Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"You don't want none of these messages," she told him.

Evon made Robbie promise not to leave the office without calling; then she returned to McManis's, where they'd held off the viewing until everyone was together. McManis and all the other UCAs, as well as the local gents from the surveillance squad, were elbowed into the conference room. Sennett came huffing in last and delayed one second further to call me, but my office reported I was with a client.

Alf slid the cassette into the recorder and worked the controls.

The screen filled with snow.

Alf rewound and fast-forwarded. He fiddled with the connections. Eventually he realized the tape was blank. He went back to the van to search and returned only with an empty box. It was quite some time before they started looking for Robbie, and that was long after he'd brought the tape they wanted down to me. ROBBIE HAD BEEN A SIGHT in my reception area. His clothing was still wet, and for warmth he'd put on a heavy overcoat, a spare he kept in his office. His hair was clinging to his face, looking, without its blow-dried buoyancy, like the plumage of a crow that had been jumped by a cat.

He asked to see me alone. I was in a meeting, but he promised to be only a minute. In the little reading room side my office, he handed me the cassette and told me what was on it.

Ostensibly, he wanted legal advice about whether he had any grounds to retain the tape. We both knew that was dubious, but Robbie was shopping for time. He had visions of Sennett making a nighttime visit to Mort's home. The tape would be the feature presentation on Mort's big-screen TV, while Stan banged away, trying to find out what Tohey had meant when he said it was Dinnerstein who'd warned him what Robbie was up to. Robbie wanted to get the answer to that one himself, and, more important, ensure that Mort knew he had no more time before hiring an attorney. Sennett's terror tactics, especially his threats of prison, would turn Morty to pudding.

I asked Robbie if he'd told Mort he was working for the government. I'd long suspected that Robbie had informed Dinnerstein months ago, but Feaver insisted he'd kept his partner in the dark, not out of any commitment to Sennett, but because he had realized that telling Mort would place Dinnerstein in an impossible position. Sheilah Dinnerstein would never have forgiven her son if she knew he'd done nothing when he had a chance to save his Uncle Brendan. Even on Monday, after Evon's melodramatic appearance at the office, when she'd identified herself as FBI Special Agent DeDe Kurzweil and served that subpoena, Robbie had told Mort only that he had the situation 'completely covered.'

"He must have scoped it out on his own," Robbie said. "I don't know how. But I figure Brendan was up his alimentary canal with a router the past couple weeks. You know, `What's the story with Robbie, why's he so strange?' I still can't believe Morty told him what he figured. I mean, it's Brendan, for Godsake. What'd he think his uncle would do, throw me a tea party?" Robbie was abject, unable even to face me, which was just as well, since I could not think of an appropriate consolation. Blood thicker than water? I realized Robbie had been protecting himself from just this moment when he'd chosen not to tell Mort in the first place.

He headed back up to see Dinnerstein, promising to call e as soon as they were done. By six, I'd heard nothing. I had several urgent messages from Stan Sennett by then which I'd failed to return. I was sure, though, that agents id fanned out seeking Feaver, and I expected McManis Stan at my door any moment. My inside line rang at that point. It was Robbie on his car phone. He'd just been driving around, he said. He told me I should call Mort's lawyer, Sandy Stem. Feaver was about to hang up and I shouted to him to wait.

Had Mort explained, I asked. Had he said how he came tell Tuohey?

"Yeah," said Robbie. For a moment he seemed determined to say no more. Then he gathered himself to the task and added, "He said Stan Sennett asked him to do it."

Although he is only a few years older than I am, Sandy Stern has always been something of my hero. I met him immediately after law school. We were two Easton graduates practicing as defense lawyers in the inferno of the North End courthouse, and I was instructed by Stem's example. He showed me that no matter what the crime or the client, an advocate could remain an emblem of dignity. He is not much to look at, portly, bald, dark, with a face whose small features are engrossed by too much flesh. But his presence is imposing. He is Argentine by birth, his family the wandering Jews of the saying. A muted Hispanic lilt sings its own rhythm in his careful speech, in which the central cadence is always one of a precisely balanced intelligence. Much like me, he can be remote and chary of feeling. Our friendship has its tidy boundaries that are never crossed. But I came of age here thinking of him as the best lawyer I knew, and for that reason I'd never resented the fact that, in informed minds, he remained, more than me, Kindle County's lawyer of choice in delicate criminal matters. Besides, whatever the wounds to my pride, they were salved by his generous referrals. I was the first outlet for the overflow.

Sitting that evening in a comer, amid the precise Chippendale surroundings of Stern's club atop the Morgan Towers, he told me a disturbing story. One night last June, Stan Sennett and three agents of the Internal Revenue Service had appeared at Mort's home. Sennett claimed to have reliable information-from Moreland's records, as it turned out-that Dinnerstein had a pattern of remarkable success in the Common Law Claims Division, over which his uncle, Brendan Tuohey, presided. Sennett was going to find out why, one way or the other. Here and now, Mr. Dinnerstein could receive complete immunity and speak with total candor. The alternative was to watch the government wreak havoc in his life, issuing grand jury subpoenas to his bank, his accountant, his clients, his employees, even his neighbors. When Stan found what he expected, Mr. Dinnerstein wouldd be sitting in a federal penitentiary long after both his children had finished college, assuming they'd received scholarships, since Sennett would use the racketeering statute to forfeit every penny Mort had made practicing law.

Dinnerstein begged time to speak to an attorney, who turned out to be Stern. Fully briefed by his client, Sandy knew two things with reasonable confidence. The first was that Sennett had nothing concrete at the moment; immunity wouldn't have been offered otherwise. The second was that as soon as Stan reached Mort and Robbie's secret checking account at River National, he'd have a good foothold on proving what Mort had acknowledged to Sandy, namely, that under his uncle's guidance, Dinnerstein and his partner, Robbie Feaver, had been paying off judges of the Common Law Claims Division for years.

What Stem offered, therefore, and what Sennett ultimately accepted, was that Dinnerstein would become a true confidential informant, and only that. Dinnerstein would fully and truthfully answer any questions Sennett asked. None of the information he gave, and nothing that came from it, could ever be used in any way against Dinnerstein, and he would never be called to the witness stand. His identity as an informant would be revealed only if Dinnerstein chose, an unlikely event given the tumult the news that he'd turned on his uncle would cause in his family. In the best case, if Sennett's investigation foundered, Dinnerstein would suffer no disadvantage at all. In the worst, if the full truth about him emerged from other sources, Dinnerstein would resign his law license and attribute escaping prosecution to his attorney's sly manipulations of various legal technicalities arising from the fact that Mort had never actually had the stomach to deliver any money.