Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"I know you didn't, Delay," I say. And then I tell him what I think is the truth. "You did your job the way you thought you were supposed to. You just relied on the wrong people."

He watches me.

"Well, it's probably not going to be my job much longer. You've heard about this recall thing?" he asks. He is looking up and down the street again. "Of course you have. Everybody has. Well, what's the difference? They all tell me my career is over."

He is not looking for sympathy. He just wants me to know that the waves of calamity have spread and washed over him as well. Carolyn has pulled all of us down in her black wake. I find myself encouraging him.

"You can't tell, Delay. You never know how things'll turn out."

He shakes his head.

"No, no," he says. "No, you're the hero, I'm the goat. It's great." Nico, smiles, in a sudden way, so that you know he finds his own thoughts weird, inappropriate. "A year ago, you could have beat me in the election, and you could do it today. Isn't that great?" Nico Della Guardia laughs out loud, pinched by his own ironies, the peculiar readings from his own terms of reference. He spreads his arms here in the middle of Kindle Boulevard. "Nothing," he says, "has changed."

In the front room of the home in which I have lived for better than eight years there is complete disorder. Open boxes, half packed, are everywhere, the items removed from shelves and drawers are strewn in all directions. The furniture is gone. I never cared much for the sofa or the love seat, and Barbara wanted them for her condo outside Detroit. I'll move January 2 to an apartment in the city. Not a bad place. The realtor said I was lucky to get it. The house is up for rent. I've decided that each step should be slow.

Now that Nat has left, the job of packing seems to take forever. I move from room to room. Every item reminds me of something. Each corner seems to contain its quotient of pain and melancholy. When I reach my limit, I start working somewhere else. I think often of my father and that scene I recalled for Marty Polhemus, in which I found my old man, the week after my mother's death, packing up the apartment he had abandoned a few years before. He worked in a sleeveless undervest, and he had a brazen manner as he pitched the remains of his adult life into crates and boxes. He kicked the cartons from his path as he moved about the rooms.

I heard from Marty just last week. He sent a Christmas card. "Glad to hear everything worked out for you." I laughed aloud when I read his message. Lord, that kid really has the knack. I threw the card away. But the toll of loneliness is greater than I imagined. A couple of hours ago, I went rummaging through the boxes of trash in the living room, looking for the envelope. I need the address to write him back.

I never wrote my father after he left for Arizona, I did not see him again. I called on occasion, but only because Barbara dialed the number and put the receiver in my hand. He was so deliberately uncommunicative, so chary with the details of his life, that it was never worth the effort. I knew he was living with a woman by then, that he worked three days a week in a local bakery. He found Arizona hot.

The woman, Wanda, called to tell me he was dead. That was more than eight years ago now, but the shock of it, in a way, is with me every day. He was strong and fit; I had taken it for granted that he would live to be a hundred, that there would always be this far-off target for my bitterness. He had already been cremated. Wanda only found my number as she was cleaning out the trailer and she insisted I come West to settle the rest of his affairs. Barbara was eight months pregnant then and we both regarded this trip West as my father's final imposition. Wanda, it turned out, was from New York City, in her late fifties, tall, not bad-looking. She did not hesitate to speak ill of the dead. Actually, she told me when I arrived, she had moved out on him six months before. They called her from the bakery, where he collapsed with the coronary, because they knew no one else. 'I don't know why I do these things. Really, I have to tell you,' she said, after a couple of drinks, 'he was mostly a prick.'

She did not think it was funny when I suggested her phrase was what should be carved on the stone.

She left me alone to pick through the trailer. On his bed were red socks. In the chiffon robe, I found another six or seven dozen pairs of men's hose. Red and yellow. Striped. Dotted. Argyles. In his last years, my father had finally found an indulgence.

The doorbell rings. I feel the faintest surge of anticipation. I look forward to a moment's conversation with the postal carrier or the man from UPS.

"Lip," I say through the storm door. He enters and stomps the snow off his feet.

"Nice and homey," Lip says, surveying the disaster in the living room. As he stands on the doormat he hands me a small package, not much wider than the satin bow on top.

"Christmas present," he says.

"That's awfully nice," I say. We've never done this before.

"I figured you could use a pick-me-up. Nat get off okay?"

I nod. I took him to the airport yesterday. They allowed him to be seated first. I wanted to go with him onto the plane, but Nat would not permit it. From the doorway, I watched him go down the jetway in his dark blue NFL parka, alone and already lost in dreams. He is his father's, son. He did not turn to wave. I want, I thought quite distinctly, I want the life I had.

Lip and I spend a moment looking at each other. I still have not taken his coat. God, it is awkward, and it is like this with everyone, people on the street or people I know well. So much has happened to me that I never counted on. And how are people to respond? Somehow it does not fit into any recognized conversational pattern to say, It's tough about your wife, but at least they didn't get you for that murder.

I finally offer him a beer.

"If you're drinkin," he answers, and follows me to the kitchen. Here, too, half the housewares are in boxes.

As I'm taking a glass out of the cabinet, Lipranzer points to the package he brought, which I've set down on the table.

"I wanna see you open that. I been savin it a while."

He has done a careful job with the paper.

"I never saw a gift wrapped before," I say, "with hospital corners."

Crumpled inside a small white box is a manila envelope ribboned with red-and-white evidence tape. I cut through that and find the glass that turned up missing during the trial, the tumbler from Carolyn's bar. I put it all down on the table and take a step away. This is one guess where I would never have been close.

Lip fishes in his pocket and comes out with his lighter. He holds a corner of the evidence envelope in the flame until he's sure it's burning, then flips it into the sink. The glass he hands to me. The blue ninhydrin powder is still all over it, the three partial prints etched there, a kind of surrealistic delft. I hold the glass up to the window light for a moment, trying for reasons I cannot discern to figure which of the tiny networks of lines are the marks of my right thumb and my third right middle finger, the former telltale signs. I am still looking at the glass when I start talking to Lipranzer.

"There's a genuine question here, whether I should be touched," I say, and now finally catch his eye, "or real pissed off."

"How that?"

"It's a felony in this state to secrete evidence of a crime. You hung your ass out a good long way on this one, Lippen"

"No one around who'll ever know." Lip pours the beer that I've just opened.

"Besides, I didn't do a goddamn thing. It was them that fucked up. Remember they got Schmidt to come grab all the evidence? The glass wasn't there. I'd took the thing down to Dickerman. Next day I get a call from the lab, the test is done, I can come pick up my glass. When I get down there somebody's signed the receipt 'Returned to Evidence.' You know, the idea is that I'll put it back in. Only I don't got any way to put it anywhere, since it's not my goddamn case anymore. So I tossed it in a drawer. Figured sooner or later somebody's gotta ask me. Nobody did. In the meantime. Molto's like every other half-ass deputy. Signs off on all the receipts without matchin em against the evidence. Three months later he's got himself in a bucket of shit. But that's his problem." Lip lifts his glass and drains most of it. "None of them ever had the most screwed-up idea where the thing went. They tell stories about the way Nico tore his office apart. He had them pick up the tacked-down carpet, I hear."