Kindle County: Reversible Errors Part 13

"Can you explain how you happened to know he had that cameo?"

"Can, but it's a long story. A week or two before Luisa died"" Erno straightened up to correct himself""before I killed her, I was checking on her all the time, spying on her is what it really came down to. But I come in early one morning as she's leaving, and she chews me up one side and down the other about all the thieves I let roam around this airfield. Bottom line, she'd taken this locket off, when it got wound up in her telephone cord, and she'd laid it on her counter. She goes away for a second and when she comes back, there's Squirrel slipping off like a shadow and the cameo is gone. She's cussing me out about this, and crying because it's been in the family for a couple centuries.

"Well, what are you gonna do? So I go hunt up Squirrel. Took a day, but I found him in some h.e.l.lhole in the North End. Course, he said he didn't know nothin about it, but I said, 'Listen, knucklehead, that piece is worth a h.e.l.l of a lot more to that lady than anybody you can peddle it to. Get it back and we'll make it worth your while, no questions asked.'

"Naturally, once I killed her, I didn't think much about that, except I noticed the papers were featuring the cameo as taken off her when she died, which I knew was a crock. I figured Luisa didn't want to confess to Mamma Mia that she'd lost the family treasure. You know, there's always a lot the cops think is true that isn't, but that's another subject." Erno cast a fast glance at Larry, then reached over to adjust his oxygen. He was starting to look tired.

"Anyway, must have been late September, I run into Squirrel out at the airport. I don't think he could have told you my name but he knew I'd promised him money. 'I still got this here,' he says and takes the cameo out of his pocket. Right there in the terminal. I thought my heart was going to fall out of my chest and roll down my trouser leg, just from shock, you know, because that thing was in the media and I didn't want to be within a mile of it. I told him I'd work on the money, and ran off, fast as if he was leprosy.

"Afterwards, I started in thinking, takin off like that might have been a dead giveaway. Maybe I should have had him arrested and carried on like he was the bad guy. I kind of liked that idea and began researching, you might say, talking to copper friends, pretending I was interested in Squirrel because he was a problem at the airport. Once I found out he had a thing with Gus, too, I started considering it seriously, you know, unloading this on him. Even so, I might not have done it, but then Collins got into that jackpot, and there was Rommy, sort of made to order.

"So far as Collins knew, Rommy was the right guy. I put it that I'd been developing information about Rommy, and I was just letting Collins dress it up a little and pa.s.s it on to get out of this jam. I told Collins I'd send some cops around, and he should make the best deal he could"squirm real hard about having to testify, because I wasn't sure how good Collins would do on the stand. Then, I just waited for a chance to lay all this on some officer, which turned out to be Larry Starczek, when he showed up at the airport a day or two later."

Erno lifted his hand to point across the courtroom to Larry, who, in the face of this dissection of how he'd been had, seemed finally to be reflecting on the possibility.

"The rest is history," Erno said.

There was a lull again as Arthur considered his notes. He was going on to Erno's letters to Larry and Gillian, but Erno held up his hand, which, for some reason"his health or the strain"trembled slightly.

"Can I say something here, Judge?" He coughed again, a harsh sound in the silent courtroom. "It probably won't mean much, but I'd like you to know this, because it's something I always consider. My nephew? He got out in five. Cause he ratted out Squirrel. But he's all grown up. He's come to Jesus, which is a bit much, but he's got a wife, he's got two kids, he's got a little business. I gave him a chance"well, more than one"but he took it. Finally. So in the middle of this horrible mess I made, there's that. I always think about it. I think about it a lot."

Harlow took this in, like the rest, neutrally, in a mood of somber contemplation. Arthur knew it would be hours before even the judge could puzzle through all the details. But he had a question now. Harlow turned first to Muriel to ask if she minded inquiry from the Court. She answered that she had several questions of her own, but would be happy to let the judge go first. That was the kind of courtroom posturing the judge revered as an art form. He granted her a small smile, before he returned to Erno.

"Before you leave this area, Mr. Raven, I want to be certain I'm following Mr. Erdai's testimony. As I understand what you're saying, sir, you expected to frame Mr. Gandolph, is that correct?"

"That's the best word for it, I'm afraid," Erno answered. "I mean, it was a flier, Judge. I was trying to do what I could for the kid, but I couldn't guarantee anything. I knew enough about how this all goes to realize Collins wouldn't get a real big break unless Rommy went down."

"Well, that's what I'm wondering about. Your calculation was that you'd accomplish that by having your nephew lead the police to the cameo in Mr. Gandolph's pocket. Correct? That's not much of a case, is it? What happens if Gandolph has an alibi? Or explains how he got the locket?"

"That could've happened, I suppose. Course, I'd never have backed him up on the cameo. And you're forgetting that he had a bad history with Gus, too. But I had a pretty good guess what would, you know, transpire."

"And what was your guess?"

"My best guess? My guess was that sooner or later I'd hear that Rommy had fessed up."

"To a crime he didn't commit?"

"I mean, look, Judge." Erno stopped again, his chest and shoulders heaving. He was smiling faintly. "I mean, Judge, I've been around. You got a heater case and a sewer rat with one victim's jewelry in his pocket and a motive to kill another. I mean, Judge," said Erno, raising his worn, sallow face to. the bench, "this ain't Shangri-la."

Chapter 16.

June 12, 2001 Back to Court THE OLD FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, a three-sided structure fronted by an arcade of fluted Corinthian columns, had been part of the original design of Center City in DuSable, the focal point of a broad plaza called Federal Square. As Gillian rushed along the granite walkways, pigeons with their shining heads barely rose into the air, giving ground to her, and a puff of underground exhaust ruffled her skirt. Like most Kindle County public transportation, her bus had been late.

Two days ago Arthur Raven had phoned, characteristically apologetic. He and his young a.s.sociate had decided that if at all possible, Gillian should be at court. They wanted her present in case it was necessary to authenticate the letter Erno Erdai had sent her, or to confirm that she had received it in late March before any news broke about Arthur's appointment, an event which arguably might have inspired Erdai to fictionalize. It was a trifle compulsive on Arthur's part, but she had agreed to accept his subpoena with less reluctance than she might have expected.

Now she hurried up the courthouse's lovely central staircase, a gentle spiral of alabaster, unsuccessfully attempting to force from her mind the last time she had been here. That was March 6, 1995. All of the trials against other corrupted attorneys and judges against whom Gillian had been a potential witness were concluded without the need of her testimony. Her service to the government was complete. At her sentencing, several young a.s.sistant United States Attorneys vouched for Gillian's sobriety and cooperation, and her lawyer begged for leniency. Moira Winch.e.l.l, the Chief Judge here before Kenton Harlow, an icy paragon often compared to Gillian herself, remained horrified by the crime, and sentenced Gillian to seventy months in custody. It was at least one, probably two years longer than she had expected under the federal sentencing guidelines, particularly in light of her a.s.sistance to the prosecutors. Yet Gillian had p.r.o.nounced thousands of sentences herself, rarely with any feeling of absolute certainty that she had weighed all factors perfectly, and to her enduring astonishment, she had found the need to speak two words to the judge when Winch.e.l.l had finished with her. Gillian had said, "I understand."

On the top floor, she peered briefly through the small windows in the leather-clad swinging doors to the Chief Judge's vast courtroom. Within, Erno Erdai, with a plastic oxygen apparatus in his nose, gripped the rail of the witness box. On a bench that looked, amid pillars of marble, very much like a baptismal font, Kenton Harlow was studying Erno with a finger laid beside his long nose. Her impulse, which she quickly suppressed, was to open the doors and take a seat. A potential witness did not belong in the courtroom. Nor did she personally. Yet her trip to Rudyard with Arthur had led to nights of turbulent dreams. In their wake, as she'd admitted to Duffy when she left the house today, she'd found herself increasingly intrigued by what Erno would say, and the likely impact his testimony would have around the Tri-Cities and, in consequence, on her.

For nearly an hour, she waited across the marble hall in the narrow room reserved for witnesses, still reading about the Peloponnesian War, until the sudden commotion in the corridor made it evident that court had broken. Out of habit, she stood to use the small wall mirror, adjusting the shoulders on her dark suit and centering the largest pearl on her choker. Ten minutes after that, Arthur Raven arrived. He appeared earnest as ever, but there was a light about him which Gillian could not keep from envying. Arthur was triumphant.

He began with apologies. Muriel had just made a great show of telling Judge Harlow that she'd been bushwhacked, demanding twenty-four hours to prepare for cross-examination of Erdai.

"Are you saying I need to come back tomorrow?" Gillian asked.

"I'm afraid so. I'd ask Muriel if she even wants you, but frankly I don't think she'll talk to me at the moment about her plans. t.i.t for tat."

The wounds of war. Gillian remembered.

"I can give you another subpoena if you need an excuse at work," Arthur said.

"No, I have an understanding boss." Ralph Podolsky, the manager who hired her, was the younger brother of Lowell Podolsky, a former P.I. lawyer, who'd crashed and burned in the same scandal that led to Gillian's downfall. Ralph had not mentioned his relationship to Lowell until her first day on the job, and never returned to the subject after that.

Gillian retrieved her purse. Arthur offered to show her how to escape downstairs, unnoticed by the reporters who, he said, were busy flagellating Muriel. In the elevator, she asked how it had gone with Erno Erdai.

"Amazing," said Arthur.

"Erno did well?"

"I thought so."

"You look exultant."

"Me?" The notion appeared to shock him. "All I've been feeling is the burden. It isn't just losing when they kill the client for your mistakes. I wake up three times a night. This case is the only thing I think about. You know, I've been in the trenches, digging for dollars, for years now"commercial stuff, big companies blaming each other for deals that hit the rocks. I like most of my clients, I want them to win, but there's not much at stake beyond that. If something goes wrong here, I'll feel like somebody sucked the light out of the universe."

The elevator sprang open. Behind it, Arthur showed her a pa.s.sageway she'd never have found on her own, then followed her out onto the street, eager to exit before any of the print reporters saw him. He said he'd agreed to give his first interviews back at his office to the two leading TV stations. Morton's was three blocks from the courthouse, on the way to Arthur's office in the IBM Building, and he walked beside her.

"What did the judge make of Erno?" she asked. "Any idea?"

"I think he believed him. It almost felt like he had to."

"Had to?"

"There was just something that came into the room." Arthur reflected. "The sorrow," he said. "Erno didn't wallow"he wasn't going to ask anybody to be sorry for him because he did horrible things. But there was a sadness to every word."

"Yes, sorrow," said Gillian. Perhaps that was why she had wanted to hear Erno. The foot traffic was light in the lull before evening rush hour. They strolled on a mild day, strikingly bright, as they weaved in and out of the shadows cast by the tall buildings on Grand Avenue. Gillian had pulled her sungla.s.ses from her purse, but found Arthur eyeing her.

"You didn't do what he did, you know," he said. "It wasn't murder."

"Well, that's something to say for myself."

"And you've paid the price."

"I'll tell you the terrible truth," she said. She was aware that yet again she was on her way down a path with Arthur she steadily refused to tread with others, but you could not deflect Arthur Raven with subtlety or indirection. He cried when he was sad and in other moods laughed like a child. He was plain, his kindness was plain, and interacting with him required the same kind of unguarded responses. That was never an easy task for Gillian, and down at Rudyard she'd been surprised by how near at hand certain emotions"a canyon-deep sense of loss, especially"had been in his company. Yet by now he was well established as trustworthy.

"It's not what I did I feel worst about, Arthur. You'll take this the wrong way, and I don't blame you a bit, but I don't think the money changed the outcome of any of those cases. No one can say for sure, least of all me, and that's what makes what I did so insidious. But it was a system, Arthur, almost like a tax. The lawyers got rich, so the judges were ent.i.tled to a share. I was never conscious of taking a fall on a case, not because I was so honorable but because no one would ask me to. None of us wanted to risk arousing suspicions. I'm ashamed of the condition I was in during those years. And the ma.s.sive violation of trust. But you're correct, the years away seem a reasonable penance for that. It's the waste that consumes me."

"The waste?"

"Having the kinds of chances in life I had and wasting them."

"Look, you have plenty of time for a new life. If you'll let yourself have one. You were always in your own time zone anyway."

She laughed out loud, only because the description was so apt. She inhabited a universe parallel to but not quite the same as others. Gillian-time, as Arthur suggested, moved slightly faster. She was out of college at nineteen, worked for a year to fund law school, and had graduated from Harvard at twenty-three, then returned to Kindle County. In a sense, she'd never left, since she'd lived all three years with her father's cousins in Cambridge. She could have gone to Wall Street, to D.C., even to Hollywood. But for a policeman's daughter, the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office was the premier destination.

In all of that, however, the determining element was her will. In the current of the times, she had thought of herself as an existentialist: decide on a project and pursue it. It was shocking how far out of fashion will had fallen by now. Americans today viewed themselves as powerless as soft pavement, relentlessly steamrollered by their early childhoods. But perhaps that was better. In her case, once she'd started using, she'd exalted her celebration of will to the point of regarding herself as a Nietzschean figure, a Napoleonic Superwoman with the courage to set herself outside convention. She realized only years later in a prison cell that it was fear that had fueled her revulsion with middle-cla.s.s morality, a sense of how crushingly she might otherwise have imposed its strict judgments on herself.

"People live through all kinds of s.h.i.t, Gillian. In my family, there are people who survived years at Dachau. And they went on. They came here and sold window treatments and went bowling and watched their grandchildren grow up. I mean, you go on."

"I did this to myself, Arthur. I didn't live through some natural calamity or some exercise in human perfidy."

"You got caught. I mean, for Chrissake, what are you doing back here anyway? You're suffering or punishing yourself or reliving whatever weird psychological s.h.i.t you were going through in the first place. I mean, it's over. You're different."

"Am I?" That, she realized, was one thing to be resolved.

"You stopped drinking. I was terrified to go see you that first time because I figured I'd find you half in the bag. But no, you're sober. So take heart. Move on. Move up. I open the paper three times a week and see the name of somebody I prosecuted when I was in Financial Crimes, and usually they're in the middle of making a big deal."

"And you think they're jerks."

"No, I think they're doing what they're ent.i.tled to. To go on. I hope they're wiser now. Some are. Some aren't. If they do it again, then I'll think they're jerks."

She was not fully persuaded, but the valor of his efforts was touching.

"Have I mentioned that you're very kind to me, Arthur?"

He was squinting at her in the late-afternoon sun. "Is that against the rules?"

"It's unfamiliar."

"Maybe I think we have things in common."

Whenever she saw Arthur, they somehow harked back to that first moment when she'd devastated him in the coffee shop. It had opened up something, even though it had seemed intended to close all doors. He continued to insist they were kindred spirits, while she remained dubious of any resemblance. She enjoyed Arthur. Save for Duffy, who had never fully qualified, she'd cut herself off from attorneys. Real conversation in the lawyerly fashion, real contact, earnest talk about motives and meanings, with someone able to cut to the core"it was a hunger. But that still seemed to her the limit of what they shared.

They stood now before the doors of Morton's. The building, by a famous architect who had taught Frank Lloyd Wright, was the example that had driven his pupil in the other direction. The exterior was ornate, with heavy impressions in the iron facade and twenty-foot I gla.s.s doors framed in decorated bra.s.s. Vines formed the handles, which had been polished by the grasp of the thousands who entered each day, and were brilliant in the potent afternoon light. The cosmetics counter was I just inside.

"My post." She pointed. She had long avoided working in the Center City store, where she was frequently recognized, but with summer vacations beginning, Ralph needed her here two days a week.

"Are you enjoying this job?"

"Well, I'm happy to be working. It's regarded as a privilege in prison. And it turns out it is. I saw an ad and thought it might be a good place to start."

The job had actually seemed like fun, although her interest in fashion had never been completely lighthearted. Over the years, she'd heard a thousand sayings about the world of style that struck her to the core, like pieces of perfect wisdom plucked from the Gospels or Shakespeare. 'Fashion is close to the quick of the soul.' 'Fashion is as much a part of life as s.e.x.' For her it was this simple: at least look good. It was part masquerade, part child's play, part vulnerability to the judgment of others, and, more than anything else, the delight that came from molding those opinions. It made no sense"any more than the ridiculous and repet.i.tive little-boy behavior with b.a.l.l.s and sticks in which men obsessively engaged"but so many women, whether tethered by culture or instinct, craved beauty and a.s.sessed one another in terms of their efforts. These days, she had retired from compet.i.tion. In comparison with the splendid young women who came from their health clubs to her counter, Gillian was now a 'former beauty,' words carrying the same sad undertone as 'former athlete.' But dealing with her customers, she was relieved every day to be so much less dominated by vanity, which she had taken to be an element of her demise.

"I take it this strikes you as superficial, Arthur."

"Well""

"You can say it. That's the word. It's cosmetic, by definition."

"I suppose you could say I don't relate. I mean even unattractive people have instincts, but you have to come to terms with yourself."

"Oh, come on, Arthur!" She often found Arthur's abased view of himself wrenching. "Attractiveness for a man after a certain age has nothing to do with what it meant as a teenager. Big success, big salary, nice car. We all know how that goes. There's no such thing as a bad-looking man with a fat wallet."

"That doesn't seem to work for me."

"I doubt that."

"Probably because I'm immature," he said.

She laughed.

"I am," he said. "I still want my fantasies."

"Which are?"

"Somebody sleek and smart"I mean it's stupid, right? I want somebody who's everything I'm not."

"A young girl out of a magazine?"

"I'm not that immature. A grown-up would be nice." Arthur half averted his face. For a second he seemed dazzled by the sun, then added in a muted tone, "Someone like you."

"Me?" In panic, she faced about, hoping the conversation had not taken the turn she feared. "But someone more your age?" At forty-seven she had, by her best calculation, a decade on Arthur.

Arthur laughed once. "Oh, you'd do fine."

"I'm old enough to be your mother."

"Please."

"Your aunt."

"'No' will do, Gillian," he said mildly. "I'm used to it."

"Ar-thur," she said. "Arthur, I am a mess that no one can or should want to clean up. That's the truth. In candor, I don't say yes to anyone. That's not part of my life."

Jest had still not entirely left him, but he frowned and briefly lowered his head, allowing the open s.p.a.ces in his scalp to reflect the strong light. Then he summoned himself to grin again.

"Forget it, Gillian. I was just kind of ill.u.s.trating the point."

Some sisterly kiss on the cheek might have been in order, but that had never been her style. Instead she smiled in a way she hoped was a trifle less remote and promised to see him tomorrow. Raven smiled as well, but he went off at a plodding pace, his briefcase dragging by his side. In her midsection, the rot of guilt set in once again. The man in triumph, who perhaps had dared an unfamiliar boldness, was gone now. With a few words, she had vanquished him, returning Arthur to himself.