by Scott Turow
“I still don’t understand why I never heard about this case,” I tell Lip. I can’t imagine a procedural reason for not informing me—or for the case to have ended up in the hands of Carolyn, who did not work in our public corruption unit. I have spent more than a few moments with that puzzle, full as it is with sorrowful implications about my fading romance with Raymond Horgan, and his with me.
Lip shrugs. “What’s Horgan tell you?”
“I haven’t been able to corner him. It’s twelve days to the election. They’re on a twenty-four-hour operation now.”
“How about Kenneally. What’d he say?”
“He’s been on leave.”
“Well, you better talk to him. He ain’t tellin shit to me. We ain’t in each other’s fan clubs.”
The police department is full of people with whom Lipranzer does not get along, but I would have guessed Lip would take to Kenneally. He likes good cops. But there is something between them. He’s hinted at it before.
Lip starts to leave, then steps back in the office. I am already headed out to see Eugenia, but Lip takes me by the elbow to detain me. He closes the door I just opened.
“One thing,” he says. He looks right at me. “We got her MUDs back.”
“And?”
“Nothin great. Only we wanted to get MUDs on any number she called more than three times in the last six months.”
“Yeah?”
“I noticed as I’m goin through there, one of the numbers that comes up that way is yours.”
“Here?” I ask.
An especially narrow look emerges from Lip’s narrow, Slavic face.
“Home,” he says. “Last October. Thereabouts.”
I am about to tell him this could not possibly be right. Carolyn never tried to reach me at home. Then I realize what it is. I made those calls from Carolyn’s place. Lying to my wife. Late again, kid. This trial’s gonna be a bitch. I’ll catch dinner down here.
Lip watches me calculate. His eyes are flat and gray.
“I’d just as soon you let it go,” I say at last. “If Barbara sees a subpoena notice from the phone company, she’ll blow a gut. Under the circumstances. If you don’t mind, Lip, I’d appreciate it.”
He nods, but I can see that it is still not right with him. If nothing else, we have always depended on each other to be above certain base kinds of stupidity, and Dan Lipranzer would be unfaithful to that compact if he did not take one more moment to cast his gray eyes on me harshly, so that I know I’ve let him down.
9
“In the end,” I told Robinson, “we had to put Wendell McGaffen on the witness stand.” His testimony was the only effective response to his father, and so we called the boy in rebuttal. Carolyn was splendid. She wore a dark blue suit and a beige blouse with a huge satin bow, and she stood beside Wendell, whose feet did not reach the floor from the hard oak chair in the witness box. You could not hear a thing in the courtroom.
And then what did your mother do, Wendell?
He asked for water.
When your mother took you in the basement, Wendell, what did she do?
It was bad, he said.
Was it this? Carolyn went to the vise, which had sat throughout, like an omen, at the edge of the prosecution table, grease-smeared and black, thicker in all its parts than any of Wendell’s limbs.
Uh huh.
Did she hurt you?
Uh huh.
And did you cry?
Uh huh. Wendell drank some more water and then added, A lot.
Tell how it happened, said Carolyn finally, softly, and Wendell did. She said to lie down. He said he screamed and cried. He cried, Mommy don’t. He begged her.
But he finally laid himself down.
And she told him not to scream.
Wendell swung his feet as he talked. He gripped his doll. And as Carolyn and Mattingly had instructed him, he never looked over at his mother. On cross Stern did what little he could, asked Wendell how many times he’d met with Carolyn and whether he loved his mother, which caused Wendell to ask for more water. There was no disputing, really. Every person there knew the child was telling the truth, not because he was practiced or particularly emotional, but because somehow in every syllable Wendell spoke there was a tone, a knowledge, a bone-hard instinct that what he was describing was wrong. Wendell convinced with his moral courage.
I delivered the closing argument for the county. My state of personal disturbance was such that when I approached the podium I had no idea of what I was going to say, and for one moment I was full of panic, convinced that I would be speechless. Instead, I found the well of all my passionate turmoil and I spoke fervently for this boy, who must have lived, I said, desperate and uncertain every moment, wanting, as we all wanted, love, and receiving instead, not just indifference or harshness, but torture.
Then we waited. Having a jury out is the closest thing in life to suspended animation. Even the simplest tasks, cleaning my desk, returning phone calls, reading prosecution reports, are beyond my attention, and I end up walking the halls, talking over the evidence and the arguments with anyone unlucky enough to ask me how the case went. About 4:00, Carolyn came by to say she was going to return something to Morton’s and I volunteered to walk along. As we left the building, it began raining hard, a cold downpour driven almost sideways by the wind, which was full of winter. People dashed down the street, covering their heads. Carolyn returned her merchandise, a glass bowl whose source she did not identify, and then we headed back into the rain. She more or less shouted out as the wind came up, and I put an arm around her protectively, and she leaned against me beneath my umbrella. It was like something coming loose, and we went on that way for a few blocks, saying nothing, until I finally followed my impulse to speak.
Listen, I said. I started again. Listen.
In her heels, Carolyn was about six feet, an inch or so taller than me, so it was almost an embrace when she turned her face in my direction. In the natural light, you could see what Carolyn, with her devotion to lotions and gyms and spectacular fashions, tried to obscure—that it was an older face, past forty, the makeup clinging to the lines radiating from her eyes, a haggard roughness now part of the skin. But somehow that made her more real to me. This was my life and this was happening.
I’ve been wondering, I told her, about something you said. What you meant the other night when you told me, Not now.
She looked at me. She shook her head as if she did not know, but her face was full of caprice, her lips sealed to hold back her laughter.
The wind came up again then, and I drew her into the shelter of a recessed storefront. We were on Grayson Boulevard, where the shops face the stately elms of the Midway.
I mean, I said, hopeless and pitiable and small, there seems to be something going on between us. I mean, am I crazy? To think that?
I don’t think so.
You don’t?
No.
Ah, I said.
Still smiling wonderfully, she put her arm through mine and moved me back down the street.
The jury returned a little before 7:00. Guilty on all counts. Raymond had remained in the office awaiting the verdict, and he came downstairs with us to meet the press, cameras not being allowed above the lobby of the County Building. Then he took us out for a drink. He had a date, and so around 8:30 he left us in a back booth at Caballero’s, where Carolyn and I talked and became drunk and moony. I told her that she had been magnificent. Magnificent. I don’t know how many times I said that.
TV and the movies have spoiled the most intimate moments of our lives. They have given us conventions which dominate our expectations in instants whose intensity would ordinarily make them spontaneous and unique. We have conventions of grief, which we learned from the Kennedys, and ordained gestures for victory by which we imitate the athletes we see on the tube, who in turn have learned the same things from other jocks they saw on TV. Seduction, too, has got its standards now, its sloe-eyed moments, its breathless
repartee.
And so we both ended up coming on smooth and wry and bravely composed, like all those gorgeous, poised movietime couples, probably because we had no other idea of how to behave. And even so, there was a gathering in the air, a racing current that made it difficult to sit in place, to move my mouth or lift my glass to drink. I don’t believe we ordered dinner, but we had the menus, something to stare at, like coquettes with their silk fans. Beneath the table Carolyn’s hand was laid out casually, very close to my hip.
I didn’t know you when this started.
What? she asks. We are close on the plush bench, but she must lean a bit nearer because I am speaking so softly. I can smell the liquor on her breath.
I didn’t know you before this case, before this started. That amazes me.
Because?
Because it just doesn’t seem that way now—that I didn’t know you.
Do you know me now?
Better. I think so. Don’t I?
Maybe, she says. Maybe what it is, is that now you know you want to get to know me.
That’s possible, I say, and she repeats it:
That’s possible.
And will I get to know you?
That’s possible, too, she says. If that’s what you want.
I think that is, I say.
I think that’s one thing, she says, that you want.
One thing?
One thing, she says. She brings her glass up to drink without looking away from me. Our faces are not very far apart at all. When she puts her glass down, the large bow on her blouse almost brushes my chin. Her face seems coarse with too much makeup, but her eyes are deep and spectacularly bright, and the air is wild with cosmetic scents, perfume, and body emanations from our closeness. It seems as if our talk has been drifting like this, circling languorously, like a hawk over the hills, for hours.
What else do I want? I ask.
I think you know, she says.
I do?
I think you do.
I think I do, I say. But there’s one thing I still don’t know.
There is?
I don’t quite know how to get it—what I want.
You don’t?
Not quite.
Not quite?
I really don’t.
Her smile, so arch and delicately contained, now broadens, and she says, Just reach.
Reach?
Just reach, she says.
Right now?
Just reach.
The air between us seems so full of feeling that it is almost like a haze. Slowly I extend my hand and find the smooth edge of her bright satin bow. I do not quite touch her breast in doing that. And then, without turning my eyes away from hers, I gradually tug on that wide ribbon. It slides perfectly, and the knot breaks open so that the button at her blouse collar is exposed, and at just that moment, I feel Carolyn’s hand fluttering up beneath the table like some bird and one long fingernail skates for an instant down my aching bulge. I almost scream, but instead, it all comes down to a shudder, and Carolyn says quietly that we should get a cab.
“So,” I said to Robinson, “that was how my affair began. I took her back to her fashionable loft and made love to her on the soft Greek rugs. I just grabbed her the minute she set the bolt in her front door, hiked her skirt up with one hand, and put the other down her blouse. Very suave. I came like lightning. And afterward, I lay on top of her, surveying the room, the teak and walnut and the crystal figurines, thinking how much it looked like the show window of some tony shop downtown and wondering in this idle way what in the fuck I was doing with my life, or even in a life where the culmination of a long-cultivated passion passed so quickly that I could hardly believe it had happened at all. But there was not a lot of time to think about that, because we had a drink, and then went to her bedroom to watch the story about our case on the late news, and by then I was capable again, and then, that time, when I reared up over her, I knew I was lost.”
10
“Whatever I can do for you, Rusty. Anything you need.”
So says Lou Balistrieri, the police department’s Commander of Special Services. I am sitting in his office in McGrath Hall, where the P.D.’s central operating sections are housed. I can’t tell you how many Lous there are over here, fifty-five-year-old guys with gray hair and guts that hang on them like saddlebags, phlegmy voices from smoking. A gifted bureaucrat, ruthless with any person in his employ and a shameless toady to anyone, like me, who has sufficient power to harm him. He is on the phone now, calling down to the crime lab, which is under his control.
“Morris, this is Balistrieri. Get me Dickerman. Yeah, now. If he’s in the can, go in there and get him off. Yeah.” Balistrieri winks at me. He was a street cop for twenty years, but he works now without a uniform. His rayon shirt is sweated through under the arms. “Dickerman, yeah. On this Polhemus thing. Rusty Sabich is over here with me. Yeah. Sabich. Sabich, for Chrissake. Right, Horgan’s guy. Chief deputy. We got a glass or something. Yeah, I know there latents, I know, that’s why I’m calling you. Whatta you think? Right, I’m a big dumb gumba. Right, and don’t fuckin forget it. This big dumb gumba can send you home with your nuts in a paper bag. Right. Right. But why I’m calling is this. Can’t we do a computer scan with that laser thing against our knowns? Yeah, you got three good prints there, right? So get what you need and run them through the computer and let’s figure out if they’re anyone we know. I hear the cop on the case has been asking for ten days now you should do this. Murphy? Yeah, which one? Leo or Henry? Because Henry is a horse’s ass. Good. Well, tell him to un-onload it. Don’t give me the computer crap, I don’t understand that shit anyway. No. No. Not good enough. All right. Call me back. Ten minutes. Ten. Let’s figure this thing out.”
The problem, as it gradually emerges, is not equipment but the fact that the computer is under another section’s jurisdiction. The department owns only one machine, and the people who do things like payroll believe it should be regarded as theirs alone.
“Right. I’ll ask. I’ll ask,” says Balistrieri when he gets the return call. He covers the receiver. “They want to know how big a field you want to run against. We can do all felons or all knowns in the county. You know, everybody who’s ever been printed. County employees. Shit like that.”
I pause. “Felons is probably enough. I can do the rest later if we ever need it.”
Balistrieri makes a face. “Do it all. God knows if I can get back on.” He takes his hand away before I get a chance to answer. “Do all of it. Yeah. How soon? What the fuck is gonna take a week? This man’s runnin the biggest murder case in the city and he’s got to kiss your ring? Well, fuck Murphy’s statistical analysis. Yeah. Tell him I said so. Right.” He puts the phone down. “A week, probably ten days. They gotta get the payroll out, then the chief needs some statistics for the LEAA”—Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. “I’ll push, but I doubt you’ll see it any sooner. And have your copper get the glass back out of evidence and bring it to the lab, case they need it for anything.”
I thank Lou for his help and head down to the Pathology Lab. This building looks more or less like an old high school, with varnished oak trim and worn hallways. It is coppers wall to wall, men—and more than a few women these days—in deep blue shirts and black ties, bustling around and making jokes with one another. People of my generation and social stratum do not like cops. They were always beating our heads and sniffing for dope. They were unenlightened. So when I became a prosecutor I started from some distance behind which, in truth, I have never made up. I’ve worked with policemen for years. Some I like; more I don’t. Most of them have two failings. They’re hard. And they’re crazy. They see too much; they live with their nose in the gutter.
Three or four weeks ago, I stayed longer than I should have on a Friday night at Gil’s and began buying rounds with a street copper named Palucci. He did a beer and a shot a couple of times, and started talking about a heart he had found that morning in a Ziploc bag
. That was all. Just the organ, and the major vessels, lying right next to a garbage can at the end of an alley. He picked it up; he looked at it; he drove away. But then he made himself come back. He lifted the lid of the can and stirred the rubbish. No body parts. ‘That was it. I done my duty. I dropped it off downtown and told them to mark it goat.’
Crazy. They are our paid paranoids. A copper sees a conspiracy in a cloudy day; he suspects treachery when you say good morning. A grim fellowship, nurtured in our midst, thinking ill about us all.
The elevator takes me to the basement.
“Dr. Kumagai.” I greet him. His office is right outside the morgue, which lies beyond, with its stainless-steel tables and the ghastly odors of open peritoneal cavities. Through the walls, I can hear a surgical saw screaming. Painless’s desk is a mess, papers and journals in ramparts, overflowing wooden trays. Set at one corner, a small TV is on, the volume low, with an afternoon baseball game.
“Mr. Savage. Real important stuff, huh? We got chief deputy with us.” Painless is every kind of weird, a five-foot, five-inch Japanese, with heavy brows and a small mustache divided over the middle of his lip. A kinetic type, always dodging and twisting, talking with his hands in the air. The mad scientist, except there is nothing benevolent about him. Whoever got the idea that Painless would be best off working with stiffs pushed him in the right direction. I can’t imagine his bedside manner. He is the kind to throw things at you, cuss you out. Whatever bitter little notion is in his brain will find expression. He is one of those people of whom the globe at moments seems so full. I do not understand him. If I try very hard, in that sort of instinctive effort we all make at pseudo-telepathy, my screen comes up full of fuzz. I cannot imagine what is passing through his mind when he does his job, or watches TV, or turns after a woman. I know I could lose a bet even if I had ten chances to guess what he did last Saturday night.