Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"Raymond, this is a reporter thinking out loud. There is probably nothing to it."

"There better not be," he says.

I start to tell Raymond about the debacle between the police and DEA, but he does not let me finish.

"Where are we on Carolyn ourselves?" he asks. I can see that the speculation on Molto's activities has reheated Raymond's desire for results in our own investigation. He machine-guns questions. Do we have a Hair and Fiber report? How long will it be? Have we gotten any better news on fingerprints? How about a report from the state index on sexual offenders Carolyn prosecuted?

When I tell Raymond that all of this is in the offing, but that I spent the last three hours in the charging conference, he stops dead in the street. He is furious.

"Damnit, Rusty!" His color is high and his brow flexed down angrily over his eyes. "I told you the other day: Give this investigation top priority. That's what it deserves. Della Guardia is eating me alive with this thing. And we owe Carolyn as much. Let Mac run the office. She's more than capable. She can watch DEA and the coppers urinate all over each other. She can second-guess indictments. You stay on this. I want you to run out every ground ball, and do it in a goddamn orderly fashion. Do it! Act like a fucking professional."

I look down the street, both ways. I do not see anyone I know. I am thirty-nine years old, I think. I have been a lawyer thirteen years.

Raymond walks ahead in silence. Finally, he looks back at me, shaking his head. I expect a further complaint about my performance, but instead he says, "Man, those guys were assholes." Raymond, I see, did not enjoy lunch. In the County Building, Goldie, the little white-haired elevator operator who sits all day with an empty car, waiting to take Raymond and the county commissioners up and down, tosses his stool inside and folds his paper. I have begun to broach the subject of the missing B file, but I hold off while we are in the elevator. Goldie and Nico were the best of pals. I even saw Goldie break with protocol and hie Nico up and down on one or two occasions: that was the kind of touch Nico adored-the official elevator. His destiny. Nico maintained a noble poker face as Goldie scanned the lobby to be sure the coast was clear.

Once we are in the office, I trail behind. Various deputies come forward to get a word or two with Raymond, some with problems, a number who simply want the news from the campaign front. On a couple of occasions, I explain that I have been through Carolyn's docket. I do this in a desultory fashion, since I have no desire to confess to further failures, and Raymond loses the thread of what I am telling him as he moves between conversations.

"There's a file missing," I say again. "She had a case we can't account for."

This finally catches Raymond's attention. We have come through the side door to his office.

"What kind of case? Do we know anything about it?"

"We know it was logged in as a bribe case-a B. Nobody seems to know what happened to it. I asked Mac. I checked my own records."

Raymond studies me for a second: then his look becomes absent.

"Where am I supposed to be at two o'clock?" he asks me.

When I tell him that I have no idea, he shouts for Loretta, his secretary, calling her name until she appears. Raymond, it turns out, is due at a Bar Committee meeting on criminal procedure. He is supposed to outline various reforms in the state sentencing scheme that he has been calling for as part of his campaign. A press release has been issued; reporters and TV crews will be there-and he is already late.

"Shit," says Raymond. "Shit." He stomps around the office saying "Shit."

I try again.

"Anyway, the case is still in the computer system."

"Did she call Cody?" he asks me.

"Carolyn?"

"No. Loretta."

"I don't know, Raymond."

He screams again for Loretta. "Call Cody. Did you call him? For Chrissake, call him. Well, get somebody to go down there." Raymond looks at me. "Sot sits on the car phone and you can never get through. Who the hell does he talk to?"

"I thought maybe you had heard something about this case. Maybe you remember something."

Raymond is not listening. He has fallen into an easy chair, angled against what the deputies irreverently refer to as Raymond's Wall of Respect, a stretch of plaster solid with plaques and pictures and other mementos of great triumphs or honors: bar associations' awards, courtroom artists' sketches, political cartoons. Raymond has that aging look again, wandering, pensive, a man who has seen things unravel.

"God, what a fucking disaster this is. Every campaign Larren has told me to ask a deputy to take a leave so that I have somebody running things full-time, and we've always been able to scrape by without it. But this is out of control. There's too goddamn much to do and nobody in charge. Do you know that we haven't taken a poll in two months? Two weeks to the election and we have no idea where we are, with who." He folds his hand against his mouth and shakes his head. It is not anxiety he shows so much as distress, Raymond Horgan, Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, has lost his ability to cope.

A moment passes between us, completely silent. I am not inclined, however, after the pasting I took out on the street, to be reverential. After thirteen years in government, I know how to be a bureaucrat and I want to be sure my butt is covered with Raymond on the subject of the missing file.

"Anyway," I say yet again, "I don't know what significance to attach to it. I don't know if it's misfiled or something's sinister."

Raymond stares. "Are you talking about that file again?"

I do not get a chance to answer. Loretta announces a phone call and Raymond takes it. Alejandro Stern, the defense lawyer who is the chairman of the Bar Committee, is on the line. Raymond begs apologies, says he's been wrapped up in discussions of that bizarre episode between DEA and the local police, and is on the way. When he puts the phone down he screams again for Cody.

"I'm right here," Cody announces. He has come in the side door.

"Great." Raymond starts in one direction, then the other. "Where the hell is my coat?"

Cody already has it.

I wish Raymond luck.

Cody opens the door. Raymond goes through it and comes right back.

"Loretta! Where's my speech?"

Cody, it turns out, has that, too. Nonetheless, Raymond continues to his desk. He opens a drawer and hands me a folder on his way out again.

It is the B file.

"We'll talk," he promises me and, with Cody hard behind him, goes running down the hall.

"Somehow, the boy, Wendell, became important," I said to Robinson. "To us, I mean. To me, at least. It's hard to explain. But somehow he was part of this thing with Carolyn."

He was an unusual child, big for his age, and he had the ambling clumsiness of some big children, a thick, almost oafish appearance. He was not so much slow as dulled. I asked one of the psychiatrists for an explanation, as if one is needed, and he said of this five-year-old, 'He's depressed.'

Wendell McGaffen, during the pendency of his mother's case, had been moved from the County Shelter to a foster home. He saw his father every day, but never his mother. After the usual disputes in court, Carolyn and I were given permission to speak with him. Actually, at first we did not talk to him at all. We sat in on sessions he had with the psychiatrists, who introduced us to Wendell. Wendell would play with the toys and figures that the shrink had around the room, and the shrink would ask Wendell whether he had any thoughts on different topics, which, almost inevitably, Wendell did not. The shrink, named Mattingly, said that Wendell had not in his weeks there asked once about his mother. And as a result they had not raised the subject.