God Makes Them Mean

CHAPTER 6

Judge Taylor is an inbred WASP, with no chin, a trembling left eyelid and ice cold eyes. They say anyone unlucky enough to get him as a judge, if found guilty, will always get the maximum sentence. His office is wood panels and book shelves and Civil War paintings and memorabilia kept under lock and key in glass cabinets. You walk in and you feel like the clock has been rewinded ninety years. Make it a hundred and five.

I walk in that he's smoking a cigar.

'Ah, MacCreedy,' he says. 'Sit down, take a load off.' If you're not guilty, he's a pleasant man, with pleasant manners studied to make you feel like you're in the presence of a grand, generous king. Cigar in the corner of his mouth, he swivels his armchair so that he's facing me, hands wrapped into each other under his weak jaw. 'So, what can I help you with today?'

'I need a search warrant.'

He raises an eyebrow. 'Please, don't let it be Jay Mavis again.'

'I'm afraid it is.'

He raises the other eyebrow, and shakes his head slowly, pensively, like Salomon a moment before trying to chop the baby boy in two with his sword. 'Detective MacCreedy, I am afraid somebody should tell you to ease off. Looks like this somebody is going to be me. I heard complaints, you know? Prosecutor Tedeschi told me you are harassing the guy so hard it will be impossible for him to built a proper case the moment he gets one, just because even a sub standard lawyer can claim Jay Mavis has been persecuted too long and too often by the Police Department.' He stops to gently remove the ashes from his cigar. 'How did it happen that you got a case even remotely involving Mr Mavis, again?'

'I was the first one on the crime scene.'

'And Captain McPhaerson hasn't deemed it wise to pass the torch on to somebody with less of an attitude towards the aforementioned lowlife?'

'I haven't seen the Captain yet. I've been avoiding him all morning long.'

I draw a smile from him.  He has no sympathy for McPhaerson, whom he referred to as a bureaucratic martinet on a couple of occasions. 'Tell me about the case,' he exhorts me.

'Homeless person, shot dead in an alley downtown, with connections to the same strip clubs Jay and his friends frequent. Or, allegedly, protect. One of the latter admitted to knowing him.'

'Did you have the terrible idea to go and question them?' he asks.

'No Judge, we only conversed.'

His mouth upturn in a quick grin, equally quick to disappear. 'It sounds pretty flimsy so far.'

'Somebody with a pink lipstick was servicing the victim before he was killed. Jay has girls, many of them would stoop to pretty much anything in exchange for their next shot of cocaine. I would like to talk to them, but they live in his place and apparently they've taken a collective decision not to step out of the house. It's like they're union-ran.'

'It's all far-fetched, situational, and seems to me like you're forcing pieces of the puzzle together. You're crating a fiction too disjointed from reality.'

I grimace. 'Is that a no?'

'You are a good Detective. One of our best, in spite of your lack of glamour and the total disrespect you have for your body and your health, which makes it impossible to use you as a poster boy for the Department, like somebody would like to. Which is probably all the best for you. Anyway, you should drop this insanity. I'll call your Captain in person and tell him to shift your assignment. I won't have Internal Affair sniff up your ass for this, I won't see your career down in the drain. This insanity stops now.'

'Is this a no?'

He nods. 'This is a decisive, firm, no. Drop the case. Stop pestering Mavis. The man will be his own downfall anyway.' He looks at me with those cold blue eyes half hidden under bushy white eyebrows. He reminds me of someone in a Walt Disney cartoon, but I can't remember whom. 'Get a cigar before you go. No, not from that box, those are good cubans. The others. Jamaican.'