Reversible Errors

by Scott Turow

  “Are you talking about Pharaoh?” asked Arthur.

  Rommy actually smiled. “Tha’s him. Tha’s what he was callin hisself. Couldn’t hardly ’member his name.”

  Pamela inquired if Rommy had any memory of Pharaoh’s last name.

  “Might be I knowed another name, but all I recollect is Pharaoh.” He spelled it out in four letters: F, a, r, o. Pamela smiled fleetingly.

  “And how did you meet him?” Arthur asked.

  “I ain too sure ‘bout that. I knowed him awhile. I’m thinkin could be he used to hook me up. But I ain seed him in a long time. Then I run across’t him in a club. I was doin some bidness, and how you like that, there he is, didn’t even ’member his name, but he knowed me. We got to kickin. He had hisself a whole new scene. How you call it?” Squirrel asked himself.

  “Stealing,” said Arthur. At his side, Pamela recoiled, delivering a stark look, but he didn’t really care. This was getting worse by the minute. As for his client, Rommy had learned long ago to humor rather than confront his antagonists. He chuckled amiably at his lawyer.

  “No, I knowed that word,” he said. “He had somethin goin where he was tellin me he could unload hot airline tickets and never get cracked or nothin. Pushin them through some company. So he had in mind if maybe I knowed somebody might get some tickets for him, be good for us both. Tha’s how the lady got into it.”

  “Luisa? Remind us how you knew Luisa,” said Arthur. From the corner of his eyes, he issued a warning look to Pamela. He didn’t want her trying to dig Rommy out from under any of his earlier lies.

  “She been takin some stuff off me, actually.”

  “Stuff? You mean stolen merchandise?”

  “Stole?” countered Rommy. “I didn’t never aks no man his bidness. If I could make a dollar, tha’s all I wanted to know.”

  “But Luisa bought from you?”

  “Wasn’t nothin really. They was one them dispatch guys over at T&L, with the trucks? Him and me put some stuff on the street. She took a radio, I ’member. That’s how I knowed her to start. She was always kind of a talky one. Middle of the night, they wasn’t a whole lot for her to be doin. She be rappin to the walls if it wasn’t for me. The other, what’d you say her name—”

  “Genevieve?”

  “She just liked to sit with her book, if they wasn’t no planes. I ain never talked with her much. She probably don’t even know my name, truth be told. Must be she sayin she know me cause that po-lice got her like he done with me. Ain that right?” Rommy peered over a hand to see how this defense, undoubtedly assembled for him last night by prison mates, would go down. Arthur suggested he continue.

  “Well, tha’s all. I aksed that other lady, Lisa, one night, said I knowed somebody might want to buy some extra tickets. She wasn’t too interested to start, but I kept aksin—Pharaoh, he said this here was real money—and finally she say she gone meet up with this dude just to be done with it. Was over there by Gus’s, and I’s kinda walkin by the window, cause ol Gus was there and I couldn’t go in. She seem to be shakin her head mostly, but Pharaoh, he musta tole her somethin good cause no more’n a week later, she gimme a nice handful of green money, mine for doin the hookup and all.

  “Then I didn’t hear no more of it. So one day, I’s on them streets and yo, man, there’s that Pharaoh and it falls out, man, he and this lady, Lisa, they been doin somethin together every month or two. And I ain gettin no more. Pharaoh, he like, I thought for sure she be kickin down to you, she sure as hell gettin some on her end to do that. So I told him I’s gonna kill her next I see her, holdin out on me like that. That ain right, not a-tall. And she knowed it, too, even though she wudn’t admit it. We scream and holler some, but in the end she give me that necklace thing to shut me up.”

  “The cameo?”

  “’Zactly. She gimme that to hold on to, cause she been afraid I’s carryin on so round there at the airport, badmouthin with one person and another, she gone lose her job or somethin. Said that necklace was the most precious thing to her with her babies’ pictures inside, and once I had that I’s gone know she gettin me the money. Only she didn’t never get round to it.”

  “So you killed her,” said Arthur.

  Rommy sat straight back. He frowned in a manner that seemed, against all Arthur’s inner warnings, entirely spontaneous.

  “You thinkin that now, too? You gone over with them po-lice?”

  “You didn’t answer me, Rommy. I asked you if you killed Luisa.”

  “No, hell no. I ain the kind to kill nobody. I’s just woofin a little, cause she made me look so bad with my man Pharaoh and all.”

  Rommy tried all the inept little tricks he’d affected throughout his messed-up life to enhance his credibility. He gave a small crippled smile and waved a thin hand, but eventually, as Arthur continued to study him, Rommy reverted to his fearful, skittery look. Still scrutinizing his client so intently that he might have been a code, Arthur thought suddenly of Gillian—not so much her plea to cling to hope but rather the sweetness of loving her. He felt somehow that protecting the Rommys of the world from the harshness that befell them was a piece of that. Those people were his, because, save for his father, he might well have been Rommy. Susan was Rommy. The planet was full of creatures in need, who could not really fend, and the law was at its best when it ensured that they were treated with dignity. He needed all of that in his life—love and purpose. He did not know, now that he’d finally embraced that, if he would ever be able to let go.

  So with the desperation with which he wanted love, he wanted to believe Rommy. But he could not. Rommy had a motive to kill Luisa. He had said he would do it. And then, when he had been caught with her cameo in his pocket, he’d admitted he had done it. It could not have all been a coincidence.

  While Arthur deliberated, Pamela was watching him, as if she needed his permission to hope herself. He moved his chin back and forth very slightly to let her know where he stood. Her look in response was deadened but resigned. It was she who then put the right question to their client.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this, Rommy? Any of it? We’ve talked with you about this case I don’t know how many times.”

  “You didn’t never aks. I tole all them lawyers what aksed.”

  There was always a point with Rommy when belief in his utter guilelessness evaporated, or more properly, where it was revealed as yet another mask. He may have had an IQ south of 75, but he knew how to be deceitful. From the start, he had realized the impact the truth about Luisa would have on Arthur and Pamela and their enthusiasm for his case. He knew that because he had seen what happened before, when he had told his earlier lawyers about fencing tickets with Luisa, getting shortchanged, and vowing to kill her. At the start, Arthur had decided not to pierce Rommy’s privilege with any of his former attorneys, bearing in mind the motto he had repeated to Pamela the day they first met Rommy—new lawyer, new story. But there was no longer any mystery about why Rommy’s trial counsel had used an insanity defense or why their successors had never challenged Rommy’s guilt. Given his prior education, Rommy had no trouble reading what was on his present lawyers’ faces.

  “I ain kill’t nobody,” he repeated. “I ain the kind.” Then even he seemed to acknowledge the pointlessness of his protests. His shoulders lost shape and he looked away. “That don’t mean they ain gone kill me though, do it?”

  Arthur would do his duty and fight. He would remind the appellate court of Erno’s confession and the tardiness of Genevieve’s testimony about Rommy’s threat. But there was nothing to substantiate Erno, while Genevieve’s version was consistent with all the known facts. Its sincerity was bolstered by her reluctance. Worst of all, as Arthur now knew, what she’d said was true.

  “No,” said Arthur. “It doesn’t mean that.”

  “Yeah,” said Rommy, “I knowed that, cause I already started in havin the dream again last night.”

  “What dream?” asked Pamela.

  “How they comin to g
it me. How it’s time. When I was first in Condemned, I’s havin that dream all the time. Wake up, you sweatin so, you smell bad to your own self, I swear. Sometime I think they ain gonna have to bother killin me. All us Yellows, we always talkin ’bout it. You hear some dude cryin in the night, man, you know he done had the dream. It ain right a-tall to do that to a man, make him hear all that. They let me outta here,” said Rommy, “I ain never gone be right.”

  Neither Arthur nor Pamela could find a response to that.

  “You know, man, I been here when they come for a guy. Couple days before, they take you down there to the death house. Move you and all, I guess, when you still got some hope, so you don start in strugglin or nothin. Man, the last guy they done, Rufus Tryon, he was next cell to me, man. He wudn’t gone let them take him. Say he gone get somebody ’fore he go. They wump him good. Even so, they say he done it again at the end. Had that last meal and throwed it all up on hisself—probably had some broken bones when they tied him in, but it don’t matter none then, do it? You think it’s better to get drug in or just walk, let them do what they gone do?”

  Pamela was nearly as red as a stoplight. She finally scraped out some word of consolation and told their client that the best thing was not to have to go in there at all. Rommy, who knew a joke when he heard it, offered his jack-o’-lantern smile.

  “Yeah, tha’s better all right, but still and all, you got to think on it. Gets on your mind, too. How’m I gone let them do me? Most of the time, I’s thinking, walk in there with your head up. I ain done nothin anybody ought to be killin me for. I stole some stuff, but you can’t get death for that, right? But that-all’s what I’m gone get anyway.”

  Past the point of professional dignity, Pamela had surrendered to promises she could not keep.

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “Yeah, I’m use to it. I mean, that got to be some time, don’t you think, knowin someone gone kill you? Thinkin to youself and all, I go walk down that hall and somebody gone kill me, this here the last walk, this the last stuff I’m gone see and I cain’t do nothin about it. That got to be some time. Man, I look down that way, in my head and all, I start to shake so bad.” Rommy hunched up his shoulders and, in the sight of his lawyers, dwelled with that terror. “Man, you doin all you doin, but I’m still here. Ain nothing changed for me.”

  Rommy’s anger was usually a shadow even to himself, but he suddenly marshaled much of it, due undoubtedly to the influence of the good Reverend Dr. Blythe. But at least Rommy found the rare strength there to bring his sepia eyes directly to Arthur’s through the glass.

  “I’m innocent, man,” he said then, “I ain kill’t nobody.”

  28

  JULY 5, 2001

  Secrets of the Pharaoh

  EVENING IN THE OFFICE. At her vast desk, Muriel moved through the papers which had awaited her all day. On the rare nights when she and Talmadge were both home, she would bundle the draft indictments, the mail, and the memos into her case, and after dinner read everything over in bed, occasionally seeking her husband’s advice while the TV blared, the sheepdog and the cat competed for space on the covers, and Talmadge, loud at the best of times, held forth in a body-shaking timbre as he talked overseas, still unpersuaded that he did not have to shout across the ocean.

  But she preferred the solitary stillness of the office at six. When she was done tonight, like most nights, she would put in an appearance at a fund-raiser for a pol or a cause, banking a little more capital for her own campaign. Muriel would remember her precise destination only as she departed, when she picked up the file her assistant had left outside her door.

  For the moment, she was intent on a series of responses to a memorandum she’d circulated late last week, proposing a pilot diversion program for first-time narcotics offenders. The Chief Judge had signed off with timid commentary, intended to garner no blame if anything went wrong. Naturally, the General Counsel of the Police Force was opposed—the police wanted everybody in jail. Ned’s one-word note read, “Timing?” He wouldn’t put more in writing, but he was concerned about the political ramifications of allowing dope peddlers—albeit small-timers—back on the street in an election year. Yet Muriel would brave it. Counseling and job training were far cheaper than prison and trial, and she’d defang the right by talking up the tax savings; at the same time this initiative would help forestall Blythe and his camp followers in the minority communities. More important, it was the right thing to do. Kids with the guile and energy to sell drugs could still find a place in the legitimate world, if you got them started.

  “I’m sick of using the criminal justice system to clean up other people’s messes,” she wrote back to Ned. ‘The other people’ she had in mind were the schools, the social service network, the economic institutions, but Ned didn’t need a lecture. Nonetheless, she recognized the voice resounding through her note—her father’s. Tom Wynn was gone more than twelve years, but she heard herself uttering his populist wisdom frequently these days, and with more pleasure than she would have imagined a decade ago. Courtroom dramatics, much as she relished them, were already receding into her past—in fact, Erno Erdai might be the last man she ever cross-examined. She wanted to affect more than one life at a time. And the brute truth of prosecution was that you rarely made anybody’s existence much better. You stopped the bleeding. You prevented more pain. But you didn’t walk out of the building at night expecting to see any trees you’d planted.

  Her inside line rang. Her first thought was Talmadge, but the Caller I.D. showed Larry’s cell phone.

  “You’re working late,” she said.

  “No, you are. I’m at home. But I just thought of something. And I had a guess I’d find you there. I’m calling to tell on myself.”

  “Have you been naughty, Larry?”

  “I’ve been a moron. Was it me you were stroking the other day about being so smart?”

  “To the best of my recollection.”

  “Maybe you should ask for a recount,” Larry said now.

  Muriel wondered if this conversation was picking up where they’d left off. She’d never regarded herself as introspective by any measure. All her life, she’d been so bound up in being in the world, in doing, that she was liable to lose track of herself, like the fact that she was starving or needed the bathroom. Yet in the weeks since she’d been to Atlanta, she seemed to be spending a lot of time with her fingers on her own pulse. And one of the main questions that leaped out of the underbrush in her mind several times each day was exactly what was going on with Larry and her. It wasn’t breaking news when Larry had informed her on the way to Atlanta that she’d settled for less in her marriage. Reflective or not, she’d understood that much. What she’d missed was the repetitive nature of her mistakes. She had married idols, knowing all along she’d been rubbing her toes on clay feet at night. It would require some time, maybe a century or two, for her to sort out what that meant about her.

  For the present, Larry was the puzzle. She was glad she’d put him on the spot the other day after Genevieve’s dep, trying to get him to say why he’d been so determined to wise her up to herself. Was he wreaking vengeance or offering an alternative? It was obvious Larry had no clue, which was just as well, because she wasn’t sure either possibility would have made her particularly happy.

  As he went on now, she realized he had not called for a personal discussion.

  “I actually went to visit with Rocky Madhafi at Gang Crimes this a.m.,” he said, “and I’m there telling him how I’ve got to find some gangbanger called the Pharaoh and all the sudden I see the light. Remember you told me to dig up the guy Erno shot at Ike’s four years ago?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, do you remember his name?”

  Eventually, she said, “Cole.”

  “What about his first name?”

  She was blank.

  “F, a, r, o,” said Larry.

  She took a second to get it, and her initial reaction was skeptical. For so
me reason, she’d assumed ‘Faro’ was pronounced like ‘Fargo.’

  “Well, there’s a good way to find out if it’s the same guy,” Larry said. “I mean, maybe there is. That’s what I just thought of.”

  For the hearing in front of Harlow, Larry and she had assembled a transfer case full of documents, which was now in the bay window behind Muriel’s desk. Among the records was a photocopy of the address book the evidence tech had found in Luisa’s purse at Paradise a decade ago. Originally, Muriel was planning to cross Erdai on the fact that his name wasn’t in there, but she decided to forgo it, since Arthur would just argue that a woman having an affair wouldn’t be calling her married lover at home. Muriel pulled the phone down to the carpet beside her and talked to Larry as she thumbed through the papers until she’d found the copy.

  “No ‘Faro Cole,’” Muriel announced.

  The sound of his cell spit on the line. “Check under F?” Larry asked finally.

  She hadn’t. ‘Faro’ was written in pen, in Luisa’s precise hand, which looked as if it had been inscribed against a ruler. ‘Cole’ had been added in pencil some time later.

  “Fuck,” Larry said.

  “Time-out,” Muriel said. She rewound and tried to go through it on her own. “Erno shot Luisa’s fence six years later? Is that a coincidence? Or do we know there’s a connection between Erdai and him?”

  “When Erno was arrested at Ike’s,” Larry said, “right after the shooting, Erno claimed Cole went off because Erdai had investigated him way back when for some kind of ticket fraud. Had to be referring to the scam Faro had run with Luisa and Squirrel, right?”