Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

There was nothing tender about her inquisition, but it was not prolonged. Who? I told her. Was I leaving? It was over, I said. It was short, I said, it barely happened.

Oh, I was heroic. I sat there at my own dining-room table with both arms over my face, crying, almost howling, into my shirtsleeves. I heard the dishes clank as Barbara stood and began clearing her place. "At least I don't have to ask," she said, "who dropped who."

Later, after I got Nat into bed, I wandered up, shipwrecked and still pathetic, to see her in the bedroom, where she had taken refuge. Barbara was exercising again, with the insipid music on the tape thumping loudly. I watched her bend, do her double-jointed extensions, while I was still in deep disorder, so ravaged, beaten, that my skin seemed the only thing holding me together, a tender husk. I had come in to say something prosaic, that I wanted to go on. But that never emerged. The unhindered anger with which she slammed her own body about made it obvious to me, even in my undefended state, that the effort would be wasted. I just watched, perhaps as long as five minutes. Barbara never glanced at me, but finally in the midst of some contortion she uttered an opinion. 'You could have done better.' There was a little more which I did not hear. The final word was 'Bimbo.'

We have gone on from there. In a way my affair with Carolyn has provided an odd kind of relief. There is a cause now for the effect, an occasion for Barbara's black anger, a reason we do not get along. There is now something to get over and, as a result, a shadowy hope that things may improve. Nat is, I realize, the issue now: whether we will give up whatever progress has been made. For months Carolyn has been a demon, a spirit slowly being exorcised from this home. And death has brought her back to life. I understand Barbara's complaint. But I cannot-cannot-give up what she wants me to; and my reasons are sufficiently personal as to lie within the realm of the unspoken, even the unspeakable.

I try a plain and quiet appeal.

"Barbara, what difference does it make? You're talking about two and a half weeks. Until the primary. That's all. Then it's another, routine police case. Unsolved homicide."

"Don't you see what you're doing? To yourself. To me?"

"Barbara," I say again.

"I knew it," she says. "I knew you'd do something like this. When you called the other day. I could hear it in your voice. You're going to go through everything again, Rusty. You want to, that's the truth, isn't it? You want to. She's dead. And you're still obsessing."

"Barbara."

"Rusty, I have had more than I can take. I won't put up with this." Barbara does not cry on these occasions. She recedes instead into the fiery pit of a volcanic anger. She hurls herself back now to gather her will, bound, as she sits on the bed, within her wide satin sleeves. She grabs a book, the remote control, two pillows. Mount Saint Helen's rumbles. And I decide to leave. I go to the closet and grope for my robe.

As I reach the threshold, she speaks behind me.

"Can I ask a question?" she says.

"Sure."

"That I always wanted to ask?"

"Sure."

"Why did she stop seeing you?"

"Carolyn?"

"No, the man in the moon." The words have so much bitterness that I wonder if she might spit. I would have thought Barbara's question would be why did I start, but she apparently decided on her own answers to that long ago. "I don't know," I say. "I tend to think I wasn't very important to her." She closes her eyes and opens them. Barbara shakes her head.

"You are an asshole," my wife tells me solemnly. "Just get out."

I do. Quickly. She has been known to throw things. Having nowhere else to go, and craving some form of company, I cross the hall to check once more on Nat. His breath is husky and uninterrupted in the deepest phase of sleep, and I sit down on the bed, safe in the dark beneath the protecting arms of Spider-Man.

Monday morning: a day in the life. The commuter coach unleashes the gray-flannel flock on the east side of the river. The terminal plaza is surrounded by willows, their skirts greening in the spring. I am in the office before 9:00. From my secretary, Eugenia Martinez, I receive the usual: mail, telephone-message slips, and a dark look. Eugenia is obese, single, middle-aged, and, it often seems, determined to get even for it all. She types reluctantly, refuses dictation, and many times of day I will find her staring with immobile droopy-eyed irritation at the telephone as it rings. Of course, she cannot be fired, or even demoted, because civil service, like concrete, has set. She remains, a curse to a decade of chief deputies, having first been stationed here by John White, who did so in order to avoid the carping that would have followed if he'd assigned her to anybody else.

On the top of what Eugenia has given me is a leave slip for Tommy Molto, whose absence remains unaccounted for. Personnel wants to dock him as Away without Leave. I make a note to talk to Mac about this and graze through my communications. The docket room has provided me with a printout naming thirteen individuals released from state custody in the last two years whose cases had been prosecuted by Carolyn. A handwritten note says that the underlying case files have been delivered to her office. I position the computer run in the center of my desk, so that I will not forget.

With Raymond out most of the day on campaign appearances, I resolve much of what the P.A. would ordinarily be faced with. I call the shots on case prosecutions, immunities, plea bargains, and deal with the investigative agencies. This morning I will preside over a charging conference in which we will decide on the phrasing and merits of all of this week's indictments. This afternoon I have a meeting about last week's fiasco, in which a police undercover bought from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in disguise; the two drew guns and badges on each other and demanded surrender. Their backups became involved, too, so that in the end eleven law enforcement officers were standing on opposite corners, shouting obscenities and waving their pistols. Now we are having meetings. The coppers will tell me the feds do everything in secret; the DEA agent in charge will insinuate that any confidence the police department learns is up for sale. In the meantime, I am supposed to find somebody to prosecute for killing Carolyn Polhemus.

Someone else may be looking, too. Near 9:30 I get a call from Stew Dubinsky from the Trib. During the campaign, Raymond answers most press calls himself; he does not want to miss the free ink or draw criticisms that he is losing his hold on the office. But Stew is probably the best courthouse reporter we have. He gets most of his facts straight and he knows the boundaries. I can talk to him.

"So what's new on Carolyn?" he asks. The way he shorthands the murder with her name disconcerts me. Carolyn's death is already receding from the ranks of tragedy to become one more ugly historic event.

I cannot, of course, tell Stew that nothing is doing. Word could trail back to Nico, who would use the occasion to blast us again.

"Prosecuting Attorney Raymond Horgan had no comment," I say.

"Would the P.A. care to comment on another piece of information?" This, whatever it is, is the real motive for Stew's call. "I hear something about a high-level defection. From the Homicide Section? Sound familiar?"

That would be Molto. After Nico left, Tommy, his second-in-command, became acting head of the section. Horgan refused to give him the job permanently, suspecting that sooner or later something like this would come to pass. I contemplate for a moment the fact that the press is already sniffing. No good. Not at all. I see, from the way Dubinsky has lined up the questions, how this will run. One high-ranking deputy is killed; another, who should be in charge of the investigation, quits. It will sound as if the office is on the verge of chaos.