Presumed innocent

Chapter 23

Every week, usually on Wednesday night, the phone rings. Even before he starts I know who it is. I can hear him pulling on his goddamn cigarette. I am not supposed to talk to him. He is not supposed to talk to me. We both have our orders. He does not say his name.

How you doin? he asks.

Hanging in.

You guys okay?

Getting by.

This is a tough thing.

Tell me about it.

He laughs. No. I guess I don't gotta tell you. Well, you need anything? Anything I can do?

Not much. You're good to call.

Yeah, I am, but I figure you'll be runnin the joint again soon. I'm coverin my bets.

I know you are. What about you? How you doing?

Good. Survivin.

Schmidt still on your case? I ask, referring to his boss.

Hey, always.

That's the guy. Screw him, I figure.

How tough are they making it on you?

These cupcakes? Come on.

But I know Lip is having a hard time. Mac, who has also called on a couple of occasions, told me they pulled him back into McGrath Hall, took him off the Special Command in the P.A.'s office. Schmidt has got him chained to a desk, signing off on other dicks' reports. That is bound to drive him crazy. But Lip always was doing a high-wire act with the department. He had to keep dazzling the crowds to hold off his detractors. Plenty of people were waiting to see him fall. Now he has. Cops will always figure that Lipranzer knew and let me hide it. That's just the way they think.

I'll call next week, he always promises at the end of every conversation. And he does, faithfully. Our talks do not seem to vary more than a line or two. About a month along, when it was becoming clear to everyone that this was serious, he offered money. I understand these kinda things can be expensive, he said. You know a bohunk's always got some dough salted away. I told him Barbara had come through in the pinch. He made a remark about marrying a Jewish girl.

This week, when the phone rings, I have been waiting.

"How you doin?" he asks.

"Hanging in," I say.

Barbara picks it up, just in time to hear that exchange.

"It's for me, Barb," I say.

Unaware of our arrangement, she says simply, "Hi, Lip," and puts the phone back down.

"So what's goin on?"

"We're going to trial now," I say. "Three weeks. Less."

"Yeah, I know. I seen the papers." We both hang on that for a while. There is nothing Dan Lipranzer can do about his testimony. It is going to break my back, both of us know it, and there is no choice. He answered Molto's question the day after the election, before Lip could guess the score; and I tend to think that the answers would have been the same, even if Lip knew the consequences. What happened happened. That's the way he would explain it to himself.

"So you gettin ready?" he asks.

"We're working real hard. Stern's amazing. He really is. He's the best by a time and a half."

"That's what they say." When he pauses, I recognize the click of his lighter. "Well, okay. Anything you need?"

"There is," I say. If he hadn't asked, I wasn't going to say anything. That's the deal I made with myself.

"Shoot," he tells me.

"I've got to find this guy Leon. Leon Wells. You know, the guy who's supposed to have paid off the P.A. in the North Branch? The defendant in the court file you dug up, the one with Carolyn and Molto? Stern hired some skip tracer and he came back with a complete zip. As far as he can tell, no such guy even exists. I don't know any other way to go. I can't have a heart-to-heart with Tommy Molto."

This private investigator was named Ned Bermari. Sandy said that he was good, but he seemed to have no idea what he was doing. I gave him copies of the pages of the court file. Three days later he was back saying he could not help. The North Branch, man, in those days, he said, it was a real zoo. I wish you luck. I really do. You couldn't tell out there who was doing what to who.

Lipranzer takes some time with this request, more than I expected. But I know the problem. If the department finds out he helped in the preparation of my defense, they will can him. Insubordination. Disloyalty. Fifteen years plus, and his pension, in the dumper.

"I wouldn't ask, you know I wouldn't. But I think it might really matter."

"How?" he asks. "You thinkin Tommy's kinky on this? Set you up to keep you from lookin?" I can tell that even though he is trying not to make judgments, Lipranzer regards that notion as far-fetched.

"I don't know what to say. You want to hear me say I think it's possible? I do. And whether he's sandbagging me or not, if we could get that kind of stuff out, it would look real bad for him. Something like that can really catch a jury's attention."

He is silent again.

"After I testify," he says. "You know, those guys have got their eye on me. And I don't want anybody askin me any questions where I got to give the wrong answer under oath. A lot of people would like to see that. When I get off the stand, they'll ease up. I'll work on it then. Hard. Okay?"

It is not okay. It is likely to be too late. But I've asked for much too much already.

"That's great. You're a pal. I mean that."

"I figure you'll be runnin the joint again soon," he says. He says, "I'm just coverin my bets."

Tee ball, again. The summer league. In this circuit, mercifully, there are no standings, for the Stingers are only marginally improved. In the heavy air of the August evenings, the fly balls still seem to mystify our players. They fall with the unhindered downward velocity of rain. The girls respond better to tutoring. They throw and bat with increasing skill. But the boys for the most part seem unreachable. There is no telling them about the merit of a measured swing. Each eight-year-old male comes to the plate with dreams of violent magic in his bat. He envisions home runs and wicked liners. For the boys, there is no point in the repetitive instructions to keep the ball on the ground.

Nat, surprisingly, is something of an exception. This summer he is changing, beginning to acquire some worldly focus. He seems newly aware of his powers, and of the fact that people regard the manner in which you do things as a sign of character. When he takes his turn at bat and hits, I watch the way his eyes lift as he comes around first base before he sprints for second. It is not enough to say that he is merely imitating the players on TV, because what is significant is that he noticed in the first place. He is starting to care about style. Barbara says he seems more particular about his clothes. I would be more delighted by all of this were I not wary about the motives for this sudden maturation. He has not reached and developed so much as he has been plucked by the heels from his dreaminess. Nathaniel has turned his attention to the world, I suspect, because he knows that it has caused so much trouble for his father.

After the game, we head home alone. No one has been so heartless as to suggest we skip the picnic, but it is for the best. We attended once after the indictment, and the time passed so fitfully, with such sudden ponderous silences arising at the mention of the most ordinary topics-work to which I do not go; TV detective shows that turn on predicaments like mine-that I knew we could not return. These men are generous enough to accept my presence among themselves. The risk I pose is for the kids. We all must think about the months ahead, the impossibility there would be of explaining where I'd gone and what I did. It is unfair to hobble these splendid evenings with the omen of evil. Instead, Nat and I depart with a friendly wave. I carry the bat, the glove. He goes along stomping out dandelions.

From Nathaniel, there are no words of complaint. I am pathetically touched by this, by my son's loyalty. God only knows what mayhem his friends are wreaking on him. No grownup can fully imagine the smirking wisecracks, the casual viciousness he bears. And yet he refuses to desert me, the vessel from which this pain has poured. He does not dote. But he is with me. He pulls me to my feet from the sofa to work with him on the slider; he accompanies me at night when I venture out to get the paper and a gallon of milk. He walks beside me through the small woods between our subdivision and the Nearing village green. He shows no fear.

"Are you scared?" I ask suddenly tonight as we are walking.

"You mean scared you won't get off?" The trial looms so near, so large, that even my eight-year-old knows at once what I must mean.

"Yes."

"Naw."

"Why not?"

"I'm not, that's all. It's just a bunch of junk, right?" He squints up at me, from beneath the bill of his cockeyed baseball cap.

"In a manner of speaking."

"They'll have this trial, and you'll tell what really happened, and that'll be the end of it. That's what Mom says."

Oh, bursting, bursting heart: that's what his mom says. I put my arm around my son, more amazed than ever by his faith in her. I cannot imagine the lengthy therapeutic sessions between mother and child in which she has pitched him up to this level of support. It is a miracle which Barbara alone could have achieved. As a family, we are bound together by this symmetry: in the world, I love Nat most, and he adores his mother. Even at this scrappy age, full of the furious energy of a person of eight, he softens for her as no one else. She alone is allowed to hold him at length; and they enjoy a special sympathy, communion, a dependence that goes deeper even than the unsounded depths of mother and child. He is more like her than me, high- strung and full of her driving intelligence, those dark and private moods. She equals his devotion. He is never out of her imagination. I believe her when she says she could never wrest from herself the same emotion for another child.

Neither of them parts from the other comfortably. Last summer Barbara spent four days in Detroit, visiting a college friend, Yetta Graver, who she discovered is now a professor of mathematics. Barbara called twice a day. And Nat was like a running sore, crabby, miserable. The only way I could quiet him for bed was by imagining for him precisely what his mother and Yetta were doing at that moment.

They are in a quiet restaurant, I would tell him. Each of them is eating fish. It is broiled with very little butter. They each have had a glass of wine. At dessert they will break down and eat something they find too tempting.

Pie? asked Nat.

Pie, I said.

My son, the one I always dreamed of, fell asleep thinking of his mother eating sweets.