Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"I'm not sure what I thought of her then. I suppose I thought she was just a little bit too much."

Robinson looked at me.

"Too much everything," I said. "You know. Too bold. Too self-impressed. Always running one gear too high. She didn't have the right sense of proportion."

"And," said Robinson, proceeding to the obvious, "you fell in love with her."

I went silent, still. When are words ever enough? "I fell in love with her," I said.

Raymond felt she needed a partner and so she asked me. It was September of last year.

"Could you have said no?" asked Robinson.

"I suppose. The chief deputy isn't expected to try a lot of cases. I could have said no."

"But?"

But I said yes.

Because, I told myself, the case was interesting. The case was strange. Darryl McGaffen was a banker. He worked for his brother, Joey, who was a gangster, a florid personality, a hotshot type who enjoyed being the target of every law enforcement agency in town. Joey used the bank, out in McCrary, to wash a river of dirty money, mostly mob dough. But that was Joey's action. Darryl kept his head down and the accounts straight. Darryl was as mild as Joey was flamboyant. An ordinary guy. He lived out west, near McCrary. He had a wife. And a somewhat tragic life. His first child, a little girl, had died at the age of three. I knew all about that, because Joey had once testified before the grand jury about his niece's fall from a second-floor terrace at his brother's home. Joey had explained, almost convincingly, that the girl's resulting skull fracture and immediate death were large in his mind and had obstructed his judgment when four mysterious fellows delivered to his bank certain bonds which, to Joey's great chagrin, turned out to be hot. Joey wrung his hands when he talked about the girl. He touched his silk pocket hankie to both his eyes.

Darryl and his wife had another child, a boy named Wendell. When Wendell was five, his mother arrived with him at the West End Pavilion Hospital emergency room. The boy was unconscious and his mother was hysterical, for her child had taken a terrible fall, sustaining severe head injuries. The mother claimed that he had never been at the hospital before, but the emergency room physician-A young Indian woman, Dr. Narajee-had a memory of treating Wendell a year earlier, and when a medical record was summoned she found he had been there twice, once with a broken collarbone, once with a broken arm, both the results, his mother had said, of falls. The child was unconscious now and not likely in most events to speak, and so Dr. Narajee studied his injuries. When she testified later, Dr. Narajee said she realized initially that the wounds were too symmetrical and too evenly positioned laterally to be the result of a fall. She repeatedly examined the gashes, two inches by one inch on each side of the head, over more than a day, before she had it all figured out, and then she called Carolyn Polhemus at the prosecuting attorney's office to report that she was treating a child whose skull appeared to have been fractured when his mother placed his head in a vise.

Carolyn obtained a search warrant at once. They recovered the grip with skin fragments still on it from the basement of the McGaffen home. They examined the unconscious child and found healed wounds which appeared to have been cigarette burns in his anus. And then they waited to see what would happen with the boy. He lived.

By then he was in court custody. And the P.A.'s office was under siege. Darryl McGaffen came to his wife's defense. She was a loving and devoted mother. It was insanity, he said, to claim she'd hurt her child. He had seen the boy fall, McGaffen said, a terrible accident, a tragedy, marred by this nightmarish experience of doctors and lawyers madly conspiring to take their sick child away. Very emotional. Very well staged. Joey made sure the cameras were there when the brother got to the courthouse and that Darryl claimed a vendetta by Raymond Horgan against his family. In order to show forthrightness, Raymond was going to try the case himself at first. But the campaign was beginning to heat up. Raymond sent the case back to Carolyn and recommended, given the press attention, that she try it with another senior deputy, someone like me, whose presence would show the office's commitment. So she asked. And I agreed. I told myself I was doing it for Raymond.

The physicists call it Brownian movement, the action of molecules coursing against one another in the air. This activity produces a kind of hum, a high-pitched, almost screeching sound at a frequency level on the margins of human audibility. As a child I could hear this tone, if I chose to, at virtually any moment. Most often, I would ignore it, but every now and then my will eroded and I would let the pitch rise inside my ears to the point where it was almost blaring. Apparently at puberty the bones in the inner ear harden so that the Brownian ringing can no longer be heard. Which is just as well. Because by then there are other distractions. For me, during most of my married life, the allure of other women has been like that daily hum which I willfully ignored, and when I started working around Carolyn that resolve went weak, and the pitch rose, vibrated, sang.

"And I can't really tell you why," I said to Robinson.

I consider myself a person of values. I had always despised my father for his philandering. On Friday nights he was emitted from the household like a wandering cat, headed for a tavern and, later, the Hotel Delaney over on Western Avenue, only a little better than a flop, with its old woolen carpets worn to the backing over the stairs, and the naphtha scent of some chemical agent used to control the infestation of pests. There he would pursue his passion with various soiled women-barroom chippies, horny divorcees, wives out on the sneak. Before he left on these outings, he had dinner with my mother and me. We both knew where be was going. He would hum, the only sound anything like music which came from him all week. But somehow as I worked around Carolyn, with her jangling jewelry and her light perfume, her silk blouses, her red lipstick and painted nails, that large heaving bosom and her long legs, that splash of bright hair, I became overwhelmed by her-and in just that fashion, detail by detail, so that I would become excited when I smelled her scent on another woman who passed me in the hall.

"And I can't really tell you why. Maybe that's why I am here. Some frequency is heard and everything begins to shatter, A vibration sets in, a fundamental tone, and the whole interior is shaking. We'd talk about the trial, our lives, whatever, and she seemed such a remarkable mix of things. Symphonic. A symphonic personality. Disciplined and glamorous. This musical laugh. And an orthodontic wonder of a smile. She was much wittier than I expected; tough, as they said, but she did not seem hard."

I was affected particularly by her offhand remarks, the way her eyes, hooded with shadow and liner, would take on this tone of level assessment. Analyzing politics or witnesses or cops, she showed you just how firm a purchase she had on what was going on. And that was very exciting to me, to meet a woman who seemed to really have the lowdown, who was moving through the world at Carolyn's speed, and who was so many different things to different people. Maybe it was the contrast to Barbara, who is so deliberately none of that.

"Here was this bold, bright, handsome woman, much celebrated, with a kind of spotlight radiance. And I find I am going down to her office-which is itself a minor wonder in a place as stark as ours, Carolyn having taken the trouble to add a small Oriental rug, plants, an antique bookcase, and an Empire desk she snagged through a connection with Central Services-I'm going down there with nothing to say. There is this heat, this parched sensation-all the old crappy metaphors-and I start thinking, Jesus Christ, this can't be happening. And maybe it still wouldn't have, but about this time I begin to notice, I begin to think she is paying attention to me. She is looking at me. Oh, I know, this sounds like high school. No, worse, junior high school. But there is this thing, people don't look at one another."