Scott Turow - Personal injuries

Most of my negotiations with Stan were conducted during our resumed morning trots in Warz Park. Neither winter darkness nor anything short of a blizzard deterred Stan from running, but I had taken a few months off until the weather eased. Now I met him there several times to talk things through. Although UCORC threatened for a week not to allow the Project to go on, they were in too deep, with too much money expended and too much crime uncovered, simply to throw everything aside. Ultimately, Stan and I agreed that the government would no longer promise Robbie probation. Instead, they would advise the sentencing judge of all relevant matters-Robbie's extraordinary cooperation and the full range of his misfeasance, including his unlicensed law practice-and let the judge impose whatever sentence the court found appropriate. My best guess, when the whole story came out, assuming there were some significant convictions, was that Robbie would do about two years inside. The restitution order relating to Feaver's unlawful practice might be staggering, but most judges would let the financial issues fall out in the inevitable morass of civil law suits for fraud that the insurance companies would file. Even with all that resolved between us, Stan needed D.C. to sign off.

"We accept," he finally advised me one morning in the middle of May. "But there's one more condition you're not going to like." Somehow, Sennett finished six miles every morning looking a picture of order. He had perfect equipment-neopropylene shorts and a sleeveless jersey, footgear the size of snowshoes, and a water bottle in a holster at the small of his back. His wiry Mediterranean hair was unmussed and his sweat always seemed to evaporate. His cheeks were already razored clean. Now he gave me his elevated look, chin ascendant, attempting to appear impregnable in the face of my expected complaints.

He had many excuses for what he proposed. Every prosecution, he said, even Skolnick and Crowthers, was in danger. The government could probably beat back the inevitable defense motions blaming them for Robbie's fraud, but the chances had grown significantly that a jury might just flush the cases out of disgust with Feaver. The future of Petros, therefore, rested more than ever on justifying the government's deal with this devil by demonstrating the widest ranging success in uncovering corruption. Yet they'd already lost Malatesta, and Feaver was done going to court on the contrived cases, since that wouldn't square with his pose with Dinnerstein. Instead, Sennett had a plan for a new matter, a fictitious motion to reopen one of our old cases, a motion in which Robbie's role, in essence, would be not as a lawyer but as a defendant under attack.

"It'll have to be heard by the Special Motions judge." Stan watched to see how long it would take before I got it, then he confirmed the worst. "We want him to try to fix Magda."

He was right. I didn't like it. We stood in the park fighting for quite a while. He had no predication, I pointed out, no reason to think Magda would corrupt herself. But he claimed that D.C. had decided the long-concealed personal relationship between the judge and a lawyer appearing regularly before her met the threshold. He said this actually had been UCORC's idea.

To me the whole business sounded like trial by ordeal, the medieval ritual where the hands and legs of a suspected witch were bound before she was thrown into a pond to see if she could float. Stan took my criticisms the way he usually did-without patience.

"George," he answered, "how many times, how many hundreds of times have you had a guilty client walk away? Not an acquittal, but some guy we just never found out about. How many scared-shitless executives have you had in your office, a guy who's caught a subpoena and is terrified about what might come out if he's asked the wrong question, or a fellow who's in the middle of a divorce and gets a spastic colon every time he thinks about all the naughty secrets his angry ex might spill? You've had a thousand of them, George. And they stroll. Most of them. Because we never know. It's not that we can't catch them all. The truth is we hardly catch anybody. And so it goes, George. I can't get ulcers over what I don't know about. But when I do know, George, then I've got a responsibility. It's not my job to be a sweet guy or say it's just an accident we found out. It's my job to protect the folks who live in this district. I'm not supposed to hope Magda won't do something worse in the future. It's my job to catch her, if she deserves to be caught."

His intelligence kept his self-image as spotless as stainless steel, but I gave him a hard look that rang up No Sale.

"I told you, you wouldn't like it," he replied as he turned to jog back to his car.

Robbie, bless him, said no.

"She's not a crook. I'll give them crooks. But I'm not going to try to sucker an honest person just because she's dumb enough to like me."

I loved him for it, I admit. It wasn't brass or the flatulent bluff of a coward. He was ready to do the extra time, years, frankly, it would cost him to defy Sennett. I admired his fortitude and his loyalty, uncertain whether, in his circumstances, I'd have the same resolve. And then I did what I had to as his lawyer. I explained why he had to go along.

If Robbie was anything other than a remote-control automaton, the government would have no choice about pulling the plug on the Project. They were taking a risk as it was, because a defense lawyer already had a howitzer load to lob at them, portraying the U.S. Attorney as the naive handmaiden of the worst kind of double-dealing snitch. Allowing Robbie to veto their selection of targets would just go to prove that point and pave the way for disaster in front of a jury.

"But Stan would give up a vital organ for Brendan," Robbie said.

He would, but to the people in the Department fortress in D.C. Brendan barely mattered at all. They cared about Congress, the President, the media, the national bar organizations. And when UCORC shut Petros down, Sennett would vent his wrath. The cases he'd be left with-on Skolnick, on Crowthers, on Walter-were preserved on magnetic media and could be proved now without even putting Robbie on the stand. And if the government decided to call him as a witness, they'd prefer he be dressed in a pair of prison overalls, a visual aid demonstrating to a jury that they hadn't let him get away. Stan, therefore, would arrest Robbie right now and use his deception about his law license as compelling evidence that he couldn't be trusted on bail. In the end, Stan had the same leverage he'd had from the start: Lorraine.

When I spoke his wife's name, Robert Feaver did what many other strong persons have done as they've received grim news from me. Positioned in that maroon chair he always sat in, he turned again to my window. Then as the sad facts took root, he raised his hand to his forehead. The resolve not to give in fixed in his face and then passed through him. He wrenched his circled eyes shut and succeeded, except for a few seconds, in his effort not to cry.

The other commitment I'd made to Stan was that I would `explain' Robbie's new situation to Dinnerstein. Evon would remain in their law office as an observer who could testify that Robbie had forsaken further action as an attorney. But Mort had to understand where the lines were drawn, since any failure to comply could end up endangering his right to practice as well. Stan was not about to trust Robbie to deliver the message.

To effect our plan, Robbie presented Mort with a somewhat desperate invention: In the wake of a particularly anguished scene with Lorraine, in which she'd assailed him with the thousand ways he had betrayed his commitments to her over the years, Robbie had supposedly raced to the offices of Bar Admissions and Discipline-BAD-and, in the most dramatic gesture to his wife imaginable, surrendered his license to practice law. Now she would know she was his absolute priority. He had purportedly thought only afterwards to check with me, as an ethical adviser, on the implications of this emotional act. As Robbie's counsel, I'd agreed to help him explain them to Mort.