Reversible Errors Read online

  Raven, however, was not about to give up.

  “Look, I don’t want to preach,” he said, “but this Erdai, he has a point, doesn’t he? You made the decisions. You found this man guilty, you sentenced him to death. Don’t you have some responsibility, if my guy doesn’t deserve that?”

  “Arthur, to be blunt, I’ve done more than I had to already.” She had wrestled it through for several days before deciding to bring him the letter. It was foolish, she knew, to risk any further contact with Raven, who might become more precise with his questions about her past. And she felt no allegiance to the law, whose stratagems and puzzles had once delighted her, but which, like a sovereign, had expelled her from its kingdom. But she smarted at the memory of that one cruel remark to Arthur. It was not the law but the rules she had set down for herself, with the avuncular assistance of Duffy, her sponsor and landlord, that required her to be here. No more messes, no more casual destruction of others or herself. When necessary, make amends.

  Still yearning for nicotine, she stood and wandered to a corner of the room. She had not been in a law office in the months she had been out of the penitentiary, and the plummy atmosphere seemed somehow hilarious. Everyone had grown so much richer in the time she was away. It was unimaginable that normal people lived with this luxury—the rich woods, the granite, a silver coffee service of Swedish design, and rolling armchairs of buttery calfskin. She had never yearned for any of this. But it was still difficult to see Arthur Raven, able and driven, but perhaps not gifted, so comforted by fortune.

  As he watched her, Raven was unconsciously stroking the fried-up hair that stood straight on his scalp at the few points where it still resided. Arthur, as always, appeared to have been working hard—his tie was dragged down, and there were ink spots on his hand, and on his shirt cuff. Intuitively, she sought some way to deflect him.

  “How is your sister, Arthur? Is my memory right? Is that who was ill?”

  “Schizophrenic. I got her into an assisted living arrangement, but I’m over there all the time. The last words my father said to me were, ‘Take care of Susan.’ Which wasn’t very surprising. He’d been telling me that since I was twelve.”

  “Other sibs?”

  “It’s just Susan and me.”

  “And when did your mother die?”

  “My mother’s hale and hearty. She just washed her hands of all of us thirty years ago when Susan got sick. She went to Mexico for a long time, then wandered back here. She was kind of a free spirit. And she and my father were a strange match. She’s got a little place here in Center City and supports herself as a model for life-drawing classes at the Museum Art School.”

  “A nude model?”

  “Oh sure. ‘The human body is a beautiful thing at all ages, Arthur.’ I guess it’s more of a challenge to draw wrinkles. I really don’t know.” Raven was smiling somewhat tentatively, a bit bewildered by what he was confessing.

  “You see her?”

  “Now and then. But it’s like visiting a distant aunt. I mean in high school, I had a couple of friends, black guys actually, who’d been raised by their grandmothers. They knew their moms the way I did—like having a much older pal. It was how I grew up. What else do you know?”

  He smiled the same way. Mrs. Raven, clearly, was the other pole from May Sullivan, who had demanded preeminence in the lives of all family members. She was brilliant and a savage wit, but the bottle of Triple Sec was open on the kitchen counter by the time Gillian came home every afternoon from St. Margaret’s. The evening always proceeded in the same sick suspense. Who would Ma go after? Would she scream or, as was often the case in her fights with Gillian’s father, resort to violence? Her rages could bring a house with ten occupants to a freighted silence that lasted hours.

  Arthur, who had appeared to welcome Gillian’s interest in him, nonetheless reverted to his effort to get her to visit Erdai. Discipline, she recalled, was always one of his professional strengths.

  “I don’t know how to talk you into this,” he said. “I won’t ask much. Just smooth the way with the guy.” Arthur promised she would not even have to listen to Erdai’s story, if she chose, and that he would drive her down himself to be certain she made it back and forth from the institution in one day. “Look, Gillian. I never wanted this case. The court just threw it on me, like a saddle. And now I haven’t had a day off in four weeks. But I’m doing it, you know, my duty. And I have to ask you to help.”

  Openly plaintive and disarmingly humble, Arthur extended his short arms toward her. He smiled as he had when he spoke of his mother: this was all he knew, and there was no choice but to accept it. He was a nice man, Gillian realized. He’d grown up to be a nice man, someone who’d come to know more of himself than she would have predicted. He knew he was one of life’s ardent eager beavers, a doright afraid to do wrong, and he knew, as he’d said last time, there were persons, such as she, who judged the likes of him boring. Yet that, she suddenly saw, had been her mistake. Not her only mistake. But one of them. She had always owed Arthur and those like him a great deal more respect. Realizing that was a step in her rehabilitation. Because it came to her now that rehabilitation was in fact her plan. In some secret part, she had intended all along, when her strength returned, to reform and remake herself, to refill with stronger stuff the fathomless crater she’d blown through her life.

  “I’ll go,” she said. As soon as the words were uttered, they seemed like precious china knocked from a self. She watched their fall and impact—the light that spread on Raven’s face—suspecting at once that she’d made a dreadful mistake. All she desired was a safely anesthetized life. She had been living out a daily plan—take her Paxil and minimize significant contact with what had gone before. She felt an ex-addict’s natural panic to think her resolve had broken down.

  Showing her to the handsome reception area, Raven offered a variety of inept expressions of gratitude, then retrieved her wet umbrella and her coat. A giant rug, a bright design by a modern master who’d branched from paintings to textiles, covered the polished hardwood and Gillian, still deeply shaken, stared at the abstract figures. Twice with Arthur Raven in as many weeks, some spirit, like a woodland elf haunting a tree, had spoken for her.

  She said goodbye abruptly and descended in the high-speed elevator, fully baffled by herself and, especially, the brief fluttery sensation in her chest, which seemed like a small flame in the corner of a cage. It would not last long and so she did not have to decide if it might be hope.

  7

  OCTOBER 4, 1991

  The Jail

  IN THE HOUSE OF CORRECTIONS, most inmates had several names. If the Laws found out you had a record, there was less chance to walk a beef, or get bail. So when perps were arrested, they tended to forget what Momma had called them. Usually guys had been cooling for weeks before the Identification Division in McGrath Hall compared ten-card fingerprint records from booking with what was on file and figured out who was who.

  Unfortunately for Collins Farwell, he had matched early. Although he’d checked in as Congo Fanon, by the time Muriel got Larry’s call, the jail had Collins’s given name. She was trying a bank robbery case, but she agreed to meet Larry at the jail after court, and when she arrived, he was waiting for her on one of the granite blocks that served as a bench in the lobby. His large blue eyes lingered as she approached.

  “Lookin pretty spiffy,” Larry told her.

  She was dressed for trial in a red suit, wearing a little more makeup than when she was in the office pushing files. Always a little too familiar, Larry reached up to touch one of her large loop earrings.

  “African?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “Nice,” he said.

  She asked what was up and Larry offered a more elaborate version than he had on the telephone of what Erno had told him yesterday. It was 5 p.m. and the prisoners were locked down for the count, which meant Larry and she would have to wait to interview Collins.

  “Wan
na take a look at him in the meantime?” Larry asked.

  He badged them in and they climbed up on the catwalks, the grated piers outside the cages. Muriel lagged a bit. She had not had time to change shoes and it was easy to put a high heel through the grating. A stumble could lead to more than embarrassment. Civilians, male and female, learned to keep their distance from the cells. Men had been nearly garroted with their neckties, and women, naturally, endured worse. The Sheriff’s deputies who served as guards maintained a live-and-let-live truce with the inmates, and were not always quick to intervene.

  Walking along, it was the usual jailhouse scene—dark faces, bad smells, the insults and sexual taunts hurled toward their backs. In some cells, the men had strung clotheslines, further dividing the minimal space. Often photos were taped to the bars—family, or girlie shots sliced from magazines. During the lockdown, the men lounged, or slept, played radios, called out to one another, frequently in gang codes. An officer in drab, a big black man, had come to escort them when they moved through the last gate to the tiers and was plainly irritated to have been bothered. He rapped his stick twice on the bars to indicate they had reached Collins’s cell, and sauntered off, running his baton against the bars just to let the boys know he was around.

  “Which one of you is Collins?” Larry asked the two men in there. One was on the pot and the other was playing cards, through the bars, with the inmate next door.

  “Yo, man, can’t I get no privacy or nothin.” Seated on the stainless steel fixture, Collins pointed at Muriel, but went about his business in defiance of the intrusion.

  They strolled away briefly. When they returned, Collins was just pulling up the zipper on his orange jumpsuit.

  “You narco or what?” Collins asked when Larry flipped his shield. Collins Farwell was medium color, with light eyes and a perfectly cropped sponge of African hair. As advertised, he was large and handsome. His eyes were nearly orange and as luminescent as a cat’s, and he was clearly aware of his good looks. Peering at Muriel, Collins adjusted the jumpsuit on his shoulders to make sure the fit was just so.

  “Homicide,” Larry said.

  “I ain fuckin kill’t nobody. That’s not my act, man. Must be some other nigger you come for. Ain no killer. I’m a lover.” Collins sang a few bars from Otis Redding to prove the point, providing considerable amusement in several of the cages stacked on the floors above and below him. With that, Collins turned and dropped the zipper on his jumpsuit, and strolled back toward the potty. He looked directly at Muriel, expecting her to scurry, and she held her ground for a minute.

  “Whatta you think?” Larry asked, when they were on the way back down.

  “Damn good-looking,” Muriel answered. He resembled her mother’s favorite, Harry Belafonte.

  “I’ll see if we can get his mug shot in a frame for you. Are we wasting our time?”

  She asked what Larry thought.

  “I think he’s the average jailhouse piece of shit,” Larry said. “But I got an hour if you do.”

  After feed time, when Collins was back in general population, they could bring him down to an interview room without fanfare. In the administrative office, Larry asked the officer on duty to arrange that, saying only that they had to question Farwell concerning a murder. Half the staff in here was jumped-in to a gang, or otherwise affiliated, and word would trail back quickly if they thought Collins was cooperating. The duty officer took Larry and Muriel to a small interview room, a trapezoid of cheap plasterboard, scuffed with heel marks several inches up the wall. They sat in plastic swivel chairs, which, like the small table between them, was fixed to the floor with heavy hex bolts.

  “So how’s Talmadge?” Larry’s eyes angled away promptly, as if he regretted the remark once it was out. Lots of people were mentioning Talmadge to her now. A photo, taken at a fund-raiser, had appeared in the paper last week. Still, this wasn’t a discussion she was having with Larry.

  “You know, Larry, I never figured you as jealous.”

  “That’s informational,” he protested. “You know. Like the weather report. Like how’s your health and your family?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And?”

  “Come on, Larry. I’m seeing the man. We have a nice time.”

  “And you’re not seeing me.”

  “Larry, I don’t recall ever ‘seeing’ you very often. As far as I can tell, you never thought about me when you weren’t horny.”

  “So what’s wrong with that?” Larry asked. She nearly went for it, before she realized he was having her. “I’ll send flowers every day now and billets-doux.”

  ‘Billets-doux.’ Larry could always surprise you. She just looked at him.

  “I’m giving you space,” Larry said. “I thought you wanted space.”

  “I want space, Larry.” When she closed her eyes, her lashes seemed to catch in her makeup. Somehow Larry, who lived on his instincts, knew something was up. Two nights ago, as Talmadge was leaving her place, he had pressed her head to his chest and said, ‘Maybe we should start thinking about making this permanent.’ She had recognized all along this was where they were headed, but a palsy had shaken her anyhow. In her own way she had been working hard since then not to think of what he had said, meaning at bottom she’d thought of nothing else.

  It felt as if she were looking down into the Grand Canyon. Somehow her first marriage, which was rarely even a topic of reflection, was in the dangerous distance below. She had married at nineteen, when the dumb things people did were legion, and when she believed she was getting a prize. Rod had been her high-school English teacher, caustic and bright and still unmarried at the age of forty-two-it had not even occurred to her to wonder why. The summer after she graduated, she ran into him on a corner and flirted boldly, having discovered in those years that sexual forwardness did wonders for a girl whose looks didn’t stop traffic. She’d pursued him, begged him to join her for lunch, to go to movies, always on the sly. Her parents were horrified when she announced their wedding. But she worked and finished college in five years, taught in the public schools, and went to law school at night.

  In time, of course, Rod’s charm had worn thin. Well, that was not really true. He remained one of the most devastatingly funny humans she’d known—the wise-guy drunk at the end of the bar who got off the best lines in English comedies. But he was, in a phrase, a human being who’d never become. He was a brilliant boy, bound hand and foot by his own unhappiness, and he knew it, often claiming that his fundamental problem in life was that you couldn’t hold a Stoli, a cigarette, and the TV remote with only two hands. He was probably gay, but too cowardly to face it. Certainly his interest in sex with her had not seemed to last much beyond their engagement. By the third year of their marriage, his sexual disinterest had led her to other men. Rod knew and did not seem to care. In fact, he went to pieces whenever she mentioned divorce. He could not face his mother with that. She was a severe, bloodless, upper-class type, whom he should have told to fuck off ages ago. Instead, he allowed her to judge. Until the day he died. The cause was a coronary, which the early deaths of his father and grandfather had long presaged. Despite all the warnings, Rod never exercised and went to the doctor only to mock him, but for Muriel, the loss had been unexpectedly monumental, not only of Rod himself but of the glory he was to her when she was nineteen.

  Having married a man old enough to be your father, you look back and say, I had issues. Yet in retrospect, her core motive still felt identifiable and familiar: she had just wanted to get somewhere with her life. Rod, feckless and drunk, and Talmadge, a force for the eons, had less in common than a rock and a plant. And the fifteen years since she’d first married was a literal lifetime. But the omen of how mistaken, how invisible she could be to herself in these things continued to haunt her. With Larry, however, she was determined to appear resolute.

  “I can’t believe Talmadge is such a big deal to you,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “It looks
like I’m on the loose.” He was getting divorced, he said, and seemed to mean it this time. Nancy and he had gone to a lawyer together, a woman who’d first tried to talk them into sticking it out. There were no problems with property. The only issue was his boys. Nancy was too attached to leave them and had actually proposed getting custody, but Larry had eighty-sixed that. For the time being, they were stalemated, but figured to settle eventually. They both wanted out.

  “It’s sad,” said Larry. He seemed to mean that, too. He didn’t bother looking at her. To his credit, Larry had no appetite for cheap sympathy.

  Outside they heard the jailhouse music of jangling chains. A guard knocked once and steered Collins Farwell into the room, shackled from the waist, and bound hand and foot. The officer placed Collins at an adjoining table and padlocked his ankle chain to a black hasp bolted on the floor.

  “Wanna time-cut, man,” said Collins, as soon as the officer was out the door.

  “Whoa,” said Larry. “Take a few steps back there, bud. Maybe we ought to say howdy.”

  “I said I want a time-cut,” answered Collins. Off the tiers, his accent was noticeably whiter. He addressed Muriel, apparently realizing that it was the P.A. who’d make the decisions.

  “How much dope did you have when they busted you?” she asked.