Innocent Read online

  So if twenty years ago they'd gone on an innocent guy, he'd be the first to tell Rusty he was sorry. And if it was the other way, if it was Rusty who did Carolyn, then--then what? But he knew instantly. It would be like his marriage. It would be like finding Dominga and falling in love with her. And having Tomaso. The one lingering blot on his career would be lifted. But most important, Tommy himself would know. The guilt that still nagged at him from that time, for having stupidly talked out of school to Nico, would be dissolved. He would have been right, in his own eyes more than anyone else's. He would be fifty-nine years old. And thoroughly reborn. Only God could remake a life so completely. Tommy knew that. He took an instant to offer prayerful thanks in advance.

  Then he heard Brand bang into his office next door and Tommy stepped in immediately. Jim still had his briefcase in his hand and his overcoat half off and was surprised to see Tommy on his threshold. Master in the servant's quarters. He stared a minute. Then he smiled. He said what Tommy had always known someone would say eventually.

  Brand said, "It's him."

  PART TWO

  III.

  CHAPTER 23

  Nat, June 22, 2009

  State your name, please, and spell your last name for the record." From his seat at the walnut defense table, Sandy Stern clears his throat. It is a reflex these days both before and after he speaks, a phlegmy little rattle that never sounds quite normal.

  "Rozat K. Sabich. S, A, B, I, C, H."

  "Are you known by any other name?"

  "Rusty."

  On the witness stand, my father in his pressed blue suit maintains perfect posture and an unruffled demeanor. In his place, I would be a mess, but in the last few months my dad has taken on the distant air of a mystic. For the most part, he seems to have stopped believing in cause and effect. Things happen. Period.

  "And may we call you Rusty?" Stern asks, lifting the back of his hand gallantly, as if he might be imposing. After my father agrees, Stern asks him to tell the jury how he is employed.

  "I was elected to the state supreme court last November, but I have not yet taken the oath of office."

  "And why, sir, is that?"

  "Because I was indicted on these charges, and felt it was fairer to all concerned to await the outcome of this trial. In the interval, I remain the chief judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District here in Kindle County, although I have taken administrative leave."

  Stern brings out that both the supreme and appellate courts are what lawyers call courts of review, meaning basically that they hear appeals.

  "And tell us, please, what it means to be a judge on a court of review."

  My dad details the duties. Across the courtroom, Tommy Molto stands to object as my dad begins to explain that the appeal in a criminal case ordinarily does not give the judges any right to overrule a jury's factual decision.

  Judge Basil Yee visibly weighs the issue, wagging his gray head from one side to the other. From downstate Ware, Judge Yee was specially assigned by the state supreme court to preside over this case after all the judges in the Kindle County Superior Court, whose decisions my father has routinely reviewed for well more than a decade, recused themselves together. He is a Taiwanese immigrant who came to Ware, a town of no more than ten thousand, at age eleven, when his parents took over the local Chinese restaurant. Judge Yee writes flawless English but still speaks it as a second tongue, with a strong accent that includes high Asian pitches, and at times he ignores some of the connective tissue of language--articles, prepositions, state-of-being verbs. His regular court reporter did not accompany him upstate and the annoying way Jenny Tilden is constantly interrupting to tell the judge to spell what he has just said has made him a man of even fewer words

  Judge Yee rules for my dad, who lays it on pretty thick, just as Molto feared, making sure the jury knows they will have the last word on his innocence or guilt.

  "Very well," says Stern. He coughs and grips the table to struggle to his feet. Sandy has received Judge Yee's permission to question witnesses while seated whenever he likes. In one of those can-you-believe-it consequences that medicine may not comprehend for aeons, his brand of non-small-cell lung cancer is known to cause arthritis in one knee, which has left him hobbling. Beside him, Marta, his daughter and law partner, reflexively puts her left hand with its bright manicure on her father's elbow to lend a subtle boost. I have heard about Sandy Stern's magnetism in a courtroom since I was a boy. Like a lot of things in life, it's pretty much beyond anybody's ability to explain. He is short--barely five feet six, if that--and to be honest, pretty dumpy. You would walk past Sandy Stern on the street a thousand times. But when he stands up in court, it is as if someone lit a beacon. Even though he is worn out by cancer, there is a precision to every word and movement that makes it impossible to remove your eyes.

  "Now tell us if you would, Rusty, a bit about your background." Stern runs my father down his resume. Son of an immigrant. College on a scholarship. Law school while working two jobs.

  "And after law school?" Stern asks.

  "I was hired as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Kindle County."

  "That is the office Mr. Molto now heads?"

  "Correct. Mr. Molto and I started there within a couple years of one another."

  "Objection," Molto says quietly. He has not looked up from the legal pad on which he is writing, but the strain shows in his chin. He sees just what my dad and Stern are up to, trying to remind the jury that my father and Tommy have a history, something they probably already know from the papers that replay the details of the first trial daily. The jurors swear every morning they have steered clear of any journalistic accounts, but according to Marta and her dad, word almost always filters into the jury room.

  Judge Yee says, "Enough that subject, I think."

  Still facing his pad, Tommy nods curtly in satisfaction. I tolerate Tommy Molto, with his wilting face and hangdog manner, better than I expected to. It's his chief deputy, Jim Brand, who gets me cranked. He has this bad-ass thing going most of the time, except when it's worse and he comes on as too cool for the room.

  Stern takes my dad through his progress in the very office that is now prosecuting him and his eventual arrival on the bench. In his account, the first indictment and trial are never mentioned, as the judge has ordered. This is the seamless chronicle of the courtroom, where history's speed bumps are leveled.

  "Are you a married man, Rusty?"

  "I was. I married Barbara more than thirty-eight years ago."

  "Any children?"

  "My son, Nat, is right there in the first row." Stern looks back with mock curiosity, as if he had not told me exactly where to sit. He is such a subtle courtroom actor that I find myself hoping now and then that his failing health is also for show, but I know better.

  Around the courthouse, people will frequently draw me aside and ask in low tones how Stern is doing, assuming that somebody who has defended my father twice on murder charges must be a closer family friend than he really is. I tell everyone pretty much the same thing. Stern exhibits the courage of a cliff diver, but as for the true state of his health, I know very little. He is private about his condition. Marta is philosophical but equally closemouthed, even though the two of us have had a nearly instantaneous bond as the lawyer children of local legal eagles. Both Sterns are fiercely professional. Our relationship right now is about my father's troubles, not theirs.

  But you don't need a medical degree to see that Sandy's condition is perilous. Last year, part of the left lobe of his lung was removed surgically, which seemed at the time to be a good sign that the disease had not spread. In the last four to five months though, he has endured at least two separate rounds of chemo and radiation. My high school pal Hal Marko, who is now a surgical resident, speculated that Stern must have had some kind of recurrence and added, in that incredibly cold-blooded tone I also hear from my law school friends, meant to show they have progressed from human being to profes
sional, that Stern's median survival time should be less than a year. I have no idea if that's so, only that the treatments have left Stern a wreck. He has a persistent cough and shortness of breath, due not to his cancer, but as a side effect of the radiation. He claims to be regaining his appetite, but he ate virtually nothing for the period leading to the trial, and the man I grew up knowing as chubby during his slimmest periods is positively thin. He has not replaced his wardrobe, and his suits hang like kaftans. Whenever he struggles to his feet, he is in visible pain. To top it all off, the last drug he took, a second-line chemo agent, left him with a bright rash all over his body, including his face. From where the jury sits, it must look as if he has had a large fuchsia tattooed on one side. The inflammation crawls up his cheek and around his eye, reaching in a single islet up above his temple and pointing cruelly toward his bald head.

  Judge Yee granted one continuance, but my dad and Sandy decided not to seek another, despite the way he looks. His mind remains strong, and if he husbands his strength, he can withstand the physical rigors of trial. But the meaning for Sandy of the decision to proceed seems obvious: Now or never.

  "Now, Rusty, you have been called as the first witness for the defense in this case."

  "I have."

  "You understand that the Constitution of the United States protects you from being forced to testify in your own trial."

  "I understand that."

  "You have chosen to testify nonetheless."

  "I have."

  "And you were here throughout the time that the prosecution witnesses gave their testimony?"

  "I was."

  "And you heard all of them? Mr. Harnason? Dr. Strack, the toxicologist. Dr. Gorvetich, the computer expert? All fourteen of the persons whom the prosecutor called to the stand?"

  "I heard each of them."

  "And so, Rusty, you understand that you are here accused of murdering your wife, Barbara Bernstein Sabich?"

  "I do."

  "Did you do that, Rusty? Murder Mrs. Sabich?"

  "No."

  "Did you have any role of any kind in causing her death?"

  "No."

  The sheer oddity of a supreme court justice-elect indicted for murder a second time, and by the same prosecutor, no less, has garnered press around the globe. People stand in line outside the courtroom each day to get a seat, and two rows across the way are crowded with sketch artists and reporters. The accumulated attention of the world often seems to penetrate the courtroom, where there is a high-strung air brought on by so many people recalculating with every word. My father's 'No' lingers now, seemingly held aloft by the magnitude of the declaration. With all eyes on him, Stern looks around the large rococo courtroom and rears back slightly, as if he is only now discovering something that the better informed know he has always planned.

  "No further questions," he says, and plunges with mortal weariness back to his seat.

  My father's case is the first trial I've ever sat through end to end. The trial process has absorbed so much of my dad's life, as a prosecutor and a judge, that in spite of the indescribable heaviness of the whole business for me, I have found sitting here constantly informative. I finally have a clue what he was doing in the many hours he was gone from home and some sense of what he found so beguiling. And although the courtroom will never be the place for me, I have been fascinated by its little rituals and dramas, especially the moments too banal to be represented on TV or in the movies. The present instant, when the sides change, with one lawyer sitting and the opponent coming to his feet, is the law's equivalent of the time between innings, a moment of suspended animation. The court reporter's computer stops clicking. The jurors shift in their seats and scratch what itches, and the spectators clear their throats. Papers scrape across both tables as the lawyers gather their notes.

  By whatever trick of fate, my dad's case is being heard in one of the four older courtrooms in this building, the Central Branch Courthouse, where the court of appeals is housed on the top floor. He arrives every day to stand trial for murder in a place where he remains, at least by title, the highest-ranking judicial official and next door to the courtroom where he was freed more than twenty years ago. All the old rooms, where serious felonies have been tried for seventy years now, are jewels of bygone architectural detail, with the jury boxes set off by these strings of walnut bubbles. The same kind of rail fronts the witness stand and the massive bench where Judge Yee looms over the courtroom. The spaces for the witness and the judge are each defined by red marble pillars that support a walnut canopy, decorated with more of those corny wooden balls.

  Beneath that overhang, my dad sits impassively as he awaits the start of Tommy Molto's cross-examination. For the first time, he lets his blue eyes light on mine, and for a tiny instant, he squeezes them shut. Here we go, he seems to be saying. The wild rocket ship ride that has been life for both of us since my mother died nine months ago will end and allow us to parachute back to earth, where we will inhabit either some shrunken version of the life we had before or a new nightmare terrain, in which my weekly conversations with my father will be conducted for the rest of his life through a pane of bulletproof glass.

  When a parent dies--everybody says this, so I know it isn't so totally original--but when you lose your mother or father, life is fundamentally different. One of the poles, north or south, has been wiped off the globe and will never rematerialize.

  But my life was really different. I was sort of a kid for too long, and then suddenly I was where I was. I had fallen in love with Anna. My mom was dead. And my dad was indicted for killing her.

  Because what happened to my parents was in each case so much worse for them than me, it sounds weak to say what I have gone through has been an ordeal. But it has. Of course, losing my mom so suddenly was the ultimate blow. But the charges against my dad have left me in a predicament few people can even begin to understand. My dad has been a public figure most of my life, meaning his shadow has frequently fallen across me. When I went to law school I knew I was only making that worse, that I was always going to be known as Rusty's kid and would be dragging his reputation and achievements along behind me like a bride trying to figure out how to get her train through a revolving door. But now he's infamous, not famous, an object of hatred and ridicule. When I see his picture on the Net or TV--or even on one national magazine cover--there's a way I feel he no longer quite belongs to me. And of course nobody knows how to treat me or what to say. It must be a little like being outed with HIV, where people know you haven't really done anything wrong but can't quite stifle an impulse to recoil.

  But the worst part is what goes on inside of me, because from moment to moment I have no idea how I feel, or should feel for that matter. I guess parents are always moving objects. We grow up, and our perspectives constantly evolve. In this courtroom, there is just one question--did he or didn't he? But for me, for months now the issue has been far more complicated, trying to figure out what most kids get a lifetime to assess--namely, who my old man really is. Not who I thought. I've figured that much out already.

  That process began on election day with an angry thumping on the door to Anna's condo. A small woman had her badge out.

  'KCUPF.' Kindle County Unified Police Force. 'Do you have a second to talk?'

  It was like TV and so I knew I was supposed to say, What is this about? But really, why would I care? She stepped into the apartment, strutted, really, without an invitation, a short, plump woman with her hat under her arm and her wiry, brass-colored hair drawn back in a pony tail.

  'Debby Diaz.' Die As, she pronounced it. She offered a small, rough hand and sat down on a hassock covered in retro blue shag, which Anna had bought largely as a gag a couple of weeks before. 'Known your dad forever. I was a bailiff when he started in the superior court. Actually, I remember you.'

  'Me?'

  'Yeah, I was assigned to that courtroom a couple times when you come down. You used to sit up on his chair on the bench during reces
ses. Couldn't really see you from down in the courtroom, but nobody told you that. Young man, you could really pound that gavel. Act of God you didn't break it.' She was quite merry with the memory, and I suddenly remembered what she was describing, including the musical echo when I slammed the gavel on the oak block. 'I was young and slim in those days,' she said. 'Waiting to get on the force.'

  'I guess you made it.' I said that only because I couldn't think of anything else, but she took it for a joke and smiled a little.

  'It was what I wanted. What I thought I wanted.' She shook her head briefly at the follies of youth. Then she focused on me with disturbingly sudden intensity. 'We're trying to clear on your mother's death.'

  'Clear?'

  'Get some questions answered. You know how it is. Not a damn thing happens for a month, then all of a sudden it's gotta be wrapped up in a week. Guys on the scene took a long statement from your father, but nobody thought to talk to you. When I heard your name, I figured I'd stroll over and do it myself.'

  There are people you meet who you know are used to not saying what they actually mean and Detective Diaz was one of them for sure. I wondered for a second how she'd found me, then realized I'd left this forwarding address when I finished at the court. All in all, I was happier to be talking to her at home on election day than I would have been if she'd shown up at school. There are still plenty of people on the faculty who remember my years at Nearing High and have a hard time believing I can set much of an example.

  'I still don't understand what you want to ask about,' I told her, and she motioned as if it were all too vague, too cop, too bureaucratic, to explain.

  'Sit down,' she said, 'and you'll find out.' From the seat on the hassock, she motioned me toward a chair in my own place. What I really needed to do, I realized, was call my father, or at least Anna. But the thought seemed mostly useless against the reality of Detective Diaz sitting there. Small as she was, there was an edge, that cop-thing, like, I'm in charge here, don't mess around.