The Last Trial

by Scott Turow

  “It’s a great result, Dad,” Marta says. “The guy was charged with murder and ended up with a moving violation.”

  “You do not go to the penitentiary for speeding.”

  “Neither will Kiril. Not for long anyway. The guideline will be high,” she says, referring to the time in prison prescribed by the federal sentencing guidelines, “but with the NG counts, Pafko’s cancer research, the lives he’s saved, and his age—all of it will give Sonny solid reasons to depart,” Marta says, meaning that the judge will be free to ignore the guidelines in this case. “The last thing Moses said was, ‘Call me.’ They know Kiril has a whopping good chance in the appellate court, with the murder evidence and Innis taking five. If Kiril waives appeal, we might get an agreed sentence, or a cap. Six months in, six months home confinement? He’ll work in the infirmary. It’ll be like going on a medical mission.”

  “How did Kiril take it?”

  Describing that part drives Marta down into a leatherette chair on the other side of the hospital bed.

  “Terribly. He cried. You know, he rose for the verdict. He stared when it was read, then he looked over at me and asked, ‘I am convicted?’ When I nodded, he just crumbled. He put his head down on the table, sobbing like a baby. Then two of the jurors started crying.”

  “But they held to their verdict when they were polled?” asks Stern. After the decision is announced in open court, the defense may request that the judge ask each juror individually, Was this and is this your verdict? In the federal system, all twelve jurors must agree to a conviction, and if even one person changes their mind and sticks to it, the case ends up a mistrial—as this one should have been.

  “I really thought one of them was going to buckle,” Marta says.

  “Mrs. Murtaugh?”

  “I bet you can date her, Dad.”

  “Totally,” says Pinky. “She’s just totally in love.”

  “I am retired, Marta. From the courtroom and matters of the heart.” Given how little he had staked on pursuing things with Innis, he is shocked by how hurt he is—or perhaps just humiliated.

  “One is a good idea,” says Marta, “the other maybe not.”

  “Bail?”

  “Yes, Sonny left Kiril on bond. Until sentencing. The usual.”

  “As soon as I am able, I would like to go see him. You will come, Marta?”

  “Of course.”

  “Al says I can leave the house on Monday. Please call the Pafkos to see if we can stop over then.”

  34. Donatella’s News

  Kiril and Donatella have lived for two decades in an English manor house in Greenwood County with steep slate mansards. Within, it is appointed in the tone of a British barony, with lustrous antiques of chestnut and cherry, long velvet drapes in scarlet, and sterling pieces heavy enough to double as murder weapons. Despite Donatella’s Italian bloodlines, her Anglophilic decoration is in the style of the Argentine upper class, which gravitated toward English mannerisms in the nineteenth century as a way to repudiate the influence of Spain.

  Stern has been here several times before for the huge holiday parties that the Pafkos hosted. It was just the kind of scene that pleased Kiril, a confluence of many of Kindle County’s most influential citizens—although ‘interesting’ would be the word Kiril would prefer—pols, musicians, many figures from Easton and the U, artists, business leaders. Still at heart the frightened young stranger who arrived here, Stern was always a little thrilled to be included.

  It is an odd visit from the start. A few minutes late, Stern and Marta find themselves standing outside on the front step for an eternity, even after ringing the bell several times. Marta has her cell phone in hand, about to call the house line, when Donatella sweeps the front door open. She blusters apologies, clearly harried, a rare mode for her, and shows them into the living room, where Stern is surprised to find Lep standing there to greet them, tall and slender in his corduroy sport coat.

  Donatella offers refreshments. They chat about Thanksgiving and the latest musical achievements of Lep’s daughters. Finally, after several minutes, Stern says, “Where, may I ask, is our friend Kiril?”

  Donatella and Lep exchange looks. The son finally says, “We don’t know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Donatella says, “I have not seen him for three days.”

  Stern tries to think of some way around the question, then finally asks, “Is that common?”

  “Common? No. He was not here for several nights before the arguments began, but then he returned all last week.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “He drove off early Friday afternoon.”

  “Did he say anything as he left?”

  Donatella purses her mouth. “He said, ‘Please forgive me, cara, for all of this.’”

  That does not sound good.

  “What was his mood?”

  “He seemed to be recovering a little, Sandy. The verdict had come only a few hours before.” She looks to Lep, who nods to support that assessment. Donatella continues. “He knew about this appointment. Marta, you spoke to him yourself. He was eager to thank both of you. He thought the defense you mounted was brilliant. Both Lep and I have been expecting him to come through the door any minute.”

  “Has he been to PT to look at his mail this morning or on Friday?” Stern asks Lep. The answer is no. He has not shown up at the lab at Easton either. Nor has Kiril responded to e-mails or calls.

  “Lep, have you asked anyone else who might have seen him?”

  “He missed his poker game Friday night.”

  “Anybody else?” Stern means Olga but does not want to speak her name in Donatella’s presence. From the way Lep’s mouth knots, he takes it that Lep, understandably, has not found a way to question her.

  “Are you concerned he might have harmed himself?”

  Donatella’s sudden snide laugh is surprising given the somber mood.

  “Kiril? He cannot imagine the world without him.”

  Stern looks to Marta.

  “Where does he keep his passport?” she asks.

  “He gave it to the probation department long ago,” Donatella answers. “Surrendering it was a condition of his bond. You both know that.”

  But something in Donatella’s response strikes a false note. As a straightforward person, she is not an accomplished liar. An immigrant is always an immigrant in some part of their soul, a guest who never takes citizenship or belonging entirely for granted. Stern realizes there is a question he should have asked long ago.

  “Does he have an Argentine passport as well?”

  Donatella looks down to her doughy hands in her lap.

  “Both of us. When we visit family, we have renewed them over the years.”

  “And where is that kept?” Stern asks.

  “We have a little safe upstairs.”

  “May I ask you to look?”

  She is back in a few minutes.

  “It’s gone,” says Donatella, somewhat breathless.

  Marta groans. This is big trouble.

  Stern says, “We are obliged to report Kiril’s disappearance to the court, Donatella. The attorney-client privilege cannot provide a refuge for a crime. Jumping bond is a serious offense, the more so after conviction.”

  The woman who was derisive a few minutes ago now seems gripped by a new sadness. The disappearance of Kiril’s Argentine documents has clearly taken her by surprise. She now realizes that there is a chance she may never see Kiril again.

  The Sterns and Lep depart together. It snowed last night, less than an inch but enough to make things slick, and Marta brings the car up so her father does not have to walk on the gravel drive where the footing is unsteady.

  “Lep,” Sandy says, as they are about to part, “at some point, I would love to ask you a few frank questions, just between two gentlemen.”

  Lep, with his fair eyes, stares back at Stern.

  “You know what my lawyers have told me, Sandy. I can’t go into
this, even with you.”

  “The trial is over.”

  “Does that matter? There will be an appeal, if Kiril turns up. And all these lawsuits? I need to keep things to myself.”

  He is right, of course. As Marta’s SUV rolls up, Stern says, “Once it is all settled, perhaps.”

  Lep smiles and offers his hand. “I don’t expect that, Sandy.” He means it without rancor. He’s walked through a minefield and has no intention of retracing his steps.

  From the Pafkos’, Stern and Marta head to the Center City. Stern makes a call to announce their visit as they are driving in, and together they wait in the chief judge’s anteroom until Sonny is off the bench. She has started another trial, a civil case, and openings should be wrapping up momentarily.

  The judge has a separate entrance to her private chambers directly through the courtroom, and one of her clerks opens the front door to admit them about twenty minutes later. Sonny, without her robe, rises from behind her desk and advances to hug them both. She holds on to Stern for quite some time.

  “You scared the hell out of us.”

  “It is a mystical experience,” Stern says of the few moments when his death had started. He had no memory of it at first, but now he is beginning to recall more: the white light that so many people speak of. It has made the prospect of the time soon, when he will not be called back, much less frightening. It had felt shockingly natural.

  “We have come on two missions,” says Stern. “The most urgent is to report to the court that our client seems to have decamped.”

  “For sure?”

  “By all appearances.”

  “Shit,” says Sonny. A fugitive is always a black mark for the judge who admitted him to bail. It means she made a poor assessment of his character. With chagrin, Stern explains about the second passport.

  “I should have asked,” says Stern.

  “Me too,” Sonny answers. “Any idea where he’s gone?”

  “There is no evidence thus far. But the marshals will be able to check the flight manifests, assuming he went by air.” Stern has already put some thought into the judge’s question and could make a good wager at this point, but his obligation is to report the facts they know, not share his hunches. Even so, their responsibility to assist in their client’s arrest comes with an unavoidable consequence.

  “Since we are witnesses against Kiril now,” says Marta, “we will be filing a motion to withdraw.”

  “Granted,” says Sonny. She tosses a hand and calls out to her docket clerk. Luis’s face emerges through another doorway. Across the room, the judge says, “US v. Pafko. Granted: Oral motion of Stern & Stern to withdraw as counsel for Defendant Pafko.” She does not want any formality to slow the Sterns in sharing information with the Marshals Service, which will begin the hunt at once. Next, the judge calls in her deputy marshal, Ginny Taylor, to inform her.

  The entire situation leaves Sonny shaking her gray head. Stern will forever see Sonny Klonsky as the peasant beauty with whom he was once for a minute in time so deeply smitten. Yet now, in another part of his mind, he will always be calling her ‘the judge.’ Unexpectedly, his thoughts light upon that detail Marta shared, that when he collapsed, Sonny took a turn or two administering mouth-to-mouth. After all these decades, their lips had met, as neither ever envisioned, his mouth soft as puddled wax. What comedy! We live, we change. It is part of the adventure.

  “What terrible judgment your client seems to have,” Sonny says then. “May I safely assume it was his idea to go to verdict with that jury?”

  “We cannot comment,” says Stern, “except to note yet again the court’s great perspicacity.”

  Sonny is amused by Stern’s delicacy. He sits forward in his chair, both hands on the ivory knob of his walking stick.

  “My other reason for coming is to apologize to you.”

  She laughs and waves a hand.

  “Advocates are advocates, Sandy. And you have always been the best. Frankly, I thought you’d pulled the rabbit out of the hat with this one.”

  “Marta says I was not a wise tactician to collapse and give Moses extra time to prepare his rebuttal.”

  “He did a very fine job.”

  “Moses and I spoke on Saturday,” Stern says. “I congratulated him and he was very gracious. We shall have lunch.” That has always been the Sterns’ custom with Moses after a case against one another. The loser pays, which has worked out to Moses’s advantage over the years, as it should. “Nonetheless, I know I put the court in a difficult position at some moments.”

  “Apology accepted. But you know you will never lose me as a friend. And frankly, the court put the court in a difficult position. I was upset because I realized I should have stepped aside. I’ll need to talk to Moses about how to handle these situations in the future. Whenever the case is over.” She brightens then and laughs in her good-natured way. “And for you two, it is.”

  Stern has told himself at every step, the end is coming. His final cross-exam. His last closing. But when Sonny waved to Luis a moment ago to grant their motion to withdraw, that tiny back-of-the-hand gesture rang down the curtain on his career. Now, in every sense, he is a former lawyer. As is Marta.

  The judge walks them to the chambers door and hugs them both again.

  It is over.

  35. Another Interview with Ms. Fernandez

  By Friday, a week after the verdict, Stern is restless. Pinky and Marta are in the office, having undertaken the laborious business of returning files to the former clients who want them. Many have not responded yet to the Sterns’ letter. His assignment, when he goes to the office next week, will be to call the clients they haven’t heard from. He is looking forward to checking in with several of those folks. Together they endured tense times, although it is the nature of a criminal practice that even some who walked away unscathed would prefer to forget Stern’s name, as part of a period of undeserved misery. Some others, who were convicted, won’t pick up the phone because by now they have decided all their troubles were Sandy’s fault.

  With nothing much to do besides be outraged by what he sees on cable news, Stern dwells on Kiril’s case. He is unsatisfied with the conclusion, not just the conviction and Kiril’s departure, but the amount he still does not really know. After more than a year of arduous work, Stern has little insight into what actually occurred on September 15 and 16, 2016, when the clinical trial database was changed. He has concluded dozens and dozens of cases in which his client’s lack of candor, combined with the blame-shifting and dissembling of government witnesses, has basically left him in the dark. And in this instance, Stern could tell himself to accept his own advice about how hard it is to say, ‘I do not know.’ But Kiril is—or was—his friend, so the dishonesty has a personal edge, especially given Marta’s prediction from the start that Kiril chose Stern as his lawyer in order to lie to him. And then there is the lingering question concerning who deliberately ran Stern off the road.

  On impulse, Stern calls PT and asks for Olga Fernandez. When he gets through, he tells her he would like to pay a visit. For an instant, it seems like the line has gone dead.

  “Que pasa?” she asks then.

  “Some loose ends,” says Stern.

  “Suit yourself. How long will this take?” She gives him fifteen minutes at 1:00. Stern calls Ardent, who will soon become Sandy’s personal employee.

  Not unexpectedly, Olga does not get up to greet him. Instead she motions Stern to one of the two contemporary office chairs in front of her desk. Since March, when he saw her here, she has moved out of Innis’s office beside Kiril’s, where Kiril had placed her. This glass-walled enclosure is considerably smaller. Olga explains that with Lep becoming CEO, without the prefix ‘Acting,’ he has promoted Tanakawa to chief operating officer.

  “And I’m headed for the exit,” she adds. “Lep doesn’t want me around.” Olga’s success marketing g-Livia has earned frequent mention in the business press, but now that Lep is free to run the company h
imself, he apparently is unwilling to repeat his experience with Innis. He won’t tolerate dealing with his father’s lover on a daily basis.

  When Stern saw Olga in court the other day, he registered something different about her, which, given his excitement over Innis’s phone records, he did not try to identify. Now that he is less stressed, he sees that she is wearing the contemporary equivalent of braces, that plastic casing over her teeth. As someone often embarrassed by the mess in his mouth, Stern sympathizes. In his children’s and grandchildren’s generations—and those are Olga’s cohorts—there is no surer marker of social class than what someone sees when you laugh or smile. As always, he gives Olga credit for her ambition and her matching efforts at self-improvement.

  “You look good for a dead man, Sandy.”

  “A temporary departure, apparently. I am not certain, however, Olga, that you would have missed me.”

  “Chacho!” She draws back with a narrow look. With Stern, a fellow Latino, Olga reverts often to Spanish, but that is only to maintain the upper hand. For decades, his desperation to be a true American meant he did everything he could to obliterate Spanish from his mind. Spending time around Marta’s home, where English and Spanish are spoken interchangeably, often in the space of a single sentence, has restored some of his comprehension, but he is still very slow to converse. In any event, Olga speaks the standard Spanish of the boricuas in which half the consonants are swallowed, which generally goes past him anyway. “Are we enemies, Sandy? I’ve never thought so. You came to ask me where he is?”

  “That is one subject.”

  “I’ll tell you what I told Marshal What’s-her-name.” Olga sits forward. With the arrival of December, the Tri-Cities are getting cold, seldom above freezing—twenty-nine today—but Olga has maintained her habits, and her blouse, beneath the large gold cross she wears, is open to reveal a healthy stretch of freckled décolletage.