Pleading Guilty kc-3

by Scott Turow

  Mr Entropy, I thought. There were entire universes saved from self-reproach by that remark. Jesus, this was one person who didn't take long to get under my skin.

  'He's thirty years younger than me and doesn't have the same well-worn excuses.' I smiled tightly and she made various faces, implying it was all right, she could take being stiff-armed. We confronted one another in simmering silence until Lyle returned and blew past me, taking his mother in tow.

  In the aftermath, I settled by the TV in the living room. The Hands were playing UW-Milwaukee the usual tough first half — both their bench and self-confidence would give out in the last twenty minutes, when they would resume their role as this decade's Mid-Ten doormat. Within, I continued prolonged fomenting. Nora fucking Goggins. Entropy! How long had she been storing up that one? There was always a hundred megaton warhead in her silo.

  When I stopped drinking, Nora used to tell me I was really no fun anymore, a line that served the great principle of relationship transitivity by which she could both put me down and make excuses for herself. If I was no fun, she should have fun on her own. We reached a seven-week period where she went off for weekend conventions three times and then finally a mid-week night when my bride of nineteen years simply did not come home.

  When I marched through the door the next evening, the house was clean, I could smell a hot meal, a relative rarity, and I immediately made out the plan: life as normal. The idea was that I should ask nothing. Neither of us had enough fingers and toes to count the occasions when I'd pulled more or less the same stunt in those nineteen years, nights when I was so drunk that I sometimes felt I had to hang on to the grass to keep from falling off the earth, though usually the barkeep knew enough to give her a call. Nonetheless, about 9:30 I finally glued together my courage.

  ‘I was with Jill,' she answered. Jill Horwich, her erstwhile manager and bartime buddy.

  ‘I know you started out with Jill. I want to know who else you were with.'

  'Nobody else.'

  'Nora, don't bullshit me.'

  'I'm not bullshitting.' When I fixed her with one of those looks she might have given me, she said, 'I don't believe this is happening.' She was on her feet, twisting the wedding ring around on her finger, posed in a corner of the living room where a lovely brass vase with gladioli was arranged. I was, I admitted, struck at that moment by the enduring phenomenon of beauty. 'Mack, leave it be. I know I don't have the right to ask that. But I am.'

  'Motion denied,' I said. 'Let's go. The sticky truth.'

  'You don't want to know.'

  'You're right, I don't. But I'm asking anyway.'

  'Why?' She looked at me bleakly.

  'I suppose I sort of think it's important.'

  Silence.

  'So who's the guy?'

  'There is no guy, Mack.'

  'Nora, who were you with?'

  'I told you, Mack, I was with Jill.'

  Press your buzzer when you have the correct answer. It was the next afternoon before I got it, sitting in my office, being, as usual, no use to anyone, talking as I recall to Hans Ottobee, an interior decorator hired to do something about my furnishings. Nineteen years, you think you've seen everything from a person and then some guy mentions a modular wall unit and somehow you see something else. I always loved cubism. What a wonderful illusion that you can see all sides at once.

  At home that night, I didn't wait long. She'd cooked again. I took my plate of pot roast from the oven and started right in.

  'So how long have you been like this?'

  'What do you mean "like this"?'

  'Spare me. When did you start?' I finally got the heart to look at her straight on, which was more or less the end of the game.

  'Always.' She blinked. 'As far as I know.' '"Always"?'

  'Do you remember Sue Ellen Tomkins?' 'From the sorority?' She just nodded.

  'I don't think women are like men,' she said. 'I don't expect you to understand.' 'Jesus,' I said.

  'Mack, this is taking incredible courage for me.'

  She apparently did not consider that it wasn't particularly easy for me. People who stay married, who hold on for the long pull, put up with a lot from each other: personal oddities, bad habits, ill health. For some it's tolerance, others commitment, many, like me, fear the unknown. For a while I tested myself with the notion that I should put up with this too. People stay married without sex. I'd known plenty. After all, I grew up a Catholic. And who even said it had to be like that? But it just sort of cut to the heart of things. I never saw this issue in normative terms. I wasn't worried that it was a perversion, or something that would have made my sainted ma faint, and I gave Nora no points just because it was the latest in style. It just seemed like an awful lot not to know. For her not to tell. For me not to recognize.

  So what was it like for her, those many years with drunken old Mack, whose sails on rare occasion would blow full of lust and fall upon her, riding her waves, mast in her harbor? What did she think? How much was she faking? Inquiring minds want to know. I sat there tonight with the wretched dark broken by the flickering of the sporting event and the announcer's occasionally hysterical pitch, trying to fathom it all, and found myself, for me, admirably charitable. I doubt she knew what to think. She must have felt uncertain, not really herself. Not resentful. Not engaged. How could she not know? you ask. The law governs acts, not evil intent alone, and we seem to take that lesson to heart. In this life — Catholic theology notwithstanding — we are what we do. She must have thought about her college friend from time to time and been surprised to find herself stimulated by the memory. She must have put it off to voyaging youth, the same untamed daring that let her give fellas blow jobs on the second date, and dismissed her continuing reflections as part of the universe of unruly and unsavory things rattling around in the average human mind. At times she must have confronted herself starkly with the question — Am I? — and at other instants comforted herself with the facts: husband, boys in the past, her roots in the present, her child. It must have taken her by surprise to have been so pleased the first time Jill Horwich laid a hand on her shoulder and then, feigning inadvertence, brushed against her breasts. That's what I think. I didn't know, whatever the disbelief with which that state of knowledge — or grace — is greeted. We see a person, hear a voice, are drawn most intimately to them, and yet so much remains unknown. No matter how earnestly we search, the mysteries abide. As Nora would tell you, we do not even know for certain when we look in the mirror.

  Practicing man's original sin, I have found my own unruly mind passing over the image of the two of them, with Jill's face buried up to the brows in Nora's female region and my wife lolled back in an ecstasy she only aspired to with me. I see this, I admit, with an unseemly exactness of detail, imagining it from Nora's eyes, another of those figures I can't manage to paint. Afterwards, I am morose, immobilized by grief. But often in the instant of sensation and heat, in that image of Nora finally free, relishing her own sensations like the finest music, I have a certain flight myself, as if something similar were even possible for me.

  So that's what I thought, staring frozenly at the TV, suddenly recollecting how much I loved to drink and hating my surroundings. I swear, aren't the Irish the tackiest decorators in the world, dark and cheap, with so many fucking little knick-knacks collared in dust that I never can find an inch of space on a tabletop to put down a glass, and too much lace and all the required family pictures? My ma's place looked just like this too, kind of a savage irony, since Nora hated Bess, both her tightfisted, pursed-lipped, judgmental ways and her flipside moods where she was worshipfully reverent of her men. More's the marvel, since as time passes and I close my eyes, it feels as if they both filled the same space inside.

  The TV screen was full of a big close-up of the referee. As I watched the picture, some extraordinary sensation of discovery took hold of me: I was at once suddenly focused, rescued, finally free.

  'That guy!' I shouted in the empty house
. I knew him, I'd seen his face.

  In Pigeyes's drawing.

  That was Kam Roberts.

  XVII

  I COULDN'‘I HAVE BEEN MORE SUPRISED IE THE HANDS HAD WON

  A. Phantom of the Fieldhouse

  Among the many noble institutions that, years ago, had first sought Leotis Griswell's counsel was the U. For his partners, this connection was priceless, inasmuch as it allowed us to obtain prime seats for football and basketball games and private tours of important university facilities like the bevatron or the fieldhouse, where the Hands played their games. I'd been down on the lacquered playing floor, with the huge-knuckled hands drawn at the center line amid a collar of vermilion, had capered down the tunnels and visited the locker rooms. Most important now, I'd also been to the ugly little changing room, where the refs dressed before games and sat out halftime and, after the final buzzer, immediately showered and put on their street clothes and dark glasses and escaped by mixing into the throng, rather than waiting for any lurking villain who wanted to engage in his own instant replay of various calls.

  Flying out of the house, I grabbed only a tweed sport jacket and drove recklessly over the river back into the city, wary of black-and-whites as I spun the dial to find the game on the radio. I had to lower the windows to clear the odor from yesterday morning and the Chevy was frigid. I blew on my fingers when I stopped at each light. It turned to halftime, the Hands down by only a bucket. I was desperate to get there while the refs were off the floor so that I'd have some chance to get hold of this Kam.

  Approaching this guy, whatever his name was, was going to be dicey. As far as I was concerned, the bookies and he could fix what they liked, but I didn't expect him to be carefree about that, and almost everything I might mention was likely to spook him. I was curious, naturally, although it didn't take much imagination to see how having a ref in your pocket could be, as they say in the law, outcome-determinative: a foul here and there, an out-of-bounds, a jump ball, a goal tend, a travel, all called or not. You could probably swing twenty to thirty points a game without being too obvious, given the usual grousing about officiating and the fact that in a sport like basketball, where everybody's always pushing and moving, a ref can only be expected to see so much. Archie had a great thing with this Kam, no question, but I had retired as a policeman. All I needed was to know about Bert — alive or dead, and if the former, how to make contact. For my sake, aside from my usual snoopy impulses, I didn't even need to know where Bert fit in their scam.

  The fieldhouse, 'The House of the Hands', as it was known, was the usual old university structure, a formidable mass of the same red-clay bricks from which most of the U's buildings were constructed. The House was relieved of utter grimness by roofline adornments of turrets and battlements and gunsight notches blocked out of stone. Someone will have to explain to me someday why the architectural plans for so many of the land-grant universities seem to have been borrowed from Clausewitz. What was the idea, that if the South rose again these buildings could be converted to armories?

  At the moment I could have used my own militia, since without it I could not find any place to park. The attendant at the lot across the street stoutly refused the two twenties I tried to force on him to get the Chevy inside, and I tore off around the block, sweating, swearing, itchy and bitchy, running out of time. Outside the fieldhouse the hawkers with the pennants and cups, buttons and banners, were milling with nothing to do, putting up with the little black kids in hooded sweatshirts and tatty coats who hung out just to get a scent of the game and the players. A dribble of early departees emerged through the gates two or three at a time. There were no more than five minutes left of halftime by now. The teams would be out there warming up, trying to look loose and jovial while they strutted their stuff without opposition, jamming and blocking, doing drills; the refs would soon follow them back out. I finally left the car on the street in a red zone. With luck, if I found this guy, I could be back out in ten minutes.

  I did not have a ticket. This didn't occur to me until I saw the gate attendant. They guarded the entrances throughout the game due to the little kids outside, who employed considerable craft figuring out how to get in. I ran back to the ticket windows in front, which were closed when I got there. I had to get a glum kid to go fetch some old biddy, who raised the shade halfway, eyed me serenely, and said, 'I'm sorry, we're totally sold out.'

  'I'll take standing room.'

  'Fire marshal doesn't allow that here in the House.' The shade dropped. I heard her walking away while I pounded on the glass.

  Back in front, I found some guy with three young kids, leaving to put them to sleep; he did not mind parting with his ticket stub for ten bucks, and I ran back to a different gate. The two student ushers, a boy and a girl in their red sport coats, were both overweight and obviously amorous, still overcome by that first thrill of love, the amazing news that in the flight of life, solo thus far, there might be a copilot. Watching them, I had an abrupt thought of Brushy, pleasing and then somehow muddled and pained. I bulled through the stiles between them, shaking my head and smiling and telling anyone who could hear how glad I was that I'd remembered the car lights. As I rushed on, I heard the boom of the horn and the crowd suddenly rousing itself: the second half was starting. I was in the dark rampway by then and I stood beneath the enormous welling crowd noise muttering, 'Fuck.' I could be one of those jerks who run out on the court, but the best that would come of that would be a trip to District 19, maybe even a clubbing.

  Instead, I slowly paced through the warren of brick corridors, trying to remember where the refs' changing room was. The old interior bricks of the place were all painted in a heavy enamel, a garish Hands' vermilion that refracted the spectral light. The air had a sort of salty smell, not so much sweat as excitement, the way lightning leaves the pungency of ozone in its wake. Already there was a lull in the clamor, which meant that the Hands were fading. Passing by a ramp up, I caught a look at the big four-sided scoreboard suspended on taut cables between the rafters and the blue ribbons of smoke floated in from the hallways. Milwaukee had put up six points in the first forty seconds out of the locker room. Maybe the Hands weren't even on the court.

  Finally I found what I was looking for, a simple wooden door painted the same red as the bricks and labeled 'Authorized Personnel Only'. I caught my only break of the night. The security guard in his ill-fitting red jacket was down the concrete corridor a good fifty yards, his radio clutched to his ear as he meandered, probably on his way for a leak now that halftime was over. I grabbed the knob and went through like I knew what I was doing. There were steel stairs, then a long low passage lit by bare incandescent bulbs, a janitor's gangway running downward beside the boiler pipes and plumbing into the fieldhouse basement, where the refs changed.

  To be under there while the game roared above was strange. Overhead there was glamour. The ash floor gleamed under the phenomenal brightness of the stadium lights. The cheerleaders, heartbreaking emblems of youth, simple in their grace, like flowers, flounced their skirts and jumped up and down. In the stands that timeless thing that goes back to when we ran in packs was strumming like the current in a high voltage wire in 18,000 sober citizens who were now nothing but one mass of screaming freaks. People with troubles, with a disabled kid or a mortgage they couldn't meet, were shouting so loud that tomorrow they wouldn't be able to speak at work, but now they were thinking of nothing but whether some long-bodied kid in shorts could throw a leather ball through a hole.

  And the refs would be out there, dressed in black and white amid the colors and brightness, the very figures of reason, the law, the rules, the arbiters, the force that kept it a game, not a fistfight. Down here was where they got ready, where they steadied themselves and came to grips with reality, and believe me, it stank. Literally. I remembered from visiting before. The changing room would be gamy with sweat, a little closet with a seven-foot ceiling, an architectural afterthought carved out of the service channel that ru
ns for the sewer pipes. The walls were wood, painted some miserable yellowish eggshell lacquer that glimmered cheaply under the unshaded bulbs. There were two little partitioned changing cubicles and a shower and a crapper, each behind a blue canvas drape, a setup that offered about the same level of privacy that inmates get in a holding cell.

  At the bottom, the gangway joined a tunnel that ran up at an angle, leading to the court. Noise and light were funneled down, and as I got close to the door of the changing room, looking up the concrete channel to court-side, I could see the legs and red coat hems of two security guys stationed there to guard this area. The crowd above and the fury of the game, the pounding sounds of the court, the whistles, the yells, reached down here like exotic music.

  The door to the changing room was like the one I'd come through above, an old wood thing painted red, with three raised panels. If the security guys up there were smart, they'd have locked it. If not, I'd hide inside, waiting. When I rattled the knob, it didn't give; I shook it twice and swore. I'd have no choice but to lurk about ten feet down the gangway, hoping for a chance as the refs came rushing down the tunnel right after the game. I was likely to get grabbed by security guys. They'd drag me away as I was screaming something dumb like 'Kam! Kam Roberts!'

  I was still holding the doorknob when I felt it move. The bolt shot back inside, and as my heart seized up, the door opened toward me.

  Bert Kamin looked me up and down.

  'Hey, Mack,' he said. 'Jesus, am I glad to see you.' He waved me inside and threw the bolt at once when I was beside him. Then he told me something I already knew.

  He said, 'I'm in a lot of trouble.'

  B. Troubled Heart

  Bert has never really mastered the gestures of amiability. In my unworthy suspicions about him, I imagined he was reluctant to put a hand on your shoulder for fear of what he might reveal. But the fact is that Bert is just strange. His usual manner is of some hey-man hipster. He chews his gum and gives forth with cynical carping from the side of his mouth. I'm never sure exactly who he thinks he is — he comes on like somebody who didn't quite get the sixties, who wanted to be in on what was happening but was too tough or unsentimental to take part. He reminds me at times of the first guy I ever busted, an engaging little rat named Stewie Spivak who was a student at the U and seemed to enjoy peddling dope much more than taking it.