Fanatics by Richard Hilary Weber Read Free Book Online Page A

first time, it was hard to know whether to genuflect, shake his hand, or kiss his ring—a platinum job set with a ruby at least the size of a plum.
    Flo offered him her hand, and with two hands he raised it to his lips. His gold cuff links dazzled. “I’m so honored, Lieutenant”—his voice was
basso profundo
, his tone Sunday-church-choir jubilant, sincerity vitalizing every word—“that any friend of yours should become an esteemed client of mine.”
    He smiled a broad smile, so warm it made Flo laugh as always, a smile that exposed his mouth full of lustrously gold teeth, as welcoming as a splash of Caribbean sunshine after a New York sleet storm. Golden Bobby earned his winning appellation.
    He led the way for his new client, Annie Agron, and her partner, Betty Fitzgerald, all walking with dignity down the long hall to the hearing room.
    Annie Agron had short, dark hair, a soft mouth, and sad brown eyes. She was wearing a gray flannel skirt, a navy blazer, a white blouse, and high-heeled black calfskin shoes. Except for the shoes, and the sad knowing eyes, she might have passed for an Upper East Side prep-school senior.
    Betty Fitzgerald, on the other hand, looked like any other hard-nosed divorce lawyer, an avenging angel in a black pinstripe suit. “Annie never should’ve been arrested,” Fitzgerald said to Golden Bobby. “Forget referred to trial.”
    “I’ve no objections to that,” he said. “Speaking purely technically, of course. Annie’s so obviously innocent. It hurts me to know our criminal justice system—and even our New York’s finest—could have made such a colossal blunder. I’m truly shocked.”
    “Yeah, right,” Flo said. “Shocked. Now tell it to the judge, Bobby.”
    2:05 P.M.
    The hearing room, devoid of decoration save for two American flags, a New York State flag, and a New York City flag, had space for about fifty spectators.
    The chamber was more than half empty. Present were defendants, a few family members, defendants’ lawyers, and assistant district attorneys, these last mainly young men and women not long out of law school. All waited their turn before the judge.
    The Honorable Lydia Compton was an African American woman in her mid-forties, a judge with an air of patience not unlike that of a presidential foreign affairs adviser, a thoughtful presence surrounded and harassed by ambitious generals and ignorant ideologues, each insistent on his own self-seeking position.
    Judge Compton’s patience would be put to the test this afternoon.
    Recollections of a crime, in Flo’s experience, seemed to acquire a dark indestructibility as infinite and as inescapable as memories are particular to the persons recollecting.
    In this case, once Annie Agron’s rearraignment hearing began in Judge Compton’s court, the accused, and the two arresting officers, patrolmen Magee and Dente, had experiences to relate that were banking up all around them, a huge wave that seemed poised to break over their heads, certainly if Robert J. Keating, Esq., had anything to say about it.
    Annie Agron, aggrieved, frightened, anxious, didn’t even glance at the patrolmen who arrested her for armed robbery.
    Officers Magee and Dente were both in uniform, caps off, and both appeared quite put-upon by this experience. Not only were they appearing in court, again, on their own time, no additional pay for the extra hour or so, but they were less than encouraged to find their perp now represented by the African Buddha Golden Bobby, every prosecutor’s nemesis.
    The courtroom surroundings, otherwise so ordinary for Flo Ott, on this occasion felt bizarre. Not the bewildering news and the absurd allegations, not the no-holds-barred procedural tactics Golden Bobby promised, but this. Detective Lieutenant Flo Ott, officer of the law, willing to act as a character witness for a criminal defendant. She might not have to say a word today, probably wouldn’t even be asked, not at a rearraignment. But Flo’s