Innocent

  "Truly," said Marco. "Seemed like whenever I seen him, there was this chiquita on his arm."

  Brand's dark eyes found Tommy's. Molto knew now why they were here.

  "How young?" asked Tommy.

  "Past voting age. I don't know. Thirty? Good-looking, with a great set of headlights. First time, I seen him just sittin around in the lobby. That don't make sense, right? Chief judge gotta be a busy fella. I went over to gab. But I could see his eyes rolling sideways, looking somebody off. I bent down to straighten my trouser cuff and could make this chick pedaling backward, headed for the elevator.

  "Then a couple of weeks later, I'm up on one of the floors, checking out some jet-lagged Asian businessman who didn't answer his wake-up call, and as the elevator doors open, I can see this couple breaking apart, scurrying to their corners. Judge and her. She was literally sticking her blouse back in her skirt, and old chiefy, he's got that look, you know, Bladder, don't fail me now. Couple weeks later, I catch sight of him marchin into the lobby, and when he sees me, he literally makes like a ballerina and whirls full around and goes back out the revolving doors. The chick, though--she's at reception."

  "What time of day was this happening?" Tommy asked, making a wary survey of the customers around them. At the next table there was a group from the hospital, all in their long white coats with their instruments in the breast pockets. They were teasing one another, laughing it up, and took no account of the PA within ten feet of them.

  "Lunch twice. Last time was right after work."

  "The judge is catching a nooner?"

  "How it looked to me," said Marco.

  Tommy took his time with his warring judgments. It didn't surprise him Rusty was a hypocrite, that he'd run for supreme court and fuck around at the same time. Some guys were like that, little head first and only. The idea of cheating on his wife was incomprehensible to Tommy, literally beyond the compass of any desire. Why? What could be more precious than a wife's love? Overall, this whole story merely confirmed his judgment that Rusty Sabich was an asshole.

  "Seems to me," said Tommy, "I've been to bar association luncheons in that hotel?"

  "Sure. All the time."

  "Conference rooms always full, night and day?"

  "Back then, yeah. Right now business could use a little boost."

  "Okay," said Tommy, "but there are a lot of reasons for this young woman and him to be roaming around there. Any chance you took a peek at your registration records, Marco, to see if the judge actually checked in?"

  "Yeah. But like I said, it was the girl at the desk."

  "That mean there's no record?"

  "No record."

  Tommy looked at Brand, who was happy enough with the way things were going to resume an eager assault on his sandwich. Even at this age, Jimmy was always famished. Molto had a lot to say, but not in front of Marco. They talked about the U's football team, until Cantu folded up the waxed paper and what little was left of the bun. Ready to go, Marco rested his hands on his wide thighs..

  "You know, I never liked the way Rusty fucked with you at that trial," said Cantu. "So I didn't mind telling a couple of guys this story with a cold one in my hand."

  "I appreciate it," said Tommy, although the machinery inside him was going tilt. He figured Cantu was just putting a spit polish on his own grudge with Sabich.

  "But the hotel," Marco said. "'The privacy of our guests.'" With his thick fingers, Cantu danced the quotation marks in the air. "Super-duper big deal. Like it's some goddamn Swiss bank or something. So, anything ever hits the fan, I didn't tell you. You need this on paper, send a dick around, and I'll go run to my boss so he can run to his boss. Comes out same in the wash, but you know how it goes."

  "Got it," said Molto, and watched Marco walk off in his nice suit.

  Tommy threw away the rest of his sandwich and motioned Brand back to his car. Jim had parked the Mercedes across the street in a NO-PARKING zone, where he could watch it. Getting in, Brand scraped up the placard he'd thrown on the dash--KINDLE COUNTY UNIFIED POLICE--OFFICIAL BUSINESS--and slipped it back behind his visor.

  "You know, that guy was no kind of cop when he was on the street," Tommy told him.

  "I'd say a sack of dung," said Brand, "only the dung might complain."

  "And there's some bad mojo between Rusty and him, right?"

  "That's my read. The first time we talked it through, Marco let on about Sabich calling him out on a motion to suppress when Rusty was a trial judge."

  "Okay, so maybe No Cantu is seeing a little more than meets another guy's eye."

  "Maybe, maybe not. But you know, if he's right, it's a motive to adios Mrs. Judge."

  "Whatever you call it, it was a year and a half ago. And that's not much of a motive for murder. Ever hear of divorce?"

  "Not with my wife," said Brand. "She'd kick my ass." Jody, a former deputy PA, was a hard case. "Maybe Rusty thought a divorce would disagree with his campaign."

  "So he could wait six weeks."

  "Maybe he couldn't. Maybe the young lady's with child and starting to show."

  "Lot of maybes here, Jimmy."

  They were on Madison now, right across from the main doors of U Hospital. There was a crowd on the corner waiting for the light, docs and patients and workers by the looks of them, and every single person, eight when Molto counted, was talking on a cell phone. Whatever happened to the here and now?

  "Boss," said Brand, "Rusty's not gonna get executed at midnight on this. But you said, Bring me somethin. And this is something. We got a guy here with a track record for murder. Now his wife dies all of a sudden and he lets the body cool an entire day for no good reason. And turns out, he was getting some play on the side. So maybe he wanted an easy trade-in. I don't know. But we gotta look. That's all I'm saying. We got a job to do and we gotta look."

  Tommy gazed down the broad avenue canopied by the solid old trees that rose in the parkway on either side. It just would have been worlds easier if it were somebody else.

  "How'd this information come to you, anyway?" he asked. "Who pointed you at Marco?"

  "One of the Nearing cops shoots pool with Cantu every Tuesday night."

  Tommy didn't like that part. "I hope they're all talking in their quiet voices. I don't want half the Nearing station bopping around, asking every second person they see if they got any reason to think Rusty Sabich cooled his wife."

  Brand promised he had the lid screwed down tight. The best Tommy could tell himself was that it hadn't hit the press yet. He asked Brand what he wanted to do.

  "I say it's time to pull his bank records, his phone records," said Jim. "Let's see if there really is a mystery girl and whether they're still making time. We can put a ninety-day letter on everybody, keep them from telling Rusty until after the election." Under the state version of the Patriot Act, the PAs had the right to subpoena documents and order the person providing them to tell no one but a lawyer for ninety days. It was a pale version of what the feds could do--they had the right to keep the subpoenas secret forever--but the local criminal defense lawyers had raised hell, as usual, up at the capital.

  Tommy groaned and quoted Machiavelli, an Italian who knew what was what. "If you shoot at the king, you better kill the king."

  But Brand was shaking his big bald head.

  "Assume the worst, Boss, assume it's a dry hole. Rusty'll be pissed when he finds out, maybe he pokes us in the eye now and then, but he's not going anywhere to complain. He's on the supreme court, he didn't get hurt, and he's not advertising that once upon a time, while his missus was still breathing, he had a girlfriend. He'll just hate your guts a little more than he hates your guts already."

  "Great."

  "We got a job, Boss. We got some information."

  "Half-ass information."

  "Half-ass or not, we have to run it out. You want some Nearing copper crying in a reporter's beer six months from now about how they turned up some good shit on the new justice before he got elected and you ne
eded a heart transplant because you didn't want big bad Rusty to paddle your ass again? That's not good either."

  Brand was right. They had a job to do. But it was a peril. The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.

  Tommy waited all the way back to the courthouse before he gave Brand permission to proceed.

  CHAPTER 7

  Rusty, March-April 2007

  Four days after becoming lovers, Anna and I meet again at the Hotel Gresham. Her place is out. Her roommate, Stiles, arrives unpredictably. More to the point, her East Bank development of redbrick midrises is only two blocks from the state supreme court, where Nat is already putting in a few hours each week.

  Appearances being paramount, we have agreed through several cryptic e-mails that she will put her credit card down for the hotel room. I sit in the lobby, pretending I am awaiting someone else. When the registration clerk turns away, Anna's eyes find mine. I slip my hand inside my jacket and touch my heart.

  When you have looked at a woman for months with the imagination's desiring eye, a part of you cannot accept that it's really her naked in your arms. And to some extent, it isn't. Her waist is narrower than I'd realized, the thighs a trifle heavier. Yet the essence of the thrill is having jumped the wall into my fantasies, an experience as otherworldly as crawling between the bars and romping with the jungle animals in the zoo. At last, I think, when I touch her. At last.

  Afterward, as she works the tail of her blouse back into her skirt, I say, "So this actually happened."

  Her smile is blissful, innocent. When Anna enjoys something, she feels no self-consciousness.

  "You didn't want to, did you? I could feel you weighing this every time I stepped into the room. And deciding not to."

  "I didn't want to," I say. "But I'm here."

  "I only think about something once," she tells me. "And then I decide. It's a gift. About three months ago I realized I wanted to sleep with you."

  "And you're like the Mounties, right? Always get your man?"

  She smiles, smiles for all the world. "I'm like the Mounties," she says.

  In my chambers, at campaign events, as I walk down the street or ride the bus, I go through the gestures of a normal life, but inwardly I've moved to a new location. I think of Anna constantly, obsessively reviewing the incremental steps we took over the months on our way to becoming lovers, still stunned to have escaped the hard limits I'd fixed on my existence. At home, I have no impulse to sleep, not merely because I am reluctant to lie down beside Barbara, but because more vitality has entered my body in the last week than I have experienced in decades. And without the display case glass behind which every female but my wife has reposed safely for a generation, there is a tactile thrill in the presence of virtually any woman.

  Yet I know at all moments that what I am doing is in every colloquial sense insane. Powerful middle-aged man, beautiful younger woman. The plot scores zero for originality and is deservedly the object of universal scorn, including my own. My first affair--twenty-plus years ago--left me so racked by conflict that I started seeing a shrink. But I have no thought now of finding another therapist, which has been a loose agenda item for years, because I don't need someone else's advice to know this is simply crazy, hedonistic, nihilistic, and that most important "istic"--unreal. It must stop.

  For Anna, discovery would be nowhere as cataclysmic as for me. It would make for an embarrassing start to her career. But she would never shoulder most of the blame. She has no wife to whom she's vowed fidelity, no continuing public responsibilities. At the court, the fact that we restrained ourselves until she was no longer employed might save my position, but N. J. Koll would become the instant favorite in our contest.

  And those would be the least of the costs. Barbara's rage is lethal and at this stage is most likely to make her a danger to herself. But by far the worst would be facing Nat and his new look, empty of any respect.

  One revelation of my first affair was that I carry around a lot of baggage from the dark, unhappy home in which I was raised. Until then, I had naively thought I was Joe College or Beaver Cleaver, someone who had been able to convert himself, the son of a sadistic war survivor and an eccentric recluse, into a better-than-average normal American guy. I still yearn in some ways to be a paragon, master of an elusive regularity. But I am haunted by the shadow who knows I am not. No one is. I know that, too. But I am far more concerned by my shortcomings than anybody else's. Vice has that attraction. It means embracing who I am.

  Anna is like many people I knew in law school, not intellectual but brilliant, so agile with the lawyer's tasks of mating fact and law that it is as thrilling as watching a great athlete on the playing field. Now suddenly peer to peer, I find her brightness engaging at an elemental level. But our conversations involve little sweetness or murmuring. It is lawyer to lawyer, almost always a debate, half-amused, but never without an edge. And what we debate is a truth that had to be clear to both of us from the start: This cannot possibly end well. She will meet someone better suited to her. Or we will be discovered and my life again will lie in smoking ruins. Either way, there is no future.

  "Why not?" she asks when I say that casually on the second afternoon.

  "I can't leave Barbara. For one thing, my son would never forgive me. And for the second, it's unfair." I explain some of the history, even detailing the pharmacopeia in Barbara's medicine cabinet as a way to make a point: My wife is damaged goods. I took her back knowing that.

  Anna's look flutters somewhere between sullen and hurt, and she flushes.

  "Anna, you understood this. You had to understand this."

  "I don't know what I understood. I just needed to be with you." Tears are crawling down her bright cheeks.

  "Here's the problem," I say to her. "There is a fundamental difference between us."

  "Age, you mean? You're a man. And I'm a woman. I don't think about age."

  "You're supposed to. You're starting and I'm ending. Have you noticed that men my age lose their hair. And that it starts growing from their ears. That their guts soften. What do you think that's about?"

  She made a face. "Hormones?"

  "No, what would Darwin say? Why is it advantageous for the old men to look different from the young men? So the fertile young women can see who they should be mating with. So some lounge lizard my age can't get away with telling you he's twenty years younger."

  "You're not a lounge lizard. And I'm not a bimbo." Offended, she throws back the covers and stalks, in naked glory, to the desk for a cigarette. I had never seen her light up before and was a trifle taken aback that she booked a smoking room. I kicked when I left the reserves, but I have never stopped finding in the smell of a burning cigarette the aroma of blind indulgence. "What do you think?" she asks. "This is just an experience for me?"

  "That's what it will end up being. Something crazy you once did so you could learn better."

  "Don't tell me I'm young."

  "Neither of us would be here if you weren't young. We would hold far less fascination for each other."

  Standing behind, I turn her to me and run my hands the full length of her torso. Physically, she is glorious, a power Anna enjoys and works hard to hold on to--manicures and pedicures, hair appointments, facials, 'routine maintenance,' as she calls it. Her breasts are perfect, large, beautifully belled, with a broad, dark aureole and long nipples. And I am fascinated by her female parts, where her youth somehow seems centered. She's waxed there, 'a full Brazilian,' is her term. It's a first for me, and the smooth feel provokes my lust like a lightning bolt. I worship, drink, and take my time as she alternately moans and whispers directions.

  In this state of amazement, life goes on. I do my job, write opinions, issue orders, meet with bar association groups and committees, settle the ongoing bureaucratic combat withi
n the court, but Anna, in various sultry poses, is always warring for my attention. Koll's change of parties, which he made within a week of my birthday, has sucked the urgency out of my campaign for the moment, although Raymond continues to schedule fund-raising events.

  Anna and I talk several times a day. I call only from work, wary of the detailed cell bills that are mailed to my house. Alone in my chambers, I will phone Anna's private line at the firm, or she will dial my inside number. They are hushed conversations, always too quick, an odd mix of banalities and proclamations of desire: "Guerner put me on this bitch of a document case. I'll have to work all weekend." "I miss you." "I need you."

  One day on the phone, Anna asks me, "What happened with Harnason?" Anna's last official act as law clerk was to draft my dissent, and she is concerned about the case, as well as many others she worked on. I have largely forgotten about Harnason, like so much else in my life, but I summon Kumari once I put down the receiver. Responding to my dissent, George gallantly exercised the right of every judge of my court, circulating Marvina's feisty opinion and my draft to all chambers, asking if the case seemed appropriate for en banc review, in which all eighteen judges would decide the case. Several of my colleagues, reticent about offending the chief, have chosen the diplomatic alternative of not responding at all. I set a deadline of a week and end up thumped roundly, 13 to 5--counting Marvina, George, and me--in favor of affirming the conviction. This all but guarantees that the supreme court will also refuse to hear the case, on the theory that eighteen judges can't be wrong. Relishing victory, Marvina asks to rework the opinion one more time, but in no more than a month John Harnason will be returning to the penitentiary.

  My mind is on Barbara almost as often as Anna. At home, I am entirely beyond suspicion. The nights before Anna and I are to meet next, I scrutinize my naked bulk in the full light of the bathroom. I am old, lumpy, bulging. I trim my pubic hair with a nose hair clipper, eliminating the long, unruly wires of gray. I should worry that Barbara might notice, but the truth is that she does not remark on my trips to the barber or serious razor burns. After thirty-six years, she is attached to my presence much more than my form.