Presumed Innocent (14 page)

"You knew some of her secrets," I say. "You met the kid."

"That's true. You've talked to him?"

"Last week."

"And he blew Mommy's cover?"

I say yes. I know how much a man in Raymond's shoes wants to believe he was inscrutable.

"An unhappy kid," Raymond observes.

"You know, he told me that she wanted to be P.A."

"I heard that from her. I told her she had to work the vineyards a little. Either you got to have professional standing or political connections. You can't just walk into it." Raymond's tone is casual, but he gives me a penetrating look: I'm not as dumb as you think, he is saying, I can see the forest for the trees. A dozen years of power and flattery have not dulled him that much. I feel, with pleasure, a gust of pride and respect again for Raymond. Good for you, I think.

So that's the way it worked. Four months ago they ended, Raymond said. Well, the arithmetic fits: Raymond announced and Carolyn went her own way. She had figured, like everybody else, that Raymond wasn't running, that he could hand the mantle to anyone he chose. Maybe he could be persuaded to make it a woman — depart with one final gesture in the direction of progress. The only puzzle is why Carolyn's train to glory had stopped first with me. Why tarry with the local when you're ready to hop the express? Unless it was all a little less calculating than it now seems.

"She was one tough cookie, that one," Horgan says. "A good kid, you know. But tough. Tough."

"Yeah," I say, "good and tough and dead."

Raymond stands.

"Can I ask one more?" I ask.

"Now you want to get personal, huh?" Raymond smiles, all Irish charm and teeth. "Let me guess: What the fuck was I doing with that file?"

"Close," I say. "But I understand why you didn't want it floating around. Why'd you give it to her in the first place?"

"Shit," he says, "she asked. You wanna be cynical? She asked
and
I was sleeping with her. I guess she heard about it from Linda Perez." One of the paralegals who read the crank mail. "You know Carolyn. Hot case. I suppose she thought it would be good for her. I considered it bullshit all along. What's the guy's name?"

"Noel?"

"Noel, right. He rainmade this guy." Swindled. Kept the money. "That's my take. Don't you think?"

"I don't know."

"She looked at it, went out, and shoveled through the records in the 32nd District. There was nothing there. That's what she told me."

"I would like to have heard about the case," I say, with the lightning tongue of a quick drunk.

Raymond nods. He drinks more of his whiskey.

"You know how it is, Rusty. You do one dumb thing, you do another dumb thing. She didn't want me to talk about it. Somebody asks why I gave her the case and pretty soon everyone knows she's balling the boss. The boss didn't mind keeping that one to himself, either. You understand. Who'd it hurt?"

"Me," I say, as I have meant to do for many years.

He nods at that one, too.

"I'm sorry, Rusty. I really am. Shit, I'm the sorriest son of a bitch in town." He goes to a sideboard and looks at a picture of his kids. There are five of them. Then he goes to put on his coat. His arms and hands move unevenly; he has a hard time smoothing down the collar. "You know, if I really do lose this fucking election, I'm just gonna quit. Let Nico run the show, he wants to so bad." He stops. "Or maybe you. You wanna do this job for a little while?"

Thanks, Raymond, I think. Thanks a lot. In the end, maybe Carolyn had the right approach.

But I cannot help myself. I get up, too. I turn down Raymond's collar. I shut off the lights and lock his office and point him down the hall in the right direction. I make sure that he will take a cab. The last thing I say to him is "Your shoes are too big to fill." And, of course, old habits being what they are, when the words come out of me, I mean them.

Somehow the dizzy, mad hunger I felt for Carolyn showed itself in a revived addiction to rock music.

"This had nothing to do with Carolyn's tastes," I explained to Robinson. Even in the madhouse of the P.A.'s office, she kept a symphonic station on in her office. And it wasn't some kind of adolescent nostalgia. I did not crave the vintage sixties soul and rock, which had sound-tracked my late teens and early twenties. This was New Wave junk: screechy, whiny music with perverse lyrics and rhythms mindless as rain. I began driving to work, telling Barbara I was going through my annual phobic reaction to the bus. The car, of course, made my evening escapes to Carolyn's apartment easier; but those, in any event, could have been arranged. What I wanted was the chance to drive for fifty minutes with the windows cranked tight while Rock Radio, WNOF, screamed from the wagon's speakers, the volume so high that the windshield rattled when the bass line became prominent on certain songs.

"I was messed up, all strung out." When I walked down the street after parking the car, I was half-tumescent because I was starting a day which was, I felt, a tantalizing sweet crawl toward my secret plunder of Carolyn. I sweated all day, my pulse raced. And every hour or so, in the midst of a phone call or a conference, I was visited by visions, so palpable and immediate, of Carolyn in passionate repose, that I would become lost in space and time.

Carolyn, for her part, was chilling in her command. The weekend after our initial night together, I spent hours — dazed, unrooted hours — pondering our next encounter. I had no idea what was to follow. At the door to her apartment, she had kissed my hand and said, simply, See you. For me, there was no thought of resistance. I would take whatever was allowed.

On Monday morning, I appeared at her office door with a file in my hand. My pose, my pace, had already been endlessly planned. Nothing urgent. I leaned against the doorjamb. I smiled, hip and calm. Carolyn was at her desk. The Jupiter Symphony was surging.

About the Nagel case, I say.

The Nagels were another visit to the dark side of suburbia: a husband-and-wife rape-and-sodomy team. She would approach women on the street, assist in the abduction, engage in imaginative uses of a dildo. Carolyn wanted to plead the case out, with the wife taking a lesser charge.

I can live with the plea, I tell her, but I think we need two counts.

Only now does Carolyn look up from her work. Impassive. Her eyes do not quiver. In a mild collegial way she smiles.

Who's got her? I ask, meaning who is her defense lawyer.

Sandy, Carolyn answers, referring to Alejandro Stern, who seems to represent every person of genteel upbringing who is charged with a crime in this state.

Tell Sandy, I say, that she has to plead to an Agg Battery, too. We don't want the judge to think we're trying to tie his hands.

Or the press to think we're pushing probation for female sex violators, says she.

That too, I say. We're equal-opportunity prosecutors.

I smile. She smiles. I linger. I have gotten through this, but my heart is knocking, and I fear that there is something fluttering and insipid in my expression.

Okay. I flap the file against my thigh. I turn.

We should have a drink, she says.

I nod with buttoned-up lips. Gil's? I ask.

How about, she says, the place we ended up on Friday?

Her apartment. My soul expands. She has the barest inkling of a smile, but she has looked back to her work, even before I have departed.

"In reflection, I see myself on that threshold with immense pity. I was so full of hope. So grateful. And I should have known the future from the past."

There was great passion in my love for Carolyn, but seldom joy. From that instant forward, when I realized this would go on, I was like the mandrake in the old poems I read in college, pulled screaming from the earth. I was devastated by my passion. I was shattered. Riven. Decimated. Torn to bits. Every moment was turmoil. What I'd struck upon was old and dark and deep. I had no vision of myself. I was like a blind ghost groping about a castle and moaning for love. The idea of Carolyn, more even than the image, was upon me every moment. I wanted in a way I could not recall — and the desire was insistent, obsessive, and, because of that, somehow debased. Now I think of Pandora, whom as a child I always confused with Peter Pan, opening her box and finding that torrent of miseries unloosed.

"There was something so real in the flesh of another woman," I told the shrink.

After almost twenty years of sleeping with Barbara, I no longer went to bed with only her. I lay down with five thousand other fucks; with the recollection of younger bodies; with the worries for the million things that supported and surrounded our life: the corroding rain gutters, Nat's unwillingness to study mathematics, the way Raymond, over the years, had come to greet my work with an eye to its defects rather than successes, the particular arrogant glint that came into my mother-in-law's eye when she discussed any person outside her immediate family, including me. In our bed, I reached for Barbara through the spectral intervention of all these visitors, all that time.

But Carolyn was pure phenomenon. I was dizzy. I was disoriented. After seventeen years of faithful marriage, of wandering impulse suppressed for the sake of tranquil domestic life, I could not believe that I was here, with fantasy made real. Real. I studied her naked body. The gorgeous large areolas, her long nipples, the sheen of her flesh running from her belly to her thighs. I was lost and high, here in the land beyond restraint, rescued from the diligent, slowly moving circles of my life. Each time I entered her, I felt I divided the world.

"I was with her three or four nights a week. We tended toward a routine. She left the door unlocked for me and the news was on when I arrived." Carolyn was cleaning, drinking, opening her mail. A bottle of white wine, cool and wet like some river-bottom stone, was uncorked on the kitchen table. She never rushed to greet me. Her business, whatever it was, preoccupied her. Usually her comments to me as she traveled between rooms were about the office or local political events. The rumors were thick by then that Raymond would not be running, and Carolyn followed this possibility with great interest. She seemed to gather scuttlebutt from everywhere — the office, the police force, the bar association.

And then, sometime, finally, she would find her way to me. Open her arms. Embrace me. Welcome me. I found her bathing once and made love to her there. I caught her once while she was dressing. But usually we would go through that wandering toward one another, time passing until she was finally ready to lead me to the bedroom, where my hour of worship would begin.

My approach to her was prayerful. Most often, I found myself on my knees. I would unpeel her skirt, her slip, her pants, so that her perfect thighs, that lovely triangle, were exposed as she stood before me; even before I began to push my face in her, that heavy female aroma overpowered the atmosphere. Perfect mad wild moments. On my knees, straining and blind, driving my face inside her, my tongue at work in fevered, silent ululation, while I stretched my hands upward, probing in her garments for her breasts. My passion at those moments was as pure as music.

Then, slowly, Carolyn would take control. She liked it rough, and in time, I would be called upon to slam myself inside her. I stood beside the bed. I dug my hands into her behind and shook her.

"She did not stop speaking."

"Saying what?" Robinson asked.

"You know: Mumbles. Words." 'Good.' 'More.' 'Yes, yes. Oh yes.' 'Oh, hard.' 'Hold on, hold on, hold on, oh, please, baby, yes.'

We were not, I realized later, lovers who fulfilled each other's needs. As time went on, Carolyn's mood with me seemed to become more confrontational. For all her pretense to sophistication, I found that she could border on the gross. She liked to talk dirty. She boasted. She liked to talk about my parts: I'm going to suck your cock, your hard hairy cock. These outbursts would astound me. One time I laughed, but her look revealed such obvious displeasure, almost fury, that I learned to absorb these predatory remarks. I let her have her way. For her, over days, I realized there was a progression. This lovemaking seemed to have for her a destiny, a goal. She was to be given her own dominion. She would roam, take my penis in her mouth, let it go, and slide her hand past my scrotum, probing in that hole. One night she spoke to me. 'Does Barbara do this for you?' Working there. And looking up to ask again, serene, commanding, 'Does Barbara do this for you?' She showed no reluctance, no fear. By now, Carolyn knew there would be no wilting paroxysm of shame from me at the mention of Barbara's name. She knew. She could bring my wife into our bed and make her one more witness to how much I was willing to abandon.

Most nights we ordered out for Chinese food. The same kid always brought it, squint-eyed and looking greedily at Carolyn in her orange silk robe. Then we would lie in bed, passing the cartons back and forth. The TV was on. Always, wherever she was, a TV or a radio was going, a habit, I realized, of her many years alone. In bed, we would gossip. Carolyn was an acute observer of the maelstrom of local politics and its endless crabbed quests for private aggrandizement and power. She viewed it in those terms, but with more excitement than I did and less amusement. She was not as willing as I to disown the quest for personal glory. She viewed it as the natural right of everyone, including her.

While I was seeing Carolyn, Nico was in the initial phases of his campaign. At that point I did not take him seriously. None of us, including Carolyn, gave him any chance to win. Carolyn, however, saw a different potential, which she explained one night not long before our little paradise came to an end. I was telling her my latest analysis of Nico's motives.

He wants a sop, I told Carolyn. He's waiting for Raymond's friends to find something for him. It's not good party politics in Kindle County to begin a primary fight. Look at Horgan. Bolcarro's never let him forget that Raymond ran against him for mayor.

What if Bolcarro wants to get even?