But that kind of long shot was not worth the risks. Holding this job had seemed for years to be another of Tommy's futile yearnings, and he felt the sweet power of pride in doing it well. More to the point, he had the opportunity to repair much of the lingering damage to his reputation from the accusations at Rusty's trial, so that when a new PA was elected in two years, Tommy could reclaim the mantle of white knight and exit to a big boy's salary doing in-house investigations for some corporation. That would never happen if people thought he'd used this position to pursue a vendetta.
"Jimmy, let's be straight, okay? No way I can fuck around with Rusty Sabich again. I got a one-year-old. Other guys my age, they're thinking about hanging it up. I gotta consider the future. I can't afford to wear the black hat again." Tommy was regularly befuddled by where he stood now on the life chain. He had not meant to butt in line or take another turn, only to have a bit of what he'd so far missed. He had never been one of those guys with an ego so big that he thought he could brazen even time.
But Brand's look said it alclass="underline" That was not Tommy Molto. What he'd just heard-the self-interest, the caution-that was not the prosecutor he knew. Tommy felt his heart constrict in the face of Brand's disappointment.
"Fuck," said Molto. "Whatta you want?"
"Let me dig," said Brand. "On my own. Really careful. But let me be sure this really is nothing."
"Anything leaks, Jimmy, especially before the election, and we've turned nothing, you can just write my obit. You understand that? You're fucking around with the rest of my life."
"Quiet as Little Bo Peep." He lifted his large square hand and put a finger to his lips.
"Fuck," said Tommy again.
CHAPTER 5
Rusty, March 19, 2007
When I depart the bus in Nearing, the former ferry port along the river that turned into a suburb not long before we moved here in 1977, I stop at the chain pharmacy across the way to pick up Barbara's prescriptions. A few months after my trial ended twenty-one years ago, for reasons fully understood only by the two of us, Barbara and I separated. We might have gone on to divorce had she not been diagnosed in the wake of an aborted suicide attempt with bipolar disorder. For me, that ended up being excuse enough to reconsider. Past the trial, past the months of climbing down, branch by branch, and still never feeling I had reached the ground, past the nights of furious recriminations at the colleagues and friends who had turned on me or not done enough-after all that receded, I wanted what I had wanted from the time the nightmare began: the life I had before. I did not have the strength, if the truth be told, to start again. Or to see my son, a fragile creature, become the final victim of the entire tragedy. Nat and Barbara moved back from Detroit, where she had been teaching mathematics at Wayne State, subject to only one condition: Barbara's vow to adhere scrupulously to her drug regimen.
Her moods are not stabilized easily. When things were going well, especially in the first few years after Nat and she came back home, I found her far less cantankerous and often fun to live with. But she missed her manic side. She no longer had the will or energy for those twenty-four-hour computer sessions when she pursued some elusive mathematical theory like a panting dog determined to run a fox to ground. In time, she gave up her career, which brought more frequent gloom. These days Barbara refers to herself as a lab rat, willing to try anything her psychopharmacologist suggests to get a better grip. There is a handful of pills at the best of times: Tegretol. Seroquel. Lamictal. Topamax. When she gets the blues-which in her case ought to be called the blacks-she reaches deeper into the medicine cabinet for tricyclic drugs, like Asendin or Tofranil, which can leave her sleepy and looking as if holes had been drilled into the pupils, requiring her to walk around inside the house in dark glasses. At the worst moments, she will go to phenelzine, an antipsychotic that she and her doctor have discovered will reliably pull her back from the brink, making it worth its many risks. At this stage, she has prescriptions for fifteen to twenty drugs, including the sleeping pills she takes every night and the meds that counter her chronic high blood pressure and occasional heart arrhythmia. She orders refills on the Internet, and I pick them up for her two or three times a week.
Birthday dinner at home is a desultory affair. My wife is a fine cook and has grilled three filets, each the size of Paul Bunyan's fist, but somehow all of us have exhausted our quota of good cheer at the celebration in chambers. Nat, who at one point seemed as if he would never leave the family house, returns reluctantly these days and is characteristically quiet throughout the meal. It is clear almost from the start that our main goal is to get it over with, to say we dined together on a momentous day and return to the internal world of signs and symbols with which each one of us is peculiarly preoccupied. Nat will go home to read for tomorrow's law classes, Barbara will retreat to her study and the Internet, and I, birthday or no, will put the flash drive in my computer and review draft opinions.
In the meantime, as often happens with my family, I carry the conversation. My encounter with Harnason, if nothing else, is odd enough to be worth sharing.
"The poisoner?" asks Barbara when I first mention his name. She rarely listens if I discuss work, but you can never tell what Barbara Bernstein Sabich will know. At this stage, she is a frightening replica, with far better style, of my own slightly loony mother, whose mania late in life, after my father left her, was organizing her thoughts on hundreds of note cards that were stacked on our old dining room table. Rigidly agoraphobic, she found a way to reach beyond her small apartment as a regular caller on radio talk shows.
My wife too hates to leave home. A born computer geek, she cruises the Net four to six hours a day, indulging every curiosity-recipes, our stock portfolio, the latest mathematical papers, newspapers, consumer purchases, and a few games. Nothing in life steadies her so much as having a universe of information at hand.
"It turns out I prosecuted the guy. He was a lawyer who was living off his clients' money. Gay."
"And what does he expect from you now?" Barbara asks.
I shrug, but somehow in retelling the story, I confront something that has grown on me over the hours, which I am reluctant to acknowledge, even to my wife and son: I am sorely guilty that I sent a man to the penitentiary for the sake of prejudices I'm now ashamed I had. And in that light I recognize what Harnason was slyly trying to suggest: If I hadn't prosecuted him for the wrong reasons, stripped him of his profession, and hurled him into the pit of shame, his life would have turned out entirely differently; he would have had the self-respect and self-restraint not to have murdered his partner. I started the cascade. Contemplating the moral force of the point, I go silent.
"You'll recuse now, won't you?" Nat asks, meaning I'll remove myself from the case. When Nat lived at home after college, it was rare for him to intervene directly in the substance of our conversations. Usually, he assumed a role more or less like a color commentator, interrupting only for remarks about the way his mother or I had expressed ourselves-'Nice, Dad,' or 'Tell us how you really feel, Mom.'-clearly intended to prevent either of us from upending the precarious balance between us. I have long feared that mediating between his parents is one more thing that has made the path rougher for Nat. But these days, Nat will actively engage me on legal issues, providing a rare avenue into the mind of my dark, isolated son.
"No point," I say. "I already voted. The only doubt on the case, and there's not much, is about George Mason. And Harnason really didn't try to talk about the merits of his appeal anyway." The other problem, were I to unseat myself now, is that most of my colleagues on the court would suspect I was doing it for the sake of my campaign, trying to avoid recording my vote to reverse a murder conviction, an act that seldom pleases the public.