Limitations by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online

out of Center City. Beyond U.S. 843, the area is blighted, sometimes dangerous, and offers few decent spots for lunch. But George Mason, who began his professional career in this courthouse as a Deputy State Defender, relishes every day the fact that he has come full circle.
    Now, in the adjacent concrete parking structure, Judge Mason throws his briefcase down on the front seat of his car. He triggers the ignition so he can put on the air-it is another close evening in early June-but he has no intention of driving anywhere yet. The 1994 Lexus LS 400 is a remaining prize of his flush times in private practice, and he maintains the car devotedly, in part because it is the only space in the world he thinks of as exclusively his. Here at the end of the day, he often reflects on cases and personal issues, when he is finally free from the robe, whose weight he feels everywhere in the courthouse, whether he is wearing it or not.
    The gloomy parking garage would not strike many as a welcoming spot for reflection, especially since the Central Branch Courthouse is where many of the County’s most dangerous citizens must report monthly while they are out on bail. Although the garage is heavily patrolled by Marina’s forces during business hours, perpetual budget cuts have left only a small crew on duty after 6:00 P.M., when George customarily returns. Through the years, the garage has been the scene of stickups, beatings, and more than one shooting, involving Kindle County’s eternally warring gangs, the Black Saints Disciples, the Gangster Outlaws, and the Almighty Latin Nation, and their constituent ‘sets.’ ‘Get in and get out’ is the standard advice.
    At the moment, the judge has his eye on two kids, one long, one short, both in sweatshirts, who have popped up in his rear- and side-view mirrors several times. From their looks, he takes it that the two are probably here for late-afternoon drug court. At one point, he feared they were actually circling him, but they disappeared soon afterward. Either way, he is not about to move. The vague tingle of lurking danger has always been one of the attractions of the garage for George, whose entire professional life has been founded on the conviction that he knows himself best under these shadows.
    The driver’s seat in this car is as large and soft as a piece of den furniture, and he motors it back from the wheel, reclining slightly, so he can ask himself the question that has waited for hours. What is it that lingers with him about People v. Warnovits? ‘This case is me,’ he almost declared to his colleagues several hours before. Me? He had meant to say ‘my,’ on his way to offering, as a good-natured jest, ‘This case is my problem.’ Even that remark seems oddly proprietary in retrospect, since his role in the ideal is to speak for all three judges.
    And so the inner tuning fork has been struck. He continues, eyes closed meditatively, trolling his memory until what he has long sought is suddenly snagged. His grin with the first recollection fades as the problem becomes apparent.
    The event took place more than forty years ago, in a different world. In Charlottesville in those days, no one would have found it humorous to hear him say as a first-year-never ‘freshman’-that he was there to become a gentleman and a scholar. He attended class in a sport coat and tie. Like all the men in his family, he was colorblind. His mother had given him an index card explaining how to match his clothes, but he misplaced it and stepped out of the old dorm each morning expecting to be greeted with smirks.
    He had not been happy then. The chafing and boiling that would ultimately drive him here, a thousand miles from home, had started. He could not have named everything that bothered him-his mother’s relentless social pretensions, his father’s rigid adherence to faith and honor as the credo of a Southern gentleman-but coming of age amid the unyielding proprieties of southern