The Nix(164)

“So I suppose you’re here to blackmail me then, right?” Brown said. “I agree to back off Faye Andresen, and in exchange you don’t release your information to the press. Am I close?”

“I actually hadn’t considered that.”

“Do you also want money?”

“I’m sort of embarrassingly bad at this,” the man said. “You just right now came up with a way better plan than mine. I really came here only to spy on you.”

“But now you’re considering blackmail. Is that fair to say? You are threatening me with blackmail. You are threatening a judge.”

“Wait. Hold on. Note that I said nothing of the sort. You are putting incriminating words in my mouth.”

“What would you tell the press? How would you explain what happened? I would love to hear your story.”

“Well, I guess I’d tell the truth? That you were having an affair with Alice, and Faye ruined it. And you’ve been waiting all these years to get your revenge. Which is why you took the case.”

“Uh-huh. Good luck proving that.”

“If I told everyone—and I’m not saying I will tell everyone, I’m saying if, this is a hypothetical, you understand—then you’d be embarrassed in public. You’d be tried and convicted in the press. You’d be taken off the case.”

Brown smiled and rolled his eyes. “Look, I am a Cook County circuit judge. I have brunch regularly with the mayor. I was the Chicago Bar Association Man of the Year. I don’t know who the f*ck you are, but I’d guess from your shitty car that you’re nobody’s man of the year.”

“What’s your point?”

“If it’s my word against yours, I feel pretty comfortable with those odds.”

“But Faye didn’t do anything to you. She shouldn’t go to prison for something she didn’t do.”

“She ruined my life. She put me in this chair.”

“She never even knew who you were.”

“I warned Faye once—never let me catch you in Chicago. That’s what I told her. I’m a man of my word. And now you have the gall to come here and tell me what to do with her? Let me explain what’s going to happen. I’m going to do everything in my power to see she’s convicted of high crimes. And I’m going to see her hang.”

“That’s insane!”

“It would be best if you didn’t try to stop me.”

“Or else what?”

“You know the penalties for threatening a judge?”

“But I never threatened you!”

“That’s not what it’ll look like. From the point of view of that security camera on my porch, it’ll look like you hid in the trees—very suspicious—until I came out of my house, at which point you approached me in a threatening manner.”

“You have a security camera?”

“I have nine security cameras.”

And at that, the man walked to his car, got in, and turned the ignition. The car’s engine thrummed quietly. Then with an electric buzz, the driver’s window came down.

“Alice was right,” the man said. “You’re a psychopath.”

“Just stay out of my way.”

Then the car rolled off, and Brown watched as it reached the end of his street, turned, and zoomed lightlessly away.





2


FAYE SAT SLUMPED on her couch, watching television, her eyes glassy, her face expressionless. Behind her, Samuel paced the apartment, from the kitchen to the couch and back, watching her. She flipped channels, staying between one and five seconds on any given show. Commercials she jumped away from immediately. Any other program she gave roughly a single breath to impress her. Then flip. The small television sat on the mantel of the apartment’s inoperative fireplace. Samuel could swear the TV wasn’t there on his first visit.

Outside, the midmorning sun shone brightly off Lake Michigan. Through the open windows, Samuel could hear car horns, far off. The city’s usual weekday roar. To the west, he could see the traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway moving at its usual viscous creep. He’d come here directly from his unfortunate encounter with Judge Brown. Samuel decided he needed to warn his mother, to tell her what he now knew about the judge. He had buzzed her apartment, and then buzzed again, and then again, and was about to start throwing rocks at Faye’s third-story windows when the front door finally clicked open. He came up and found his mother like this: quiet, distracted, a little befuddled.

Faye flipped to a reality show about a couple renovating their kitchen, which seemed to hold her attention.

“This is a show ostensibly about home improvement,” she said, “but really it’s about watching these two sweep away the ashes of their dead marriage.”

The show seemed to cut between clips of the couple’s inept DIY misadventures and interviews where they independently complained about the other. The husband—too eager with his sledgehammer—put a hole in a wall that he thought was slated for demolition but, turns out, wasn’t. Cut to clip of the wife complaining about how he never listens and is constitutionally unable to take directions. Cut to clip of the husband examining the damage he’s done to the wall and proclaiming with false authority: It’ll be fine, just calm down.