Scott Turow - Personal injuries

Once inside, the Movers swept for bugs, checked the angles from all windows and the thinness of the walls, then delivered a lengthy list of do's and don'ts. The team leader, Dorville, handed her a wallet with a driver's license, credit cards, social security number, even private health insurance and photos of three little girls who were supposed to be her nieces. `Don't be thinking about a shopping spree,' Dorville had told her as he'd thumbed through the plastic. `We pay the bills out of your check.'

In the small entry, she stood before an illuminated mirror, prodding her shoulder to see how bad the damage was. Maybe she'd find someplace this weekend for a massage. Something hopeful spurted up at the thought, an unearthed memory of the lost body pleasures of the training room and the prospect of some balm for the tedium of the weekend. Monday through Friday, she was in motion. Once Robbie dropped her off, she'd go work out at the U., and on the way home grab something she could heat up in the microwave. Somewhere during the evening, in the midst of laundry or ESPN, she'd dictate her 302s, reporting on the day's activities, and drop the microcassette into a zipped compartment in her briefcase. Tomorrow, under some pretext, she would deliver it to The Law Offices of James McManis.

But the weekends dragged. On Sundays she called her mother, or her sister Merrel, from a pay phone, a different one each week, sometimes miles from her apartment. The airport was a favored location, because she had a clear view up and down the long corridors to make a tail. Next month, when it wouldn't look so strange to an outsider, she could get together with some of the other UCAs working in McManis's make-believe law office. For now, she was alone. She was going to watch the Super Bowl by herself in a sports bar a few blocks over, where she'd drink O'Doul's. She could handle that. She had before.

She was staring at herself. Even a month along, there were times she passed a mirror and thought she was wearing a mask. All that makeup! She'd worn contacts for years on the field. But the dye job and the hairdo still made her knees buckle; she looked like she'd run into a stylist who was seasick. It was the falseness she hated. When she was eleven, dressed for church-it was Easter, she believedshe'd heard an exchange between her mother and Merrel in the hallway. Merrel had twisted up Evon's hair in a curling iron, primped her skirt. `Doesn't she look wonderful?' Merrel asked. `She does, she does,' Momma had responded then let the weight of worry force itself out in a sigh. `But she's never going to be that much to write home about.' Not like Merrel, she meant, the beautiful daughter, who actually represented the county twice for Miss Colorado.

It had always been a primary discipline to look into a mirror and see what was there. There seemed a cruel putdown in the fact they'd made her go around painted and hidden. Wasn't life confusing enough? How had she allowed that?

She knew this was where she had been heading, downward to confront the raw disappointment that this assignment, once so sweetly anticipated, had now become. She winced once more, with the pain in her shoulder and the accompanying memory of that tussle with Feaver. When she opened her eyes, the light from the bar of clear bulbs hanging over the mirror seemed painfully intense. She could see the granules of powder on her cheeks, the phony color of the blush. Her own green eyes were drawn tight into little points of black that somehow seemed the tiny hiding place of truth. She knew the reason she was here now. She couldn't answer McManis in Des Moines, but tonight she knew why she'd been so eager, and why she now felt so dashed.

She was thirty-four years old. She had a life about which some people-even an ineradicable fragment of herselfbelieved that the best was past, summed up by a four-inch metallic disk hanging in a special plastic box on her parents' rec room shelf. She had her work. Her cases. Her cat. Her sibs and their kids. Church on Sunday and choir practice Thursday evenings. But she awoke in the middle of the night, often for long stretches, her heart stirring with nameless anxieties, her dreams just beyond the grasp of memory, while she was drilled by the knowledge that life was not turning out right. And then there was a little yellow Teletype from the Deputy Director. High voltage to her heart. Caps. Initials. FBI-speak. But she could decode the message, and she felt as if every word were set to song. Adventure. Importance. A step ahead of the boys, instead of a step behind. But the best, the very best part, the deepest secret, the sweetest note, was one only she could hear. For six months to two years. Maybe forever. Someone else. The blessing. The chance. She could be someone else.

I'd long confessed to Robbie how surprised I was about Silvio Malatesta. I had worked with Malatesta on a judicial committee while I was President of the Kindle County Bar Association and had found him intelligent and honorable, if somewhat woolly-headed. Immediately before going on the bench, he had been a law professor at Robbie's alma mater, Blackstone Law School here in town, a Torts scholar who liked to argue the occasional unusual case in the Appellate Court. That didn't strike me as a career path to corruption, but Robbie rarely bothered with character assessment in this area. Some took. Most didn't. Who would, he said, was never predictable.

The story told by Walter Wunsch was that Malatesta, like many legal scholars, longed for the bench and the chance to make the law he'd spent years studying. Silvio lacked political connections and had turned to the overlord of his old neighborhood, Toots Nuccio, the legendary pol, mobster. and fixer. Toots had Silvio on the bench within six months. Only then did Silvio learn that his genie required more in return than a rub on his lamp.

Now and then Toots would phone with suggestions about the way matters pending before Malatesta ought to proceed. The first time the judge had told Toots he didn't think his call was proper. Toots had laughed and made reference to a local reporter who'd been blinded when some unknown assailant threw a beaker of muriatic acid in his face. He was the last person, Toots said, who'd asked a favor from him and refused to reciprocate. You get, you give, Nuccio told Malatesta. Silvio was much too frightened to do anything other than comply. In time, he'd learned to accept the envelopes that arrived after Nuccio's calls, and even worked up the nerve to ask for another favor, assignment to Common Law Claims. Now Tuohey's guys, Kosic and Sig Milacki, were the persons who stopped by with occasional guidance about the lawyers to favor. Malatesta went along in the hope he'd eventually be promoted to the Appellate Court, where he could deal more in the realm of scholarship and theory, and where the three judge panels that decided each case reduced the prospects for venality.

Perhaps because he remained unsettled about his situation, Malatesta's behavior on the bench, according to Feaver, was often confounding. It surely was in Peter Petros's case. One morning early in February, Evon found a notice in the mail setting oral argument on McManis's motion to dismiss. Both Stan and Jim were alarmed, albeit for different reasons. Malatesta could have denied the motion without a hearing, by filing a brief written order. Sennett saw no reason for the judge to call attention to the case by holding a public session. Stan was worried that Wunsch and Malatesta were somehow onto Robbie. Feaver shrugged it off. Silvio, he said, never made sense.

McManis's concerns were more practical: he'd never been to court as a lawyer. Undoubtedly, during his years as an agent, he'd testified. But he'd never had to argue to a judge and he betrayed the first nervousness Evon had seen from him. The day of the hearing, Robbie stopped briefly in Jim's office to strap on the recording equipment and to sign the consent forms. Because the FoxBIte's batteries might run out during a lengthy wait in the courtroom, Evon would carry the remote and activate the recorder there. McManis was noticeably taciturn. Robbie assured him that the worse he looked, the better it would be under the circumstances, but McManis seemed too taut to take much comfort from the jest. He had on a blue church suit and a white shirt, and his hair, usually slightly astray, was gelled in place like a helmet.