Glass Houses by Jane Haddam Page A

the gills. Is all of this clear to you?”
    â€œSure it is.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œPeople are drunk in court all the time though,” Henry said. “I’ve got an uncle like that. He’s never falling down drunk, you know, or slurring his words, but he’s never sober. Starts drinking at breakfast and keeps it up the whole day. Just enough. You know what I mean, just enough?”
    â€œI know what you mean, Henry, but from what I’ve seen of your arrest record, you’re not really good at knowing what’s just enough.”
    â€œNo,” Henry said. “I’m not.”
    And since that was the truth, he sat back and gave it a rest for a while. He didn’t turn around to look at his sisters, even though he had seen them come in and knew they were there. They were literally
right
behind him, and he didn’t want to get into a conversation. He looked at the prosecution table and saw that he had lucked out there, too. Instead of the usual junior assistant district attorney just old enough to have graduated from kindergarten and not really clear on how to proceed in a real court, he had the district attorney himself, complete with that cotton-candy pompadour that made him look like he was about to sing doo-wop for a street quartet. The district attorney had come with three assistants, two of them women, and a secretary with a short-hand pad.
    The door behind the judge’s platform opened and the judge came out, and Henry was nearly struck dumb. This was beyond lucking out. This was Annabel Draydon Wallace, the first black woman to have been named a judge in Philadelphia and a kind of force of nature. She was as tall as most men. Some of the articles about her—and they appeared in
TIME
and
People
as well as
The Philadelphia Inquirer
—said she was six feet when she was out of her shoes, and she always wore high-heeled shoes. She was no skinny little super-model either. She had weight on her. She looked like the
Queen Elizabeth II
in the midst of a full ocean voyage.
    â€œDamn,” Russ Donahue said. “They must have gotten her out of bed for this.”
    It was true, Henry thought. The more serious the crime; the more seriousthe courtroom, in every way. He had broken through to the big time in the criminal justice system. He could only do better if he blew up a federal building or drove a plane into a skyscraper, and he didn’t have the skill for one or the guts for the other. This was enough, really. He felt more than a little proud of himself. Maybe he would one day get sober and get a job and get a wife and have children and grandchildren, and this would be the kind of story he would love to tell them.
    But he wouldn’t do any of those things. He didn’t want to do any of those things. He just wanted to drink in peace and sleep where nobody would bother him about it, even if that meant sleeping on the sidewalk.
    Judge Wallace banged her gavel on the desk and sat down. The room sat down with her. Somebody said something to open the court, but Henry’s mind had been wandering. He didn’t see who it was or hear what was said. He suddenly wondered if this happened in every court, and if he’d missed it every time.
    Judge Wallace leaned forward and looked at the prosecution and defense tables. “Before we start,” she said, “I want to get something perfectly clear. Those doors back there are locked at the moment, and I’ve put extra officers on them to make sure nobody gets in, because the corridor is full of reporters. We’ve got all the major networks, broadcast and cable, and everything from
The Inquirer
to the
Weekly World News.
Now there is going to be no way, over the course of this situation, to keep the press out indefinitely. If there’s a trial, we’ll have to find ways of accommodating them. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to put up with grandstanding and publicity hogging from either of