Scott Turow - Personal injuries

He sat, then thought better of something, and got up to shut the blinds. From now on they were going to assume that Tuohey had a full countersurveillance going. Jim leaned against his desk on her side. She knew before he started that he was pulling her in, and she began talking him out of it before he could find his words.

"Jim, I know what I'm doing."

"It's not your choice."

"You can put the whole surveillance squad on me."

"DeDe-" He hadn't called her that since the day he'd met her in Des Moines. "We had surveillance on you. And this creep walked right past them. We're lucky he didn't kill you. The next time they catch hold of you, it'll be guys in ski masks thumping you all night long to find out what we've got."

"Then make sure I've got company. Twenty-four hours. Have Shirley move in with me. And I can pack again now. I'll be safe. Jim, I know what I'm doing."

"No you don't," McManis said, but he was smiling gently again, much as before. With admiration. At moments, she was amazed to realize how much he liked her. He'd liked her from the beginning.

She begged. He had a thousand more objections. About UCORC, and the feasibility of Sennett's plan. But she could see he was wearing down.

"Jim, we all deserve the shot at Tuohey. I do. You do. Sennett does. We can't stop here." She was almost desperate with that thought. How could she just go back to Des Moines? To bank thefts and church choir and thinking about getting a new cat? "I mean, Jim," she said and spoke one of her errant pieces of humor, a joke that was not really a joke at all, "I'm Evon Miller."

In the grainy reduction of the black-and-white monitor on which we watched, His Honor Brendan Tuohey, Presiding Judge of the Kindle County Superior Court's Common Law Claims Division, was mustached with confectioner's sugar when he first came into view. The picture had careened as Robbie had entered the restaurant, tossing off morning greetings with characteristic brio to the owner and several members of the staff. When Feaver had reached Tuohey's table, he had apparently set his briefcase, and the camera within it, on an extra chair, or perhaps on the next table. Whatever the perch, it afforded a well-framed picture of the three men he was joining.

Paddywacks was another venerable Kindle County institution. Its appeal was not in the overripe decor-brass fixtures and tufted benches, and floors that were mopped once a week. Rather, it was renowned for its gargantuan omelets and its early morning clientele, which included most of the county's important insiders: officeholders, Party bigwigs-and the ward types and others who relished the opportunity to mingle with them. While Augie Bolcarro was living, he had appeared here at least once a week, and Toots Nuccio, the octogenarian fixer, had a large table in the corner where he kept court every day with his many vassals in politics and the mob. In the world of the Democratic Farmers amp; Union Party, where working-class values still forbade too much overt splash, one of the truest signs of stature was if the gregarious proprietor, Plato, released the red velvet rope with which he restrained the regular trade and beckoned you to a table at once upon your arrival.

From the surveillance van parked immediately across the avenue from Paddywacks' plate glass doors, Sennett and McManis and I, like Macbeth's witches around their cauldron, watched the black-and-white imagery froth up on the monitor. The guessing game concerning what Tuohey's cohort knew about Evon left everyone uncertain about how they would react to Robbie. He might encounter anythinga beating, the cold shoulder, or some preconceived drama intended to portray their innocence. Amari and several local agents were circulating through the moderate early traffic, on radio silence, but tuned in for emergency direction. Depending on the turns in the conversation, Stan was prepared to respond with surveillance, or even, in his fantasy, a bust.

I had gone to see Robbie on Friday to tell him what would be required today. We sat in the perfect white living room, which had been restored to order for the days of visitation following his mother's death. Robbie remained gripped by that retrospective mood and, with little prompting, his conversation wandered to his childhood memories of Tuohey, which remained intense.

Hungry for men, for their smell, their ways, their company and example, Robbie loved Morty's uncle more, frankly, than Mort seemed to. He was allowed to address him as Uncle Brendan, and despite the fact that Sunday was Robbie's only full day with his mother, he rarely missed one of the afternoon suppers when Tuohey appeared at his sister's table. Brendan was still a cop then. With his gun and his blue patrol uniform, Brendan seemed as auraed and heroic to Robbie as Roy Rogers, and he was greeted with roisterous delight by the boys when he arrived in the entry of the Dinnersteins' home. After supper, he'd let Mort and Robbie gallop around the house wearing his heavy cap with its strip of silver braid along the short brim. Occasionally, he would even unsnap the polished black holster on his hip. He'd empty his service revolver and allow the boys to hold the weapon and inspect the brass jacketed dumdum rounds, which he stood on end on the dining table, a lethal hollow cut dark and deep into the leaden tip of each bullet.

`Even then,' Robbie told me, `I was scared of Brendan. You had to be. There was this thing that came off of him, like a smell. You knew he didn't completely like anybody, that he was pretending just a little bit with everyone, except his sister.' The stories he liked to tell were of his rough encounters on the street, shellacking some mouthy blackguard he'd caught up with in a gangway.

Sometimes on Sundays, Estelle also came next door with Robbie for supper. For a period, he said, she actually seemed to have taken some kind of shine to Brendan, and Robbie could even recall a cockeyed childhood hope that Brendan would become his stepfather. But Estelle was a decade older and not really of interest to Brendan, and Robbie's mom, for her part, would have no more considered marriage to a gentile than to an ape. She always came home talking about how much Tuohey and Sheilah drank, expressing a kind of sorrowing wonder that Mort's dad, Arthur Dinnerstein, could put up with it. For Robbie, starstruck by Brendan, these criticisms were incomprehensible.

Eventually, Estelle stopped accompanying her son. Brendan passed the bar, joined the Prosecuting Attorney's Office, and appeared on Sunday in the suit he'd worn to church, rather than his police regalia.

`It was all downhill,' Robbie told me. Something came apart. He wasn't specific, but his eyes froze in the past, pinched for the shortest moment by obvious regret. Then they swung back to me with a lingering dark look.

'So whatta you think, George. Is it just silly chatter when I talk about Brendan having me waxed?'

I didn't think it was silly. There were certain practical incentives. If Robbie's car blew up, if he were run down by a speeding auto, if his remains were found tangled in the limestone crags along the river, Tuohey's cause would be immeasurably advanced, not so much because Robbie would no longer be available as a witness, but because anybody else with thoughts of flipping would be bound to think several times.

But in twenty-five years in practice, I'd had only a single client who'd found turning fatal. John Collegio was an oil executive who'd played ball with the wiseguys as a young man and then, after he'd risen up the phylum, went to the G to complain about the way gasoline was distributed, the mobbed-up companies getting the first supply. He'd been killed with a shotgun blast when he answered his front doorbell at dinnertime. But within the outfit, that would have gone down under the rubric of internal affairs. They seldom took aim at civilians.