Stealing the Elf-King's Roses

by Duane, Diane

• ISBN13: 9780446609838
• ISBN10: 0446609838
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Aspect

Summary

In an alternate-world Los Angeles, prosecutor/psychic Lee Enfield and her partner, Gelert, investigate the murder of an elf. They soon reveal a deadly network of ties among organized crime, multinational corporations, and planetary governments of the Seven Worlds--all working together on the "ethnic cleansing" of elves from the alternate world of Alfheim. Original.

Excerpts

All rise for the right honorable Charles Redpath, magistrate," said the bailiff, "acting in and for the City and County of Los Angeles, in proceedings designated DL-5745-27 and to be enacted this day, April 27, 2004, in the City and County Circuit Court, session nine hundred and forty-five. Let all who desire Justice draw near, and Justice shall be done them."

Lee was still always amazed that the last sentence of the "blurb" didn't cause a rush for the doors. Nevertheless, everyone stayed where they were, and they all stood up, and in a flurry of black silk robes over that brown tweed suit, here came Charles out of his chambers and up the steps to the bench-a brisk, florid little dark-haired man, running slightly to stoutness now, with a short bristly mustache that could make him look extremely stern until he forgot himself and smiled. But he rarely forgot himself in the courtroom, and when he did, people were usually sorry afterward that they had tried to provoke the smile in the first place, or expected it to indicate humor. Lee kept her face very straight, and noticed that beside her, Gelert was for once not wagging his tail.

"Please be seated," Charles said, and in a rustle everyone sat down. The court was a little fuller than usual today, for this was sentencing, and the case had attracted some attention in the papers: more than usual, since Mr. Redpath had excused the cameras last week, citing only the traditional stricture (as was his right) that "the camera looks, but Justice sees." Now the magistrate shuffled through his paperwork and unlimbered his laptop, waiting a moment for the pertinent documents to display themselves. "All right," he said, "this is the continuation of Ellay City docket 88- 38715-4548, the People versus Lawrence J. Blair...." He looked up from the papers, glanced around the courtroom.

"We'll resume as from our recess of last Friday," he said, "assuming no one has anything strictly procedural to add. Mr. Hess?"

"Nothing, Your Honor," said Alan: very prudently, Lee thought, since he had pretty much exhausted Mr. Redpath's patience last week with procedural interferences of various kinds, all apparently directed toward one purpose: stalling.

"Ms. Enfield? Madra Gelert?" "Nothing, Your Honor," Lee said, and Gelert shook his head.

"Very well. Summations may commence," Mr. Redpath said. "Prosecution?"

Lee stood up, shrugging her own silks into place over the new light blue dress. As always on a summation and sentencing morning, she was nervous for no good reason, and her chain of office felt like it was askew, and twice as heavy as it really was. She knew she looked all right, knew that she looked polished and professional enough, knew what the jury and Charles Redpath and all the newsies were seeing: a woman of medium height and medium build, face with all the features in the usual order, figure not terrible for her age, and nice hair, for the new shorter cut and the blond streaking worked well. Yet she felt haggard, unprepared, clammy, tired from having stayed up late preparing, and unready for what she knew was about to happen.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Your Honor, and Justice here present-" she said. And all that preparation cut in and started to make her feel better, as it usually did. "You've heard the evidence which my colleague has presented to you. The defendant stands before you now accused of a chain of frauds which have finally caught up with him- several of them directly connected, as we have proven, to the one for which he has been brought before you in this proceeding...."

Lawrence Blair was a promoter who put together concert packages for various popular and rock musicians, some famous, some just getting started and rather vulnerable, financially at least. Five years or so ago a concert involving several large bands appeared to have been badly undersold by the "packaging" company handling ticket sales. There had been allegations of ineptitude on the part of the packaging company, a couple of civil suits filed, later dropped when Blair entered into a gentleman's agreement with the debtors and promised to repay them their losses.

His debtors accepted the arrangement and settled back to wait a reasonable time to be paid what they were owed, and Blair went on to organize other gigs, some successful, some not. Some of his creditor "clients" got paid, and most did not. "Mr. Blair's defense," Lee said to the jury, "would like you to believe that the people who didn't get paid on time, or at all, were merely the victims of accidents: lost payments, misunderstandings with the bank, unavoidable cashflow difficulties. But we've shown that the cause of these nonpayments was Mr. Blair's own redirection of the funds owed these people into other projects destined to make him more money."

She reminded the jury of dates and names, while in the background hearing Gel lie down on his pad, the links of his chain sounding softly against each other-not the normal gold a human practitioner might wear, but fairy gold-lowcarat, but still an extravagance hidden in plain sight. Gel loved such extravagances, and not being caught at them. But that was typical of how he preferred to operate, letting Lee do the "front work" while he stepped softly around in the background, fading into it where necessary.

He had nothing to do this morning except observe the verdict; all his work had been done with his usual skill in the discovery stage of the case. Lee thought sometimes that part of his success at eliciting testimony lay in the continuing fascination of many humans with the madrín . They hadn't been common in Lee's universe until twenty years or so ago, and there were lots of people who were charmed by the sound of a melliflous voice and courteous conversation coming out of what appeared to be a frizzy-coated white wolfhound the size of a small horse. If the big goofy-looking grin Gelert could produce while conducting an interview put people off their guard, Lee didn't mind. And if the lolling tongue and dingbat expression, or the way he twitched those big shell-pink ears around, made other people discount or entirely forget Gelert's expertise, Lee didn't mind that either ... and she knew her partner, one of the first products of UCLA's doctorate program in litigative mantics, enjoyed taking advantage of the misapprehension. She threw a glance over her shoulder at him as she wound up her closing statement. Gelert opened those huge jaws in a gigantic, silent stage yawn, exhibiting entirely too many fangs: a private signal of profound confidence and a desire to cut to the chase.

"Joel Delaney's case brings us up to the present," said Lee, coming to a stand now at the foreman's end of the jury box. "Out of forty performers whom Mr. Blair has engaged to perform over the last three years, only ten have been paid in full: five have received partial payments, well short of what was promised: and the rest, still unpaid, have pooled a significant amount of funds in order to bring this case into the civil courts, so that Justice might be given a chance to operate where other agencies have failed. We ask you to look with us at the defendant and open the way for Justice to enter here; to see the truth of the matter, find him guilty as charged, and to participate in sentencing should the verdict so require."

Lee nodded to the foreman and to the other jurors, turned and went to sit down. In a few moments Alan was on his feet, and had begun addressing the jury with his usual smoothness. Right now he was making the whole case sound like a series of coincidences, complicated by incompetent accountants, accidents, and badly drawn-up contracts. He went on to make everything Lee had said sound either foolish or mischievous, and finally said, "We ask you to look with us at the defendant, opening the way for Justice; to see the truth of the matter and to find him innocent." He sat down.

"Thank you," said Mr. Redpath, and tapped at his laptop's keyboard briefly. He looked over at the jurors' box. "Before we proceed, do any of you ladies or gentlemen require a recess at this time?"

The foreman, a small round woman with long wavy blond hair, looked down the length of the box at her fellow jurors. Heads were shaken. "No, Your Honor," she said after a moment.

"Very well." Mr. Redpath glanced at the bailiff. "Secure the room," he said.

The bailiff nodded, went over to confirm the time with the clerk of the court: the clerk reached under her desk to touch the button that locked the doors. Mr. Redpath folded down his laptop's screen, then folded his hands in front of him. There was a spate of the usual brief shuffling and last chance- to-cough coughing. Then things got very still.

The prosaic courtroom-the slightly dusty windows through which the afternoon's sunlight was beginning to pour, the pale golden birch paneling of the walls, the terrazzo floor and the acoustic ceiling, now started to take on a strange, sharp-edged quality, as if another kind of light were starting to suffuse the place, different from the hot sunlight, harsher, clearer. A different view of human affairs began to superimpose itself over the merely human one, as the Other without whom no court was fully functional began to manifest.

Once such manifestations had taken much more work. In ancient Greece, men had compelled Justice's presence by sheer weight of numbers. As technique improved, the Romans and Byzantines managed it with tribunals of fifty, and medieval Europe with only "twelve good men and true." In this country, most jurisdictions kept the jury as a check on the judiciary process. But you really needed only two or three properly trained people, these days-the two advocates, and the magistrate who maintained the structure which compelled the Power's attention. Once you had Justice's attention, everything else happened very quickly indeed.

That sense of the Other's presence deepened. Mr. Redpath just gazed down at his folded hands as the presence increased in the room, as everything became subtly more visible. Redpath wasn't one of those jurists who went in for voiced invocations or flamboyant gestures; he simply made room in the courtroom for Justice, and it arrived, without fuss, focused and fully empowered. Such matter-of-fact competence would probably push him into the Court of Appeal eventually, maybe even the State Supreme Court. But right now Lee was glad he was here, since with that matter-of- fact quality came the certainty of control. Justice might be a good thing, but if improperly mediated, a cardinal Virtue could get out of hand and affect everyone in a courtroom, not just those in whose cause it had been invoked.

The silence around Lee was no longer something that needed to be enforced. People felt it looking at them. Like small creatures caught suddenly under the regard of something with sharp eyes and sharp claws, people tended to hold still and try not to attract its notice. Yet soon enough that additional effect set in, the sense of the stately presence of an ancient and deserved grandeur, something intangible yet powerful and splendid; possibly what people spoke of when they mentioned "the majesty of the law." The bailiff, the court clerk, the security guards minding the doors, all stood up when they felt it. Others stood as well, some in a hurry, some more slowly. Finally, only Charles, already standing for Justice in his person, remained seated.

Lee looked into the "well," the empty space between the bench and the counsels' tables, and Saw edges-that twoedged sword with which the Power manifesting here was so often pictured, immaterial but multiplied many times over, a tangle or nest of potential enforcement, like so much barbed wire. Mr. Redpath swallowed once, a strained motion, and looked up. "Let the defendant come forward and be judged," he said.

Lawrence Blair came out from behind the defense table, exchanged a suddenly nervous glance with Alan Hess, and stepped out into the well. He stood there with a most neutral expression, one which for Lee didn't hide his feelings at all. Finally, this late in the proceeding, he had had the sense to become afraid.

Lee let her gaze rest on Lawrence Blair and concentrated on letting Justice here present see so clearly through her that others wouldn't be able to help seeing as well. Across the aisle, Alan Hess was doing the same. And leaning against them like sunlight made solid, heavy and intent, the Power looked at Blair.

Lee looked at the defendant, and waited, letting the Sight work, concentrating on keeping her own thoughts quiet and making of herself a transparent conduit through which Justice could gaze unimpeded. Trained and inured to the Regard as she was, it hurt somewhat. Lee was better than usual at bearing the discomfort, partly because she did so much work in the forensic side of Seeing-perceiving the truth about things. But things hurt less to look at than people, and Lee stood there and shook as the pain increased.

Standing there in the well, among swords of light that he could not see but was beginning to feel, Blair started to tremble too ... and inside him, the Balance shook itself loose and wavered between rise and fall. In it lay his soul, and Justice's other tool, the sense of true right or wrong, even more powerful than the mind to work its will on the harboring body.

And the Balance began to sink. Lee Saw in Blair the swathing concealment of self-delusive good intention (... I'll pay them as soon as I have it ...) and expediency (... I really need the funds more for this new project, they can wait a little longer ...) and calculation (... If I don't pay this guy, he's powerful enough to make trouble down the line ...) . And from long ago, from sometime buried in his past, the image: his mother's words, when she first caught him stealing. "You little w-"

Even now he tried not to hear the word, to see the image. But Lee saw it as Justice, looking through her, did. She felt the Balance inside Blair shift with a groan-the soul admitting itself, in the unavoidable hot glare of Justice's regard, to have been found wanting, and weighing the scales hard down.

The first sound came from someone on the jury, the kind of angry gasp a man might make when he's cut himself. Then came another, someone wishing they could deny what they saw, and unable to. If only one juror failed to see what both the prosecution and Justice saw, the judgment would not take.

One last soft moan came from the jury box. Lee didn't see who it was, but she felt the mind behind the moan make the verdict unanimous. The Power in the room with them struck through her and Alan like lightning; and the nest of unseen swords rose up, surrounded Blair, and sliced him through.

Continue...

Excerpted from Stealing the Elf-King's Roses by Diane Duane Copyright © 2002 by Diane Duane
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.