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complicated every year.
The district attorney keeps a score card, so many wins, so many losses.
The defense lawyers keeps theirs, wins, losses. At my end, it's the same; how many arrests, how many
convictions, how much of a raise does that warrant, how fast up the ladder does it get you. Like the
kids' game, Chutes and Ladders, remember that? Aim for the ladder, avoid the pits, and keep climbing,
keep playing the game. And then, one day you're reminded it's not a game. Not to those whose heads
get blown off, or the parents watching their kids taken away in manacles, or... You get the picture."
She nodded slightly. "I never had the chance to ask a judge this," he said then. "Is it like that with
judges? A big game complete with score card? Not wins and losses as such for judges, but what?
What's the plus side, the minus?" "Reversals," she said in a low voice. "You don't want to get the
reputation of having a lot of reversals.
And sometimes you might make case law, be in the textbooks, be cited in other cases."
"Ah. Fame. That's the biggie for judges? Within a narrow circle, granted, but a big frog in a small pond
must feel pretty good." "That's too simple," she said hotly then. "Some judges also try to put things right.
And my God, in this country in this time, someone had better try to do it!"
He nodded, and now he removed the key from the ignition. "My starting point," he said easily. "Try to
put things right. We all know that the prosecutors and the defense attorneys are biased as hell; they have
to be. At my end, and yours, the rule is to be impartial. A good rule. For one thing, it gets harder when
you're biased, doesn't it?" "Now what do you mean?" she demanded, and opened her door.
"Oh, I admit to bias. Fran was a friend. At one time more than that maybe, but a good friend. I'm going
to put things right for her. And I'd like to do it before you meddle too much. I'd hate to think you're
finding out anything that's getting deep sixed, making LIFE harder for us. And before someone gets the
idea that your meddling could be dangerous and puts a few bullets through your head. Come on, I'll
walk you to your room."
At her door he handed her the car keys. "Thanks for a nice dinner," he said, when she opened her motel
door. "Goodnight, Judge."
SARAH TOOK A long tepid shower, and then, dressed in a thin cotton gown, barefoot, she found that
she was too restless to consider trying sleep yet. The phrase try to put things right kept playing in her
head, over and over until it acquired a metronomic rhythm of its own.
She thought of the things he had said, what she had said, what she should have said, and through it all the
phrase put things right kept up a contrapuntal beat. All right, she taunted herself, so lurking under that
practical exterior is a full-blown Joan of Arc complex, a need to fix the world. She nodded. Yes. A
need, a real need.
Egotistical, she thought, then; sanctimonious, and again she nodded.
It was. But she knew she was good, better than some-better than most, she said to herself almost
savagely. "God damn it, admit it, you're better than most!"
Curiously, the image of her mother flashed in her mind, how she had wept when Sarah told her she was
getting married. She had wept even more when Sarah announced her pregnancy later the same year, but
that encounter was not as sharply etched in her memory as the first one.
Sarah had been furious with her mother; her own happiness had been overwhelming, the tears had
seemed a deliberate attempt to destroy everything.
"You know what you'll be, don't you?" her mother had cried. "A tag-along wife, just like me. I wanted
more for you. You're better than that."
Tag-along wife. Sarah could hear her mother's voice uttering the words in despair. What had her mother
wanted to do? Sarah never found out.
When she asked, her mother had shrugged and said it didn't matter.
Later, Sarah asked her father and he had simply looked blank.
She had been padding around the room in her bare feet as the thoughts raced, always against the
background music of the phrase put things right. Stop! she ordered herself. Abruptly she sat down and
pulled her notebook from her purse and looked over the list of numbers she had copied from Fran
Donatio's phone bill. Twenty calls, thirty, or more.
Area codes widely scattered. Well, she would turn that chore over to her secretary in the morning, let
her run them down, link names and addresses to the telephone numbers. Beatrice Wordley had done
similar chores in the past for Blaine.
And then she was thinking of Blaine, when he first became a prosecutor, the long talk they had had
about how awkward it would be to oppose one another in court. He had not asked, or even suggested,
that ' she stop taking criminal cases, she told herself sharply; they had joked about it that night, laughed
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