Presumed Innocent (6 page)

"You should have," Barbara says.

I look back at her.

"Really." Her enthusiasm, in a way, is not surprising. Barbara has always felt a spouse's disdain for the boss. And besides, all of this comes, somewhat, at my expense. I'm the one who lacked the nerve to do what everybody else could see was obvious.

"I am not a politician."

"Oh, you'd make do," says Barbara. "You'd love to be P.A." As I figured: I am tweaked by wife's superior knowledge of my nature. I decide to sidestep and tell Barbara that this is all academic. Raymond will pull through.

"Bolcarro will finally endorse him. Or we'll catch the killer" — I nod toward the TV set—"and he'll ride into Election Day with all the media murmuring his name."

"How's he going to do that?" asks Barbara. "Do they have a suspect?"

"We have shit."

"So?"

"So Dan Lipranzer and Rusty Sabich will work day and night for the next two weeks and catch Raymond a killer. That's the strategy. Carefully devised."

The remote snaps and the TV shrinks to a star. Behind me, I hear from Barbara a whinny, a snort. It is not a pleasant sound. When I look back, her eyes, fixed upon me, are stilled to a zero point, an absolute in hatred.

"You are so predictable," she says, low and mean. "You're in charge of this investigation?"

"Of course."

" 'Of course'?"

"Barbara, I'm the chief deputy prosecuting attorney and Raymond's running for his life. Who else would handle the investigation? Raymond would do it himself if he weren't campaigning fourteen hours a day."

It was the prospect of a moment just like this that left me in a state of excruciating unease a couple of days ago when I realized that I would have to phone Barbara to tell her what had happened. I could not ignore it; that would pretend too much. My call was for the announced purpose of telling Barbara I would be late. The office, I explained, was in an uproar.

Carolyn Polhemus is dead, I added.

Huh, said Barbara. Her tone was one of detached wonder. An overdose? she asked.

I stared at the receiver in my hand, marveling at the depth of this misunderstanding.

But I cannot divert her now. Barbara's rage is gathering.

"Tell me the truth," she says. "Isn't that a conflict of interest or something?"

"Barbara—"

"No," she says, standing now. "Answer me. Is that professional — for you to be doing this? There are 120 lawyers down there. Can't they find anybody who didn't sleep with her?"

I am familiar with this rise in pitch and descent in tactics. I strive to remain even.

"Barbara, Raymond asked me to do it."

"Oh, spare me, Rusty. Spare me the high purpose, noble crap. You could explain to Raymond why you shouldn't do this."

"I don't care to. I would be letting him down. And it happens to be none of his business."

At this evidence of my embarrassment, Barbara hoots. That I realize was poor strategy, a bad moment to tell the truth. Barbara has little sympathy for my secret; if it would not pain her equally, she would put it all on billboards. During the short time that I was actually seeing Carolyn, I did not have whatever it is — the courage or the decency or the willingness to be disturbed — to confess anything to Barbara. That awaited the end, a week or two after I had become resolved it all was past. I was home for an early dinner, atoning for the month before when I had been absent almost every evening, my liberty procured with the phony excuse of preparation for a trial, which I ultimately claimed had been continued. Nat had just gone off to his permitted half hour with the television set. And I, somehow, became unglued. The moon. The mood. A drink. The psychologists would say a fugue state. I drifted, staring at the dinner table. I took my highball tumbler in my hand, just like one of Carolyn's. And I was reminded of her so powerfully that I was suddenly beyond control. I cried — wept with stormy passion as I sat there — and Barbara knew immediately. She did not think that I was ill; she did not think that it was fatigue, or trial stress, or tear-duct disease. She knew; and she knew that I was crying out of loss, not shame.

There was nothing tender about her inquisition, but it was not prolonged. Who? I told her. Was I leaving? It was over, I said. It was short, I said, it barely happened.

Oh, I was heroic. I sat there at my own dining-room table with both arms over my face, crying, almost howling, into my shirtsleeves. I heard the dishes clank as Barbara stood and began clearing her place. 'At least I don't have to ask,' she said, 'who dropped who.'

Later, after I got Nat into bed, I wandered up, shipwrecked and still pathetic, to see her in the bedroom, where she had taken refuge. Barbara was exercising again, with the insipid music on the tape thumping loudly. I watched her bend, do her double-jointed extensions, while I was still in deep disorder, so ravaged, beaten, that my skin seemed the only thing holding me together, a tender husk. I had come in to say something prosaic, that I wanted to go on. But that never emerged. The unhindered anger with which she slammed her own body about made it obvious to me, even in my undefended state, that the effort would be wasted. I just watched, perhaps as long as five minutes. Barbara never glanced at me, but finally in the midst of some contortion she uttered an opinion. 'You could have. Done better.' There was a little more which I did not hear. The final word was 'Bimbo.'

We have gone on from there. In a way my affair with Carolyn has provided an odd kind of relief. There is a cause now for the effect, an occasion for Barbara's black anger, a reason we do not get along. There is now something to get over and, as a result, a shadowy hope that things may improve.

That is, I realize, the issue now: whether we will give up whatever progress has been made. For months Carolyn has been a demon, a spirit slowly being exorcised from this home. And death has brought her back to life. I understand Barbara's complaint. But I cannot —
cannot
— give up what she wants me to; and my reasons are sufficiently personal as to lie within the realm of the unspoken, even the unspeakable.

I try a plain and quiet appeal.

"Barbara, what difference does it make? You're talking about two and a half weeks. Until the primary. That's all. Then it's another routine police case. Unsolved homicide."

"Don't you see what you're doing? To yourself? To me?"

"Barbara," I say again.

"I knew it," she says. "I knew you'd do something like this. When you called the other day. I could hear it in your voice. You're going to go through everything again, Rusty. You want to, that's the truth, isn't it? You want to. She's dead. And you're still obsessing."

"Barbara."

"Rusty, I have had more than I can take. I won't put up with this." Barbara does not cry on these occasions. She recedes instead into the fiery pit of a volcanic anger. She hurls herself back now to gather her will, bound, as she sits on the bed, within her wide satin sleeves. She grabs a book, the remote control, two pillows. Mount Saint Helens rumbles. And I decide to leave. I go to the closet and grope for my robe.

As I reach the threshold, she speaks behind me.

"Can I ask a question?" she says.

"Sure."

"That I always wanted to ask?"

"Sure."

"Why did she stop seeing you?"

"Carolyn?"

"No, the man in the moon." The words have so much bitterness that I wonder if she might spit. I would have thought Barbara's question would be why did I start, but she apparently decided on her own answers to that long ago.

"I don't know," I say. "I tend to think I wasn't very important to her."

She closes her eyes and opens them. Barbara shakes her head.

"You are an asshole," my wife tells me solemnly. "Just get out."

I do. Quickly. She has been known to throw things. Having nowhere else to go, and craving some form of company, I cross the hall to check once more on Nat. His breath is husky and uninterrupted in the deepest phase of sleep, and I sit down on the bed, safe in the dark beneath the protecting arms of Spider-Man.

Monday morning: a day in the life. The commuter coach unleashes the gray-flannel flock on the east side of the river. The terminal plaza is surrounded by willows, their skirts greening in the spring. I am in the office before 9:00. From my secretary, Eugenia Martinez, I receive the usual: mail, telephone-message slips, and a dark look. Eugenia is obese, single, middle-aged, and, it often seems, determined to get even for it all. She types reluctantly, refuses dictation, and many times of day I will find her staring with immobile droopy-eyed irritation at the telephone as it rings. Of course, she cannot be fired, or even demoted, because civil service, like concrete, has set. She remains, a curse to a decade of chief deputies, having first been stationed here by John White, who did so in order to avoid the carping that would have followed if he'd assigned her to anybody else.

On the top of what Eugenia has given me is a leave slip for Tommy Molto, whose absence remains unaccounted for. Personnel wants to dock him as Away without Leave. I make a note to talk to Mac about this and graze through my communications. The docket room has provided me with a printout naming thirteen individuals released from state custody in the last two years whose cases had been prosecuted by Carolyn. A handwritten note says that the underlying case files have been delivered to her office. I position the computer run in the center of my desk, so that I will not forget.

With Raymond out most of the day on campaign appearances, I resolve much of what the P.A. would ordinarily be faced with. I call the shots on case prosecutions, immunities, plea bargains, and deal with the investigative agencies. This morning I will preside over a charging conference in which we will decide on the phrasing and merits of all of this week's indictments. This afternoon I have a meeting about last week's fiasco, in which a police undercover bought from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in disguise; the two drew guns and badges on each other and demanded surrender. Their backups became involved, too, so that in the end eleven law enforcement officers were standing on opposite corners, shouting obscenities and waving their pistols. Now we are having meetings. The coppers will tell me the feds do everything in secret; the DEA agent in charge will insinuate that any confidence the police department learns is up for sale. In the meantime, I am supposed to find somebody to prosecute for killing Carolyn Polhemus.

Someone else may be looking, too. Near 9:30 I get a call from Stew Dubinsky from the
Trib
. During the campaign, Raymond answers most press calls himself; he does not want to miss the free ink or draw criticisms that he is losing his hold on the office. But Stew is probably the best courthouse reporter we have. He gets most of his facts straight and he knows the boundaries. I can talk to him.

"So what's new on Carolyn?" he asks. The way he shorthands the murder with her name disconcerts me. Carolyn's death is already receding from the ranks of tragedy to become one more ugly historic event.

I cannot, of course, tell Stew that nothing is doing. Word could trail back to Nico, who would use the occasion to blast us again.

"Prosecuting Attorney Raymond Horgan had no comment," I say.

"Would the P.A. care to comment on another piece of information?" This, whatever it is, is the real motive for Stew's call. "I hear something about a high-level defection. From the Homicide Section? Sound familiar?"

That would be Molto. After Nico left, Tommy, his second-in-command, became acting head of the section. Horgan refused to give him the job permanently, suspecting that sooner or later something like this would come to pass. I contemplate for a moment the fact that the press is already sniffing. No good. Not at all. I see, from the way Dubinsky has lined up the questions, how this will run. One high-ranking deputy is killed; another, who should be in charge of the investigation, quits. It will sound as if the office is on the verge of chaos.

"Same response," I tell him. "Quote the P.A."

Stew makes a sound. He is bored.

"Off the record?" I ask.

"Sure."

"How good is your information?" I want to know how close we are to reading about this.

"So-so. Guy who always thinks he knows more than he does. I figure this has got to be Tommy Molto. He and Nico are hand-and-glove, right?"

Stew clearly does not have enough to run. I avoid his question. "What does Della Guardia tell you?" I ask.

"He says he has no comment. Come on, Rusty," Dubinsky says, "what gives?"

"Stew, off the record, I do not have the most fucked-up idea where Tommy Molto is. But if he's holding hands with Nico, why won't the candidate tell you that?"

"You want a theory?"

"Sure."

"Maybe Nico has him out there investigating the case on his own. Think about that one.
DELLA GUARDIA CATCHES KILLER
. How's that for a headline?"

The notion is absurd. A private murder investigation could too easily end up an impediment to the police. Obstruction of justice is bad politics. But as ridiculous as it is, the sheer flare of the idea makes it sound like Nico. And Stew is not the kind to float loony notions. He works off information.

"Do I take it," I ask, "that this is part of your rumor, too?"

"No comment," says Stew.

We laugh at each other, before I hang up the phone. Immediately I make some calls. I leave a message with Loretta, Raymond's secretary, that I have to speak with him whenever he phones in. I try to find Mac, the administrative deputy, to talk about Molto. Not in, I'm told. I leave another message.

Then, with a few minutes before the charging conference, I venture down the hall to Carolyn's office. This place already has a desolate air. The Empire desk which Carolyn commandeered from Central Services has been swept clean, and the contents of the drawers — two old compacts, soup mix, a package of napkins, a cable-knit sweater, a pint bottle of peppermint schnapps — have been pitched into a cardboard box, along with Carolyn's diplomas and bar certificates, which were formerly clustered on the walls. Cartons called in from the warehouse are pyramided in the middle of the room, giving the office an air of obvious disuse, and the dust gathered in a week's inactivity has its own faintly corrupt smell. I pour a glass of water in the wilting greenery and dust some of the leaves.