Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

' Before?' he asks. ‘I thought you wanted to know what happened to Michael Frain. When you said you had a question? I figured you had to ask eventually.' 'Can I ask?'

‘I gave you my answer.' He said he didn't know.

'Well, is that all there is to it, Seth? I've always thought it was a bizarre choice for a pen name.'

'It's a story,' he answers. 'I'll tell you one day.' 'And you never hear from him?'

‘I doubt he's alive.' He says this in a morose, deadened tone that spells trouble to me.

'Okay,' I say and lift a hand in farewell.

'Are you really going to avoid me as long as this trial lasts?'

‘I intend to try.'

When I wave again, he catches my fingers, and with his other hand taps once on my knuckles, a tiny gesture affirming some lingering contact. I take it that way, with a laconic smile, and turn at once, where, to my misfortune, I confront Marietta, who has just come through the back entrance to the courtroom. Chief Judge Tuohey's chambers are on the phone, she says, counting noses for a judges' meeting later today. I take the call at my desk and assure Wanda, the judge's officious secretary, that I'll be along.

By the time I'm done, Marietta has resumed her standard lunch-hour posture at her desk in the outer office, attention fixed on a minute TV held on her lap, while she eats a sandwich off the brown sack in which she brought it. The metal band between her headphones glints amid her bushy curls, and disregarded crumbs dandruff her full bosom and the nubbly brownish tweed of her sweater. Nonetheless, I become aware, through the open doorway, of her droopy eyes drifting toward me in assessment.

'Not a word,' I tell her.

She remains silent only a few seconds. 'Folks never do forget bein in love,' she says suddenly, as if to herself.

'Oh, give it a rest, Marietta.' I scowl at her from twenty feet. She turns away, but her jaw is set as if to show she's standing her ground. 'It wasn't love,' I say, 'not for me.' She actually grimaces slightly. I'm blaspheming. But over time my understanding has become surprisingly clear. 'He adored me,' I explain, 'and the ugly truth is I loved that.' I never felt more splendid, more admired, than in those months I spent with Seth. But his attention was draining because it was so needy. Seth was like a nosebleed. So close, too close. Life with him was always on the verge of turning suffocating.

'Well, I thought you two wasn't talking,' Marietta offers in her defense.

Annie has just come in and quietly takes the straight-backed chair in the corner of Marietta's office. She is carrying a school text and demurely finishing an apple.

' I had to ask him about something.' I explain to them that I found out Hobie and Dubinsky have been friends since high school.

'So?' asks Marietta.

So it means the notion Molto offered two days ago which I scoffed at is actually possible: Hobie could have been the source of the very leak for which he blasted the state on the first day of the trial, the story revealing that Eddgar was the target of the shooting. I've caught both women's attention with this idea. Marietta lays her earphones down. Annie is quick to accept that there is a conspiracy afoot.

'That Dubinsky,' she says. 'He is bad. He is a snake.' She recalls an incident two or three years ago, during the Termolli trial, in which an oil executive and his mistress were charged with killing his wife. The judge, Simon Norfolk, found Dubinsky with an ear up on the jury-room door, during deliberations. Norfolk stuck Stew in the lockup for several hours for contempt, before the Trib's lawyers arrived in flotilla screaming about the First Amendment.

'Yeah,' says Marietta, 'but you asked the right question, Judge, the other day. What's the defense get out of leaking this? It don't make any sense for them.'

In reply, Annie speaks up softly. 'Maybe for the bench trial?' she asks. That's what's occurred to me, too.

'Think about this, Marietta,' I say. 'Tommy's hair's on fire – he has to get started, because he' s hoping to keep Lovinia corralled. Hobie knows it, since he's the one who's been causing the problem with her. So he pushes his story into the paper, screams bloody murder about how he can't get an impartial jury, and then magnanimously takes a bench so we can get started, realizing that normally I'd be reluctant to do it in a case where I know so many of the players. Remember that remark of Nile' s when I admonished him on the jury waiver? "That's what we want." '

'Ooh,' says Annie and makes a face. 'Ooh. That is sneaky.'

'What I can't figure out is what he thinks he gets out of a bench.'

Marietta laughs. 'Judge, I'm not picking on you or teasing you or nothing but, Judge, you know, there's lots of defense lawyers who work in this courthouse might have said to him, "You get a bench with her, you got a pretty good deal." That's fact, Judge.'

In this building, the judges who were once PAs are expected to exhibit the loyalty of a Marine to their former office. Many think of being a prosecutor here as akin to combat experience, each courtroom another theater in a war zone, civilization versus barbarians. After my weekly call, I've heard supervisors ask the courtroom PA for a 'body count,' referring to the number of guilty pleas. But the rhetoric I grew up with in the federal courts was constitutional not military: I still think about rights, about inviolable first principles in the dealings between individuals and the state. The defense lawyers regard me as a natural ally – and Marietta as a turncoat.

She stands, her skirt another pleated brownish print that spreads about her amply, and tosses her empty soda can into the trash, then shoots me a hard look, reaffirming her message. Hobie did this because he thinks I'm more likely than a jury to acquit Nile. Who'd be more sympathetic to Nile, twelve coldhearted folks off the street or me, somebody who knew Nile as a boy and, better yet, who knows firsthand the gripes of a child who lived through the revolution at home? That's the bet Hobie took. I'm here because I'm Zora's daughter. Always. Inescapably. Just as Gwen said yesterday. Marietta goes off, unable to restrain a slight toss of her head in unending amazement at what I miss.

*

The trial resumes with bickering. Hobie wants to have lab work performed on the money the state introduced yesterday. He cites Montague's acknowledgment that the bills had not been tested for blood, for example, or gunpowder. Rudy objects for the state.

'Yaw On-uh, such tests are to be puhfawmed befaw thee trial.'

'I made some calls,' says Hobie. 'I can have the tests done in twenty-four hours. Montague admitted the state doesn't need the bills they didn't submit to the lab. What's the harm?'

'What's the relevance?' asks Tommy. 'Even if there's gunpowder or blood on the money, so what?'

'Well then,' says Hobie, 'the state will have to explain how it got there.'

'Talk about a fishing expedition!'

Tommy's right. But I allow the motion. It's harmless, and the accepted wisdom in this job is to let the defendant have his meaningless victories. It shows evenhandedness to the court of appeals.

The state completes its examination of Lovinia uneventfully. With unsettling calm, Bug describes the shooting on September 7: the approach of June's car, her call to Gorgo, and then, when a woman, not a man, rolled down the window to the Nova, summoning Hardcore. The woman and she were alone for about five minutes.

'Did you have a conversation with the woman?'

'She askin, can she talk to Or-dell.' Messing with Hardcore's given name, Bug pauses to smile. Hardcore came up fast, she says, and the woman and he conversed momentarily. Then Gorgo swung out of the alley. ‘I got wounded,' she says, with the composure of a soldier.

Having survived the last of this examination, Tommy retreats to the prosecution table with a glum look, awaiting whatever will happen next. Hobie rises for cross.