Scott Turow - Identical

As a plaintiff’s lawyer who made his living in those courtrooms, Paul had heard the same tales as everyone else. Appearing before certain judges said to be part of Tuohey’s ring, Paul worried that the defense lawyers might slip something into the judge’s drawer, but he figured he would be OK if he got to a jury. And he was-more than OK. He got good cases, usually through his Easton Law School classmates in big firms who wouldn’t soil themselves with contingency matters, worked the files carefully and rang the bell hard, several times.

In 1991, Paul won his first big verdict, eighteen million dollars in a trial before Sherm Crowthers. Paul represented a concert violinist who lost an arm on the light-rail when the doors closed on his Stradivarius and dragged the musician several hundred yards down the track. Days after the jury had come back, Paul was in the courthouse and bumped into Sherm, who more or less steered Paul, with an arm like a tree branch, into the private corridor outside his chambers. Post-trial motions were still pending, in which the defense was trying to overturn the verdict, but Paul assumed that the judge wanted no more than to offer congratulations on a job well done, until he pushed Paul into the small clerk’s alcove in his chambers and closed the door. Sherm was huge, six foot six and well over three hundred pounds by now, with a storm of overgrown gray eyebrows and intense yellowed eyes.

‘Motherfucker,’ he said to Paul, ‘you don’t seem to understand what’s goin on here.’

Paul, who didn’t think he scared easily any more, was too terrified by what was happening to answer. The judge then told Paul that he had to try the food at Crowthers’s sister’s restaurant in the North End.

Quietly asking around afterward, Paul learned that Judith Crowthers reputedly bagged for her brother, tending the cash register at her thriving soul food restaurant in her abundant purple eye shadow and dangling earrings, and accepting without comment the envelopes certain lawyers handed over as they paid their lunch checks. Paul had no thought of dealing with something like this without talking it over with Cass. They met two days later in one of the tiny whitewashed attorneys’ rooms at the Hillcrest Correctional Facility. By now, Paul understood the grim operating mode of the whole corrupt system in Common Pleas. His fee on the case was close to four million dollars-the ten or twenty thousand he was expected to hand over was next to nothing. If he refused, he had no doubt Crowthers would set aside the verdict, reversing key evidentiary rulings, and order another trial, which Paul almost surely would lose. If he reported Sherm to the authorities, it would be Paul’s word against the judge’s, who would claim he had done no more than recommend his sister’s restaurant. Worse, Paul would be a marked man whom Chief Tuohey and his cabal would do their best to drive out of the courthouse.

‘Fuck him anyway,’ Cass concluded. After years in Hillcrest, they both knew the perils of kowtowing to bullies. It never ended. You stood up. But didn’t snitch.

Paul filed a motion the next day, asking Judge Crowthers to disqualify himself from presiding further on the case, because of ‘inappropriate ex parte contact,’ which went otherwise unexplained. There were half a dozen people who’d seen the judge with his arm around Paul, drawing him toward his chambers. If it came to a showdown, Paul would get some backing. Rather than go through that, Crowthers withdrew from the case, but for the next two years, whenever Paul’s firm filed a new lawsuit in the Common Pleas section, it ended up before one of Tuohey’s judges who, without exception, granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss the complaint. Eventually, they referred out any new matters in Kindle County and began trying to develop their practice in the outlying counties.

And then Special Agent Evon Miller of the FBI arrived in Paul’s office. The government’s undercover investigation of Common Pleas judges, Project Petros, was all over the news. Evon had a copy of Paul’s motion in her hand and wanted to know exactly what “inappropriate ex parte contact” meant. Paul stalled until he could get to Hillcrest the next Sunday. Cass and he, as usual, saw this the same way: It was time for this shit to end. Paul told Evon the story on Monday, and agreed to testify. Crowthers, it turned out, was on tape, but the government informant who’d made the recording had died, giving Sherm a shot at trial. But with his placid recitation of the shakedown, Paul appeared to be the emblem of everything good in the law, and a potent contrast to the deeply compromised sleazeballs who were the government’s other witnesses. The trial was over, in effect, as soon as Paul left the stand.

Du Bois Lands was Sherman Crowthers’s nephew, the child of his wife’s sister. D.B.’s mom was a schoolteacher who ended up with a drug problem and, in time, a prison sentence-for black folks it was still the case that when they stumbled they had further to fall. D.B. had lived off and on with Sherm in his huge Colonial home in Assembly Point and regarded his uncle as his idol. When Paul entered the federal courtroom to testify against Crowthers, Du Bois was in the front spectators’ row. He had striking grayish eyes and they bulleted Paul. Du Bois would never say a word, but Paul knew what D.B. was thinking: ‘You didn’t have to do this. You could have said it was all too vague by now, that you just couldn’t recall.’ The two of them never exchanged another word.

These days, Du Bois had sat on the bench five years. He’d been promoted to Common Pleas a year ago, and was assigned to the same courtroom his uncle had occupied fifteen years before, where Paul and Ray Horgan now awaited the start of proceedings. The courtroom was Bauhausy and functional, with all the furnishings, including the paneling and a low, squared-off bench and witness stand, formed of yellowing birch. Kronon and Tooley sat across the courtroom at the other counsel’s desk, and there were dozens of reporters and sketch artists in the front rows of the straight-backed pews. The benches behind them were thick with civilian onlookers.

When Du Bois had been assigned to the suit against Kronon, Paul had taken it for granted they would move to disqualify D.B., but Ray was adamantly opposed. He didn’t want to take the risk of antagonizing black voters, of whom Paul still had a fair share, despite the presence in the race of Willie Dixon, the county councilman from the North End. Beyond that, D.B. had a sterling reputation. And when he’d run for the bench, Ray had been one of his three campaign co-chairs.

Now the elderly clerk bellowed out the case name, “Gianis versus Kronon, Number C-315.” Tooley in his silly shaggy toupee arrived first at the podium and introduced himself for the record, while Ray rolled forward, his gait halting given his rickety knees. With heat, Tooley began to explain his new motions related to fingerprint and DNA testing, but Du Bois cut him off.

“I’ve read all the papers, gentlemen. I always do.” By reputation, D.B.’s in-court demeanor was serious, even stern. But his tone never changed. He treated everyone who appeared before him with civility, tinctured by an undercurrent of skepticism. He was also said to be great at the basic job of a judge: deciding. He ruled after appropriate reflection, but without wavering, unlike others who dithered or tried to force the parties to settle even trivial disputes. “Let’s take the motions in the order they were filed,” the judge said. “First, Mr. Horgan seeks guidance about what public comment the parties may make concerning the subject matter of this lawsuit.”

D.B. treated the motion seriously, but as Paul had expected, refused to gag either party, even though the lawyers litigating the case would have to adhere to the rules about comments outside court. Since Paul wasn’t acting as his own counsel, it would be unfair, the judge said, to restrict him, especially in light of the campaign. Paul wondered if D.B. was going to kill him with kindness.