Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"That should be a week, ten days," Lip says. "They'll try to come up with somethin on the rope. Only other interesting thing they tell me is they got a lot of floor fluff. There a few hairs around, but not what you'd find if there was any kinda fight."

"How about fingerprints?" I ask.

"They dusted everything in the place."

"Did they dust this glass table here?" I show Lip the picture.

"Yeah."

"Did they get latents?"

"Yeah."

"Report?"

"Preliminary."

"Whose prints?"

"Carolyn Polhemus."

"Super."

"It ain't all bad," says Lip. He takes the picture from me and points. "See this bar here. See the glass?" One tall bar glass, standing undisturbed. "There latents on that. Three fingers. And the prints ain't the decedent's."

"Do we have any idea whose prints they are?"

"No. Identification says three weeks. They got all kinda backlogs." The police department identification division keeps a digit-by-digit record of every person who has ever been printed, classified by so-called points of comparison, the ridges and valleys on a fingertip to which numerical values are assigned. In the old days, they were unable to identify an unknown print unless the subject left behind latents of all ten fingers, so I.D. could search the existing catalogue. Now, in the computer era, the search can be done by machine. A laser mechanism reads the print and compares to every one in memory. The process takes only a few minutes, but the department, due to budgetary constraints, does not yet own all of the equipment and must borrow pieces from the state police for special cases. "I told them to rush it up, but they're giving me all that shit about Zilogs and onloading. A call from the P.A. would really help. Tell them to compare to every known in the county. Anybody. Any dirtball who's ever been printed."

I make a note to myself.

"We need MUDs, too," Lipranzer says, and points to the pad. Although it is not well known, the telephone company keeps a computerized record of all local calls made from most exchanges: Message Unit Detail sheets. I begin writing out the grand-jury subpoena duces tecum, a request for documents. "And ask them for MUDs on anybody she called in the last six months," says Lip.

"They'll scream. You're probably talking about two hundred numbers."

"Anybody she called three times. I'll get back to them with a list. But ask for it now, so I'm not runnin my ass around tryin to find you to do another subpoena."

I nod. I'm thinking.

"If you're going back six months," I tell him, "you're probably going to hit this number." I nod toward the phone on my desk.

Lipranzer looks at me levelly and says, "I know."

So he knows, I think. I take a minute with this, trying to figure him. People guess, I think. They gossip. Besides, Lip would notice things that anyone else would miss. I doubt that he approves. He is single, but he is no rover. There is a Polish woman a good ten years older than he, a widow with a grown kid, who cooks a meal and sleeps with Lipranzer two or three times a week. On the phone, he calls her Momma.

"You know," I say, "as long as we're on the subject, Carolyn always locked her doors and windows." I tell him this with admirable evenness. "I mean, always. She was a little soft, but Carolyn was a grownup. She knew she lived in the city."

Lipranzer's look focuses gradually and his eyes take on a metallic gleam. He has not lost the significance of what I'm telling him or, it seems, of the fact that I delayed.

"So what do you figure?" he asks at last. "Somebody walked around there openin the windows?"

"Could be."

"So they'd make it look like a break-in? Somebody she let in in the first place?"

"Doesn't that make sense? You're the one who's telling me there's a glass on the bar. She was entertaining. I wouldn't bet the ranch on the bad guy being some crazed parolee."

Lip stares at his cigarette. Looking through the doorway, I see that Eugenia, my secretary, has returned. There are voices now in the hallway as people filter back in from the graveside. I detect a lot of the anxious laughter of release.

"Not necessarily," he says finally. "Not with Carolyn Polhemus. She was a funny lady." He looks at me hard again.

"You mean, you think she'd open the door to some bum she sent to jail?"

"I think with Carolyn there's no tellin. Suppose she bumped into one of these characters in a bar. Or some guy called her up and said, Let's have a pop. You think there's no chance she'd say yes? We're talkin Carolyn now."

I can see where Lip is going. Lady P.A., Prosecutor of Perverts, Fucks Defendant and Lives Out Forbidden Fantasy. Lip has got her number pretty well. Carolyn Polhemus would not have minded at all the idea that some guy had dwelled with the thought of her for years. But somehow, with this discussion a seasick misery begins to ebb through me.

"You didn't like her much, did you, Lip?"

"Not much." We look at each other. Then Lipranzer reaches over and chucks me on the knee. "At least we know one thing," he says. "She had piss-poor taste in men."

That is his exit line. He tucks his Camels into his windbreaker and is gone. I call out to Eugenia to please hold anything else. With a moment's privacy I am now ready to examine the photographs. For a minute, after I begin sorting through them, my attention is mostly on myself. How well will I manage this? I urge myself to maintain professional composure.

But that, of course, begins to give way. It is like the network of crazing that sometimes seeps through glass in the wake of an impact. There is excitement at first, slow-entering and reluctant, but more than a little. In the top photographs the heavy glass of the table is canted over, compressing her shoulder, so that you might almost make the comparison to a laboratory slide. But soon it is removed. And here is Carolyn's spectacularly lithe body in a pose which, for all the agony there must have been, seems, initially, supple and athletic. Her legs are trim and graceful; her breasts are high and large. Even in death, she retains her erotic bearing. But, I slowly recognize, other experiences must influence this response. Because what is actually here is horrible. There are bruises on her face and neck, mulberry patches. A rope runs from her ankles to her knees, her waist, her wrists; then it is jerked tight around her neck, where the rim of the burn is visible. She is drawn back in an ugly tormented bow and her face is ghastly; her eyes, with the hyperthyroid look of the attempted strangulation, are enormous and protruding and her mouth is fixed in a silent scream. I watch, I study. Her look holds the same wild, disbelieving, desperate thing that so frightens me when I find the courage to let my glance fix on the wide black eye of a landed fish dying on a pier. I take it in now in the same reverential, awestruck, uncomprehending way. And then, worst of all, when all the dirt is scraped off the treasure box there is rising within, unhindered by shame, or even fear, a bubble of something light enough that I must eventually recognize it as satisfaction, and no lecture to myself about the baseness of my nature can quite discourage me. Carolyn Polhemus, that tower of grace and fortitude, lies here in my line of sight with a look she never had in life. I see it finally now. She wants my pity. She needs my help.

When it was all over, I went to see a psychiatrist. His name was Robinson.

"I would say she's the most exciting woman I've known," I told him.

"Sexy?" he asked after a moment.

"Sexy, yes. Very sexy. Torrents of blond hair, and almost no behind, and this very full bosom. And long red fingernails, too. I mean, definitely, deliberately, almost ironically sexy. You notice. That's the idea with Carolyn. You're supposed to notice. And I did. She's worked around our office for years. She was a probation officer before she went to law school. But that's all she was to me originally. You know: this very good-looking blonde with big tits. Every copper Who came in would roll his eyes and make like he was jerking off. That's all. Over time, people began to talk about her. Even while she was still in the branch courts. You know: highpowered. Capable. Then for a while she was dating this newsman on Channel 3. Chet whatever his name is. And she showed up a lot of places. Very active in the bar organizations. An officer for a while in the local NOW chapter. And shrewd. She asked to be assigned out to the Rape Section when it was considered a crappy place to work. All these impossible one-on-ones where you could never figure out if it was the victim or the defendant who was closer to the truth. Hard cases. Just to find the ones that deserved to be prosecuted, let alone to win them. And she did very well out there. Eventually Raymond put her in charge of all those trials. He liked to send her on those Sunday-morning public service TV programs. Show his concern on women's issues. And Carolyn liked to go and carry the banner. She enjoyed the limelight. But she was a good prosecutor. And damn tough. The defense lawyers used to complain that she had a complex, that she was trying to prove that she had balls. But the coppers loved her.