Scott Turow - Innocent

Nat, September 30, 2008

A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.

The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother.

This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends. But it is the moment my mind returns to, the way I always see them.

According to what my father will soon tell me, he has been there, in that room, for nearly twenty-three hours, except for bathroom breaks. Yesterday, he awoke, as he does most weekdays, at half past six and could see the mortal change as soon as he glanced back at my mother, just as his feet had found his slippers. He rocked her shoulder, touched her lips. He pumped the heel of his palm against her sternum a few times, but her skin was cool as clay. Her limbs were already moving in a piece, like a mannequin's.

He will tell me he sat then, in a chair across from her. He never cried. He thought, he will say. He does not know how long, except that the sun had moved all the way across the room, when he finally stood again and began to tidy obsessively.

He will say he put the three or four books she was always reading back on the shelf. He hung up the clothes she had a habit of piling on the chaise in front of her dressing mirror, then made the bed around her, pulling the sheets tight, folding the spread down evenly, before laying her hands out like a doll's on the satin binding of the blanket. He threw out two of the flowers that had wilted in the vase on her night table and straightened the papers and magazines on her desk.

He will tell me he called no one, not even the paramedics because he was certain she was dead, and sent only a one-line e-mail to his assistant to say he would not be at work. He did not answer the phone, although it rang several times. Almost an entire day will have passed before he realizes he must contact me.

But how can she be dead? I will ask. She was fine two nights ago when we were together. After a freighted second, I will tell my father, She didn't kill herself.

No, he will agree at once.

She wasn't in that kind of mood.

It was her heart, he will say then. It had to be her heart. And her blood pressure. Your grandfather died the same way.

Are you going to call the police?

The police, he will say after a time. Why would I call the police?

Well, Christ, Dad. You're a judge. Isn't that what you do when someone dies suddenly? I was crying by now. I didn't know when I had started.

I was going to phone the funeral home, he will tell me, but I realized you might want to see her before I did that.

Well, shit, well, yes, I want to see her.

As it happens, the funeral home will tell us to call our family doctor, and he in turn will summon the coroner, who will send the police. It will become a long morning, and then a longer afternoon, with dozens of people moving in and out of the house. The coroner will not arrive for nearly six hours. He will be alone with my mom's body for only a minute before asking my dad's permission to make an index of all the medications she took. An hour later, I will pass my parents' bathroom and see a cop standing slack-jawed before the open medicine cabinet, a pen and pad in hand.

Jesus, he will declare.

Bipolar disorder, I will tell him when he finally notices me. She had to take a lot of pills. In time, he will simply sweep the shelves clean and go off with a garbage bag containing all the bottles.

In the meanwhile, every so often another police officer will arrive and ask my father about what happened. He tells the story again and again, always the same way.

What was there to think about all that time? one cop will say.

My dad can have a hard way with his blue eyes, something he probably learned from his own father, a man he despised.

Officer, are you married?

I am, Judge.

Then you know what there was to think about. Life, he will answer. Marriage. Her.

The police will make him go through his account three or four more times-how he sat there and why. His response will never vary. He will answer every question in his usual contained manner, the stolid man of law who looks out on life as an endless sea.

He will tell them how he moved each item.

He will tell them where he spent each hour.

But he will not tell anybody about the girl.

Rusty, March 19, 2007, Eighteen Months Earlier

From the elevated walnut bench a dozen feet above the lawyers' podium, I bang the gavel and call the last case of the morning for oral argument.

"People versus John Harnason," I say, "fifteen minutes each side."

The stately appellate courtroom, with its oxblood pillars rising two stories to a ceiling decorated with rococo gildings, is largely empty of spectators, save for Molly Singh, the Tribune's courthouse reporter, and several young deputy PAs, drawn by a difficult case and the fact that their boss, the acting prosecuting attorney, Tommy Molto, will be making a rare appearance up here to argue in behalf of the State. A ravaged-looking warhorse, Molto sits with two of his deputies at one of the lustrous walnut tables in front of the bench. On the other side, the defendant, John Harnason, convicted of the fatal poisoning of his roommate and lover, waits to hear his fate debated, while his lawyer, Mel Tooley, advances toward the podium. Along the far wall, several law clerks are seated, including Anna Vostic, my senior clerk, who will leave the job on Friday. At my nodding direction, Anna will ignite the tiny lights atop counsel's podium, green, yellow, and red, to indicate the same things they do in traffic.

"May it please the Court," says Mel, the time-ingrained salutation of lawyers to appellate judges. At least seventy pounds overweight these days, Mel still insists on wearing bold pin-striped suits as snug as sausage casings-enough to instill vertigo-and the same lousy rug, which looks as though he skinned a poodle. He begins with an oily grin, as if he and I, and the two judges who flank me on the three-judge panel that will decide the appeal, Marvina Hamlin and George Mason, are all the best of friends. I have never cared for Mel, a bigger snake than usual in the nest of serpents that is the criminal defense bar.

"First," says Mel, "I can't start without briefly wishing Chief Judge Sabich a happy birthday on this personal milestone."

I am sixty years old today, an occasion I have approached with gloom. Mel undoubtedly gleaned this tidibit from the gossip column on page two of today's Trib, a daily drumbeat of innuendo and leaks. It concludes routinely with birthday greetings to a variety of celebrities and local notables, which this morning included me: " Rusty Sabich, Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District and candidate for the state Supreme Court, 60." Seeing it in boldface was like taking a bullet.

"I hoped no one had noticed, Mr. Tooley," I say. Everyone in the courtroom laughs. As I discovered long ago, being a judge somehow makes your every joke, even the lamest, side splitting. I beckon Tooley to proceed.

The work of the appellate court in its simplest terms is to make sure that the person appealing got a fair trial. Our docket reflects justice in the American style, divided evenly between the rich, who are usually contesting expensive civil cases, and the poor, who make up most of the criminal appellants and face significant prison terms. Because the state supreme court reviews very few matters, nine times out of ten the court of appeals holds the final word on a case.

The issue today is well-defined: Did the State offer enough evidence to justify the jury's murder verdict against Harnason? Appellate courts rarely reverse on this ground; the rule is that the jury's decision stands unless it is literally irrational. But this was a very close case. Ricardo Millan, Harnason's roommate and business partner in a travel-packaging enterprise, died at the age of thirty-nine of a mysterious progressive illness that the coroner took for an undiagnosed intestinal infection or parasite. There things might have ended were it not for the doggedness of Ricardo's mother, who made several trips here from Puerto Rico. She used all her savings to hire a private detective and a toxicologist at the U who persuaded the police to exhume Ricardo's body. Hair specimens showed lethal levels of arsenic.