Presumed Innocent (11 page)

The letter, of course, is unsigned. Our office gets letters like this every day. Two paralegals are assigned to do pretty much nothing but answer this kind of correspondence, and talk to the various cranks who wander into the reception area in person. The more serious complaints tend to get passed along, which, presumably, is how this one found its way to Raymond. Even at that point, a lot of what comes in is junk. But this one, for all its funny twitches, has the ring of the real thing. It is more than possible, of course, that our tipster was simply scammed by his friend Noel. But the guy who wrote the letter was in the best position to judge, and he doesn't seem to think that was the case.

Scam or not, it is easy to figure out why Raymond Horgan would not want this file floating around in an election year. Nico would love to have evidence of any kind of undiscovered crimes committed during Raymond's regime. As the letter writer surmises, it is not likely that friend Noel's case was an isolated episode. What we have in hand is a first-class scandal: an unnoticed — worse — unapprehended bribery ring operating in one of the branch courts.

Lipranzer has lit a cigarette. He has been quiet a long time.

"You think it's bull?" I ask.

"Neh," he says. "Somethin's there. Maybe not what this jamoche thinks, but it's somethin."

"Do you think it's worth looking at?"

"Can't hurt. We ain't exactly buried in leads."

"That's what I thought. Carolyn figured these guys were gay," I say. "I think she was probably on the right track." I point to her notes. She has the section number of various provisions of what is still titled the Morals chapter of the state criminal code written down, a question mark beside them. "Remember the panty raids out in the Public Forest? That would have been right about then. We were busting those guys in carloads. And the cases went to the North Branch, didn't they?"

Lip is nodding: it all fits. The embarrassing nature of the crime, the mania to conceal it. And the timing is right. Sexual crimes, involving consenting adults, were ignored as a matter of policy in Raymond's first administration. The cops brought in the cases, but we gave them the shuffle. By the time Raymond began to campaign for re-election, certain groups, prostitutes and gays particularly, were, in their more florid segments, largely beyond control. With the gays, the problem was acute in the public forests which ring the city. Families would not go there at midday on the weekends for fear of what their children would be exposed to. There were some fairly graphic complaints about what was taking place in broad daylight on the picnic tables, where, Mom tended to point out, people were supposed to eat. With the election nine months away, we made a large show of a concerted clean-up. Dozens of men were arrested every night, often in
flagrante delicto
. Their cases were usually disposed of with court supervision — a kind of expungeable guilty plea — and the defendants then disappeared.

That is the problem. Both Lip and I recognize it will be difficult to find Noel. There were probably four hundred of these cases that summer, and we don't even know his name. If Carolyn made much progress, the file does not seem to show it. The jacket date indicates she got the case about five months before her murder. Her notes reflect little investigation. "Noel" is written in an upper corner and underlined countless times. A little farther down the page she has written "Leon." The significance of this eluded me at first; then I realized that she had assumed that, like many aliases, the name chosen by the letter writer was the product of some meaningful association. Maybe the name was a rebus. Carolyn was going to suppose that she was looking for somebody named Leon. Finally, she has another name, "Kenneally," at the foot of the page, and his assignment. This is Lionel Kenneally, a good copper, now a commander. We worked the Night Saints cases together. He runs the watch in the 32nd Police District, whose cases are heard in the North Branch.

"I still don't understand why I never heard about this case," I tell Lip. I can't imagine a procedural reason for not informing me — or for the case to have ended up in the hands of Carolyn, who did not work in our public corruption unit. I have spent more than a few moments with that puzzle, full as it is with sorrowful implications about my fading romance with Raymond Horgan, and his with me.

Lip shrugs. "What's Horgan tell you?"

"I haven't been able to corner him. It's twelve days to the election. They're on a twenty-four-hour operation now."

"How about Kenneally. What'd he say?"

"He's been on leave."

"Well, you better talk to him. He ain't tellin shit to me. We ain't in each other's fan clubs."

The police department is full of people with whom Lipranzer does not get along, but I would have guessed Lip would take to Kenneally. He likes good cops. But there is something between them. He's hinted at it before.

Lip starts to leave, then steps back in the office. I am already headed out to see Eugenia, but Lip takes me by the elbow to detain me. He closes the door I just opened.

"One thing," he says. He looks right at me. "We got her MUDs back."

"And?"

"Nothin great. Only we wanted to get MUDs on any number she called more than three times in the last six months."

"Yeah?"

"I noticed as I'm goin through there, one of the numbers that comes up that way is yours."

"Here?" I ask.

An especially narrow look emerges from Lip's narrow, Slavic face.

"Home," he says. "Last October. Thereabouts."

I am about to tell him this could not possibly be right. Carolyn never tried to reach me at home. Then I realize what it is.
I
made those calls from Carolyn's place. Lying to my wife. Late again, kid. This trial's gonna be a bitch. I'll catch dinner down here.

Lip watches me calculate. His eyes are flat and gray.

"I'd just as soon you let it go," I say at last. "If Barbara sees a subpoena notice from the phone company, she'll blow a gut. Under the circumstances. If you don't mind, Lip, I'd appreciate it."

He nods, but I can see that it is still not right with him. If nothing else, we have always depended on each other to be above certain base kinds of stupidity, and Dan Lipranzer would be unfaithful to that compact if he did not take one more moment to cast his gray eyes on me harshly, so that I know I've let him down.

"In the end," I told Robinson, "we had to put Wendell McGaffen on the witness stand." His testimony was the only effective response to his father, and so we called the boy in rebuttal. Carolyn was splendid. She wore a dark blue suit and a beige blouse with a huge satin bow, and she stood beside Wendell, whose feet did not reach the floor from the hard oak chair in the witness box. You could not hear a thing in the courtroom.

And then what did your mother do, Wendell?

He asked for water.

When your mother took you in the basement, Wendell, what did she do?

It was bad, he said.

Was it this? Carolyn went to the vise, which had sat throughout, like an omen, at the edge of the prosecution table, grease-smeared and black, thicker in all its parts than any of Wendell's limbs.

Uh huh.

Did she hurt you?

Uh huh.

And did you cry?

Uh huh. Wendell drank some more water and then added, A lot.

Tell how it happened, said Carolyn finally, softly, and Wendell did. She said to lie down. He said he screamed and cried. He cried, Mommy don't. He begged her.

But he finally laid himself down.

And she told him not to scream.

Wendell swung his feet as he talked. He gripped his doll. And as Carolyn and Mattingly had instructed him, he never looked over at his mother. On cross Stern did what little he could, asked Wendell how many times he'd met with Carolyn and whether he loved his mother, which caused Wendell to ask for more water. There was no disputing, really. Every person there knew the child was telling the truth, not because he was practiced or particularly emotional, but because somehow in every syllable Wendell spoke there was a tone, a knowledge, a bone-hard instinct that what he was describing was wrong. Wendell convinced with his moral courage.

I delivered the closing argument for the county. My state of personal disturbance was such that when I approached the podium I had no idea of what I was going to say, and for one moment I was full of panic, convinced that I would be speechless. Instead, I found the well of all my passionate turmoil and I spoke fervently for this boy, who must have lived, I said, desperate and uncertain every moment, wanting, as we all wanted, love, and receiving instead, not just indifference or harshness, but torture.

Then we waited. Having a jury out is the closest thing in life to suspended animation. Even the simplest tasks, cleaning my desk, returning phone calls, reading prosecution reports, are beyond my attention, and I end up walking the halls, talking over the evidence and the arguments with anyone unlucky enough to ask me how the case went. About 4:00, Carolyn came by to say she was going to return something to Morton's and I volunteered to walk along. As we left the building, it began raining hard, a cold downpour driven almost sideways by the wind, which was full of winter. People dashed down the street, covering their heads. Carolyn returned her merchandise, a glass bowl whose source she did not identify, and then we headed back into the rain. She more or less shouted out as the wind came up, and I put an arm around her protectively, and she leaned against me beneath my umbrella. It was like something coming loose, and we went on that way for a few blocks, saying nothing, until I finally followed my impulse to speak.

Listen, I said. I started again. Listen.

In her heels, Carolyn was about six feet, an inch or so taller than me, so it was almost an embrace when she turned her face in my direction. In the natural light, you could see what Carolyn, with her devotion to lotions and gyms and spectacular fashions, tried to obscure — that it was an older face, past forty, the makeup clinging to the lines radiating from her eyes, a haggard roughness now part of the skin. But somehow that made her more real to me. This was my life and this was happening.

I've been wondering, I told her, about something you said. What you meant the other night when you told me, Not now.

She looked at me. She shook her head as if she did not know, but her face was full of caprice, her lips sealed to hold back her laughter.

The wind came up again then, and I drew her into the shelter of a recessed storefront. We were on Grayson Boulevard, where the shops face the stately elms of the Midway.

I mean, I said, hopeless and pitiable and small, there seems to be something going on between us. I mean, am I crazy? To think that?

I don't think so.

You don't?

No.

Ah, I said.

Still smiling wonderfully, she put her arm through mine and moved me back down the street.

The jury returned a little before 7:00. Guilty on all counts. Raymond had remained in the office awaiting the verdict, and he came downstairs with us to meet the press, cameras not being allowed above the lobby of the County Building. Then he took us out for a drink. He had a date, and so around 8:30 he left us in a back booth at Caballero's, where Carolyn and I talked and became drunk and moony. I told her that she had been magnificent. Magnificent. I don't know how many times I said that.

TV and the movies have spoiled the most intimate moments of our lives. They have given us conventions which dominate our expectations in instants whose intensity would ordinarily make them spontaneous and unique. We have conventions of grief, which we learned from the Kennedys, and ordained gestures for victory by which we imitate the athletes we see on the tube, who in turn have learned the same things from other jocks they saw on TV. Seduction, too, has got its standards now, its sloe-eyed moments, its breathless repartee.

And so we both ended up coming on smooth and wry and bravely composed, like all those gorgeous, poised movietime couples, probably because we had no other idea of how to behave. And even so, there was a gathering in the air, a racing current that made it difficult to sit in place, to move my mouth or lift my glass to drink. I don't believe we ordered dinner, but we had the menus, something to stare at, like coquettes with their silk fans. Beneath the table Carolyn's hand was laid out casually, very close to my hip.

I didn't know you when this started.

What? she asks. We are close on the plush bench, but she must lean a bit nearer because I am speaking so softly. I can smell the liquor on her breath.

I didn't know you before this case, before this started. That amazes me.

Because?

Because it just doesn't seem that way now — that I didn't know you.

Do you know me now?

Better. I think so. Don't I?

Maybe, she says. Maybe what it is, is that now you know you want to get to know me.

That's possible, I say, and she repeats it:

That's possible.

And will I get to know you?

That's possible, too, she says. If that's what you want.

I think that is, I say.

I think that's one thing, she says, that you want.

One thing?

One thing, she says. She brings her glass up to drink without looking away from me. Our faces are not very far apart at all. When she puts her glass down, the large bow on her blouse almost brushes my chin. Her face seems coarse with too much makeup, but her eyes are deep and spectacularly bright, and the air is wild with cosmetic scents, perfume, and body emanations from our closeness. It seems as if our talk has been drifting like this, circling languorously, like a hawk over the hills, for hours.

What else do I want? I ask.

I think you know, she says.

I do?

I think you do.

I think I do, I say. But there's one thing I still don't know.

There is?

I don't quite know how to get it — what I want.

You don't?

Not quite.

Not quite?

I really don't.