Presumed innocent

Chapter 5

Monday morning: a day in the life. The commuter coach unleashes the gray-flannel flock on the east side of the river. The terminal plaza is surrounded by willows, their skirts greening in the spring. I am in the office before 9:00. From my secretary, Eugenia Martinez, I receive the usual: mail, telephone-message slips, and a dark look. Eugenia is obese, single, middle-aged, and, it often seems, determined to get even for it all. She types reluctantly, refuses dictation, and many times of day I will find her staring with immobile droopy-eyed irritation at the telephone as it rings. Of course, she cannot be fired, or even demoted, because civil service, like concrete, has set. She remains, a curse to a decade of chief deputies, having first been stationed here by John White, who did so in order to avoid the carping that would have followed if he'd assigned her to anybody else.

On the top of what Eugenia has given me is a leave slip for Tommy Molto, whose absence remains unaccounted for. Personnel wants to dock him as Away without Leave. I make a note to talk to Mac about this and graze through my communications. The docket room has provided me with a printout naming thirteen individuals released from state custody in the last two years whose cases had been prosecuted by Carolyn. A handwritten note says that the underlying case files have been delivered to her office. I position the computer run in the center of my desk, so that I will not forget.

With Raymond out most of the day on campaign appearances, I resolve much of what the P.A. would ordinarily be faced with. I call the shots on case prosecutions, immunities, plea bargains, and deal with the investigative agencies. This morning I will preside over a charging conference in which we will decide on the phrasing and merits of all of this week's indictments. This afternoon I have a meeting about last week's fiasco, in which a police undercover bought from a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in disguise; the two drew guns and badges on each other and demanded surrender. Their backups became involved, too, so that in the end eleven law enforcement officers were standing on opposite corners, shouting obscenities and waving their pistols. Now we are having meetings. The coppers will tell me the feds do everything in secret; the DEA agent in charge will insinuate that any confidence the police department learns is up for sale. In the meantime, I am supposed to find somebody to prosecute for killing Carolyn Polhemus.

Someone else may be looking, too. Near 9:30 I get a call from Stew Dubinsky from the Trib. During the campaign, Raymond answers most press calls himself; he does not want to miss the free ink or draw criticisms that he is losing his hold on the office. But Stew is probably the best courthouse reporter we have. He gets most of his facts straight and he knows the boundaries. I can talk to him.

"So what's new on Carolyn?" he asks. The way he shorthands the murder with her name disconcerts me. Carolyn's death is already receding from the ranks of tragedy to become one more ugly historic event.

I cannot, of course, tell Stew that nothing is doing. Word could trail back to Nico, who would use the occasion to blast us again.

"Prosecuting Attorney Raymond Horgan had no comment," I say.

"Would the P.A. care to comment on another piece of information?" This, whatever it is, is the real motive for Stew's call. "I hear something about a high-level defection. From the Homicide Section? Sound familiar?"

That would be Molto. After Nico left, Tommy, his second-in-command, became acting head of the section. Horgan refused to give him the job permanently, suspecting that sooner or later something like this would come to pass. I contemplate for a moment the fact that the press is already sniffing. No good. Not at all. I see, from the way Dubinsky has lined up the questions, how this will run. One high-ranking deputy is killed; another, who should be in charge of the investigation, quits. It will sound as if the office is on the verge of chaos.

"Same response," I tell him. "Quote the P.A."

Stew makes a sound. He is bored.

"Off the record?" I ask.

"Sure."

"How good is your information?" I want to know how close we are to reading about this.

"So-so. Guy who always thinks he knows more than he does. I figure this has got to be Tommy Molto. He and Nico are hand-and-glove, right?"

Stew clearly does not have enough to run. I avoid his question. "What does Della Guardia tell you?" I ask.

"He says he has no comment. Come on, Rusty," Dubinsky says, "what gives?"

"Stew, off the record, I do not have the most fucked-up idea where Tommy Motto is. But if he's holding hands with Nico, why won't the candidate tell you that?"

"You want a theory?"

"Sure."

"Maybe Nico has him out there investigating the case on his own. Think about that one. DELLA GUARDIA CATCHES KILLER. How's that for a headline?" The notion is absurd. A private murder investigation could too easily end up an impediment to the police. Obstruction of justice is bad politics. But as ridiculous as it is, the sheer flair of the idea makes it sound like Nico. And Stew is not the kind to float loony notions. He works off information.

"Do I take it," I ask, "that this is part of your rumor, too?"

"No comment," says Stew.

We laugh at each other, before I hang up the phone. Immediately I make some calls. I leave a message with Loretta, Raymond's secretary, that I have to speak with him whenever he phones in. I try to find Mac, the administrative deputy, to talk about Molto. Not in, I'm told. I leave another message. Then, with a few minutes before the charging conference, I venture down the hall to Carolyn's office. This place already has a desolate air. The Empire desk which Carolyn commandeered from Central Services has been swept clean, and the contents of the drawers-two old compacts, soup mix, a package of napkins, a cable-knit sweater, a pint bottle of peppermint schnapps-have been pitched into a cardboard box, along with Carolyn's diplomas and bar certificates, which were formerly clustered on the walls. Cartons called in from the warehouse are pyramided in the middle of the room, giving the office an air of obvious disuse, and the dust gathered in a week's inactivity has its own faintly corrupt smell. I pour a glass of water in the wilting greenery and dust some of the leaves.

Carolyn's caseload was made up primarily of sexual assaults. According to the codes on the file jackets, there are, by my count, twenty-two such cases awaiting indictment or trial which I find in the top drawers of her old oak file cabinet. Carolyn claimed a special sympathy with the victims of these crimes, and over time, I found that her commitment was more genuine than at first I had believed. When she talked about the reviving terrors these women experienced, the glittery surfaces receded from Carolyn and revealed alternating moods of tenderness and rage. But there are in these cases also an element of the bizarre: an intern at U. Hospital who gave a number of female patients a physical which ended with insertion of his own instrument; one victim received this treatment on three separate occasions before she was moved to complain. The girlfriend of a suspect who, on her second day of questioning, admitted that she had met him when he cut through the screen door to her apartment and forced himself on her. When he put the knife down, she said, he had seemed like such a nice young man. Like many others, I suspected Carolyn of more than a passing fascination with this aspect of her work, as well, and I examine the case files with the hope that there will be a pattern I can seize on-we will be able to charge that it was actually some cultish ceremony that was duplicated six days ago in Carolyn's loft apartment, or a brutal mimicry of an offense in which Carolyn somehow displayed too obvious a voyeuristic interest. But there is none of that; the thirteen names lead nowhere. The new files disgorge no clues.

It is now time for the charging conference, but something is nagging at me. When I look again at the computer printout, I recognize that there is one case I have not come across yet-a B file, as we call it, referring to the subsection of the state criminal code addressed to bribery of law enforcement officials. Carolyn seldom handled anything outside her domain, and B files, which are so-called Special Investigation cases, were directly under my supervision when this case was assigned. At first, I assumed the B designation was the usual computer mess-up, maybe an included charge. But there is no companion case; in fact, this one is listed as an UnSub-unknown subject-which usually means a non-arrest investigation. I go through her drawers quickly, one more time, and check down in my office. I have my own printout of B cases, but this one isn't there. In fact, it seems to have been generally obliterated from the computer docketing system, except for Carolyn's call.

I make a note on my pad: B file? Polhemus?

Eugenia is standing in the doorway.

"Oh, man," she says. "Where you been? I been lookin for you. Mr. Big Cheese called back." Mr. Big Cheese, of course, is Raymond Horgan. "I was lookin all over. He left a message to meet him at the Delancey Club, 1:30."

Raymond and I have many of these meetings during the campaign. I catch him

after a luncheon, before a speech, to bring him up to speed on the office.

"How about Mac? Did we hear anything?"

Eugenia reads the message. "Be cross the street all morning." Observing, no doubt, watching some of the newer deputies do their stuff during the morning call in the Central Branch.

I ask Eugenia to set back the charging conference half an hour; then I head over to the courthouse to find Mac. On the second floor, the Central Branch session is held. The branch courts are where arrested persons make their first formal court appearance to set bail, where misdemeanors are tried and preliminary evidentiary hearings are held in felony cases. An assignment to one of the branches is usually the second or third stopping-off place for a deputy, after time in Appeals or the Complaint and Warrant Section. I worked this courtroom for nineteen months before I was sent to Felony Review, and I try to come back as little as possible. It is here that crime always seemed most real, the air quivering with a struggling agony at the brink of finding voice.

In the hallway outside two enormous central courtrooms, there is a churning mass, like my imaginings of the crushed poor in the steerage bowels, of the old oceangoing vessels. Mothers and girlfriends and brothers are here weeping and crying out over the young men detained in the granite lockup that abuts the courtroom. Lawyers of a kind move about hustling clients in the subverted tones of scalpers, while the state defenders shout out the names of persons whom they have never met and whom they will be defending in a moment. The prosecutors are shouting, too, searching for each of the arresting officers on a dozen cases, hoping to enhance the slender knowledge provided by police reports prepared in a deliberately elliptical fashion, the better to hinder cross-examination.

Inside the vaulted courtroom, with its red marble pillars and oaken buttresses and straight-backed pews, the tumult continues, a persistent din. Situated closer to the front so they will not fail to hear their cases called, prosecutors and defense lawyers haggle amiably over prospective plea bargains. Beside the judge's bench, six or seven attorneys are clustered around the docket clerk, handing in appearance forms, examining court files, and urging the clerk to pass their case forward to be called next. The cops, most of them, are lined up in pairs against the grimy walls-many of them in from the 12-to-8 shift for the bail hearings on their nighttime collars-sipping coffee and rolling on the balls of their feet to keep themselves awake. And far to one side of the courtroom, there is a continuing clamor from the lockup, where defendants in custody await their appearance, one or two of them inevitably shouting obscenities at the bailiffs or their attorneys, complaining about the cramped conditions back there and the indecent odors from the commode. The rest moan occasionally or bang on the bars.

Now at the dead end of the morning call, the streetwalkers in their halter tops and shorts are being arraigned, tried, fined, and sent back out on the street in time for sleep and another night's work. Usually they are represented in groups by two or three lawyers, but every now and then a pimp, to economize, will take on the assignment himself. That is occurring right now as some jerk in a flamingo-colored suit goes on about police brutality.

Mac takes me into the cloakroom, where no coats are hung. No visitor would be so cavalier as to leave a valuable garment unguarded in this company. The room is completely empty, except for a court reporter's shorthand typewriter and a huge dining-room chandelier in a plastic bag which is evidence, undoubtedly, in a case that is going to be called.

She asks me what is up.

"Tell me what Carolyn Polhemus was doing with a B file," I say.

"I had no idea that Carolyn was interested in crimes above the waist," says Mac. An old line. She beams up from her wheelchair, everybody's favorite smart-ass, brassy and irreverent. She makes a number of suggestions concerning the B file, all of which I've already tried. "it doesn't figure," she finally admits.

As chief administrative deputy, Lydia MacDougall is in charge of personnel, procurement, and the deployment of staff. It is a lousy, thankless job with a nice-sounding title, but Lydia is accustomed to adversity. She has been a paraplegic since shortly after we started in this office together, nearly twelve years ago. It was one of those early winter nights where the mist is half snow. Lydia was driving. Her first husband, Tom, was killed in the plunge into the river.

In the general run of things, I would say Mac is probably the finest lawyer in this office, organized, shrewd, gifted in court. Over the years she has even teamed to use the chair to advantage before a jury. There are some tragedies that run so deep that our comprehension of them is evolutionary at best. As the jurors get a couple of days to think about what it would be like to have their legs flapping around, loose as flags, as they listen to this woman, handsome, forceful, good-humored, absorb the wedding ring, the casual mention of her baby, observe the fact that she is impossibly normal, they are full of admiration and, as we all should be, hope.

Next September, Mac will become a judge. She already has party slating and will run in the primary unopposed. The general election will be an automatic. There are not, apparently, a lot of people who feel they can beat a lawyer with support from women's groups, the handicapped, law-and-order types, and the city's three major bar associations.

"Why don't you ask Raymond about the file?" she finally suggests.

I make a noise. Horgan is not a detail man. He is unlikely to know anything about an individual case. And these days I am reluctant to advise him of problems. He is always looking for someone to blame.

Going down the corridor to the next courtroom, where Mac is scheduled to observe, I talk to her about Tommy Motto and the problem of his unaccounted-for status. If we fire Motto, Nico will make capital, alleging that Horgan is on a witch-hunt for Delay's friends. If we keep Tommy on the staff, we increase Nico's profit from the defection. We decide, at last, that he will be placed on Unauthorized Leave, an employment category which previously did not exist. I tell Mac I would feel more comfortable about this if somebody I trusted had seen Molto alive.

"Let's get a posse out. We have, one deputy P.A. dead already. If some lady finds little pieces of Molto in her trash tomorrow morning, I'd like to be able to say we'd been searching high and low."

It is Mac's turn. She makes a note.

His Honor, Larren Lyttle, his large dark face full of wiliness and majesty, is the first to notice me. A black man in a club in which only whites were members until three years ago, the judge shows no sign of yielding to the atmosphere. He is at ease among the leather club chairs and the servers in green livery.

Larren is Raymond's former law partner. In those days, they were agitators, defending draft dodgers and possessors of marijuana, and most of the local black militants, as well as a paying clientele. I tried one case against Larren before he took the bench-really just a juvenile proceeding against a very rich kid from the West Shore suburbs who liked to break into the homes of his parents' friends. Larren was an imposing figure of robust stature, shrewd and bullying with witnesses, and possessed of a rhetorical range of operatic dimension. He could adopt a refined demeanor and then move with the next utterance into the round oratory of a pork-chop preacher, or squealing ghettoese. The jury rarely noticed there was another lawyer in the courtroom.

Raymond made the break for politics first. Larren managed the campaign, quite visibly, and brought out black votes in substantial numbers. Two years later, when Raymond thought he could be mayor, Larren joined him on the ticket as a candidate for judge. Larren won and Raymond lost, and Judge Lyttle suffered for his loyalties. Bolcarro kept him quarantined in the North Branch, where Larren heard traffic cases and rumdum misdemeanors, usually the job of the appointed magistrates, until Raymond bought his freedom four years later with his early and enthusiastic endorsement of Mayor Bolcarro's re-election campaign. Larren has been a downtown felony judge ever since, a ruthless autocrat in his courtroom and, notwithstanding his friendship with Raymond, the sworn enemy of the deputy prosecuting attorneys. The saying is that there are two defense lawyers in the courtroom, and the one who's hard to beat is wearing a robe.

In spite of that, Larren remains an active force in Raymond's campaigns. The Code of Judicial Conduct now prohibits him from taking any official role. But he is still a member of Raymond's inner group, the men from Horgan's years in law school and his early time in practice whose intimacy with Raymond has filled me at moments with a kind of adolescent pining. Larren; Mike Duke, the managing partner at a massive firm downtown; Joe Reilly from the First-these are the people Raymond falls back on at these times.

To Mike Duke goes the duty of overseeing campaign financing. It has proved a more daunting task this year than in the past, when Raymond was without significant opponents. Then Raymond would not take part in a campaign solicitation of any kind, for fear that it might compromise his independence. But those scruples this year have been laid aside. Raymond has been through a number of these meetings of late, preening for the checkbook liberals, elegant-looking gentlemen like the group assembled here today, showing them that he is still the same sleek instrument of justice that he was a decade ago. Raymond delivers his campaign speech in conversational tones, awaiting the moment that first he, and then the judge, can be called away so that Mike, in their absence, can apply the squeeze.

That is my function here today. I will be Raymond's excuse to leave. He introduces me and explains that he has to catch up with the office. In this atmosphere, I am pure flunky-no one even thinks of asking me to sit down, and only Judge Lyttle bothers to stand to shake my hand. I remain behind the table and the cigar smoke, while there is a final round of handshakes and bluff jokes, then head out behind Raymond as he grabs a mint by the doorway.

"What's going on?" he asks me as soon as we are past the doorman and beneath the club's green awning. You can feel, just since the morning, that the air is starting to soften. My blood stirs. It is going to be spring.

When I tell him about Dubinsky's call, he makes no effort to hide his irritation.

"Let me just catch either one of them fucking around like that." He means Nico and Molto. We are walking briskly down the street now toward the County Building. "What kind of crap is this? An independent investigation."

"Raymond, this is a reporter thinking out loud. There is probably nothing to it."

"There better not be," he says.

I start to tell Raymond about the debacle between the police and DEA, but he does not let me finish.

"Where are we on Carolyn ourselves?" he asks. I can see that the speculation on Molto's activities has reheated Raymond's desire for results in our own investigation. He machine-guns questions. Do we have a Hair and Fiber report? How long will it be? Have we gotten any better news on fingerprints? How about a report from the state index on sexual offenders Carolyn prosecuted?

When I tell Raymond that all of this is in the offing, but that I spent the last three hours in the charging conference, he stops dead in the street. He is furious.

"Damnit, Rusty!" His color is high and his brow flexed down angrily over his eyes. "I told you the other day: Give this investigation top priority. That's what it deserves. Della Guardia is eating me alive with this thing. And we owe Carolyn as much. Let Mac run the office. She's more than capable. She can watch DEA and the coppers urinate all over each other. She can second-guess indictments. You stay on this. I want you to run out every ground ball, and do it in a goddamn orderly fashion. Do it! Act like a fucking professional."

I look down the street, both ways. I do not see anyone I know. I am thirty-nine years old, I think. I have been a lawyer thirteen years.

Raymond walks ahead in silence. Finally, he looks back at me, shaking his head. I expect a further complaint about my performance, but instead he says, "Man, those guys were assholes." Raymond, I see, did not enjoy lunch. In the County Building, Goldie, the little white-haired elevator operator who sits all day with an empty car, waiting to take Raymond and the county commissioners up and down, tosses his stool inside and folds his paper. I have begun to broach the subject of the missing B file, but I hold off while we are in the elevator. Goldie and Nico were the best of pals. I even saw Goldie break with protocol and hie Nico up and down on one or two occasions: that was the kind of touch Nico adored-the official elevator. His destiny. Nico maintained a noble poker face as Goldie scanned the lobby to be sure the coast was clear.

Once we are in the office, I trail behind. Various deputies come forward to get a word or two with Raymond, some with problems, a number who simply want the news from the campaign front. On a couple of occasions, I explain that I have been through Carolyn's docket. I do this in a desultory fashion, since I have no desire to confess to further failures, and Raymond loses the thread of what I am telling him as he moves between conversations.

"There's a file missing," I say again. "She had a case we can't account for."

This finally catches Raymond's attention. We have come through the side door to his office.

"What kind of case? Do we know anything about it?"

"We know it was logged in as a bribe case-a B. Nobody seems to know what happened to it. I asked Mac. I checked my own records."

Raymond studies me for a second: then his look becomes absent.

"Where am I supposed to be at two o'clock?" he asks me.

When I tell him that I have no idea, he shouts for Loretta, his secretary, calling her name until she appears. Raymond, it turns out, is due at a Bar Committee meeting on criminal procedure. He is supposed to outline various reforms in the state sentencing scheme that he has been calling for as part of his campaign. A press release has been issued; reporters and TV crews will be there-and he is already late.

"Shit," says Raymond. "Shit." He stomps around the office saying "Shit."

I try again.

"Anyway, the case is still in the computer system."

"Did she call Cody?" he asks me.

"Carolyn?"

"No. Loretta."

"I don't know, Raymond."

He screams again for Loretta. "Call Cody. Did you call him? For Chrissake, call him. Well, get somebody to go down there." Raymond looks at me. "Sot sits on the car phone and you can never get through. Who the hell does he talk to?"

"I thought maybe you had heard something about this case. Maybe you remember something."

Raymond is not listening. He has fallen into an easy chair, angled against what the deputies irreverently refer to as Raymond's Wall of Respect, a stretch of plaster solid with plaques and pictures and other mementos of great triumphs or honors: bar associations' awards, courtroom artists' sketches, political cartoons. Raymond has that aging look again, wandering, pensive, a man who has seen things unravel.

"God, what a fucking disaster this is. Every campaign Larren has told me to ask a deputy to take a leave so that I have somebody running things full-time, and we've always been able to scrape by without it. But this is out of control. There's too goddamn much to do and nobody in charge. Do you know that we haven't taken a poll in two months? Two weeks to the election and we have no idea where we are, with who." He folds his hand against his mouth and shakes his head. It is not anxiety he shows so much as distress, Raymond Horgan, Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, has lost his ability to cope.

A moment passes between us, completely silent. I am not inclined, however, after the pasting I took out on the street, to be reverential. After thirteen years in government, I know how to be a bureaucrat and I want to be sure my butt is covered with Raymond on the subject of the missing file.

"Anyway," I say yet again, "I don't know what significance to attach to it. I don't know if it's misfiled or something's sinister."

Raymond stares. "Are you talking about that file again?"

I do not get a chance to answer. Loretta announces a phone call and Raymond takes it. Alejandro Stern, the defense lawyer who is the chairman of the Bar Committee, is on the line. Raymond begs apologies, says he's been wrapped up in discussions of that bizarre episode between DEA and the local police, and is on the way. When he puts the phone down he screams again for Cody.

"I'm right here," Cody announces. He has come in the side door.

"Great." Raymond starts in one direction, then the other. "Where the hell is my coat?"

Cody already has it.

I wish Raymond luck.

Cody opens the door. Raymond goes through it and comes right back.

"Loretta! Where's my speech?"

Cody, it turns out, has that, too. Nonetheless, Raymond continues to his desk. He opens a drawer and hands me a folder on his way out again.

It is the B file.

"We'll talk," he promises me and, with Cody hard behind him, goes running down the hall.