Presumed innocent

"A."

"Ah," I say, "my very own."

"I thoughta that," says Lip, "but you got a kid."

I again comment on Lipranzer's sentimentality. He does not bother to respond. Instead, he lights another cigarette and shakes his head. I'm just not grabbin it yet," he says. "The whole goddamn deal is too weird. We're missin somethin."

So we begin again, the investigators' favorite parlor game, who and why. Lipranzer's number-one suspicion from the start has been that Carolyn was killed by someone she convicted. That is every prosecutor's worst fantasy, the long-nurtured vengeance of some dip you sent away. Shortly after I was first assigned to the jury trial section, a youth, as the papers would have it, by the name of Pancho Mercado, took exception to my closing argument, in which I had questioned the manliness of anyone who made his living by pistol-whipping seventy-seven year-old men. Six foot four and well over 250 pounds, Pancho leaped the dock and thundered behind me through most of the courthouse before he was stopped cold in the P.A.'s lunchroom by MacDougall, wheelchair and all. The whole thing ended up on page 3 of the Tribune, with a grotesque headline: PANICKED PROSECUTOR SAVED BY CRIPPLE. Something like that. Barbara, my wife, likes to refer to this as my first famous case. Carolyn worked on stranger types than Pancho. For several years she had headed what is called the office's Rape Section. The name gives a good idea of what is involved, although all forms of sexual assault tend to be prosecuted there, including child abuse, and one case I can recall where an all-male menage-a-trois had turned rough and the state's main witness had ended the evening with a light bulb up his rectum. It is Lipranzer's hypothesis, at moments, that one of the rapists Carolyn prosecuted got even.

Accordingly, we agree to go over Carolyn's docket to see if there was anybody she tried-or investigated-for a crime resembling what took place three nights ago. I promise to look through the records in Carolyn's office. The state investigative agencies also maintain a computer run of sexual offenders, and Lip will see if we can cross-match there on Carolyn's name, or the stunt with the ropes.

"What kind of leads are we running?"

Lipranzer begins to tick it off for me. The neighbors were all seen in the day following the murder, but those interviews were probably hasty and Lip will arrange for homicide investigators to make another pass at everyone in a square block. This time they'll do it in the evening, so that the neighbors who are home at the hour when the murder took place will be in. "One lady says she saw a guy in a raincoat on the stairs." Lip looks at his notebook. "Mrs. Krapotnik. Says maybe he looked familiar, but she doesn't think he lives there."

"The Hair and Fiber guys went through first, right?" I ask. "When do we hear from them?" To these people falls the grotesque duty of vacuuming the corpse, picking over the crime scene with tweezers, in order to make microscopic examinations of any trace materials they discover. Often they can type hair, identify an offender's clothing.

"That should be a week, ten days," Lip says. "They'll try to come up with somethin on the rope. Only other interesting thing they tell me is they got a lot of floor fluff. There a few hairs around, but not what you'd find if there was any kinda fight."

"How about fingerprints?" I ask.

"They dusted everything in the place."

"Did they dust this glass table here?" I show Lip the picture.

"Yeah."

"Did they get latents?"

"Yeah."

"Report?"

"Preliminary."

"Whose prints?"

"Carolyn Polhemus."

"Super."

"It ain't all bad," says Lip. He takes the picture from me and points. "See this bar here. See the glass?" One tall bar glass, standing undisturbed. "There latents on that. Three fingers. And the prints ain't the decedent's."

"Do we have any idea whose prints they are?"

"No. Identification says three weeks. They got all kinda backlogs." The police department identification division keeps a digit-by-digit record of every person who has ever been printed, classified by so-called points of comparison, the ridges and valleys on a fingertip to which numerical values are assigned. In the old days, they were unable to identify an unknown print unless the subject left behind latents of all ten fingers, so I.D. could search the existing catalogue. Now, in the computer era, the search can be done by machine. A laser mechanism reads the print and compares to every one in memory. The process takes only a few minutes, but the department, due to budgetary constraints, does not yet own all of the equipment and must borrow pieces from the state police for special cases. "I told them to rush it up, but they're giving me all that shit about Zilogs and onloading. A call from the P.A. would really help. Tell them to compare to every known in the county. Anybody. Any dirtball who's ever been printed."

I make a note to myself.

"We need MUDs, too," Lipranzer says, and points to the pad. Although it is not well known, the telephone company keeps a computerized record of all local calls made from most exchanges: Message Unit Detail sheets. I begin writing out the grand-jury subpoena duces tecum, a request for documents. "And ask them for MUDs on anybody she called in the last six months," says Lip.

"They'll scream. You're probably talking about two hundred numbers."

"Anybody she called three times. I'll get back to them with a list. But ask for it now, so I'm not runnin my ass around tryin to find you to do another subpoena."

I nod. I'm thinking.

"If you're going back six months," I tell him, "you're probably going to hit this number." I nod toward the phone on my desk.

Lipranzer looks at me levelly and says, "I know."

So he knows, I think. I take a minute with this, trying to figure him. People guess, I think. They gossip. Besides, Lip would notice things that anyone else would miss. I doubt that he approves. He is single, but he is no rover. There is a Polish woman a good ten years older than he, a widow with a grown kid, who cooks a meal and sleeps with Lipranzer two or three times a week. On the phone, he calls her Momma.

"You know," I say, "as long as we're on the subject, Carolyn always locked her doors and windows." I tell him this with admirable evenness. "I mean, always. She was a little soft, but Carolyn was a grownup. She knew she lived in the city."

Lipranzer's look focuses gradually and his eyes take on a metallic gleam. He has not lost the significance of what I'm telling him or, it seems, of the fact that I delayed.

"So what do you figure?" he asks at last. "Somebody walked around there openin the windows?"

"Could be."

"So they'd make it look like a break-in? Somebody she let in in the first place?"

"Doesn't that make sense? You're the one who's telling me there's a glass on the bar. She was entertaining. I wouldn't bet the ranch on the bad guy being some crazed parolee."

Lip stares at his cigarette. Looking through the doorway, I see that Eugenia, my secretary, has returned. There are voices now in the hallway as people filter back in from the graveside. I detect a lot of the anxious laughter of release.

"Not necessarily," he says finally. "Not with Carolyn Polhemus. She was a funny lady." He looks at me hard again.

"You mean, you think she'd open the door to some bum she sent to jail?"

"I think with Carolyn there's no tellin. Suppose she bumped into one of these characters in a bar. Or some guy called her up and said, Let's have a pop. You think there's no chance she'd say yes? We're talkin Carolyn now."

I can see where Lip is going. Lady P.A., Prosecutor of Perverts, Fucks Defendant and Lives Out Forbidden Fantasy. Lip has got her number pretty well. Carolyn Polhemus would not have minded at all the idea that some guy had dwelled with the thought of her for years. But somehow, with this discussion a seasick misery begins to ebb through me.

"You didn't like her much, did you, Lip?"

"Not much." We look at each other. Then Lipranzer reaches over and chucks me on the knee. "At least we know one thing," he says. "She had piss-poor taste in men."

That is his exit line. He tucks his Camels into his windbreaker and is gone. I call out to Eugenia to please hold anything else. With a moment's privacy I am now ready to examine the photographs. For a minute, after I begin sorting through them, my attention is mostly on myself. How well will I manage this? I urge myself to maintain professional composure.

But that, of course, begins to give way. It is like the network of crazing that sometimes seeps through glass in the wake of an impact. There is excitement at first, slow-entering and reluctant, but more than a little. In the top photographs the heavy glass of the table is canted over, compressing her shoulder, so that you might almost make the comparison to a laboratory slide. But soon it is removed. And here is Carolyn's spectacularly lithe body in a pose which, for all the agony there must have been, seems, initially, supple and athletic. Her legs are trim and graceful; her breasts are high and large. Even in death, she retains her erotic bearing. But, I slowly recognize, other experiences must influence this response. Because what is actually here is horrible. There are bruises on her face and neck, mulberry patches. A rope runs from her ankles to her knees, her waist, her wrists; then it is jerked tight around her neck, where the rim of the burn is visible. She is drawn back in an ugly tormented bow and her face is ghastly; her eyes, with the hyperthyroid look of the attempted strangulation, are enormous and protruding and her mouth is fixed in a silent scream. I watch, I study. Her look holds the same wild, disbelieving, desperate thing that so frightens me when I find the courage to let my glance fix on the wide black eye of a landed fish dying on a pier. I take it in now in the same reverential, awestruck, uncomprehending way. And then, worst of all, when all the dirt is scraped off the treasure box there is rising within, unhindered by shame, or even fear, a bubble of something light enough that I must eventually recognize it as satisfaction, and no lecture to myself about the baseness of my nature can quite discourage me. Carolyn Polhemus, that tower of grace and fortitude, lies here in my line of sight with a look she never had in life. I see it finally now. She wants my pity. She needs my help.