Innocent Page 10

  I have no idea how the mess with Harnason will play out, if Sandy will advise me to make a clean breast of the matter with the court or keep my peace. But my soul is at rest on one thing: I must stop seeing Anna. Having had a taste of ruin again, I cannot tolerate any more danger.

  Three days later, I arrive early in the lobby of the Hotel Dulcimer, to be sure I intercept her before she goes up to the room. From my untimely appearance, she knows something is awry, but I draw her toward one of the columns and whisper, "We have to stop, Anna."

  I watch her face crumple. "Let's go upstairs," she says impatiently. If I say no, I know she will be unable to keep herself from making a scene here.

  She cries bitterly as soon as the door is closed and takes a seat on an armchair, still in the light raincoat she wore in today's storm.

  "I've tried to imagine," she says. "I've tried to imagine this so many times. What was I going to feel like when you said this? And I just couldn't. I just couldn't, and I can't believe it now."

  I have decided in advance not to explain about Harnason. I said nothing at the time of the incident, and no matter how paradoxical, I'm certain the same woman who encouraged my illicit passions would be crushed to think I could behave as a judge with such blatant impropriety. Instead, I say simply, "It's time. I know it's time. It's only going to get harder."

  "Rusty," she says.

  "I'm right, Anna. You know that."

  To my surprise, she nods. She herself has been coming to terms. Eight weeks, I think. That will be the final duration of my flight from sanity.

  "You have to hold me again," she says.

  She is in my arms for a long time as we stand just inside the door. It is a bookend of our first moments together. But we hardly need the reminder. The bodies have their own momentum. We are both quick to finish, knowing perhaps we are on stolen time.

  Dressed again and at the door, she clings to me once.

  "Do we have to stop seeing each other?"

  "No," I say. "But let's give it a little while."

  Once she's gone, I lie there a long, long time. More than an hour. The rest of my life, dark and doomed, has started.

  I would say there is no coping with the loss, but that is untrue. I walk through my life like an amputee who feels the phantom pain of the missing limb, my heart bursting with longing and my mind telling me, in perhaps the saddest note of all, this too will pass. Never again, I think. The curse has now come true. Never again.

  After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable--so young, so much a citizen of a different era--that it is hard to feel fully deprived. And no matter what the course with Harnason, this part of the tale will remain untold. Barbara will not know. Nat will not know. I have avoided the worst.

  I wonder all the time. Is it Anna I miss? Or love?

  Two weeks after our last meeting at the Dulcimer, Anna shows up in chambers. I recognize her voice from my desk, where I am working, and hear her tell my secretary that she was in the building to file a brief and just wanted to drop by. She lights up when she sees me in my doorway and breezes into the inner chambers uninvited, just another former clerk who's happened by to pay respects, something that occurs all the time.

  She is gay, joking loudly with Joyce about the fact they are each wearing the same boots, until I close the door. Then she slumps and drops her face into her hands.

  I can feel my heart thumping. She is so lovely. She's in a gray suit, nicely tailored, whose feel I recall as clearly as if my hand were on it now.

  "I've met somebody," she says quietly once she looks up. "He actually lives in my building. I've seen him a hundred times and just started talking to him ten days ago."

  "Lawyer?" My voice too is very low.

  "No." She gives her head a determined shake, as if to suggest she'd never be that stupid. "He's in business. Investments. Divorced. A little older. I like him. I slept with him last night."

  I manage not to flinch.

  "I hated it," she says. "Hated myself. I mean, I tell myself there are people like you and me in everybody's life, people who can't stay forever but who matter immensely at the moment. I think if you've led an open and honest life, there will be those people. Don't you think that?"

  I have friends who believe all relationships really fall under this heading--good only for a while. But I nod solemnly.

  "I'm trying everything, Rusty."

  "We each need time," I say.

  She shakes her lovely hair about. It's been cut in the last two weeks, turned under a bit.

  "I'll always be waiting for you to say you want me back."

  "I'll always want you back," I answer. "But you'll never hear me say it." She smiles a trifle as she gathers in the deliberate absurdity of my last remark.

  "Why are you so determined?" she asks.

  "Because we reached the logical conclusion. There is no happy ending. Nothing happier. And I'm beginning to come to terms."

  "And what terms are those, Rusty?"

  "That I don't have the right to live twice. Nobody does. I made my choices. It would disrespect the life I've lived to throw all that over. And I have to show some gratitude to whatever force allowed me to skate across the thinnest ice and make it. I mean, I've told you over and over, Barbara cannot know. Cannot."

  Anna looks at me in a hard way, an expression I've seen occasionally and that will greet hundreds of witnesses on cross-examination in the next decades.

  "Do you love Barbara?"

  There's a question. Oddly, she has never asked until now.

  "How many hours do you have?" I ask.

  "A lifetime if you want it."

  I smile thinly. "I think I could have done better."

  "Then why not leave?"

  "I might." I have never said this aloud.

  "But not for someone younger? Not for a former clerk. Because you care about what people would say?"

  I do not answer. I have already explained. She continues to apply that cool, objective eye.

  "It's because you're running, isn't it," she says then. "You're picking the supreme court over me."

  I see it instantly: I must lie. "I am," I say.

  She emits a derisive little snort, then lifts her face again to continue her frigid assessment. She sees me now, all my weakness, all my vanity. I've lied, but she still has glimpsed the truth.

  Yet I have accomplished one thing.

  We are done.

  My relationship with Sandy Stern is intense and sui generis. He is the only lawyer who appears in the court of appeals from whose cases I inalterably recuse myself. Even my former clerks come before me five years after they've left. But Stern and I are not intimates. In fact, I did not speak to him for nearly two years after my trial, until gratitude overwhelmed other feelings I had about what had gone on in my case. By now, we have an appreciative rapport and eat lunch on occasion. But I hear none of his secrets. Yet his role in my life was so epochal that I could never pretend he is just another advocate. His defense of me was masterful, with every word spoken in court as significant as each note in Mozart. I owe him my life.

  We chat in his office about his kids and grandkids. His youngest, Kate, has three children. She divorced two years ago but has remarried. His son, Peter, moved off to San Francisco with his partner, another physician. Clearly the most content is Marta, his daughter who practices with him. She married Solomon, a management consultant, twelve years ago, with whom she has three kids and a full life.

  Sandy looks himself, if rounder, all of that obscured by perfect tailoring. One advantage of appearing middle-aged as a younger person is that at this stage you seem immune to time.

  "You look like you recovered well from your laryngitis," I tell him.

  "Not quite, Rusty. I had a bronchoscopy the day before you called me. I shall be having surgery for lung cancer later this week."

  I am devastated for both our sakes. His damn cigars. They are ever-present, and when de
ep in thought, Stern seldom remembers not to inhale. The smoke pours out of his nose like a dragon's.

  "Oh, Sandy."

  "They tell me it is good they can operate. There are worse scenarios with this sort of thing. They will remove a lobe, then wait and watch."

  I ask about his wife, and he describes Helen, whom he married as a widower, as herself, brave and funny. As always, she has been just what he needs.

  "But," he says, enjoying the joke, "enough about me." I wonder if I was truly doomed, if my hours were dwindling, I would choose to ascend the bench. It is a tribute to what Stern has done that he feels these remain his best moments.

  I tell him my story in bare strokes, relating the minimum he needs to know: that I was seeing someone, was followed by Harnason, who caught me unaware and left me unsettled--angry, intimidated, guilty. The story draws Stern's complex Latin expression, all his features briefly mobilized while he embraces the elusive categories of life.

  The two weeks I have waited to see Sandy have not done much to clarify my thinking about my predicament with Harnason. I want Stern's advice concerning what the law and ethics require me to do. Must I tell the truth to my fellow judges or the police? And what will happen to me as a result? Listening, Stern reaches out reflexively for his cigar and stops. Instead, he rubs his temples as he thinks. He takes quite some time.

  "A case like this, Rusty, a man like that--" Stern does not complete the sentence, but his manner suggests that he has fully grasped Harnason's strangeness. "He bankrolled his flight very cleverly, and I suspect he has made equally careful plans to hide himself. I doubt he will be seen again.

  "If he is apprehended, then of course--" Sandy's hand drifts off. "It would be problematic. One might hope the fellow would keep your confidence out of gratitude, but it would be unwise to expect that. As a criminal matter, however, it seems to me a very difficult prosecution--a twice convicted felon, whom you initially sent to the pentitentiary? Not much of a witness. And that assumes Molto could gin up some imagined crime. But if Harnason is the only witness the state has--and it's difficult to see how there could be another--it will be a meager case.

  "As a disciplinary matter for the Courts Commission, that is another thing. Unlike the criminal inquiry, you will be required to testify eventually, and no matter how confused you found yourself, we both know your conduct ran afoul of several canons of judicial conduct. But as long as the prospect of criminal prosecution is not ephemeral--and it surely is not with Tommy Molto sitting in the PA's chair--you need say nothing to your colleagues. I rarely make a record of my exchanges with clients, but in this case, I will do a memo to the file, in case you ever want to substantiate that you received this advice from me."

  He speaks offhandedly, but of course he is referring to the likelihood he will be dead by the time any occasion arises for me to explain my silence.

  In the elevator down, I try to absorb Stern's assessment, which is largely the same as my own. Understanding the realities, I am likely to get away with all of it. Harnason is gone for good. Barbara and Nat will remain unknowing about Anna. I will ascend to the supreme court and will forget in time a brief era of incredible folly. I will obtain what I've wanted, if not fully deserved, and, having risked it all, may enjoy my life more than I might have otherwise. The train of reason seems inexorable but is of little comfort. A sickness swims through my center.

  I emerge from the gauntlet of revolving doors into a radiant day, with the first full heat of summer. The street is thronged with lunchgoers and shoppers, who walk with their wraps across their arms. Out in the street, roadworkers are repairing winter-made potholes, heating tar whose fulsome aroma seems oddly intoxicating. The trees in the park across the way wear new green, finally in full leaf, and the steely smell of the river is on the wind. Life seems pure. My way is set. And thus there is no hiding from the truth, which nearly brings me to my knees.

  I love Anna. What can I possibly do?

  CHAPTER 10

  Tommy, October 23, 2008

  Tommy Molto did not like the jail. It was three stories high, but dim as a dungeon, even in daytime, because in 1906 they prevented escapes by building windows that were only six inches wide. There was also something unsettling about the sound, the anguished din arising from three thousand captured souls. And none of that was to talk about the odor. No matter how strict the sanitation, so many men in quarters this close, with a coverless stainless-steel toilet between every two of them, filled the entire structure with a swampy, fetid smell. It wasn't the Four Seasons. Nor was it meant to be. But you would think after thirty years of visiting the place to talk to witnesses, to try to roll defendants, Tommy would be used to it. But his gut still clutched. Some of it came down to the ugly reality of what he did. Tommy tended to think of his job as being about right and wrong and just deserts. The fact that his work culminated in a stark captivity that he himself always doubted he could survive remained even now an unwelcome reality.

  "Why are we talking to this bird now?" Tommy asked Brand as they waited in the gate room. It was nine p.m. Tommy had been at home when Brand reached him. Tomaso has just gone down, and Dominga was in the kitchen, cleaning up. The house still smelled of spice and diapers. These were the precious hours in Tommy's day, feeling the rhythm of his family, the sweet order arriving out of the relative chaos of the rest of his life. But Brand wouldn't have asked the boss to come out unless it was something that really couldn't wait, and he'd gone and put his suit back on. He was the PA. Wherever he went, he had to look the part, and as it turned out, both the warden and the captain of the COs had skedaddled in from home once they heard he was coming, so they could shake hands and pass some gas together. It was only a second ago they had departed, leaving Tommy to get a briefing at last from his chief deputy.

  "Because Mel Tooley said it would be worth the trip. Really, really worth the trip. He's got something the PA has to hear in person. And nine p.m. with no reporters within a mile, that's the best time."

  "Jimmy, I got a wife and a kid."

  "I got a wife and two kids," Brand answered. He was smiling, though. He thought it was cute, the way Tommy sometimes acted as though he'd invented having a family. Brand had more faith in Mel Tooley than most people because Mel shared office space with one of Brand's older brothers.

  "So background me," Tommy said. "This guy, the poisoner, what's his name again? Harnason?" Eighteen months ago, the head of the appellate section in the office, Grin Brieson, had begged Tommy to argue the case. He recalled that much and, naturally, that he had won despite Sabich's dissent. But the other details were gone in the wash of time.

  "Right. He's been in the breeze for a year and a half now."

  "I remember," said Tommy. "Sabich gave him bail." Last month, N. J. Koll had been running commercials calling Rusty out, ballyhooing the fact that the PAs had opposed bond for Harnason. Once Barbara croaked, N.J. had to take the high road and pull his stuff off the air, a relief to Molto. Tommy didn't like having his office in the middle of an election fight, especially that one.

  "They grabbed Harnason yesterday in Coalville, burg three hundred miles south, on the other side of the state line, population twenty grand. That was Harnason's new homestead. He hung out a shingle as a lawyer, practicing under the name of Thorsen Skoglund."

  "Asshole," said Molto. Tommy took a second to remember Thorsen, long gone now, an honorable man.

  "So he's practicing law and on the side, get this, he's working as a children's party clown. You just can't make this stuff up. He was bringing in more as a clown than a lawyer, which may tell you something, but it was all going pretty good until his drinking problem got the better of him and he caught a DUI. The print comparison came back from the FBI about two hours after he had bonded out. Harnason apparently thought it was still the old days when it would have taken weeks. He was at home packing when the local sheriff came for him with a SWAT team."

  Mel Tooley had waived extradition and the sheriff in Coalville had driven
Harnason back to the Tri-Cities himself. Not a lot of bail-jumping murder fugitives were picked up in Coalville. The sheriff would be talking about Harnason the rest of his life. So far, Harnason had not been to court, and the press had no idea he was in custody again, but the story would probably get out. All in all, that would be good news for Rusty. When Koll's ads went up again, he wouldn't be able to wave his arms around about the madman Sabich had set free, who was still on the loose.

  By now, Tommy and Brand had been buzzed through the two sets of massive iron bars, a sort of air lock between captivity and freedom, and were escorted by a corrections officer named Sullivan back to the interview rooms. Sullivan knocked on a white door and Tooley came out into the narrow corridor. Mel, usually a bulbous fashion plate, was in civvies. He'd been gardening, apparently, when Harnason had hit town about five p.m. There was dirt under Mel's polished fingernails and on his jeans. It took Tommy a second to realize that in the rush, Tooley had forgotten his toup. The truth was he looked better without it, but Tommy decided to spare Mel that opinion.

  Tooley did the usual bowing and scraping because the almighty PA had come out at night.

  "I love you, too, Mel," said Tommy. "What's the scoop?"

  "Okay, this is strictly hypothetical," said Mel, lowering his voice. In the jail, you never knew what side anybody was playing on. Some of the COs worked for the gangs, some were on a reporter's pad. Tooley crept close enough that you would think he was cozying up for a kiss. "But if you were to ask Mr. Harnason why he decided to make a run for it, he would tell you he had advance word of the appellate court's decision."