Chapter 8 - The Arraignment and the Bail Hearing
The courtroom of Part Two of the Orange County Courthouse in Goshen was eighty feet long, paneled in dark, varnished white oak that had absorbed sixty years of cigar smoke and legal sweat, and smelled of wet overcoats, radiator steam, and the cedar shavings the janitors used to clean the spittoons behind the jury box.
It was ten o'clock on Friday morning.
The gallery was packed to the oak wainscoting with eighty members of the northern agricultural cooperatives, forty parishioners from the Baptist church in Pine Bluff wearing their black Sunday coats, and twenty reporters from the regional news bureaus whose camera tripods clattered against the marble floor of the corridor outside.
Behind the defense table sat Warren Vance and Evelyn Vance.
They were not sitting together.
The court had ordered a four-foot separation between the co-defendants after Evelyn had attempted to strike Warren with her chained wrists in the holding cell beneath the courthouse forty minutes earlier, screaming that his stupidity had ruined four generations of the family name.
Warren was wearing an orange institutional jumper that was three sizes too large for his shoulders, the sleeves rolled twice over wrists that were ringed with purple contusions from the transport cuffs. His face was gray, sunken, his thick hair unwashed and sticking to his temples in greasy tufts.
Evelyn sat upright, her chin tilted at that high, imperious angle that she had used during thirty years of parish meetings. She wore the same navy wool dress she had been arrested in, though the lace collar had been removed by the jail matron because it contained a two-inch brass stay that violated the facility’s suicide prevention protocols.
At the prosecution table sat Sarah Vance-Kearny, flanked by Senior Assistant District Attorney Marcus King and Investigator Thomas Miller.
On the table between them sat the BlackVue dashcam, resting on a clean square of green felt like an unexploded mortar shell.
"Case number twenty-six-CR-zero-eight-nine-two," the court clerk intoned from the raised dais beneath the state seal. "The People of the State of New York versus Warren Arthur Vance and Evelyn Miller Vance. Indictment charging Attempted Murder in the Second Degree, Aggravated Assault with a Weapon, and Endangering the Welfare of an Unborn Child."
The heavy oak door behind the bench swung open.
Judge Horace L. Van Horn took his seat.
He was seventy-two, with a shock of thick white hair that looked like an uncombed thistle, a red, vascular nose that spoke of fifty years of cold river duck blinds, and a pair of small, ferocious blue eyes that had sent three generations of horse thieves and crooked town supervisors to the state prison at Dannemora.
He did not open the file. He set his gold-rimmed half-glasses on his nose, rested his heavy, liver-spotted forearms on the bench, and looked down at the defense table.
"Mr. Sterling," Judge Van Horn said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that cut through the room like a crosscut saw. "I have read your forty-two-page motion for release on personal recognizance. You cite forty years of community standing, six hundred acres of unencumbered real property, and your client’s position as an elder of the church in Pine Bluff."
"Yes, Your Honor," Harold Sterling said, rising from his chair with his three-thousand-dollar briefcase open on the table. "The Vance family is an integral component of the agricultural economy of this county. There is zero risk of flight. The incident in question was an unfortunate, domestic misunderstanding between a husband and a wife experiencing severe prenatal psychiatric complications—"
"Stop talking, Mr. Sterling," Judge Van Horn said.
The courtroom fell into an absolute, suffocating quiet.
"I have reviewed the preliminary forensic report from the state police crime laboratory," the judge continued, his eyes drifting toward the small black camera on the green felt. "And I have reviewed the transcript of the audio recording recovered from the vehicle of an independent freight driver who had the misfortune of parking his rig outside your client's gate."
He looked at the old woman in the navy dress.
"Mrs. Vance," the judge said, his voice dropping into a register that made the court stenographer’s fingers freeze above her machine. "I knew your father. Judge Miller sat on this bench when I was a junior clerk in the county attorney’s office. He was a hard man. He was an unbending man. But he was an officer of the law."
The judge leaned forward, his face darkening until the veins in his neck stood out like cords.
"Your father would have taken his own horsewhip to you in the courthouse square before he allowed a daughter of his blood to cane a pregnant woman on an unplaned fir bench and rub red pepper into her open meat like she was a side of salt pork hanging in a smokehouse."
Evelyn Vance’s mouth opened. A tiny, whistling gasp escaped her throat, her hands rising to touch her unstayed collar, her eyes wide with a shock that was purely social—the realization that the men of her own class were not going to close the door and settle the matter over port wine in the back room of the bank.
"Your Honor!" Sterling shouted, his arms waving wildly. "The audio recording has not been subject to a preliminary suppression hearing! Under the state wiretapping statutes, an un-consented audio interception—"
"The truck was parked on a public highway, Mr. Sterling," Judge Van Horn roared, bringing his heavy wooden gavel down against the sounding block with a single, concussive BANG that made the front row of the gallery flinch. "The microphone was mounted on an external chassis licensed for commercial transit. If your clients chose to conduct a medieval execution within twenty yards of the public easement, they have no expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment, the state constitution, or the laws of common decency!"
The judge turned his eyes upon Warren.
"As to the defendant Warren Vance: Bail is denied. You are remanded to the custody of the sheriff to be held without bond at the county correctional facility in Goshen pending trial."
He turned to the mother.
"As to the defendant Evelyn Vance: Bail is set at five million dollars, cash or fully secured corporate surety. And should that bond be posted by any entity, you will be subject to continuous electronic ankle monitoring, you will surrender your passport within sixty minutes of release, and you will not set foot within five miles of the township of Pine Bluff."
The gavel came down again.
BANG.
"Clear the courtroom," Judge Van Horn said, standing up and sweeping his black robes behind him as he retreated through the heavy oak door.
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Two female deputies in green uniforms stepped behind Evelyn’s chair, their hands catching her by the upper arms with an unyielding, professional leverage that lifted the seventy-year-old woman off her seat before she could reach for her black prayer book.
Warren did not look at her as she was dragged past him toward the prisoner elevator. He sat with his forehead pressed against the oak table, his hands cuffed behind his back, his shoulders heaving with the dry, soundless sobs of an animal that has finally realized the gate is iron, the fence is ten feet high, and the hounds are already in the ditch.
