Reversible Errors Read online

  For court, Larry had worn a tie and a linen sport coat, both rather stylish. He’d always liked clothes, although they no longer fit him as well. He was big and soft now, and his remaining hair, silky and whitening, had been carefully piled in place. But he had maintained the compelling bearing that comes from knowing who you are. At the sight of her, he smiled broadly and she felt his amusement—it was funny, pleasantly ticklish, that life moves on so unfathomably, that you go your ways and survive.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Larry answered.

  She asked if he minded stopping for lunch. “I thought we could get something on the way to the Federal Building and talk about this stupid hearing.”

  “Cool,” answered Larry.

  Hearing him infected by his sons’ vocabulary, she grinned and asked how the boys were.

  “Are they mine? I thought they were the spawn of Satan.” He had pictures in his wallet. Michael was twenty, a junior at Michigan. His younger boy, Darrell, was a high-school hero like his father and brother, although he played soccer rather than football. He looked to be a sure thing for a Division One scholarship, Larry said. “Only I may kill him before then. Talk about attitude. My folks, of course, they’re still kicking, and they watch him and me and it’s like old family movies. They think it’s a laugh a minute.”

  Muriel took him into her office for a second to show off the photos of Theo, Talmadge’s first grandson. Even at three, you could see he would take after Talmadge, large and broad. He was such a sweet guy, this little boy, the dearest soul in her life.

  “None of your own, right, you and Talmadge?” asked Larry. It was probably the single question she most hated answering, but Larry clearly meant no more by it than confirming his memory.

  “Never worked out,” she answered and pointed him to the door.

  In the elevator down, Larry asked her to explain today’s hearing.

  “Raven moved to depose a guy named Erno Erdai, who you supposedly knew,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “Well, Arthur wants to do the dep in the presence of a judge, so the judge can make credibility findings now, because Erno won’t be around later, if the case proceeds. He’s dying of cancer.”

  “Dying? Jesus, things went to hell for Erno in the last few years, I’d say. You know the story?”

  As head of Violent Crimes, she’d reviewed Erdai’s case at the time of the shooting four years ago. Ex-cadet, TN executive, and solid citizen goes nutzo at a cop bar. Mel Tooley had represented Erno and had tried like hell for probation, even getting the victim’s lawyer, Jackson Aires, to say he had no objection. But she couldn’t pass a guy on pen time because he lived in the suburbs. They locked up twenty black men a week in this town for shooting somebody. Erno had to go.

  “How is old Arthur, by the way?” Larry asked.

  “Still litigates like a man trying to save himself from drowning. He’s okay.”

  “I always liked bringing cases to Arthur. You know, he was a plowhorse, not a racehorse, but he followed through.”

  “Well, that’s what he’s doing. Following through. He was pretty creased when the Court of Appeals dragooned him for this case, but he keeps pushing new buttons. This week he says Erdai’s a critical witness.”

  “Yeah, ‘critical,’” said Larry. “Critical of who?”

  “You got it.” She smiled. “You got some splainin’ to do, Lucy. The motion claims Erdai tried to alert you to exculpatory evidence which you concealed.”

  “I hate when I do that,” said Larry, then promptly denounced the whole notion as bullshit. “Erno wrote me a couple of letters from the joint, same as he did half the Force, looking for help once he got in there. What the hell was I supposed to do, send him a sympathy card? I guess Erno joined the other team inside. He’s got an angle, right?”

  “He must. I asked to talk to him a week ago, and he refused. The staff at Rudyard has no clue what he’s up to.”

  A few doors down from the courthouse, Muriel stopped by Bao Din.

  “You still eat Chinese?” she asked.

  “Sure. But nothing real spicy.”

  The restaurant was old style with a bamboo curtain in the front entry and Formica tables, and the larded smells of fried peanut oil and yeasty foreign spices. Muriel harbored permanent suspicions about what passed for meat in the kitchen and stuck to vegetable plates. As a regular, and a person of influence, she was greeted warmly by Lloyd Wu, the proprietor, to whom she introduced Larry.

  Given the allegations in the motion, she’d had no choice about asking Larry to attend the hearing, although they hadn’t spent more than ten minutes together on any occasion in close to a decade. When he was around the office on a case, he would stop in sometimes. They’d take each other’s pulse in a few moments, talk about his kids, the Force, and the office. They laughed a lot. After he left, she usually felt she had made an error horsing around with him. Not because of Larry himself—Larry the Elder was less of a hard case than the man she’d met seventeen years ago in law school. But he was a past she had self-consciously set aside, an attachment of the young, lost Muriel, a woman who was meaner, flightier, and unhappier than the current model.

  But she needed Larry today. Dicks never forgot the evidence in a case. Carol Keeney, an appellate supervisor who’d been handling the matter for the last few years as it plodded toward execution, had found no mention of Erdai in the file, but Larry quickly reminded Muriel of the begats. Erno led to Collins. Collins led to Squirrel. She hadn’t realized Erdai was the original source. Eyes closed, she waited for the digits to fall, but nothing came up. She leaned over the table.

  “Old times’ sake, Larry. Just us girls. Is there anything we have to worry about? I mean, just a fantasy of what they’re aiming at?”

  “You mean something Erno knows?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “You’re not a virgin, Muriel,” said Larry, treading close to a line that was seldom acknowledged. There was street truth and court truth, and a good officer, like Larry, knew how to make one conform to the other without playing fast and loose. She let his remark go. “What kind of exculpatory evidence was this I supposedly hid?” Larry asked.

  “Arthur never said and we never found out. I sent Carol over when the motion was up and she irritated the judge somehow and he granted it.”

  Larry groaned.

  “You know how this goes, Larry. Harlow’s the kind who thinks appointed counsel deserves every break, especially in a capital case. And he probably likes Arthur. His firm does a lot of federal work.”

  “Oh, great,” said Larry. “I love federal court. It’s like the Union League Club. Everybody talking very quietly and smiling at one another because they’re not the poor peasants.”

  Muriel laughed again. She’d forgotten how amusing and accurate Larry could be. As Chief Deputy P.A. and heir apparent, she was well treated on the rare occasions when she entered the state’s courtrooms these days. The Superior Court judges were elected, which meant sooner or later most of them would be on the same ticket with her. Federal court, however, was another universe, where the judges were appointed for life. Muriel had been over here only a handful of times in her career and felt about the federal system largely as Larry did.

  “I think Harlow is just letting Raven take his best shot, Lar. It’ll be okay in the end.”

  Larry nodded, looking soothed. Back in law school, he’d been the first human being ever to place faith in her legal abilities. To him, her word on the law was always gospel.

  “You mean, I’m not gonna be bunking with Erno?” he asked. “I’ve been hoping for a way to get outta this racket.”

  “You’ll never quit the job.”

  “Hell you say. I put in my papers, Muriel. I’m double five’s in November and I’m out Jan One, Two-O-O-Two. People are always going to kill each other. And I know everything about that I need to. Besides, they’ll name a new Detective Commander next year, who’ll be either me, which i
s ridiculous, or somebody else, which is even stupider. Time’s up. And you know, this thing I did rehabbing? I got six guys working for me now. Fifty-four is old for two jobs.”

  “Six guys?”

  “We turned over eight houses last year.”

  “Yikes, Larry. You’re rich.”

  “Not like you and Talmadge, but it’s been pretty good. I’m a lot better off than anybody in my family ever expected. And the stock market, too. The net worth is a big number but everything’s leveraged. Still.” He smiled, as if he were somewhat amazed to be slinging the lingo, then asked how her life was.

  “Good,” she answered and left it at that. She ran the uniquely female race that began at daylight with the persistent anxiety that there would never be time to attend to everything, a fear, unlike many others, which was firmly rooted in fact. Nothing ever felt as if it were done perfectly—not her work or her marriage, even her stepmothering. But she had plenty in her life—great work, money, that wonderful little boy. She concentrated on those things and had moved past the disappointments.

  “What about your marriage?” he asked.

  She laughed out loud. “Grown-ups don’t ask each other about their marriages, Larry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay, how’s your marriage? You never got out the door, huh? Did you and Nancy sign a peace treaty?”

  “You know how that goes,” said Larry. “You wouldn’t have me, so anybody else would be second best.” That line didn’t sound good, but he was smiling. “No, I mean, it’s okay. She’s a good person, Nancy. Really good. What can you say about a woman who adopts your children? Nothing bad. Life’s not perfect, right?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I tell you, I think more and more about my grandparents. My mom’s folks? When he was sixteen, Grandpa’s parents apprenticed him as a wheelwright—talk about a job with a future—and arranged for a wife. He saw my grandmother for the first time two years later, three days before he married her. And when you page ahead sixty-five years they were still clopping along. Never a cross word between them either. So go figure.”

  He was fiddling with the knob on the cheap little aluminum teapot as he spoke. Listening, Muriel found herself surprisingly at ease. It turned out there were bonds in life that couldn’t be broken. And having slept with somebody was one of them. At least for her. And probably most people. She’d be carrying a piece of Larry around with her for the rest of her life.

  “Okay, so it’s your turn,” he said. “Is it hard? I look at Talmadge, when I see him on TV sometimes, and frankly, I think to myself, putting up with that act must be hard.”

  “Being married to Talmadge doesn’t require much but a sense of humor and a black dress.” She laughed at herself, but she was disturbed by the undercurrent. She had spent all those years thinking she would never succumb to lesser things the way everyone else did. Normal. Middle. Average. Those words were still enough to make her weak at the knees. “Talmadge is Talmadge, Larry. It’s like riding in the chariot with the Sun God. You always feel the glow.”

  Her husband led the life of Millennium America, on an airplane somewhere three or four times a week. He had clients throughout the world, including several governments. Home to Talmadge was generally just a place he could safely retreat from his glimmering public persona to a surprisingly dark core. He sat up late, sipping whiskey, brooding, and salving the wounds he’d been too adrenalized to feel when they were inflicted on the battlefield. Although he was more often purely giddy at the size of his success, in his dark moods he seemed to believe the world had showered favor on him in order to demean him, to prove he wasn’t truly worthy of all of it. She was required to comfort him at length.

  “I have his respect,” she said, “and that means a lot to me. We listen to each other. Give a lot of advice. Spend a lot of time talking. It’s good.”

  “Marriage of the titans,” he said. “The Super Lawyer and the Prosecuting Attorney.”

  For Muriel, it remained irritating that an ambitious woman was so much more acceptable when she was wed to an ambitious man. In truth, though, she’d probably figured that out when she married Talmadge.

  “Nobody’s elected me yet, Larry.”

  “You can’t miss. Who the hell will even run against you? Everybody in law enforcement is lined up behind you. You got the woman thing going, not to mention all of Talmadge’s pals with open checkbooks. The papers say you’re gonna be Senator before you’re done.”

  Senator. Mayor. She’d actually read both. Recognizing the sheer serendipity that led to such pinnacles, she refused to treat the speculation as anything other than rank amusement.

  “This is the job I want, Larry. Frankly, I’m running because it’s so easy. Ned’s laid his hands on. Talmadge will manage the campaign from Airfones. Even so, I still spend time wondering what I’m getting into.”

  “Bull. This has always been your dream.”

  “I don’t know, Larry.” She hesitated, trying to figure out where momentum was taking her, then gave up, which was the same old story of being with Larry. “Even a year ago, I was still hoping I’d have to think twice about running. But I’ve faced the fact that I’m never going to get pregnant. That was really the priority. I know so much about fertility—” She stopped. Never once in her life had she felt sorry for herself, but contemplating the years of examinations, medications, irrigations, of clock-watching, day-counting, temperature-taking, of hoping and hoping—the memory sometimes seemed enough to defeat her. As a younger person, it had never occurred to her where her desire to be of consequence in the world would lead. But that potent childhood vow to leave behind some trace of herself for eternity led, in the hands of nature, to a fierce passion to repeat herself, to raise, to nurture, to teach, to love. No yearning she had experienced in life, not the tide of libido, not hunger, not even ambition, could equal the force with which that need had arisen in Muriel after she was married. It was as if her heart were driven forward by a great turning wheel—beneath which, over time, it was crushed. She lived with the absence, a form of mourning, that would continue to her last day.

  Larry was listening with concern, his blue eyes still. He finally said, “Well, you have my vote, Muriel. I want you to be P.A. It’s important to me, you know, that you get what you want.” There was purpose in his expression. It was a sweet discovery that he remained so committedly her friend.

  They fought over the check, but Larry insisted on paying. He reminded her that he was, in her word, rich. Then they hiked through lunchtime foot traffic to the old Federal Courthouse. Kenton Harlow, the Chief Judge of the District Court, had assigned the deposition to himself, rather than push the matter off on a Magistrate Judge. The procedural posture of the case was bizarre anyway, a by-product of Congress’s recent efforts to truncate the endless parade of appeals and collateral attacks that was death-penalty litigation. The Court of Appeals, which never heard live testimony, had nonetheless reserved the right to evaluate the evidence turned up during the limited period for discovery and to decide for itself whether the case should continue, a function that had traditionally been reserved to the trial-level judges in the District Court. No one Muriel had talked to had ever been through a proceeding like this one.

  The Chief Judge presided in the so-called Ceremonial Courtroom. Given the amount of brown marble behind the bench, the vast room could have been mistaken for a chapel. But Muriel’s attention was soon drawn by something else. In the first row of walnut pews, on the scarlet cushions, several members of the press were assembled, not just the beleaguered courthouse regulars, but also several television reporters. Stanley Rosenberg from Channel 5, Jill Jones, a few others—as well as two sketch artists. The only reason a gallery like this would be present was if Arthur had tipped them, promising big doings.

  She grabbed Larry’s arm as she gathered the portent and whispered a term from his days in Nam, so he’d understand the gravity of the situation.

  “Incoming,” she said.

/>   15

  JUNE 12, 2001

  Erno’s Testimony

  “STATE YOUR NAME, please, and spell your last name for the record.”

  “Erno Erdai,” he said and recited each letter.

  From the bench above the witness stand, Judge Harlow repeated Erno’s surname to be sure he had it. “Air-die?” asked the judge. That was like Harlow, Arthur thought. He’d grant anyone the courtesy of calling him by the right name, even after he found out Erno had shot five people in his lifetime and left four of them dead.

  Judge Kenton Harlow was most often described as ‘Lincolnesque.’ The judge was lean and nearly six four, with a narrow beard and large, imposing features. He had a direct style and a rousing commitment to constitutional ideals. But the comparisons to Lincoln hardly came unbidden. He had been the model of Harlow’s adult life. The judge’s chambers were decorated with a variety of Lincoln memorabilia, everything from first editions of the Carl Sandburg biography, to numerous busts and masks and bronze figures of Honest Abe at all ages. As a lawyer, a teacher, a renowned constitutional scholar, and as an Assistant Attorney General of the United States in charge of the Civil Rights Division in the Carter Administration, Harlow had fulfilled the credo he attributed to Lincoln, a faith in the law as the flower of humanism.

  Arthur proceeded through the preliminary questioning of Erno. Erdai was already thinner than when Arthur had seen him in prison three weeks ago, and his lungs had begun to fail. The marshals had hiked a canister of pure oxygen on wheels onto the witness stand at Erno’s feet, and the protrusions on a clear tube connected to the cylinder were holstered in his nose. Despite that, Erno seemed of good cheer. Although Arthur had told him it was unnecessary, Erno had insisted on wearing a suit.

  “Your Honor, for the record.” At the prosecution table, Muriel Wynn had arisen to renew her objections to the proceedings. Arthur had phoned Muriel a dozen times about Rommy’s case, but he hadn’t seen her in person for several years. She had aged agreeably. Slender people always seemed to, Arthur thought. There was gray in her tight black hair, but she wore more makeup now, a concession not so much to age, he surmised, as to the fact that as a prominent figure she was often photographed.