The Tenth Justice Read Free Page A

Tough Guy Joey, the neighborhood’s angriest street person. “Hey, Joey,” Ben said.
    “Screw you,” Joey snapped. “Bite me.”
    “Here’s some dinner,” Ben said, handing Joey the turkey sandwich he had brought to work. “Lucky me, they feed you on the first day.”
    “Thanks, man,” Joey said, grabbing the sandwich. “Drop dead. Eat shit.”
    “You got it,” Ben said. Passing the worn but cozy brownstones that lined almost every block of his neighborhood, Ben watched the legion of young professionals rush home to dinner down Dupont Circle’s tree-lined streets. Almost home, Ben inhaled deeply, indulging in the whiff of home cooking that always flowed from the red-brick house on the corner of his block. Ben’s own house was a narrow, uninspired brownstone with a faded beige awning and a forty-eight-starred American flag. Although it was August, the front door was still covered with Halloween decorations. Ben’s roommate Ober was quite proud of his decorating and had refused to take them down before they got another year’s use out of them. When Ben finally walked through the door, Ober and Nathan were cooking dinner.
    “How was it?” Ober asked. “Did you sue anybody?”
    “It was great,” Ben said. He dropped his briefcase by the closet and undid his tie. “The justice is away for the next two weeks, so my co-clerk and I just worked through some introductory stuff.”
    “Your co-clerk—what’s he like?” Ober asked, adding pasta to his boiling water.
    “She’s a woman.”
    “What’s she look like? Is she hot?”
    “She’s pretty cute,” Ben said. “She’s spunky, very straightforward. There’s no sense of bullshit about her. She’s got nice eyes, pretty short hair…”
    “She’s a lesbian,” Ober declared. “No question about it.”
    “What’s wrong with you?” Nathan asked as Ben shook his head.
    “Short hair and straightforward?” Ober scoffed. “And you think she’s not a lesbo?”
    “She did offer to fix my car today,” Ben added.
    “See,” Ober said, pointing to Ben. “She just met him and she’s already strapping on the tool belt.”
    Ignoring his roommate, Ben opened the refrigerator. “What’re you guys making?”
    “Anita Bryant is boiling the pasta, and I’m making my stinking garlic sauce,” Nathan said. His square shoulders didn’t budge as he moved the large pot of spaghetti to the back burner of the stove. Military in his posture, Nathan was still wearing his tie even though he had been home for a half hour. “Throw some more pasta in—there’s only twenty boxes in the cabinet.” Carefully, he moved his sauce pan to the front burner. “So tell us how it was? What’d you do all day?”
    “Until the Court officially opens, we spend most of our day writing memos for cert petitions,” Ben explained. Looking to make sure his friends were still interested in the explanation, he continued, “Every day, the Court is flooded with petitions seeking certiorari, or ‘cert.’ When four justices grant cert, it means the Court will hear the case. To save time, we read through the cert petitions, put them into a standard memo format, and recommend whether the justice should grant or deny cert.”
    “So depending on how you write your memo, you can really affect whether the Court decides to hear a case,” Nathan reasoned.
    “You can say that, but I think that might be overstating our power,” Ben said, dipping his finger into the sauce for a taste. “Every other chamber also gets to see the memo, so you’re kept in check by that. So let’s say an important case comes through that would really limit abortion rights. If I slant the memo and recommend that Justice Hollis deny cert, all the conservative justices would go screaming to Hollis, and I’d look like a fool.”
    “But I’m sure on a marginal case, no one will really notice—especially if you’re the only one who reads the original petition,” Nathan said.
    “I don’t know,” Ben