Marital Privilege

by Greg Sisk

  So Candace and Bill decided to try condominium living in downtown Minneapolis. The unit was empty—truly empty. Not a single stick of furniture remained inside the two-bedroom apartment, and every wall was bare (other than the mirrors in the bathrooms). When they had moved to San Diego, Professor Zuazo and his wife naturally had taken all their possessions. In any event, Candace and Bill would want to furnish and decorate their new home with their own furniture, knickknacks, home items, and books.

  That meant that someone had to go back inside that house, to pack things up and move them to their new home. Bill told Candace to leave the logistics to him. She needed only to be in the ­condominium unit on moving day to direct the movers where to place the furniture and into which rooms to put the boxes as their household possessions were transported from Eden Prairie to Minneapolis.

  Bill had been oddly vague, even evasive, about the moving arrangements. Candace was so relieved not to have been asked to help gather things inside that house—and was so tired in general—that she simply acquiesced and didn’t ask questions.

  Today was moving day. Candace had opened up the unit and made arrangements with the building management for access to the loading dock area and to the freight elevator for moving things into the unit. Earlier that morning, she and Bill had driven the mini-van over to the condominium building and carried in those few possessions they had with them in the hotel.

  And Candace had brought Tucker the cat to his new home. She had taken Tucker out of the house that night of the home invasion and carried him into their hotel room so that the little guy wouldn’t have to spend another night alone in the house. At this moment, Tucker was walking slowly through the two-bedroom unit, sniffing at everything and then rubbing against walls to leave his scent. When the movers arrived, she’d close him inside the laundry room to keep him out the way.

  Now Candace stood on the balcony, relaxing while she waited to hear from Bill, who had promised to call when the movers were on the way.

  Her cell phone rang. She was surprised because it was too soon for the movers to have completed loading a van back at the house.

  It was Bill. “Candy, you need to come over to the house.”

  Her heart hammered hard inside her chest and she could only stammer: “Bill, I . . . I . . . can’t. I really meant it. I’ll never go inside that house again.”

  “I know, I know, honey,” Bill replied. “I promise you, you don’t have to put one foot inside the house. But you really, really do need to come over here.”

  Hearing the trepidation in her voice, Bill hastened to add: “Don’t worry. It’s a good thing.”

  “But how would I even get there?” asked Candace. “You know we have only one vehicle now, the mini-van.”

  “The mini-van is still in the parking space in the underground parking at the condominium building, right where you are. I got a ride to the house with someone else.” Once again, Bill was being mysterious.

  Because it now was mid-morning, and long past rush-hour, the drive from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie took Candace only about twenty minutes.

  As she turned onto Dunnell Drive, she began to see cars and trucks parked tightly along the street, as occasionally happened when one of their neighbors was hosting a large party on the block. The number of parked vehicles increased as she drew closer to the house at 3732 Dunnell Drive. She slowly pulled into the drive.

  Before her vision blurred with tears, she was stunned by what she saw. At least fifty people filled the large front yard. Dean Colleen Ordway. Other law professors. Staff from the law school. Dozens of law students she had taught over the past three years. They were all wearing work or casual clothes.

  More colleagues and students were coming out of the house carrying furniture and boxes toward pickup trucks and vans that had been backed in close to the front door and garage. Even through her tear-filled eyes, there was no mistaking the towering Sharon Tipplett as she came out of the house carrying two boxes toward a pick-up truck.

  Bill came over to the mini-van and helped her out, as tears streamed down Candace’s face. Dean Ordway was the first to come over and hug Candace, saying, “I made a couple of phone calls, and others made more calls. Everyone who heard wanted to help. We’ve got this, Candace. We’ve got this for you.”

  Able only to repeat “thank you,” Candace embraced each of the many people who made up the moving crew as they took a break from their work to greet her.

  At the end of the line was her friend and law school clinic colleague Sharon Tipplett, who hugged her, and said, “Oh, no, we’ve got you crying again.”

  “These aren’t tears of sadness,” Candace assured her. “Thank you, thank you.”

  After a set of boxes had been loaded into the Klein mini-van, Bill got into the driver’s seat, while Candace climbed into the passenger seat. Bill said, “I think Dean Ordway and the law school crew can get the rest packed and moved. Let’s go home.”

  Candace slid over to the left on the seat and hugged Bill tightly. The only words she gave Bill were the same she had been repeating to everyone else: “Thank you.” But a deeper meaning, a stronger feeling lay behind those same words when she shared them with her husband.

  As Bill backed the mini-van out of the driveway, she thought: Going home. I hope so. I need a home.

  • • •

  Robert (Robby) Sherburne wasn’t a bad lawyer. But he wasn’t a good one either. Or, to be fair, it was hard to judge whether he might have become a good lawyer because he’d never really practiced law. He might have a law degree. He might be the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota. But Sherburne saw his job as a political one. And he practiced politics pretty darn well, or at least he thought so.

  Sherburne’s father, Wilburn, had been elected to two terms as Minnesota Secretary of State in the 1970s. Affectionately known as Burney Sherburne, he then became the nominee for governor of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (which is Minnesota-speak for the Democratic Party). That was back when getting the party nod was almost always the equivalent of being elected to state office in Minnesota. Not that year; not for Burney. So Burney never again ran for political office. In those halcyon days of DFL domination in Minnesota state politics, there would be no second chance for a DFLer who couldn’t even beat a Republican.

  It was a different time now, as Robby Sherburne knew all too well. Republicans did win statewide office in Minnesota, more than once in a blue moon. To be sure, the DFL nominee for governor or attorney general or senator won more often than not. Republicans hadn’t reached parity in state bids for elective office—but they were getting there. So if Robby Sherburne wanted to take the advantage in a race for state office, he could hardly do better than to run from a platform as a criminal prosecutor and thereby seize for himself the traditional Republican theme of being tough on crime.

  After losing the gubernatorial election in the 1970s, his father, Burney Sherburne had become a mover-and-shaker behind the scenes as a partner in one of the major Minneapolis law firms. He organized fundraising events for DFL politicians and party campaigns, diplomatically dealt with insiders, helped quietly resolve scandals, and offered legal counsel to a new generation of politicians. Wilburn Sherburne would never be remembered in political history among such giants of the Minnesota DFL Party as Hubert Humphrey or Walter Mondale. But, even decades later, Burney’s name meant something to many of those active in DFL politics.

  After Robby Sherburne got his law degree—quite appropriately in the then-recently named Walter F. Mondale Hall, which houses the University of Minnesota Law School—he joined his aging father’s law firm. Other new associates were relegated to the grunt work of drafting commercial instruments or reading through thousands of pages of electronic documents to respond to discovery requests in a big lawsuit. Robby Sherburne instead followed in his father’s footsteps and chatted up clients and
potential clients.

  With his political connections, cultivated charm (for those he liked or wanted to like him), and boyish good looks, Sherburne was a natural “rain maker.” He didn’t do the legal work; he managed it for the client.

  When the time came to start his own political career as he neared the end of his thirties, he didn’t think small but lobbied to be nominated as the United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota. With his last name and the endorsement of his now-late father’s friends, the incumbent DFL United States Senator for Minnesota agreed to put forward only Sherburne’s name to the new Democratic presidential administration.

  Robby Sherburne had never practiced criminal law, and, in fact, had never tried a case. But he was sold to the new Democratic presidential administration as a strong manager, with good political instincts.

  Sherburne was resentfully aware that some inside the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., had resisted his nomination. He had not been helped by the timing of a story in Twin Cities magazine on the most eligible bachelors in the metropolitan area, which featured a picture of him with a loosened tie and jacket thrown over his shoulder, in which he had been described as Kennedy-esque in appearance. The story had reinforced the widespread perception in Washington, D.C., that Sherburne was nothing more than an ingratiating pretty boy with a great haircut. But in the end, he got what he wanted, as he expected he would.

  Nearly every prosecutor in the country aspires to higher office. Many of those who became United States Attorney hoped to be named a federal judge. Not Robby Sherburne. He was a thoroughly political man. He hoped to make the office a stepping stone to the United States Senate or the governorship.

  Another DFL politician had recently been elected to one of the state’s two United States Senate seats. The other seat was held by a Republican who would not be up for re-election for four more years.

  So, with the next gubernatorial election only eighteen months away, Sherburne had set his sights on the governor’s residence at 1006 Summit Avenue in St. Paul.

  The political attractiveness that the United States Attorney position held for Sherburne had proven to be a decidedly mixed blessing, given the office’s primary responsibility for federal criminal prosecution. Because it was such a demanding position with considerable public responsibilities, Sherburne had to be at least minimally competent in the job, if only as a manager of other people. But he knew better than to expose himself in court with any regularity, carefully reserving his court appearances to those occasions when he was most likely to shine. Fortunately, the office attracted many of the best and brightest in the legal community, so a good political manager—and Robby Sherburne prided himself on that—could float along on the superior quality legal briefing and trial court skills of the real prosecutors who went into court every day and put the criminals in jail.

  To this point, Sherburne had been very careful not to be overtly political in his superintendence of the United States Attorney’s Office, although no one in the office, the legal community, or the media had any doubt as to his political motivations. Still, the accomplished career lawyers in the United States Attorney’s office could be guided only to a degree before they would complain that their professional integrity was being compromised.

  For that reason, Sherburne had adopted a strategy that he called (if only to himself) “political percolation.” And “percolation” was a good description of how he had exercised political influence. Politics had not dominated the day-to-day life of the office. Instead, he allowed his political motivations to slowly permeate the office, filtered always by the appearance of legal merit and just results.

  Which cases got the best prosecutors assigned and which cases were pushed to trial rather than accepting a plea bargain were determined, only in part but definitely in part, by the political impact perceived by Robby Sherburne. Because the most spectacular cases often were also the ones deserving of the greatest attention by the prosecutor’s office, political advantage and prosecutorial merit usually came together. And, on Sherburne’s watch, no criminal case for which the evidence was weak had yet to be pursued for political motives. Not yet.

  But Sherburne had begun to worry that time was running out if he was to secure the state-wide visibility and crime-fighter reputation necessary to make a strong run for governor in the next year. He feared his light and incremental political touch—his strategy of “political percolation”—was failing to pay sufficient dividends for him. The political progress was too slow.

  Then into Sherburne’s lap fell a car-bombing case—with a child victim, no less. It was the kind of sensational case every politically ­ambitious prosecutor dreams about. The case screamed melodrama. Getting attention from the media and public was easy. And Sherburne had made sure he was out there early, implanting into the public mind his prominent role as the tough-minded prosecutor. He had held a press conference just a few days after the bombing, in which he announced that his office would seek the federal death penalty for the perpetrator.

  Even weeks afterward, the car bombing and speculation about the continuing investigation remained front-page news. There, however, lay the problem. It now was weeks afterward.

  One of the local television stations recently had begun the evening news by declaring that “today is Day 45 of the Minnesota car bombing case . . . and still no arrest.” It wouldn’t be long before other news outlets followed the trend. No one with any sense of political history could fail to remember how the nightly news reports that it was “Day 100” or “Day 350” of the Iranian hostage crisis, with no resolution in sight, had played a major role in turning the public against President Jimmy Carter, leading to his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

  Sherburne was determined not to let that happen to him. He was no Jimmy Carter. It was time to get results.

  So it was a very unhappy Sherburne who fidgeted in his office chair and endured a most disappointing update by the ATF and local law enforcement on the continuing investigation into the car bombing.

  Sherburne interrupted ATF special agent Alex Kramer, “Are you absolutely certain it can’t have been Pirkle? Everything was pointing so nicely in his direction.”

  “No doubt,” said Kramer.

  To Sherburne’s annoyance, as he still couldn’t understand why an Eden Prairie police officer was part of this federal investigation, Lieutenant Ed Burton interjected, “Pirkle’s guilty as sin. But of theft, not murder.”

  “Hell,” Burton followed up without waiting for Sherburne to acknowledge him, “Pirkle wasn’t really a danger to Mrs. Klein. Turns out that the gun he took with him when he broke into the Klein house was one of those replicas that get mounted on walls. It didn’t even have a firing pin. He only meant to scare the Kleins and make them listen to his woes. He isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. By waving that toy gun around, he got himself shot.”

  Sherburne pointedly ignored Burton and continued to stare coldly at Kramer. “I thought Pirkle was in bad shape. Are you sure his answers to your questions in the hospital are reliable?”

  “Yes,” Kramer answered. “Pirkle remains in serious, but not critical, condition. He’s lost a kidney and may have some permanent paralysis. He’ll be in the hospital for months. But he has been conscious long enough to share his travel itinerary with us for that week when we were looking for him.”

  Again without invitation Burton took up the story from Kramer, as Sherburne finally deigned to turn and glare at him. “And it’s much more than Pirkle’s word, sir,” said Burton. “We’ve been able to back-track along his path across the country and confirm his story.

  “After he was fired from Insignia Construction by George Peterson, Pirkle fenced some more of the construction supplies he had stolen, pocketed the money, and took the bus to Las Vegas. The guy had a real gambling problem, which is what prompted him to start stealing from the construction company. He w
as in Las Vegas losing the rest of his money when the car was bombed. He can’t have been the culprit.”

  Sherburne reluctantly favored Burton with a question, “How can you be so sure? Just because Pirkle was in Las Vegas at some point—or says that he was there—isn’t proof of anything. And how do we know the exact time-line for the placing of the car bomb in the Klein car?”

  Kramer answered first, “With respect to the time-line, we know the car bomb had to have been duct-taped to the bottom of the car within a few hours before it exploded. Forensics confirms that, having been wired into the ignition the way it was, the bomb would have exploded just a couple of minutes after the car was started. Since we have multiple eyewitnesses in the Eden Prairie neighborhood that Bill Klein had been driving the Honda coupe the day before, the bomb had to have been installed sometime between the evening before and the morning of the explosion. That’s a window of about twelve to fifteen hours.”

  “At that very time,” Burton again picked up the thread, “we know for certain Pirkle was more than 1,600 miles away in Las Vegas.”

  “But couldn’t he have flown back on a late-night flight, just in time to plant the bomb?” asked Sherburne hopefully.

  “No,” replied Burton. “We have video surveillance from the Las Vegas casino, along with multiple eyewitnesses. Pirkle was there all night long. In fact, he had a couple of short winning streaks during which he cashed in chips, for which he had to show I.D. and sign paperwork with the casino. Everything confirms it was indeed him and he was there all night long—and all the next day for that matter.”

  “Bottom-line,” finished Kramer. “Pirkle’s not our guy.”

  “Then,” declared Sherburne firmly, “it has to be Klein. We can tie the TNT to his company, he had access to the TNT and obviously had easy access to the car, and he conveniently arranged for his wife to drive the car that morning. He’s our man, then.”