Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"Same response," I tell him. "Quote the P.A."

Stew makes a sound. He is bored.

"Off the record?" I ask.

"Sure."

"How good is your information?" I want to know how close we are to reading about this.

"So-so. Guy who always thinks he knows more than he does. I figure this has got to be Tommy Molto. He and Nico are hand-and-glove, right?"

Stew clearly does not have enough to run. I avoid his question. "What does Della Guardia tell you?" I ask.

"He says he has no comment. Come on, Rusty," Dubinsky says, "what gives?"

"Stew, off the record, I do not have the most fucked-up idea where Tommy Motto is. But if he's holding hands with Nico, why won't the candidate tell you that?"

"You want a theory?"

"Sure."

"Maybe Nico has him out there investigating the case on his own. Think about that one. DELLA GUARDIA CATCHES KILLER. How's that for a headline?" The notion is absurd. A private murder investigation could too easily end up an impediment to the police. Obstruction of justice is bad politics. But as ridiculous as it is, the sheer flair of the idea makes it sound like Nico. And Stew is not the kind to float loony notions. He works off information.

"Do I take it," I ask, "that this is part of your rumor, too?"

"No comment," says Stew.

We laugh at each other, before I hang up the phone. Immediately I make some calls. I leave a message with Loretta, Raymond's secretary, that I have to speak with him whenever he phones in. I try to find Mac, the administrative deputy, to talk about Molto. Not in, I'm told. I leave another message. Then, with a few minutes before the charging conference, I venture down the hall to Carolyn's office. This place already has a desolate air. The Empire desk which Carolyn commandeered from Central Services has been swept clean, and the contents of the drawers-two old compacts, soup mix, a package of napkins, a cable-knit sweater, a pint bottle of peppermint schnapps-have been pitched into a cardboard box, along with Carolyn's diplomas and bar certificates, which were formerly clustered on the walls. Cartons called in from the warehouse are pyramided in the middle of the room, giving the office an air of obvious disuse, and the dust gathered in a week's inactivity has its own faintly corrupt smell. I pour a glass of water in the wilting greenery and dust some of the leaves.

Carolyn's caseload was made up primarily of sexual assaults. According to the codes on the file jackets, there are, by my count, twenty-two such cases awaiting indictment or trial which I find in the top drawers of her old oak file cabinet. Carolyn claimed a special sympathy with the victims of these crimes, and over time, I found that her commitment was more genuine than at first I had believed. When she talked about the reviving terrors these women experienced, the glittery surfaces receded from Carolyn and revealed alternating moods of tenderness and rage. But there are in these cases also an element of the bizarre: an intern at U. Hospital who gave a number of female patients a physical which ended with insertion of his own instrument; one victim received this treatment on three separate occasions before she was moved to complain. The girlfriend of a suspect who, on her second day of questioning, admitted that she had met him when he cut through the screen door to her apartment and forced himself on her. When he put the knife down, she said, he had seemed like such a nice young man. Like many others, I suspected Carolyn of more than a passing fascination with this aspect of her work, as well, and I examine the case files with the hope that there will be a pattern I can seize on-we will be able to charge that it was actually some cultish ceremony that was duplicated six days ago in Carolyn's loft apartment, or a brutal mimicry of an offense in which Carolyn somehow displayed too obvious a voyeuristic interest. But there is none of that; the thirteen names lead nowhere. The new files disgorge no clues.

It is now time for the charging conference, but something is nagging at me. When I look again at the computer printout, I recognize that there is one case I have not come across yet-a B file, as we call it, referring to the subsection of the state criminal code addressed to bribery of law enforcement officials. Carolyn seldom handled anything outside her domain, and B files, which are so-called Special Investigation cases, were directly under my supervision when this case was assigned. At first, I assumed the B designation was the usual computer mess-up, maybe an included charge. But there is no companion case; in fact, this one is listed as an UnSub-unknown subject-which usually means a non-arrest investigation. I go through her drawers quickly, one more time, and check down in my office. I have my own printout of B cases, but this one isn't there. In fact, it seems to have been generally obliterated from the computer docketing system, except for Carolyn's call.

I make a note on my pad: B file? Polhemus?

Eugenia is standing in the doorway.

"Oh, man," she says. "Where you been? I been lookin for you. Mr. Big Cheese called back." Mr. Big Cheese, of course, is Raymond Horgan. "I was lookin all over. He left a message to meet him at the Delancey Club, 1:30."

Raymond and I have many of these meetings during the campaign. I catch him

after a luncheon, before a speech, to bring him up to speed on the office.

"How about Mac? Did we hear anything?"

Eugenia reads the message. "Be cross the street all morning." Observing, no doubt, watching some of the newer deputies do their stuff during the morning call in the Central Branch.

I ask Eugenia to set back the charging conference half an hour; then I head over to the courthouse to find Mac. On the second floor, the Central Branch session is held. The branch courts are where arrested persons make their first formal court appearance to set bail, where misdemeanors are tried and preliminary evidentiary hearings are held in felony cases. An assignment to one of the branches is usually the second or third stopping-off place for a deputy, after time in Appeals or the Complaint and Warrant Section. I worked this courtroom for nineteen months before I was sent to Felony Review, and I try to come back as little as possible. It is here that crime always seemed most real, the air quivering with a struggling agony at the brink of finding voice.

In the hallway outside two enormous central courtrooms, there is a churning mass, like my imaginings of the crushed poor in the steerage bowels, of the old oceangoing vessels. Mothers and girlfriends and brothers are here weeping and crying out over the young men detained in the granite lockup that abuts the courtroom. Lawyers of a kind move about hustling clients in the subverted tones of scalpers, while the state defenders shout out the names of persons whom they have never met and whom they will be defending in a moment. The prosecutors are shouting, too, searching for each of the arresting officers on a dozen cases, hoping to enhance the slender knowledge provided by police reports prepared in a deliberately elliptical fashion, the better to hinder cross-examination.

Inside the vaulted courtroom, with its red marble pillars and oaken buttresses and straight-backed pews, the tumult continues, a persistent din. Situated closer to the front so they will not fail to hear their cases called, prosecutors and defense lawyers haggle amiably over prospective plea bargains. Beside the judge's bench, six or seven attorneys are clustered around the docket clerk, handing in appearance forms, examining court files, and urging the clerk to pass their case forward to be called next. The cops, most of them, are lined up in pairs against the grimy walls-many of them in from the 12-to-8 shift for the bail hearings on their nighttime collars-sipping coffee and rolling on the balls of their feet to keep themselves awake. And far to one side of the courtroom, there is a continuing clamor from the lockup, where defendants in custody await their appearance, one or two of them inevitably shouting obscenities at the bailiffs or their attorneys, complaining about the cramped conditions back there and the indecent odors from the commode. The rest moan occasionally or bang on the bars.