Innocent

"Exactly." Brand laughed. "Talk about hired guns."

  "I saw him yesterday, by the way."

  "Who?"

  "Rusty."

  That stopped Brand, who'd continued rearranging the piles on his desk. The trial cart from the Sabich case remained in the corner of Brand's office, still holding all of Jim and Tommy's files, as well as the exhibits, which Judge Yee had returned when the proceedings were over. To try a case, you ignored everything in the universe--family occasions, the news, other cases--and once it ended, all the stuff that had been pushed aside became more pressing than something as trivial as cleaning up. You could walk into the offices of half the deputy PAs and see trial boxes that had sat around untouched for months in the aftermath of verdicts. When you finally found the time to put that stuff away, it was as poignant as surveying the relics of a former love affair, these documents and pill bottles that once seemed as momentous as pieces of the True Cross and were now entirely beside the point in the flow of daily life. In a few months, Tommy would not be able to tell you how most of those objects fit into the intricate labyrinth of inference and conclusion that had been the state's case. Now it was only the outcome that mattered. Rusty Sabich was a felon in prison.

  "I was out in Morrisroe," said Tommy. He briefed Brand on the meeting. Letting convicts loose was going to be a campaign issue once it hit the press, but Brand was more interested in Sabich.

  "You just dropped in on him? No lawyer, no nothing?"

  "Kind of like old friends," said Tommy. It hadn't even occurred to him that Sabich might have refused to speak to him. Or seemingly to Sabich, for that matter. They were both much too engaged by the long-running contest between them to want to involve anyone else. It was like fighting with your ex-wife.

  "How's he look?" Brand asked.

  "Better than I thought he would."

  "Shit," said Brand.

  "I wanted to ask him face-to-face how he screwed with the computer."

  "Again?"

  "He wouldn't answer. I think he's protecting his kid."

  "That's about what I figured."

  "I know. I ran into Gorvetich a couple of days ago. He said you got blasted together after the trial and you said you think Rusty copped to something he didn't do. I couldn't imagine what the hell you were talking about at first. And then it came to me that you thought he was fronting for his son."

  Brand shrugged. "Who knows what I was thinking? I was on my ass. So was Milo."

  "But I still don't see what would have given you the idea Rusty was taking the kid's weight?"

  Brand pulled a mouth and stared back down at his desk. The piles were organized with military precision, edges even and spaced exact distances apart, like the beds in a barracks. He picked up a stack of manila folders and looked around for someplace to put them.

  "Just a feeling," he said.

  "But why?"

  Brand dropped the files on an open corner on the desk where they clearly didn't belong.

  "Who cares, Boss? Rusty's in the can. Where he should be. At least for a little while. What are you afraid of?"

  Afraid. That was the right word. Tommy had woken up at three, and most of the time he'd been flat-out nightmare scared. He tried to believe he was just torturing himself the way he sometimes did, unable or unwilling to absorb his own success. But he knew he was going to have to find out in order to be able to live with himself.

  "What I'm afraid of, Jimmy, is that you know Rusty didn't put the card on the computer."

  Brand finally sat down in his desk chair. "Why would you think that, Tom?"

  "I've just been putting together a lot of pieces in the last couple of days. What you said to Gorvetich. The fact that you were sitting here all night after the PC had been unwrapped. And that Orestes had showed you how it could be powered up without removing the evidence tape. That was after the banker came in and it looked all of a sudden like our case was circling the drain. And you know computers. You took programming from Gorvetich. So I gotta ask, right, Jim? We still don't have anything else that would pass as an explanation. You didn't put that card on there, did you?"

  "How could I have done that?" asked Brand with disarming calm. "I couldn't have turned that computer on and messed with it without the program directory showing it had been opened. Remember?"

  "Right. Except the PC was going to be turned on the next day in court, and it would be that date and time that would show up in the directory." He had Brand's attention now. Jim was watching Tommy with care.

  "It's brilliant," said Tommy. "Create a defense, which explains all the evidence, so Stern has to embrace it. And then when he has, you blow it completely out of the water. And blame the defendant for the fraud. It's just absolutely brilliant."

  Brand looked across the desk for quite some time with a dead expression. And then slowly, he began to smile, until he was grinning at Molto in the familiar way he so often did, as the two of them appreciated the clowning, the irony, the flat-out comedy, of human misbehavior and the law's futile efforts to curb it.

  "It woulda been pretty fuckin brilliant," he said.

  Inside Tommy, something broke, probably his heart. He sat in a wooden chair across the office. All Brand had needed to tell him was no. In the meantime, Jim's smile had slackened as he registered Tommy's mood.

  "That man killed somebody, Boss. Two somebodies. He's guilty."

  "Except of what we convicted him of."

  "Who cares?"

  "I do," said Tommy. For all the years he'd worked in this office, he'd listened to one PA after another lecture his deputies about a prosecutor's duty to strike hard blows but fair. Some of them meant it; some of them said it with a wink and a nod, knowing how hard it was to play redcoats and Indians, to march in straight lines down the center of the road while the bad guys hid in the bushes and attacked. Tommy had probably wavered on all of that before Tomaso was born. But you had a different stake in the future with a child. You had to teach him right from wrong. Without quibbling or qualification. The murky truth would always be on the street. But there was no hope at all if the prosecutor didn't draw hard lines and stand behind them.

  "The man stood up in court and admitted he was guilty," said Brand.

  "Would you do that to protect your son? He knew he didn't do it, Jim, and his kid would be the only other person with a motive to try to take him out that way. So he pled to put an end to all of it."

  "He's a murderer."

  "You know," said Tommy, "I'm not even completely sure about that anymore. Tell me why that woman, who was already struggling, didn't just give up the ghost when she found out about her husband's affair and kill herself?"

  "His fingerprints are on the pill bottle. He searched about phenelzine."

  "That's our whole case? You really telling me we wouldn't have thought twice about proceeding if we knew Barbara had been to the bank?"

  "He didn't deserve to walk away again. Not to mention you. You've been wearing Rusty as lead ankle weights for twenty years."

  He didn't want what Brand had done. It was no gift to him. But even as he'd sat there in the dark in the middle of the night, hearing the sobbing, sleeping breaths now and then of his son, and occasionally his wife, often in an inexplicably close rhythm, he'd understood this much: that if Brand had done it, he'd done it for him.

  "It works out for you, too, Jim. You're the guy who's running to become the next PA."

  Bluff but quick-eyed and defensive up until now, Brand sat forward in true anger. His big hands were closed hard.

  "I've been sucking hind tit for you for years, Tommy, because I owe you that. Because you're entitled to that. You've been better to me than my own brothers were. I've never put myself ahead of you. I love your ass and you know it."

  He did know that. Brand loved him. And he loved Brand. He loved Brand the way warriors learned to love the men and women who stood beside them in the trenches, who watched their backs and were among the few who actually understood the fear and bloodshed and turmoil of w
ar. You became like Siamese twins that way, joined at the heart or some other vital organ. Brand was loyal. And Brand was smart. But he hung on tight to Tommy for his own reasons. Because he needed a conscience.

  "Look," said Brand. "Shit happens. It's the middle of the fucking night and you're fried and angry, and you get this half-ass idea, mostly because you know you could do it, and you get started and it takes on a life of its own. To tell you the truth, I was laughing out loud the whole three hours it took me. It seemed pretty comical at the time."

  Tommy considered that. That was probably true, too. Not that it did any good.

  "I'm not going to let that guy sit in the can for something he didn't do, Jim."

  "You're crazy."

  "No, I'm not. I'm going to call Judge Yee. We're going to file a motion in arrest of judgment this afternoon. Sabich will be out by tomorrow morning. I just need to figure out what to say. And what to do with you."

  "With me?" Brand stiffened. "Me? I didn't do anything. I didn't testify falsely. I didn't offer any false evidence. I'm not the one who turned on the computer. Read the record, Tom. You won't find a word in the transcript where I did anything other than tell the court that the card was a fraud. And I brought evidence forward to prove that and prevent the court from being misled. What crime is that?"

  Tommy considered Brand sadly. These days, crime made him sad. When he was younger, crime made him angry. Now he knew it was just an indelible part of life. The wheel turned, people seethed with impulse and held themselves back most of the time. And when they didn't, it was Tommy's job to see them punished, not so much because what they had done was incomprehensible--not when you were really honest about how people could be--but because the other folks, the ones trying to contain themselves every day, needed the warning and, more important, the vindication of knowing bad guys got what they deserved. The regular people had to see the point of the bit and bridle they put on themselves.

  "You can't prosecute me," said Brand. "And if you ever did, Tom, you know exactly how it would end up. People will just blame you."

  With Brand's last words, Tommy felt his heart wince and he made a pained sound. But before answering, he sat thinking all of it through. Brand was quicker than he was, and he'd had many weeks to analyze the situation. So how would this actually unfold? Molto asked himself.

  A special prosecutor would have to be appointed. The argument Brand had made a second ago, that he had done nothing to defraud the court, would cut no ice with the special. Tampering with the evidence in the middle of a trial was a crime of one kind or another.

  Proving that, however, was a different matter. There were just the two of them in this room. Even if Tommy's account of the conversation was accepted, Brand hadn't really made a detailed admission yet.

  But the most important point was what Brand had said last, the artful threat he'd posed. Because Brand was right. Once Tommy fired the bullet, it was sure to ricochet and go right through him. If a prosecutor ever got close to indicting Brand, Jim would bargain his way out by saying Tommy knew, that whatever Brand did, he'd done at Tommy's behest. If Molto turned on him, as Jim saw it, he'd repay the favor by turning on Tommy. If Brand lied well enough, Tommy could even end up convicted. And even if it didn't get quite that far, he'd be back in the same purgatory he was in twenty years ago. People would believe it, because he'd admitted messing around then. Life, Tommy thought not for the first time, was not particularly fair.

  "Okay," Molto said after he'd weighed things out for several minutes more, "here's what's going to happen. I'm going to tell Judge Yee that we've discovered that the chain of evidence on the PC had been corrupted: The computer sat unwrapped in your office the night before it was turned on, and contrary to what we always understood, we've learned that the tape seals were not secure and that the computer could have been tampered with by anyone who was in the PA's office that night or early the following morning. We're not saying that happened. But since Sabich would never have pled if he knew we couldn't prove a proper chain of evidence, we're moving to void the conviction and to dismiss those charges as well.

  "And you're going to resign from the office in the next thirty days. Because there will be a big stink when Rusty walks away again. And it was your fault that the computer was not properly secured. You're going to take the blame for Sabich skating. Because it is your fault, Jim."

  "Which will fuck my candidacy," said Brand.

  "Which will fuck your candidacy," said Molto.

  "Am I supposed to say, Thank you?" said Brand.

  "You could. I think you will when you get some time."

  "It sucks," said Brand.

  Tommy shrugged. "It's kind of a sucky world, Jimmy," he said. "At least sometimes." He stood up. "I'm going to call Sandy Stern."

  Cornered and embittered, Brand was nibbling unconsciously on one of his thumbnails. "Isn't he dead yet?"

  "Not from what I hear. They say he's actually rallying. It just goes to show you, Jimmy."

  "What's that?"

  "It's why we get up in the morning. Because there's never any telling." He looked at Brand, whom he'd once loved, and shook his head. "Never," he repeated.

  CHAPTER 44

  Anna, August 5-6, 2009

  You won't believe this," Nat tells me first thing when I pick up my cell in my office. He repeats the words. Each time I think Nat and I have crashed the last wave, that it cannot get any crazier, that we are finally on the downslide toward a regular life, something else comes up. "I just got off the phone with Sandy. They're letting my father out. Can you believe this? They're dismissing the charges."

  "Oh, Nat."

  "Can you believe this? Apparently Molto found out from the evidence tech that the computer wasn't secured the night before I turned it on. So there's no chain of evidence, and without a good chain there's no provable offense."

  "I don't understand."

  "I don't either. Not really. Neither does Sandy. But Yee already entered the order. Sandy still hasn't reached my father, because guys in seg can't get unscheduled phone calls. How's that for catch-22? Stern is waiting for the warden to call him back." A second later, Nat's phone beeps with an incoming call, and he lets me go so he can talk to Marta.

  I sit in my little office, looking at the picture of Nat on my desk, full of relief for him, with joy for his joy. And even then, there is a cold corner on my heart. Although I would never wish it this way, the ugly truth is that for me it has been easier to have Rusty gone, to have no more of those confused moments when we have been together, with the signals jammed on both sides by mutual will and each of us seemingly counting the seconds until we can get away. Since Barbara died, we have said next to nothing to one another and have barely even lifted our eyes in each other's direction. The only real exception came in that moment right after his guilty plea, when Rusty turned and saw with clear surprise that I was seated beside Nat in the courtroom. "Complex" is not word enough for that look. Longing. Disapproval. Incomprehension. Everything he has probably ever felt about me was contained there. Then he turned away and held his hands behind himself.

  I sit at my desk for the next forty minutes and do absolutely nothing except wait for the phone to ring again. When it does, the Sterns have finally come up with a plan. Rusty will be released from the state work farm at Morrisroe at three a.m. The timing is Sandy's idea. He is unsure whether word of Rusty's departure will leak, but he is confident that these days none of the news organizations can easily afford the overtime involved in sending out reporters and photographers in the middle of the night.

  "Can you come with?" Nat asks me.

  "Isn't this a time for just your dad and you?"

  "No," he says. "Marta and Sandy are going to be there. We're the only family my dad has now. You should come, too."

  It is a long night waiting to leave. The glum, visibly withdrawn man I have lived with for close to a year now is gone, at least for a while. Nat cannot sit down. He walks circles around the condo, checks the W
eb for the latest commentary about his father, and turns on the TV to read the crawl on the all-news cable stations. Apparently, a cadre of reporters arrived downstate to catch footage of Judge Yee leaving his chambers at five thirty p.m. today. He said nothing but smiled and waved at the cameras, amused as always by the amazing turns in life and thus the law. The reporters all use the word "stunning" to describe today's events. Stern has released a statement that the reporters read verbatim, praising the integrity of the prosecuting attorney and saying Sandy expects his client to be released tomorrow.

  Around nine p.m., I suggest to Nat that we go out to grab some groceries for his father. It makes a good diversion, since Nat takes pleasure in gathering the things he knows his dad likes. Back home, we decide to go to bed--something good will happen there, a nap, at least--and we actually have to scramble to reach the Sabich family house in Nearing on time at one a.m., where we have agreed to meet to be sure there is not a press vigil already. Assuming all goes well at the institution, Rusty should be back here by four a.m. and will depart at once, before the press horde stakes out the place, for the family cabin in Skageon. It seems bizarre that a man would emerge from seg and choose to spend more time alone, but according to Stern, Rusty pointed out that being able to go down to town to buy a paper or watch a movie will make all the difference.

  The Sterns arrive a few minutes after us in Marta's Navigator. Marta and Nat embrace at length in the driveway. When he releases her, he goes to the passenger side, where he leans in to hug Stern, more briefly. I met both of the Sterns a few months ago, when they were preparing for the trial, but Nat reintroduces me. I shake hands with Sandy. Under the dome light, he looks far more robust than the last time I saw him in court. The startling rash that covered a large part of his face is nothing but a faint blotch, and he has lost the starved, hollow look of a prisoner of war. It is not clear to Nat, or perhaps even to Sandy, whether this recovery is only a brief reprieve or something more lasting. For whatever significance it may hold, he does remark, as he is apologizing for not standing to greet me, that he is going to do something about "this damnable knee" as soon as he can face the hospital again.