Presumed Innocent

  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 learned 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 Molto and the problem of his unaccounted-for status. If we fire Molto, 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 voters 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, t
hose 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.

  6

  “Somehow, the boy, Wendell, became important,” I said to Robinson. “To us, I mean. To me, at least. It’s hard to explain. But somehow he was part of this thing with Carolyn.”

  He was an unusual child, big for his age, and he had the ambling clumsiness of some big children, a thick, almost oafish appearance. He was not so much slow as dulled. I asked one of the psychiatrists for an explanation, as if one is needed, and he said of this five-year-old, ‘He’s depressed.’

  Wendell McGaffen, during the pendency of his mother’s case, had been moved from the County Shelter to a foster home. He saw his father every day, but never his mother. After the usual disputes in court, Carolyn and I were given permission to speak with him. Actually, at first we did not talk to him at all. We sat in on sessions he had with the psychiatrists, who introduced us to Wendell. Wendell would play with the toys and figures that the shrink had around the room, and the shrink would ask Wendell whether he had any thoughts on different topics, which, almost inevitably, Wendell did not. The shrink, named Mattingly, said that Wendell had not in his weeks there asked once about his mother. And as a result they had not raised the subject.

  Wendell liked Carolyn right from the start. He brought her the dolls. He made remarks to her. He directed her attention to birds, trucks, objects passing outside the window. On our third or fourth visit Carolyn told Wendell that she wanted to talk to him about his mother. The shrink appeared alarmed, but Wendell gripped his doll with both hands and asked, ‘What about?’

  So it progressed, twenty, thirty minutes a day. The shrink was openly impressed and eventually asked Carolyn’s permission to remain during their interviews, and over a period of weeks the story was told, in snatches and mumbled remarks, disordered offhand answers to questions Carolyn had asked, often days before. Wendell showed no real emotion other than his hesitation. Usually he would stand in front of Carolyn, with both his hands gripped hard around the midsection of a doll, at which he stared unflinchingly. Carolyn would repeat what he had told her and ask him more. Wendell would nod or shake his head or not answer at all. Now and then there were his explanations. ‘It hurt.’ ‘I criet.’ ‘She set I shouldn’t be quiet.’

  ‘She wanted you to be quiet?’

  ‘Yes. She set I shouldn’t be quiet.’

  From another person the repetition, particularly, might have seemed cruel, but Carolyn somehow seemed to have a need to know that was in some measure selfless. Not long before the trial, Carolyn and the shrink decided that the county would not call Wendell to the witness stand unless it was an absolute necessity. The confrontation with his mother, she said, would be too much. But even with that decision made, Carolyn continued to meet with Wendell, to draw more and more from him.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I told Robinson, “the way she looked at this kid. Into him almost. That intense. That earnest. I never figured her
to be the type to have any kind of rapport with children. And when she did, I was astounded.”

  It made her mystery so much larger. She seemed like some Hindu goddess, containing all feelings in creation. Whatever wild, surging, libidinal rivers Carolyn undammed in me by her manner and appearance, there was something about the tender attention she showed this needy child that drew me over the brink, that gave my emotions a melting, yearning quality that I took to be far more significant than all my priapic heat. When she took on the quiet, earnest tone and leaned toward dear, slow, hurting Wendell, I was, whatever my regrets, full of love for her.

  A wild love. Desperate and obsessive and willfully blind. Love, as love at its truest is, with no sense of the future, love beguiled by the present and unable to derive the meaning of signs.

  One day I talked to Mattingly about the way Carolyn had worked with the boy. It was extraordinary, wasn’t it? I asked. Amazing. Inexplicable. I wanted to hear him praise her. But Mattingly took my comments instead as a clinical inquiry, as if I was asking what could account for this phenomenon. He drew meditatively on his pipe. ‘I’ve thought about that,’ he said. Then his look became troubled, recognizing, I suppose, that he was liable to give offense or be misjudged himself. But he went on. ‘And I believe,’ he said, ‘that in some small way she must remind him of his mother.’

  The trial went well. Mrs. McGaffen was represented by Alejandro Stern—Sandy, outside the courtroom—an Argentinian Jew, a Spanish gentleman, courtly combed and perfect with his soft accent and his manicure. He is a mannerly, fastidious trial lawyer, and we decided to follow his low-key approach. We put in our physical evidence, the doctors’ testimony and their test results; then we offered the fruits of the search. With that, the county rested. Sandy called a psychiatrist who described Colleen McGaffen’s gentle nature. Then he showed how good a lawyer he was by reversing the usual order of presentation. The defendant testified first, denying everything; then her husband came to the stand, weeping unbearably as he described the death of his first child; Wendell’s fall, which he insisted he had witnessed; and his wife’s devotion to their son. A fine trial lawyer always has a latent message to the jury, too prejudicial or improper to speak aloud, whether it’s a racist appeal when black victims identify white defendants or the no-big-deal manner that a lawyer like Stern takes when the crime is only an attempt. In this case, Sandy wanted the jury to know that her husband forgave Colleen McGaffen, and if he could, why couldn’t they do that, too?