Tommy, August 4-5, 2009
Tommy always wondered what would become of kids like Orestes Mauro, the PA office's evidence specialist, who dealt with digital equipment. Having lived this long, Tommy felt he should have some idea, but he really didn't think there was anybody like Orestes when he was young. The kid was smart enough and got his work done, albeit his own way. But Orestes lived a life of play. The buds to his iPod were in his ears at all times, except when he removed one to speak to somebody else. Whenever Tommy overheard Orestes talking in the hall, it was about online games and the latest releases for his Xbox. And most of his interest in computers treated the machine and the software as a multilevel puzzle, so the task at hand, whatever it was, was largely secondary to the beguiling enigma of how everything inside the box functioned. Work, as a boring necessity, was something Orestes acknowledged, as long as it did not last too long. He was a sweet, friendly kid. If he noticed you were there.
Orestes was visible in the evidence section, working over several cardboard boxes on which he was tapping out rhythms, when Tommy came through the door to the PA's office. It was close to seven p.m. He had been stuck in traffic far too long on his way back in from Morrisroe and the state work farm, and he'd finally pulled off to take surface streets the rest of the way home, which brought him past the County Building. He had already missed dinner with Dominga and Tomaso, so he decided to stop and pick up the files for his meeting at the court of appeals in the morning. He could take an extra half hour at home in the a.m. and give Dominga a little more time to sleep.
Catching sight of Orestes, he veered into the evidence room, a converted warehouse space behind the freight elevator. Evidence gathered by grand jury subpoena was required by law to remain in control of the PA's office, rather than the police, and it was boxed and cataloged here. When O saw Tommy coming, he turned a full circle on his toe, a little bit of Michael Jackson.
"Boss man!" He was always too loud with the buds in.
"Hey, O." Tommy motioned to his ears, and Orestes pulled one out. Tommy tapped his other side, too. Orestes complied but clearly expected something grave.
"T's up?"
"The Sabich case," Tommy answered.
Orestes groaned in response. "That the judge?"
"The judge," answered Tommy.
"Oh, man, that whole thing, that's just too fucked up," he said.
A fair analysis. Tommy had been thinking about Rusty all the way back. It had been completely unsettling to see him in that cell, but more to Tommy than Sabich from the appearances. Tom had anticipated that Rusty might have been depressed or goofy, like most of the guys in seg, but there was something about him that seemed freed. His hair was long and he had a prison beard, whiter than Tommy might have expected, so he looked like an island castaway. And he had the same air-you can't touch me. The worst has happened. Now you can't touch me. Even so, Sabich had remained himself. He probably hadn't lied to Tommy, but he'd spoken in his own way, careful, even cagey, about the words he was using, so he could tell himself he was being honest, but typical of Rusty, making sure only he really knew the truth. Which left Tommy in the same bind he'd been in with Rusty for decades now. What was the fucking truth, anyway?
"I'm still trying to figure out how they screwed around with the computer."
"Oh, man," said Orestes. "Can't figure that. Wasn't me, man. I know that." He laughed.
"Me neither. But I keep thinking there's something we missed. I'm wondering if maybe Sabich copped to the obstruction to protect his kid. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Okay," said Orestes. He took the extraordinary step of turning off his iPod and sat on a metal stool. "Nobody asked me, but remember that big meet we had after you all had been in court, once you knew the card was phony? And Milo was trippin about how nobody who was on the computer in Judge Mason's chambers-not Sabich or the kid or the former clerk-not any one of them had time to mess around and to do all the stuff it took to get the card on there. Remember?"
"Sure."
"And Jimmy B., he went off then about how Sabich must have snuck into the courthouse?"
"Right."
"But here's the thing. What if it was all of them? What if they were in this together, planting that card? One of them downloaded from a flash drive, and another ran Spy, and another edited the directory. Together all of them, even a couple of them, had the time."
Tommy grabbed his forehead. Of course. Maybe Orestes had a better future than he thought.
"So is that what you think happened?" Molto asked.
Orestes laughed out loud. "Dude," he said, "I don't have a clue. Computers, man, are always a trip. Ain't no one person who knows everything. That's why they're so cool."
Tommy contemplated this bit of philosophy. It was pretty sci-fi. Computers, O was saying, were already like people in the sense that you could never fully understand them.
"But if you were planting that card, is that how you would have done it?"
"Me?" O laughed again, a high-pitched musical sound. "Oh, I could have done it for sure. But that's me."
Orestes's casual confidence was slightly alarming. His job was to set up systems to ensure the evidence in his control was tamper-proof. Naturally, Tommy asked what he meant.
"Well, that's just how it rolled out. Like the night I was up there with Jimmy B. to take the wrapping off-"
"I thought that was in the morning, right before court?"
"Hey, man. Twelve p.m. to eight." Orestes laid a thumb on one of the vivid stripes in his shirt. "Gotta go to school in the a.m. Get an education. Make something of myself." Orestes did a rim shot on one of the cardboard boxes to reemphasize the point. "So I went down to Brand's office, because the PC was on the trial cart, and together we pulled off all the wrapping, which took like forever because we had initialed three or four layers, and then I get down to the components and when I looked at it all, it's like, Fuck me, this is messed up."
"Meaning?"
"Cause, you know, the evidence tape on the tower, it was across the power button. But the power button is recessed, like down? So there's like this itty-bitty space under the tape, and I tell Brand, like, 'Bad job, we done a bad job, you could power that baby up.' He's like, 'No way,' so I had one of my tools-" From his breast pocket Orestes produced a tiny driver, small enough to fix the screws in eyeglasses. "And I just run it up in there. Brand, man, he's my peeps, but he just about choked me. He's thinking I was gonna violate the tape. That was the day the chiquita showed up from the bank, and Brand was like, 'Whoa, coolio, it's way bad enough already.' I didn't do nothing. Just scared him. Gorvetich and them got all the tape off in the morning, no problem.
"But that's what I'm sayin. If I was going to mess with the computer, I'd have messed with it then."
"So you could have turned the computer on?"
"I didn't."
"I know you didn't, O. But you could have? The other components, like the keyboard and the monitor-they were still sealed, weren't they?"
"Totally, man. But the ports on the tower weren't taped. You coulda used another mouse or monitor that was compatible. There're only about a billion. That's why I was tripped out about it. But that's not what happened or nothin. It had all been wrapped up for months, anyway. The initials were there and everything, I'm just saying, since you ask, that's how I coulda done it. But I didn't, and Sabich and them-they did. But I don't know how. Rule one, man. What you don't know, you don't know. You just don't."
O had a great smile under the little fuzz that passed for a 'stache. He was a really smart kid, Tommy thought again. And as the years went on, he'd begin to realize what it was he didn't know.
Brand was in his office in the morning, moving files around on his desk, when Tommy returned about eleven a.m. from his conference at the court of appeals. The substance of the meeting had been largely the same as the meeting at the prison yesterday. Nobody had enough money. What do they cut?
Brand had taken the day off yesterday to interview political consultants. His opponent, Beroja, had the advantage of an existing organization. Brand would have a lot of help from the party, but he had to get his own people in place.
Molto asked what he made of the consultants he'd met.
"I liked the two women. O'Bannon and Meyers? Pretty sharp. Only guess what their last local campaign was."
"Sabich?"
"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 war. 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.