Scott Turow - Personal injuries

The grand jury room's reception area looked as if it might be attached to a homeless shelter or a cheap motel. The low-grade plasterboard was marred and gouged, and the likes of the foam furniture, soft forms without armrests or separate cushions, had not been seen since the height of the sixties. The pieces had apparently been discovered in the recesses of some government warehouse and offered to various federal agencies at a price they couldn't refuse in the former Reagan era of suffocating budgetary restraint. Looking at the furnishings, you could just about imagine hippies in beads dropping acid and holding on to their headbands. Instead, for more than a decade, the witnesses awaiting their appearances had perched there, dejectedly hunched like molting birds.

Today there was an extraordinary assemblage. As always, Sennett had acted with cunning and subpoenaed everyone whom Robbie had recorded to any effect at all. Several obscure court clerks and deputies were here, as well as persons far more prominent. Sherm Crowthers sat like a lump of stone beside his lawyer, Jackson Aires, a skillful and obstinate government foe whose analysis of any case, much like Sherman's, reliably started and ended with race. Jackson had brought a colleague, a cat's-paw to represent the ravaged-looking Judith McQueevey, who by now had recanted her confession of two evenings before. There were thirteen or fourteen persons subpoenaed in all, and some obvious absences, Pincus Lebovic and Kwan, and, most notably, Barnett Skolnick, all of whom by now had folded and turned. Everyone else who stood in peril of indictment was present, even Walter Wunsch, whose pancreatic cancer left him unlikely to live until even the speediest trial.

The point of this exercise was relatively clear to me and not particularly pretty. To force an appearance, each of the prospective defendants had been served with a subpoena duces tecum, demanding the production of documents or physical objects in their personal possession. Datebooks seemed to be the chief item required, although two of the clerks had been summoned to bring merchandise Robbie had presented as `tips.' Gretchen Souvalek, Gillian Sullivan's clerk, clutched a Tiffany box containing a set of earrings Robbie had provided for general ingratiation. Walter Wunsch, seated with his attorney, Mel Tooley-who represented a number of those present had brought not only various court volumes but also the set of expensive graphite-shafted irons which Robbie had presented to him several weeks ago. Walter held the clubs, complete with a snappy black leather carry bag, against his knee, manifesting a state of glum agitation which made it look as if he'd discovered only after arriving here that he had not been invited to play. Following Robbie's testimony, each person would be called before the grand jury by Sennett or one of the phalanx of Assistant U.S. Attorneys assisting him, and, after various legal gymnastics aimed at skirting the Fifth Amendment, forced to surrender what they'd brought.

This exercise, however, would be largely pageantry. Stan had other motives in dragging his targets down here. He wanted them to confront Feaver, to see for themselves that his cooperation was not simply half-baked media speculation. He wanted them to face each other, familiar figures, silent conspirators, now brought low. Yet even this was ancillary to Stan's principal purpose. The morning papers had announced that the Petros grand jury was convening today, a result no doubt of one of Sennett's well-timed leaks. TV crews were downstairs, just outside the building's doors, and print reporters were stalking the hallways. They could not attend the grand jury sessions, which were secret by law, but they would report who had come and gone from the courthouse. As a result, each of the persons who could not find a comfortable spot on the uncomfortable furniture would be vilified by the end of the day. Still shots and video clips of them would appear in all the media organs. It was no less than a naked march through the streets, during which their presumptive criminality would be displayed like waffles and belly fat to the amusement or horror of every person they knew. That was Sennett's real aim-to crush them, to deal the first of many hard blows to be borne as the cost of refusing to cooperate, and to show them that most of the esteem they'd held in the eyes of others was already gone. Looking around the room, seeing everyone else similarly devastated, they would know that sooner or later one of them, probably many more, would do the only sensible thing-capitulate, snitch, do time, and move on.

Most of these persons didn't know me. When I emerged after escorting Robbie to the attorney/witness room down the hall where Evon and McManis were now keeping him company, only one or two of the future defendants cast spiteful looks in my direction. Sherm Crowthers, who sat clutching his sister's hand, clearly wished me dead. But the enmity that I felt broil me like microwaves came from another source: the lawyers. As the persons charged with protecting their clients from just the kind of savaging Sennett had delivered, the attorneys here Tooley, Ned Halsey, Jackson Aires, several others-were in a nasty mood. Tooley came to pal around first. With his silly toupee, like the coat of a shaggy poodle, and his tight Continental tailoring, ill suited to his hogshead physique, Mel was a vision of disingenuousness.

"I'd like to talk to your guy. Down the road, you know. Possible?"

Unlikely.

"Will you get me the answer to a question or two?"

That was more in the realm.

"I'll call you," said Mel. "You know," he said, turning back, "the one with titanium testicles is you. Your guy got squeezed. But nobody was forcing you to help him, George. I hope I don't have the co-defendant the next time you're in state court."

It was advocacy of a kind, the underhanded variety in which Me] specialized. He was suggesting I'd better quickly disassociate myself from the prosecution and help out the defendants if I wanted my practice to survive.

I had already turned heel without comment when, at the stroke of ten, Stan appeared. He was tight as a bowstring and in the happy clutch of the intense precision that sustained him. It had not all worked out as he hoped, but it was still a bright moment for him. He stood among the despised as the man who had vanquished them. He said good morning only to the grand jury clerk. Then, as he reached the door of the grand jury room, he faced me.

"Give me a second," he said, "to tell the jurors what this is all about."

"I'll tell them!" yelled Walter Wunsch. He was closest to the door. "I'll tell them plenty. American citizens! I fought for this goddamned country and now it's like Red China with spooks and bugs. Lemme in there." Walter had risen to his feet, a somewhat pathetic exercise, because he was already wasting. His flesh hung just enough to leave the impression that in the degenerative processes of the cancer his skin was attempting to slough itself from the muscle and bone. Tooley advanced from my side and made his client sit down.

"He's just tellin it like it is," said Sherm Crowthers wearily from across the room.

Stan took this in with an indulgent smile. At other moments he would have hated the disorder, but now he knew he'd caused it. He suggested I get Robbie ready.

I returned to the small attorney/witness room down one of the interior corridors. The space was often used for coffee breaks and quick lunches by the court reporter and the clerk. Arriving earlier, I'd nearly reeled from the driving odor of the white onions arising from a half-eaten sandwich that had remained overnight in the drab metal trash bin. Although I'd removed the can, the odor was still strong.

Except for questions about the tape, Robbie's testimony was predictable. Once he entered the small windowless room where the twenty-three grand jurors waited like the audience in a small theater, a desultory exercise would take place. He would identify his initials on the dozens of reelto-reel tapes and computer magazines, and say, `Yes, that's accurate,' when Evon's 302s describing various critical events were read to him. When that was over, come what may, Robbie could not change his account of what had happened without risking a conviction for perjury. There was even some chance this would be the last time he testified. Understandably, Stan had never wanted to stake his prosecutions on Robbie's credibility, and he'd constructed the evidence, especially the recordings, so he could prove his cases without putting Feaver on the stand. If he called him at all it would only be as a show of openhandedness for the juries.