers.

  She put a hand on her stomach.

  Don’t let them!

  Hand on stomach and head spinning. Warm sweat on her face. She had been sleeping.

  And she knew she’d had the nightmare again, the same one, the one where they were dressed in black. Not white smocks. Black robes. They had her tied down on the cold, hard ground. Her wrists, in the dream, were fastened to stakes. She could not move. One of the robed ones laughed at her.

  It always seemed like an image from a horror film, one of those devil movies where the devil actually comes to life.

  Life. That was what she’d had inside her. A life, a baby. She knew that now. They hadn’t told her. In the dream she had seen him, a son, a little boy. Her stomach was like a window, and she could see into it. A dome of glass, and under the dome her baby.

  He had opened his eyes and looked at her.

  Don’t let them!

  But in the dream the robed ones closed in, and one of them had a knife. He was going to do it – she had said he could, but now she didn’t want him to, and she tried to move, but she was tied down.

  That was always when she heard herself scream.

  This was the fourth night in a row she’d had the dream. It had come and gone before, but now it came every night, and she knew it would never go away. She had tried to end the dreams before, with a razor blade. But Mama had found her and the doctors brought her back to life.

  She did not deserve life. That was another thing she knew. That’s what the dreams were telling her. At sixteen she had lived too long, long enough to let them kill her baby.

  Barefoot, in underwear and a T-shirt, she slipped out of bed so her mama wouldn’t hear, and then out the window into the warm southern night. The smell of old tires and rusted car parts hit her, and the buzz of cicadas was as loud as her beating heart. She headed for the highway, for pavement, so she could run flat out. She knew she’d have to make a decision soon. What could she do? Wait for a truck and throw herself in front of it?

  Or maybe the bridge.

  Yes, that was it. Just like in that song her mama used to sing to her, about that girl named Billie Jo who jumped off a bridge. There was one just a mile away, over the gorge. She’d thrown rocks off it once with Cody. He’d said he loved her then but it was a lie. He said get rid of the baby and he wouldn’t tell. Then he told her to leave him alone forever.

  Now she’d go over the gorge like a rock herself, and Cody would know about it. They’d all know about it. They’d all suffer like she had suffered.

  For one second she thought about not doing it, because of Mama, even though Mama yelled a lot. She would be alone. But in that second the hurt inside took over and she remembered the dreams and knew this was the only way.

  Once she looked back and thought she saw something, a scary something. The people in black robes. Only this time there were hundreds of them and they were running behind her, almost pushing her. She thought she heard them whispering in unison, do it, do it, do it.

  She would do it. She reached the bridge and saw it outlined against the moon. She could hear the rush of the river below, deep in the gorge, sloshing over sharp rocks. When she started over the bridge, the waters sounded like they were singing.

  Singing…

  No, it was voices singing. Real voices. Somewhere close. There was a campground on the other side of the bridge. That meant people.

  She stopped for a moment. What were they singing? Something about… Jesus. A church camp maybe? A bunch of kids singing church songs. She’d done that once, a long time ago, before Mama stopped going to church. She had once sung songs about Jesus. No more. Jesus hated her.

  She thought of God then, and wondered why God hadn’t stopped them from doing it, hadn’t stopped her from letting them. If God was real he would reach down right now and make it all better, bring her baby back.

  God should have stopped it before it happened. He gave the laws, didn’t he? She thought about the law that was supposed to protect her. Wasn’t that why they’d made her sign the paper? She didn’t understand it, but they said to sign it, so she did. They said it was the law, and the law was good and it would protect her.

  It didn’t.

  And if the law didn’t protect her, and God didn’t, nothing else would either. She moved to the middle of the bridge.

  There was a narrow strip of asphalt road across the bridge with small steel rails on either side. She’d be able to hop it, no trouble.

  The singing got louder. They were praising Jesus. He hadn’t reached down to help her either, any more than God had.

  She hesitated. One second between life and death. It wouldn’t be so bad. And then she wouldn’t have the dreams anymore, and everybody’d be sorry, and they’d know they killed her and her baby, and they’d cry. All of them.

  She thought she heard something. Someone coming. A voice said, “Hey…”

  She jumped up on the rail.

  PartOne

  *

  We are very quiet on the Supreme Court,

  but it is the quiet of a storm center.

  JUSTICE OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  Millicent Mannings Hollander could not stop looking at evil.

  She sat, along with her eight colleagues, on the raised dais facing the marble frieze over the main entrance to the United States Supreme Court. The frieze depicted the forces of evil – deceit and corruption – overcome by good: security, charity, and peace. The scene was dominated by the triumphant figure of justice, an enduring testament to the greatest virtue of the law.

  As a ten-year veteran of the Court, Millie Hollander had seen that artwork hundreds of times. Why should it jump out at her now? Was it simple judicial fatigue? Thou
gh in relatively good shape at fifty-two (she liked to shoot hoops in the Supreme Court gym), every term was a challenge.

  Work on the Court was a day in, day out cavalcade of cases, court petitions, emergency appeals, oral arguments, conferences, analyses, and draft opinions. The same held true even for the three hundred other employees of the Court – everyone from the private police to the cafeteria cooks – who did not don the robes.

  Though she loved everything about the Court, by mid-June Millie was ready for the recess, the summer break that lasted until Labor Day.

  But mere weariness wasn’t behind this perception – this sensation – of evil. She’d been tired before. No, there was a feeling of something deeper, something out there.

  She blinked a couple of times and then thought it might just be the lawyer at the podium. Not that lawyers were evil (though some might be inclined to disagree with her there) but he was phrasing his argument in apocalyptic terms. “The matter is not simply what is right for this student,” he had just said, “but for all the future students who must decide if life has any meaning at all.”

  Millie Hollander, in all her time as an associate justice of the Court, had rarely heard an advocate cast so wide a net. Got to admire his ambition, Millie thought, if not his grasp of the Establishment Clause.

  “What business is it of the public schools to teach anything about the meaning of life?” Thomas Riley thundered at the lawyer.

  Millie had to smile. How many times had she heard that voice, now eighty-four years young, plow right into the heart of an issue?

  As the lawyer for the high school student stammered a reply, Millie once again found her gaze pulled, almost magnetically, to the frieze and the rendition of evil. There seemed to be something new about it, though that was absurd. Her legal mind clicked a notch and informed her that there couldn’t be anything new about artwork that had been in place nearly seventy years.

  “Public schools have some sort of mandate to prepare students for life, don’t they?” Justice Byrne asked the lawyer. Raymond Byrne was the Court’s most conservative member – the polar opposite of Tom Riley – and often asked soft follow-up questions after Riley had skewered some hapless lawyer.

  Millie knew it was all part of the dance. The two most extreme justices were really trying to pull the middle three swing votes – herself, Valarde, and Parsons – to their side of the fence. Millie almost always came out on Riley’s side. Thus her label as a moderate liberal in the popular press.

  And on this issue, the role of religion in schools, Millie had long made her position clear – no role. Strict separation of church and state.

  “… so yes, Your Honor,” the lawyer for the student said, “we must allow the free discussion of the most important issue in any student’s life, as – ”

  “But, Counsel,” Millie said, “isn’t the Establishment Clause’s very purpose to prevent any governmental stance on a religious issue?”

  The lawyer cleared his throat. “I believe, Your Honor, that to allow discussion is not really a ‘stance’ on a religious issue, it is a – ”

  “But it’s happening on school grounds, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it – ”

  “And students are compelled to be there by law, aren’t they?”

  “That’s true, Your Honor, but – ”

  “Then what you are arguing for is tantamount to legal coercion, is it not?”

  “I don’t believe it is,” the lawyer said, his voice warbling a bit. Millie was about to tell him that the only thing that mattered was what the Constitution declared, but let it go. The man had suffered enough.

  Ten minutes later, Chief Justice Pavel announced the adjournment of the Court for the last time this term. The nine justices rose to make their magisterial exit through the burgundy velvet curtains behind the bench.

  Just before she did, Millie took one more look at the frieze. There was that sense again, of something from the evil side moving toward her. That was enough. She told herself to get a very serious grip.

  Then she looked down from the frieze to the packed gallery, and immediately locked eyes with someone in the back row.

  The eyes belonged to a United States senator, one the New York Times had recently named the most powerful politician of the last twenty-five years. And Senator Samuel T. Levering, D-Oklahoma, was giving Justice Millicent Mannings Hollander a very enthusiastic thumbs-up sign.

  Not something she usually got from politicians. But she knew this was no ordinary time. In two hours she would be meeting with Levering, at his request. She also knew he was probably going to offer her the dream of a lifetime.

  2

  Charlene Moore closed her eyes and sang.

  Oh, God, don’t let me mess up, no no. Her voice was a whisper in the elevator. Oh, God, don’t let me sweat. Oh, God, this is my one good suit! Ain’t got money for a new one, Lord. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  At least the elevator air was cool. As the elevator charged toward the thirtieth floor, Charlene wondered what would happen if she just stayed in the car, rode it back to ground level, and ran from the building.

  She sang again, which was how she prayed when she was nervous. Lord, take my feet and make ’em walk on fire.

  A fire it would be, going up to Winsor & Grimes! Little Charlene Moore, born twenty-seven years ago in Mobile, Alabama, the great-granddaughter of a slave. A girl who wanted nothing more than to sing like Patti LaBelle. What was she doing here, a lone, unmarried lawyer with only one client and a very large tiger by the tail?

  Because God had spoken to her?

  The elevator bell rang, startling Charlene. She smoothed her skirt and checked the clasp on her briefcase. The doors opened. With one last prayer, Charlene stepped into the largest reception area she had ever seen. At just over five feet tall, she felt a little like Frodo Baggins looking up at Mount Doom.

  Over a desk the size of an aircraft carrier were huge brass letters: Winsor & Grimes. Founded just before World War I, it had prospered even through the Great Depression. A Spanish American War veteran, Captain Beauregard Winsor, was the legendary founder. Malcolm Grimes was an equally storied personality who had joined the firm in 1920.

  Though both names were now part of regional legal lore, neither had achieved the stature of the man Charlene was about to meet. Beau Winsor III, who many said had engineered the election of the current president of the United States, was the one who had summoned her here.

  After a cursory check-in with the receptionist, Charlene was ushered into a conference room by a young woman who looked as if she could gnaw metal. Winsor & Grimes was known for toughness, even in its assistants.

  Ten minutes later the door to the conference room opened. A lean square-chinned man in an impeccable navy blue suit, with a full head of graying hair and a blindingly white smile, extended his hand. “Beau Winsor,” he said.

  Charlene swallowed. “Charlene Moore.”

  “Welcome.” He spun the chair next to her so he could sit down. Charlene was unnerved. She had anticipated he would sit across from her, like an adversary. “You get up here to Mobile much?” he said.

  “No, actually,” Charlene said, certain her throbbing pulse could be heard by everyone on the thirtieth floor.

  “How I envy you,” Winsor said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, that simple life down in Dudley. The way things move, easy and nice. Not like up here, where things are a bit more hurried, more harsh.”

  He drawled that last word in a rich, honeyed tone. And his was the smile of a killer. Hardly a word had been spoken and already Charlene felt like a plug of red meat dangling by a thread over a lion’s cage.

  Charlene cleared her throat. “I’m sure it could be a little dangerous to come to the city unless a person knew exactly what was going on.”

  “Words of wisdom, Ms. Moore. It’d be more than a little dangerous. A person could get hurt pretty bad. And I hate to see people get hurt.”

  He nodded at her, li
ke an uncle. An uncle hiding a stiletto behind his back.

  “You know,” he continued, “federal court is like the city. When you filed your case it was in state court. Nice, easy-going judges and juries. When we moved it to federal court, well, it’s a whole new world. You ever tried a case in federal court?”

  Charlene had never even been inside a federal courthouse. “This will be my first,” she said.

  “Can’t say as I’d recommend this case to be your debut.”

  She could feel him circling her, looking for cracks in her façade.

  “My policy is to meet with opposing counsel face-to-face,” Winsor said, “before a trial starts. Talk some turkey. Now it seems to me you’ve invested quite a bit of time and money in this whole thing.”

  How true that was. Her bank account was precariously low, her credit cards maxed out. “I believe in this case,” she said.

  “’Course you do, darlin’. Mark of a good lawyer. And when I see a good lawyer, I want to make sure he – or she – gets a fair hearing. So before we go taking up a lot of time and trouble in court, how about we settle this right here and now?”

  “What,” Charlene said slowly, “did you have in mind?”

  “Well now, you’re asking for a whale of a lot of money, Ms. Moore. We know that’s how you play the game. I’ve got no grudge against a good game. Did you know my grandpappy played ball against Ty Cobb?”

  The sudden turn threw her off balance. “Really?” she said, trying to sound interested.

  “Sure enough. Baseball was a game for men back then. Tough men. And Cobb, well, he was one of the toughest. Used to slide into base with his spikes high, hoping to rip up the legs of anybody in his way. Well, my grandpappy stood in his way once. He played pro ball before settling on the law. And old Cobb, he came flying at him heading into third base, and what do you think my grandpappy did?”