Judge Sentences by Meagher Dermot;

Author:Meagher, Dermot;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northeastern University Press

RECOVERY

She has HIV and a new pal with a heart of gold

Missy Mortimer appeared again in the second criminal session. At the time, we judges still rotated among the sessions and courtrooms in the old and new buildings that made up the Suffolk County Courthouse. I hadn’t seen Missy there in a while. The women’s holding cell is adjacent to the second session courtroom, which is why all women are arraigned in that room. Hanging over the bench is a portrait of an old, long-dead judge who the prostitutes greatly feared. Supposedly the women would come in the courtroom door, see him on the bench, and flee, not to return until his weekly duty in that session ended.

The holding cell adjacent to the second session is a stark place with shiny yellow-tiled walls, small barred windows, and wooden benches along the sides. At one time a place on that bench could have had Missy’s name on it. She used to be a regular here, often wearing a ladies-to-lunch navy blue suit with detachable white collar. And usually she was preceded or followed by another good-looking blonde, similarly attired, the two them like alumnae of a finishing school. Missy did not look so chic today. She was in jeans and a T-shirt, and her skin color was the off gray of an addict’s.

There used to be four of them, Missy, two other blondes, and a brunette, and they worked together, not as a team but all on the street at the same time, flagging down cars. Usually they were “hotel girls,” I was told, but they liked excitement and would sometimes work the street just for the thrill of it. They often got arrested, usually near the Don Bosco School and the Eliot Norton Park by Sergeant Detective Dunkirk. All of them were attractive and good-humored. They would flirt with the judges while in the dock, even with the women judges.

Missy was born in Winchester, a toney Northwest suburb, and she claimed that she now lived with her grandmother in Wakefield, also a quiet suburb, although I suspected that was not true. She was such a con that she would have said she lived in a convent if she could get away with it.

Missy had often been arrested for what was known as a “BMC disorderly” or a “Dunkirk disorderly,” named after the rumpled detective who made so many of the arrests and brought the defendants to our court.

The evidence in a Dunkirk disorderly was always presented in a staccato fashion and sounded like this: “Sergeant Detective Dunkirk, Your Honor. The defendant was standing on Tremont Street; Wang Center; Zebra spandex; flagging down cars with male occupants; traffic backing up all the way up the street; cars beeping their horns; people shouting; 4 AM, Your Honor, sir.”

This kind of arrest was so predictable that Sgt. Dunkirk made up a mimeographed form for the application for the complaint; he only had to fill in the blanks for the outfit, the date, and the time.

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