The Warehouse on 49th Street is really a continuation of The Claysville Escapade.  As the story opens, Scuilli, the mob-related district attorney, is desperate to find the $4,000,000 of money paid to fix cases that was entrusted to him by the crooked judges who earned it and is now missing.  He is also trying to find out why sixteen of his family’s mobsters who had located the money were involved in a gun battle with BATF agents at  Claysville in which everyone was killed and the money disappeared. 

He doesnt know Sam and his associates walked away from the Claysville gunbattle with the missing $4,000,000. 

In addition to worries about the missing money, Scuilli is concerned about a pending federal investigation into the case-fixing scheme.  In this chapter Scuilli, now under indictment, visits one of the case-fixing judges who, out of anger at the theft of their ill-gotten money while it was entrusted to Scuilli, has helped write a letter to the U.S. Attorney implicating Scuilli in the illegal scheme to buy results in litigation.

From The Warehouse on 49th St

    The next morning, Scuilli sat in his car in a run down Pittsburgh neighborhood across the street from Judge Elizabeth Arnold’s house.  The house was unremarkable.  Three stories, dirty brown brick, ugly front porch cluttered with children’s’ toys, broken flower pots, lawn chairs that were in disrepair, and unidentified paper bags.  The trim on the windows was peeling paint and the front door had wide cracks in what was at one time a varnished finish.  Scuilli sipped his coffee and looked at the house in disgust. 

    At eight thirty, a rumpled man came out of the house carrying a briefcase and got into a rusted Honda Acura which was parked on a concrete pad alongside the house.  As he drove off, the judge herself appeared on the porch in a housecoat and fussed with the coats of her two girls, who were on their way to the bus stop and school.  The older girl was eleven, the younger, eight.  The girls left with kisses from their mother and the Honorable Elizabeth Arnold went back into the house.

    Scuilli disliked Judge Arnold with some intensity.  She was the fat girl who no one had ever paid attention to in school who somehow got through law school and then got a government job.  In the government job she saw that her bosses and even the judges weren’t all that different from her.  They were all mediocre with a veneer of efficiency just like her.  They all formed alliances with the prevailing political machine, and they relied on the machine, particularly the police, to get them elected and keep them elected, and get them into the next higher court.

      Arnold wanted to play that game too, and she soon discovered that just like anyone else who would ante up, she could become a player.  All she had to do was become an ally, a friend of the cops.

     

    But it was different with her.  Most political slugs just played the game; she relished it because – and she was right – the game of politics gave her a standing, the appearance of an accomplishment that she could never otherwise have achieved.  Life was good, she was important, she was beautiful, at least as long as she hung with the cop crowd.

    Scuilli waited five minutes, and then got out of the car and walked across the street to the house.  He wore a light wool overcoat with a small tweed pattern and a blue blazer and gray slacks with cordovan slip-ons.  His starched blue shirt was set off by a red striped tie.  He knocked on the door.

    Judge Arnold opened the door and looked at Scuilli with surprise and reflexively clutched her open housecoat at the neck.  Her short, boy-cut hair, was an unruly mess.  A cowlick stuck up at the back of her head and seemed to accentuate the artificiality of the red dye which the judge affected. Scuilli imagined rolls of belly fat jiggling just under the thin veneer of the housecoat.

    “Mr. Scuilli,” she said.  “What are you doing here?”

    “May I come in?” he said.

    “Well, I’m . . . I’m not dressed.  It’s early in the morning.”

    “That’s fine, judge,” Scuilli smiled, “This meeting doesn’t require being dressed up.”  Scuilli thought of the ridiculous outfits she made a practice of wearing to court. She wouldn’t know what ‘dressed up’ was.

    When Arnold began her career as judge ten years earlier, she was bright-eyed and unpleasingly plump.  Now, she bordered on the obese, and in spite of being middle-aged, she continued to squeeze herself into short skirts with her fat cellulite-ridden thighs showing below the hem of the skirt, jammed in tight against each other, the flesh of one fat thigh pressed against the flesh of the other, straining the seams of the skirt, perched on top of stick-like calves.

    Scuilli thought of the joke about the woman who discovered she needed to go on a diet when she took a walk during which her thighs rubbed together with such friction that they set her panties on fire.

    Reluctantly, Judge Arnold opened the front door so that Scuilli could come in.  The ramshackle screen door banged behind him.  Newspapers, toys, and discarded clothes littered the room.

    “This is so awkward,” the judge said, reaching up to smooth her hair.

    “May I sit down?” Scuilli said.  Seeing her in her domestic element made Scuilli even more disgusted with her than he had been before.

    “Of course,” she said, again reluctantly.

Scuilli sat in a wingback chair and Judge Arnold gingerly moved to the sofa.  On the coffee table in front of the sofa was a plate with a huge iced cinnamon roll and a cup steaming with coffee. 

“I see that you’re in the middle of breakfast,” Scuilli said.

    “Oh, yes.  Just a coffee roll.”

    Scuilli was toying with her, waiting to see whether she would offer him coffee.  Scuilli had seldom attended meetings at which judges were present, but he had attended at least half a dozen meetings where Judge Arnold had come in late, disrupting the discussion, full of her own importance, confident that nothing significant could be decided without her, and then made a spectacle of herself by slurping coffee or soup or tea, and stuffing her mouth with whatever food was available.  Predictably, she would then interrupt what was being said – no matter what it was – and talk with food dribbling out of her mouth and onto her blouse.  He had disliked her from the first.

 

     “Well, judge, don’t let me interrupt you,” Scuilli said.  “Go right ahead.  Maybe I can even get you to talk with your mouth full and dribble some saliva on your bathrobe.”

    Judge Arnold snapped to attention, unable to believe what she had just heard.  After a three second pause, she decided that what she thought happened actually happened, and she accelerated into her judge role.  Her majesty as a judicial officer had been affronted.  She stood up, her face contorted in anger and insult. 

    She said, “What in the world are you saying?  How dare you come into my house and insult me and behave like a common thug.”

    “I’m sorry, judge, I didn’t mean any disrespect.  It’s just that every time I’ve seen you before at meal time you’ve been stuffing yourself like a hog in deep slop.”

    “You get out of here now,” the judge shouted, spittle forming on her chin.

    “I think you’d better sit down now,” Scuilli said.

    “Who do you think you are?  I’m going to call the police.”

    “I think I’m the man who will pick up the phone and have someone kill those two little girls I saw this morning if you piss me off.  Is that a good enough answer?”

    Scuilli’s answer had the effect of sticking a pin in a balloon.  All of the fight went out of the enraged fat woman.  Her outrage and her anger collapsed.  She looked at him in disbelief, and then resignation, and she slumped to the couch.  Tears came to her eyes.  She said nothing. “I knew this would happen,” she sobbed.

    Scuilli got up from his chair and walked toward her.  She looked at him in fear.  He picked up the coffee cup full of coffee, held it in both hands for a moment, and then threw it on the judge.  Coffee dripped from her face and the entire front of her robe was soaked. 

“That’s just to get your attention,” he said, walking back to his chair.  “Make no mistake, I will kill everybody who lives in this house if you fuck with me.”

 

    “What do you want?” she sobbed.

   

    “Who was the ringleader in writing this letter?”

   

    She wiped the coffee from her face and said, “It was Judge Cashgrabber.”

    “Who else?”

    “Judge Coldhammer thought it was a good idea and so did Judge Doernbluth.”

    “Who actually wrote the letter?”

    “I think it was mostly Judge Cashgrabber.”

    “What did you think?”

    “I was scared.”

    “What turned you into a criminal?”

    “What do you mean?”

   

    “As I recall, we paid you about as much graft as any other judge.  Why did you decide to become a criminal?”

    “The kids, I guess.”

    “Doesn’t your husband work?”

    “Yes.”

    “How much does he make?”

    “Maybe ninety or a hundred thousand.”

    “And you make about the same, but you couldn’t raise two kids on that?”

    “Colleges and schools are expensive.”

    “You’re disgusting,” Scuilli said.  “First of all, you look like a hog on steroids and secondly, you jeopardize your livelihood by getting involved with people who will kill you or put you in jail and ruin your life, all for a few bucks.”

    “I’ve thought about it a lot.  You’re right.  I’ve been scared ever since I started doing it.”

    “But that’s not the whole story, is it?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “I mean you’re just like your pals on the bench.  You want to run for the appellate court, don’t you.  And you know you aren’t good enough to do it on your own, so you decided to align yourself with the guys who fix elections and get things done.  Right?  You climbed in bed with the cops.  They fix elections, they get votes, they drive the drunks to the polls.  Just like your bench-buddies, you’re a cop-whore.”

    Arnold looked at the floor.

    “You thought that if you played with the cops, the cops would protect you, didn’t you?”

    “Yes.”

    “And it didn’t matter to you what they did, so long as they protected you and protected your job.  And maybe got you elected to an even better job.  They could break the law, fuck people up, lie and be arrogant as you are, but that was o.k. with you, wasn’t it.”

    “I didn’t know what they were like until it was too late.”

    “That’s pathetic.  You knew what they are, but you didn’t care because they would bring you into their corrupt fold and protect you.  They would make you one of them.  They would pretend to respect you and bow down before your black robe.”

    “I thought they were my friends.”

    “They’ve never been your friends.  They hold you in contempt.  They think you’re weak.  You need them and they’re just dumb goombas.  Most of them didn’t graduate high school, and these are the people you depend on.  These are the people you believe in.  You associate with them.  You hold them in high esteem.”

    “What do you want from me?”

    “I want you to tell those stupid fucks who signed that letter that they screwed up and they need to figure out a way to undo what they did.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Well, you must know by now.  The feds have the letter and they’ve authenticated it by proving that it was copied on Coldhammer’s copier.  That means that unless everybody has a change of heart, there are ten or twelve judges who are pissing in their pants waiting to testify against me.  Except that if one of you testifies, all of you die.  In fact, every fucking one of you and every member of your families will die.”

    The honorable Arnold cried openly and held her face in her hands.  Her sobs shook the fat under the bathrobe.  Her unkempt short hair jagged unevenly away from her head and seemed to reflect the shambles that her life had become.

    “Nobody is going to testify against you.” she sobbed.  Her hair standing up as if it were electrified.

    “Very good,” Scuilli said. “Do you think you will be able to communicate the gravity of the situation to your colleagues?”

    “Yes.”

    “I want you to start working on this today.  And I want you to call me once a day until the problem is resolved and tell me what you have accomplished and what you have not.”

    “Yes.”

    “And if any of those crazy bastards don’t want to go along with the program, you let me know right away.  You got that?  You call me up.   I will kill that sonofabitch within the hour.  And you tell them that.  I’ll kill their wives.  I’ll kill their kids.  I’ll kill all you political whores.”

    Scuilli got up and walked to the door, opened it, and walked out, not looking back.