Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

Surprise seems to drive me backward. I murmur something to Raymond and push down the row toward my seat at the end, between two sizable floral arrangements on pedestals. For an instant I am certain that this lightheaded moment of shock has passed, but as an unexpectedly bold tone forges from the organ immediately behind me, and the reverend speaks his first words of address, my amazement deepens, ripples, and somehow takes on the infected hurt of real sorrow. I did not know. I feel a sort of shimmering incomprehension. It does not seem plausible that she could have kept a fact like this to herself. The husband I had long ago surmised, but she never made mention of a child, let alone one nearby, and I must stifle an immediate instinct to leave, to remove myself from this theater darkness for the sobering effect of strong light. As a matter of will, I urge myself, after a few moments, to attend to what is present.

Raymond has arrived at the podium; there has been no formal introduction. Others-the Reverend Mr. Hiller, Rita Worth from the Women's Bar Association-have spoken briefly; but now a sudden gravity and portentousness comes into the air, a current strong enough to wrest me from my sense of grievance. The hundreds here grow stiller. Raymond Horgan has his shortcomings as a politician, but he is a consummate public man, a speaker, a presence. Balding, growing stout, standing there in his fine blue suit, he broadcasts his anguish and his power like a beaconed emission.

His remarks are anecdotal. He recalls Carolyn's hiring over the objections of more hard-bitten prosecutors who regarded probation officers as social workers. He celebrates her toughness and her flint. He remembers cases that she won, judges she defied, archaic rules she took pleasure in seeing broken. From Raymond, these stories have a soulful wit, a sweet melancholy for Carolyn and all of her lost courage. He really has no equal in a setting like this, just talking to people about what he thinks and feels. For me, though, there is no quick recovery from the disorder of the moments before. I find all of it-the hurt, the shock, the piercing force of Raymond's words, my deep, my unspeakable sorrow-welling up, pushing at the limits of tolerance and a composure I desperately need to maintain. I bargain with myself. I will not go to the interment. There is work to do, and the office will be represented. The secretaries and clerks, the older ladies who always criticized Carolyn's airs and are here now, crying in the front rows, will be pressed close at the graveside, weeping over one more of life's endless desolations. I will let them observe Carolyn's disappearance into open ground.

Raymond finishes. The impressive register of his performance, witnessed by so many who regard him as beleaguered, sets a palpable stir in the auditorium as he strides toward his seat. The reverend recites the details of the burial, but I let that pass. I am resolved: I will go back to the office. As Raymond wishes, I will resume the search for Carolyn's killer. Nobody will mind-least of all, I think, Carolyn herself. I have already paid her my respects. Too much so, she might say. Too often. She knows, I know, that I have already done my grieving over Carolyn Polhemus.

The office has the bizarre air of calamity, of things badly out of place. The halls are empty, but the phones are pealing in wearying succession. Two secretaries, the only ones who stayed behind, are sprinting up and down the corridors putting callers on hold.

Even in the best of times, the Office of the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney has a dismal aspect. Most deputies work two to an office in a space of Dickensian grimness. The Kindle County Building was erected in 1897 in the emerging institutional style of factories and high schools. It is a solid red-brick block dressed up with a few Doric columns to let everybody know it is a public place. Inside, there are transoms; over the doors and dour casement windows. The walls are that mossy hospital green. Worst of all is the light, a kind of yellow fluid, like old shellac. So here we are, two hundred harried individuals attempting to deal with every crime committed in a city of one million, and the surrounding county, where two million people more reside. In the summer we labor in jungle humidity, with the old window units rattling over the constant clamor of the telephones. In the winter the radiators spit and clank while the hint of darkness never seems to leave the daylight. Justice in the Middle West. In my office, Lipranzer is waiting for me like a bad guy in a Western, hidden as he sits behind the door.

"Everybody dead and gone?" he asks.

I comment on his sentimentality and throw my coat down on a chair. "Where were you, by the way? Any copper with five years' service showed."

"I'm no funeralgoer," Lipranzer says dryly. There is, I decide, some significance in a homicide dick's distaste for funerals, but the connection does not come to me immediately and so I let the idea go. Life in the workplace: so many signs of the hidden world of meanings elude me in a day, bumps on the surface, shadows, like creatures darting by.

I attend to what is present. On my desk there are two items: a memo from MacDougall, the chief administrative deputy, and an envelope Lipranzer has placed there. Mac's memo simply says, "Where is Tommy Molto?" It occurs to me that for all of our suspicions of political intrigue, we should not ignore the obvious: someone ought to check the hospitals and Tommy's apartment. One deputy PA is dead already. That is the reason for Lipranzer's envelope. It bears a label typed by the police lab: OFFENDER: UNKNOWN. VICTIM: C. POLHEMUS.

"Did you know that our decedent left an heir?" I ask as I'm looking for the letter opener.

"No shit," says Lip.

"A kid. Looked to be eighteen, twenty. He was at the funeral."

"No shit," Lip says again, and considers his cigarette. "You figure one thing about goin to a funeral is at least no surprises."

"One of us ought to talk to him. He's at the U."

"Get me an address, I'll see him. 'Anything Horgan's guys want.' Morano gave me that crock again this mornin." Morano is the police chief, an ally of Bolcarro's. "He's waitin to see Raymond fall on his ass."

"Him and Nico. I bumped into Delay." I tell Lip about our visit. "Nico's really high on himself. He even made me believe it for a minute."

"He'll do better than people say. Then you'll be kickin yourself in the ass, thinkin you should have run."

I make a face: who knows? With Lip, I do not have to bother with more. For my fifteenth college reunion I received a questionnaire which asked a lot of personal questions I found difficult to answer: What contemporary American do you admire most? What is your most important physical possession? Name your best friend and describe him. On this one, I puzzled for some time, but I finally wrote down Lipranzer's name. 'My best friend,' I wrote, 'is a cop: He is five foot eight inches tall, weighs 120 pounds after a full meal, and has a duckass hairdo and that look of lurking small-time viciousness that you've seen on every no-account kid hanging on a street corner. He smokes two packs of Camel cigarettes a day. I do not know what we have in common, but I admire him. He is very good at what he does.'

I first ran across Lip seven or eight years ago, when I was initially assigned to the Violence Section and he had just begun working Homicide. We have done a dozen cases since, but there are still ways in which I regard him as a mystery, even a danger. His father was a watch commander in a precinct in the West End, and when his old man died, Lip left college to take up a place that came to him by rights of a kind of departmental primogeniture. By now he has been placed in the P.A.'s office on direct assignment, a so-called Special Command. On paper, his job is to act as police liaison, coordinating homicide investigations of special interest to our office. In practice, he is as solitary as a shooting star. He reports to a Captain Schmidt, who cares only that he has sixteen homicide collars to show at the end of every fiscal year. Lip spends most of this time alone, hanging out in bars and on loading docks, drinking shots with anybody who's got good information-hoods, reporters, queers, federal agents, anybody who can keep him up to speed on the world of big-time bad guys. Lipranzer is a scholar of the underlife. Eventually, I have come to recognize that it is the weird weight of that information that somehow accounts for his rheumy-eyed sulking look.