Innocent kc-8

by Scott Turow

  My father leaves the courtroom without ever looking back.

  IV.

  CHAPTER 41

  Tommy, August 3, 2009

  Summer in all its sweet indulgence. It was five p.m. and Tommy was one of the squad of fathers following their children around the tot lot, relieving beleaguered moms in the hour before dinner. The playground was, without doubt, Tomaso's favorite place on earth. When Tommy's son arrived, he ran from one piece of equipment to another, touching the little merry-go-round, climbing onto the spiderweb and off. Dashing a step behind, Tommy always felt the anguish of his two-year-old that he could not do everything at once.

  Dominga was having a harder time with this pregnancy than with Tomaso's. There was more morning nausea and constant fatigue, and she complained of feeling swollen in the heat, like something ripening on the vine. Now officially a lame duck, Tommy was finding it easier to get out of the office and tried to be home no later than four thirty to give her a break. Tomaso and he often returned from the playground to find her sound asleep. Tomaso would crawl across his mother's recumbent body, trying to squeeze his way into her arms. Dominga smiled before she stirred and clutched her little boy to her, grimy and beloved.

  Life was good. Tommy was going to be sixty any minute, and his life was better than at any time he could recall. Just as the first Sabich trial and its dismal aftermath had darkened his existence decades before, so the second trial was proving to be the start of a life as an esteemed figure. Public perceptions had formed very much as Brand had foreseen the night they decided to take Rusty's plea. Sabich's conviction verified Tommy on everything. The DNA from the first trial was regarded as controversial, because of doubts about the specimen, but the common comparison was to O.J., who'd also gotten away with murder because of bad labwork. The consensus on the editorial pages was that prosecutor Molto had made the best of it and had convicted a man whose conviction was long overdue. In fact, in the last six weeks, the papers had dropped the word "Acting" when they referred to him as PA. And the county executive had let it be known that Tommy was welcome on the ticket next year if he wanted to run for the job.

  He had actually pondered that possibility for a few days. But it was time to accept his blessings. He was ten times luckier than all his peers in the PA's office who'd had to struggle to make their careers while their kids were young. Tommy could leap onto the bench now, a worthy job that would leave him time to savor his boys and to be more than a rumor in their lives. Two weeks ago, he had announced he was running for superior court judge and endorsed Jim Brand to succeed him. Ramon Beroja, a former deputy PA now on the county board, was going to run against Jim in the primary, but the party preferred Brand, largely because of the broad suspicions that Ramon would take on the county executive next. Jim would spend the next six months running hard, but he was expected to win.

  Across the tot lot, a man was eyeing Tommy, an old bushy-looking fellow with a stretch of appallingly white legs revealed between the ends of his cargo shorts and his calf-high tube socks. This was not uncommon. Tommy was a familiar figure on TV, and people were always trying to place him, often mistaking him for someone they'd known at an earlier time. But this man was more intent than the usual curious neighbors with their puzzled glances. When the kids he was trailing moved in Tomaso's direction, the man approached Tommy and had actually shaken his hand before Molto finally placed Milo Gorvetich, the computer expert from the Sabich trial.

  "Aren't grandchildren life's greatest blessing?" he asked, nodding toward two little girls, both wearing glasses. The girls were on the slide while Tomaso followed them there and stood on the bottom rung, looking up longingly but afraid to venture any farther. This drama played itself out daily. Eventually, Tomaso would cry and his father would lift him to the top. There Tomaso would linger again until he finally found his courage and plunged to the bottom, where Tommy would be waiting to catch him.

  "He's my son," said Tommy. "I got a late start."

  "Oh, dear," answered Gorvetich, but Tommy laughed. He kept telling Dominga he was going to have a T-shirt made for Tomaso that read, 'That old man over there is actually my father.' Usually by the time Tommy explained himself to the other parents here, they had placed him as PA. From the comments that followed, he could tell that many assumed he was a county power broker looking after the child born of his second or third marriage to a trophy wife. Nobody really ever understood anybody else's life.

  "A beautiful boy," said Gorvetich.

  "The light of my life," Tommy answered.

  It turned out that Gorvetich's youngest daughter was a neighbor of Tommy's, living one street behind him closer to the river. She was a professor of physics married to an engineer. Gorvetich, a widower, was here often at this hour to look after the girls until their parents were home from work.

  "So are you preparing for your next big trial?" Gorvetich asked by way of small talk.

  "Not yet," said Tommy. The norm, in fact, was for the PA to be solely an administrator. Most of Tommy's predecessors never saw the inside of a courtroom, and Tommy was already testing the idea that the Sabich case would be the last trial of his life.

  "Standard fare for you," said Gorvetich, "but I must say I have been preoccupied by that case since it ended. One thinks of trials as emphatic and conclusive, and this was anything but."

  Sometimes it was like that, Tommy answered. A few tight little categories-guilty, not guilty, of this or that-to hold a universe of complicated facts.

  "We do a little justice, rather than none at all," answered Tommy.

  "To an outsider it's confounding, but you boys are accustomed enough to the murkiness of all of it to find some grim humor, I suppose."

  "I don't think I found much to laugh at in that case."

  "There's the difference between Brand and you, then," said Gorvetich.

  Tommy had his eye on Tomaso, who was yet to move off the ladder, even though a line had formed behind him. Tommy tried to wrest the boy from the first rung, but he squawked in objection and uttered his favorite syllable: "No." In time, Tommy persuaded Tomaso to let the other children climb, but as soon as they had started up, Tomaso went right back to the first rung like a hawk on a perch. His father stood immediately behind him, within arm's reach.

  "Persistent," said Gorvetich, laughing.

  "Stubborn like his father. Genes are amazing things." He drew his mind back to the conversation before. "What were you saying about Brand?"

  "Only that I was struck by a remark he made when we had dinner the week after. It was a little celebration. I believe you were invited."

  Tommy remembered. After a month of working round the clock for the trial, he did not want another night away from his family. He explained now that his wife was newly pregnant at the time of the dinner. Tommy accepted Gorvetich's congratulations, before the old professor went back to his story.

  "It was the end of the evening. We were out on the walk in front of the Matchbook, and we were both well in our cups, and I made a remark to Jim about how unsettling it must be to be part of a system that sometimes comes to such an unsatisfying outcome. Jim laughed and said that as time went on, he was finding more and more perverse humor in this case, seeing somebody who had contrived to commit the perfect

  murder end up punished for a crime in which he had no role."

  "What did that mean?" Tommy asked.

  "I don't know. I asked at the time, but Jim brushed it off. I thought you might understand."

  "Hardly," said Tommy.

  "I've rolled it over in my mind. When Sabich pled guilty, I took it for granted he had a collaborator in tampering with his PC. It would have been an exceptional technical feat for a man who demonstrated such limited knowledge of his computer to do that himself. Remember, he hadn't even realized that his Web searches would be cached in the browser."

  "Right," said Tommy.

  "I've wondered if Jim had concluded that the accomplice wasn't an accomplice at all, but somebody who acted entirely on
his own without any direction from Sabich."

  Tommy shrugged. He had no idea what this was about. They had tried to consider every possibility the day they'd discovered that the card wasn't on the image. Half expecting the defense to accuse them of something, they had reviewed the chain of evidence carefully to be sure it was secure. Back in December when Yee ordered the PC returned, Gorvetich and Orestes Mauro, an evidence tech from the PA's office, covered the screen, the keyboard, the power button on the tower, and even the mouse in evidence tape, which they'd initialed before shrink-wrapping all the components. The day Nat Sabich testified, the shrink-wrap had been sliced off in the PA's office with the consent of the defense, but the tape seals were removed only in the courtroom in the presence of Sabich's two hotshot experts, who verified that none of them showed the word "Violated" that appeared in blue if the tape was ever disturbed.

  So the only possibility was that the tampering had taken place while the machine was in George Mason's chambers. Gorvetich had looked at Mason's log and was of the opinion that no one had access to the computer long enough to make all the changes, especially the registry deletions, which he said would be time-consuming even for him. The only plausible explanation seemed to be that Sabich and some techie they were yet to discover had snuck into the building after hours. But apparently another explanation had occurred to Brand in the ensuing weeks.

  "Brand was probably spitballing," said Molto.

  "Perhaps so," said Gorvetich. "Or I misunderstood. We'd had quite a bit to drink."

  "Probably that. I'll have to ask him."

  "Or let it go," said Gorvetich.

  The old man seemed woolly-headed and self-involved at all times, but there was a shrewd light in his eyes for a second. Tommy did not quite understand what he was thinking, but Milo's granddaughters had wandered to the other side of the play area and he departed quickly. That was just as well, since Tommy heard the cry he recognized as Tomaso's at the same instant. When Tom looked up, he saw that his son had ascended the ladder. The two-year-old now stood at the top, utterly terrified by what he had achieved.

  CHAPTER 42

  Rusty, August 4, 2009

  Prison holds no fear for him.' We said that all the time decades ago when I was a deputy PA. We were usually talking about hardened crooks-con men, gangbangers, professional thieves-who committed crimes as a way of life and were undeterred by the prospect of confinement, either because they never considered the future or because a stop in the penitentiary had long been accepted as part of what passed for a career plan.

  The saying circulates in my head all the time, because it is a nearly constant preoccupation to tell myself that prison is not so bad. I survived yesterday. I will survive today, then go on to tomorrow. The things you think would matter-the dread of other inmates and the fabled dangers of the shower-occupy their share of psychic space, but they count far less than what seemed to be trivial matters on the outside. You have no way to know how much you enjoy the company of other human beings or the warmth of natural daylight until you live without them. Nor can you fully comprehend the preciousness of liberty until matters of daily whim-when to get up, where to go, what to wear-are rigidly prescribed by someone else. Ironically, stupendously, the worst part of being in the joint is the most obvious-you cannot leave.

  Because my safety in the general population is regarded as a high-risk proposition, I am held in what is called administrative detention, which is better known as seg. I routinely debate whether I would be better off taking my chances in genpop, which would at least allow me to work eight hours a day. The inmates here are mostly young, Latin and black gang members who were picked up on drug offenses and do not have a long record of violence. Whether any of them would care to do me harm is a matter of pure speculation. I have already heard through the COs, who are the institution's Internet, that there are two men here whose convictions I affirmed, and by pure addition and subtraction, I can figure that there are probably a few more whose fathers or grandfathers I prosecuted decades ago. Overall, I accept the view of the assistant warden, who encouraged me to volunteer for seg, that I am too famous not to be a symbol to some depressed and furious young man, a trophy fish whom he'd enjoy feeling on his hook.

  So I am held in an eight-by-eight cell with cement walls, a short steel-reinforced door through which my meals are delivered, and a single bulb. There is also a six-inchby-twenty-four-inch window, which barely admits any light. In here, I am free to spend my time as I like. I read a book every day or two. Stern suggested I may be able to find a market for my memoirs when I am released, and I write a little every day, but I'll probably burn the pages as soon as I am out. The newspaper comes by mail, two days late, with the occasional articles relating to the state prisons scissored out. I have started to study Spanish-I practice with a couple of the COs willing to answer back. And, like a man of leisure at the end of the nineteenth century, I attend to my correspondence. I write a letter to Nat every day and hear often from several figures from my former life whose loyalty I value immensely, particularly George Mason and Ray Horgan and one of my neighbors. There are also a good two dozen nut-jobs, mostly female, who have written to me in the last month to proclaim their faith in my innocence and to share their own tales of injustice, usually involving a corrupt judge who presided over their divorce.

  When the four prisoners who are being held in administrative detention are released together in the yard for our one hour of exercise, I have an instant impulse to embrace each of them, which does not take long to stifle. Rocky Toranto is a transvestite, HIV-positive, who would not stop turning tricks in genpop. The other two who eye me as I trot around the yard and do my jumping jacks and push-ups are criminally insane. Manuel Rodegas has a face like a bug that was crushed. He is about five feet three, and his head seems to grow straight out of his shoulders. His conversation, while occasionally lucid, veers into gibberish much of the time. Harold Kumbeela is everyone's bad dream, six feet six, three hundred pounds, who crippled one man and nearly killed another while he was housed downstairs. He is far too violent to have been assigned to the state work farm and is here only because of a paid arrangement with Homeland Security, which rents half a dozen cells for immigration detainees who are awaiting deportation, which in Harold's case cannot come too soon. Unfortunately for me, Harold has learned that I was a judge and regularly seeks my advice about his case. Telling him I know nothing about immigration law was a feint that bought me only a couple of weeks. 'Yeah, bra,' he told me a few days ago, 'but maybe, dude, you could be studying up, you know. Do a bra a favor, you know?' I have asked the COs to keep an eye on Harold, which they do anyway.

  Nat comes down to see me every Sunday, bringing a basket of books, which the staff inspects, and the fourteen dollars I am allowed each week in the commissary. I spend the entire sum on candy, since no matter how much I exercise, the food rarely seems to be worth eating. Nat and I sit at a little whitewashed version of a picnic table. Because it is minimum security, I am allowed to reach over and touch his hand for a second and to hug him when he arrives and departs. We get only an hour. He cried the first two times he saw me here, but we have started to enjoy our visits, where he does most of the talking, generally bringing me news of the world, of work, and of the family, as well as the week's best offering of Internet jokes. We spend much of the hour laughing, although there is always a moment of anguish when we discuss the Trappers, mired in yet another hopeless season.

  Thus far, Nat has been my only visitor. It would be imprudent for Anna to join him for many reasons, and she keeps the same distance she has for most of the last two years. Besides, I am not really eager for anybody else to see me in here. On Sundays, when Nat arrives, I am walked through the nesting gatehouses by a CO named Gregg, literally progressing toward daylight.

  I am therefore completely startled when the door to my cell swings wide open and Torrez, one of the COs who helps me with my Spanish, says, "Su amigo." He stands aside and Tommy Molto ducks his head t
o come through the door. I have been lying on my bunk, reading a novel. I sit up suddenly, but I have no idea what to say. Nor does Tom, who stands inside the door, seeming to wonder only now why he is here.

  "Rusty." Tommy offers his hand, which I take. "Like the whiskers," he says.

  I have grown a beard here, largely because the light in my cell makes shaving hazardous and because the safety razors that we are allowed are famously dull.

  "How you doing here?" Molto asks.

  I open my hands. "I don't care much for the health club, but at least there's room service."

  He smiles. I use the line all the time in my letters.

  "I didn't come to gloat, if that's what you're afraid of," says Molto. "There was a meeting here of state prison officials and PAs from around the state."

  "Strange place for a get-together."

  "No reporters."

  "Ah."

  "The Corrections Department wants the prosecutors to okay a plan to release some inmates over sixty-five."

  "Because they're no longer risks?"

  "To save money. The state can't really afford to pay for their health care."

  I smile. What a world. No one in the criminal justice system ever talks about the cost of punishment. Everybody there thinks there's no price to morality.

  "Maybe Harnason made a better deal than he thought," I tell Tommy.

  Tommy likes that but shrugs. "I thought he told the truth."

  "So did I. Pretty much."

  Tommy nods. The cell door is still open, and Torrez is right outside. To make himself comfy, Tommy in his suit has leaned back against the wall. I have decided not to tell him that moisture often collects there.

  "Anyway," says Tommy, "there are some people who think you also ought to be a candidate for early release."