Innocent Page 17

  "That's what I'm telling you. But everybody will understand. They'll know we're not chasing ghosts."

  "But we'll lose. That's the really, really bad news. We have a case we gotta bring that we're going to lose. Because the DNA never comes in for the prosecution. Never. It's a one-way street. He was acquitted. We can't use the old evidence against him now. It wouldn't make sense without retrying the old case, and no judge will allow that. And besides, there were so many questions about the specimen by the end of that trial, nine judges out of ten wouldn't admit it now anyway. If the DNA is good for Rusty, it sails in. And if it makes him a killer, it's out. So we've got the same thin case, even with the DNA, where we're going to have our fingers crossed that we don't get directed out on corpus delicti, because we don't have enough proof to show murder."

  "No." Brand shook his head hard on his thick neck. "No way. You're laying a mattress, Boss. We all do it."

  "No, Jimmy. You said it before. This guy is smart. Way smart. The bad news is that if he killed her, he thought it all through. And he figured out how to do it and walk again. And he will."

  They were at the courthouse. Brand finally looked at Tommy and said, "That would be really bad news."

  CHAPTER 21

  Nat, September 28, 2008

  You're not really in a relationship until you see each other's stuff--the way I sometimes can't talk for an entire hour after dealing with my parents or how she goes off completely if I so much as mention Ray Horgan, the geezy guy she had a thing with. Sometimes it takes a while to get a peek into the little corners of craziness every person tries to hide. I had been going out with Kat nearly a year and sometimes worried she was just too normal for me, until she got out of bed one morning, complaining about her knee. When I asked how she hurt it, she looked at me, no trace of humor, and said, 'I got hit with a mace when I was a Crusader in one of my prior lives.' At that point, it's all about how well your junk fits with hers. Can you still take each other seriously despite it and stay in tune?

  My life with Anna has been, no lie, pretty much paradise, but the one thing that has made her a total whack-job all month has been my parents. I think the way my mom sometimes overwhelms me tends to bug Anna as much as me, and she also seems unsure about her relationship with my dad, convinced, perhaps, that he'll never get beyond seeing her as one of his minions. Privately, I've also wondered if her fling with Ray has something to do with it. My guess is that she assumes my father knows and she's even more embarrassed to be around him, since he would have expected her to exhibit better sense.

  But because of all of that, Anna pretty much had a cow when I told her I was going to have to out us to my mom, who was relentless about asking where I would be living at the end of the month. And I really wondered for a second if I would need to dial 911 after I told Anna my mom had invited us to dinner. In the end, my mom, who can be the irresistible force, got on the phone with Anna and cornered her the same way she corners me. But even after Anna said yes the prospect has seemed to make her unbelievably tense.

  I came back from school last Thursday night, only a few days before our date with my parents, and found her home already, sitting in the dark and crying, with a pack of cigarettes beside her and at least eight butts in an ashtray. It's a no-smoking building, too.

  'What?' I asked, and received no answer. She was frozen at the kitchen table. When I took the chair beside her, she reached for both my hands.

  'I love you so much,' she said. She could barely choke out the words.

  'I love you, too,' I answered. 'What is this about?'

  She gave me this disbelieving look, searching my face for a long time, the tears welling over her green eyes like jewels. 'I so, so, so don't want this to get fucked up,' she said. 'I would do anything to keep that from happening.'

  'It's not happening,' I told her, which didn't seem to do much good. She seemed to get a grip for a couple days, but today when we get ready to go to my parents', she's in a state again.

  As we cross the Nearing Bridge on the way, Anna says, "I may be sick." The suspension structure is known to boogie in heavy winds, but it's a great day, still more summer than fall, and the late sun has thrown a gold net on the water. We barely make it to the other side before Anna pulls her new Prius into the public forest and dashes from the car. I get there in time to hold her from behind while she vomits into a rusted oil drum used as a garbage can.

  I ask, knowing better, if it's something she ate.

  "It's this whole fucking thing, Nat," she answers.

  "We can cancel," I say. "Tell them you're sick."

  She's still gripping the can but shakes her head vehemently. "Let's get it over with. Let's just get it over with."

  When she feels good enough to take a few steps, we move to a decrepit picnic table with a squeaky bench, the surface decorated with spray-painted slogans and hunks of bird shit.

  "Oh, gross!" she says.

  "What?"

  "I puked in my hair." She is inspecting the blondish strands with obvious pain.

  From the car, I bring a half-drunk bottle of water and a couple of old napkins preserved from fast-food meals, and she does her best to clean up.

  "Just tell your parents you found me under a viaduct."

  I say she looks great. She doesn't. She's lost all color, and a team of rodents might have held a track meet in her hair. I have given up consoling her or asking why.

  She asks me to drive, which means she must assume my role as guardian of the cupcakes. Anna volunteered to bring dessert and has baked four giant cupcakes, each of our individual favorites with our names frosted on top. My dad will get the carrot cake he adores, and my mother a kind of blueberry muffin made from soy flour. For herself and me, she prepared something far more decadent, these giant killer double chocolate chip balls. She grips the plate from both sides in her lap and positions the quart of ice cream she bought for a la mode between her feet.

  "Can I beg one thing," she says as I'm about to trigger the ignition. "Don't leave me alone with either one of them. Okay? I'm not in the mood for any heart-to-hearts. Just tell me to go upstairs and look at your room. Something like that to get me out of the way. Okay?"

  "Okay." She has actually made this request several times before.

  In a few minutes, we are at the house in which I grew up. These days, every time I arrive it looks different to me--smaller, quainter, a little like something from a fairy tale. It's an odd structure to start, the kind of thing my mom would pick, with weeping mortar and this supersteep roof, a style that doesn't seem to match the abundant flowers that remain in bloom in urns and pots in front. All the time I was growing up, my mom said she couldn't wait to move back to the city, but when my dad proposed it a couple years ago, she'd changed her mind. The fact they're still here reflects the enduring stalemate between them. She wins. He resents it.

  My mom sweeps the door open before we even set foot on the stoop. She's wearing a little makeup and one of these waffle-fabric athletic suits, which is pretty much dressed up for her when she's at home. She hugs me and then raves about the baked goods as she accepts the plate from Anna, kissing her cheek breezily in the process. She apologizes as soon as we are through the door. My dad and she have been working in the garden all day, and they are running behind.

  "I sent your father to the store, Nat. He'll be right back. Come in. Anna, can I get you anything to drink?"

  I've told Anna that my mom likes red wine, and she bought a fancy bottle, but my mom decides to save it for dinner. Anna and I each take a beer from the fridge for now.

  My mom's moods are so unpredictable that often when I'm headed out here to visit, I will call my dad's cell to discuss her as if she is a weather balloon. 'Bad day,' my dad will warn me. 'Lower than catfish crap.' But she is rarely as visibly excited as she seems tonight, dashing around the kitchen. Hyper is not usually in her emotional range.

  Anna has never been here before. My mom really doesn't open the house to anyone but family, and
I show Anna the living and family rooms, identifying all my now dead grandparents and my cousins in their photographs and letting her poke me about all my little-kid pictures. Eventually, we rejoin my mom in the kitchen.

  "It's simple," my mom says about dinner, "just like I promised. Steak. Corn. Salad. Anna's cupcakes. Maybe with a little ice cream." She smiles, a cholesterol nut relishing the thought of being evil.

  Together Anna and I take on the salad. A knockout cook, Anna has started on a dressing, using olive oil and lemon, when my dad comes in with several plastic bags bearing the orange logo of Mega-Drugs. He thunks them down on the counter, extends his hand to Anna, and then gives me a quick hug.

  "I never would have predicted this," he says, motioning to the two of us. "It makes too much sense."

  We all laugh, then my mom makes my dad look at the stuff Anna baked. He chips a tiny bit of frosting off her muffin. Anna and my mom both cry out at once.

  "Hey, that's mine," my mother tells him.

  "You have the longest name," my father points out.

  My dad is limping as he moves around the kitchen, and I ask how his back is.

  "Rotten at the moment. Your mother had me digging for her new rhododendron all afternoon."

  "Here," my mother answers. "Take your Advil and stop complaining. The exercise is good for you. Between the campaign and George Mason's rotator cuff, I don't think you've had any kind of workout all month." My dad normally plays handball a couple times a week with Judge Mason, and he does look a little softer than usual. He puts the pills my mom hands him on the counter, then disappears into the family room and comes back with a glass of wine for her.

  "Did you remember the appetizers?" she asks as he's in the fridge, taking a beer for himself.

  "Yes, horse deserves," he declares, a rotten joke he has made since I was a boy. He bought aged cheddar and Genoa salami, family favorites, although my mom will not eat much of that. She loves the pickled herring he brought home, but she'll have only a piece or two because the salt is bad for her blood pressure, so my dad has also come back with yogurt, which he mixes with onion soup to make a dip, while Anna and I set out the carrots and celery that were already in the refrigerator, as well as the other items my father got.

  As we are all toiling, my mom questions Anna about work and then with no apparent segue about her family.

  "Only child," she explains.

  "Like Nat. That's probably an important thing to have in common."

  Anna is chopping onion for the salad, which has brought a dribble from her eyes, and she makes a joke of it.

  "It wasn't that bad of a childhood," she says.

  The three of us laugh uproariously at the remark. Now that it's actually happening, Anna seems to be doing fine. I understand. Every spring for more years than I could count, I was convinced I would never remember how to hit a baseball and found myself amazed the first time I felt the buzz of solid contact and heard the ringing of the bat.

  Anna diverts further inquiries by asking my father about the campaign.

  Cutting more salami, he says, "I'm pretty sick of hearing about John Harnason."

  My mom turns from the counter to shoot my dad a look. "We should never have had to go through any of this," she says. "Never."

  I catch Anna's eye to warn her, as I should have before, about this subject.

  My dad says, "It'll be over soon, Barbara."

  "Not soon enough. Your father hasn't slept through the night all month."

  She enjoys this role, telling on my dad, and he turns away, knowing better than to risk further comment. I thought my father's nights as an insomniac were long past. When I was a boy, there were periods when he was up, roaming the house. I would sometimes hear him and was actually comforted to know he was awake, able to dispel the nighttime spooks and demons I feared. Listening, watching now, I can feel that the weight of the household is different in some minute way. The campaign seems to have brought the usual silent conflicts between my parents more into the open.

  Accustomed to my mother's criticisms, my father offers her the appetizer platter, which he and Anna and I seem to be doing a good job of hogging down. Then my dad takes the steaks out of the fridge and begins to season them. He needs more garlic powder, he says, and heads down to the basement to bring it up.

  "Boys cook?" my dad asks me when he's ready to face the fire.

  "Mom, you mind if Anna looks around upstairs while we're out there? I wanted her to see my room."

  "Anything you like up there, Anna, feel free. Nat won't let me throw away a thing. Don't you think a shelf full of baseball trophies is just what your new place needs?"

  We all laugh again. It's hard to tell if this jolliness is nerves or actual enjoyment, but it's uncharacteristic for the home in which I was raised. Out of sight of anybody else, Anna rolls her eyes at me from the staircase, while I follow my dad out to the porch. The sun is setting, falling into the river in a vivid display of colors, and there is a little fall coolness to the air.

  My dad and I play with the knobs until the barbecue is ignited, and we stand there watching the flames spread between the burners as if it were a religious rite. When I was a child, my mom always surrounded me in a way that didn't seem to require words, and maybe as a result I have never gotten the knack of talking to my dad. Of course, I didn't really talk all that much to anybody before Anna, which must mean something, I guess. Naturally, my dad and I have conversations, but they are usually to the point, unless we are talking about law or the Trappers, the two subjects where we are liable to become animated together. Usually my principal communion with my father comes, like now, from coexistence, breathing the same air, firing off occasional comments about the flames or the way the meat is sizzling.

  In my junior year of high school, I realized I did not especially like baseball as a sport. At that point, I was the starting center fielder on the Nearing team, although I was sure to lose the spot to a terrific freshman, Josey Higgins, who unlike me had no trouble hitting breaking pitches and was even faster in the field. He went on to a full ride at Wisconsin State, where he was All Mid-Ten. What came to me almost in a single moment as I was trained on a fly arcing its way to me was that I had watched baseball on TV and trotted onto the field every summer since I was six years old only so I could talk about it with my father. I was not especially resentful, just unwilling to continue doing that once I understood. When I quit, I heard little complaint from the coach, who was plainly relieved not to have to deliver the inevitable speech about the good of the team. Everyone--including my dad--always thought I dropped out rather than warm the bench, and I have been just as happy to leave it that way.

  When we have been standing there some time, he asks what I am going to be doing next week when my clerkship is over. I've decided to go back to subbing while I work on my law review article, on which I've recently made some progress. He nods as if to say it's a reasonable plan.

  "So overall?" he asks as he's ducking left and right around the smoke.

  "I'm really happy, Dad."

  When I turn, he's stopped to look at me intently with a largely unfathomable expression, while he allows the billows to surround him. I realize it's been a long time since I answered either of my parents that way. Over the years, I far more often have fended off their questions about my state of being by describing myself simply as 'okay.'

  To evade my dad's attention now, I take a long draft of my beer and look into the small yard where I played as a child. It once looked as big as the prairie. Now the little continuous space has been broken by the new rhodie, three feet high if that, with its glossy leaves and the fresh earth surrounding it my father turned today. Things change, and sometimes for the better. I am proud Anna is here with me, pleased with myself for realizing how good she'd be for me and pursuing her and making her love me, and I'm happy I have brought her together with these other people I love. It's one of those moments I hope I will always remember: That day I was so happy.

  CHAP
TER 22

  Tommy, November 4, 2008

  Over the years, the PA's office, like any other institution, had developed its own odd protocol. The boss stayed put. The prosecuting attorney walked into his office in the morning with his briefcase under his arm and never left, except for lunch and court. It was nominally a sign of respect. Everyone who needed to speak to him came to the mountain. But the practice actually protected the freewheeling demeanor within the PA's office. Guys could stand in the hallways sixty feet apart and talk over a case while they tossed a softball. People could say "fuck" as loud as they wanted to. Deputies could bad-mouth judges, and cops could spout. Within his inner sanctum, the PA conducted himself with a dignity the everyday life of his office would never really reflect.

  As a result, Tommy often felt as if he were in jail. He had to intercom or phone everybody. For more than thirty years, he had cruised the hallways, popping in and out of offices to gossip about cases and the kids at home. And right now, he was sick of waiting. First thing this morning Brand had gone to a meeting at the crime lab, where they were going to brief him on the DNA results on the two-decade-old sperm fraction from the first Sabich trial. Tommy had left his office six times by now to see if Brand was back.

  In the moment, the fact that these results would force Tommy's hand one way or the other, leave him caught between bad news and worse, seemed to matter less. Nor did he really care about the notion Brand was suddenly promoting, that after they convicted Rusty Sabich, Tommy could run for PA next year. The truth was that if that happened and a judgeship opened up, Tommy would probably toss the mantle to Brand. But anytime Brand speculated that way out loud, Tommy hushed him. Politics would never be his passion. What Tommy Molto really cared about was the same thing he had cared about for decades as a prosecutor. Justice. About whether something was right or whether it was wrong.