Final Appeal Read Online Free PDF

some mistake. “My God,” is all I can say.
    “Judge Galanter says the court will continue with its operations as before.”
    I think of Galanter, taking over. Then Armen, dead. This can’t be happening.
    “Galanter said the Hightower case will be reassigned to another judge. Wasn’t that the case you stayed late on?”
    “Who found him?”
    “His wife, when she got in from Washington. She’s the one who called the police.”
    “Susan found him? Did she say anything? Did they interview her?”
    Her response is an abrupt laugh; I imagine a puff of smoke erupting from her mouth. “She’s holding a press conference this morning.”
    Susan. A press conference. What is going on? Why would Armen do such a thing? I close my eyes, breathing him in, feeling him still. Just hours ago, he was with me. Inside me.
    “Are you there?” my mother asks.
    I want to say, I’m not sure.
    I’m not sure where I am at all.

5
     

    I pack Maddie off to school in record time and barrel down the expressway into Center City, rattling in my VW station wagon past far more able cars. KYW news radio confirms over and over that Armen committed suicide. I swallow the pain welling up inside and tromp on the gas.
    I can’t get to the courthouse doors because of the press, newly arrived to feast on the news. Reporters are everywhere, the TV newspeople waiting around in apricot-colored pancake. Cameramen thread black cables through a group of demonstrators, also new to the scene. There must be forty pickets, walking in a silent circle, saying nothing. I look up at their signs, screaming for justice against a searing blue sky: HIGHTOWER .
    But I have to get inside.
    “Would you like one?” asks an older man in a checked short-sleeved shirt. He holds a pink flyer in a hand missing a thumb; his face is weatherbeaten like a farmer’s. “It tells about my daughters.”
    “Your daughters?” I look up in surprise.
    He nods. “Do you have children?”
    “Yes. A daughter.”
    “How old?”
    “Six.” I don’t want to talk to him. I can’t think about Hightower now. I want to get inside.
    “Does she like Barney?”
    “No, she likes Madeline. The doll.”
    The deep creases at his eyes soften into laugh lines. “My little one, Sally? She liked dolls. She had a Barbie, and Barbie’s sister, too. What was the name of that sister doll?” He looks down at a pair of shiny brown shoes and scratches his head between grayish slats of hair. “My wife would know,” he says, his voice trailing off.
    “Skipper.”
    “Right!” He laughs thickly, a smoker. “That’s right. Skipper. Skipper, that’s the one.”
    I seize the moment. “Well, I should go.”
    “Sure thing. You hafta get to work.” He thrusts the flyer into my hand. On it is a black-and-white photograph of two pretty girls sitting on a split wooden rail. The typed caption says SHERRI AND SALLY GILPIN . I glance at it, stunned for a second. I knew the way they died, but I didn’t know the way they lived. The younger one, Sally, has a meandering part in her hair like Maddie’s, a giveaway that she hated to have her hair brushed. I can’t take my eyes from the little girl; she was strangled, the life choked out of her. What did Armen say last night? We saved a life .
    “You better go, we don’t want you to get fired on our account,” says the man. “God bless you now.”
    I nod, rattled, and make my way through the crowd with difficulty. Several of the women in line look at me: solid, sturdy women, their faces plain, without makeup. I avoid them and push open the heavy glass doors to the bustling courthouse lobby. I slip the flyer into my purse and flash a laminated court ID at the marshals at the security desk in front of the elevator bank. Two minutes later, I plow through the heavy door to chambers.
    Eletha is sitting at her desk, staring at a blue monitor with a stick-figure rendering of a courthouse made by one of the programmer’s kids. Underneath the picture it says: