by Scott Turow
"Now tell us if you would, Rusty, a bit about your background." Stern runs my father down his resume. Son of an immigrant. College on a scholarship. Law school while working two jobs.
"And after law school?" Stern asks.
"I was hired as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Kindle County."
"That is the office Mr. Molto now heads?"
"Correct. Mr. Molto and I started there within a couple years of one another."
"Objection," Molto says quietly. He has not looked up from the legal pad on which he is writing, but the strain shows in his chin. He sees just what my dad and Stern are up to, trying to remind the jury that my father and Tommy have a history, something they probably already know from the papers that replay the details of the first trial daily. The jurors swear every morning they have steered clear of any journalistic accounts, but according to Marta and her dad, word almost always filters into the jury room.
Judge Yee says, "Enough that subject, I think."
Still facing his pad, Tommy nods curtly in satisfaction. I tolerate Tommy Molto, with his wilting face and hangdog manner, better than I expected to. It's his chief deputy, Jim Brand, who gets me cranked. He has this bad-ass thing going most of the time, except when it's worse and he comes on as too cool for the room.
Stern takes my dad through his progress in the very office that is now prosecuting him and his eventual arrival on the bench. In his account, the first indictment and trial are never mentioned, as the judge has ordered. This is the seamless chronicle of the courtroom, where history's speed bumps are leveled.
"Are you a married man, Rusty?"
"I was. I married Barbara more than thirty-eight years ago."
"Any children?"
"My son, Nat, is right there in the first row." Stern looks back with mock curiosity, as if he had not told me exactly where to sit. He is such a subtle courtroom actor that I find myself hoping now and then that his failing health is also for show, but I know better.
Around the courthouse, people will frequently draw me aside and ask in low tones how Stern is doing, assuming that somebody who has defended my father twice on murder charges must be a closer family friend than he really is. I tell everyone pretty much the same thing. Stern exhibits the courage of a cliff diver, but as for the true state of his health, I know very little. He is private about his condition. Marta is philosophical but equally closemouthed, even though the two of us have had a nearly instantaneous bond as the lawyer children of local legal eagles. Both Sterns are fiercely professional. Our relationship right now is about my father's troubles, not theirs.
But you don't need a medical degree to see that Sandy's condition is perilous. Last year, part of the left lobe of his lung was removed surgically, which seemed at the time to be a good sign that the disease had not spread. In the last four to five months though, he has endured at least two separate rounds of chemo and radiation. My high school pal Hal Marko, who is now a surgical resident, speculated that Stern must have had some kind of recurrence and added, in that incredibly cold-blooded tone I also hear from my law school friends, meant to show they have progressed from human being to professional, that Stern's median survival time should be less than a year. I have no idea if that's so, only that the treatments have left Stern a wreck. He has a persistent cough and shortness of breath, due not to his cancer, but as a side effect of the radiation. He claims to be regaining his appetite, but he ate virtually nothing for the period leading to the trial, and the man I grew up knowing as chubby during his slimmest periods is positively thin. He has not replaced his wardrobe, and his suits hang like kaftans. Whenever he struggles to his feet, he is in visible pain. To top it all off, the last drug he took, a second-line chemo agent, left him with a bright rash all over his body, including his face. From where the jury sits, it must look as if he has had a large fuchsia tattooed on one side. The inflammation crawls up his cheek and around his eye, reaching in a single islet up above his temple and pointing cruelly toward his bald head.
Judge Yee granted one continuance, but my dad and Sandy decided not to seek another, despite the way he looks. His mind remains strong, and if he husbands his strength, he can withstand the physical rigors of trial. But the meaning for Sandy of the decision to proceed seems obvious: Now or never.
"Now, Rusty, you have been called as the first witness for the defense in this case."
"I have."
"You understand that the Constitution of the United States protects you from being forced to testify in your own trial."
"I understand that."
"You have chosen to testify nonetheless."
"I have."
"And you were here throughout the time that the prosecution witnesses gave their testimony?"
"I was."
"And you heard all of them? Mr. Harnason? Dr. Strack, the toxicologist. Dr. Gorvetich, the computer expert? All fourteen of the persons whom the prosecutor called to the stand?"
"I heard each of them."
"And so, Rusty, you understand that you are here accused of murdering your wife, Barbara Bernstein Sabich?"
"I do."
"Did you do that, Rusty? Murder Mrs. Sabich?"
"No."
"Did you have any role of any kind in causing her death?"
"No."
The sheer oddity of a supreme court justice-elect indicted for murder a second time, and by the same prosecutor, no less, has garnered press around the globe. People stand in line outside the courtroom each day to get a seat, and two rows across the way are crowded with sketch artists and reporters. The accumulated attention of the world often seems to penetrate the courtroom, where there is a high-strung air brought on by so many people recalculating with every word. My father's 'No' lingers now, seemingly held aloft by the magnitude of the declaration. With all eyes on him, Stern looks around the large rococo courtroom and rears back slightly, as if he is only now discovering something that the better informed know he has always planned.
"No further questions," he says, and plunges with mortal weariness back to his seat.
My father's case is the first trial I've ever sat through end to end. The trial process has absorbed so much of my dad's life, as a prosecutor and a judge, that in spite of the indescribable heaviness of the whole business for me, I have found sitting here constantly informative. I finally have a clue what he was doing in the many hours he was gone from home and some sense of what he found so beguiling. And although the courtroom will never be the place for me, I have been fascinated by its little rituals and dramas, especially the moments too banal to be represented on TV or in the movies. The present instant, when the sides change, with one lawyer sitting and the opponent coming to his feet, is the law's equivalent of the time between innings, a moment of suspended animation. The court reporter's computer stops clicking. The jurors shift in their seats and scratch what itches, and the spectators clear their throats. Papers scrape across both tables as the lawyers gather their notes.
By whatever trick of fate, my dad's case is being heard in one of the four older courtrooms in this building, the Central Branch Courthouse, where the court of appeals is housed on the top floor. He arrives every day to stand trial for murder in a place where he remains, at least by title, the highest-ranking judicial official and next door to the courtroom where he was freed more than twenty years ago. All the old rooms, where serious felonies have been tried for seventy years now, are jewels of bygone architectural detail, with the jury boxes set off by these strings of walnut bubbles. The same kind of rail fronts the witness stand and the massive bench where Judge Yee looms over the courtroom. The spaces for the witness and the judge are each defined by red marble pillars that support a walnut canopy, decorated with more of those corny wooden balls.
Beneath that overhang, my dad sits impassively as he awaits the start of Tommy Molto's cross-examination. For the first time, he lets his blue eyes light on mine, and for a tiny instant, he squeezes them shut. Here we go, he seems to be saying. The wild roc
ket ship ride that has been life for both of us since my mother died nine months ago will end and allow us to parachute back to earth, where we will inhabit either some shrunken version of the life we had before or a new nightmare terrain, in which my weekly conversations with my father will be conducted for the rest of his life through a pane of bulletproof glass.
When a parent dies-everybody says this, so I know it isn't so totally original-but when you lose your mother or father, life is fundamentally different. One of the poles, north or south, has been wiped off the globe and will never rematerialize.
But my life was really different. I was sort of a kid for too long, and then suddenly I was where I was. I had fallen in love with Anna. My mom was dead. And my dad was indicted for killing her.
Because what happened to my parents was in each case so much worse for them than me, it sounds weak to say what I have gone through has been an ordeal. But it has. Of course, losing my mom so suddenly was the ultimate blow. But the charges against my dad have left me in a predicament few people can even begin to understand. My dad has been a public figure most of my life, meaning his shadow has frequently fallen across me. When I went to law school I knew I was only making that worse, that I was always going to be known as Rusty's kid and would be dragging his reputation and achievements along behind me like a bride trying to figure out how to get her train through a revolving door. But now he's infamous, not famous, an object of hatred and ridicule. When I see his picture on the Net or TV-or even on one national magazine cover-there's a way I feel he no longer quite belongs to me. And of course nobody knows how to treat me or what to say. It must be a little like being outed with HIV, where people know you haven't really done anything wrong but can't quite stifle an impulse to recoil.
But the worst part is what goes on inside of me, because from moment to moment I have no idea how I feel, or should feel for that matter. I guess parents are always moving objects. We grow up, and our perspectives constantly evolve. In this courtroom, there is just one question-did he or didn't he? But for me, for months now the issue has been far more complicated, trying to figure out what most kids get a lifetime to assess-namely, who my old man really is. Not who I thought. I've figured that much out already.
That process began on election day with an angry thumping on the door to Anna's condo. A small woman had her badge out.
'KCUPF.' Kindle County Unified Police Force. 'Do you have a second to talk?'
It was like TV and so I knew I was supposed to say, What is this about? But really, why would I care? She stepped into the apartment, strutted, really, without an invitation, a short, plump woman with her hat under her arm and her wiry, brass-colored hair drawn back in a pony tail.
'Debby Diaz.' Die As, she pronounced it. She offered a small, rough hand and sat down on a hassock covered in retro blue shag, which Anna had bought largely as a gag a couple of weeks before. 'Known your dad forever. I was a bailiff when he started in the superior court. Actually, I remember you.'
'Me?'
'Yeah, I was assigned to that courtroom a couple times when you come down. You used to sit up on his chair on the bench during recesses. Couldn't really see you from down in the courtroom, but nobody told you that. Young man, you could really pound that gavel. Act of God you didn't break it.' She was quite merry with the memory, and I suddenly remembered what she was describing, including the musical echo when I slammed the gavel on the oak block. 'I was young and slim in those days,' she said. 'Waiting to get on the force.'
'I guess you made it.' I said that only because I couldn't think of anything else, but she took it for a joke and smiled a little.
'It was what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.' She shook her head briefly at the follies of youth. Then she focused on me with disturbingly sudden intensity. 'We're trying to clear on your mother's death.'
'Clear?'
'Get some questions answered. You know how it is. Not a damn thing happens for a month, then all of a sudden it's gotta be wrapped up in a week. Guys on the scene took a long statement from your father, but nobody thought to talk to you. When I heard your name, I figured I'd stroll over and do it myself.'
There are people you meet who you know are used to not saying what they actually mean and Detective Diaz was one of them for sure. I wondered for a second how she'd found me, then realized I'd left this forwarding address when I finished at the court. All in all, I was happier to be talking to her at home on election day than I would have been if she'd shown up at school. There are still plenty of people on the faculty who remember my years at Nearing High and have a hard time believing I can set much of an example.
'I still don't understand what you want to ask about,' I told her, and she motioned as if it were all too vague, too cop, too bureaucratic, to explain.
'Sit down,' she said, 'and you'll find out.' From the seat on the hassock, she motioned me toward a chair in my own place. What I really needed to do, I realized, was call my father, or at least Anna. But the thought seemed mostly useless against the reality of Detective Diaz sitting there. Small as she was, there was an edge, that cop-thing, like, I'm in charge here, don't mess around.
'My mom died of heart failure,' I told her.
'True.'
'So. What is there to ask about?'
'Nat,' she said. 'I can call you "Nat," right? Somebody says we got to interview the kid to close this, so I'm here to interview you. That's all.' She picked up a magazine, a copy of People Anna had left there, and turned a few pages. 'Could I care less about Brad and Angie?' she asked before throwing it down. 'Things cool between your mom and dad around the time she passed?'
I couldn't help but smile. That's exactly the word for how things were between my parents generally-cool. Not quite involved.
'Same as always,' I answered.
'But they weren't bitching at each other or to you?'
'Nothing different.'
'And how's your dad doing now? Pretty torn up, still?' She'd produced a little spiral notebook from somewhere and was writing in it.
'I mean, my dad-I never really know what's happening with him. He's pretty stoic. But I think we're both fairly much in shock. He kind of suspended most of his campaigning. If he'd asked me, I'd've told him to do more to take his mind off things.'
'Seeing anybody?'
'Hell, no.' The thought of my father with someone else, which several brain-damaged individuals had mentioned in the weeks after my mom's death, inevitably rattled me.
'You getting on okay with your dad?' she asked.
'Sure,' I said. 'Is that what this is about? My dad? Is somebody making trouble for him?'
When I was in the second grade, my father was tried for murder. In retrospect, it always amazes me how long it took for me to comprehend the full dimension of that simple statement. At the time, my parents told me that my father had had a bad fight with his friends at work, like bad fights I had with friends at school, that these former amigos were very mad at him and doing mean and unfair things. I naturally accepted that-I still do, actually. But I realized there was more to it, if for no other reason than that every adult I knew treated me more warily, as if I were suspected of something, too-the parents of my friends, the teachers and custodians at school, and, most conspicuously, my parents, who hovered in an intense protective way as if they feared I was coming down with something terrible. My dad stayed home from work. A bunch of policemen swarmed through the house one day. And eventually I learned, either by asking or by overhearing, that something very bad might happen to my father-that he might be gone for years and years and conceivably could never live with us again. He was petrified; I could sense that. So was my mother. And so I became terrified, too. They sent me to overnight camp for the summer, where I found myself more scared for being away. I would play ball and run with friends but wake up constantly to the reality that something awful might be happening at home. I cried like mad every night until they decided to ship me back. And when I got there, this thing they called a trial was
over. Everybody knew my father had done nothing bad, that the bad things had been done by his former friends, just as my parents had been saying all along. But still it wasn't right. My dad wasn't working. And my parents seemed unable to recover a normal air with each other. It came as no surprise when my mom told me that just the two of us were moving away. I had known something cataclysmic had happened all along.
'You think your dad deserves trouble?' Detective Diaz asked.
'Well, of course not.'
"We don't make things up,' she said. I hadn't sat down yet, and she pointed to the chair again, this time with a pen. 'A guy like your dad, he's been around since they started telling time, everybody and his cat has got an opinion. Some people, you know, here and there, they got axes to grind. But that's how it goes, right? Judges, prosecutors, cops, they're always sand in somebody's ointment. But your dad's running for office. That's the main thing. Somebody looked at the file and said, We got to clear this before he takes the oath, answer all the questions.'
She asked me to tell her what happened the day my mom died. Or actually the day after.
'Is that the thing?' I asked. 'Did that seem strange-him sitting with the body for a day?'
She lifted a hand-back to that routine, just doing her job. 'I don't know. My mom, her people was Irish, they put the body in the living room with candles and sat around it all night. So, no, I mean. People lose someone, there ain't no manual for that. Everybody does it his own way. But you know, if somebody wants to make trouble, they'd say, "Now, that's strange. Putting everything away." You know how folks can be: What's he cleaning up? What's he hiding?'