“If you feel like I’m screwing you over by not letting him have it,” he told Evon, “then I’ll give it to him.”
She weaseled at first, said it was his decision, not hers, but he wouldn’t let her off that way.
“You know me,” she said. “It’s black-and-white. That’s why I have such a damn hard time with myself. Two wrongs don’t make a right That’s where I come out. Personally. But I’ll stand up for you either way, bub. You tell him to go spit, I’m right here behind you.” She stiffened her chin and nodded. Her only hesitation was McManis. She cared about what he would say, the same way Robbie cared about her, and she told Feaver that. They returned to the conference room and Robbie put the same question to Jim. Would he feel personally messed over if Sennett didn’t get the tape? Would he feel like he’d wasted his time?
Jim adjusted the large frames on his nose. His demeanor betrayed some of the intense calculation going on within, but his tone was placid.
“I think we did a lot of good work here. I’ll always be proud of it. I’d like to get Tuohey. He’s a bad guy. But I’ve lived twenty-two years on this job convinced that the government comes out the loser if you get a bad guy a bad way. So I’ll handle whatever you decide. Personally, I’d say take some time. Sort it out.”
Feaver nodded and looked at the three of us.
“I can’t give it to him,” he said. “Not today.”
We all lingered there, perhaps waiting to see if hearing him say it changed anything, but it didn’t seem to. Evon was as good as her word and patted his arm.
“Show time,” Robbie said then, and opened the door himself.
“I think I’ll come along just to keep you company,” said Evon. “Just to make sure nobody gets disorderly.”
Robbie reminded her that there were metal detectors at the entrance of the courthouse. The firearms and switchblades had presumably been left behind. But he seemed content to go forward with his honor guard, Evon leading and Jim covering him from behind and me at his shoulder. Robbie emerged from the shadowed corridor with his eyes fast and his stride certain. He looked handsome and heroic, fitting snugly once again into his role. His life as a lawyer was behind him and he had celebrated by appearing in a black shirt, beneath his suit, and no tie.
“Judas Iscariot!” cried Walter as soon as Robbie had stepped around the corner. The news that he was dying had filled Walter with abandon and rage. Evon immediately fronted between Robbie and Wunsch, and Tooley returned from one of his other clients to take hold again of Walter’s arm. He was not easily stilled. “Fucking Judas Iscariot!” cried Walter. “You’re just another loudmouth, stinking sell-out.”
Robbie’s wits remained in order.
“Right, Walter,” he said, “and you’re the Messiah.”
His delivery was perfect and the acid rain of humiliating laughter drizzled down on Walter, even from a number of his confreres. Despite his condition, malice had revitalized Walter and it took a considerable effort from Tooley to push Wunsch back down into his seat next to his golf clubs.
At the door to the grand jury room, Sennett stood, his hands folded primly.
“Mr. Feaver,” he said with imposing formality. He wanted Robbie to know he was prepared for anything. “How are you this morning?”
“Sick and tired,” said Robbie, “especially of you.”
Stan didn’t flinch. God knows what he thought he deserved. Without a word, he opened the door to the grand jury room and extended a hand to show Robbie in.
I told Robbie I would be just outside and reminded him he had the right to stop Sennett at any time to consult me. Robbie smiled generously. He shook my hand and, as he often did, thanked me for everything I’d done, before he advanced to the threshold.
The sequence of events after that has always remained jumbled. In the ensuing moments, my reactions remained a step behind; I was still attempting to make sense of the first sensation by the time I was hit with the next one. Initially, I heard a sudden crescendo of voices, culminating in a drilling female scream. As it turned out, it was Judith, but for some reason I thought it was Evon and swung in her direction as something flew past me, stunning the air. A bird was my first impression, a pigeon, some silvery form. I jumped back in panic, and at the same time heard a flat sound, vaguely like the noise I knew as a boy when for mean sport we’d smash melons on the hot tar of the road. I realized, though, that something was broken. A small hard pellet ricocheted off my face and I was spattered with what I took first for mud. There was an animal smell from somewhere, sudden heat, then the low, guttural sound that Robbie Feaver made as he slumped against me.
I caught him and his completely inert weight pulled me to the floor with him. The back of his suit and the arm I had around him were warmed with what I improbably took first for soup, then realized was blood. There was enormous turmoil now, people yelling for the phone and for doctors, screams from inside the grand jury room, and Walter Wunsch hollering to leave him be, as Jim and Evon and three or four other persons subdued and disarmed him. In the process, they broke two of his fingers, but they pried from his fist the number two iron whose blade Walter had driven straight through Robbie’s skull.
I saw the wound then, which looked wildly out of place, a welling gash distinct in spite of the gobs of thickened blood that already matted Robbie’s crown. Somehow it resembled an open mouth, almost that wide, with red matter that might have been skin crushed inward and a single protrusion, white and ghastly, which I knew was a piece of Robbie’s cranium. I had no idea what to do. For the moment everything in the universe seemed open to doubt. Realizing there was absolutely no point to it, I applied my handkerchief to the wound, watching the spreading bloodstain creep over the cloth. Evon had reached us by then and I told her quietly what I’d sensed from the first instant he’d fallen against me: I was afraid Robbie was dead.
Evon grabbed his wrist for a pulse, then tried his neck, and finally brought her face to his lips to feel for breath.
“Turn him over!” she screamed. Several of us helped her. She pounded his chest three times, then she grabbed his nose, from which a thick line of blood had already emerged, and, after a tremendous inhalation, applied her mouth to his. She went on with this for at least a minute as every person in the room, even those scurrying about at the periphery, watched. A phone rang repeatedly and no one picked it up.
A moment later, two Secret Service agents with paramedical training bolted in. They’d been summoned by one of the Assistant U.S Attorneys who’d gone screaming for help. In another minute, an M.D who had been testifying down the hall as an expert witness crashed through the door and took over. He placed his fingertips on the carotids, then got on his hands and knees and lifted Robbie’s head gently to examine the wound.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Somebody say it was a golf club? It looks like a hatchet.”
The club, brown from the shaft to the toe, was still in McManis’s hand. Walter, confronting what he’d done and the phenomenon of death that would soon claim him, sat in the same foam chair. His head looked almost unstrung from his body, leaning against the metal doorframe of the grand jury room. He held his broken hand rigidly in the air. A private security guard had appeared from somewhere and stood over him.
The 911 paramedics arrived then. They were wheeling oxygen tanks and they fastened the mask over Robbie’s mouth and strapped him to the cart.
“No, I don’t want to pronounce him,” the M.D. said.
Evon sat on the floor with her back against the wall. Her hand, blood-painted up to the knuckles, was over her mouth and she stared out unseeing. Sennett, who had run for help, dashed back into the room. When he saw me, he averted his eyes. He addressed McManis and asked how the hell it could have happened. Jim did not bother to reply.
I stood and helped Evon to her feet. I realized we should go to the hospital.
As we headed out, Mel Tooley, who had dug his hands in his trouser pockets, passed a remark to the man guarding Walter.
r /> “I don’t think this is going to do much for his handicap.”
AFTERWARDS
TODAY I SIT AS A JUDGE OF THE APPELLATE Court. As the stink of scandal spread through the Kindle County courts, the Democratic Farmers & Union Party grew desperate to recruit judicial candidates whose independence was not open to doubt. In another example of life’s ability to elude expectations, my role in Petros had come to be widely viewed as an emblem of my fortitude. I was just the person they needed. I was elected to a ten-year term and took the oath of office with my father’s Bible in my hand.
In all, six judges, nine lawyers, and a dozen sheriff’s deputies and court clerks were convicted in connection with Project Petros. The ricochet effect that Stan had hoped for from the start—the first cooperator implicating a second who turned on a third—more or less occurred. Skolnick and Gillian Sullivan and a judge who had moved on to the Felony Division all pled guilty and talked. Sherman Crowthers battled the government bravely through trial, only to succumb after two years in the penitentiary. In his orange jumpsuit, forty pounds thinner and unable to shake the cough left by one of several bouts of pneumonia, Sherm made a sad sight. He barely raised his eyes above the rail on the witness stand as he implicated two of the judges from the Felony Division to whom he’d passed money years before. He seemed most humiliated by the sheer collapse of his own bravado.
Despite these successes, Stan returned to San Diego. He was following his own advice, having shot at the king and missed. Brendan Tuohey was never convicted, nor even implicated in any public testimony. Despite a few murmured cavils, he succeeded old Judge Mumphrey as Chief of the Kindle County Superior Court a few months after Robbie was killed, inheriting administrative power over every other judge and courtroom. He retired a little more than a year ago. His home in Palm Beach was big enough to cause him to remark often on his extraordinary success in the bull market, but he died in his first month there, as the result of a drunken boating accident in which he crashed headlong into a pier at night.
The week after Robbie was killed, Stan Sennett had come to see me. He wanted to know what Robbie had done with the tape. He pleaded for almost an hour. He did not understand how I could allow Robbie’s death to remain unpunished, or how I could willfully leave a monster like Tuohey at large. Robbie’s killing was grisly and inflammatory enough that, with the videotape, Stan might yet have been able to convince a jury to convict Brendan Tuohey for conspiracy to murder a federal witness. Whether there was a factual basis to the charge was another matter. It’s possible that Tuohey, by way of his usual sinister indirection, incited Walter to what he did. But Wunsch, who died at the Federal Penitentiary Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, long before any case could come to trial, maintained he’d been acting on behalf of no one but himself. McManis, who interviewed him several times, told me that to the end Walter remained acid and unrepentant.
After lengthy consultations with Stern in his role as attorney for Robbie’s executor, Morton Dinnerstein, we turned the cassette over to Judge Winchell. Notified by the court, Mel Tooley appeared for Tuohey and, as I’d predicted, prevailed on a motion to suppress the tape. The best truth the law could make of the murky circumstances was that Robbie had never consented to the recording, which was, accordingly, unlawful.
Mort has survived the years with his role in all of this untold, but his grief, the most visible of anyone’s at the extraordinary double funeral the following Sunday, seemed to break him irreparably. He left both the practice of law and, in time, Kindle County, after his younger son, Max, graduated from high school.
There were happier trails. McManis finished twenty-five years with the FBI and moved to San Jose, California. He passed the bar there and, inspired in part by his experiences in Petros, began trying lawsuits at the age of fifty-two. I hear from mutual acquaintances that juries find his even demeanor soothing.
Evon remained for several years in Kindle County, testifying in half a dozen of the Petros cases, and eventually becoming supervisor of the surveillance squad. Two years ago, she moved back to the West with a friend, a woman, who couldn’t forgo a glorious job opportunity. By then Evon and I had revisited the events reported here over many evenings. She never discussed investigative details safeguarded by Bureau regulations, but her candor about herself was remarkable, and I have always felt it was offered in some fashion as a memorial to Robbie.
Despite her willingness to reprise remarkably intimate matters with me, Evon has never shared precisely what occurred after we left the hospital the day Robbie was murdered. Yet I’ve imagined it in the same detail as so much else I’ve described but never witnessed. Those were probably the most disoriented hours of my life. I felt as if nature had been reversed, as if my lungs and heart and nerves hung outside my body. What had happened was not unimaginable but, in fact, something that seemed confined only to the realm of the imaginary. Confronting it, I lost all sense of boundaries.
But Evon, who’d always experienced a special clarity in urgent moments, was sure about the tasks at hand. She must have returned to Robbie’s, since for the time being she had no other place to stay, and showered very quickly, before she dismissed Elba so she could speak to Rainey alone. She applied the laser mount over Rainey’s eye in order to allow Lorraine to operate the voice synthesizer, but Rainey, with no small effort, requested it be removed. With the pace of her breathing, she could not focus or move the cursor reliably, and she preferred to see who was talking to her.
In the Feavers’ bedroom there was a mortar and pestle, used to grind up Rainey’s medications so they could be ingested, and in plain sight of Lorraine, Evon retrieved the tablets Robbie had mentioned last night and began pulverizing them. She chatted to Rainey all the while, telling her several endearing stories about Robbie: the way he joshed with Leo, his blind cousin, in the courthouse, or cried when he first met his clients.
“Quite a boy,” she told Rainey. “Quite a boy.” She mixed the powder in water, as Robbie’d said he’d do, and then, after using an alligator clip to clamp the line to the feeding tube in Rainey’s stomach, Evon poured the solution into the clear plastic bag on top of the IV stand.
“Now, Rainey,” she went on, “you see what I’m fixin here. And you might wonder why it’s me, but in the end, it turns out Robbie can’t do this himself. You have to forgive him. You’ve forgiven him a lot of things in this life and you’ll have to forgive him this one, too. There’s a whole lot of weakness in the man, you just can’t get around that, you have to take the hide with the fur, but that’s the fella. And he is just never gonna be able to do this, Rainey. Not this part. That’s the bald unchanging truth. So I’m here. Rather not be, naturally. But I’m here. And I’m easy with it. You know how it is with him, Lorraine. Sometimes you’re even glad to be able to do what he needs.
“But once you get on your way, he’ll be right here with you. I promise you that. He’s gonna come right in and take hold of your hand as you’re falling asleep. He’s gonna be tellin a hundred funny stories about some of the great things you’ve done together and sayin a few prayers. You’re gonna feel him right with you. Right here.” Evon directed herself to Rainey’s remarkable amethyst-colored eyes, where her soul still shone unimpaired. She felt Robbie himself could not have lied more convincingly; indeed, she felt, as he’d feel, that she was not lying at all. Evon had pulled up a chair beside the bed and stroked Rainey’s hand, bruised from the injections and infiltrating IVs, the muscles so wasted they felt almost liquid within the skin. She went on with what she had to say, as Lorraine struggled for breath under the fogged plastic of the oxygen mask.
“Now this, me being here and everything, this may be a little quick. And if it is, I can come back tomorrow. Or the day after. Or whenever. Or never. Because maybe right now, as you, you know, as you face it, I guess, maybe you might very well feel that, after all, this isn’t what you want to do. Everybody will still be here for you. We’ll have that doc here, we’ll have that vent going in no time, no time a
t all. Now, if you’re ready, then I’m here with you, and if you’re not, that’s just fine, I’m here with you, too. But I need you to tell me. If you’re ready, if this is what you want, then you have to tell me. I’m gonna count to three. And after I get to three I want you to blink your eyes very slowly, if you want this to go ahead, if this is your time. Squeeze em shut for a three count, you know, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, and then open them again, and that means for me to go on. Unless you do that, nothin’s gonna happen except me gettin Elba in here to set up a new IV. But otherwise, you have to blink. Blink to say this is what you want. All right? You ready now? I’m going to start.”
She blinked.
NOTE
I TOOK ADVANTAGE OF THE PATIENCE AND knowledge of many persons in writing this book. I am indebted to all of them.
Several Chicago tort lawyers—none of them bearing the remotest resemblance to Robbie—took the time to reflect with me about their practices. Mike Mullen provided an initial primer. Jordan Margolis spent hours with me; his humor and candor were of immense help. I was greatly informed, too, by the reflections and stories of Howard Rigsby, who also read and commented on a draft of this manuscript, a kindness also generously provided by Julian Solotorovsky.
There were several other persons I depended upon for frank comments about earlier drafts—Jennifer Arra, Mark Barry, Arnold Kanter, Carol Kanter, and James McManus (the wonderful novelist and poet, unrelated, even in jest, to the similarly named character) all went over the manuscript scrupulously. Rachel Turow not only read but doubled for several weeks as a premier research assistant. I must also acknowledge the characteristically incisive suggestions of my agents, Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola, and the impeccable guidance of my editor, Jon Galassi, as well as several other persons at Farrar, Straus—Bailey Foster, Elaine Chubb, and Lorin Stein—who made important contributions to the editing process. And of course I have relied at every point, as I have for nearly thirty years now, on the wisdom and judgment of my foremost sounding board, Annette Turow.