Innocent kc-8 Page 3

  "Have to say I was curious whether you remembered me, Judge. I've been a bit of a bad penny in your life."

  "We've met?"

  "I used to be a lawyer, Your Honor. Long ago. Until you prosecuted me."

  In all, I spent nearly fifteen years in the prosecuting attorney's office, more than twelve as a deputy and two, like Tommy Molto, as the court-appointed acting PA, before I was elected to the bench. Even then, there was no chance I could remember every case I handled, and by now it's hopeless. But we charged very few lawyers in those days. We did not prosecute priests or doctors or executives, either. Punishment, back then, was reserved largely for the poor.

  "Wasn't called John," he says. "That was my dad. Used to go as J. Robert."

  "J. Robert Harnason," I say. The name is like an incantation, and I let slip a tiny sound. No wonder Harnason looked familiar.

  "Now you've placed me." He seems pleased the case came to mind so quickly, although I doubt he feels anything but pique. Harnason was a knockabout neighborhood lawyer, scuffling for a living, who eventually hit on a familiar strategy to improve his lifestyle. He settled personal injury cases, and instead of paying out the share of the insurance proceeds due his clients, he kept it until he stilled one client's repeated complaints by repaying him with the settlement money due somebody else. Hundreds of other attorneys in the Tri-Cities committed the same big-time no-no every year, dipping into their clients' funds to make rent or pay taxes or their kids' tuition. The worst cases led to disbarment, and Harnason probably would have gotten away with only that, but for one fact: He had a lengthy arrest record for public indecency, as a denizen of the gay shadow world of those years, where bars were alternately raided and shaken down by cops.

  His lawyer, Thorsen Skoglund, a taciturn Finn now long gone, didn't bother pulling punches when he came to argue my decision to charge Harnason with a felony.

  'You're prosecuting him for being queer.'

  'So?' I answered. I frequently recall the conversation-if not who it concerned-because even when I said that, it felt as if a hand had started waving near my heart, asking for more attention. One of the harshest realities of the jobs I've had, as a prosecutor and a judge, is that I have done a lot in the name of the law that history-and I-have come to regret.

  "You changed my life, Judge." There is nothing unpleasant in his tone, but prison was a hard place for a punk in those days. Very hard. He had been a handsome young man as I remember him, a bit soft-looking, with slicked-back auburn hair, nervous, but far more self-possessed than the oddball who has come to accost me.

  "That doesn't sound like a thank-you to me, Mr. Harnason."

  "No. No, I wouldn't have offered any thanks at the time. But frankly, Judge, I'm a realist. I truly am. Even twenty-five years ago, shoe could have been on the other foot, you know. I applied twice to the prosecuting attorney's office and nearly got hired as a deputy PA. I could have been the one trying to send you away because of who you slept with. That's what they prosecuted you for, really, right? If my memory's good, there wasn't much proof besides you had your finger in the pudding?"

  The facts are close enough. I've got Harnason's message: He sank, I floated. And it's hard, at least for him, to see why.

  "This is not a fruitful conversation, Mr. Harnason. Or an appropriate one." I turn, but he reaches after me again.

  "No harm meant, Judge. Just wanted to say hello. And thanks. You've had my life in your hands twice, Your Honor. You did me better this time than the first-at least so far." He smiles a little at the caveat, but with that thought his look grows more solemn. "Do I have a chance, at least, Judge?" Uttering the question, he suddenly seems as pathetic as an orphaned child.

  "John," I say, then stop. 'John'? But there is something about the fact that Harnason and I met decades ago, and the harm I did him, that demands a less imperial pose. And I can hardly retrieve his first name now that it's come out of my mouth. "As you could tell from the argument, your points aren't falling entirely on deaf ears, John. The discussion isn't over."

  "Still hope, then?"

  I shake my head to indicate no more, but he thanks me nonetheless, bowing slightly in utter obsequiousness.

  "Happy birthday," he calls again when I've finally turned my back on him. I walk off, fully haunted.

  When I return to the building, following a mildly disturbing campaign meeting with Raymond, it is after five, the witching hour after which the public employees disappear as if sucked out by a Hoover. Anna, the hardest-working clerk I've ever had by a long measure, is here, as she often is, toiling alone. Shoeless, she wanders behind me into my inner chambers, where the rows of leather-spined legal volumes that are basically ornamental in the computer era repose on the bookshelves along with photos and mementos of family and career.

  "Getting ready to go?" I ask her. We will celebrate Anna's last day with me on Friday with a dinner in her honor, something I do for all departing law clerks. The following Monday, Anna will join the litigation department in Ray Horgan's firm. She will have a higher salary than I do and a long-delayed start on Real Life. In the last twelve years, she has been an EMT, an advertising writer, a business school student, a marketing executive, and now a lawyer. Like Nat, Anna is part of a generation that often seem frozen in place by their unrelenting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.

  "I suppose," she says, then brightens. "I have a birthday card."

  "After everything else?" I answer, but I accept the envelope.

  "You're SIXTY," it reads. There is a picture of a knockout blonde in a tight sweater. "Too old not to know better." Overleaf: "Or to care." The card adds, "Enjoy it all!" Below, she has written simply, "Love, Anna."

  'Not to care.' Were it only so. Is it just my imagination that the buxom girl on the front even looks faintly like her?

  "Cute," I say.

  "It was too perfect," she answers. "I couldn't pass it up."

  I say nothing for a second as we stare at each other.

  "Go," I finally tell her. "Work." She is, alas, very cute, green-eyed and dishwater blond, ruddy, sturdily built. She is pretty and, if not quite in the drop-dead category, full of earthy appeal. She sashays off in her straight skirt with a little extra hip roll of a broad but nicely turned behind and looks back to measure the effect. I flip my hand to tell her to keep moving.

  Anna has worked for me for almost two and a half years now, longer than any other clerk I've employed. A canny lawyer with an obvious gift for this profession, she also has a sunny, eager nature. She is open with almost everyone and is frequently blazingly funny, which delights no one more than her. On top of all that, she is tirelessly kind. Because her computer skills exceed those of most of the IT staff, she is always giving up her lunch hour to fix a problem in another chambers. She bakes for my staff, remembers birthdays and the details of everybody's families. She is, in other words, a human being engaged by human beings and is beloved around the building.

  But she is happier about the lives of others than she is about her own. Love, in particular, is a preoccupation. She is full of yearning-and despair. She has brought to chambers a stream of self-help titles, which she often trades with Joyce, my courtroom bailiff. Loved the Way You Want to Be. How to Know If You Are Loved Enough. When she reads at lunch, you can see her bright exterior peeled away.

  Anna's lengthy stint with me, which was extended when the successor I'd hired, Kumari Bata, ended up unexpectedly pregnant and on total bed rest, has led to an inevitable familiarity. For some time now, when we work together a couple nights a week to clear up administrative orders, she allows herself a free-form confessional that often touches on her romantic misfortunes.

  'I've been dating around, trying not to take anything too seriously so I don't get my hopes up,' she told me once. 'That's worked in a way. I have no hope at all.' She smiled, as she does, enjoying the humor more than the bitterness. 'You know
, I was married for a nanosecond when I was twenty-two, and once it was over, I never worried I wouldn't find anybody special. I thought I was too young. But the men still are! I'm thirty-four. The last guy I went out with was forty. And he was a boy. A baby! He hadn't learned to pick up his laundry off the floor. I need a man, a real grown-up.'

  All of this seemed innocent enough until a few months ago, when I began to sense that the grown-up she had in mind was me.

  'Why is it so hard to get laid?' she asked me one night in December as she was describing another unrewarding first date.

  'I can't believe that,' I finally said, when I could breathe.

  'Not by anyone I really care about,' she answered, and abjectly shook her midlength, many-toned hairdo. 'You know, I'm really starting to say, What the hell? I'll try anything. Not anything. Not midgets and horses. But maybe I should go to one of those places I never considered. Or that I actually considered and laughed off. Because trying to do what's "normal" hasn't produced such especially good results. So maybe I should be bad. Have you been bad, Judge?' she asked me suddenly, her dark green eyes like radar.

  'We've all been bad,' I said quietly.

  That was a pivot point. By now, her approaches whenever we are alone are unabashed and direct-cheap double entendres, winks, everything short of a FOR SALE sign. A few nights back, she suddenly stood and laid her hand on her midriff to tighten her blouse as she stood at profile.

  'Do you think I'm top-heavy?' she asked.

  I took too long enjoying the sight before I answered in as neutral a tone as I could muster that she looked fine.

  My excuses for tolerating this are twofold. First, at thirty-four, Anna is a little long in the tooth for judicial clerks and well beyond any developmental stage that would mark her behavior as part of childhood. Second, she will not be around here much longer. Kumari, now a healthy mom, started last week, and Anna has stayed a few final days to train her. For me, Anna's departure will be both a genuine tragedy and a considerable relief.

  But since the mere passage of time is going to solve my problems, the one thing I have not done is what good judgment really requires-sit Anna down and tell her no. Gently. Kindly. With openhearted tribute to the flattery I'm being paid. But nohow, no way. I have prepared the speech several times but cannot bring myself to deliver it. For one thing, I could end up badly embarrassed. Anna's sense of humor, which could be called "male" in this Mars and Venus era, veers often to the risque. I still fear she would say this was all a joke, the kinds of cracks ventured, as we all do now and then, to be sure you don't really mean them. A sorer truth is that I am reluctant to stop drinking in the sheer aqua vitae that springs from the purported sexual willingness, even in jest, of a good-looking woman more than twenty-five years my junior.

  But I have recognized all along I will turn away. I don't know what percentage of attractions are consigned to mere flirtation and never pass the best controlled of all borders, the one between imagining and actual events, but surely it's most. In thirty-six years of marriage, I have had one affair, not counting a drunken tossing in the back of a station wagon when I was in basic training for the National Guard, and that lone mad, compulsive detour into the pure excesses of pleasure led directly to me standing trial for murder. If I'm not the poster boy for Twice Wise, nobody will ever be.

  I work in my chambers for no more than half an hour when Anna sticks her head in again.

  "I think you're late." She's right. I have my birthday dinner.

  "Crap," I answer. "I'm an airhead."

  She has the flash drive she prepares each night with draft opinions I will review at home, and she helps me into my suit coat, settling it in on my shoulder.

  "Happy birthday again, Judge," she says, and lays one finger on the middle button. "I hope whatever you wish for comes true." She gives me an utterly naked look and rises in her stocking feet to her toes. It's one of those moments so corny and obvious that it seems it could not quite happen, but her lips are set on mine, if only for a second. As ever, I do nothing to resist. I light up from root to stem but say no word, not even good-bye, as I go out the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tommy Molto, October 3, 2008

  Jim Brand knocked on Tommy's door but remained on the threshold, waiting for the PA to motion him in. During Tommy's first brief term as PA in 2006, he had felt a lack of regard. After more than thirty years in this office, he had such a defined reputation as a stolid warrior, here from eight a.m. to ten p.m. each day, it seemed hard for other deputy PAs to treat him with the deference due the office's ultimate authority. As chief deputy, Brand had changed that. His respect and affection for Molto were obvious, and it was natural for him to make the kinds of small formal gestures-knocking on the door-that by now had led most of the deputies to greet Tommy as "Boss."

  "Okay," says Brand. "So we got a little update on Rusty Sabich. An initial path report on the wife."

  "And?"

  "And it's interesting. Ready?"

  That actually was a question worth asking. Was Tommy ready? Going around again with Rusty Sabich could kill him. In terms of common understanding these days, the kind that floated around the courthouse like the fluoride in the tap water from the river Kindle, the Sabich case had been a rush to judgment by Nico. Tommy was along for the ride, but not responsible for the ultimate decisions, which were inept but not made with true malice. This interpretation suited everybody. After being recalled as prosecuting attorney, Nico had moved to Florida, where he had made several gazillion dollars in the tobacco litigation. He owned an island in the Keys, to which he invited Tommy, and now Dominga, at least twice a year.

  As for Tommy and Sabich, both had crawled to shore in the aftermath of a personal disaster and resumed their lives. It was actually Rusty, then acting PA, who'd given Tommy his job back, a silent acknowledgment that all that frame-up stuff was horse-hockey. When the two were together these days, as occurred frequently, they managed a strained cordiality, not only as a matter of professional necessity but perhaps because they had overcome the same cataclysm together. They were like two brothers who would never get along but were scarred and shaped by the same upbringing.

  "Cause of death heart failure, as the result of arrhythmia and a possible hypertensive reaction," said Brand.

  "That's interesting?"

  "Well, that's what Sabich said. That she had a skippy heart and high blood pressure. He told the cops that. How does somebody just guess?"

  "Come on, Jim. There was probably a family history."

  "That's what he said. That her old man died that way. But maybe her aorta blew out. Maybe she had a stroke. But no-he says, boom, 'heart failure.'"

  "Let me see," said Molto. He extended his hand for the report and in the process decided it was a good idea to close the door. From the threshold, he looked out beyond the anteroom, where his two secretaries worked, to the dark corridors. He had to do something about these offices; that was another thing Tommy thought each day. The PA had been housed in the dismal County Building, where the light had the quality of old shellac, throughout Tommy's three-decade career here and for at least a quarter century before that. The place was a hazard, with the wires in plastic casings running across the floors like sausages escaped from the butcher's and the rattling window units that were still the only means of air-conditioning.

  After returning to his chair, he read the autopsy notes. It was right there: "Hypertensive heart failure." She had a high bp, a family with hearts as fragile as a racehorse's ankles, and had died in her sleep, probably with a fever as the result of a sudden flu. The coroner had recommended a conclusion of death by natural causes, consistent with her known medical history. Tommy just kept shaking his head.

  "This woman," said Brand, "was a hundred and nine pounds and five foot three. She worked out every day. She looked half her age."

  "Jimmy, I got ten bucks that says she worked out every day because nobody in her family lived past sixty-five. You can't beat the genes. What'
s the blood chemistry?"

  "Well, they did an immunoassay. Routine tox screen."

  "Anything show up?"

  "A lot showed up. This lady had a medicine cabinet the size of a steamer trunk. But no positives on anything she didn't have a prescription for. Sleeping pill, which she took every night, lots of crap for manic-depression."

  Molto gave his chief deputy a look. "Which crap can cause heart failure, right?"

  "Not in clinical doses. I mean, not usually. It's hard to measure the levels on that stuff postmortem."

  "You got a consistent medical history. And if she didn't die of natural causes-which is maybe one chance in fifty-it's because she accidentally took an overdose of her meds."

  Brand rumpled up his lips. He had nothing to say, but he wasn't satisfied.

  "What's with the guy sitting there for twenty-four hours?" asked Brand. A good prosecutor, like a good cop, could sometimes make a case out of one fact. Maybe Brand was right. But he had no evidence.

  "We have nothing to investigate," Tommy told him. "With a guy who's going to be sitting on the state supreme court in a little more than three months and potentially voting yea or nay on every conviction this office gets. If Rusty Sabich wants to make our lives miserable, he'll have ten years to do it."

  Even as he argued with his chief deputy, it was slowly coming to Tommy what was going on here. Rusty Sabich was nobody to Brand. It was who he was to Tommy that was driving this. In order to get his job back when Rusty was acting PA two decades ago, Tommy had to admit that he had violated office protocols for the handling of evidence in connection with Sabich's trial. Molto's punishment was minimal, giving up any claim for back pay over the year he had been suspended during the post-trial investigation.

  But as time passed, Tommy's admission of wrongdoing had become a dead weight. More than half the judges of the Kindle County Superior Court these days were former deputy PAs who had worked with Tommy. They knew who he was-solid, experienced and predictable, if dull-and had been happy to appoint him the office's temporary leader when the elected PA, Moses Appleby, had resigned with an inoperable brain tumor only ten days after taking the oath of office. But the Democratic-Farmers-Labor Party Central Committee, where every dirty secret was always known, was unwilling to slate Tommy for this job-or even a judgeship, the position Tommy actually coveted because it offered more long-term security for a man with a young family. Voters did not understand nuance, and the entire ticket might be compromised when an election opponent unearthed Tommy's admission and started acting as if he had confessed to a felony. Maybe if he had the somber star power of somebody like Rusty, he could overcome that. But all in all he had been happy to leave that dark note in his biography largely unknown by all but a few insiders. No doubt Brand was right. Proving Sabich was actually a bad guy could rinse away the stain. Even if everybody knew everything, no one would care then if Tommy had overstepped.