Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

I thank Lou for his help and head down to the Pathology Lab. This building looks more or less like an old high school, with varnished oak trim and worn hallways. It is coppers wall to wall, men-and more than a few women these days-in deep blue shirts and black ties, bustling around and making jokes with one another. People of my generation and social stratum do not like cops. They were always beating our heads and sniffing for dope. They were unenlightened. So when I became a prosecutor I started from some distance behind which, in truth, I have never made up. I've worked with policemen for years. Some I like; more I don't. Most of them have two failings. They're hard. And they're crazy. They see too much; they live with their nose in the gutter.

Three or four weeks ago, I stayed longer than I should have on a Friday night at Gil's and began buying rounds with a street copper named Palucci. He did a beer and a shot a couple of times, and started talking about a heart he had found that morning in a Ziploc bag. That was all. Just the organ, and the major vessels, lying right next to a garbage can at the end of an alley. He picked it up; he looked at it; he drove away. But then he made himself come back. He lifted the lid of the can and stirred the rubbish. No body parts. 'That was it. I done my duty. I dropped it off downtown and told them to mark it goat.'

Crazy. They are our paid paranoids. A copper sees a conspiracy in a cloudy day; he suspects treachery when you say good morning. A grim fellowship, nurtured in our midst, thinking ill about us all.

The elevator takes me to the basement.

"Dr. Kumagai." I greet him. His office is right outside the morgue, which lies beyond, with its stainless-steel tables and the ghastly odors of open peritoneal cavities. Through the walls, I can hear a surgical saw screaming. Painless's desk is a mess, papers and journals in ramparts, overflowing wooden trays. Set at one corner, a small TV is on, the volume low, with an afternoon baseball game.

"Mr. Savage. Real important stuff, huh? We got chief deputy with us." Painless is every kind of weird, a five-foot, five-inch Japanese, with heavy brows and a small mustache divided over the middle of his lip. A kinetic type, always dodging and twisting, talking with his hands in the air. The mad scientist, except there is nothing benevolent about him. Whoever got the idea that Painless would be best off working with stiffs pushed him in the right direction. I can't imagine his bedside manner. He is the kind to throw things at you, cuss you out. Whatever bitter little notion is in his brain will find expression. He is one of those people of whom the globe at moments seems so full. I do not understand him. If I try very hard, in that sort of instinctive effort we all make at pseudo-telepathy, my screen comes up full of fuzz. I cannot imagine what is passing through his mind when he does his job, or watches TV, or turns after a woman. I know I could lose a bet even if I had ten chances to guess what he did last Saturday night.

"Actually, I just came in to pick up a report. You called Lipranzer."

"Oh yeah, oh yeah," says Painless. "Right here somewhere. That fuckin Lipranzer. He wants you call right away with everything." Painless works two-handed, transporting the stacks of paper across his desk as he seeks the new report. "So you won't be chief deputy too much longer, huh? Della Guardia, I think, gonna kick Raymond Horgan in the ass. Huh?" He looks to me to respond. Painless is smiling, as is his custom when dealing with something that others find unpleasant.

"We'll see," I say: then I decide to be a bit more aggressive. "Delay a pal of yours, Doctor?"

"Nico's hell of a guy, hell of a guy. Oh yeah. We work on all kinds big murder case together. He's good, too, real good. Yeah, he get up there, he really kick those defense lawyers in the ass. This is this thing." He tosses a file folder in my direction and bends toward the TV. "That fuckin Dave Parker. Now he only got dope in one nostril, really hittin the goddamn ball."

The association between Nico and Painless had eluded me before, but it's a natural, the big-time homicide prosecutor and the police pathologist. They would need each other badly from time to time. I ask Painless if I can sit down for a minute.

"Sure sit, sit." He moves a stack of files and looks back to the television.

"Lipranzer and I have been kicking over this theory lately. Well, let's say idea. Maybe this was some weird bondage thing that got out of hand. Maybe Carolyn was living dangerously, and when her beau thought she had expired, he gave her a whack in the head to make it look like something else. Does that sound possible?"

Painless in his white lab coat rests his elbows on the turrets of papers.

"No fuckin way."

"No fuckin way. Coppers dumb," says Painless the police department pathologist. "Somethin hard, they make easy. Somethin easy, they make hard. Read the fuckin report. I write a report, fuckin read it. Lipranzer wants me hurry up, hurry up. Then he don't read the fuckin report."

"This report?"

"Not that report." He swipes at the new report when I hold it up. "My report. Autopsy. You see anything with bruises on wrists? Bruises on ankles? Bruises on knees? This lady is dead from gettin hit, not strangled. Read the fuckin report."

"She was tied up pretty good. You can see the rope burn on the neck in the pictures."

"Oh sure, oh sure. She was tied up real tight, real good. Looked like a fuckin bow and arrow when they brought her in. But you got one mark on the neck. Somebody jerkin that rope tighter and tighter, rope's gonna move. Get a wide bruise. She got one skinny little mark on her neck."

"Meaning?" I ask.

Painless smiles. He loves to hold the cards. He pushes his face close enough to the TV that the gray gleam of the screen is reflected on his brow. "First and third," he says.

"What does it mean that there's a narrow mark?" I ask again.

I wait. The TV announcer declaims over a line drive.

"Do I need a subpoena?" I ask quietly. I try to smile, but my voice has some edge.

"What?" asks Painless.

"What do you make of the bruises on her neck?"

"I make that rope was tightened there first. Okay?"

I take a moment to gather this in. As Painless knows, I'm lost.

"Time out," I say. "I thought the working theory was that somebody hit her to subdue her. The blow was lethal, but our guy doesn't realize that or care. He ties her up, and rapes her, with this bizarre slip-knotting, so he's strangling her at the same time. Have I got it right or have you changed your mind?"

"Me change? Look at fuckin report. Don't say nothin like that. I'm not saying that. Looks like that, maybe. Maybe that's what coppers think. Not me."

"Well, what do you think?"

Painless smiles. Painless shrugs.

I close my eyes an instant.

"Look," I say, "we're ten days into a big-deal murder investigation and I hear right now for the fast time that you think the rope went around her neck first. I would have appreciated knowing that a while ago."

"Ask. Lipranzer call me up. 'Hurry up. Need a report.' Okay, he got a report. Nobody ask me what I think."

"I just did."

Painless sits back in his chair. "Maybe I don't think nothin," he says.

Either this guy is a bigger douche bag than I even remember or something is way out of line. I deliberate for a moment, working backward.

"Are you telling me you think she was raped and then tied up?"

"Tied up last, yeah. I think that. Raped? Now I'm thinkin no."

"Now?"

"Now," says Painless. We stare at each other. "Read the report," he says.

"The autopsy?"

"This report. This fuckin report." He hits the folder I'm holding. So I read the report. It is from the forensic chemist's office. Another substance in the vagina of Carolyn Polhemus has been identified. It is known as nonoxynol 9. From the concentrations, the chemist concludes that it derived from spermicidal jelly. That is why there were no viable spermatozoa.