A change of gravity

Hammond said with satisfaction, locking up the office at 2:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve and collecting the last of his gift parcels from the oak bench beside the door. "Thought being generous one day a year'd make people forget what a bastard he was all the rest of it. And what did it get him? Not much. Now he's up there by himself on the boulevard, all by his lonesome, gone and forgotten as well."

"What the hell're you talking about?" Merrion said. "Larry's got a big family, six or eight kids. He lives with his wife down in Indian Orchard in the same little house they raised all those kids in. "One bathroom and ten people trying to get in it."

"Well, his family got wise to him," Hammond said gaily. "Told him either he hadda lay off a the grog, or go live by himself somewhere else. Serves the prick right, you ask me."

Merrion had felt sharply embarrassed not to have found out earlier. He had not made any effort to contact Lane in the month that had passed since Larry, having no choice in the face of Carries family power, had turned the chief clerk's job over to Richie, going on what was called terminal leave the week after the four-day Thanksgiving break. He thought it strange that Larry had not telephoned him either, but knew guiltily that did not excuse his own omission. Initially suspicious, as he was of everyone, Larry after a year or two of daily scrutiny had accepted Merrion as 'a fairly decent guy, once you get to know the kid, make allowances for him," and made him his office protege, teaching him what the job really meant and entailed, grooming him someday to take it. To Hilliard Merrion admitted: "I owe Larry. I should've shown more respect."

When the court had opened with Larry as its first clerk, the title of magistrate was not included in the statutory definition of the office that he held. But that was in fact the job he had soon begun to do, years before the law was changed. He had started exercising magisterial powers when he and Charles Spring, the first judge to preside in Canterbury, soon after taking office deduced that Spring's job would become a lot simpler and less time-consuming if the judge informally ceded to his more-than-willing clerk and comp licit fellow-investor enough actual power to decide de facto Small Claims civil matters applications for summary process brought by landlords, tradesmen and public utilities against people who had failed to pay their bills. Lane began to hold what he and the judge called 'preliminary screening hearings," putatively to enable the judge to conduct 'official sessions' more expeditiously, 'saving everybody's time."

The bill-collectors immediately perceived that this procedure was by far the quickest, surest and most efficient way to get judgments against stubborn debtors. They learned to agree to allow "Judge Spring to decide the case and sign the judgment on the basis of the memo I'll write up of this session, and then after you've seen his ruling, if you have no objection, he will sign a judgment. If you do have an objection, all you'll have to do is state it and he'll hear the case."

If within three days neither party entered an objection to Lane's memo, a judgment tracking the content of the memo was entered on the docket, carrying the "Chas. Spring' signature Lane had expertly forged.

When there was an objection, experience soon demonstrated, the judge, after rather brusquely holding the full hearing requested by a disappointed litigant tended to decide the case against that party, disappointing him again. As that understanding gained currency, the formal debt-collection process became even speedier in the Canterbury District Court. The grateful lawyers thought it fitting to be openly generous at Christmas and eager to pick up bar-tabs when they saw Lane in The Tavern after a hard day on the job.

From the beginning Lane was publicly forthright about the civil powers he'd annexed as well the power to dispose of minor criminal matters; experience on the civil side revealed to the legally savvy the meritorious economies of time and expense of the Lane approach and led to its adaptation for quick and quiet resolution of minor criminal matters especially motor vehicle violations, but no one involved saw any need to publicize that. "Phone bills; oil bills; light bills; gas bills: most people've got no idea what a mountain of chickenshit we get every day in this building," Larry said. "Until he took the judgeship, Chassy was one of them."

Spring as a somewhat-affected teenager had formed the lifetime habit of abbreviating his given name as "Chas.," when he signed it in black ink with a gold-nib bed Waterman fountain pen, copying the steel-point signature reproduced as attestation of ironclad security on the cover of every policy issued by the company his namesake grandfather had founded in 1884, Pioneer Valley Insurance. His seventh-grade teacher, amused by the mannerism, had taken it at face-value, applying the durable nickname.