Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

So that's the way it worked. Four months ago they ended, Raymond said.

Well, the arithmetic fits: Raymond announced and Carolyn went her own way. She had figured, like everybody else, that Raymond wasn't running, that he could hand the mantle to anyone he chose. Maybe he could be persuaded to make it a woman-depart with one final gesture in the direction of progress. The only puzzle is why Carolyn's train to glory had stopped first with me. Why tarry with the local when you're ready to hop the express? Unless it was all a little less calculating than it now seems.

"She was one tough cookie, that one," Horgan says. "A good kid, you know. But tough. Tough."

"Yeah," I say, "good and tough and dead."

Raymond stands.

"Can I ask one more?" I ask.

"Now you want to get personal, huh?" Raymond smiles, all Irish charm and teeth. "Let me guess: What the fuck was I doing with that file?"

"Close," I say. "But I understand why you didn't want it floating around. Why'd you give it to her in the first place?"

"Shit," he says, "she asked. You wanna be cynical? She asked and I was sleeping with her. I guess she heard about it from Linda Perez." One of the paralegals who read the crank mail. "You know Carolyn. Hot case. I suppose she thought it would be good for her. I considered it bullshit all along. What's the guy's name?"

"Noel?"

"Noel, right. He rainmade this guy." Swindled. Kept the money. "That's my take. Don't you think?"

"I don't know."

"She looked at it, went out, and shoveled through the records in the 32nd District. There was nothing there. That's what she told me."

"I would like to have heard about the case," I say, with the dilitning tongue of a quick drunk.

Raymond nods. He drinks more of his whiskey.

"You know how it is, Rusty. You do one dumb thing, you do another dumb thing. She didn't want me to talk about it. Somebody asks why I gave her the case and pretty soon everyone knows she's balling the boss. The boss didn't mind keeping that one to himself, either. You understand. Who'd it hurt?"

"Me," I say, as I have meant to do for many years.

He nods at that one, too.

"I'm sorry, Rusty. I really am. Shit, I'm the sorriest son of a bitch in town." He goes to a sideboard and looks at a picture of his kids. There are five of them. Then he goes to put on his coat. His arms and hands move unevenly; he has a hard time smoothing down the collar. "You know, if I really do lose this fucking election, I'm just gonna quit. Let Nico run the show, he wants to so bad." He stops. "Or maybe you. You wanna do this job for a little while?"

Thanks, Raymond, I think. Thanks a lot. In the end, maybe Carolyn had the right approach.

But I cannot help myself. I get up, too. I turn down Raymond's collar. I shut off the lights and lock his office and point him down the hall in the right direction. I make sure that he will take a cab. The last thing I say to him is "Your shoes are too big to fill." And, of course, old habits being what they are, when the words come out of me, I mean them.

Somehow the dizzy, mad hunger I felt for Carolyn showed itself in a revived addiction to rock music.

"This had nothing to do with Carolyn's tastes," I explained to Robinson. Even in the madhouse of the P.A.'s office, she kept a symphonic station on in her office. And it wasn't some kind of adolescent nostalgia. I did not crave the vintage sixties soul and rock, which had sound-tracked my late teens and early twenties. This was New Wave junk: screechy, whiny music with perverse lyrics and rhythms mindless as rain. I began driving to work, telling Barbara I was going through my annual phobic reaction to the bus. The car, of course, made my evening escapes to Carolyn's apartment easier; but those, in any event, could have been arranged. What I wanted was the chance to drive for fifty minutes with the windows cranked tight while Rock Radio, WNOF, screamed from the wagon's speakers, the volume so high that the windshield rattled when the bass line became prominent on certain songs.

"I was messed up, all strung out." When I walked down the street after parking the car, I was half-turnescent because I was starting a day which was, I felt, a tantalizing sweet crawl toward my secret plunder of Carolyn. I sweated all day, my pulse raced. And every hour or so, in the midst of a phone call or a conference, I was visited by visions, so palpable and immediate, of Carolyn in passionate repose, that I would become lost in space and time.

Carolyn, for her part, was chilling in her command. The weekend after our initial night together, I spent hours-dazed, unrooted hours-pondering our next encounter. I had no idea what was to follow. At the door to her apartment, she had kissed my hand and said, simply, See you. For me, there was no thought of resistance. I would take whatever was allowed.

On Monday morning, I appeared at her office door with a file in my hand. My pose, my pace, had already been endlessly planned. Nothing urgent. I leaned against the doorjamb. I smiled, hip and calm. Carolyn was at her desk. The Jupiter Symphony was surging.

About the Nagel case, I say.

The Nagels were another visit to the dark side of suburbia. a husband-and-wife rape-and-sodomy team. She would approach women on the street, assist in the abduction, engage in imaginative uses of a dildo. Carolyn wanted to plead the case out, with the wife taking a lesser charge. I can live with the plea, I tell her, but I think we need two counts. Only now does Carolyn look up from her work. Impassive. Her eyes do not quiver. In a mild collegial way she smiles.

Who's got her? I ask, meaning who is her defense lawyer.

Sandy, Carolyn answers, referring to Alejandro Stern, who seems to represent every person of genteel upbringing who is charged with a crime in this state.

Tell Sandy, I say, that she has to plead to an Agg Battery, too. We don't want the judge to think we're trying to tie his hands.

Or the press to think we're pushing probation for female sex violators, says she.

That too, I say. We're equal-opportunity prosecutors.

I smile. She smiles. I linger. I have gotten through this, but my heart is knocking, and I fear that there is something fluttering and insipid in my expression.

We should have a drink, she says.

I nod with buttoned-up lips. Gil's? I ask.

How about, she says, the place we ended up on Friday?

Her apartment. My soul expands. She has the barest inkling of a smile, but she has looked back to her work, even before I have departed.

"In reflection, I see myself on that threshold with immense pity. I was so full of hope. So grateful. And I should have known the future from the past."

There was great passion in my love for Carolyn, but seldom joy. From that instant forward, when I realized this would go on, I was like the mandrake in the old poems I read in college, pulled screaming from the earth. I was devastated by my passion. I was shattered. Riven. Decimated. Tom to bits. Every moment was turmoil. What I'd struck upon was old and dark and deep. I had no vision of myself. I was like a blind ghost groping about a castle and moaning for love. The idea of Carolyn, more even than the image, was upon me every moment. I wanted in a way I could not recall and the desire was insistent, obsessive, and, because of that, somehow debased. Now I think of Pandora, whom as a child I always confused with Peter Pan, opening her box and finding that torrent of miseries unloosed.

"There was something so real in the flesh of another woman," I told the shrink.

After almost twenty years of sleeping with Barbara, I no longer went to bed with only her. I lay down with five thousand other fucks; with the recollection of younger bodies; with the worries for the million things that supported and surrounded our life: the corroding rain gutters, Nat's unwillingness to study mathematics, the way Raymond, over the years, had come to greet my work with an eye to its defects rather than successes, the particular arrogant glint that came into my mother-in-law's eye when she discussed any person outside her immediate family, including me. In our bed, I reached for Barbara through the spectral intervention of all these visitors, all that time.