Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

Without really noticing at first, I become aware that both of us have ceased comment, even motion, and are facing the television set, where the images of today's service for Carolyn. Raymond's car arrives and the back of my head is briefly shown. The son is escorted up to the doors of the chapel. The newsreader is doing a voice-over: Eight hundred persons, including many city leaders, gathered at First Presbyterian Church for final rites for Carolyn Polhemus, a deputy prosecuting attorney slain three nights ago in a brutal rape-murder. Now people are emerging. The mayor and Raymond are both depicted speaking to reporters, but only Nico gets audio. He employs the quietest voice he knows and deflects questions about the investigation of the murder. "I came to remember a colleague," he tells the camera, with one foot in his car.

It is Barbara who speaks first.

"How was it?" She has wrapped herself now in a red silk robe.

"Gala," I answer. "in a way. A meeting of all the luminaries."

"Did you cry?"

"Come on, Barbara."

"I'm serious." She is leaning forward. Her jaw is set and there is a savage deadness in her eye. I always marvel that Barbara's anger remains so near at hand. Over the years, her superior access has become a source of intimidation. She knows I am slower to respond, restrained by archaic fears, the dark weight of memory. My parents often fell into robust shouting matches, even occasional brawls. I have such a vivid recollection of one night when I awoke to their disturbance and found that my mother had taken hold of a handful of my father's Brillo-y red hair while she slapped him with a rolled-up newspaper, as if he were a dog. The aftermath of these quarrels would send my mother to bed for days, where she would lie spent, dwelling with the sensational pain of enormous migraine headaches that required her to remain in a darkened room and left me under an injunction to make no sound.

Lacking that kind of refuge now, I move over to a basket of clean laundry Barbara has brought up and begin matching the socks. For a moment we are silent, left to the burbling of the TV and the nighttime noises of the house. A tiny finger of the river runs behind the homes half a block away, and without the traffic you can hear it licking. The furnace kicks in two floors below. On for the first time today, it will spill up through the ducts a kind of oily effluvium.

"Nico was trying hard enough to look unhappy," Barbara finally tells me. "He wasn't very successful if you saw him up close. He was positively radiant. He thinks he's got a shot at Raymond now."

"Is that possible?"

I sort the socks and shrug. "He's gained a lot of ground with this thing." Barbara, a witness all these years to Raymond's invincibility, is obviously surprised, but the mathematician in her shows, for I can see that she is quickly factoring the new possibilities. She grabs at her hair, gray-flecked and curly, worn in a fashionable shag, and her pretty face takes on the light of curiosity.

"What would you do, Rusty, if that happened? If Raymond lost?"

"Accept it. What else could I do?"

"I mean for a living."

Blue with blue. Black with black. It is not easy with only incandescent light. Some years ago I used to talk about leaving the office. That was when I could still imagine myself as a defense lawyer. But I never got around to making that move, and it has been some time since we have spoken at about my future.

"I don't know what I'd do," I tell her honestly. "I'm a lawyer. I'd practice law. Teach. I don't know. Delay says he's going to keep me on as chief deputy."

"Do you believe that?"

"No." I take my stockings to my drawer. "He was a river of bullshit today. Told me, in a very serious tone, that the only real primary opponent he had been afraid of was me. You know, as if I would talk Raymond into stepping aside and anointing me successor."

"You should have," Barbara says.

I look back at her.

"Really." Her enthusiasm, in a way, is not surprising. Barbara has always felt a spouse's disdain for the boss. And besides, all of this comes, somewhat, at my expense. I'm the one who lacked the nerve to do what everybody else could see was obvious.

"I am not a politician."

"Oh, you'd make do," says Barbara. "You'd love to be P.A." As I figured: I am tweaked by wife's superior knowledge of my nature. I decide to sidestep and tell Barbara that this is all academic. Raymond will pull through. "Bolcarro will finally endorse him. Or we'll catch the killer"-I nod toward the TV set-and he'll ride into Election Day with all the media murmuring his name."

"How's he going to do that?" asks Barbara. "Do they have a suspect?"

"We have shit."

"So Dan Lipranzer and Rusty Sabich will work day and night for the next two weeks and catch Raymond a killer. That's the strategy. Carefully devised." The remote snaps and the TV shrinks to a star. Behind me, I hear from Barbara a whinny, a snort. It is not a pleasant sound. When I look back, her eyes, fixed upon me, are stilled to a zero point, an absolute in hatred.

"You are so predictable," she says, low and mean. "You're in charge of this investigation?"

"Of course."

"Of course?"

"Barbara, I'm the chief deputy prosecuting attorney and Raymond's running for his life. Who else would handle the investigation? Raymond would do it himself if he weren't campaigning fourteen hours a day."

It was the prospect of a moment just like this that left me in a state of excruciating unease a couple of days ago when I realized that I would have to phone Barbara to tell her what had happened. I could not ignore it; that would pretend too much. My call was for the announced purpose of telling Barbara I would be late. The office, I explained, was in an uproar. Carolyn Polhemus is dead, I added.

"Huh", said Barbara. Her tone was one of detached wonder. "An overdose?" she asked.

I stared at the receiver in my hand, marveling at the depth of this misunderstanding.

But I cannot divert her now. Barbara's rage is gathering.

"Tell me the truth," she says. "Isn't that a conflict of interest or something?"

"Barbara-"

"No," she says, standing now. "Answer me. Is that professional-for you to be doing this? There are 120 lawyers down there. Can't they find anybody who didn't sleep with her?"

I am familiar with this rise in pitch and descent in tactics. I strive to remain even.

"Barbara, Raymond asked me to do it."

"Oh, spare me, Rusty. Spare me the high purpose, noble crap. You could explain to Raymond why you shouldn't do this."

"I don't care to. I would be letting him down. And it happens to be none of his business."

At this evidence of my embarrassment, Barbara hoots. That I realize was poor strategy, a bad moment to tell the truth. Barbara has little sympathy for my secret; if it would not pain her equally, she would put it all on billboards. During the short time that I was actually seeing Carolyn, I did not have whatever it is-the courage or the decency or the willingness to be disturbed-to confess anything to Barbara. That awaited the end, a week or two after I had become resolved it all was past. I was home for an early dinner, atoning for the month before when I had been absent almost every evening, my liberty procured with the phony excuse of preparation for a trial, which I ultimately claimed had been continued. Nat had just gone off to his permitted half hour with the television set. And I, somehow, became unglued. The moon. The mood. A drink. The psychologists would say a fugue state. I drifted, staring at the dinner table. I took my highball tumbler in my hand, just like one of Carolyn's. And I was reminded of her so powerfully that I was suddenly beyond control. I cried-wept with stormy passion as I sat there-and Barbara knew immediately. She did not think that I was ill; she did not think that it was fatigue, or trial stress, or tear-duct disease. She knew; and she knew that I was crying out of loss, not shame.