Innocent

  "I'll try not to land on your doorstep." He actually smiles. "Nat, this is a compromise. I plead guilty to something I did and serve the sentence, without risking conviction for something I'm completely innocent of. Is that a bad deal? After Judge Yee rules about whether all the computer evidence can come in, one side will have the upper hand and this kind of resolution won't be possible. It's time we get this over with and move on to the rest of life. You need to forgive me for all the stupid things I did in the last two years. But I did them, and it's not wrong that I pay this price. I can live with this outcome and you should, too."

  We stand in unison and I hug my father, blubbering foolishly. When we break apart, the man who never cries is weeping, too.

  Court is convened in a few minutes. Word of what is about to transpire has hit the courthouse, and the buffs and PAs stream into the courtroom, along with at least a dozen reporters. I do not have the heart to go in at first. I stand at the door, through the grace of the courtroom deputies, who allow me to watch the proceedings through the tiny window in the door. There is so much misery in this building, which is full of the anguish of the victims and the defendants and their loved ones, that I actually think the people who work here every day go out of their way to be especially kind to the people like me who, through no will of their own, are caught in the thresher called justice. One of them, an older Hispanic man, actually keeps his hand on my back for a second when the session begins and my father rises to stand between Marta and Sandy before Judge Yee. Brand and Molto are on Stern's other side. My dad nods and speaks. The prosecutors hand up papers, probably a formal plea agreement and the new charges, and the judge begins questioning my dad, an elaborate process that has been going several minutes already when I catch sight of Anna. I sent her a simple text--"My dad is going to plead guilty to obstruction to end the case"--only a few minutes ago. Now she is tearing down the hall, dashing in her high heels, with one hand at the V of her blouse, because her go-to-work underwear is not meant for running.

  "I don't believe this," she says.

  I explain what I can, and then we enter the courtroom arm in arm and proceed to the front-row seats still reserved for my father's dwindling family. Judge Yee's eyes flick up to see me, and he emits the minutest smile of reassurance. He then looks back down to the form book in front of him, which contains the required questions a judge must ask before accepting a guilty plea. Notably, Judge Yee reads the printed text without any of the grammatical errors that emerge when he is speaking on his own, although his accent remains strong.

  "And Judge Sabich, you are pleading guilty to this one-count information because you are in fact guilty of the crime charged there, correct?"

  "Yes, Your Honor."

  "All right, prosecutors. Please state the factual basis for the offense."

  Jim Brand speaks. He describes all the technical details concerning the computers, the "object" now present on my dad's hard drive that was not there when it was imaged in early November 2008. Then he adds that a night custodian in the courthouse, Anthony Potts, is prepared to testify that he recalls seeing my father in the corridors there one night last fall and that my father seemed to speed away when Potts observed him.

  "All right," says Judge Yee, and looks down to his primer. "And, Mr. Stern, is the defense satisfied that the factual basis offered constitutes sufficient competent evidence to prove Judge Sabich guilty were the matter submitted to trial?"

  "We are, Your Honor."

  "Judge Sabich, do you agree with Mr. Stern about that?"

  "Yes, Judge Yee."

  "All right," says Yee. He closes the book. He is back on his own. "The Court wish to compliment all party on a very good resolution for this case. This case very, very complex. This outcome that defense and prosecution agree to is fair to the People and the defendant in judgment of the Court." He nods several times, as if to enforce that opinion on the reporters across from me on the other side of the front row.

  "Okay," he says. "Court find there is sufficient basis for guilty plea and accept the plea of defendant Roz--" He stumbles with the name, which comes out something akin to "Rosy"--"Sabich to information 09-0872. Indictment 08-2456 is dismissed on all count with prejudice. Judge Sabich, you remanded to custody of Kindle County sheriff for a period of two year. Court adjourned." He smacks the gavel.

  My father shakes hands with Sandy and kisses Marta's cheek, then turns to me. He starts when he does. It takes me a second to realize it is Anna he is reacting to. It's her first time in court, and she is plainly unexpected. Like me, she has spent the last ten minutes crying quietly, and her makeup is all over her face. He gives her this complicated little smile and then looks at me and nods. Then he turns away and without a word from anyone places his hands behind his back. He is fully prepared for this moment. It occurs to me he has probably been through it a hundred times in his dreams.

  Manny, the deputy sheriff, fastens the cuffs on my dad and whispers to him, probably trying to be sure they are not too tight, then pushes my dad toward the courtroom's side door, where there is a small lockup in which he will be held until he is transported to the jail with the rest of the defendants who have appeared in court this morning.

  My father leaves the courtroom without ever looking back.

  IV.

  CHAPTER 41

  Tommy, August 3, 2009

  Summer in all its sweet indulgence. It was five p.m. and Tommy was one of the squad of fathers following their children around the tot lot, relieving beleaguered moms in the hour before dinner. The playground was, without doubt, Tomaso's favorite place on earth. When Tommy's son arrived, he ran from one piece of equipment to another, touching the little merry-go-round, climbing onto the spiderweb and off. Dashing a step behind, Tommy always felt the anguish of his two-year-old that he could not do everything at once.

  Dominga was having a harder time with this pregnancy than with Tomaso's. There was more morning nausea and constant fatigue, and she complained of feeling swollen in the heat, like something ripening on the vine. Now officially a lame duck, Tommy was finding it easier to get out of the office and tried to be home no later than four thirty to give her a break. Tomaso and he often returned from the playground to find her sound asleep. Tomaso would crawl across his mother's recumbent body, trying to squeeze his way into her arms. Dominga smiled before she stirred and clutched her little boy to her, grimy and beloved.

  Life was good. Tommy was going to be sixty any minute, and his life was better than at any time he could recall. Just as the first Sabich trial and its dismal aftermath had darkened his existence decades before, so the second trial was proving to be the start of a life as an esteemed figure. Public perceptions had formed very much as Brand had foreseen the night they decided to take Rusty's plea. Sabich's conviction verified Tommy on everything. The DNA from the first trial was regarded as controversial, because of doubts about the specimen, but the common comparison was to O.J., who'd also gotten away with murder because of bad labwork. The consensus on the editorial pages was that prosecutor Molto had made the best of it and had convicted a man whose conviction was long overdue. In fact, in the last six weeks, the papers had dropped the word "Acting" when they referred to him as PA. And the county executive had let it be known that Tommy was welcome on the ticket next year if he wanted to run for the job.

  He had actually pondered that possibility for a few days. But it was time to accept his blessings. He was ten times luckier than all his peers in the PA's office who'd had to struggle to make their careers while their kids were young. Tommy could leap onto the bench now, a worthy job that would leave him time to savor his boys and to be more than a rumor in their lives. Two weeks ago, he had announced he was running for superior court judge and endorsed Jim Brand to succeed him. Ramon Beroja, a former deputy PA now on the county board, was going to run against Jim in the primary, but the party preferred Brand, largely because of the broad suspicions that Ramon would take on the county executive next. Jim would spend the n
ext six months running hard, but he was expected to win.

  Across the tot lot, a man was eyeing Tommy, an old bushy-looking fellow with a stretch of appallingly white legs revealed between the ends of his cargo shorts and his calf-high tube socks. This was not uncommon. Tommy was a familiar figure on TV, and people were always trying to place him, often mistaking him for someone they'd known at an earlier time. But this man was more intent than the usual curious neighbors with their puzzled glances. When the kids he was trailing moved in Tomaso's direction, the man approached Tommy and had actually shaken his hand before Molto finally placed Milo Gorvetich, the computer expert from the Sabich trial.

  "Aren't grandchildren life's greatest blessing?" he asked, nodding toward two little girls, both wearing glasses. The girls were on the slide while Tomaso followed them there and stood on the bottom rung, looking up longingly but afraid to venture any farther. This drama played itself out daily. Eventually, Tomaso would cry and his father would lift him to the top. There Tomaso would linger again until he finally found his courage and plunged to the bottom, where Tommy would be waiting to catch him.

  "He's my son," said Tommy. "I got a late start."

  "Oh, dear," answered Gorvetich, but Tommy laughed. He kept telling Dominga he was going to have a T-shirt made for Tomaso that read, 'That old man over there is actually my father.' Usually by the time Tommy explained himself to the other parents here, they had placed him as PA. From the comments that followed, he could tell that many assumed he was a county power broker looking after the child born of his second or third marriage to a trophy wife. Nobody really ever understood anybody else's life.

  "A beautiful boy," said Gorvetich.

  "The light of my life," Tommy answered.

  It turned out that Gorvetich's youngest daughter was a neighbor of Tommy's, living one street behind him closer to the river. She was a professor of physics married to an engineer. Gorvetich, a widower, was here often at this hour to look after the girls until their parents were home from work.

  "So are you preparing for your next big trial?" Gorvetich asked by way of small talk.

  "Not yet," said Tommy. The norm, in fact, was for the PA to be solely an administrator. Most of Tommy's predecessors never saw the inside of a courtroom, and Tommy was already testing the idea that the Sabich case would be the last trial of his life.

  "Standard fare for you," said Gorvetich, "but I must say I have been preoccupied by that case since it ended. One thinks of trials as emphatic and conclusive, and this was anything but."

  Sometimes it was like that, Tommy answered. A few tight little categories--guilty, not guilty, of this or that--to hold a universe of complicated facts.

  "We do a little justice, rather than none at all," answered Tommy.

  "To an outsider it's confounding, but you boys are accustomed enough to the murkiness of all of it to find some grim humor, I suppose."

  "I don't think I found much to laugh at in that case."

  "There's the difference between Brand and you, then," said Gorvetich.

  Tommy had his eye on Tomaso, who was yet to move off the ladder, even though a line had formed behind him. Tommy tried to wrest the boy from the first rung, but he squawked in objection and uttered his favorite syllable: "No." In time, Tommy persuaded Tomaso to let the other children climb, but as soon as they had started up, Tomaso went right back to the first rung like a hawk on a perch. His father stood immediately behind him, within arm's reach.

  "Persistent," said Gorvetich, laughing.

  "Stubborn like his father. Genes are amazing things." He drew his mind back to the conversation before. "What were you saying about Brand?"

  "Only that I was struck by a remark he made when we had dinner the week after. It was a little celebration. I believe you were invited."

  Tommy remembered. After a month of working round the clock for the trial, he did not want another night away from his family. He explained now that his wife was newly pregnant at the time of the dinner. Tommy accepted Gorvetich's congratulations, before the old professor went back to his story.

  "It was the end of the evening. We were out on the walk in front of the Matchbook, and we were both well in our cups, and I made a remark to Jim about how unsettling it must be to be part of a system that sometimes comes to such an unsatisfying outcome. Jim laughed and said that as time went on, he was finding more and more perverse humor in this case, seeing somebody who had contrived to commit the perfect murder end up punished for a crime in which he had no role."

  "What did that mean?" Tommy asked.

  "I don't know. I asked at the time, but Jim brushed it off. I thought you might understand."

  "Hardly," said Tommy.

  "I've rolled it over in my mind. When Sabich pled guilty, I took it for granted he had a collaborator in tampering with his PC. It would have been an exceptional technical feat for a man who demonstrated such limited knowledge of his computer to do that himself. Remember, he hadn't even realized that his Web searches would be cached in the browser."

  "Right," said Tommy.

  "I've wondered if Jim had concluded that the accomplice wasn't an accomplice at all, but somebody who acted entirely on his own without any direction from Sabich."

  Tommy shrugged. He had no idea what this was about. They had tried to consider every possibility the day they'd discovered that the card wasn't on the image. Half expecting the defense to accuse them of something, they had reviewed the chain of evidence carefully to be sure it was secure. Back in December when Yee ordered the PC returned, Gorvetich and Orestes Mauro, an evidence tech from the PA's office, covered the screen, the keyboard, the power button on the tower, and even the mouse in evidence tape, which they'd initialed before shrink-wrapping all the components. The day Nat Sabich testified, the shrink-wrap had been sliced off in the PA's office with the consent of the defense, but the tape seals were removed only in the courtroom in the presence of Sabich's two hotshot experts, who verified that none of them showed the word "Violated" that appeared in blue if the tape was ever disturbed.

  So the only possibility was that the tampering had taken place while the machine was in George Mason's chambers. Gorvetich had looked at Mason's log and was of the opinion that no one had access to the computer long enough to make all the changes, especially the registry deletions, which he said would be time-consuming even for him. The only plausible explanation seemed to be that Sabich and some techie they were yet to discover had snuck into the building after hours. But apparently another explanation had occurred to Brand in the ensuing weeks.

  "Brand was probably spitballing," said Molto.

  "Perhaps so," said Gorvetich. "Or I misunderstood. We'd had quite a bit to drink."

  "Probably that. I'll have to ask him."

  "Or let it go," said Gorvetich.

  The old man seemed woolly-headed and self-involved at all times, but there was a shrewd light in his eyes for a second. Tommy did not quite understand what he was thinking, but Milo's granddaughters had wandered to the other side of the play area and he departed quickly. That was just as well, since Tommy heard the cry he recognized as Tomaso's at the same instant. When Tom looked up, he saw that his son had ascended the ladder. The two-year-old now stood at the top, utterly terrified by what he had achieved.

  CHAPTER 42

  Rusty, August 4, 2009

  Prison holds no fear for him.' We said that all the time decades ago when I was a deputy PA. We were usually talking about hardened crooks--con men, gangbangers, professional thieves--who committed crimes as a way of life and were undeterred by the prospect of confinement, either because they never considered the future or because a stop in the penitentiary had long been accepted as part of what passed for a career plan.

  The saying circulates in my head all the time, because it is a nearly constant preoccupation to tell myself that prison is not so bad. I survived yesterday. I will survive today, then go on to tomorrow. The things you think would matter--the dread of other inmates and the fa
bled dangers of the shower--occupy their share of psychic space, but they count far less than what seemed to be trivial matters on the outside. You have no way to know how much you enjoy the company of other human beings or the warmth of natural daylight until you live without them. Nor can you fully comprehend the preciousness of liberty until matters of daily whim--when to get up, where to go, what to wear--are rigidly prescribed by someone else. Ironically, stupendously, the worst part of being in the joint is the most obvious--you cannot leave.

  Because my safety in the general population is regarded as a high-risk proposition, I am held in what is called administrative detention, which is better known as seg. I routinely debate whether I would be better off taking my chances in genpop, which would at least allow me to work eight hours a day. The inmates here are mostly young, Latin and black gang members who were picked up on drug offenses and do not have a long record of violence. Whether any of them would care to do me harm is a matter of pure speculation. I have already heard through the COs, who are the institution's Internet, that there are two men here whose convictions I affirmed, and by pure addition and subtraction, I can figure that there are probably a few more whose fathers or grandfathers I prosecuted decades ago. Overall, I accept the view of the assistant warden, who encouraged me to volunteer for seg, that I am too famous not to be a symbol to some depressed and furious young man, a trophy fish whom he'd enjoy feeling on his hook.

  So I am held in an eight-by-eight cell with cement walls, a short steel-reinforced door through which my meals are delivered, and a single bulb. There is also a six-inch-by-twenty-four-inch window, which barely admits any light. In here, I am free to spend my time as I like. I read a book every day or two. Stern suggested I may be able to find a market for my memoirs when I am released, and I write a little every day, but I'll probably burn the pages as soon as I am out. The newspaper comes by mail, two days late, with the occasional articles relating to the state prisons scissored out. I have started to study Spanish--I practice with a couple of the COs willing to answer back. And, like a man of leisure at the end of the nineteenth century, I attend to my correspondence. I write a letter to Nat every day and hear often from several figures from my former life whose loyalty I value immensely, particularly George Mason and Ray Horgan and one of my neighbors. There are also a good two dozen nut-jobs, mostly female, who have written to me in the last month to proclaim their faith in my innocence and to share their own tales of injustice, usually involving a corrupt judge who presided over their divorce.