When Patterson knocked on Jaworski’s door, he heard hip-hop music and a male voice inside, not too happy, shouting “Just a sec!” The condo complex was swank, with neatly trimmed lawns, lush shrubbery around the Colonial-style buildings, and big pots of yellow mums on the brick landings.
The kid’s family definitely had the cash. Did he bother with a roommate?
Jaworski was wearing baggy cargo shorts and a black-and-gold Chicago Bulls T-shirt when he answered the door. His hair was wet, and he was scrubbing the sides of his head with a big orange towel.
“Uh, hullo?”
“Ryan Jaworski?”
“Yeah?”
“My name’s Mike Patterson. I’m a special agent for the FBI. I wonder if I could talk to you for a couple minutes.” He held out his badge.
Jaworski squinted down at the badge and then blinked up at him. “I don’t know. Do I have to?”
“No. But I could sure use your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Can I come in?”
“Gee. Boy, I don’t know. What’s your name again?”
“Mike Patterson. I only need a couple minutes.” Jaworski was taking his time looking him over. Was he scared or just trying to figure out if Patterson was real? A black FBI agent?
Patterson ran into this situation regularly. The number of African American FBI agents these days must have that old racist J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave—assuming his pantyhose didn’t get in a twist.
“Well …” Jaworski glanced behind him and ran his fingers back through his hair.
Ryan Jaworski was real nervous. Interesting. Patterson was glad he’d stopped.
Patterson shrugged and started to turn away. “Hey, man, if you don’t want to talk to me …” The “man” was deliberate. Sometimes a touch of street talk, or what a white kid like Ryan might take for street talk, could crack things open. It worked.
“Nah, nah, it’s okay, I guess. Just a couple minutes, right?”
“All I need, Ryan. Two or three minor details we’re looking into. Just happened to be in the neighborhood. No biggie. My dinner’s waiting.”
“Okay.” Jaworski threw the towel onto a sofa. “Place is a little messy.” The kid was working hard to act casual.
“I’m used to messes.” Patterson gave him a smile, patted him on the shoulder, and stepped in. Whatever happened after this, he could testify that Jaworski had voluntarily given him consent to enter. “Got a roommate? Anyone else on the premises?”
“No. It’s just me.” Jaworski looked around vaguely as they crossed into the living room. “Um, I’m not sure where we should sit.”
Patterson picked up a chair from the dining area and swung it around so it was facing the couch. “Why don’t I take this, and you can shove some of that stuff over and sit there?” Patterson nodded at a heavy canvas robe with a black belt on top of it. “Judogi?”
“Just got back from a workout.”
“Good for you.”
Patterson started his questioning as he always did, with things he already knew, jotting on a pad as he went: Ryan’s full name and birth date, his class, his major, and easy basics to get the kid comfortable responding. He got Jaworski talking about the fact that he was a Bulls fan.
“Sorry.” Patterson tapped himself on the chest. “Wizards. I’m a glutton for punishment.”
“Bulls stunk, too.” Ryan made a face. “Next season may be better.”
“Listen.” Patterson put the pad aside and leaned forward. “You probably read about the problems one of your professors is having. Sidney Cranmer. Can you give me some background? Did you ever take any classes with him?”
“No.” Jaworski sniffed, looked to the side, and wiped his hand across his mouth. “Like I said, I’m a computer science major.”
“Any contact with him at all?”
“Not really.”
Patterson made a point of looking bored. He’d been right. This was getting interesting.
“Well, I doubt you can help me then. Let me see. I wrote a couple things down so I wouldn’t forget. Where did I put that piece of paper?” No law required a person to answer questions from an FBI agent, but if you did answer, it was a crime to lie. Jaworski’s fib about not taking a class with Cranmer was a five-year felony, something that might come in handy if they needed his cooperation. “Ah, here it is.” He unfolded Ames’s note and pretended to read it over. “Do you know anyone named, um, Lizzie Spencer?”
“Libby.” Jaworski supplied the correction quickly, flushed, then put on the brakes. “Not all that … Not … Well, we’ve dated. She was, for a while she was, sort of my girlfriend.”
“You still seeing her?”
“Sometimes. I’m mostly dating someone else now. Not from around here.”
“Uh-huh.” Patterson looked down at the paper again, putting on his confused face. “Says here she worked with Professor Cranmer, or something like that. Were you aware of that?”
“I think she said something about it, yeah.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Actually, now I’m remembering, it’s stupid. I forgot. I guess I’m …” Jaworski scrubbed his head, putting on a show.
“People forget things all the time, Ryan. You’d be amazed.”
“I-I did take a class with Cranmer.”
“Oh, that’s terrific.” Patterson picked up his pad and jotted a note. “What was it like?”
“Dull as dirt.” They both laughed. “I have to take a certain number of classes outside my major. I kept, like, falling asleep in Cranmer’s class. I guess that’s why it slipped my mind.” Jaworski chuckled again, trying to get something back from Patterson, who obliged by smiling and waving a hand dismissively.
“Remember it well. How’d you do?”
“Pretty good. B-plus or A-minus, something like that.”
“Any chance you’ve ever been to Cranmer’s house?”
“Why are you asking me that? I mean, it’s kind of weird. … I can’t even …”
Stepped on the kid’s toe. Sometimes his job was more fun than beer and Super Bowl commercials. “No particular reason. Says here something about Ms. Spencer working out of his house sometimes. Thought maybe you might have dropped by or something and could help me out with what his place is like.”
“Let me think.” Jaworski actually grasped his chin and did such a crude pantomime of brain work that Patterson had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from breaking into a grin. “Yeah. Yeah. I … actually, I do think I might have dropped by there once. I don’t remember when. I think Libby and I were going out, and I was picking her up—something like that.”
“Uh-huh. Great. Happen to go inside?”
“Maybe for, like, twenty seconds.”
“Excellent. What was it like?”
“Little old lady’s house. Prissy. Smelled like my grandmother.”
“Really? That doesn’t surprise me.” Patterson tossed the pad on the coffee table, as though the interview were basically over. “One quickie. This is a long shot. Did you happen to see a flyer, a piece of paper, anywhere in the house, a kind of advertisement from some company selling pornographic DVDs? Anywhere in his house? Doorstep? Mailbox? Anything like that?”
Jaworski’s mouth dropped open, and he actually went pale. Generally, Patterson didn’t consider himself a particularly good judge of when someone was lying. He’d been fooled many times. But this poor worm had a flashing light over his head.
“No, no, no way. Nothing like that.” Jaworski breathed and settled himself down a little. “Like I said, it was, like, thirty seconds I was in the house.”
“Got it. Just so I’m clear, you never saw, say, a brochure or flyer or anything like that advertising child pornography, or any kind of pornography, in his house. I know I’m pushing here, but my supervisor says I
have to run through this with everybody. Part of the drill.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Almost forgot.”
“No,” Jaworski said, relaxing a little. “Nothing like that. I mean, I barely stuck my nose in the place.”
“Okay, that’ll do it.” Patterson retrieved the pad, stuck it in his pocket, and stood up. As they walked toward the door, he put a hand on Jaworski’s arm and said, “I’m getting absentminded in my middle age. Just a wrap-up question. Anything further you can think of about Cranmer that might give me a better picture of him? Anyone else you think I should talk to?”
After a pause, Jaworski responded casually. “Well, I know there’s more child porn at his house, that’s for sure.”
“I bet there is.”
Did Jaworski actually think this information was not important? Or had he just made the decision to croak Cranmer to cover himself?
“And there’s this one professor I know who kind of hates Cranmer, a guy named Harlan Graves. You might want to talk with him.”
“Good. Thanks. Maybe I will.” Patterson stopped inside the front door, looked down, and scratched his head. “Maybe.” He sighed and made a show of hesitating. “This is probably not going to make any difference, but could I have, maybe, just two more minutes of your time?”
25
Claire, sitting in her office, eyed the phone, trying to decide whether to take a shot at calling Sid again. Would it be kinder just to let him alone? After five or six messages, it was clear he was avoiding her. She knew, of course, that he must be crawling into his cave out of sheer humiliation. The college was certainly dropping him off a cliff. Students who’d been victims of childhood abuse had made their views known—which took tremendous courage—and rumor had it that the administration might be reprinting the course catalog to expunge Professor Cranmer’s name.
But Sid was her friend, and Claire had no intention of being maneuvered out of his life just because things were tough. She also badly wanted to fill Sid in on a couple things that, for better or worse, she’d been up to. Time was flying. The Columbus Day holiday was next week; the sugar maple below her office window was already a red-and-orange bonfire.
Claire’s safe-deposit box at the Amherst Savings Bank now held the folder Libby Spencer had given her, containing a sheaf of black-and-white photographs taken by Charles Dodgson in the 1860s of partly or entirely naked little girls. The prints were originals, made by Dodgson himself. Many had never been published, and from an academic point of view, they were priceless. Claire hadn’t been able to resist taking a look at them. While they weren’t quite pornographic by contemporary standards, they were certainly erotic and creepy—the kind of preteen cheesecake that might very well get a pedophile sweating. She had stored the file with relief (a) that it was out of Sid’s house and (b) that she wouldn’t be needing to look inside it for a long time, if ever.
She hadn’t made up her mind whether to tell Sid about Libby’s theft of the folder. He might be better off not knowing it was gone or where it went. On the other hand, the photographs, for better or worse, belonged to him. Claire hoped talking to Sid would help her feel her way toward a decision about what to do.
Then, there was the phone call she’d made to Linda Ames about Ryan Jaworski. Claire badly needed to let Sid know about that. She had done it on an impulse the morning after the upsetting grilled cheese dinner with David. She kept telling herself that she’d acted with the best of intentions, suspicious of Ryan and inspired by David’s description of what a good lawyer Ames was. But now, no matter how often she recalled her good motives, the sheer brass of what she’d done almost gave her vertigo. If David found out, his Boy Scout sense of betrayal would probably end their relationship for good. It would be proof positive that they just couldn’t navigate as a couple. After their recent overnight, which had improved things between them tremendously, a heartbreak like that would be unbearable, especially since it would be her own stupid fault.
But it was done, and she couldn’t go back. She needed, at least, to let Sid know before Ames told him first, so he’d have a fair opportunity to call Claire an interfering asshole to her face, instead of just hating her on his own, on the other side of his big high wall.
Problem was, he wouldn’t pick up his goddamned phone. She decided to make one last attempt. Punching in his number, Claire told herself that, if she got his answering machine again, she was going to shout, curse, and threaten to pitch a rock through his window. If that didn’t get him to call her back, she’d go stand on his front lawn and scream.
She’d worked herself into such a lather of enraged determination that she was caught off guard when Sid actually picked up. His voice sounded thin but healthy, and they quickly decided that if she wanted to come over and see him there was no time like the present. Just at the moment, he said, he could really use some company.
When Sid opened the door, Claire was shocked at how haggard he looked and the way he seemed to be sagging to one side.
“Still healing up?”
“Yeah. It’s nothing.” Sid was shorter than Claire, and when they hugged, he leaned his head into the side of her neck. “God, it’s good to see you, dearie.” He waved her inside. “Come in, come in. Sorry about the hide-and-seek.” He closed the door. “What can I say? I’m a fucking basket case.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“My friends are few these days, Claire, and I’ve decided to stop walling them out.” The house was as well ordered as ever, and there was the usual lovely aroma coming from the kitchen. “From now on, drop by any time. You don’t even need to call.” He held up a finger and spoke as though he were lecturing. “The wonderful thing about home confinement is that you’re always home.”
They spent the next half hour eating warm three-berry pie and catching up on college gossip. Claire was reassured to see that her friend, though pale and moving slowly, had not lost his edge. When she told him that Darren Mattoon had taken over one of his fall classes, and overhauled the syllabus substantially, Sid shot back, “Darren doesn’t need a syllabus. Every class he teaches is the same thing: Mattoon 101, Mattoon 202, Mattoon …”
“Now, now.”
Sid leaned back in his chair. “It’s okay. Let him have his fun ruining Western literature. Adversity is making me stoic. I’m a regular Socrates without the hemlock.”
This seemed like a reasonable opening to inquire about the case. When Claire asked how it was going, Sid got quiet for a while, dabbing at his pie and then turning to stare at the row of African violets he kept on the sill of his bow window.
Finally, he looked back at her. “Don’t ever get indicted, Claire. It sucks.”
“I’ll bet.”
Claire waited while Sid gathered himself, poking at a piece of crust. “I’m going to say something that may surprise you. I hope it will anyway.” He spoke quietly, and his eyes when he lifted his face to her were moist. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and spoke a little louder. “I’m beginning to wonder if I might be better off pleading guilty.” He swallowed and flicked the corner of his eye. “Nothing to cry about. A lot of people in this world have it worse.”
The suggestion took Claire’s breath away. “How can you plead guilty?”
“Because, basically, there seems to be a ton of evidence that I am guilty, Claire. I don’t think I’ve done everything they say, but I have done some stuff, and it turns out there are parts of me …”
“Everybody has parts, Sid. Everybody’s done stuff …”
“My lawyer says if I plead, she can maybe work the sentence down to three or four years.”
“Three or four years!” Claire fell back in her chair. After a few seconds, she realized her mouth was open, and she closed it. “Three or four years? My God!”
“She says if I go to trial, and the jury finds me guilty, I’ll get at least five, and the judge could give me eight or ten. I d
oubt I could survive that.”
Claire’s wave of shock and anguish slapped up against a concrete wall as she remembered that the judge he was talking about was the man whose furry chest she had recently laid her cheek against. She couldn’t believe that Sid had actually voluntarily downloaded and looked at child porn—it was too revolting, too impossible—but she also couldn’t endure the thought of what might happen to him if he admitted he had. She pictured him in some remote federal prison, in a cell, sitting there in the shadows for years. He’d nearly been killed during only a few days in the local jail. She could barely find words.
“Couldn’t you … Can’t you … ?”
“No, Claire, I couldn’t, and I can’t.” Sid placed his fork down on his plate carefully. “My lawyer’s more or less telling me that if I go to trial, I don’t stand a chance. She says it’s my decision, and she’ll fight for me no matter what and all that. She’s trying to be, I don’t know, diplomatic or something, but … ”
“There’s always a chance.” She knew she was babbling.
“No, dearie, there isn’t. Linda Ames is one of the nicest, smartest, and toughest people I’ve ever known. If anyone could pull my ass out of this, it would be her.” He hesitated and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I’ve been looking over samples of the stuff they took off my computer, and it’s just fucking horrible.”
“God.”
“Some of it.” Sid wavered. “Some of it seemed familiar.”
“Oh, Sid.” She reached over and took his hand. “Do you honestly think you could stand up in public and … ?” She couldn’t finish the question.
The One-Eyed Judge Page 20