The Hearing Read Online Free PDF Page B

in Montgomery denied the suppression motion. Less than a month after that, Ernesto Vicaro—faced
     with a Continuing Criminal Enterprise charge that could give him a life sentence with no parole—accepted a plea bargain guaranteeing
     twenty years in prison. It was a triumph for Gus. He’d locked up the biggest cocaine dealer on earth.
    For the Montgomery papers it was a case of a local boy defeating a world-class dope dealer, an army of big-city lawyers, and
     doing it all despite threats to himself and his wife. And the praise wasn’t just local. Invitations continued to come from
     national talk shows. The
New York Times
ran an editorial: “A choice between a bribe or a bullet. Three million dollars or the murder of himself and his wife. And
     Gus Parham didn’t even think it over. He called the cops. Today the man who made that threat is in prison serving 20 years,
     and Gus Parham is still in his office in the Montgomery federal building preparing what we hope are more cases against criminal bullies like Ernesto Vicaro-Garza.”
    Nineteen months after the Ernesto Vicaro case, Gus was appointed federal magistrate in Montgomery. A year later he stepped
     up to district court judge in the middle district of Alabama, located in Montgomery. It was the answer to a dream, not as
     big as his Supreme Court dream, but big enough, to see if he could be the kind of judge he knew a judge should be, to answer
     not to clients or complainants or police or politicians, but only to the truth and to the law. When people thought to ask
     about his politics, the answer was always “He doesn’t have politics, he only has principles.” People who tried to contradict
     that came up empty.
    Gus had been a district court judge for less than a year when his Harvard friend Dave Chapman, then serving in the Senate,
     was nominated to run for President. In November, Chapman was elected.

6
    T raffic slowed and Gus saw flashing red police lights in the block ahead. An accident. It was early April, a beautiful spring
     day. He gripped the wheel and sighed. Why did these things always happen when he was in a hurry? A murder defendant, her attorney,
     and the prosecutor were waiting outside his chambers, ready to work out a plea bargain to a reduced charge of manslaughter.
    He didn’t usually take this road. A construction detour had forced him from his regular route onto something called Bakersfield
     Boulevard. The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t remember having been here before. And now it looked as if he might never
     be able to get off it.
    Three minutes later the line of cars began to move. He crept forward, and as he approached the police lights, he saw a crowd.
    It wasn’t an accident. Some kind of disturbance. A group of protesters was waving placards. The placards said BABY KILLERS!
    And then Gus remembered where he’d heard the name Bakersfield Boulevard. Twenty feet in from the street, a one-story white
     stucco building sat behind a metal sign reading HAMILTON-SMYTH CLINIC.
    Years ago, Gus had found it in the telephone book, the only abortion clinic in Montgomery. That must be where his child had
     been killed. He knew a lot of people wouldn’t look at it like that, that his child had been killed. He wished
he
didn’t look at it like that. But he could never think of the child as simply a lifeless mass of tissue, as anything other
     than a child—his child—who had been killed. Killed with his approval. At his insistence. The only child that would ever occupy
     Michelle’s womb.
    It was then, when he found the name in the phone book, that he had thought of going over and looking at the clinic. It was
     the closest he would ever be able to get to the child. It was the only place on earth to which the child had had any physical
     connection. Maybe if he went he could get some sense of the child—of its presence, of its existence.
    But he hadn’t done it. As much as he wanted some memory or experience of the child, he