Scott Turow - Personal injuries

But bugging him, I insisted. A deal to cooperate didn't authorize this kind of gross intrusion into his private life.

"We're legal," Stan shot back. Like every prosecutor, he resented the suggestion of abuse. "We're completely legal. That's all I'll say." He bulleted me with one more angry dark look and put on his coat, which had been slung over a chair.

"No, I'll say something else, George. Because I resent your sanctimony. Your beloved client is what people have in mind when they use the word `lawyer' as a pejorative. He treated a profession which you and I are both proud to be a part of as if it's tantamount to pimping. And he got rich doing it. And when we caught him, he made a deal to tell us the whole truth and nothing but, a deal which he doesn't seem to be living up to. And you and he both better understand that I'll do whatever I have to within the limit of the law to protect these prosecutions. Because I have to, George. Because the people on the other side, your client's buddies, the Brendans, the Kosics, they're a law unto themselves. For them, there are no limits. These are ruthless men, George." My friend Stan Sennett stared from the door, his eyes now hidden in the shadow of his snap brim hat. He was pointing at me, a gesture meant to indicate he had no present use for courtesy or any of my other pretenses.

"And if I'm not willing to be as tough as they are, to seize every advantage allowed-if I'm not willing to do that, something terrible will happen, George. They'll walk away. And they'll do all of this, again and again. They'll win, George. And we'll lose. You and me. And the profession we're proud of." He looked back from the threshold. "And I don't want to lose." FEAVER PACED in my office and raged.

"Is that corrupt?" he asked. "Letting a lonely woman have a little affection?"

According to the recording, I offered, it wasn't so little. The locker room humor, an effort to soothe him, drew a fleet smile, but he barely changed stride.

"So I'm her jocker. So what? This is a lady, a person for Chrissake, she's a great person. You think she was looking for this? I was whispering sweet nothings in her ear for years. Do you know who Magda is? She was a novice, she lived in a convent until she was nineteen. She's still in an apartment with her eighty-eight-year-old mother. And we fuck in her chambers because she'd rather die than be seen coming out of a hotel room with a man. This lady, George, didn't have sex with anybody until she was forty, and then just because she couldn't stand thinking of herself as a virgin. So she got keelhauled and let the super in her building have at her one day while Mom's visiting an aunt. Quite a story. This guy wooin her a mile a minute in Polish, not a word of which she happens to speak, and smellin, so she says, a little European. And then, of course, she was so embarrassed she moved out the next month. I mean, she's pretty goddamned funny about it. Did you know Magda was funny?"

I'd had a four-week trial in front of Judge Medzyk when she sat in the Felony Division, and I didn't remember a moment that warranted more than a momentary smile. She had good demeanor and better-than-average ability, but for Robbie's purposes and mine there was only one thing about her that mattered-she was a judge, before whom he had appeared often over the years.

"I like Magda, for Chrissake. I really like her. We have a great time together. I'd like her whether she ruled for me or not. And she doesn't rule for me all the time. I get this little tiny smile and a shrug when it goes the wrong way, like, What can I do, this is my job?"

She had no business ruling either way, not in these circumstances. It was shame, I could see, that had been her undoing. She hadn't recused herself from Feaver's cases because she would have expired if she were ever called upon to explain the reasons to the Presiding Judge.

"So they're gonna put her in the penitentiary for getting laid?"

Probably not. There was no mention of any case on the tape I'd heard, and Robbie insisted there never had been. But that didn't obscure Sennett's larger message that Bobbie was not entitled to pick and choose whom he'd talk about.

"Who would I be holding out on?" he asked. "Really?"

Mort was my first answer. Robbie jolted. I'd scared him or caught him, perhaps both. My continuing worry was that Sennett and I would someday be having a heart-to-heart much like today's, but one where it was Morty on the tape, up to his ears in all of this. I told Robbie that the train was leaving the station. Anything that should be said about Mort or anyone else had to be heard now. He insisted, as always, that Mort was clean.

"Don't you believe me?" His dark face was a beacon of baptismal innocence.

Conveniently, my phone rang. Even before summoning Robbie, I'd called a private investigator named Lorenzo Kotrar, whom I'd represented some years before when he was charged with violating the federal wiretapping statute. Poor Lorenzo had gotten the goods on his client's cheating husband, a police captain, but the captain took more than his pound of flesh when Lorenzo went off to the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone for sixteen months. When Lo was released, he found the notoriety of his case had led to significant demand for his technical expertise. He now worked the other side of the street, so to speak, sweeping and debugging, usually for major corporations, but also for persons wary of snooping by spouses and partners, not to mention the government. He was calling from Robbie's office, to which Feaver had admitted him before coming to see me.

"It's clean," Lo told me, but he could not say that Sennett hadn't shut down, anticipating the sweep. Klecker had had such free access to the line cabinet in the building that it might have been no more than a matter of throwing a switch. Lo offered to do Robbie's car and house next, but Feaver was certain his two calls to Magda had come from the office.

I looked out to the river below, where the city lights swam on the currents. It remained possible that Sennett had tapped Magda's chambers for other reasons. Perhaps Bobbie had wandered into a trap set for someone else. But he found that idea laughable.

"Magda's a quality person. She wouldn't even know how to be a crook." So where? I asked, Where did Stan get probable cause for the bug?

Feaver's black eyes were still, but if he knew, he wasn't telling me.

McManis phoned Evon at home that night. He had never done that before and he stayed with the cover, telling her he hadn't received a copy of Feaver's brief in a case in which his reply was due the next day. He insisted, cordially but firmly, that she bring it to his office right now.

He unlocked the door himself. Past 8 p.m., the LeSueur Building had a ghost town feeling. A cleaning man ran a floor buffer down the corridor, but aside from the security guards, he was the only person she'd seen about. Somewhere, young lawyers were toiling, but they were confined like secrets, given away only by the occasional scattered lights visible from the street.

McManis told her the story in bold strokes. Her heart rippled at one point when she thought he was about to play her the tape, but Jim proved too old-fashioned for that. Shame was her predominant reaction anyway. It felt as if someone had poured battery acid into her veins. She had been placed in Feaver's office to prevent, or detect, episodes exactly like this.

"So I look real good on this thing," she said when Jim finished. From experience, she'd have expected something forgiving from McManis, his usual faint, silent smile. But his light eyes were still as he studied her. Jim had his tie down, his sleeves rolled. Two cartons of Chinese were at the end of the long conference table, one of them emitting an overpowering odor of garlic.