Shake the Trees Read Online Free PDF

James Mason would receive a lifetime appointment as a federal district court judge before he turned 40.  It never happened.
    Magistrate Judge Mason, or Judge Mason as he preferred to be called, was tired.  In the federal court system, the magistrate judges conducted the routine hearings and waded through the vast filings of paperwork that flooded in.  Quite often, the decisions of a magistrate were critical to the resolution of a case. This was especially true of a magistrate who had been on the bench longer than all of the federal judges for whom he labored.  The most clever and successful trial attorneys appearing before the federal bench understood this, and had carefully cultivated the friendship and loyalty of Judge Mason.  The rest and vast majority of the Bar considered his position to vaguely lie somewhere between a clerk and a “real” judge.
    For years Judge Mason had worked tirelessly on behalf of several charities and, particularly, as an advocate for the elderly.  This effort sprang from both real concern and a desire to reveal the qualities that would help him ascend to the position he so desperately coveted.  But James Mason was politically tone deaf, and receiving a Presidential appointment to the federal bench was all about politics.  The winds of change were always blowing.  Despite switching parties, at the critical moments Magistrate Judge Mason always found himself on the wrong side of the political fence.
    Several neatly stacked piles of paper covered the huge oak desk that his father had sat behind for decades.  The Masons were one of a few “almost” founding families that had arrived in Miami relatively early in its history.  James Mason, II, had been a state court judge for 41 years and had ruled with an iron fist.  The Judge, as he was known to nearly everyone, had bequeathed his only son a desk and a heritage, but little else.
    James Mason ran his fingers through his full mane of white hair and sighed.  His clerk Elizabeth laid his telephone messages on a pile of paperwork and brushed the top of his hand with her fingertips as she breezed out of the room.  The top message was from Stanley Rosen, his divorce attorney.
    James Mason and his wife, Lorna, had been happily married for two years; the other thirty-four varied between quiet desperation and pure misery.  Lorna had always wanted more.  More money and more prestige.  Her focus in life had generally been three-fold: the Junior League, the Floridian Garden Club, and The Miami Lakes Country Club.  Against all odds, their two daughters had turned out well, and lived out of state.  Their only son, James Marcus Mason, IV, known throughout his childhood as “Jimmy”, was a different story. 
    As he looked down at the telephone message, James ruefully recalled an episode that had taken place more than two decades earlier.  Lorna had taken Jimmy to the country club for swimming lessons.  Unfortunately, Jimmy ignored his mother’s admonition that children should be seen and not heard.  One of the other ladies had asked Lorna how “the Judge” was doing.  Everyone knew Lorna took a great deal of pride in being married to a judge.  Unfortunately, little Jimmy felt it necessary to correct the apparent misconception.
    “My dad’s not a real judge.  He’s just a magistrate.  He does all the shit work.”
    Lorna was horrified.  She marched her son out to the car and called him a little ass.  She told him that she wanted nothing to do with him; he was his father’s responsibility now.  Jimmy cried himself to sleep that night.  James tried to console him, but Jimmy locked his door and refused to talk.  Lorna didn’t return to the club for weeks. Somehow the whole thing ended up being James’ fault.  She had refused to enter the doors of Miami Lakes Country Club with Jimmy again.  Jimmy learned to swim at the YMCA. 
    As sole male heir to the Mason family legacy of achievement, Jimmy went on to commit an