Reversible Errors

by Scott Turow

  “What are you telling me, Mo?”

  “Well, let me just show you what I did. You can draw your own conclusions.”

  With that, from a metal file drawer behind him, Mo removed the pistol and the carbons of several forms that had accompanied the gun from Evidence. It had been resealed in the heavy plastic, now brittle and brown along the creases, in which it had been stored since Erno shot Faro in 1997. Larry hadn’t seen the weapon until now. It was a revolver, a . 38 by the looks of it. Given procedures established to combat the notorious propensity of firearms and narcotics to disappear from the police Evidence Room, Larry, in the absence of a court order, would have had better luck getting a look at the Crown Jewels, and he’d simply requisitioned the pistol to Fingerprints once he’d determined it had never been released. When a prosecution was complete, the legal owner of a firearm utilized in a crime could apply for return. Evidence would check with ATF and examine the indexes of stolen firearms. If the gun was clean, the owner could have it. But Faro Cole had never bothered, which hadn’t surprised Larry, given Faro’s disappearance after the shooting.

  In his tedious fashion, Mo now explained how hard it was to lift fingerprints long after a suspect’s last contact with the object. Because prints were generally left by an oily residue emitted with perspiration, they tended to evaporate over the years. Larry knew all of that, which was why, in the days when he was looking hard for Faro, he had requested that the Fingerprint God himself conduct the examination. Notwithstanding the lectures, it had been a good thought, because Mo appeared to have had some luck.

  “In this case, the only latent that developed with standard techniques was right here.” Mo pushed his black glasses up on his nose and pointed with an eraser tip, through the plastic, at a couple of spots on the barrel, then showed Larry the digitial photos on his computer monitor. “They’re very, very partial. AFIS kicked out about half a dozen ten-cards. After visual examination, I’d say they appear to be from the right middle finger and thumb of this guy. But I wouldn’t call it a courtroom-quality opinion. A good defense lawyer would have me looking like a barking seal for making on such scant impressions.”

  He laid down the ten-card. It was a six-by-nine file card, filled with the familiar black reliefs of fingerprints, four each in two rows for the fingers, two larger blocks for the thumbs, and then, at the bottom, a simultaneous impression of five fingers on each hand. To ensure the reliability of the identification, a face-on photo of the fingerprints’ donor was laminated to the upper left-hand corner of the card. The handsome young man, looking entirely vacant in the light of the flash, was Collins. Larry’s better senses had told him this was coming, but apparently he’d held out hope, because a sigh forced itself from him. Life would have been easier.

  “Seems he was holding the gun by the muzzle,” said Mo.

  “That’s what the reports said,” Larry told him. “But I still need to be 100 percent it’s this guy.” Larry tapped the ten-card. With something less than absolute certainty, Arthur would have a harder time making any use of the evidence.

  “I understand. And I wanted to confirm my opinion. I did a second-tier examination. Down here on the butt, I noticed something. What does that look like to you?” He was indicating a filament of color, almost the same shade as the ochre handle of the gun.

  “Blood?”

  “I’d say this man has a chance to be a homicide detective. There’s usually blood at a shooting. And blood is an interesting medium for prints. It dries quickly. And the impression is often more permanent than a finger-oil print. But when you’re identifying prints in blood, the chemicals the techs routinely dust with, which adhere to sweat residues, don’t work. Here the latent is literally etched in the blood, and often so faintly it’s not visible. You don’t see any bloody prints on that gun, do you?”

  He didn’t.

  “A decade ago,” said Mo, “that would have been the end of the line. Today, we take an infrared digital photograph that highlights the blood and screens out the underlying medium, in this case, the brown handle. Then I filtered that photo further for any striated imagery. And when I did, there were four blood-prints present—three partials and a very clear thumbprint. Two partials and the thumb turned up on the gun handle. And one partial was on the trigger.”

  Mo slid his chair back so that Larry could see the pictures on the large monitor. Larry nodded dutifully, but he was impatient.

  “Did you run those through AFIS?”

  “Naturally,” said Mo.

  Dickerman reached into his file folder and laid two ten-cards on the desk in front of Larry. One was close to tweny-five years old, taken upon Erno Erdai’s entry into the Police Academy, the other from his arrest for shooting the man whom Larry now knew for certain was Collins.

  “That’s how come you realized it was the Gandolph case,” Larry said.

  Mo nodded.

  “See,” said Larry, “Erno took the gun off the guy who was holding it by the muzzle—let’s assume it’s Collins—and shot him. That’s what Erdai was doing time for. And that’s why his print’s on the trigger.”

  “That information could have been helpful,” said Mo dryly. “Not having it at the time, I went over the weapon once more, still hoping to confirm the identification of Mr. Farwell. As an afterthought, really, I did what I should have done in the first place and checked the cylinder for ammo. I was delighted to learn that Evidence had sent over a loaded piece—and that I’d been dumb enough to work on the trigger without checking to find out.”

  “Sorry,” said Larry, “but that sort of figures. Erno’s lawyer had said he would plead by the time they got him to the station. So I guess nobody bothered processing the weapon after that.”

  “I guess,” said Mo, shaking his head at the legendary stupidity of everyone, including himself. “My wife thinks I have a nice desk job. Do you think anybody would have figured it was suicide?”

  “Not during baseball season, Mo.”

  Mo made a mouth and nodded. He hadn’t thought of that.

  “How many rounds were there?” Larry asked.

  “Just one. But there were also four casings in the other chambers with firing-pin markings.”

  Mo was saying the weapon had been fired four times. The reports were uniform that Erno had shot Collins only once. With Mo’s permission, Larry reached out for the bag and pressed down on the plastic to get a better view of the gun. It was a five-shot revolver, definitely a .38.

  “Any rate,” said Mo, “once my heart started beating again, it turned out to be a worthwhile expedition. Very clear prints on every casing. Those chambers, I guess, kept things moist.” Mo clicked to display new photos, then pointed to the bullets and the four casings in a separate plastic envelope inside the bag with the gun.

  “And did you get a hit on the prints in the database?”

  “Yep. Man was arrested in 1955 when he was twenty-two for Mob Action.” Mob Action usually meant a bar fight, charges that were almost always dismissed. Mo laid that card down, too. After ten years, Larry had to work to place the face, particularly because the man in the picture was far younger than the guy Larry knew. But it came. The fellow with the hangdog look in the black-and-white mug shot was Gus Leonidis.

  For just an instant, Larry was pleased with himself for remembering. Then a sensation of radical alarm fired through his limbs as he took in the meaning.

  McGrath Hall had been built as a World War I Armory. The Force had occupied the building since 1921, and as the jokes went, several of the clerks had been here since then. It was a gloomy timeless tomb. In recognition of his status, Mo had an office with a northern exposure. The large double-hung windows overlooked the crumbling Kewahnee neighborhood nearby, buffered by a patchy lawn, an iron fence, and several trees. Larry could see a fast-food wrapper tumbling along in the wind like a frisky boy and he watched until it rose out of the frame. This case, he thought. Man, this case.

  Larry bent again toward the weapon. It was a Smith &
Wesson—Gus’s gun, no doubt of that. And Gus’s gun had Erno’s print on the trigger, and one unfired round in the cylinder. Another slug had been removed from Collins Farwell in surgery. That left three bullets unaccounted for. Larry told himself, No, then No, then followed the train of thought to the end of the line.

  “You think this is the murder weapon on my case, Mo?”

  “I think Ballistics can tell you for sure. And I suspect the DNA deacons can say whose blood was on Erdai’s hand. I need to send this gun back to the Evidence Room for purposes of the chain. But I’m going to make damn sure somebody comes over here and signs for it. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  Mo handed over an envelope containing his report. Larry put it in his jacket pocket, but his mind was stumbling along. All Larry had to go on right now was the same witchy instinct that so often guided him. But the cool, deliberate homing mechanism of instinct said the blood on Erno’s hand was not Collins’s. Now that he had time to think, Larry realized that the reports from the shooting at Ike’s all said at least a dozen cops had jumped on Erno right after he shot. The gun had been wrested from him before Erno approached his bleeding nephew. So the blood on the handle of Gus Leonidis’s gun came from somebody else. Like a slow grinding mill, Larry turned through the possibilities, fighting mostly himself. Luisa Remardi had been shot point-blank. And if Erno’s fingerprint was etched on the trigger in Luisa’s blood, that meant Erno was the shooter on July 4, 1991.

  Erno was the shooter. This was the murder weapon. And somehow Collins had that gun in his hand six years later. Collins’s prints were there, too. The only guy whose fingerprints weren’t on it was Squirrel. And he had confessed.

  “So Erno and/or Collins did this together with Squirrel,” Larry said. “Squirrel didn’t rat them out, and Erno returned the favor once he knew he was dying.”

  Mo shook his long face. “All I can tell you, Larry, is whose fingerprints are there.”

  Larry knew that. He was just explaining it to himself. Squirrel had confessed. Squirrel had known about this very gun. Squirrel had Luisa’s cameo in his pocket. And Squirrel had told Genevieve he was going to kill Luisa. Nothing had changed. Not so far as Squirrel was concerned.

  What in the hell was up with Collins?

  When Arthur got hold of this, it was going to be mayhem. The case that wouldn’t end was going to rev up again to 7500 rpm’s. As Larry stood, Mo pointed toward his sport coat where Larry had placed the report.

  “I’ll let you be the messenger in Center City.”

  “Eternal gratitude,” he said. He looked at Mo and added, “Fuck.”

  Outside, in front of the Hall, there were splintered park benches where the civilian personnel often ate their sandwiches in the summer months. The squirrels, accustomed to feasting on crumbs, came out of hiding and jumped around Larry as soon as he sat down to think.

  There wasn’t even a word for what he was. ‘Upset’? But he always learned things at these moments of revelation. And what he was learning here was that he wasn’t really surprised about Erno. He’d always factored in the possibility that Erdai was messing around in proximity to the truth. Erno was the shooter. He repeated it to himself several more times. The consequence shook him, but not the fact.

  What bothered him more, as the minutes wore on in a day of wearying humidity, was Muriel. He was going to have to see her now. For real. He sat on the bench enduring everything he’d been going through for the last two days, the same congested feelings, his pulse skipping at the thought of being in the same room with her. And in this moment of revelation something else was clear: Muriel was never going to leave Talmadge. She was never going to sever herself from Talmadge’s influence with an election sixteen months away. No matter what, she hadn’t changed that much. And even forgetting the election, she’d invite scandal by admitting she was sleeping with a witness in an ongoing—and controversial—case. The hard-boned, clear-eyed part of Muriel that had always drawn Larry to her meant, in the end, that she’d never give up her entire career for his sake. What was left for the two of them was skunking around, more hotel rooms, begging for time. And Nancy, since she was a woman, the kind who paid attention, would know. What he was really butchering himself about was the life he’d made without Muriel. The fact that he was even considering chucking it in order to reach for something ungraspable filled him with bitterness, as if his heart was pumping battery acid.

  He could feel the report in his breast pocket. He wasn’t ready for any of this. Not for Muriel. Or to read in the press about some new fucking breakthrough in a murder case that was solved a decade ago. He was ready for Rommy Gandolph to be gone and for his own life to be at peace.

  Or was he? These chances didn’t come around very often—to recover what had been lost and was still regretted. To reverse the mistakes of a stupid and more ignorant self. Could he just let that opportunity go? He sat there dizzy with doubt, ready to cry out for no purpose at all. Then he tore the report into several pieces and dropped it in the trash. The squirrels rushed over, but for them, like others, there was only disappointment.

  36

  AUGUST 17, 2001

  Lincoln Land

  IN JUDGE KENTON HARLOW’S COURTROOM, there was no longer any expectation of drama. The vast gallery of onlookers was gone and the press contingent had dwindled to the standard retinue—Stew Dubinsky, Mira Amir, and a local news-service reporter, fresh from J school, who, even to Arthur’s eyes, needed to learn how to dress. With the media, Arthur had downplayed the allegations of the motions he’d filed. Whatever hopes he had with Harlow would not be enhanced if the judge felt Muriel had already been punished in the papers for her lapses.

  Arthur had not slept well. He was at a loss about exactly where Rommy’s case was headed. With Muriel’s letter about Collins, he might prop the coffin lid open for some time to come, and he even had flights of fantasy that Collins could somehow establish Rommy’s innocence. Yet lately, for whatever reason, Arthur had become concerned for his future. Sooner or later, this was all going to end. As Gillian had put it weeks ago, life would be life again, not an adventure. Never without a long-range plan, he suddenly could see nothing clearly. And that uncertainty had reached his dreams, turning them turbulent. Near five, he had crept into the kitchen, to the eastern window, to watch the fiery disc of the sun burn its place into the sky. It’s going to be okay, he told himself. He believed it, but never more so than twenty minutes later when Gillian in a thin white robe found him, drew her chair beside his, and, without a word between them, held his hand while the sun regally threw off its rosy disguise and in blinding beauty ascended.

  With Carol Keeney, and a determined step, Muriel arrived in the courtroom. She was dressed in a sleek pantsuit, looking, as always, like a lean cat ready for a fight. She deposited her files on one of the counsel tables, then strolled across the courtroom and plopped down beside Arthur on the front bench where he, and several other lawyers here on motions, awaited the commencement of court.

  “So,” she said. “How big is that top hat of yours? Any more rabbits left in there?”

  “I’m hoping this one is enough.”

  “This is really clever, Arthur. I grant you that.”

  Arthur had eked one more extension from the Court of Appeals, this time for his motion to reconsider the order terminating Rommy’s case, so he could investigate the matters about Collins that Muriel had disclosed in her letter. The next move, plotted with Gillian, was far more unorthodox. Under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Arthur had asked Judge Harlow to sanction the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for failing to disclose what Collins had told Larry in Atlanta. Essentially, Arthur claimed that Muriel’s response months ago to Arthur’s motion to grant Collins immunity had been functionally false. As punishment, he wanted Judge Harlow to order Muriel to immunize Collins and allow Arthur to take his deposition. In theory, Judge Harlow no longer had power over this case. Yet the original judge was in the best posit
ion to determine if he had been lied to and so such questions were referred first to him. And the law would defer to the sanctions he imposed if he found a party had acted in bad faith.

  “The Court of Appeals will see right through this, Arthur. Smart as this is, it’s hopeless in the long run.”

  “I don’t think it’s hopeless, Muriel. I think Judge Harlow may feel you were hiding material information.”

  “I wasn’t hiding anything, Arthur. It was Erno who was hiding—and lying.”

  “He was protecting his nephew.”

  “By shooting him? Besides, I don’t think there’s a motive exception for perjury. Erno’s word is worthless, Arthur. It always was.”

  “Especially if you won’t disclose anything that backs him up.”

  “Nothing backs him up, Arthur.”

  “How about Collins saying he prays every night for God to forgive him for what Erno and he did to Rommy? How could you possibly sit on that in good conscience?”

  “It’s b.s., Arthur, Collins getting his uncle’s back on the cheap, blowing smoke up Larry’s behind without the risk of perjury. And you got the information, Arthur, as soon as it appeared remotely relevant to anything.”

  “What else is there, Muriel, that you’ve decided isn’t remotely relevant?”

  “Arthur, I told you and the judge in my response that you have everything conceivably favorable to your client.”

  “Except Collins’s testimony. You really think the courts are going to let you keep Collins in the closet while you execute Rommy?”

  “Collins is a sideshow, Arthur. There’s nothing that connects him to these murders. You’ve been very good at creating sideshows. That’s your job. I give you credit. I’ll tell you another sideshow that interests me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A little birdie says he sees a lot of Gillian Sullivan around your of fice over there. And holding hands at the Matchbook. What’s that about? Inquiring minds want to know.” With the question, Muriel bestowed a lurid little smile.