Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"Just a second." I can take no more. "How I was interested in handling the investigation? Raymond, you asked me to take the case."

"There was a conversation between us."

From the corner of my eye, I note Stern raising a hand, but I fix on Horgan.

"Raymond, you asked me. You told me that you were busy with the campaign, it had to be in the best hands, you couldn't worry about somebody else lousing this up."

"That's possible."

"That's what happened."

I look to Stern, seeking support. He is sitting back in his chair, staring at me. He is simply furious.

"I'm sorry," I say quietly.

Raymond goes on, oblivious to my exchange with my lawyer.

"I don't remember that, Rusty. Maybe that's what happened-as you said, I was busy with the campaign. But the way I remember it, we had a conversation, a day, two days before the funeral, and at the end of that conversation we had agreed that you'd be handling the case, and the idea that you handle it, it's my feeling that that was more your idea than mine; I was receptive, I admit that, but I remember some surprise about the way things ended up."

"Raymond-What are you trying to do to me, Raymond?" I look at Sandy, who has his eyes closed. "Can't I just ask him that?"

But I have finally pushed things beyond the crest; Raymond is traveling full speed downhill on his own momentum. He leans as far as he can across his desk.

"What am I trying to do to you?" He repeats the question twice, growing Bushed. "What were you trying to do to me, Rusty? What the hell are your fingerprints doing all over that goddamn glass? What's all this bullshit of sitting in my office asking about who I'm fucking, and never then, when it would have been friendly, or two weeks before, when I assigned you to that investigation which, as I remember, I bawled you out a couple times for not pushing-" He turns abruptly to Sandy and points. "That's something else I'm going to testify to," he tells Sandy, then looks back at me. "Never, two weeks before, when it was the professional thing to have done, never at any time do you tell me you were dicking the same gal. I've spent a whole long time on that conversation, Rusty, asking myself what the hell you were doing there? What were you doing?"

This scene is more than Peter the associate can handle. He, has stopped writing entirely and is just watching us. Stern points at Peter.

"Under the circumstances, I am advising my client to make no response. Clearly he would like to."

"So that's what I'm going to testify to," Raymond tells Sandy. He stands up and ticks the points off on his fingers. "That he wanted the case. That I had to chew his ass repeatedly to move it. That he was more interested in finding out who else was fucking Carolyn than who had murdered her. And that when push finally came to shove, he sat in my office and gave us all a bunch of happy horseshit that he'd been nowhere near Carolyn's apartment that night. That's what I'll testify to. And I'll be goddamned pleased to do it."

"Very well, Raymond," says Sandy. He picks up his hat, a gray felt homburg, off the chair on which he laid it in the midst of his efforts to quiet me. I stare directly at Horgan. He looks back.

"Nico Della Guardia was honest about the fact that he was out to screw me," Horgan says.

Sandy steps between us. He hauls me to my feet, both hands on my arm.

"Enough," he declares.

"Son of a bitch," I say as we are moving briskly ahead of Peter, on our way out. "Son of a bitch."

"We know where we stand," Stern says quietly. As we enter the reception area, he tells me in the barest sibilance to please hush. This enforced silence sits in my mouth like a bit. As the elevator sinks, I find myself with a bursting desperation to speak, and I grab Sandy's arm as we reach the ground floor.

"What is it with him?"

"He is a very angry man." Stern walks determinedly through the marble lobby.

"I see, that. Has Nico convinced him that I'm guilty?"

"Probably. Certainly he thinks you could have been a good deal more cautious, particularly on his behalf."

"I wasn't a faithful servant?"

Sandy makes another of his Latin movements: hands, eyes, brow. He has other matters on his mind. As he walks, he cocks a grave eye in my direction.

"I had no idea that Horgan had an affair with Carolyn. Or that you had conversed with him on that subject."

"I didn't remember the conversation."

"No doubt," says Stern in a tone which implies that he doubts me a good deal. "Well, I think Della Guardia will be able to use that to his advantage. When was it that this relationship took place between Raymond and Carolyn?"

"Right after she stopped seeing me."

Sandy stops. He makes no effort to mask his pain. He talks to himself an instant in his native tongue.

"Well, Nico is certainly coming closer to a motive.

"But he's still some distance," I say hopefully. He still cannot prove the principal relationship between Carolyn and me.

"Some," Sandy tells me. There is a deliberate flatness in his expression. He is clearly quite put out with me, both for my performance upstairs and for keeping so significant a detail from him. We will have to speak at length, he says. Right now he has a court call. He puts his homburg on and ventures. into the blazing heat without glancing back at me.

In the lobby I feel instantly bereft. So many emotions are surging that there is a kind of dizziness. Most of all, there is caustic shame for my own stupidity. After all these years, I still failed to recognize how these events would impact on Raymond Horgan, although now the trajectory of his emotions seems as predictable as a hyperbolic curve. Raymond Horgan is a public man. He has lived to make a reputation. He said he was not a pol, but he has a pol's affliction: he thrives on acclamation, he yearns for the good opinion of everyone. He does not care about my guilt or innocence. He is devastated by his own disgrace. His own chief deputy indicted for murder. The investigation, which he let me run, sabotaged right before his face. And he will have to sit upon the witness stand and broadcast his own indiscretions. There will be tavern jokes for years about being a deputy P.A. under Raymond Horgan. Between his conduct and mine, the office will sound more active than a Roman bath. Worst of all is the fact that the murder took Raymond from the life he really loved; it changed the course of the election; it sent him here to his glass-and-steel cage. What infuriates Raymond, inspires his rage, is not really that I committed this crime. It is that he believes he was intended to be another victim. He said as much when he finally let things loose. I screwed him. I killed Carolyn to bring him down. And I succeeded. Horgan thinks he has the whole thing figured out. And he has clearly planned his vengeance.

I finally leave the building. The heat is intense; the sun is blinding. I feel instantly unsteady on my feet. Compulsively, I try to calculate the one thousand subtle impacts on the trial of Raymond's testimony and his evident hostility to me, but that soon gives way. Ideas come and go erratically. I see my father's face. I cannot make things connect. After all these weeks, after all of this, I feel that I am finally going to go to pieces, and I find, stunningly, that as I turn about in the street, I am praying, a habit of my childhood, when I would try to cover my bets with a God in whom I knew I did not much believe.

And now, dear God, I think, dear God in whom I do not believe, I pray to you to stop this, for I am deathly frightened. Dear God, I smell my fear, with an odor as distinct as ozone on the air after a lightning Bash. I feel fear so palpably it has a color, an oozing fiery red, and I feel it pitifully in my bones, which ache. My pain is so extreme that I can barely move down this hot avenue, and for a moment cannot, as my backbone bows with fear, as if a smelted rod, red-hot and livid, had been laid there. Dear God, dear God, I am in agony and fear, and whatever I may have done to make you bring this down upon me, release me, please, I pray, release me. Release me. Dear God in whom I do not believe, dear God, let me go free.