Scott Turow - Pleading Guilty

Jorge closed his eyes, heavy-lidded like a lizard's.

'Wouldn't know him. Don' know him and don' know nobody he knows. I tole the first copper what come around askin Kam Roberts, I tole him straight up, I don' want none of this shit. I tole him, see Hans, and now we got some fucker here playin What's My Line. Don' fuck with me.' He worked his head around completely as if it were on a string, so that I knew I'd had it right to start: a former boxer.

I got it now, why he thought I was a cop, because the cops had already been here looking for Kam Roberts. I wanted to ask more, of course — which coppers, which unit, what they thought Bert had done — but I knew better than to press my luck.

Jorge had leaned in his confidential way across the table once again.

'I'm not supposed to have any this shit.' That's what he paid Hans for, that's what he was telling me. I knew Hans too, a watch commander in the Sixth District, two, three years from retirement, Hans Gudrich, real fat these days, with very clear blue eyes, quite beautiful actually, if you could say that about the eyes on a fat old cop.

‘I was on my way out,' I said.

'See, that's what I thought.'

'You were right.' I stood up, my sheet wetting the floor beneath me. 'We all have a job to do.' My impression of an honest policeman didn't sell. Jorge pointed.

'Nobody got no jobs to do here. You want to sweat, that's fine. You come here runnin any scams, Mr Roberts or whatever, we'll take a piece of your candy-ass, I don' care what kind of star you carry. To me, Mr Roberts, man, I better not hear no Mr Roberts again, you know?'

'Got it.'

I was gone fast. Bert may have been a fake tough guy; these fellas knew a thing or two about making hard choices, and I was dressed and on the street in a jiffy, bombing down the walk, my insides still melted down in fear. Nice crowd, I told Bert, and, once I'd started this conversation, asked a few more questions like why he was calling himself Kam Roberts.

I was now up to the intersection of Duhaney and Shields, one of these grand city neighborhoods, the league of nations, four blocks with eleven languages, all of them displayed on the garish signs flogging bargains that are pasted in the store windows. Taxis here are at best occasional, and I stomped around near the bus stop, where a little bit of the last snow remained in a dirty crusted hump, my cheeks stinging in the cold and my soul still seething from the trip into that inferno of tough men and intense heat. Near my native ground, I found myself in the thick grip of time and the stalled feelings that forty years ago seemed to bind my spirit like glue. I was hopelessly at odds with everyone — my ma, the Church, the nuns at school, the entire claustrophobic community with its million rules. I took no part in the joy that everybody here seemed to feel in belonging. Instead, I felt I was a spy, a clandestine agent from somewhere else, an outsider who took them all as objects, surfaces, things to see.

Now this last couple of years, since Nora scooted, I seem to be back here more and more, my dreams set in the dim houses beneath the Callison Street Bridge, where I am searching. Four decades later, it turns out it was me who was secretly infiltrated. Sometimes in these dreams I think I'm looking for my sister, sweet Elaine, dead three years now, but I cannot find her. Outside, the wash flags in the sunshine which is bright enough to purify, but I am inside, the wind shifting in the curtains and the papers down the hall as I prowl the grim interior corridors to find some lost connection. What did I care about back then? Desperately, in the nights now, I sit up, concentrating, trying to recall the source of all of these errors, knowing that somewhere in this dark house, in one room or another, I will sweep aside a door and feel the rush of light and heat, the flames.

It was about seven-thirty when I got back to the office, and Brushy, as usual, was still there. Near as I can tell, none of my partners believes that money is the most important thing in the world — they just work as if they did. They are decent folks, my partners, men and women of refined instinct, other-thinking, many of them lively company and committed to a lot of do-good stuff, but we are joined together, like the nucleus of an atom, by the dark magnetic forces of nature — a shared weakness for our own worst desires. Get ahead. Make money. Wield power. It all takes time. In this life you're often so hard-pressed that scratching your head sometimes seems to absorb an instant you're sure will be precious later in the day.

Brush, like many others, felt best here, burning like some torch in the dark hours. No phone, no opposing counsel or associates, no fucking management meetings. Her fierce intelligence could be concentrated on the tasks at hand, writing letters, reviewing memos, seven little things in sixty minutes, each one billable as a quarter of an hour. My own time in the office was a chain of aimless spells.

I stuck my head in, feeling the need for someone sensible.

'Got a minute?'

Brushy has the corner office, the glamour spot. I'm ten years older, with smaller digs next door. She was at her desk, a plane of glass engulfed at either end by green standing plants whose fronds languished on her papers.

'Business?' she asked. 'Who's the client?' She had reached for her time sheet already.

'Old one,' I said. 'Me.' Brushy was my attorney in my wars with Nora. An absolutely ruthless trial lawyer, Emilia Bruccia is one of G amp; G's great stars. On deposition, I've seen her reform the recollections of witnesses more dramatically than if they had ingested psychoactive drugs, and she's also gifted with that wonderful, devious, clever cast of mind by which she can always explain away the opposition's most damaging documents as something not worth using to wrap fish. She's become a mainstay of our relationship with TN, while developing a dozen great clients of her own, including a big insurance company in California.

Not only does she bill a million bucks a year, but this is a terrific person. I mean it. I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther. But she is not dim to feelings. She has plenty of her own, which she exhausts in work and sexual plunder, having a terminal case of hot pants that makes her personal life, behind her back, the object of local sport. She is loyal; she is smart; she has a long memory for kindnesses done. And she is a great partner. If I had to find someone on an hour's notice to go take a dep for me a hundred miles from Tulsa in the middle of the night, I'd call Brushy first. It was her dependability, in fact, which inspired my visit. When I told her I needed a favor, she didn't even flinch.

'I'd love it if you could grab the wheel on Toots's disciplinary hearing at BAD,' I said. 'I'll be there for the first session on Wednesday, but after that I may be on the loose.' BAD — the Bar Admissions and Disciplinary Commission — is a sagging bureaucracy ministering over entrances, exits, and timeouts from the practice of law. I spent my first four years as a lawyer there, struggling to remain afloat in the tidal crest of complaints regarding lawyerly feasance, mis, mal, and non.

Brushy objected that she'd never handled a hearing at

BAD and it took a second to persuade her she was up to it. Like many great successes, Brushy has her moments of doubt. She flashes the world a winning smile, then wrings her hands when she is alone, not sure she sees what everybody else does. I promised to have Lucinda, the secretary whose services we shared, copy the file, to let Brushy look it over.

'Where will you be?' she asked.

'Looking for Bert.'

'Yeah, where in the world is he?'

'That's what the Committee wants to know.'