Presumed innocent kc-1 Page 5

  I try a plain and quiet appeal.

  "Barbara, what difference does it make? You're talking about two and a half weeks. Until the primary. That's all. Then it's another, routine police case. Unsolved homicide."

  "Don't you see what you're doing? To yourself. To me?"

  "Barbara," I say again.

  "I knew it," she says. "I knew you'd do something like this. When you called the other day. I could hear it in your voice. You're going to go through everything again, Rusty. You want to, that's the truth, isn't it? You want to. She's dead. And you're still obsessing."

  "Barbara."

  "Rusty, I have had more than I can take. I won't put up with this." Barbara does not cry on these occasions. She recedes instead into the fiery pit of a volcanic anger. She hurls herself back now to gather her will, bound, as she sits on the bed, within her wide satin sleeves. She grabs a book, the remote control, two pillows. Mount Saint Helen's rumbles. And I decide to leave. I go to the closet and grope for my robe.

  As I reach the threshold, she speaks behind me.

  "Can I ask a question?" she says.

  "Sure."

  "That I always wanted to ask?"

  "Sure."

  "Why did she stop seeing you?"

  "Carolyn?"

  "No, the man in the moon." The words have so much bitterness that I wonder if she might spit. I would have thought Barbara's question would be why did I start, but she apparently decided on her own answers to that long ago. "I don't know," I say. "I tend to think I wasn't very important to her." She closes her eyes and opens them. Barbara shakes her head.

  "You are an asshole," my wife tells me solemnly. "Just get out."

  I do. Quickly. She has been known to throw things. Having nowhere else to go, and craving some form of company, I cross the hall to check once more on Nat. His breath is husky and uninterrupted in the deepest phase of sleep, and I sit down on the bed, safe in the dark beneath the protecting arms of Spider-Man.

  Chapter 5

  Monday morning: a day in the life. The commuter coach unleashes the gray-flannel flock on the east side of the river. The terminal plaza is surrounded by willows, their skirts greening in the spring. I am in the office before 9:00. From my secretary, Eugenia Martinez, I receive the usual: mail, telephone-message slips, and a dark look. Eugenia is obese, single, middle-aged, and, it often seems, determined to get even for it all. She types reluctantly, refuses dictation, and many times of day I will find her staring with immobile droopy-eyed irritation at the telephone as it rings. Of course, she cannot be fired, or even demoted, because civil service, like concrete, has set. She remains, a curse to a decade of chief deputies, having first been stationed here by John White, who did so in order to avoid the carping that would have followed if he'd assigned her to anybody else.

  On the top of what Eugenia has given me is a leave slip for Tommy Molto, whose absence remains unaccounted for. Personnel wants to dock him as Away without Leave. I make a note to talk to Mac about this and graze through my communications. The docket room has provided me with a printout naming thirteen individuals released from state custody in the last two years whose cases had been prosecuted by Carolyn. A handwritten note says that the underlying case files have been delivered to her office. I position the computer run in the center of my desk, so that I will not forget.

  With Raymond out most of the day on campaign appearances, I resolve much of what the P.A. would ordinarily be faced with. I call the shots on case prosecutions, immunities, plea bargains, and deal with the investigative agencies. This morning I will preside over a charging conference in which we will decide on the phrasing and merits of all of this week's indictments. This afternoon I have a meeting about last week's fiasco, in which a police undercover bought from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in disguise; the two drew guns and badges on each other and demanded surrender. Their backups became involved, too, so that in the end eleven law enforcement officers were standing on opposite corners, shouting obscenities and waving their pistols. Now we are having meetings. The coppers will tell me the feds do everything in secret; the DEA agent in charge will insinuate that any confidence the police department learns is up for sale. In the meantime, I am supposed to find somebody to prosecute for killing Carolyn Polhemus.

  Someone else may be looking, too. Near 9:30 I get a call from Stew Dubinsky from the Trib. During the campaign, Raymond answers most press calls himself; he does not want to miss the free ink or draw criticisms that he is losing his hold on the office. But Stew is probably the best courthouse reporter we have. He gets most of his facts straight and he knows the boundaries. I can talk to him.

  "So what's new on Carolyn?" he asks. The way he shorthands the murder with her name disconcerts me. Carolyn's death is already receding from the ranks of tragedy to become one more ugly historic event.

  I cannot, of course, tell Stew that nothing is doing. Word could trail back to Nico, who would use the occasion to blast us again.

  "Prosecuting Attorney Raymond Horgan had no comment," I say.

  "Would the P.A. care to comment on another piece of information?" This, whatever it is, is the real motive for Stew's call. "I hear something about a high-level defection. From the Homicide Section? Sound familiar?"

  That would be Molto. After Nico left, Tommy, his second-in-command, became acting head of the section. Horgan refused to give him the job permanently, suspecting that sooner or later something like this would come to pass. I contemplate for a moment the fact that the press is already sniffing. No good. Not at all. I see, from the way Dubinsky has lined up the questions, how this will run. One high-ranking deputy is killed; another, who should be in charge of the investigation, quits. It will sound as if the office is on the verge of chaos.

  "Same response," I tell him. "Quote the P.A."

  Stew makes a sound. He is bored.

  "Off the record?" I ask.

  "Sure."

  "How good is your information?" I want to know how close we are to reading about this.

  "So-so. Guy who always thinks he knows more than he does. I figure this has got to be Tommy Molto. He and Nico are hand-and-glove, right?"

  Stew clearly does not have enough to run. I avoid his question. "What does Della Guardia tell you?" I ask.

  "He says he has no comment. Come on, Rusty," Dubinsky says, "what gives?"

  "Stew, off the record, I do not have the most fucked-up idea where Tommy Motto is. But if he's holding hands with Nico, why won't the candidate tell you that?"

  "You want a theory?"

  "Sure."

  "Maybe Nico has him out there investigating the case on his own. Think about that one. DELLA GUARDIA CATCHES KILLER. How's that for a headline?" The notion is absurd. A private murder investigation could too easily end up an impediment to the police. Obstruction of justice is bad politics. But as ridiculous as it is, the sheer flair of the idea makes it sound like Nico. And Stew is not the kind to float loony notions. He works off information.

  "Do I take it," I ask, "that this is part of your rumor, too?"

  "No comment," says Stew.

  We laugh at each other, before I hang up the phone. Immediately I make some calls. I leave a message with Loretta, Raymond's secretary, that I have to speak with him whenever he phones in. I try to find Mac, the administrative deputy, to talk about Molto. Not in, I'm told. I leave another message. Then, with a few minutes before the charging conference, I venture down the hall to Carolyn's office. This place already has a desolate air. The Empire desk which Carolyn commandeered from Central Services has been swept clean, and the contents of the drawers-two old compacts, soup mix, a package of napkins, a cable-knit sweater, a pint bottle of peppermint schnapps-have been pitched into a cardboard box, along with Carolyn's diplomas and bar certificates, which were formerly clustered on the walls. Cartons called in from the warehouse are pyramided in the middle of the room, giving the office an air of obvious disuse, and the dust gathered in a week's inactivity has its own faintly
corrupt smell. I pour a glass of water in the wilting greenery and dust some of the leaves.

  Carolyn's caseload was made up primarily of sexual assaults. According to the codes on the file jackets, there are, by my count, twenty-two such cases awaiting indictment or trial which I find in the top drawers of her old oak file cabinet. Carolyn claimed a special sympathy with the victims of these crimes, and over time, I found that her commitment was more genuine than at first I had believed. When she talked about the reviving terrors these women experienced, the glittery surfaces receded from Carolyn and revealed alternating moods of tenderness and rage. But there are in these cases also an element of the bizarre: an intern at U. Hospital who gave a number of female patients a physical which ended with insertion of his own instrument; one victim received this treatment on three separate occasions before she was moved to complain. The girlfriend of a suspect who, on her second day of questioning, admitted that she had met him when he cut through the screen door to her apartment and forced himself on her. When he put the knife down, she said, he had seemed like such a nice young man. Like many others, I suspected Carolyn of more than a passing fascination with this aspect of her work, as well, and I examine the case files with the hope that there will be a pattern I can seize on-we will be able to charge that it was actually some cultish ceremony that was duplicated six days ago in Carolyn's loft apartment, or a brutal mimicry of an offense in which Carolyn somehow displayed too obvious a voyeuristic interest. But there is none of that; the thirteen names lead nowhere. The new files disgorge no clues.

  It is now time for the charging conference, but something is nagging at me. When I look again at the computer printout, I recognize that there is one case I have not come across yet-a B file, as we call it, referring to the subsection of the state criminal code addressed to bribery of law enforcement officials. Carolyn seldom handled anything outside her domain, and B files, which are so-called Special Investigation cases, were directly under my supervision when this case was assigned. At first, I assumed the B designation was the usual computer mess-up, maybe an included charge. But there is no companion case; in fact, this one is listed as an UnSub-unknown subject-which usually means a non-arrest investigation. I go through her drawers quickly, one more time, and check down in my office. I have my own printout of B cases, but this one isn't there. In fact, it seems to have been generally obliterated from the computer docketing system, except for Carolyn's call.

  I make a note on my pad: B file? Polhemus?

  Eugenia is standing in the doorway.

  "Oh, man," she says. "Where you been? I been lookin for you. Mr. Big Cheese called back." Mr. Big Cheese, of course, is Raymond Horgan. "I was lookin all over. He left a message to meet him at the Delancey Club, 1:30."

  Raymond and I have many of these meetings during the campaign. I catch him

  after a luncheon, before a speech, to bring him up to speed on the office.

  "How about Mac? Did we hear anything?"

  Eugenia reads the message. "Be cross the street all morning." Observing, no doubt, watching some of the newer deputies do their stuff during the morning call in the Central Branch.

  I ask Eugenia to set back the charging conference half an hour; then I head over to the courthouse to find Mac. On the second floor, the Central Branch session is held. The branch courts are where arrested persons make their first formal court appearance to set bail, where misdemeanors are tried and preliminary evidentiary hearings are held in felony cases. An assignment to one of the branches is usually the second or third stopping-off place for a deputy, after time in Appeals or the Complaint and Warrant Section. I worked this courtroom for nineteen months before I was sent to Felony Review, and I try to come back as little as possible. It is here that crime always seemed most real, the air quivering with a struggling agony at the brink of finding voice.

  In the hallway outside two enormous central courtrooms, there is a churning mass, like my imaginings of the crushed poor in the steerage bowels, of the old oceangoing vessels. Mothers and girlfriends and brothers are here weeping and crying out over the young men detained in the granite lockup that abuts the courtroom. Lawyers of a kind move about hustling clients in the subverted tones of scalpers, while the state defenders shout out the names of persons whom they have never met and whom they will be defending in a moment. The prosecutors are shouting, too, searching for each of the arresting officers on a dozen cases, hoping to enhance the slender knowledge provided by police reports prepared in a deliberately elliptical fashion, the better to hinder cross-examination.

  Inside the vaulted courtroom, with its red marble pillars and oaken buttresses and straight-backed pews, the tumult continues, a persistent din. Situated closer to the front so they will not fail to hear their cases called, prosecutors and defense lawyers haggle amiably over prospective plea bargains. Beside the judge's bench, six or seven attorneys are clustered around the docket clerk, handing in appearance forms, examining court files, and urging the clerk to pass their case forward to be called next. The cops, most of them, are lined up in pairs against the grimy walls-many of them in from the 12-to-8 shift for the bail hearings on their nighttime collars-sipping coffee and rolling on the balls of their feet to keep themselves awake. And far to one side of the courtroom, there is a continuing clamor from the lockup, where defendants in custody await their appearance, one or two of them inevitably shouting obscenities at the bailiffs or their attorneys, complaining about the cramped conditions back there and the indecent odors from the commode. The rest moan occasionally or bang on the bars.

  Now at the dead end of the morning call, the streetwalkers in their halter tops and shorts are being arraigned, tried, fined, and sent back out on the street in time for sleep and another night's work. Usually they are represented in groups by two or three lawyers, but every now and then a pimp, to economize, will take on the assignment himself. That is occurring right now as some jerk in a flamingo-colored suit goes on about police brutality.

  Mac takes me into the cloakroom, where no coats are hung. No visitor would be so cavalier as to leave a valuable garment unguarded in this company. The room is completely empty, except for a court reporter's shorthand typewriter and a huge dining-room chandelier in a plastic bag which is evidence, undoubtedly, in a case that is going to be called.

  She asks me what is up.

  "Tell me what Carolyn Polhemus was doing with a B file," I say.

  "I had no idea that Carolyn was interested in crimes above the waist," says Mac. An old line. She beams up from her wheelchair, everybody's favorite smart-ass, brassy and irreverent. She makes a number of suggestions concerning the B file, all of which I've already tried. "it doesn't figure," she finally admits.

  As chief administrative deputy, Lydia MacDougall is in charge of personnel, procurement, and the deployment of staff. It is a lousy, thankless job with a nice-sounding title, but Lydia is accustomed to adversity. She has been a paraplegic since shortly after we started in this office together, nearly twelve years ago. It was one of those early winter nights where the mist is half snow. Lydia was driving. Her first husband, Tom, was killed in the plunge into the river.

  In the general run of things, I would say Mac is probably the finest lawyer in this office, organized, shrewd, gifted in court. Over the years she has even teamed to use the chair to advantage before a jury. There are some tragedies that run so deep that our comprehension of them is evolutionary at best. As the jurors get a couple of days to think about what it would be like to have their legs flapping around, loose as flags, as they listen to this woman, handsome, forceful, good-humored, absorb the wedding ring, the casual mention of her baby, observe the fact that she is impossibly normal, they are full of admiration and, as we all should be, hope.

  Next September, Mac will become a judge. She already has party slating and will run in the primary unopposed. The general election will be an automatic. There are not, apparently, a lot of people who feel they can beat a lawyer with support from women's gro
ups, the handicapped, law-and-order types, and the city's three major bar associations.

  "Why don't you ask Raymond about the file?" she finally suggests.

  I make a noise. Horgan is not a detail man. He is unlikely to know anything about an individual case. And these days I am reluctant to advise him of problems. He is always looking for someone to blame.

  Going down the corridor to the next courtroom, where Mac is scheduled to observe, I talk to her about Tommy Motto and the problem of his unaccounted-for status. If we fire Motto, Nico will make capital, alleging that Horgan is on a witch-hunt for Delay's friends. If we keep Tommy on the staff, we increase Nico's profit from the defection. We decide, at last, that he will be placed on Unauthorized Leave, an employment category which previously did not exist. I tell Mac I would feel more comfortable about this if somebody I trusted had seen Molto alive.

  "Let's get a posse out. We have, one deputy P.A. dead already. If some lady finds little pieces of Molto in her trash tomorrow morning, I'd like to be able to say we'd been searching high and low."

  It is Mac's turn. She makes a note.

  ***

  His Honor, Larren Lyttle, his large dark face full of wiliness and majesty, is the first to notice me. A black man in a club in which only whites were members until three years ago, the judge shows no sign of yielding to the atmosphere. He is at ease among the leather club chairs and the servers in green livery.