by Scott Turow
"Me? Anyone outside my family?"
"There seems to be a theory in my office that you pled guilty to a crime you didn't commit."
"That's about as good as the other theories you guys had about me. They were all wrong, and so is this one."
"Well, as long as I was around, I thought I'd look in on you and see what you had to say. Kind of a coincidence, but maybe that means I'm supposed to be here."
Tommy always was a little bit of a Catholic mystic. I ponder what he's said. I don't know whether to be heartened or infuriated when it strikes me that Tommy still seems willing to trust my word. It's hard to imagine what he thinks of me. Probably nothing consistent. That's his problem.
"You've heard it now, Tom. Where'd this theory in your office come from, anyway?"
"I ran into Milo Gorvetich yesterday, and he repeated something people had been saying. I didn't quite understand at first, but it came to me in the middle of the night and it bothered me."
Tommy looks about, then sticks his head outside the door to ask Torrez for a chair. It takes a minute, and the best they can come up with is a plastic crate. I was thinking of offering Molto the seatless stainless-steel commode, but Tommy is too proper to find that amusing. Nor is it much for comfort.
"You were bothered in the middle of the night," I remind him when he is situated.
"What bothers me is that I have a son. In fact, I'm about six months from having another one."
I offer my good wishes. "You give me hope, Tommy."
"How's that?"
"Starting again at a late age? Seems to be working for you. Maybe something good will happen to me once I get out of here."
"I hope so, Rusty. Everything is possible with faith, if you don't mind me saying so."
I'm not sure that's the solution for me, but I take the advice as well-intended, and I tell Tommy as much. There is silence then.
"Anyway," Molto says eventually, "if someone told me I needed to spend two years in the hole to save my boys' lives, I'd do it in a heartbeat."
"Good for you."
"So if I was convinced that somebody I loved had monkeyed with that computer, even with no say-so from me, I might have fallen on my sword and pled guilty, just to end the whole thing."
"Right. But I'd be innocent that way, and I've said to you that I'm guilty."
"So you claim."
"Don't you find this a little ironic? I've told you for more than twenty years I'm not a murderer, and you won't believe me. You finally find a crime I actually committed, and when I say I did that, you won't accept that, either."
Molto smiles. "I'll tell you what. Since you're such a truthful guy. You explain to me exactly how you managed to mess around with that computer. Just me and you. You have my word that no one else will ever be prosecuted. In fact, whatever you say will never leave this cell. Just let me hear it."
"Sorry, Tom. We already made a deal. I said I wasn't going to answer questions, if you accepted the plea. And I'm sticking to it."
"You want me to put it in writing? You have a pen? I'll write it down now. Tear a blank page out of one of your books." He points to the stack on my single slender shelf. 'I, Tommy Molto, Prosecuting Attorney for Kindle County, promise no further prosecutions of any kind related in any way to Rusty Sabich's PC and to keep any information relayed strictly confidential.' You think that's a promise I can't keep?"
"Probably not, to be honest. But that's not the point, anyway."
"Just you and me, Rusty. Tell me what happened. And I can let this whole thing go."
"And you think you'd believe me, Tom?"
"God knows why, but yes. I don't know if you're a sociopath or not, but I wouldn't be surprised, Rusty, if you haven't lied yet. At least as you understand the truth."
"You've got that part right. Okay," I say, "here's the truth. Once and for all. You and me." I get up off the bed so I can look straight at him. "I obstructed justice. Now leave it be."
"That's what you want?"
"That's what I want."
Molto shakes his head again and in the process notices the wet spot on the shoulder of his suit. He rubs at it a few times, and when he looks up I can't quite banish a smile. His eyes harden. I have touched the old nerve between us, Rusty up, Tommy down. I've made him Mr. Truth-and-Justice in town, but when it comes to the two of us, I can still push his buttons.
"Screw you, Rusty," he says then. He heads out the door, then comes back, but only to grab the crate.
CHAPTER 43
Tommy, August 4-5, 2009
Tommy always wondered what would become of kids like Orestes Mauro, the PA office's evidence specialist, who dealt with digital equipment. Having lived this long, Tommy felt he should have some idea, but he really didn't think there was anybody like Orestes when he was young. The kid was smart enough and got his work done, albeit his own way. But Orestes lived a life of play. The buds to his iPod were in his ears at all times, except when he removed one to speak to somebody else. Whenever Tommy overheard Orestes talking in the hall, it was about online games and the latest releases for his Xbox. And most of his interest in computers treated the machine and the software as a multilevel puzzle, so the task at hand, whatever it was, was largely secondary to the beguiling enigma of how everything inside the box functioned. Work, as a boring necessity, was something Orestes acknowledged, as long as it did not last too long. He was a sweet, friendly kid. If he noticed you were there.
Orestes was visible in the evidence section, working over several cardboard boxes on which he was tapping out rhythms, when Tommy came through the door to the PA's office. It was close to seven p.m. He had been stuck in traffic far too long on his way back in from Morrisroe and the state work farm, and he'd finally pulled off to take surface streets the rest of the way home, which brought him past the County Building. He had already missed dinner with Dominga and Tomaso, so he decided to stop and pick up the files for his meeting at the court of appeals in the morning. He could take an extra half hour at home in the a.m. and give Dominga a little more time to sleep.
Catching sight of Orestes, he veered into the evidence room, a converted warehouse space behind the freight elevator. Evidence gathered by grand jury subpoena was required by law to remain in control of the PA's office, rather than the police, and it was boxed and cataloged here. When O saw Tommy coming, he turned a full circle on his toe, a little bit of Michael Jackson.
"Boss man!" He was always too loud with the buds in.
"Hey, O." Tommy motioned to his ears, and Orestes pulled one out. Tommy tapped his other side, too. Orestes complied but clearly expected something grave.
"T's up?"
"The Sabich case," Tommy answered.
Orestes groaned in response. "That the judge?"
"The judge," answered Tommy.
"Oh, man, that whole thing, that's just too fucked up," he said.
A fair analysis. Tommy had been thinking about Rusty all the way back. It had been completely unsettling to see him in that cell, but more to Tommy than Sabich from the appearances. Tom had anticipated that Rusty might have been depressed or goofy, like most of the guys in seg, but there was something about him that seemed freed. His hair was long and he had a prison beard, whiter than Tommy might have expected, so he looked like an island castaway. And he had the same air-you can't touch me. The worst has happened. Now you can't touch me. Even so, Sabich had remained himself. He probably hadn't lied to Tommy, but he'd spoken in his own way, careful, even cagey, about the words he was using, so he could tell himself he was being honest, but typical of Rusty, making sure only he really knew the truth. Which left Tommy in the same bind he'd been in with Rusty for decades now. What was the fucking truth, anyway?
"I'm still trying to figure out how they screwed around with the computer."
"Oh, man," said Orestes. "Can't figure that. Wasn't me, man. I know that." He laughed.
"Me neither. But I keep thinking there's something we missed. I'm wondering if maybe Sabich copped to
the obstruction to protect his kid. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Okay," said Orestes. He took the extraordinary step of turning off his iPod and sat on a metal stool. "Nobody asked me, but remember that big meet we had after you all had been in court, once you knew the card was phony? And Milo was trippin about how nobody who was on the computer in Judge Mason's chambers-not Sabich or the kid or the former clerk-not any one of them had time to mess around and to do all the stuff it took to get the card on there. Remember?"
"Sure."
"And Jimmy B., he went off then about how Sabich must have snuck into the courthouse?"
"Right."
"But here's the thing. What if it was all of them? What if they were in this together, planting that card? One of them downloaded from a flash drive, and another ran Spy, and another edited the directory. Together all of them, even a couple of them, had the time."
Tommy grabbed his forehead. Of course. Maybe Orestes had a better future than he thought.
"So is that what you think happened?" Molto asked.
Orestes laughed out loud. "Dude," he said, "I don't have a clue. Computers, man, are always a trip. Ain't no one person who knows everything. That's why they're so cool."
Tommy contemplated this bit of philosophy. It was pretty sci-fi. Computers, O was saying, were already like people in the sense that you could never fully understand them.
"But if you were planting that card, is that how you would have done it?"
"Me?" O laughed again, a high-pitched musical sound. "Oh, I could have done it for sure. But that's me."
Orestes's casual confidence was slightly alarming. His job was to set up systems to ensure the evidence in his control was tamper-proof. Naturally, Tommy asked what he meant.
"Well, that's just how it rolled out. Like the night I was up there with Jimmy B. to take the wrapping off-"
"I thought that was in the morning, right before court?"
"Hey, man. Twelve p.m. to eight." Orestes laid a thumb on one of the vivid stripes in his shirt. "Gotta go to school in the a.m. Get an education. Make something of myself." Orestes did a rim shot on one of the cardboard boxes to reemphasize the point. "So I went down to Brand's office, because the PC was on the trial cart, and together we pulled off all the wrapping, which took like forever because we had initialed three or four layers, and then I get down to the components and when I looked at it all, it's like, Fuck me, this is messed up."
"Meaning?"
"Cause, you know, the evidence tape on the tower, it was across the power button. But the power button is recessed, like down? So there's like this itty-bitty space under the tape, and I tell Brand, like, 'Bad job, we done a bad job, you could power that baby up.' He's like, 'No way,' so I had one of my tools-" From his breast pocket Orestes produced a tiny driver, small enough to fix the screws in eyeglasses. "And I just run it up in there. Brand, man, he's my peeps, but he just about choked me. He's thinking I was gonna violate the tape. That was the day the chiquita showed up from the bank, and Brand was like, 'Whoa, coolio, it's way bad enough already.' I didn't do nothing. Just scared him. Gorvetich and them got all the tape off in the morning, no problem.
"But that's what I'm sayin. If I was going to mess with the computer, I'd have messed with it then."
"So you could have turned the computer on?"
"I didn't."
"I know you didn't, O. But you could have? The other components, like the keyboard and the monitor-they were still sealed, weren't they?"
"Totally, man. But the ports on the tower weren't taped. You coulda used another mouse or monitor that was compatible. There're only about a billion. That's why I was tripped out about it. But that's not what happened or nothin. It had all been wrapped up for months, anyway. The initials were there and everything, I'm just saying, since you ask, that's how I coulda done it. But I didn't, and Sabich and them-they did. But I don't know how. Rule one, man. What you don't know, you don't know. You just don't."
O had a great smile under the little fuzz that passed for a 'stache. He was a really smart kid, Tommy thought again. And as the years went on, he'd begin to realize what it was he didn't know.
Brand was in his office in the morning, moving files around on his desk, when Tommy returned about eleven a.m. from his conference at the court of appeals. The substance of the meeting had been largely the same as the meeting at the prison yesterday. Nobody had enough money. What do they cut?
Brand had taken the day off yesterday to interview political consultants. His opponent, Beroja, had the advantage of an existing organization. Brand would have a lot of help from the party, but he had to get his own people in place.
Molto asked what he made of the consultants he'd met.
"I liked the two women. O'Bannon and Meyers? Pretty sharp. Only guess what their last local campaign was."
"Sabich?"
"Exactly." Brand laughed. "Talk about hired guns."
"I saw him yesterday, by the way."
"Who?"
"Rusty."
That stopped Brand, who'd continued rearranging the piles on his desk. The trial cart from the Sabich case remained in the corner of Brand's office, still holding all of Jim and Tommy's files, as well as the exhibits, which Judge Yee had returned when the proceedings were over. To try a case, you ignored everything in the universe-family occasions, the news, other cases-and once it ended, all the stuff that had been pushed aside became more pressing than something as trivial as cleaning up. You could walk into the offices of half the deputy PAs and see trial boxes that had sat around untouched for months in the aftermath of verdicts. When you finally found the time to put that stuff away, it was as poignant as surveying the relics of a former love affair, these documents and pill bottles that once seemed as momentous as pieces of the True Cross and were now entirely beside the point in the flow of daily life. In a few months, Tommy would not be able to tell you how most of those objects fit into the intricate labyrinth of inference and conclusion that had been the state's case. Now it was only the outcome that mattered. Rusty Sabich was a felon in prison.
"I was out in Morrisroe," said Tommy. He briefed Brand on the meeting. Letting convicts loose was going to be a campaign issue once it hit the press, but Brand was more interested in Sabich.
"You just dropped in on him? No lawyer, no nothing?"
"Kind of like old friends," said Tommy. It hadn't even occurred to him that Sabich might have refused to speak to him. Or seemingly to Sabich, for that matter. They were both much too engaged by the long-running contest between them to want to involve anyone else. It was like fighting with your ex-wife.
"How's he look?" Brand asked.
"Better than I thought he would."
"Shit," said Brand.
"I wanted to ask him face-to-face how he screwed with the computer."
"Again?"
"He wouldn't answer. I think he's protecting his kid."
"That's about what I figured."
"I know. I ran into Gorvetich a couple of days ago. He said you got blasted together after the trial and you said you think Rusty copped to something he didn't do. I couldn't imagine what the hell you were talking about at first. And then it came to me that you thought he was fronting for his son."
Brand shrugged. "Who knows what I was thinking? I was on my ass. So was Milo."
"But I still don't see what would have given you the idea Rusty was taking the kid's weight?"
Brand pulled a mouth and stared back down at his desk. The piles were organized with military precision, edges even and spaced exact distances apart, like the beds in a barracks. He picked up a stack of manila folders and looked around for someplace to put them.
"Just a feeling," he said.
"But why?"
Brand dropped the files on an open corner on the desk where they clearly didn't belong.
"Who cares, Boss? Rusty's in the can. Where he should be. At least for a little while. What are you afraid of?"
Afraid. That was the right
word. Tommy had woken up at three, and most of the time he'd been flat-out nightmare scared. He tried to believe he was just torturing himself the way he sometimes did, unable or unwilling to absorb his own success. But he knew he was going to have to find out in order to be able to live with himself.
"What I'm afraid of, Jimmy, is that you know Rusty didn't put the card on the computer."
Brand finally sat down in his desk chair. "Why would you think that, Tom?"
"I've just been putting together a lot of pieces in the last couple of days. What you said to Gorvetich. The fact that you were sitting here all night after the PC had been unwrapped. And that Orestes had showed you how it could be powered up without removing the evidence tape. That was after the banker came in and it looked all of a sudden like our case was circling the drain. And you know computers. You took programming from Gorvetich. So I gotta ask, right, Jim? We still don't have anything else that would pass as an explanation. You didn't put that card on there, did you?"
"How could I have done that?" asked Brand with disarming calm. "I couldn't have turned that computer on and messed with it without the program directory showing it had been opened. Remember?"
"Right. Except the PC was going to be turned on the next day in court, and it would be that date and time that would show up in the directory." He had Brand's attention now. Jim was watching Tommy with care.
"It's brilliant," said Tommy. "Create a defense, which explains all the evidence, so Stern has to embrace it. And then when he has, you blow it completely out of the water. And blame the defendant for the fraud. It's just absolutely brilliant."
Brand looked across the desk for quite some time with a dead expression. And then slowly, he began to smile, until he was grinning at Molto in the familiar way he so often did, as the two of them appreciated the clowning, the irony, the flat-out comedy, of human misbehavior and the law's futile efforts to curb it.
"It woulda been pretty fuckin brilliant," he said.
Inside Tommy, something broke, probably his heart. He sat in a wooden chair across the office. All Brand had needed to tell him was no. In the meantime, Jim's smile had slackened as he registered Tommy's mood.