Presumed Innocent

by Scott Turow

  Lip’s mouth is full of torn bread and red sauce, but that does not stop him from complaining. His irritation is extreme. We are standing before a vacant lot, a dump of sorts beneath the highway viaduct. Broken pieces of stressed concrete, with the snaky rusted coils of reinforcement sticking from them, litter the uneven ground, along with more ordinary refuse: bottles, newspapers, abandoned auto parts. There is also a snowfall of white wax-paper balls and crushed cups left by the many customers who have preceded us in taking a sandwich from Giaccalone’s across the street. It is one of Lip’s favorite places, an Italian stand where they insert an entire veal chop, laden with marinara, into a Vienna roll. Lipranzer likes heavy fare at lunchtime, the single man’s answer to the anomie of dinner. Our soft drinks rest on the backless remains of a public bench on which each of us has perched one foot. Various street gangs and adolescent lovers have inscribed their names in the planks of the bench’s punky seat.

  Walking back to Lip’s car, we trade information. I talk about my visit with the kid, and the fact that he provided no meaningful leads. Lip discusses his own recent activities. He interviewed the neighbor who said she thought she saw a stranger.

  “Mrs. Krapotnik,” Lip says. “She’s a winner. Talk some? I’m tellin you.” He shakes his head. “She’ll look at mug books, but first I gotta get some earplugs.”

  “How about the Index?” The Index is the state file on sex offenders.

  “Nothin,” Lip says.

  “Nothing like the ropes?”

  “This lady I’m talkin to tells me she read somethin like that once in a book. No one she knows of ever done it. Christ, can you imagine that’s what she’s readin? You’d think she gets enough on the job.”

  Lip has his customary OPV—official police vehicle—a gold Aries, unmarked but for the blackwall tires and the license plates, which, like those on every other OPV, begin with ZF, thus forming a code recognized by every minor hoodlum in the city. Lip guns away from the curb. Coppers, cabbies, people who live in their cars always drive so fast. He swings through one of his many shortcuts back downtown and, because of a detour, is forced onto Kinbark, main drag of my old neighborhood. The diverted traffic is thick and we move with processional slowness down the avenue. There it is, I think, there it is. His cousin Milos, who bought the bakery when my father left, never even changed the sign. It still says SABICH’S in a heavy sea-blue script.

  Even though I worked there every day, I remember only certain details of the interior—the summertime screen door that transfigured the moving shapes of the street, the racks of blue metal trays behind the counter, the heavy steel cash register with its round clang. When I was six, my presence was first demanded. I was a pair of hands, unemployed, and not requiring pay. I was taught to break and stack the smooth, white-sided cake boxes. I made them a dozen at a time and brought them from the cobwebbed basement to the store. Because the boxes were so slick and substantial, their edges had, at certain angles, the lacerating power of the finest cutlery; my knuckles and fingertips were often cut. I learned to dread this, for my father regarded a trace of blood on the outside of a cake box as a scandal. “Is not here a butcher shop.” This remark would come with a look that mixed loathing and disgust in fearsome proportions. In my dreams of those times, it is always summer, when the air of this valley is as stilted as a swamp’s, and the added dry heat of the ovens made it labor just to walk about the shop. I dream that my skin is slick with sweat, my father is calling, a cake has fallen, and my fear is like an acid that is corroding my veins and bones.

  If I were to paint my father, he would have a gargoyle’s face and a dragon’s scaled heart. The channels of his emotions were too intricately wound upon themselves, too clotted, strangulated, crowded with spite to admit any feeling for a child. There was never any question of picking sides for me. Like the apartment, its walls and pictures, the furniture he broke, it was clear that my father regarded me as a possession of my mother’s. And I grew up with what seemed a simple understanding: my mother loved me; my father did not.

  He took his satisfaction, if you could call so arid a feeling by that name, from opening the shop, firing the oven, raising the shade, pushing the whitened dust out the back door at the end of the day. His family had been bakers for four generations and he simply did as he had been taught. His standards were unyielding and his procedures were exact. He never tried to charm his customers; he was far too humorless and insular for that. In fact, he saw every person who entered as a potential enemy, someone who would complain, chisel, wheedle, and finally settle for day-old bread. But his income was always steady: he was known to be reliable; he distrusted employees and did the work of two, at least, himself; and he did not file a tax return for more than twenty years.

  He had come to this country in 1946. I was named for the town in which he had been raised, a village two hundred miles from Belgrade. Almost everyone there was a partisan. When the Nazis came through in 1941, all the adults were lined up against the schoolhouse and shot. The children were left, abandoned. My father, then barely eighteen, and soft-faced enough to have been spared, roamed with a band in the mountains for almost six months before they were captured. He spent the rest of the war in camps—first the Nazi labor camps, and the Allied DP camps after the liberation. His relatives here arranged his passage, hectoring their congressman and the congressman’s local staff in a ceaseless and eccentric way. My father was one of the first of the Displaced Persons allowed to enter the United States. And after a year here, he no longer spoke to my great-aunt and my cousins who had worked so hard to save him.

  Hearing the rough chorus of auto horns, I look back to make out the problem. A white man in the car behind us pounds on his steering wheel and makes a belligerent gesture in my direction, and I finally realize that Lip has stopped dead in the traffic. I take it that he has surveyed my line of sight and let the other cars move on, but when I turn to catch his expression, his eyes have shifted and he is making a determined effort to study the traffic.

  “Hair and Fiber come in,” Lip says finally. His gray eyes, his lined, high-cheeked face betray nothing, quiet as a pond.

  “Tell me,” I say, and Lip dutifully recounts the contents of the report. On Carolyn’s clothes and body were minute fibers of a carpeting not found in her apartment—Zorak V is its name. It is a synthetic, milled domestically. The color is called Scottish Malt, the most popular shade. The dye lot cannot be identified and the fiber could be from either an industrial or a domestic weave. In all there are probably fifty thousand homes and offices in Kindle County from which the carpet fibers could have come. There are no hair or skin fragments in Carolyn’s fingers or under her nails, confirming that there was no struggle before she was bound, and the only human hair not Carolyn’s shade found anywhere near the corpse has been made as female and, thus, insignificant. The cord with which she was bound is regular clothesline, American-made, sold in every K mart, Sears, and Walgreen’s.

  “That didn’t get us very far,” I tell Lipranzer.

  “Not very,” he answers. “At least we know she didn’t grab anybody.”

  “I wonder,” I say. “I keep thinking about what we said last week. How maybe this was some guy she knew. I remember when I was in law school, everyone used to pass around this case about a guy whose life insurer refused to pay out. His widow was bringing the suit, which was a real stitch, because it turned out this character had bought it whacking off while he was hanging himself. Literally. Head through a noose and everything. He cashed in when he knocked over the stool he was supposed to land on.”

  “No shit.” Lipranzer laughs out loud. “Who won the case?”

  “The insurance company, as far as I remember. The court didn’t think it was a covered risk. Anyway, maybe that’s what this was all about. You know, big-time kinkiness? I’m thinking that more and more. Apparently it’s some weird high, coming while you’re passing out.”

  “How does she end up dead from gettin hit?”

 
“Maybe her stud gets scared. Thinks he’s cooled her. Figures it’s John Belushi all over again, and starts to make it look like it was something else.”

  Lip shakes his head. He doesn’t like it.

  “You’re stretchin,” he says. “I don’t think the path report supports it.”

  “I’m gonna run it by Painless, anyway.”

  This reminds Lipranzer of something else.

  “Painless called me a couple days ago. Says he’s got a report back from the forensic chemist. From the way he sounded, I take it we didn’t get much, but maybe you can pick it up whenever you get there. I gotta get out west today. Show Mrs. Krapotnik some pictures.” He closes his eyes and shimmies his head, like maybe, if he tries, he can stand the thought.

  We are back downtown now. Lip eases into the first open space in the police lot, and we trek back through the noontime crowds toward the County Building. Out on the street, our spring, as so often happens, is turning fast to summer. You can feel some of the balminess that is a month or two away. It has inspired some of the ladies passing on the avenue to summer fashions, sleeveless tops, and those light, clingy fabrics of the season.

  “Brother,” I tell Lip suddenly, “we are really nowhere.”

  He makes a sound. “You ever get the fingerprint lab?”

  I swear. “I knew I forgot something.”

  “You are a class A fuck-up,” he says. “They ain’t gonna do it for me. I asked twice already.”

  I promise I will do that, as well as see Painless, today or tomorrow.

  When we get back to my office, I ask Eugenia to hold my calls and I close the door. I pull the B file that Horgan gave me out of my drawer.

  Lip studies it a moment.

  The B file, as I received it from Raymond, consists, in its entirety, of a log-in slip, produced when the case was entered in our computer system; a single sheet of sparse notes in Carolyn’s hand; and a xerox of a long letter. There is nothing in the file to indicate whether an original of this letter was received or this copy is all that came in. The letter is typewritten and clean—but it still does not look professional. The margins are narrow and there is only a single paragraph. The author is someone who knows how to type but seemingly does not do it often—a housewife, perhaps, or a professional man.

  I have read the letter four or five times by now, but I read it one more time, taking each page from Lip as he finishes.

  Dear Mr. Horgan:

  I am writing to you because I have been a fan of yours for many years. I am sure that you didn’t know anything about the things that are making me write this letter. In fact, I think you would want to do something about them. Probably there is nothing you can do, since all this happened a long time ago. But I thought you would like to know. It happened while you were P.A. and it’s kind of about somebody who worked for you, a deputy prosecuting attorney who I think was taking bribes. Nine years ago this summer a person I will call Noel got arrested. Noel was not this person’s real name, but if I told you his real name you would go to him first to talk about a lot of the things I am saying in this letter and he would think about it and know I turned him in.

  Then he would hurt me to get even. Believe me, I know him real well and I know what I am talking about. He would make me very sorry. Anyway, Noel got arrested. I happen to think that what it was for isn’t real important, but I will tell you that it was something which he was very embarrassed about, because that is the kind of person he is. Noel thought that if the people he worked with and hung out with found out, they wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Great friends. But that’s Noel. The lawyer he got told him he should just admit it in court because nothing was going to happen and nobody would ever know about it. But Noel is a very paranoyd-type person and he ran all over the place fussing about what would happen if anybody ever found out. Pretty soon he started saying how he was going to pay somebody off. I thought he was joking around at first. Noel would stoop to anything, but it just didn’t sound right for him. If you knew him you would understand why. But he kept telling me he was going to do this. And it would cost $1500. I know all this because, to make a long story short, I’m the one who gave him the money. Since Noel is like he is, I thought I better be sure it was going where he said. We went all the way out to the North Branch at Runyon and 111th. Out there, we didn’t wait even a minute, when a secretary who seemed to know Noel walked up and took us downstairs to the P.A.’s office. Your name, RAYMOND HORGAN, was written right on the door, I remember. Noel told me to wait outside. I was too scared by then to fight about it, which was pretty dumb since I came all the way out there to see him give somebody the money. But anyway, he wasn’t inside two minutes and he’s back out. He had put all of this money in a sock (I’m not kidding!) and when he came out he showed me the sock and it was empty. I just about ran out of there, but Noel was very cool. I asked him later what happened. Noel never liked to talk about this thing. He said he was protecting me, which is a laugh. I’m sure he just figured that if I didn’t forget about it, sooner or later I’d want the money back. Anyway, he did say that the girl took him into an office and told him to wait at a desk there. Then a man talked behind him. He told Noel just to put what he brought in the center drawer of the desk and to leave. Noel said he never looked back or anything. Ten days later, Noel had to go to court. He was just about crazy again. He kept saying he knew he was going to get screwed over and everything, but when we got there, the lawyer from the prosecuting attorney told the judge that the case was dismissed. I have tried and tried to remember this lawyer’s name, but I can’t. Once or twice I asked Noel the name of the guy he bribed, but like I said, he really never liked to talk about this and just told me to mind my own business. So I am writing this letter to you. I haven’t seen Noel in about two years. Frankly, this is not the worst thing he ever did, by a long shot, if you believe him, but it’s really the only thing I ever saw him do myself. I’m not really out to get Noel, but I thought that this P.A. was really wrong for taking this money and taking advantage of people that way, and I wanted to write to you so that you could do something about it. A couple of people who I have told this story to without using any names said that you couldn’t do anything about something so old since the statue of limitations is past, but I figure this couldn’t have been the only time something like this ever happened and maybe even they’re still doing the same thing. Actually, I think that what I just wrote isn’t true. I hope you get Noel too. But I don’t want him to know you got him from me. And if you do get him from someone else, I beg you please (Please!) not to show him this letter. I am TRUSTING YOU.

  The letter, of course, is unsigned. Our office gets letters like this every day. Two paralegals are assigned to do pretty much nothing but answer this kind of correspondence, and talk to the various cranks who wander into the reception area in person. The more serious complaints tend to get passed along, which, presumably, is how this one found its way to Raymond. Even at that point, a lot of what comes in is junk. But this one, for all its funny twitches, has the ring of the real thing. It is more than possible, of course, that our tipster was simply scammed by his friend Noel. But the guy who wrote the letter was in the best position to judge, and he doesn’t seem to think that was the case.

  Scam or not, it is easy to figure out why Raymond Horgan would not want this file floating around in an election year. Nico would love to have evidence of any kind of undiscovered crimes committed during Raymond’s regime. As the letter writer surmises, it is not likely that friend Noel’s case was an isolated episode. What we have in hand is a first-class scandal: an unnoticed—worse—unapprehended bribery ring operating in one of the branch courts.

  Lipranzer has lit a cigarette. He has been quiet a long time.

  “You think it’s bull?” I ask.

  “Neh,” he says. “Somethin’s there. Maybe not what this jamoche thinks, but it’s somethin.”

  “Do you think it’s worth looking at?”

  “Can’t hurt. We ain�
��t exactly buried in leads.”

  “That’s what I thought. Carolyn figured these guys were gay,” I say. “I think she was probably on the right track.” I point to her notes. She has the section number of various provisions of what is still titled the Morals chapter of the state criminal code written down, a question mark beside them. “Remember the panty raids out in the Public Forest? That would have been right about then. We were busting those guys in carloads. And the cases went to the North Branch, didn’t they?”

  Lip is nodding: it all fits. The embarrassing nature of the crime, the mania to conceal it. And the timing is right. Sexual crimes, involving consenting adults, were ignored as a matter of policy in Raymond’s first administration. The cops brought in the cases, but we gave them the shuffle. By the time Raymond began to campaign for re-election, certain groups, prostitutes and gays particularly, were, in their more florid segments, largely beyond control. With the gays, the problem was acute in the public forests which ring the city. Families would not go there at midday on the weekends for fear of what their children would be exposed to. There were some fairly graphic complaints about what was taking place in broad daylight on the picnic tables, where, Mom tended to point out, people were supposed to eat. With the election nine months away, we made a large show of a concerted clean-up. Dozens of men were arrested every night, often in flagrante delicto. Their cases were usually disposed of with court supervision—a kind of expungeable guilty plea—and the defendants then disappeared.

  That is the problem. Both Lip and I recognize it will be difficult to find Noel. There were probably four hundred of these cases that summer, and we don’t even know his name. If Carolyn made much progress, the file does not seem to show it. The jacket date indicates she got the case about five months before her murder. Her notes reflect little investigation. “Noel” is written in an upper corner and underlined countless times. A little farther down the page she has written “Leon.” The significance of this eluded me at first; then I realized that she had assumed that, like many aliases, the name chosen by the letter writer was the product of some meaningful association. Maybe the name was a rebus. Carolyn was going to suppose that she was looking for somebody named Leon. Finally, she has another name, “Kenneally,” at the foot of the page, and his assignment. This is Lionel Kenneally, a good copper, now a commander. We worked the Night Saints cases together. He runs the watch in the 32nd Police District, whose cases are heard in the North Branch.