Reversible Errors (59 page)

"He's not the first defendant whose trial judge was impaired. The case was appealed, Arthur. Twice. There have been endless postconviction proceedings. No court has ever found anything near reversible errors."

"And what about the Constitution?"

She couldn't follow the reference. "The Constitution?"

"The Constitution, Gillian, promises every defendant a fair trial. Do you think that means a trial before a judge who's committing a felony on a daily basis? Not only a judge whose thinking is bound to be disturbed, but who's out on the street and, therefore, has a powerful motive not to antagonize the prosecutors and the police?"

Ah. She sat back. She had not thought of this part at all. She'd given the whole subject brief contemplation the first day she met Arthur for coffee, reasoned a bit with Duffy, and stowed it away. The only justice that had concerned her was her own. But had she reflected with just an instant of discipline, she could have recognized the implications for Gandolph, exactly as Arthur laid them out. She was as guilty as Arthur found her.

"Muriel's already called to ask what I'm going to do," he said.

"And?"

"And I told her I'm going to move to amend my complaint for habeas corpus to allege that your addiction violated Rommy's right to a fair trial."

"You're going to put me on the witness stand?"

"If I have to."

She was about to suggest he was being histrionic, or impulsive. How could he interrogate the woman he was sleeping with? But that answer, too, was plain. She really was not as fleet with all of this as she had once been, she thought sadly. Obviously, she was no longer the woman he was sleeping with.

"My God, Gillian. I can't even bear the idea. You in doorways, copping from hookers -and then going back to sit in judgment of other human beings? I can't imagine this. And you? Who in God's name are you?"

Yes, well. She'd known that sooner or later he'd have the good sense to ask that question.

"Do you expect to prevail, Arthur, with this new tack?" She was afraid it might sound as if she was asking for mercy. Then she realized she probably was.

"You mean, would I do this just to get even with you, Gillian? No. No. Pamela's started the research. A new trial is dead-bang. But my position is that retrial is barred under, the double jeopardy clause. The state failed to meet the fundamental responsibility of providing a competent forum. Muriel seemed willing to listen on that point."

For a second, Gillian imagined how Muriel was taking this. Even in defeat, she'd have the last laugh. That was a rare success in litigation. To be able to break your opponents heart.

"Let me understand," said Gillian. "I'm the scapegoat. A triple murderer is going to walk away because I was addicted to heroin. That's how it's going to be explained in the press?"

Arthur chose not to answer, but only because there was no point in denying it. She had been a wretch in the eyes of this community, and a disappointment. But now she would advance to the category of monster. Arthur, she realized, saw her that way already. Across the small distance between them, his red-eyed stare was terrifyingly objective.

"It's my fault, Gillian. You warned me. You told me just what you've done to the men in your life. You even gave me an entire case history. And I jumped in anyway."

Despite her complete muddle, she felt a new source of pain, as if muscle had severed from bone near her heart. It was certain now that Arthur and she were done. He had never before spoken to her cruelly.

She blundered out of the office, down the pale halls, to the elevator. Reaching the street, she stopped on the pavement. 'Heroin.' She heard the word from him endlessly. 'Heroin.' How could she ever have done this to herself? She truly needed to remember, and thus, for the first time in years, she experienced a clear sensation of the potent oblivion of the drug.

Chapter
41

august 27, 2001

The Midwa
y u
nder the long green hands of the oaks and elms on the Midway, Muriel and Larry walked in search of a bench. Each had a sub bundled in wax paper tucked under an arm, and the bright red cup of a soft drink in hand. This narrow pleasance, miles long, had been leveled and planted not long after the Civil War, an urban garden amid a road where horses clip-clopped in front of carriages. Now four lanes of traffic, two on the east, two on the west, whizzed by, discouraging any effort to speak until they were side by side in front of a bench of splintering crossbeams on a cement base.

"Here?" asked Muriel.

"Whatever." He remained grumpy about taking this stroll.

"I was just thinking about us, Larry, and I realized that all our time together has been in confined spaces. You know? You keep talking to me about gardens but we've always been within walls. Courtroom. Office. Hotel room."

A huge bus motored by at that point, roaring as it accelerated and spilling poisonous smells from its exhaust.

"Very rural," said Larry. "Why did I have the feeling as I was walking, Muriel, that I was on a death march?"

She could not quite muster a smile. She'd unwrapped her lunch but put it down. Somehow the next sentence required two hands.

"I've decided to dismiss our case against Rommy Gandolph," she said. It was not really a difficult analysis. Larry's treasure hunt under Erno's shed had yielded six more items with Erdai's prints, or Collins's, and not a bit of evidence against Squirrel. But she still dreaded speaking the words.

Larry had bitten off a large section of his sandwich and continued to chew, but he was otherwise rigid. His tie, dragged down six inches from his collar, rode up and stayed parallel to the ground for quite some time on the wind.

"You're the first person I've told," Muriel said. "After Ned, I mean."

He swallowed, then said, "I'm out here so nobody can hear me screaming. Right?"

She hadn't thought of that. But, as always, instinct had probably led her this way for a reason.

"You have to be kidding, Muriel. You're in a perfect position. You said Arthur wouldn't deal, but now he has no choice if he doesn't want to butcher his girlfriend in court."

After all this time, she still hadn't internalized the differences in their worlds. Larry was one of the smartest people she knew. He read books. He could think abstractly. But to him the law was only tactics. He'd never bothered to fool himself, as lawyers did, into accepting its lines of trivial consistency. He saw only a big picture where the practitioners thought up logical reasons for doing whatever they wanted to.

"I doubt he would do that," said Muriel. "He'd be selling out his client to save Gillian."

"It's worth a try."

"It's unethical for both of us, Larry. Him-and me to propose it."

"Who are you talking to, Muriel?"

"Larry, I'm no better than anybody else, I get caught up, but I do try. I believe that stuff about how you can't enforce the rules if yo
u w
on't live by them. Besides/' she said and felt her heart shiver, "I don't really believe Squirrel is guilty anymore."

Even before she spoke, she knew what she was saying, but the effect of watching him shrink from her remained heartbreaking. His spine, his face became hard as concrete. He was the one man on earth who'd loved her in the way she would have chosen and he was going to be her enemy.

"He confessed," said Larry quietly. That was the essence of it. In the end, she could say Larry fooled her. But Larry, a detective for more than twenty years now, would have to say he'd fooled himself. It might have been either a failure of integrity or a lapse in competence. Or a little of both. Yet at this stage, it would be even worse for him to attribute his mistake to his passion to please her.

The other day she had thought he was being melodramatic when he said she couldn't do this to him. But with a frequency unmatched by anyone else, Larry often beat her to the finish line, and he'd done it then. To accept her judgment, he would have to ruin himself in his own eyes. No one's devotion went that far.

"Larry, the way it's going down, it. will all be on Gillian. No Dickerman. Or Collins. No doubts about the investigation. Off the record, our story is that we couldn't risk a double jeopardy ruling when it might mean opening the prison door for everyone who appeared before Gillian over the years. If we have to fight that fight, we can't do it in a capital case, where the procedural law is so exacting."

As she explained, Larry's blue eyes never left her. Finally, he got up and walked several feet to a mesh waste bin and slammed the sandwich down in it. Then he recrossed the ragged parkway where the grass had failed, leaving circles of mud between the bent grass and dandelions.

"You know you're full of shit, don't you?" he said. "Laying this on Gillian -that protects you a hell of a lot more than me."

"I understand it helps both of us."

"Once you cut Rommy loose, the first thing Arthur does is file a big civil suit-all this stuff about Dickerman and Collins, that will come out in discovery."

"There won't be discovery, Larry. They wouldn't take the chance of letting Squirrel be deposed-he could say anything. That case will settle quick and dirty."

"Right after the primary."

In his imagination, she no longer retained any dimension. She calculated and did not feel. But she nodded in response. She was who she was. And it wasn't always pretty. She wondered if it was worth telling him how large her ache for him would be. There were going to be horrible nights. But she would stay busy. The worst times would probably be years from now.

Yesterday, she had prayed fervently in church. She had thanked God for her blessings. A meaningful life. Talmadge's grandchild. No one got everything. She did not have love, but that was probably because she wanted it less than some other people. Still, she felt dizzy again as she came to her feet. She wanted terribly at this instant to crawl against him. But loneliness was what she had chosen. Larry was hunched forward with his mouth against the heel of his palm, clearly colored by rage. When he thought about her, she knew, it was always going to be as the woman who had ruined his life.

"I have to go see John Leonidis," she said. "I told him I'd meet him at Paradise."

"Back to the scene of the crime," said Larry. "Right."

"Don't ask me to cover you on this. With him. Or the Force. I won't, Muriel. I'm going to tell the truth about you to anyone who asks."

Her enemy. His truth. She looked at him one last time and then turned to flag down a taxi.

She cried quietly for half the trip to the restaurant. Then in the last few miles, she began to think about what she would say to John. She was going to tell him everything, all the details. He was not the kind to blab and if he did, so be it. Instead, she tried to imagine something to console him. John Leonidis had waited a decade for a death to make up for the crime against his father. Even if she could convince him that Erno alone had killed his father, which she herself accepted as a certainty-even then, John would be roiled and miserable a
t t
he thought that Erdai had left life on his own terms. At the end of the day, after a decade of trying murder cases and communing with the victims' families, Muriel was convinced that most of the survivors in some remote segment of their consciousness-the primeval part that was scared of the dark and loud noises-assumed that when the right person died, the one who deserved to be removed from the planet, when that occurred their lost loved one would come back to life. That was the pathetic logic of revenge, learned in the playpen, and of the sacrificial altar, where we attempted to trade life for life.

She'd seen three executions now, as a supervisor. At the first, the father of the victim, a mother of two who'd been shot down at a Stop-N- Go gas mart, came away embittered, angry that what had been held out as a balm had only made him feel worse. But the two later families claimed that they'd gotten something from it-an end point, a sense of an awful equilibrium being restored to the world, the peace of mind that at least no one else would suffer again from this dead bastard as they had. But hurting as she did at the moment, she could not really remember why inflicting more harm would make life on earth better for anyone.

Muriel pulled aside the heavy glass door at Paradise, with a clear recollection of how she had felt in the raw summer heat when she had entered with Larry a decade ago, the cool air suddenly embracing her bare legs, which were still tingling from her activities with Larry an hour before. That was gone. He was gone. She faced that again. Perhaps it was the thought of Larry, and his dedication to what she now took as a fiction, but her mind passed briefly to Rommy Gandolph. In a dreamlike moment, she saw Squirrel as if in a cartoon, beneath a pale light in a dripping dungeon. Her inclination was to laugh, but somehow the light she envisioned, like a small porch lamp, was actually the first point of radiance of her increasing pain. It would take decades, the rest of her life, to contend with what they had done to him and the reasons why.

As always, John received her warmly. He hugged her, then took her back to the office which had once been his father's. Gus's photographs remained in the same spots on the walls.

"This isn't good news, is it?" he asked. Heel seen the papers over the weekend about Gillian. Aires's phrase, "the Junkie Judge," had proved a headline writers fave.