by Scott Turow
'So?'
'So,' he says, 'in my head, I figure it'd be neat to be around you a little. See what happens. Time or not, I just don't think people change that much at the core, Sonny. That's where I'm at. But if you tell me to take a powder, I'll do it. I'll feel bad and all that shit, but I accept the risk. But you've started this twice now and somewhere along we're going to have to mention you. You keep acting like you're powerless here,' he says, 'like all the choices are mine. Where do you fit in, Sonny? What do you do, if you can't talk me out of this?'
We're back to the parking lot, although I can't for the life of me see how we got here. Staring at Seth in the still kitchen, my eyes feel childish and large. I blink.
Nikki, perfect child, arrives at that moment to save me. She holds Spark, a stuffed puppy, by a single, bedraggled paw. She is rubbing her eyes and whiny. She should have a bath, but the thrill of Seth seems to have left her weary and she mewls at the thought.
'A book and bed,' I say.
'You read.' Nikki points to Seth. Exhausted, she seems to have forgotten his name, everything but the fact that she's in love with him.
From her bedroom, their voices tumble down the stairs. In the living room, I open The Nation, but do not even see the page. To speak and be heard; to hear and understand. How much more do we want? So much of this is welcome – why then do I resist? Atop the stairs, Seth tells Nikki good night.
'You know what?' Nikki asks, delaying his departure now by any means. 'My teacher, Mrs Schultz? She's almost fifty years old and she still can't whistle.'
Seth whistles a few bars of 'Good Night, Irene,' then I'm summoned for the final rituals. We pass on the stairs with contained smiles, measuring our mutual enjoyment of my child. He says he will wait to say goodbye, and is down there, in his coat, slumped over and twirling his hat, as he waits beside the staircase on the old country bench which Nikki and I will shortly be using to pull on our boots, when the snow flies.
'You made an enormous impression,' I tell him.
'Hey,' he says, 'one out of two.'
'Seth, it's not like that.'
'How is it?'
I heave a weary breath. 'Confusing,' I answer, and know it's the most honest thing I've offered yet. He tips his head philosophically, then zips his coat. He thanks me for dinner and sings Nikki's praises again, before I finally, thankfully, move him to the door.
'I'm not trying to drive you crazy,' he says there.
'Yes, you are,' I answer. 'You always have. But it's endearing.' I extend my hand, but it's a false gesture, far too distant for where we are now. We hold in the abrupt evening quiet of the small house, the whir of the appliances rising from the kitchen, amid a sudden sense of the tender space between us dwindling.
'Do it,' he says to me.
'What?'
'Kiss me.' 'Kiss you?' I laugh out loud.
But he closes on me, as in the movies. I have offered my cheek, but he straightens my face with a single finger and puts his lips on mine. The shock of being this close to a man is one of presence and of longing. Everything kicks in, mobile with sensation – heart and breasts, hips and fingertips. An extraordinary parched ache reaches so far down into me it is all I can muster to hold back a groan. His hand in the moment of embrace has roamed to the small of my back. I step away, and we stand for just an instant with our foreheads touching. I take hold of both his hands.
'Let's sort this out after the trial.'
'Listen, that trial won't change anything.'
'It'll make this a lot easier for me. I'll see you afterwards.' I turn his shoulder toward the doorway.
When he is gone, my brow rests against the sleek varnish of the front door, chill with the cold outside. Madness, I think again. What is in my mind? Is it only because I feel so sorry for him? I hang Nikki's coat on the peg beside the threshold, I turn the bolt. It's because I know, I think suddenly. Know that whatever sentiment he nurtures, he is not really here for me. Know that he is wounded and recovering. That his life is circling. That he will be here, then gone. Know that – yes – and isn't this one of those sick truths we always know best about ourselves? – it will be safe.
DECEMBER 11, 1995
Sonny
'Mr Trent,' Hobie says with somewhat sinister distinctness. He appears restored by a weekend's rest. He's had a crisp-looking haircut and lost the haggardness of a week on trial, the reddened, jumpy eyes, the runnels of sleeplessness. He strides to the center of the room to confront Core, who is still settling himself on the witness stand.
'Cuz,' answers Hardcore. A wayward note of black-on-black contempt. Hobie momentarily addresses him in silence, chin elevated, seeing how it is.
I have already passed an hour this morning with the attorneys in a lengthy chambers conference. Hardcore's lawyer, Jackson Aires, played stalking horse for the prosecution. He asked to limit Hobie's cross, claiming that Core should not be forced to incriminate himself about matters that go beyond his guilty plea in this case. In reply, Hobie railed about his client's constitutional right to fully confront the witness. To avoid poisoning myself with an endless rundown of Hardcore's grossest misdeeds, I ruled that the episodes would be taken up one by one during cross. Each event will be portrayed in generalized terms, and Aires and the trial lawyers then can argue about its relevance.
Aires now sits tensely at the edge of a folding chair, set about six feet behind the prosecution table against the low oak partition that runs beneath the screen of bulletproof glass. Well past sixty, Jackson, in his familiar burgundy sport coat, remains a figure of grace and ease, a long loose-jointed African-descended male with that snowball pomp above his forehead and a manner reflecting thoroughgoing contentment with his own views. In chambers, the discussion between Hobie and him became heated, due in no small measure to the fact, which eventually emerged, that Aires is one of Hobie's father's oldest friends and even employed Hobie for one summer during law school. Jackson, who has never encountered an advantage he was unwilling to use in a courtroom, repeatedly referred to Hobie as 'young Turtle' and told him more than once he had no idea what he was talking about.
Perhaps it is the stress of performing before his old mentor, or the procedure I've insisted on, which has altered the order in which Hobie wanted to proceed, but he seems fiatfooted almost from the start of his examination. The cross does not go well.
'You made a sweet deal with the prosecution, didn't you?' he begins. Hobie batters Core with various examples of how much worse things could have gone for him. As part of the plea agreement, the prosecution agreed not to charge Core with any of the narcotics offenses he committed daily. In the upside-down world of contemporary criminal law, a murder conviction often carries a lesser penalty in real terms than a drug crime, for which both parole and good time have been essentially abolished in this state. Core would do eighteen years if the same stretch was for selling dope. And had the prosecutors contrived one of their far-fetched arguments linking June's death to a narcotics transaction, they would have been obliged by statute to seek the death penalty.
Well rehearsed, Core admits matter-of-factly that flipping on Nile dramatically improved his sentence. More important, as Hobie teases out the details of the plea agreement, the inferences somehow mm against him. In one of those spontaneous audience reactions characteristic of the courtroom, we all seem to recognize together that Core' s credibility is actually enhanced by the deal he's made. A hang-tough gangbanger like Hardcore would go back to the penitentiary only because he had no other choice. Someone was going to burn him, if he didn't cop out first. And logically the person Core feared could only be Nile. After messing up, killing June, the mother Nile presumably loved, instead of Eddgar, the father he apparently hated, Core recognized a high likelihood that Nile, in grief or rage, would eventually roll over on him. That's how I add it up. I find myself somewhat shocked, much as I was on Friday, by the mounting nuances pointing toward Nile's guilt.
'Some women sold their bodies to buy your crack, didn't they?' H
obie asks, pointing out the gravity of what Core's gotten away with. 'Some folks stole?' Hardcore quarrels at points – he didn't tell nobody to steal – but acknowledges what he must in a well-schooled tone that insists, correctly, that none of this is news. Often when I sit up here, I attempt to imagine the outlaw existence of the hardened young people who come before me: getting up each morning with no real conviction that you're going to end the day intact. Someone may shoot you; you may have to slap-up some homie who has a knife you didn't see, or the Goobers may come by, slippin, and gauge you at sixty feet. Creature things must dominate. Heat and cold. Sex. Intoxication. Each moment is a struggle to maintain dominance or at least power – downtalking everyone around you, exerting strength, sometimes cruelly. And making no real plans. A vague shape to tomorrow, and no thought at all of a month, let alone a year. Survive. Make do. Life as impulse. And why not?
Having accomplished little thus far, Hobie reaches deeper. He leers across the podium and asks, 'Now, Mr Trent, would you mind telling us how many other people you've killed?'
Aires and both prosecutors leap up, all of them shouting objections. This is the kind of question we were arguing about in chambers.
'Is this for credibility, Mr Turtle?' I ask. He shakes his head yes and I shake my head no. 'I don't think it's necessary. Mr Trent has admitted he's a murderer for hire. Whether it's one murder or twenty, that acknowledgement of that sort of conduct gives me an adequate window on his character. I'll sustain the objection.'
Hobie, unfailingly respectful of my rulings until now, can't keep himself from raveling up his lips in pique. He repeats his bitter complaints about interference with Nile's constitutional rights to confront the witness. For the first time, he is clearly setting me up for appeal and even goes so far as to move for a mistrial – a claim that my ruling is so unfair, he'd rather start the trial again from scratch. It's routine defense hysterics – a sort of exclamation point for his objections – and I respond with a single word: 'Denied.'
Listening to this byplay, Hardcore displays a japing smile. For Core, this is head-up, street stuff, dude on dude, the kind of strife he's always known. He thinks he's winning. Studying him, I notice a teardrop etched beneath the corner of his right eye. He is dark enough that the tattoo barely shows, but it means he's killed with his own hands. There is probably not a Top Rank gangster out there who has not shot or knifed someone. Yet despite my glib assurances to Hobie, the sight – the reality – remains disquieting.
Hobie's next sortie is a series of questions about the crimes for which Core was arrested, but not convicted, as both a juvenile and an adult. I let Hobie explore a charge of deviate sexual assault that arose when Core, early in his career with BSD, lured a whore into a Grace Street apartment, beat her, and made her service dozens of young men, each of whom, under this arrangement, paid him instead of her. But as Hobie attempts to thumb through the catalogue of Hardcore's earlier thuggery – everything from truancy to zip-gun stickups – I begin to see the point of Aires's and the prosecutors' vehement objections. It's unfair to force Core to acknowledge much of this conduct, which has little to do with his honesty. Jackson Aires comes from his seat in back and stands before the bench to argue.
'Judge, I was the lawyer there for Trent here on all these cases,' Jackson says, 'and I can tell the court, Judge, there was somethin wrong with each of them.' On Core' s rap sheet there are twenty-two arrests which Jackson somehow beat. Sometimes he filed motions to suppress, or objected successfully on technical grounds like venue; more often – if the rumors are true – he agreed that the $1,500 pocket money Hardcore had when he was booked in Area 7 could be forgotten if certain incriminating details disappeared as well from the collective memory of the police. In Jackson's view, there's no reason black gangsters shouldn't take advantage of the same devices white ones have always employed. He'll admit that to you straight up, in the confidence of a barroom or a corridor, with a stern, humorless look daring you to tell him he's wrong.
By the time we return from the morning recess, a dazed air has come over the courtroom. The spectators' benches, thick at 9 a.m. with those awaiting a cross which the papers promised would produce theatrics, now have thinned. Hobie continues to look poised, but I know, having been there, that he spent the last ten minutes telling himself he is going to have to get Core now or, surely, lose.
'Let's talk about the shooting,' he says, ambling toward the door to the lockup. 'It was your homeboy, Gorgo, who actually gunned down Mrs Eddgar, right?'
'Sure 'nough,' Core answers. You would not call his demeanor mournful.
'And have the police asked you to help them find Gorgo?' Core thinks about it and shrugs. 'Cuz hit the wall, man. Ain no tellin where that mother gone.'
'Well, help me, Hardcore, I'd think you'd want to find Gorgo.
Isn't he one more person who could tell the police whether or not what you're saying is true?'
Molto objects that the question is argumentative, which it is, but given the constraints I've already imposed on the cross, I allow it.
'He ain goin 'gainst me,' Hardcore says with a faint smile. It's not clear if Core is asserting the truthfulness of his testimony or a reality of gang life. 'Sides, man,' he adds, 'nigger don't want to be found, you know? He ain just run from the po-lice neither. I git my dogs on that motherfucker, time I done, he be rankin out.' Begging for mercy. Core, feeling friskier as the cross goes on, ends his answer with another sneer in Hobie's direction. There is a scratchy something between them, a contest that goes beyond the courtroom. Bold and unruly, Core seems to assert at every pass that he's the real black man, poor, raised without refuge, full of the rightful indignation of the oppressed. Hobie, in Core's view, is a fake, someone who doesn't know the real deal, a challenge to which Hobie seems oddly vulnerable. That, perhaps, is what's sapped some of his strength.
'You're pretty angry with Gorgo?'
'Word,' answers Hardcore, and at the further thought of Gorgo gives he head a disgusted shake.
'Because he shot Mrs Eddgar while you were standing there, right? You and Bug? And that's how you got in trouble?'
‘I stand behind that,' says Core.
Turning away from the witness, I see Hobie smile fleetingly for the first time. Has he got something?
'Now, how close to Mrs Eddgar was Gorgo on this bicycle when he shot her?'
With his long nail, Hardcore describes the distance between Hobie and him. Close enough to kill. Core grins tautly at the thought. Hobie, catching the drift, smiles too.
'He could see it was a woman, couldn't he?'
Molto objects that Core can't testify to what Gorgo could see.
'Fair enough,' Hobie says. 'You could see it was a woman when you were twelve feet from her, couldn't you?' 'I ain dumb like he is.' Hobie absorbs that. Core fences well. 'Well, Bug was waving to Gorgo?' Thass right.' 'Trying to stop him?' 'Thass right' 'But you didn't wave?' 'Naw.'
'You didn't shout to him?' 'Uh-uh.'
'You hit the pavement?' 'Thass right'
Hobie has approached Core gradually. Now he dares to touch the front rail of the witness stand.
'You knew he wasn't going to stop, didn't you?'
' Shee-it, man.' Showily, Core waves the back of his hand inches from Hobie's nose. 'Listen how you get up on yo'self! Look that bitch-made nigger in the eye, man, you gone see that fool straight down to shoot. I like to seen that plenty.'
'Sir, you knew Gorgo was going to shoot anyway, didn't you, even though it was a woman standing there, and as a result you hit the pavement?'
‘I already answered that damn question.'
'Judge,' says Tommy, belatedly. I sustain the objection and Hobie retreats to his notes to seek another subject, once again short of success. Naturally, I've gotten the point – but it baffles me, as it has when Hobie's prowled this ground before. What earthly good does it do Nile, even if June, rather than Eddgar, was the target?
'Senator Eddgar,' says Hobie. 'Let's talk about him. You had o
ne meeting with the Senator, is that your testimony?' 'Seem like one.'
'Seems like? One or more than one?'
‘In my lid, man, you know I got one.' 'It could be more?'
Core shirks it off. Hobie fixes him with a look, but decides, after an instant's reflection, not to pursue it.
'Now, Hardcore, to you, to T-Roc, this idea of getting Kan-el out of prison – that was very important, wasn't it?'
'Down for mine, man,' he says. 'Stomp down.' The credo. The gang, he means. Everything for the gang.
'And that's why you agreed to meet with the Senator. Am I right? Because getting Kan-el out, that's a thang with you. Right?'
'You with it, cuz,' he answers, and adds a quick simpering smile, mocking Hobie for trying to take up his lingo.
'And you told us, I believe, that when you found Senator Eddgar had this idea that BSD could become a political organization you were real angry – "deep"?'
'Man, what he were stressin, man, that shit ain real.'
Hobie nods, mulling as he strolls. Then he turns back abruptly and asks in a smaller voice, 'So why'd you think Senator Eddgar was coming down there?'
Core for an instant is dead silent. I see him look to Aires.
'Nile sayin get with his daddy. Thass all.'
'That's all? Let's set the scene, Core. We got two gangbangers. Top Rank. Black men. Both convicted felons, right? And we have an important white politician, chairman of the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, who drives all the way down to the North End of DuSable and climbs in the back of a limousine with the likes of you-all, knowing you want nothing more in the world than to get your homie, Kan-el, out of Rudyard penitentiary. Now I ask you again, Hardcore, what did you think he was coming for? What did you think he was going to get out of this?'
