Reversible Errors

by Scott Turow

  Yes, well. She’d known that sooner or later he’d have the good sense to ask that question.

  “Do you expect to prevail, Arthur, with this new tack?” She was afraid it might sound as if she was asking for mercy. Then she realized she probably was.

  “You mean, would I do this just to get even with you, Gillian? No. No. Pamela’s started the research. A new trial is dead-bang. But my position is that retrial is barred under the double jeopardy clause. The state failed to meet the fundamental responsibility of providing a competent forum. Muriel seemed willing to listen on that point.”

  For a second, Gillian imagined how Muriel was taking this. Even in defeat, she’d have the last laugh. That was a rare success in litigation. To be able to break your opponent’s heart.

  “Let me understand,” said Gillian. “I’m the scapegoat. A triple murderer is going to walk away because I was addicted to heroin. That’s how it’s going to be explained in the press?”

  Arthur chose not to answer, but only because there was no point in denying it. She had been a wretch in the eyes of this community, and a disappointment. But now she would advance to the category of monster. Arthur, she realized, saw her that way already. Across the small distance between them, his red-eyed stare was terrifyingly objective.

  “It’s my fault, Gillian. You warned me. You told me just what you’ve done to the men in your life. You even gave me an entire case history. And I jumped in anyway.”

  Despite her complete muddle, she felt a new source of pain, as if muscle had severed from bone near her heart. It was certain now that Arthur and she were done. He had never before spoken to her cruelly.

  She blundered out of the office, down the pale halls, to the elevator. Reaching the street, she stopped on the pavement. ‘Heroin.’ She heard the word from him endlessly. ‘Heroin.’ How could she ever have done this to herself? She truly needed to remember, and thus, for the first time in years, she experienced a clear sensation of the potent oblivion of the drug.

  41

  AUGUST 27, 2001

  The Midway

  UNDER THE LONG GREEN HANDS of the oaks and elms on the Midway, Muriel and Larry walked in search of a bench. Each had a sub bundled in wax paper tucked under an arm, and the bright red cup of a soft drink in hand. This narrow pleasance, miles long, had been leveled and planted not long after the Civil War, an urban garden amid a road where horses clip-clopped in front of carriages. Now four lanes of traffic, two on the east, two on the west, whizzed by, discouraging any effort to speak until they were side by side in front of a bench of splintering crossbeams on a cement base.

  “Here?” asked Muriel.

  “Whatever.” He remained grumpy about taking this stroll.

  “I was just thinking about us, Larry, and I realized that all our time together has been in confined spaces. You know? You keep talking to me about gardens but we’ve always been within walls. Courtroom. Office. Hotel room.”

  A huge bus motored by at that point, roaring as it accelerated and spilling poisonous smells from its exhaust.

  “Very rural,” said Larry. “Why did I have the feeling as I was walking, Muriel, that I was on a death march?”

  She could not quite muster a smile. She’d unwrapped her lunch but put it down. Somehow the next sentence required two hands.

  “I’ve decided to dismiss our case against Rommy Gandolph,” she said. It was not really a difficult analysis. Larry’s treasure hunt under Erno’s shed had yielded six more items with Erdai’s prints, or Collins’s, and not a bit of evidence against Squirrel. But she still dreaded speaking the words.

  Larry had bitten off a large section of his sandwich and continued to chew, but he was otherwise rigid. His tie, dragged down six inches from his collar, rode up and stayed parallel to the ground for quite some time on the wind.

  “You’re the first person I’ve told,” Muriel said. “After Ned, I mean.”

  He swallowed, then said, “I’m out here so nobody can hear me screaming. Right?”

  She hadn’t thought of that. But, as always, instinct had probably led her this way for a reason.

  “You have to be kidding, Muriel. You’re in a perfect position. You said Arthur wouldn’t deal, but now he has no choice if he doesn’t want to butcher his girlfriend in court.”

  After all this time, she still hadn’t internalized the differences in their worlds. Larry was one of the smartest people she knew. He read books. He could think abstractly. But to him the law was only tactics. He’d never bothered to fool himself, as lawyers did, into accepting its lines of trivial consistency. He saw only a big picture where the practitioners thought up logical reasons for doing whatever they wanted to.

  “I doubt he would do that,” said Muriel. “He’d be selling out his client to save Gillian.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “It’s unethical for both of us, Larry. Him—and me to propose it.”

  “Who are you talking to, Muriel?”

  “Larry, I’m no better than anybody else, I get caught up, but I do try. I believe that stuff about how you can’t enforce the rules if you won’t live by them. Besides,” she said and felt her heart shiver, “I don’t really believe Squirrel is guilty anymore.”

  Even before she spoke, she knew what she was saying, but the effect of watching him shrink from her remained heartbreaking. His spine, his face became hard as concrete. He was the one man on earth who’d loved her in the way she would have chosen and he was going to be her enemy.

  “He confessed,” said Larry quietly. That was the essence of it. In the end, she could say Larry fooled her. But Larry, a detective for more than twenty years now, would have to say he’d fooled himself. It might have been either a failure of integrity or a lapse in competence. Or a little of both. Yet at this stage, it would be even worse for him to attribute his mistake to his passion to please her.

  The other day she had thought he was being melodramatic when he said she couldn’t do this to him. But with a frequency unmatched by anyone else, Larry often beat her to the finish line, and he’d done it then. To accept her judgment, he would have to ruin himself in his own eyes. No one’s devotion went that far.

  “Larry, the way it’s going down, it will all be on Gillian. No Dickerman. Or Collins. No doubts about the investigation. Off the record, our story is that we couldn’t risk a double jeopardy ruling when it might mean opening the prison door for everyone who appeared before Gillian over the years. If we have to fight that fight, we can’t do it in a capital case, where the procedural law is so exacting.”

  As she explained, Larry’s blue eyes never left her. Finally, he got up and walked several feet to a mesh waste bin and slammed the sandwich down in it. Then he recrossed the ragged parkway where the grass had failed, leaving circles of mud between the bent grass and dandelions.

  “You know you’re full of shit, don’t you?” he said. “Laying this on Gillian—that protects you a hell of a lot more than me.”

  “I understand it helps both of us.”

  “Once you cut Rommy loose, the first thing Arthur does is file a big civil suit—all this stuff about Dickerman and Collins, that will come out in discovery.”

  “There won’t be discovery, Larry. They wouldn’t take the chance of letting Squirrel be deposed—he could say anything. That case will settle quick and dirty.”

  “Right after the primary.”

  In his imagination, she no longer retained any dimension. She calculated and did not feel. But she nodded in response. She was who she was. And it wasn’t always pretty. She wondered if it was worth telling him how large her ache for him would be. There were going to be horrible nights. But she would stay busy. The worst times would probably be years from now.

  Yesterday, she had prayed fervently in church. She had thanked God for her blessings. A meaningful life. Talmadge’s grandchild. No one got everything. She did not have love, but that was probably because she wanted it less than some other people. Still, she felt dizzy aga
in as she came to her feet. She wanted terribly at this instant to crawl against him. But loneliness was what she had chosen. Larry was hunched forward with his mouth against the heel of his palm, clearly colored by rage. When he thought about her, she knew, it was always going to be as the woman who had ruined his life.

  “I have to go see John Leonidis,” she said. “I told him I’d meet him at Paradise.”

  “Back to the scene of the crime,” said Larry.

  “Right.”

  “Don’t ask me to cover you on this. With him. Or the Force. I won’t, Muriel. I’m going to tell the truth about you to anyone who asks.”

  Her enemy. His truth. She looked at him one last time and then turned to flag down a taxi.

  She cried quietly for half the trip to the restaurant. Then in the last few miles, she began to think about what she would say to John. She was going to tell him everything, all the details. He was not the kind to blab and if he did, so be it. Instead, she tried to imagine something to console him. John Leonidis had waited a decade for a death to make up for the crime against his father. Even if she could convince him that Erno alone had killed his father, which she herself accepted as a certainty—even then, John would be roiled and miserable at the thought that Erdai had left life on his own terms. At the end of the day, after a decade of trying murder cases and communing with the victims’ families, Muriel was convinced that most of the survivors in some remote segment of their consciousness—the primeval part that was scared of the dark and loud noises—assumed that when the right person died, the one who deserved to be removed from the planet, when that occurred their lost loved one would come back to life. That was the pathetic logic of revenge, learned in the playpen, and of the sacrificial altar, where we attempted to trade life for life.

  She’d seen three executions now, as a supervisor. At the first, the father of the victim, a mother of two who’d been shot down at a Stop-N-Go gas mart, came away embittered, angry that what had been held out as a balm had only made him feel worse. But the two later families claimed that they’d gotten something from it—an end point, a sense of an awful equilibrium being restored to the world, the peace of mind that at least no one else would suffer again from this dead bastard as they had. But hurting as she did at the moment, she could not really remember why inflicting more harm would make life on earth better for anyone.

  Muriel pulled aside the heavy glass door at Paradise, with a clear recollection of how she had felt in the raw summer heat when she had entered with Larry a decade ago, the cool air suddenly embracing her bare legs, which were still tingling from her activities with Larry an hour before. That was gone. He was gone. She faced that again. Perhaps it was the thought of Larry, and his dedication to what she now took as a fiction, but her mind passed briefly to Rommy Gandolph. In a dreamlike moment, she saw Squirrel as if in a cartoon, beneath a pale light in a dripping dungeon. Her inclination was to laugh, but somehow the light she envisioned, like a small porch lamp, was actually the first point of radiance of her increasing pain. It would take decades, the rest of her life, to contend with what they had done to him and the reasons why.

  As always, John received her warmly. He hugged her, then took her back to the office which had once been his father’s. Gus’s photographs remained in the same spots on the walls.

  “This isn’t good news, is it?” he asked. He’d seen the papers over the weekend about Gillian. Aires’s phrase, “the Junkie Judge,” had proved a headline writer’s fave.

  “I don’t know, John. I don’t know what to call it.”

  As he listened to her, he bit again and again at his thumbnail, to the point that Muriel feared she would see blood. She could barely prevent herself from trying to stop him. Yet she had no place telling him how to face all of this. He was, as ever, loyal. The conclusiveness of the fingerprint and blood evidence was plain to him, and he was more willing than she expected to accept her judgment that Gandolph had no role in the killings. Whether she deserved it or not, John, like so many others, had faith in her as a lawyer. The only consolation he wanted was what she had anticipated.

  “Would you have gone for death on this guy? On Erdai? If he told and all, but he got the miracle cure and didn’t die?”

  “We’d have tried, John.”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Because he’s white?”

  Even now, her steady impulse was to say no. Jurors judged the gravity of these crimes by the value of the lives lost. In that calculus, like so many others, race and social status became indistinguishable. They would have cared mightily that Erno’s victims were hardworking family people. But the counterweight was their assessment of the killer, and there color in itself mattered little.

  “In the end, juries only give death to people they think are dangerous and completely worthless. It would make a difference that Erno did one good thing,” she said to John. “He wouldn’t let an innocent man die in his place. Maybe two. He cared about his nephew.” Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. It might also have proved significant that Muriel understood his passion.

  “What sense is that?” asked John. “Honestly. Does any of this make sense? Everybody’s just as dead. My father and Luisa and Judson. That guy Erno was a shit from what you’re telling me. A murderer. A liar. A liar under oath. A thief. He was scum. Twice as bad as anybody ever thought Gandolph was. And he’d have lived?”

  There was no arguing with that. Erno was as bent as they came.

  “That’s how it is in death cases, John. It’s so extreme—the crime, the stakes, everybody’s feelings. You try to make rules and somehow none of them stick, or even make sense.”

  She had brought a transcript of Collins’s interview. John turned a few pages, then handed it back.

  “It’s done,” he said and with those words sighed enormously. “At least we’ll have that. It’s done.”

  At the door, she apologized to him again for her own role in making this so prolonged, so torturous, but he would hear none of it.

  “Never for a second,” he said with the same fierceness with which he’d decried the senselessness of the law, “is anybody going to tell me that you weren’t doing your best. You and Larry. Tommy. All of you. Never.”

  He hugged her with the same energy he had when she came in, then went to find a bandage for his thumb.

  Outside, she stopped to look back at the restaurant where ten years ago three persons had met a hideous death. Muriel would never see this simple, low building, its compound-brown bricks and large windows, without being scoured by some of the terror that Luisa and Paul and Gus had each experienced in their last moments. Standing here, she revisited once more the unbearable instant when each of them realized that this life that we all love beyond anything else was about to conclude at the whim of another human being, an ending where the sustaining forces of both reason and humanity proved worthless.

  Inside, John had repeated something he often said—that to this day he still saw the blood on the floor. Yet John had not closed Paradise. The restaurant was Gus’s monument, home to his spirit. A bright place on a dark night. A warm place on a cold day. Food for the hungry. Company for the lonely. Life abounding in a site where humans strived, like Gus, to be each other’s friends.

  She would return.

  42

  AUGUST 30, 2001

  Release

  THE CLOTHING in which Rommy Gandolph had been tried and in which he’d been committed to the prison system had been mislaid long ago. Perhaps they didn’t bother saving the apparel of the Yellow Men. Just outside the town of Rudyard, Arthur and Pamela drove into the lot of a Kmart and bought three pairs of wash pants and a few shirts for Rommy. Then they continued their happy journey south.

  By the time they reached Rudyard, there was already a significant encampment of news vans in the parking lot. The Reverend Dr. Blythe was conducting a press conference. As always, he was accompanied by a cast of thousands. Arthur never
understood where all the people around Blythe came from—some were staffers at his church, a few provided security, but the affiliations of the rest were an absolute mystery. The cohort of at least thirty included a half brother of Rommy’s whom Arthur had never known to exist until last week, when the papers began to speculate about a civil suit. Blythe’s entire legion was ebullient, relishing both the occasion and the fact that by dint of numbers and press attention they had taken over a portion of the prison grounds.

  Apparently Blythe had carried a portable stage—a tall pallet and a podium—in the trunk of the stretch limousine in which he had traveled and which was parked at a distance, out of sight of the cameras. Blythe had been good enough to call to congratulate Arthur after Muriel filed her motion to dismiss Rommy’s case, but he’d heard nothing from the Reverend or his staff since. Naturally, though, Arthur was not surprised to see Blythe here. With his glimmering bald head and large white mustache, Blythe looked entirely avuncular until he started speaking. Approaching, Arthur heard him bemoaning the injustice of a system in which drug-addict judges sentenced innocent black men to die. He had a point, Arthur figured, but it was funny how it looked from up close.

  As some of the reporters surged toward Arthur, the Reverend invited him up to the podium. Blythe shook Arthur’s hand robustly and patted his back and told him again he had done well. It was from Blythe, in their final conversation, that Arthur had heard that the state had taken a statement from Erno’s nephew, and that Muriel was simply covering herself by blaming Gillian. Jackson Aires, who insisted on keeping the secret for his client’s sake, had stowed Collins back in Atlanta and refused to confirm what Arthur suspected Jackson had privately shared with Blythe. Aires confined himself to a single detail. ‘Your man didn’t do it. Wasn’t there. Rest of it doesn’t matter anyway. Helluva job, Raven. Never thought you had much prospect as a defense lawyer, but I seem to have been wrong. Helluva job.’