Presumed innocent kc-1 Read online

  Chapter 23

  Every week, usually on Wednesday night, the phone rings. Even before he starts I know who it is. I can hear him pulling on his goddamn cigarette. I am not supposed to talk to him. He is not supposed to talk to me. We both have our orders. He does not say his name.

  How you doin? he asks.

  Hanging in.

  You guys okay?

  Getting by.

  This is a tough thing.

  Tell me about it.

  He laughs. No. I guess I don't gotta tell you. Well, you need anything? Anything I can do?

  Not much. You're good to call.

  Yeah, I am, but I figure you'll be runnin the joint again soon. I'm coverin my bets.

  I know you are. What about you? How you doing?

  Good. Survivin.

  Schmidt still on your case? I ask, referring to his boss.

  Hey, always.

  That's the guy. Screw him, I figure.

  How tough are they making it on you?

  These cupcakes? Come on.

  But I know Lip is having a hard time. Mac, who has also called on a couple of occasions, told me they pulled him back into McGrath Hall, took him off the Special Command in the P.A.'s office. Schmidt has got him chained to a desk, signing off on other dicks' reports. That is bound to drive him crazy. But Lip always was doing a high-wire act with the department. He had to keep dazzling the crowds to hold off his detractors. Plenty of people were waiting to see him fall. Now he has. Cops will always figure that Lipranzer knew and let me hide it. That's just the way they think.

  I'll call next week, he always promises at the end of every conversation. And he does, faithfully. Our talks do not seem to vary more than a line or two. About a month along, when it was becoming clear to everyone that this was serious, he offered money. I understand these kinda things can be expensive, he said. You know a bohunk's always got some dough salted away. I told him Barbara had come through in the pinch. He made a remark about marrying a Jewish girl.

  This week, when the phone rings, I have been waiting.

  "How you doin?" he asks.

  "Hanging in," I say.

  Barbara picks it up, just in time to hear that exchange.

  "It's for me, Barb," I say.

  Unaware of our arrangement, she says simply, "Hi, Lip," and puts the phone back down.

  "So what's goin on?"

  "We're going to trial now," I say. "Three weeks. Less."

  "Yeah, I know. I seen the papers." We both hang on that for a while. There is nothing Dan Lipranzer can do about his testimony. It is going to break my back, both of us know it, and there is no choice. He answered Molto's question the day after the election, before Lip could guess the score; and I tend to think that the answers would have been the same, even if Lip knew the consequences. What happened happened. That's the way he would explain it to himself.

  "So you gettin ready?" he asks.

  "We're working real hard. Stern's amazing. He really is. He's the best by a time and a half."

  "That's what they say." When he pauses, I recognize the click of his lighter. "Well, okay. Anything you need?"

  "There is," I say. If he hadn't asked, I wasn't going to say anything. That's the deal I made with myself.

  "Shoot," he tells me.

  "I've got to find this guy Leon. Leon Wells. You know, the guy who's supposed to have paid off the P.A. in the North Branch? The defendant in the court file you dug up, the one with Carolyn and Molto? Stern hired some skip tracer and he came back with a complete zip. As far as he can tell, no such guy even exists. I don't know any other way to go. I can't have a heart-to-heart with Tommy Molto."

  This private investigator was named Ned Bermari. Sandy said that he was good, but he seemed to have no idea what he was doing. I gave him copies of the pages of the court file. Three days later he was back saying he could not help. The North Branch, man, in those days, he said, it was a real zoo. I wish you luck. I really do. You couldn't tell out there who was doing what to who.

  Lipranzer takes some time with this request, more than I expected. But I know the problem. If the department finds out he helped in the preparation of my defense, they will can him. Insubordination. Disloyalty. Fifteen years plus, and his pension, in the dumper.

  "I wouldn't ask, you know I wouldn't. But I think it might really matter."

  "How?" he asks. "You thinkin Tommy's kinky on this? Set you up to keep you from lookin?" I can tell that even though he is trying not to make judgments, Lipranzer regards that notion as far-fetched.

  "I don't know what to say. You want to hear me say I think it's possible? I do. And whether he's sandbagging me or not, if we could get that kind of stuff out, it would look real bad for him. Something like that can really catch a jury's attention."

  He is silent again.

  "After I testify," he says. "You know, those guys have got their eye on me. And I don't want anybody askin me any questions where I got to give the wrong answer under oath. A lot of people would like to see that. When I get off the stand, they'll ease up. I'll work on it then. Hard. Okay?"

  It is not okay. It is likely to be too late. But I've asked for much too much already.

  "That's great. You're a pal. I mean that."

  "I figure you'll be runnin the joint again soon," he says. He says, "I'm just coverin my bets."

  ***

  Tee ball, again. The summer league. In this circuit, mercifully, there are no standings, for the Stingers are only marginally improved. In the heavy air of the August evenings, the fly balls still seem to mystify our players. They fall with the unhindered downward velocity of rain. The girls respond better to tutoring. They throw and bat with increasing skill. But the boys for the most part seem unreachable. There is no telling them about the merit of a measured swing. Each eight-year-old male comes to the plate with dreams of violent magic in his bat. He envisions home runs and wicked liners. For the boys, there is no point in the repetitive instructions to keep the ball on the ground.

  Nat, surprisingly, is something of an exception. This summer he is changing, beginning to acquire some worldly focus. He seems newly aware of his powers, and of the fact that people regard the manner in which you do things as a sign of character. When he takes his turn at bat and hits, I watch the way his eyes lift as he comes around first base before he sprints for second. It is not enough to say that he is merely imitating the players on TV, because what is significant is that he noticed in the first place. He is starting to care about style. Barbara says he seems more particular about his clothes. I would be more delighted by all of this were I not wary about the motives for this sudden maturation. He has not reached and developed so much as he has been plucked by the heels from his dreaminess. Nathaniel has turned his attention to the world, I suspect, because he knows that it has caused so much trouble for his father.

  After the game, we head home alone. No one has been so heartless as to suggest we skip the picnic, but it is for the best. We attended once after the indictment, and the time passed so fitfully, with such sudden ponderous silences arising at the mention of the most ordinary topics-work to which I do not go; TV detective shows that turn on predicaments like mine-that I knew we could not return. These men are generous enough to accept my presence among themselves. The risk I pose is for the kids. We all must think about the months ahead, the impossibility there would be of explaining where I'd gone and what I did. It is unfair to hobble these splendid evenings with the omen of evil. Instead, Nat and I depart with a friendly wave. I carry the bat, the glove. He goes along stomping out dandelions.

  From Nathaniel, there are no words of complaint. I am pathetically touched by this, by my son's loyalty. God only knows what mayhem his friends are wreaking on him. No grownup can fully imagine the smirking wisecracks, the casual viciousness he bears. And yet he refuses to desert me, the vessel from which this pain has poured. He does not dote. But he is with me. He pulls me to my feet from the sofa to work with him on the slider; he accompanies me at ni
ght when I venture out to get the paper and a gallon of milk. He walks beside me through the small woods between our subdivision and the Nearing village green. He shows no fear.

  "Are you scared?" I ask suddenly tonight as we are walking.

  "You mean scared you won't get off?" The trial looms so near, so large, that even my eight-year-old knows at once what I must mean.

  "Yes."

  "Naw."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not, that's all. It's just a bunch of junk, right?" He squints up at me, from beneath the bill of his cockeyed baseball cap.

  "In a manner of speaking."

  "They'll have this trial, and you'll tell what really happened, and that'll be the end of it. That's what Mom says."

  Oh, bursting, bursting heart: that's what his mom says. I put my arm around my son, more amazed than ever by his faith in her. I cannot imagine the lengthy therapeutic sessions between mother and child in which she has pitched him up to this level of support. It is a miracle which Barbara alone could have achieved. As a family, we are bound together by this symmetry: in the world, I love Nat most, and he adores his mother. Even at this scrappy age, full of the furious energy of a person of eight, he softens for her as no one else. She alone is allowed to hold him at length; and they enjoy a special sympathy, communion, a dependence that goes deeper even than the unsounded depths of mother and child. He is more like her than me, high- strung and full of her driving intelligence, those dark and private moods. She equals his devotion. He is never out of her imagination. I believe her when she says she could never wrest from herself the same emotion for another child.

  Neither of them parts from the other comfortably. Last summer Barbara spent four days in Detroit, visiting a college friend, Yetta Graver, who she discovered is now a professor of mathematics. Barbara called twice a day. And Nat was like a running sore, crabby, miserable. The only way I could quiet him for bed was by imagining for him precisely what his mother and Yetta were doing at that moment.

  They are in a quiet restaurant, I would tell him. Each of them is eating fish. It is broiled with very little butter. They each have had a glass of wine. At dessert they will break down and eat something they find too tempting.

  Pie? asked Nat.

  Pie, I said.

  My son, the one I always dreamed of, fell asleep thinking of his mother eating sweets.

  Chapter 24

  "Hi," Marty Polhemus says.

  "Hi," I answer. As I came off the landing and caught my first glimpse of the figure and the long hair, I thought it was Kemp, who I'm supposed to meet here. Instead, I find this boy, who I have not even thought about for months. We stand alone in the hallway outside Carolyn's apartment looking at one another. Marty extends his hand and shakes mine firmly. He has no obvious reluctance, almost as if he is pleased to see me. "I didn't expect to see you," I finally say, casting about for some way to ask why he is here.

  From his shirt pocket, he pulls a copy of Judge Lyttle's order allowing us to inspect the premises. "I got this," says Marty.

  "Oh, I get it now," I say out loud. "That was only a formality." The judge ordered us to notify the lawyer for the estate, a former P.A. named Jack Buckley. Jack apparently sent the notice on to the boy. "The idea was just to let you object if you mind us going in and looking at some of Carolyn's things. You didn't have to be here."

  "That's okay." This boy sort of shucks and bows as he talks. Back and forth. He shows no sign of leaving.

  I try to make conversation, ask what he is up to. "Last time we talked you were planning to flunk out and go back home."

  "I did," he says, without ceremony. "Actually, I got like suspended. I flunked physics. And I made a D in English. I was pretty sure I was going to flunk that, too. I went home six weeks ago. I just drove back here yesterday to get together all my junk."

  I apologize and explain that from his presence I had assumed that things had worked out.

  "Well, they did. Work out. I mean, so far as I'm concerned."

  "How'd your father take it?"

  He shrugs.

  "He wasn't real happy. About the D especially. That like hurt his feelings. But he said I had a tough year. I'll work for a while and go back." Marty looks around at nothing in particular. "So anyway, when I got that thing, I thought I'd like to come by and see what it was all about."

  The psychologists have a term, 'inappropriate.' That is this kid. Just sort of shooting the breeze outside the apartment where his mother was killed with the guy who everybody thinks did it. For a second, I wonder if he even knows what's going on. But the caption was right on the notice: PEOPLE VERSUS SABICH. And he could not have missed the buildup to the indictment in the papers. He has not been gone that long.

  I do not get a chance to probe further, because Kemp comes along then. I can hear him on the stairs. He is arguing, and when he turns the corner off the landing I see with whom-Tom Glendenning, a big cop I never much liked. Glendenning is a white man's white man. Lots of ethnic and racial cracks. Not kidding around either. His whole sensibility revolves around the fact that he was born white and is now a cop. He treats everybody else like they're intruders. No doubt he'll be just as happy to view me that way. The more there are, the better Tom feels. Kemp is explaining that Glendenning may not enter while we view the apartment, and Glendenning is saying that's not what he understands from Molto. Finally, they agree that Glendenning will go downstairs and use the phone. While he's gone I introduce Kemp to Marty Polhemus.

  "You're right," Glendenning says when he comes back. "That judge entered such an order." The way he says "that," you know what he's thinking. Kemp rolls his eyes. He is a good lawyer but still awfully Ivy League. He will not hesitate to let people know when he regards them as fools. A large phosphorescent-orange notice with an adhesive backing has been applied to the door of Carolyn's apartment. It states that this is a crime scene, sealed by order of the Superior Court of Kindle County, and that entry is forbidden. The notice overlaps the threshold so that the door cannot be opened. The locks have been filled with plastic blocks. Glendenning cuts the notice with a razor, but it takes him some time to clear the locks. When he finishes, he produces Carolyn's key ring from his pocket. It has a large red-and-white evidence tag on it. There is a door handle lock, and a dead bolt. As I told Lipranzer a long time ago, Carolyn did not fool around.

  With the keys in the lower lock, Glendenning turns and, without a word, frisks Kemp and me, then Marty. This will prevent us from planting anything. I show him a pad of paper I have in my hand. He asks for our wallets. Kemp starts to object, but I motion him to be quiet. Again, without a word, Glendenning does the same to Marty, who already has his wallet in his hand.

  "Jeez," says Marty. "Look at all this stuff. What am I ever going to do with it?" He just wanders in ahead of Kemp and me. I pass a look with Jamie. Neither of us knows if we have the authority to keep him out, or if there is any reason to bother. Glendenning calls in after him.

  "Hey there. Don't touch anything. Nothing. Just them can touch. All right?" Marty seems to nod. He drifts through the living room toward the windows, apparently to check the view.

  The air in here is stale and heavy, used up and burned out by the summer heat. Something somewhere in here may be rotting; there is a faint smell. Although the temperature outside is moderate today, the apartment, with the windows sealed, never cooled after last week's intense beat. It must be close to 85 degrees.

  I never believed in ghosts, but it is unsettling to be back. I feel a little curl of strange sensation working its way down from the bottom of my spine. The apartment seems oddly settled, especially since everything has been left largely as it was found. The table and mauve seating piece are still overturned. On the light oak floor, just off the kitchen, an outline of Carolyn's body has been chalked. But everything else seems to have acquired some added density. Beside the sofa, on another glass table, a little inlaid box remains which I had purchased for Carolyn. She had admired it at Morton's the day I wa
lked over there with her during the McGaffen trial. One of the red dragons on her Chinese screen assesses me with its fiery eye, God, I think. God, did I ever get myself in trouble. Kemp motions to me. He is going to start looking about. He hands me a pair of plastic gloves, loose ones like Baggies with fingers. There's no real need for this, but Stern insisted. Better not to be fighting about fingerprints Tommy Molto claims they discovered long before.

  I stop a minute by the bar. It's on the wall directly by the kitchen. I thought I could see what I'm looking for from the police photographs of the scene, but I want to be certain. I stand three feet from the glassware and count the tumblers lined up on a towel. It is on one of the glasses of this set that my prints have been identified. There are twelve of them here. I count them twice to be sure.

  Jamie comes beside me. He whispers, "Where in the hell do we look?" He wants to see whether there are accessories on hand used by Carolyn for birth control.

  "There's a john over that way," I say quietly. "Medicine cabinet and vanity."

  I tell him I will check the bedroom. I look first inside her closet. Her smell is on everything. I recognize the clothes I saw her wear. These sights stir mild sensation, buffeting against something that wants this all suppressed. I don't know if it is an impulse to be clinical or the sense-which I always previously seemed to check at the door here-of what is properly forbidden. I move on to her drawers.

  Her bedside table, a chubby-looking piece with clubbed Queen Anne feet, holds the telephone. This is as likely a spot as any, but when I open the single drawer I see nothing but her panty hose. I push them around and find a phone directory, a skinny volume covered in light brown calf's leather. The coppers always miss something. I can't resist. I check under S. Nothing. Then I think of R. Yes. At least I made the book. My work and home numbers are listed. I graze a minute. Horgan is here. Molto is not listed by name, but there is somebody called TM, which is probably him. I realize I should see about her doctors. D is it. I write the names down and put the paper in my pocket. Outside I hear a stirring. For some reason my first thought is that it is Glendenning, who has decided to ignore the dark-skinned judge and snoop. I flip the pages on the book to protect what I have found, but when the figure passes by the door, it is only Marty wandering. He looks in and waves. The page I turned is L. "Larren," it says right at the top. There are three numbers listed. Well, I think. That must have been a cozy group out in the North Branch. Everybody's here. Then I think again. Not quite. I check N and D, even G. Nico never made it. I tuck the book back in under the panty hose.