Presumed Innocent (4 page)

"Preliminary."

"Whose prints?"

"Carolyn Polhemus."

"Super.

"It ain't all bad," says Lip. He takes the picture from me and points. "See this bar here. See the glass?" One tall bar glass, standing undisturbed. "There latents on that. Three fingers. And the prints ain't the decedent's."

"Do we have any idea whose prints they are?"

"No. Identification says three weeks. They got all kinda backlogs." The police department identification division keeps a digit-by-digit record of every person who has ever been printed, classified by so-called points of comparison, the ridges and valleys on a fingertip to which numerical values are assigned. In the old days, they were unable to identify an unknown print unless the subject left behind latents of all ten fingers, so I.D. could search the existing catalogue. Now, in the computer era, the search can be done by machine. A laser mechanism reads the print and compares to every one in memory. The process takes only a few minutes, but the department, due to budgetary constraints, does not yet own all of the equipment and must borrow pieces from the state police for special cases. "I told them to rush it up, but they're giving me all that shit about Zilogs and onloading. A call from the P.A. would really help. Tell them to compare to every known in the county. Anybody. Any dirtball who's ever been printed."

I make a note to myself.

"We need MUDs, too," Lipranzer says, and points to the pad. Although it is not well known, the telephone company keeps a computerized record of all local calls made from most exchanges: Message Unit Detail sheets. I begin writing out the grand-jury subpoena
duces tecum
, a request for documents. "And ask them for MUDs on anybody she called in the last six months," says Lip.

"They'll scream. You're probably talking about two hundred numbers."

"Anybody she called three times. I'll get back to them with a list. But ask for it now, so I'm not runnin my ass around tryin to find you to do another subpoena."

I nod. I'm thinking.

"If you're going back six months," I tell him, "you're probably going to hit this number." I nod toward the phone on my desk.

Lipranzer looks at me levelly and says, "I know."

So he knows, I think. I take a minute with this, trying to figure how. People guess, I think. They gossip. Besides, Lip would notice things that anyone else would miss. I doubt that he approves. He is single, but he is no rover. There is a Polish woman a good ten years older than he, a widow with a grown kid, who cooks a meal and sleeps with Lipranzer two or three times a week. On the phone, he calls her Momma.

"You know," I say, "as long as we're on the subject, Carolyn always locked her doors and windows." I tell him this with admirable evenness. "I mean, always. She was a little soft, but Carolyn was a grownup. She knew she lived in the city."

Lipranzer's look focuses gradually and his eyes take on a metallic gleam. He has not lost the significance of what I'm telling him or, it seems, of the fact that I delayed.

"So what do you figure?" he asks at last. "Somebody walked around there openin the windows?"

"Could be."

"So they'd make it look like a break-in? Somebody she let in in the first place?"

"Doesn't that make sense? You're the one who's telling me there's a glass on the bar. She was entertaining. I wouldn't bet the ranch on the bad guy being some crazed parolee."

Lip stares at his cigarette. Looking through the doorway, I see that Eugenia, my secretary, has returned. There are voices now in the hallway as people filter back in from the graveside. I detect a lot of the anxious laughter of release.

"Not necessarily," he says finally. "Not with Carolyn Polhemus. She was a funny lady." He looks at me hard again.

"You mean, you think she'd open the door to some bum she sent to jail?"

"I think with Carolyn there's no tellin. Suppose she bumped into one of these characters in a bar. Or some guy called her up and said, Let's have a pop. You think there's no chance she'd say yes? We're talkin Carolyn now."

I can see where Lip is going. Lady P.A., Prosecutor of Perverts, Fucks Defendant and Lives Out Forbidden Fantasy. Lip has got her number pretty well. Carolyn Polhemus would not have minded at all the idea that some guy had dwelled with the thought of her for years. But somehow, with this discussion a seasick misery begins to ebb through me.

"You didn't like her much, did you, Lip?"

"Not much." We look at each other. Then Lipranzer reaches over and chucks me on the knee. "At least we know one thing," he says. "She had piss-poor taste in men."

That is his exit line. He tucks his Camels into his windbreaker and is gone. I call out to Eugenia to please hold anything else. With a moment's privacy I am now ready to examine the photographs. For a minute, after I begin sorting through them, my attention is mostly on myself. How well will I manage this? I urge myself to maintain professional composure.

But that, of course, begins to give way. It is like the network of crazing that sometimes seeps through glass in the wake of an impact. There is excitement at first, slow-entering and reluctant, but more than a little. In the top photographs the heavy glass of the table is canted over, compressing her shoulder, so that you might almost make the comparison to a laboratory slide. But soon it is removed. And here is Carolyn's spectacularly lithe body in a pose which, for all the agony there must have been, seems, initially, supple and athletic. Her legs are trim and graceful; her breasts are high and large. Even in death, she retains her erotic bearing. But, I slowly recognize, other experiences must influence this response. Because what is actually here is horrible. There are bruises on her face and neck, mulberry patches. A rope runs from her ankles to her knees, her waist, her wrists; then it is jerked tight around her neck, where the rim of the burn is visible. She is drawn back in an ugly tormented bow and her face is ghastly; her eyes, with the hyperthyroid look of the attempted strangulation, are enormous and protruding and her mouth is fixed in a silent scream. I watch, I study. Her look holds the same wild, disbelieving, desperate thing that so frightens me when I find the courage to let my glance fix on the wide black eye of a landed fish dying on a pier. I take it in now in the same reverential, awestruck, uncomprehending way. And then, worst of all, when all the dirt is scraped off the treasure box there is rising within, unhindered by shame, or even fear, a bubble of something light enough that I must eventually recognize it as satisfaction, and no lecture to myself about the baseness of my nature can quite discourage me. Carolyn Polhemus, that tower of grace and fortitude, lies here in my line of sight with a look she never had in life. I see it finally now. She wants my pity. She needs my help.

When it was all over, I went to see a psychiatrist. His name was Robinson.

"I would say she's the most exciting woman I've known," I told him.

"Sexy?" he asked after a moment.

"Sexy, yes. Very sexy. Torrents of blond hair, and almost no behind, and this very full bosom. And long red fingernails, too. I mean, definitely, deliberately, almost ironically sexy. You notice. That's the idea with Carolyn. You're supposed to notice. And I did. She's worked around our office for years. She was a probation officer before she went to law school. But that's all she was to me originally. You know: this very good-looking blonde with big tits. Every copper who came in would roll his eyes and make like he was jerking off. That's all.

"Over time, people began to talk about her. Even while she was still in the branch courts. You know: high-powered. Capable. Then for a while she was dating this newsman on Channel 3. Chet whatever his name is. And she showed up a lot of places. Very active in the bar organizations. An officer for a while in the local NOW chapter. And shrewd. She asked to be assigned out to the Rape Section when it was considered a crappy place to work. All these impossible one-on-ones where you could never figure out if it was the victim or the defendant who was closer to the truth. Hard cases. Just to find the ones that deserved to be prosecuted, let alone to win them. And she did very well out there. Eventually Raymond put her in charge of all those trials. He liked to send her on those Sunday-morning public service TV programs. Show his concern on women's issues. And Carolyn liked to go and carry the banner. She enjoyed the limelight. But she was a good prosecutor. And damn tough. The defense lawyers used to complain that she had a complex, that she was trying to prove that she had balls. But the coppers loved her.

"I'm not sure what I thought of her then. I suppose I thought she was just a little bit too much."

Robinson looked at me.

"Too much everything," I said. "You know. Too bold. Too self-impressed. Always running one gear too high. She didn't have the right sense of proportion."

"And," said Robinson, proceeding to the obvious, "you fell in love with her."

I went silent, still. When are words ever enough?

"I fell in love with her," I said.

Raymond felt she needed a partner and so she asked me. It was September of last year.

"Could you have said no?" asked Robinson.

"I suppose. The chief deputy isn't expected to try a lot of cases. I could have said no."

"But?"

But I said yes.

Because, I told myself, the case was interesting. The case was strange. Darryl McGaffen was a banker. He worked for his brother, Joey, who was a gangster, a florid personality, a hotshot type who enjoyed being the target of every law enforcement agency in town. Joey used the bank, out in McCrary, to wash a river of dirty money, mostly mob dough. But that was Joey's action. Darryl kept his head down and the accounts straight. Darryl was as mild as Joey was flamboyant. An ordinary guy. He lived out west, near McCrary. He had a wife. And a somewhat tragic life. His first child, a little girl, had died at the age of three. I knew all about that, because Joey had once testified before the grand jury about his niece's fall from a second-floor terrace at his brother's home. Joey had explained, almost convincingly, that the girl's resulting skull fracture and immediate death were large in his mind and had obstructed his judgment when four mysterious fellows delivered to his bank certain bonds which, to Joey's great chagrin, turned out to be hot. Joey wrung his hands when he talked about the girl. He touched his silk pocket hankie to both his eyes.

Darryl and his wife had another child, a boy named Wendell. When Wendell was five, his mother arrived with him at the West End Pavilion Hospital emergency room. The boy was unconscious and his mother was hysterical, for her child had taken a terrible fall, sustaining severe head injuries. The mother claimed that he had never been at the hospital before, but the emergency room physician — a young Indian woman, Dr. Narajee — had a memory of treating Wendell a year earlier, and when a medical record was summoned she found he had been there twice, once with a broken collarbone, once with a broken arm, both the results, his mother had said, of falls. The child was unconscious now and not likely in most events to speak, and so Dr. Narajee studied his injuries. When she testified later, Dr. Narajee said she realized initially that the wounds were too symmetrical and too evenly positioned laterally to be the result of a fall. She repeatedly examined the gashes, two inches by one inch on each side of the head, over more than a day, before she had it all figured out, and then she called Carolyn Polhemus at the prosecuting attorney's office to report that she was treating a child whose skull appeared to have been fractured when his mother placed his head in a vise.

Carolyn obtained a search warrant at once. They recovered the grip with skin fragments still on it from the basement of the McGaffen home. They examined the unconscious child and found healed wounds which appeared to have been cigarette burns in his anus. And then they waited to see what would happen with the boy. He lived.

By then he was in court custody. And the P.A.'s office was under siege. Darryl McGaffen came to his wife's defense. She was a loving and devoted mother. It was insanity, he said, to claim she'd hurt her child. He had seen the boy fall, McGaffen said, a terrible accident, a tragedy, marred by this nightmarish experience of doctors and lawyers madly conspiring to take their sick child away. Very emotional. Very well staged. Joey made sure the cameras were there when the brother got to the courthouse and that Darryl claimed a vendetta by Raymond Horgan against his family. In order to show forthrightness, Raymond was going to try the case himself at first. But the campaign was beginning to heat up. Raymond sent the case back to Carolyn and recommended, given the press attention, that she try it with another senior deputy, someone like me, whose presence would show the office's commitment. So she asked. And I agreed. I told myself I was doing it for Raymond.

The physicists call it Brownian movement, the action of molecules coursing against one another in the air. This activity produces a kind of hum, a high-pitched, almost screeching sound at a frequency level on the margins of human audibility. As a child I could hear this tone, if I chose to, at virtually any moment. Most often, I would ignore it, but every now and then my will eroded and I would let the pitch rise inside my ears to the point where it was almost blaring.

Apparently at puberty the bones in the inner ear harden so that the Brownian ringing can no longer be heard. Which is just as well. Because by then there are other distractions. For me, during most of my married life, the allure of other women has been like that daily hum which I willfully ignored, and when I started working around Carolyn that resolve went weak, and the pitch rose, vibrated,
sang
.

"And I can't really tell you why," I said to Robinson.

I consider myself a person of values. I had always despised my father for his philandering. On Friday nights he was emitted from the household like a wandering cat, headed for a tavern and, later, the Hotel Delaney over on Western Avenue, only a little better than a flop, with its old woolen carpets worn to the backing over the stairs, and the naphtha scent of some chemical agent used to control the infestation of pests. There he would pursue his passion with various soiled women — barroom chippies, horny divorcées, wives out on the sneak. Before he left on these outings, he had dinner with my mother and me. We both knew where he was going. He would hum, the only sound anything like music which came from him all week.