Presumed Innocent (54 page)

"I didn't set you up," he says. "I know what people think. But I didn't have anybody screw with the evidence. Not Tommy. Not Kumagai." I almost wince at the thought of Painless. He has resigned now from the police department. He had no refuge. He could only claim collusion or incompetence, and so he chose the lesser — and I believe more apt — of the two evils. He did not botch the semen specimen, of course, but I've come to believe that no one would have been indicted if he'd looked back at his autopsy notes. Nobody could have put it all together. Maybe Tommy's also to blame for pushing too hard to bring a marginal case. I suppose he thought my hide would still his grief — or envy — whatever state it was that Carolyn had left him in which so riled his passions.

Nico in the meantime continues, sincere as ever. "I really didn't," he says. "I know what you think. But I have to tell you that. I didn't do that."

"I know you didn't, Delay," I say. And then I tell him what I think is the truth. "You did your job the way you thought you were supposed to. You just relied on the wrong people."

He watches me.

"Well, it's probably not going to be my job much longer. You've heard about this recall thing?" he asks. He is looking up and down the street again. "Of course you have. Everybody has. Well, what's the difference? They all tell me my career is over."

He is not looking for sympathy. He just wants me to know that the waves of calamity have spread and washed over him as well. Carolyn has pulled all of us down in her black wake. I find myself encouraging him.

"You can't tell, Delay. You never know how things'll turn out."

He shakes his head.

"No, no," he says. "No, you're the hero, I'm the goat. It's great." Nico smiles, in a sudden way, so that you know he finds his own thoughts weird, inappropriate. "A year ago, you could have beat me in the election, and you could do it today. Isn't that great?" Nico Della Guardia laughs out loud, pinched by his own ironies, the peculiar readings from his own terms of reference. He spreads his arms here in the middle of Kindle Boulevard. "Nothing," he says, "has changed."

In the front room of the home in which I have lived for better than eight years there is complete disorder. Open boxes, half packed, are everywhere, and items removed from shelves and drawers are strewn in all directions. The furniture is gone. I never cared much for the sofa or the love seat, and Barbara wanted them for her condo outside Detroit. I'll move January 2 to an apartment in the city. Not a bad place. The realtor said I was lucky to get it. The house is up for rent. I've decided that each step should be slow.

Now that Nat has left, the job of packing seems to take forever. I move from room to room. Every item reminds me of something. Each corner seems to contain its quotient of pain and melancholy. When I reach my limit, I start working somewhere else. I think often of my father and that scene I recalled for Marty Polhemus, in which I found my old man, the week after my mother's death, packing up the apartment he had abandoned a few years before. He worked in a sleeveless undervest, and he had a brazen manner as he pitched the remains of his adult life into crates and boxes. He kicked the cartons from his path as he moved about the rooms.

I heard from Marty just last week. He sent a Christmas card. "Glad to hear everything worked out for you." I laughed aloud when I read his message. Lord, that kid really has the knack. I threw the card away. But the toll of loneliness is greater than I imagined. A couple of hours ago, I went rummaging through the boxes of trash in the living room, looking for the envelope. I need the address to write him back.

I never wrote my father. After he left for Arizona, I did not see him again. I called on occasion, but only because Barbara dialed the number and put the receiver in my hand. He was so deliberately uncommunicative, so chary with the details of his life, that it was never worth the effort. I knew he was living with a woman by then, that he worked three days a week in a local bakery. He found Arizona hot.

The woman, Wanda, called to tell me he was dead. That was more than eight years ago now, but the shock of it, in a way, is with me every day. He was strong and fit; I had taken it for granted that he would live to be a hundred, that there would always be this far-off target for my bitterness. He had already been cremated. Wanda only found my number as she was cleaning out the trailer and she insisted I come West to settle the rest of his affairs. Barbara was eight months pregnant then and we both regarded this trip West as my father's final imposition. Wanda, it turned out, was from New York City, in her late fifties, tall, not bad-looking. She did not hesitate to speak ill of the dead. Actually, she told me when I arrived, she had moved out on him six months before. They called her from the bakery, where he collapsed with the coronary, because they knew no one else. 'I don't know why I do these things. Really, I have to tell you,' she said, after a couple of drinks, 'he was mostly a prick.'

She did not think it was funny when I suggested her phrase was what should be carved on the stone.

She left me alone to pick through the trailer. On his bed were red socks. In the chifforobe, I found another six or seven dozen pairs of men's hose. Red and yellow. Striped. Dotted. Argyles. In his last years, my father had finally found an indulgence.

The doorbell rings. I feel the faintest surge of anticipation. I look forward to a moment's conversation with the postal carrier or the man from UPS.

"Lip," I say through the storm door. He enters and stomps the snow off his feet.

"Nice and homey," Lip says, surveying the disaster in the living room. As he stands on the doormat, he hands me a small package, not much wider than the satin bow on top.

"Christmas present," he says.

"That's awfully nice," I say. We've never done this before.

"I figured you could use a pick-me-up. Nat get off okay?"

I nod. I took him to the airport yesterday. They allowed him to be seated first. I wanted to go with him onto the plane, but Nat would not permit it. From the doorway, I watched him go down the jetway in his dark blue NFL parka, alone and already lost in dreams. He is his father's son. He did not turn to wave. I want, I thought quite distinctly, I want the life I had.

Lip and I spend a moment looking at each other. I still have not taken his coat. God, it is awkward, and it is like this with everyone, people on the street or people I know well. So much has happened to me that I never counted on. And how are people to respond? Somehow it does not fit into any recognized conversational pattern to say, It's tough about your wife, but at least they didn't get you for that murder.

I finally offer him a beer.

"If you're drinkin," he answers, and follows me to the kitchen. Here, too, half the housewares are in boxes.

As I'm taking a glass out of the cabinet, Lipranzer points to the package he brought, which I've set down on the table.

"I wanna see you open that. I been savin it a while."

He has done a careful job with the paper.

"I never saw a gift wrapped before," I say, "with hospital corners."

Crumpled inside a small white box is a manila envelope ribboned with red-and-white evidence tape. I tear through that and find the glass that turned up missing during the trial, the tumbler from Carolyn's bar. I put it all down on the table and take a step away. This is one guess where I would never have been close.

Lip fishes in his pocket and comes out with his lighter. He holds a corner of the evidence envelope in the flame until he's sure it's burning, then flips in into the sink. The glass he hands to me. The blue ninhydrin powder is still all over it, the three partial prints etched there, a kind of surrealistic delft. I hold the glass up to the window light for a moment, trying for reasons I cannot discern to figure which of the tiny networks of lines are the marks of my right thumb and my third right middle finger, the former telltale signs. I am still looking at the glass when I start talking to Lipranzer.

"There's a genuine question here, whether I should be touched," I say, and now finally catch his eye, "or
real
pissed off."

"How's that?"

"It's a felony in this state to secrete evidence of a crime. You hung your ass out a good long way on this one, Lipper."

"No one around who'll ever know." Lip pours the beer that I've just opened. "Besides, I didn't do a goddamn thing. It was them that fucked up. Remember they got Schmidt to come grab all the evidence? The glass wasn't there. I'd took the thing down to Dickerman. Next day I get a call from the lab, the test is done, I can come pick up my glass. When I get down there somebody's signed the receipt 'Returned to Evidence.' You know, the idea is that I'll put it back in. Only I don't got any way to put it anywhere, since it's not my goddamn case anymore. So I tossed it in a drawer. Figured sooner or later somebody's gotta ask me. Nobody did. In the meantime, Molto's like every other half-ass deputy. Signs off on all the receipts without matchin em against the evidence. Three months later he's got himself a bucket of shit. But that's his problem." Lip lifts his glass and drains most of it. "None of them ever had the most screwed-up idea where the thing went. They tell stories about the way Nico tore his office apart. He had them pick up the tacked-down carpet, I hear."

We laugh, both of us, knowing Nico. When he gets very excited you can see his scalp redden where the hair has thinned. His freckles seem to stand out more as well. After the laughter is done, we wait through a little hollow moment of silence.

"You know why I'm pissed, don't you?" I finally ask.

Lip shrugs and raises his beer.

"You thought I killed her," I say.

He's prepared for this and does not even flinch. He belches before he answers.

"Lady was bad news."

"Which makes it okay if I killed her?"

"Did you?" asks Lip.

That, of course, is what he's come to find out. If he just wanted to be a soul brother, he'd have taken the glass with him the last time he went fishing and dropped it in the Crown Falls, which rages so magnificently up there near Skageon. But it must be eating at him. That's why he's offered the glass, so I know that we're in it together.

"You think I did, don't you?"

He drinks his beer.

"It's possible."

"Screw off. You're gonna stick your neck out like that cause it's just a little possibility, like life on Mars?"

Lip looks straight at me, his eyes clear and gray.

"I'm not wearin a wire, you know."

"I wouldn't care if you were. I've been tried and acquitted. Double-jeopardy clause says that's all she wrote. I could publish my confession in the
Trib
tomorrow and nobody could try me again for murder. Only we both know, Lip" — I take a slug of the beer I've opened for myself—"they never do admit it, do they?"

Lip looks across the kitchen toward something that isn't there.

"Forget it," he says.

"I'm not going to forget it. Just tell me what you think, okay? You think I cooled her. That's not just for the sporting life that a fifteen-year copper hikes the evidence in the biggest case in town. Right?"

"Right. It ain't just sportin life." My friend Dan Lipranzer looks at me. "I think you killed her."

"How? I mean, you must have worked it out in your head."

He does not hesitate as long as I would have thought.

"I figure you cracked her in anger. The rest was just to make it look good. There wouldn't be much point in sayin you were sorry once she was dead."

"And why was I so pissed off?"

"I don't know. Who knows? She dumped you, right? For Raymond. That's enough to be pissed about."

Slowly, I remove the beer glass from Lipranzer's hand. I can see his apprehension when I do that. He is prepared for me to fling it. Instead, I put it on the kitchen table next to the one he brought, the one they found on Carolyn's bar, the one with my prints. They are identical. Then I go to the cabinet and take down the rest of the set, until there are a dozen glasses standing there in two rows, one sudsed with beer foam at the head on the left, one dusted with blue powder at the front of the line next to it. It is a rare moment, in which Lipranzer wears none of his hipped-up wise-guy look.

I run the water in the sink, washing down the ashes, then fill the basin with suds. I start talking while I do that.

"Imagine a woman, Lip, a strange woman, with a very precise mathematical mind. Very internal. To herself. Angry and depressed. Most of the time she is volcanically pissed. With life. With her husband. With the miserable, sad affair he had in which he gave away everything she wanted. She wanted to be his obsession and instead he's hung up on this manipulative slut, who anyone but he could see regarded him as sport. This woman, Lip, the wife, is sick in spirit and in the heart, and maybe in the head, if we're going to be laying all the cards out on the table.

"She's mixed up. She is seriously on the fence about this marriage. Some days she's sure she's going to leave him. Some days she wants to stay. Either way she has to do something. The whole thing's eating at her, destroying her. And either way, she has a wish, a wild secret hope that the woman he was sleeping with could end up dead. When the wife's rage is at a peak, she's ready to abandon her husband, head for open spaces. But there would be no satisfaction in that if the other woman is alive, because the husband, helpless slob that he is, will just go crawling back to her and end up with what his wife thinks he wants. The wife can get even only if the other woman is gone.

"But, of course, you always hurt the one you love. And in her down moods, she longs for everything they had, to find some way to bring them back to old times. But even in these moods, it seems that life would be better if the other woman were dead. With no choice, he will finally give up his obsession. Maybe then they can recycle things, build on the wreckage."

The sink by now is full of suds. The ninhydrin comes off the glass easily, although there is a sulfurous stink when it hits the water. Then I take down a towel and wipe the glass clean. When I am finished, I get a box and begin wrapping up the set. Lip helps. He separates the sheets of newsprint that the movers have provided. He is not talking yet.