Scott Turow - Personal injuries

With a sudden manifestation of his usual irritable look, Walter rose up from his desk and interrupted the judge. The bench was at eye height for him and he was on his toes, reaching over it like a window ledge to point out a paper he'd handed the judge before. Malatesta was evidently confused, and he covered the microphone for the courtroom's public address system with his palm as Walter spoke to him. He was smiling faintly when he resumed.

"Well," he said. "I had intended to hear argument, but the calendar is crowded and Mr. Wunsch reminds me that, in light of that, I signed and filed an order last night denying Mr. McManis's motion to dismiss. So no need to do again what's already done. That will be the ruling of the court, with due apology to counsel. The case will proceed." Malatesta emitted another somewhat tentative smile and directed Walter to set a date for a status. In the brief hush, the only sounds were the heat from a register below the podium and Walter's pen scratching out an order to confirm what the judge had said.

"But, Your Honor," said McManis suddenly. Robbie's head shot around. McManis was sagged over the podium with a forlorn expression. Before he could say more, Feaver thanked the judge and, as he wheeled, kicked Jim in the ankle, while he steered Evon out by the elbow. Glancing back, she saw McManis slowly gathering his papers. Klecker had stopped the FoxBIte and removed it from Feaver by the time Jim returned to the conference room from the courthouse.

"`But, Your Honor'?" screamed Robbie as soon as he saw Jim. McManis was too low-key and measured to be vulnerable to ribbing very often and Robbie made the most of the opportunity. "What were you going to do?" Robbie shouted. "Try to talk the judge into changing his mind?"

Caught somewhere between sheepishness and amusement, McManis sat in one of the conference room barrel chairs. His tie was lowered and he appeared drained by the entire experience. It had been such a confusing moment, he finally said. After all the preparation, his instinct was to react like any other loser. McManis's brief protest in the courtroom actually amounted to good cover, which made it that much easier for Robbie to give him the business. Evon and Klecker hailed several other agents in from the hallway to listen.

"You're the patsy," Feaver screamed. "You're supposed to lose."

Both Sennett and I had arrived while Robbie was carrying on. Klecker had downloaded the recording magazine to the computer equipment in the cabinet and replayed for us the brief exchange in the courtroom. Listening, McManis shook his head and said he remained utterly lost about what Malatesta had been up to. He couldn't understand then or now why the judge would schedule a hearing only to announce he'd reached a decision last night. But Sennett, running at warp speed, saw what had happened.

"That's a snow job for the record," he answered Jim. "It's wallpaper for the derriere. This guy is really clever," he said. "Mere's going to be a perfect excuse for everything. The motion's a close call. So Malatesta staged the hearing to show he had so little interest in who won or who lost that he even forgot he'd already ruled. If anybody ever questions him on the case, today's transcript will be Exhibit A for the defense. We can't drop a stitch or Malatesta'll go right through the opening."

A second of hushed admiration for Stan's deft intelligence penetrated the still air of the conference room. For the agents, perhaps, it had never been quite as clear why Sennett was in charge. He held the floor an instant longer, the smallest man there, looking about, impressing his warnings and his discipline on each of them.

For all his overenthusiastic openness about everything else, Robbie was guarded concerning Lorraine. At the start, he said next to nothing to Evon concerning his wife, as if to emphasize that, notwithstanding his deal with the government, in this arena they could not intrude. But after six weeks around him, Evon had absorbed a lot about Rainey and her illness. She'd learned bits from Mort or the staff. And coming and going from Robbie's office, she'd overheard dozens of his cheerful phone calls with his wife, as well as more sober conversations with the legion of caretakers in Rainey's life-doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, masseuses, nurses, and the home health care aide whom he employed twenty-four hours a day. By now he'd even ventured isolated observations to Evon about Rainey, but only a sentence or two, rather than his usual extended digressions. Recently, he'd glumly reported on the need to puree everything Lorraine ate. "Puree of steak, can you imagine? Pureed muffin? She can still taste, at least." His lean face took on the longing, distant look of a man at sea.

It was something of a surprise one day in mid-February when he invited Evon in to meet Lorraine. They had been in the neighborhood, down the block, in fact, meeting a prospective client. Sarah Perlan, a short and portly woman, wanted to sue the local tennis center for the Achilles tendon she'd torn when she'd stumbled on a wayward ball. When they were done at Sarah's, Robbie had suggested a visit with Lorraine. Evon was reluctant to intrude, but he insisted Rainey wanted to meet his new paralegal.

"I guess I've talked a lot about you." His furry brows crawled up his forehead as if this phenomenon struck him as unaccountable.

From the entry, you could imagine the interior as it had once been. Something of a neat freak, Rainey Feaver had tended to the austere, and had furnished almost exclusively in white. The living room, as Robbie had once observed, was the sort of place where a three-year-old with a chocolate bar could do as much damage as a tornado.

But sickness had a design sense of its own. Outside the house, Robbie referred to it as the Disease Museum, a proving ground and display space for every device, simple or complex, that might somehow improve the life Lorraine had left. Along the handcrafted walnut railing that ran up the turret staircase dominating the foyer, an electric hoist now whirred along a grease-blackened track. Metal hospital rails had been applied to all the walls, and there were a number of electronic doorbells visible that Rainey had once used to summon help.

On the first step of the staircase, he turned to Evon. "Sure you can handle this?"

He might have thought of that before, but it was too late to turn around. The truth was that she was not good with illness. Maw-Maw, her grandmother, paralyzed after disk surgery went bad, had moved in with her parents when Evon was fifteen. Her entire existence by then was founded on physical well-being, and she was often frightened in the presence of the old woman, even sickened when a sheet or hem slipped away and she caught sight of her grandmother's legs wasted to the width of a hockey stick. She kept what distance she could. `You know, it isn't catching,' her mother finally told her one afternoon in her customarily brutal fashion.

This encounter would be worse. Maw-Maw's decline had been long but natural. Rainey Feaver was thirty-eight years old and dying. There was really no hope. Some-a distinct minority of ALS patients-lived twenty years with the disease as it smoldered through their bodies. Stephen Hawking was by far the most famous of these slow-progressing cases. But Lorraine was `normal'-walking one day, falling down the next, and in a wheelchair within eighteen months. Her hands had weakened to the point that she could no longer hold a pencil or lift her arms above her head. And now, two and a half years after diagnosis, she could not feed herself or swallow well. She needed assistance even to remain upright on the toilet. She could not control her salivary glands, and shortly before Evon had arrived on the scene, they had been irradiated to keep Rainey from drowning in her own spit.