Innocent Page 4

  "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.

  But that kind of long shot was not worth the risks. Holding this job had seemed for years to be another of Tommy's futile yearnings, and he felt the sweet power of pride in doing it well. More to the point, he had the opportunity to repair much of the lingering damage to his reputation from the accusations at Rusty's trial, so that when a new PA was elected in two years, Tommy could reclaim the mantle of white knight and exit to a big boy's salary doing in-house investigations for some corporation. That would never happen if people thought he'd used this position to pursue a vendetta.

  "Jimmy, let's be straight, okay? No way I can fuck around with Rusty Sabich again. I got a one-year-old. Other guys my age, they're thinking about hanging it up. I gotta consider the future. I can't afford to wear the black hat again." Tommy was regularly befuddled by where he stood now on the life chain. He had not meant to butt in line or take another turn, only to have a bit of what he'd so far missed. He had never been one of those guys with an ego so big that he thought he could brazen even time.

  But Brand's look said it all: That was not Tommy Molto. What he'd just heard--the self-interest, the caution--that was not the prosecutor he knew. Tommy felt his heart constrict in the face of Brand's disappointment.

  "Fuck," said Molto. "Whatta you want?"

  "Let me dig," said Brand. "On my own. Really careful. But let me be sure this really is nothing."

  "Anything leaks, Jimmy, especially before the election, and we've turned nothing, you can just write my obit. You understand that? You're fucking around with the rest of my life."

  "Quiet as Little Bo Peep." He lifted his large square hand and put a finger to his lips.

  "Fuck," said Tommy again.

  CHAPTER 5

  Rusty, March 19, 2007

  When I depart the bus in Nearing, the former ferry port along the river that turned into a suburb not long before we moved here in 1977, I stop at the chain pharmacy across the way to pick up Barbara's prescriptions. A few months after my trial ended twenty-one years ago, for reasons fully understood only by the two of us, Barbara and I separated. We might have gone on to divorce had she not been diagnosed in the wake of an aborted suicide attempt with bipolar disorder. For me, that ended up being excuse enough to reconsider. Past the trial, past the months of climbing down, branch by branch, and still never feeling I had reached the ground, past the nights of furious recriminations at the colleagues and friends who had turned on me or not done enough--after all that receded, I wanted what I had wanted from the time the nightmare began: the life I had before. I did not have the strength, if the truth be told, to start again. Or to see my son, a fragile creature, become the final victim of the entire tragedy. Nat and Barbara moved back from Detroit, where she had been teaching mathematics at Wayne State, subject to only one condition: Barbara's vow to adhere scrupulously to her drug regimen.

  Her moods are not stabilized easily. When things were going well, especially in the first few years after Nat and she came back home, I found her far less cantankerous and often fun to live with. But she missed her manic side. She no longer had the will or energy for those twenty-four-hour computer sessions when she pursued some elusive mathematical theory like a panting dog determined to run a fox to ground. In time, she gave up her career, which brought more frequent gloom. These days Barbara refers to herself as a lab rat, willing to try anything her psychopharmacologist suggests to get a better grip. There is a handful of pills at the best of times: Tegretol. Seroquel. Lamictal. Topamax. When she gets the blues--which in her case ought to be called the blacks
--she reaches deeper into the medicine cabinet for tricyclic drugs, like Asendin or Tofranil, which can leave her sleepy and looking as if holes had been drilled into the pupils, requiring her to walk around inside the house in dark glasses. At the worst moments, she will go to phenelzine, an antipsychotic that she and her doctor have discovered will reliably pull her back from the brink, making it worth its many risks. At this stage, she has prescriptions for fifteen to twenty drugs, including the sleeping pills she takes every night and the meds that counter her chronic high blood pressure and occasional heart arrhythmia. She orders refills on the Internet, and I pick them up for her two or three times a week.

  Birthday dinner at home is a desultory affair. My wife is a fine cook and has grilled three filets, each the size of Paul Bunyan's fist, but somehow all of us have exhausted our quota of good cheer at the celebration in chambers. Nat, who at one point seemed as if he would never leave the family house, returns reluctantly these days and is characteristically quiet throughout the meal. It is clear almost from the start that our main goal is to get it over with, to say we dined together on a momentous day and return to the internal world of signs and symbols with which each one of us is peculiarly preoccupied. Nat will go home to read for tomorrow's law classes, Barbara will retreat to her study and the Internet, and I, birthday or no, will put the flash drive in my computer and review draft opinions.

  In the meantime, as often happens with my family, I carry the conversation. My encounter with Harnason, if nothing else, is odd enough to be worth sharing.

  "The poisoner?" asks Barbara when I first mention his name. She rarely listens if I discuss work, but you can never tell what Barbara Bernstein Sabich will know. At this stage, she is a frightening replica, with far better style, of my own slightly loony mother, whose mania late in life, after my father left her, was organizing her thoughts on hundreds of note cards that were stacked on our old dining room table. Rigidly agoraphobic, she found a way to reach beyond her small apartment as a regular caller on radio talk shows.

  My wife too hates to leave home. A born computer geek, she cruises the Net four to six hours a day, indulging every curiosity--recipes, our stock portfolio, the latest mathematical papers, newspapers, consumer purchases, and a few games. Nothing in life steadies her so much as having a universe of information at hand.

  "It turns out I prosecuted the guy. He was a lawyer who was living off his clients' money. Gay."

  "And what does he expect from you now?" Barbara asks.

  I shrug, but somehow in retelling the story, I confront something that has grown on me over the hours, which I am reluctant to acknowledge, even to my wife and son: I am sorely guilty that I sent a man to the penitentiary for the sake of prejudices I'm now ashamed I had. And in that light I recognize what Harnason was slyly trying to suggest: If I hadn't prosecuted him for the wrong reasons, stripped him of his profession, and hurled him into the pit of shame, his life would have turned out entirely differently; he would have had the self-respect and self-restraint not to have murdered his partner. I started the cascade. Contemplating the moral force of the point, I go silent.

  "You'll recuse now, won't you?" Nat asks, meaning I'll remove myself from the case. When Nat lived at home after college, it was rare for him to intervene directly in the substance of our conversations. Usually, he assumed a role more or less like a color commentator, interrupting only for remarks about the way his mother or I had expressed ourselves--'Nice, Dad,' or 'Tell us how you really feel, Mom.'--clearly intended to prevent either of us from upending the precarious balance between us. I have long feared that mediating between his parents is one more thing that has made the path rougher for Nat. But these days, Nat will actively engage me on legal issues, providing a rare avenue into the mind of my dark, isolated son.

  "No point," I say. "I already voted. The only doubt on the case, and there's not much, is about George Mason. And Harnason really didn't try to talk about the merits of his appeal anyway." The other problem, were I to unseat myself now, is that most of my colleagues on the court would suspect I was doing it for the sake of my campaign, trying to avoid recording my vote to reverse a murder conviction, an act that seldom pleases the public.

  "So you had an eventful afternoon," says Barbara.

  "And there was more," I say. The declaration brings Anna's kiss back to mind, and fearing I may have flushed, I go on quickly to recount my meeting with Raymond. "Koll has offered to drop out of the primary."

  Koll is N. J. Koll, both a legal genius and a vainglorious meathead, who once sat with me on the court of appeals. N.J. is the only opposition I expect in the primary early next year. Having the party's endorsement, I am sure to clobber Koll. But it will take a considerable investment of time and money. Because the Republicans so far have not even fielded a candidate in this one-party town, N.J.'s withdrawal would be tantamount to my winning what even the newspapers openly refer to as the "white man's seat" on the state supreme court, in distinction from the two other Kindle County seats customarily occupied by a female and an African-American.

  "That's great!" says my wife. "What a nice birthday present."

  "Too good to be true. He'll only drop out if I support his reappointment to the court of appeals as chief judge."

  "So?" asks Barbara.

  "I can't do that to George. Or the court." When I arrived on the appellate court, it was a retirement home for party loyalists who too often appeared amenable to the wrong kinds of suggestions. Now, after my twelve years as chief, the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District boasts a distinguished membership whose opinions appear in law school texts from time to time and are cited by other courts around the country. Koll, with his zany egocentricities, would destroy everything I've accomplished in no time.

  "George understands politics," says Barbara. "And he's your friend."

  "What George understands," I counter, "is that he deserves to be chief. If I helped put Koll in his place, all the judges would feel I stabbed them in the back."

  My son had Koll in class at Easton Law School, where N.J. is a revered professor, and reached the standard conclusion.

  "Koll's a fucking nut-job," Nat says.

  "Please," says Barbara, who still prefers decorum at the dinner table.

  N.J., a person of little subtlety, backed up his offer with a threat. If I don't accede, he'll change parties and become the Republican candidate in the general election in November '08. His chances will be no better, but he will increase the wear and tear on me and exact maximum punishment for not making him chief.

  "So there's a campaign?" Barbara asks, somewhat incredulous when I explain all this.

  "If Koll wasn't bluffing. He might decide it's a waste of time and money."

  She shakes her head. "He's spiteful. He'll run for spite." From the lofty distance she maintains on my universe, Barbara sees deeply, like a kingfisher, and I know instantly she's right, which brings the conversation to a dead end.

  Barbara has brought home the remains of Anna's carrot cake, but we are all still recovering from the sugar coma it nearly induced. Instead we clear and wash. My son and I spend another twenty minutes watching the Trappers boot away a ball game. The only time I ever spent with my father, outside the family bakery, where I worked from the age of six, was moments once or twice a week when he would allow me to sit beside him on the divan while he drank his beer and watched baseball, a game for which he had an unaccountable fascination as an immigrant. It was more precious than treasure when, a couple times a night, he would venture a comment to me. A fine player in high school, Nat seemed to abandon any interest in baseball when he lost his starting position junior year. But by whatever transitivity there is across the generations, he will almost always spend a few minutes beside me in front of the TV.

  Aside from our expressions of anguish about the ever-hapless team, or conversations about law, Nat and I do not tend to talk. This is in deliberate contrast to Barbara, who beleaguers our son with a daily call, which
he generally limits to less than a minute. Yet it would violate some essential compact if I did not probe his current state now, even knowing he is going to deflect my questions.

  "How's your note coming?" Nat, who aspires to be a law professor, is going to publish a student article in the Easton Law Review about psycholinguistics and jury instructions. I have read two drafts and cannot even pretend to understand it.

  "Just about done. In type this month."

  "Exciting."

  He nods several times as a way to avoid more words. "Okay if I go up to the cabin this weekend?" he asks, referring to the family place in Skageon. "I want to get away to look over the note one more time." It is not my place to ask, but it's nearly certain Nat will go only with his favorite companion--himself.

  With two gone in the ninth, Nat has finally had enough. He calls out his good-byes to his mother, who by now is zoned in to the Net and does not answer. I close the door behind him and go to find my briefcase. Barbara and I have resumed our normal mode. There is no sound, no TV, no dishwasher rumbling. The silence is the absence of any connection. She's in her world, I'm in mine. Not even the radio waves that come out of deep space could be detected. Yet this is what I chose and more often still believe I want.

  In my little study, I download from my flash drive and mark up draft opinions, then check my personal e-mail, where I find several birthday greetings. Around eleven, I creep to the bedroom and discover that Barbara unexpectedly has remained awake. It is, after all, my birthday. And I guess I am going to be the birthday boy.

  I suspect that sexual practices in long marriages are far more varied--and thus, in an abstract way, interesting--than among the couples who hook up in singles bars. From some friends our age, I hear occasional comments suggesting that sex is largely passe in their relationships. But Barbara and I have maintained a robust sex life, probably as a way to make up for the other deficits in our marriage. My wife has always been a great-looking woman and is even more striking now, when so many of her peers have been laid low by the years. Still a 1960s girl, she has allowed her tight natural curls to gray, and goes largely without makeup despite the pallor of age. But she remains a beauty, with precise features. She works out for two hours five times a week on the equipment in our basement, a routine that both counters the ailments that run in her family and keeps her girlishly shaped. I always feel the surge of male pride that comes from escorting a very attractive woman when I enter a room with her, and I still enjoy the sight of her in bed, where we find ourselves making love two or three times a week. We remember. We coalesce. It's prosaic most often, but so is much of life at its best--with the family around the table, with buddies at a bar.