Reversible Errors

  “I want you to listen,” he said again.

  Their cars were in the parking lot, near the spot where Gus’s Cadillac and Luisa’s and Paul’s vehicles had grilled in the July sun for a day while their bodies had frozen. Muriel’s Honda Civic was closer and they ended up sitting together on the front seat. Muriel wasn’t neat. She used the floor in back like a trash bag—food wrappers, plastic packaging from things she’d opened, and personal mail from the office were slopped all over.

  “You know how people always tell you when you’re young to grow up?” Larry asked. “And you hear them, and it even seems like a pretty good idea, but it’s like, what the fuck? What the fuck am I supposed to do? People tell you to get serious and you can’t even figure out what you want.”

  As he spoke, Larry looked toward the unfaced brick wall in front of him. Years ago, an advertisement for a soft drink had been painted there and the spectral remains of some bountiful young woman with a glass in her hand were still apparent under the shell lights.

  “I always wondered how in the hell I was going to figure it out. I mean, some people, like you, I think you’ve always known what you want and have been going for it since I met you. You know, to see your name in the sky. But I’m the other kind. I mean, I don’t even know it’s what I want until maybe I don’t have it. Like when Nancy says, ‘How about if I take the boys?’ I mean, Jesus Christ, get real.”

  He found himself caught in a great swell of emotion as an image of his sons overcame him. He saw them following him around like puppies while he was cutting drywall, laying tile, working away at these houses. They loved to be with him. Darrell had a saw that he dragged across the dusty floors and Michael, with two hands on a hammer, was always driving nails at all angles into a two-by-four. Larry had to keep one eye on them every second, and even so, afterwards, in the middle of the night he’d wake, split by fear like a tree by lightning, sure he had not been careful enough and that one of them could somehow come to serious harm.

  He pinched his nose, dwelling with the pain in the hope he would not break down. He had great suspicion of a certain type you often found on the Force these days, men—and some women—who gave in to every lame sentiment because they were so hard on the street, who’d weep buckets when their parakeet bought the farm, but, hours before, couldn’t so much as shake their heads over a seven-year-old killed in a hit-and-run. The idea he had of himself was to have some handle on all of it, to be able to say, as he’d tried to tell John, it hurts like hell, that’s life.

  “So that’s how I am, dumb enough to not know what something is till it’s gone. There are people like that,” Larry said. “I’m not the only one.”

  In the dark, he could not really see Muriel’s face, just the keenest light on her eyes and her profile in silhouette. She was leaning against the driver’s door, with her head of short, stiff curls held erect in a posture clearly suggesting alarm.

  “Where is this going?” She couldn’t stop being Muriel. She had to be at the end of the curve when everybody else was still at the beginning. As near as he could tell, Muriel had come from a normal whitebread family. But she must have been calculating in the womb. Like cows who always knew the shortest path to their destination, Muriel had a positioning system of her own that never failed to highlight the route to her best interests. Even when she was kind, as she often was, it felt a trifle remote, as if she’d also taken a second to figure out whether it was the right thing for her.

  Summoning himself to answer, he glanced down and was surprised to see soil ground under his nails. Yesterday he’d been at another small house in the Point, his current project, getting some evergreens in while it was still time for fall planting. His mom had always hammered on clean hands, and it amazed him that he hadn’t noticed the dirt until now, a sign of how focused he’d been on Squirrel since he woke nearly twenty-four hours ago.

  “What if I told you I was sick of my own shit,” he said to her. “Sick of looking for the life better than life. What if I told you I’ve actually started figuring stuff out.” He showed her his fingernails. “I garden.”

  “Garden?”

  “I mean, liking it. Growing things. Would that matter to you?”

  “Larry,” she said.

  “I think I know what I need in my life. And what we have going—neither one of us has ever been very honest about it. There’s a lot there—”

  “There is,” she said. She reached for his arm. “But, Larry.” She was the one having difficulty now. She’d moved into the light and he could see her eyes close and flutter with the strain. “I don’t think we can take this any further. I can’t. I’m not there now.”

  He was hit hard again, worse perhaps than in the restaurant, and felt his breath burn in his lungs. Jesus, he thought. What a fucked-up creature I am. Making a play when the woman just told you she was marrying somebody else.

  “I’m gonna feel like such a dip,” he said, “if I actually cry.”

  She leaned across and touched the back of his neck.

  “Come on, Larry. Jesus. This has never been for keeps. Come on.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said. “It should have been.”

  “It’s been good, Larry. It’s been good in a zillion ways. But it’s been a thrill ride, Lar. That’s how we wanted it. Sneaking around. Screwing our brains out. You can’t try to pretend it’s a regular life. I mean, I love it for what it was. That was great.” She laughed, an unconstrained sound in the dim car, full of earnest amusement in memory. She squeezed him around the shoulders and brought her face close to his. “We had great times,” she said and laid her other hand on his thigh as a reminder. He batted it away, and she returned it. They went that round a few times, laughing all the while, both of them enjoying the moment of physical combat, and the relief it provided. He finally grabbed her hand and she took the other one from his shoulder and used it to lower his zipper before he pushed her away.

  “I don’t need one last trip on the roller coaster, Muriel.”

  “I do,” she answered, in her usual fearless way and placed her hand where it had been. He thought he was beyond being stimulated, but he was wrong. She lowered her face to him right there, and he enjoyed it for one second before easing her away.

  “We’re in a parking lot for Chrissake,” he said.

  She threw her keys in the ignition and pulled around the corner, her free hand on his hard-on, pumping it now and then while she drove. When she stopped again, she went at him full time. Larry looked down the alley, realizing they were in the correct neighborhood for this kind of thing—behind these buildings, under these phone lines, amid the spilled garbage and rusted Dumpsters pleasure had often been purchased on the cheap and practiced on the run. Muriel was making a feast of it, taking her time, nuzzling the knob of him, running her tongue under the ridge and then bringing her lips over the top, again and again, watching attentively and understanding exactly the reaction each move inspired. That was Muriel, too. Bold. Looking at the thing and savoring the power a woman derived from being willing. He kept thinking, God, this is fucked up, I’m fucked up. When he came, it felt as if he cried out forever.

  13

  MAY 22, 2001

  Normal

  “SO YOU JUST COULDN’T STAY AWAY FROM ME,” said Ruthie, the correctional officer who’d escorted Gillian initially. With her stout form, she kept the heavy door into the guardhouse half open and beckoned to Gillian like an old friend, nodding to Arthur as well. “Thought you said you and Ernie were done talking,” Ruthie said as they followed her into the dim corridor of stone and brick.

  Arthur explained that the Lieutenant had demanded Gillian’s presence and Ruthie laughed.

  “There’s some here,” said Ruthie, “all the rules we got and they just have to make more.” That surely was Gillian’s experience. Prison officials were often in a class by themselves when it came to rigidity. And among them there were, inevitably, a few outright sadists, who were gratified to see people in cages. But a
t Alderson, Gillian also found many guards like Ruthie, good-natured souls who were there because it was the best job they could find, or because they were happiest with people who had no right to look down on them.

  By the time they’d reached the infirmary, Ruthie had offered to walk Gillian back out as soon as Arthur was situated with Erdai, assuring them that the Lieutenant would never know the difference. Gillian was admittedly curious about what Erdai would say, but her days of evaluating witnesses, matching their stories against her memory of other evidence, had been brought to a forced end. For her, the safest thing was to leave.

  Arthur had grown agitated again about what was before him and disappeared without much in the way of farewell through the infirmary entrance. Ruthie returned in several minutes to lead Gillian back through the warren of corridors and bars toward the front.

  In the main building, a trusty wheeling a stainless steel cart turned full around as Gillian passed. She felt his gaze, but assumed he was ogling. Instead she heard her name.

  “Ain’t you Judge Sullivan?”

  Ruthie came to alert beside her, but Gillian answered, “I used to be.”

  “This here is Jones,” Ruthie said. “He’s all right. Most of the time.”

  Ruthie was playing and Jones smiled, but his attention remained on Gillian.

  “You gimme sixty,” he said. “Agg Battery.” It had occurred to her there would still be plenty of inmates in here whom she had sentenced, but her concerns had rested so much on her own reactions that she’d largely forgotten the risk of being around these men. And she sensed no danger now. Jones was tall, with a beard, but he was getting past the age where he was likely to be a problem to anyone.

  “Shot someone?” she asked.

  “Dude what was with me. We were doin a job in a liquor store. Clerk went for a gun and I shot my partner instead. Ain’t that a bitch? And the state charged me for that, that and the armed robbery. I don’t mind the armed robbery rap, but how come I’m doin time for shootin someone I didn’t have any mind to shoot?”

  “Because you meant to shoot the clerk,” said Gillian.

  “Naw, I didn’t. I was jest jumpy.”

  “You could have killed somebody.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t. See that’s the part I still don’t un’erstand.”

  He understood. He just wanted to talk about it. It still kept him up nights to realize that so much of his life had been determined in an instant.

  “That’s nothing but old times now, Jones,” Ruthie told him.

  “Yeah,” said Jones, “I’m gone get old doing that time.” But he was laughing as he said it.

  “How’s your partner?” Gillian asked.

  “Okay. His stomach ain’t been right since, is the only thing. You give him just thirty. He gettin out in oh-three.”

  “He didn’t have the gun.”

  Beaten back, Jones returned to his cart. He appeared reconciled, but in a day or two he’d be convinced once again that the whole deal was wrong.

  Ruthie kept talking about him all the way to the guardhouse, informing Gillian about Jones’s troubles with his family. Ruthie’s idea of a secret must have been something she told only a quarter of the people on earth. But she was sweet. She helped Gillian pull her bag out of the locker where she’d been ordered to deposit it and, like a good host, walked Gillian right to the front gate on the other side of the guardhouse, and waved her hand to another Lieutenant behind the main desk to buzz Gillian out.

  Gillian pulled open the heavy grating and looked out of the prison gloom into a spectacular late-spring day. It was yard time and even as she remained on the threshold, she could hear the tumult of the men, whooping and gabbing some distance away. At Alderson, railroad tracks abutted the facility. Most of the trains were a hundred cars long, bearing a shiny cargo of coal, but the D.C.-to-Chicago Amtrak also clattered by, close enough to see all the passengers clearly. Gillian could never look away. Instead, with unbearable envy, she studied the travelers, who were free to move on to places they wanted to go. The Normals, she called them in her own mind.

  She turned back to Ruthie.

  “I forgot something. I didn’t put the time on the sign-out sheet.”

  “We’ll get that,” said Ruthie.

  “I want to do it myself.” She didn’t. She simply wanted to re-enter and wave and have the door open again. When the lock shot back this time, it felt as if the mechanism had been wired into her heart. A Normal.

  On a bench beneath a tree, halfway to the parking lot, Gillian rested. She watched the people come and go, Normals all of them. Like her. Eventually, she pulled from her bag the book she’d been reading. It was Thucydides. Duffy, who loved the classics, had pressed it on her, and to her surprise she had been finding great reprieve in history, in learning again the lessons of the distant past and the account of forgotten human folly. Her comfort, she suspected, arose from knowing she would someday be forgotten as well, that her sins would wash away in the great tide of time in which all but one or two people who’d trod the world beside her—a scientist, an artist—would be pulverized with her into nothing more memorable than sand. And today she was free to begin moving there. It was over, she told herself in that moment. If she could let it be, it was over.

  It was more than an hour and a half before Arthur returned. Gillian had actually been considering walking a few blocks into town for a cool drink, when he finally emerged from the guardhouse.

  “Sorry it was so long. I wanted to see Rommy before I left.”

  She told him she didn’t mind. It had been a much better day than she’d expected. “How did it go with Erdai?”

  “Great,” he said. “Couldn’t have gone better.” Something was wrong with Arthur, however. He seemed strangely unfocused. He looked into the air for a second, almost like an animal, trying to make out a scent on the breeze. He said no more and she finally asked how he felt about what Erdai had told him.

  “Oh, I believed him. Absolutely. That’s why I had to see Rommy. I wanted to tell him about this myself. I had to argue with the Captain, but they finally brought him down for a few minutes.” Arthur smiled suddenly. “Basically, he couldn’t understand why I was surprised. Like it was completely normal. ‘Tole you I didn’t have nothin to do with it.’ He’s excited about getting out of here. But it wasn’t news to him that he’s innocent. The one who’ll never let me hear the end of this is Pamela. Rommy’s innocent,” Arthur said and stared down at the gravel around the base of the tree, then he said it again. “Rommy’s innocent.”

  “May I ask? Did Erno alibi Gandolph? Or does he say he knows who the killer was?”

  “Oh, he knows,” said Arthur. “It was him. Erdai. It’s a hell of a story. But it all fits. Every detail. And it has to be true anyway. Why would a dying man bother lying? I mean, he killed all those people himself. Erdai did.” Driven down by the weight of what he had just said, Arthur fell on the bench beside her.

  Gillian waited. She was not sure she wanted to know more. No matter how isolated from the past or anesthetized she wanted to make her faculties of judgment, the story instantly struck her as implausible. It was too much to put down to coincidence that a dying inmate in the same institution with Gandolph was stepping forward to take credit for the crime.

  Judging from his strange manner, she’d thought at first that Arthur, despite his statement to the contrary, actually shared her doubts. But she suspected now that his reaction was the reverse of skepticism. Years ago, her first boss in the P.A.’s Office, Raymond Horgan, who was now Arthur’s senior partner, had told her that before his election, when Ray had been in private practice, he used to keep a slip of paper in his desk drawer. It was calligraphied with what he referred to as the defense lawyer’s prayer: ‘God save me from an innocent client.’

  Convinced by Erdai, Arthur, she saw, suddenly stood on the highest cliff of his career. Rommy Gandolph’s life, his innocent life, was in Arthur’s hands. Justice, indeed, the whole principle of law—that
it would make fairer the few elements of existence within human control—now depended on him. He was the main variable: his work, his wits, his ability to wage and win civil society’s most momentous battle. The lost look swimming in Arthur’s coffee-dark eyes was terror.

  PART TWO

  Proceedings

  14

  JUNE 12, 2001

  The Chief Deputy

  MURIEL WYNN, Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for Kindle County, sat at her desk moving papers. In this job, she had discovered an orderly side to her character, which had eluded her in her earlier years. Her bedroom closet and her shopping lists were still governed by chaos, but she had always been her best at work. Her desk, nearly eight feet long, was arranged with the precision of a military base. The ramparts of papers—prosecution packages, internal memos, legal mail—sat with evened edges, equidistant from one another. Correspondence relating to next year’s campaign for P.A., which would soon begin in earnest, was safely segregated on the upper quadrant, to be gathered at the end of the day and considered at home, on her own time.

  A pop-up message appeared with a ding on Muriel’s computer screen: “12:02 p.m.: Det. Lieut. Starczek here for hearing.” She greeted Larry in the large open area outside her office, where six assistants jumped between desks, and visitors waited on the other side of an old mahogany rail. Across the way, sharing the same secretarial pool, was the P.A.’s Office, which her boss for the last decade, Ned Halsey, was ready to surrender to her as soon as the voters said yes next year.