The Laws of our Fathers Read Online Free PDF Page B

incomprehensible: because somebody was signifying on the wrong corner; because a jacket was torn. In nine months, she has mastered all the terminology: 'ride-by' (shooting on the move); 'drive-up' (firing from a stop); 'drive-through' (the car is the weapon); 'chase-aways' (the enemy flees). The older folks also live in a world from which anger and desperation emanate, as tangible as heat. Yes, men still kill each other over dice games, drugs, and, naturally, who was coveting whose girl. What can you say about a loaded gun in the hand of a spurned and drunken man? On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.
        Now the courtroom lingers in the somnolent air of the afternoon. This morning, during the weekly status call, the courtroom and corridor teemed with all the urgent antagonists, the defense lawyers, the cops and prosecutors, the aggravated citizen witnesses, the deputies sullenly transporting the defendants, and those defendants' beleaguered, woebegone women. But now there is a melancholy stillness. Outside the open doors at the rear of the courtroom, a custodian mops the halls in the yellowing light.
        Marietta hammers the gavel sharply, and the lawyers and reporters and sheriff's deputies slowly gather themselves to their feet, as Sonny climbs up the four stairs beside the bench, a clean-lined oak affair of faux-Bauhaus design. The senior judges sit in stately palaces in the main building on the third and fourth floors, vast chambers that bespeak the same architectural strategies as cathedrals - the individual dwarfed by the majesty of marble columns and gilt-framed portraiture, by the rococo gewgaws of carved walnut and ceilings vaulting two and a half stories above. These courtrooms in the Central Courthouse Annex were built in the eighties, when DC poured what money there was into law enforcement. The room strikes a clanging note of late-century efficiency - bang for the buck. For Sonny, the courtroom feels as intimate as her living room, but like certain children, its glory is not obvious to outsiders. It is a pie-shaped room, broadening back from the bench, rickety public construction, the plasterboard gouged in places, the meal-colored carpet already tearing away in hairy chunks. The jury box and witness stand repeat the stark lines of the bench. Weirdest is the track lighting, reminiscent of a motel lounge, which is positioned over the major players -judge, witness, attorneys - leaving dim spots throughout the windowless courtroom where the lawyers, the bailiff, the clerks tend to retreat in relaxed instants, like actors offstage.
        In the wake of the shooting death of a matrimonial court judge several years ago, these courtrooms have been built with a wall of bulletproof glass in front of the spectators' sections. The sound of justice being done is piped back there by way of microphones which seem to pick up the heavy breath of everyone - defendants, lawyers, Sonny herself - in the intervals between words. She looks out there every day, toward the friends, the relatives edging forward on their seats to catch some sight, some news about their loved one in jail overalls. In warning to them, Marietta has taped a hand-lettered sign to their side of the glass:
        
    No eating no drinking no visiting In the Lockup Or the Courtroom
        
    Now the dozen reporters who are present resume the leather barrel chairs in the jury box, where they have placed themselves to ensure that they can hear. The amplification system to the region beyond the glass often conks out, and the angled walls make the acoustics unpredictable. The journalists are mostly the hangdog beat reporters, but two of the pretty faces of local TV are present. Stanley Rosenberg, the little ferret from Channel 5, in a $500 blazer - and ratty blue jeans that the camera will not see - scurries to a seat next to a sketch artist he has brought along. In this courthouse, where the