Today I sit as a judge of the Appellate Court. As the stink of scandal spread through the Kindle County courts, the Democratic Farmers amp; 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 baffled 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, Loraine. 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 at 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-onethousand, 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.