CHAPTER 2
Tommy Molto, September 30, 2008
Tomassino Molto III, acting prosecuting attorney for Kindle County, was behind the PA's desk, big and heavy as a '60s Cadillac, wondering how different he was, when his chief deputy, Jim Brand, struck a single knuckle on the door frame.
"Deep thoughts?" asked Brand.
Tommy smiled, making the best efforts of a chronically blunt personality to be elusive. The question of how much he had changed in the last two years arrived in Tommy's brain like a drip from an eave once or twice every hour. People said he was dramatically altered, joking all the time about where he hid the genie and the magic lamp. But Tommy was in his second stint as acting prosecutor and he'd learned to recognize the flattery people always paid to power. How much could anybody change, after all? he wondered. Was he really different? Or was he simply who he had always known he was at the core?
"State copper from Nearing just called in," said Brand once he entered. "They found Barbara Sabich dead in her bed. The chief judge's wife?"
Tommy loved Jim Brand. He was a fine lawyer and loyal in a way few people were these days. But even so, Molto bridled at the suggestion he had a peculiar interest in Rusty Sabich. He did, of course. Twenty-two years later, the name of the chief judge of the court of appeals, who Tommy had unsuccessfully prosecuted for murdering a female colleague of theirs, still coursed through him like current after the insertion of a plug. But what he did not care for was the insinuation he had carried a long grudge against Sabich. A grudge was a badge of the dishonest, who could not face the truth, including a truth that was unflattering to them. Tommy had long accepted the outcome of that case. A trial was a dogfight, and Rusty and his dog had won.
"So?" asked Tommy. "Is the office sending flowers?"
Brand, tall and solid in a white shirt starched stiff as a priest's collar, smiled, revealing good teeth. Tommy did not respond, because he had actually meant it. This had happened to Tommy his entire life, when his own internal logic, so clear and unfaltering, led to a remark that everybody else took for blatant comedy.
"No, it's strange," said Brand. "That's why the lieutenant called it in. It's like, 'What's up with this?' The wife croaks and the husband doesn't even dial 911. Who appointed Rusty Sabich coroner?"
Tommy beckoned for more details. The judge, Brand said, had not told a soul, not even his son, for nearly twenty-four hours. Instead, he had arranged the corpse like a mortician, as if they would be waking her right there. Sabich attributed his actions to shock, to grief. He had wanted it all to be just so before he shared the news. Tommy supposed he could understand that. Twenty-two months ago, at the age of fifty-seven, after a life in which poignant longing seemed as inevitable as breathing, Tommy had fallen in love with Dominga Cortina, a shy but lovely administrator in the Clerk of Court's office. Falling in love was nothing new for Tommy. Every couple of years throughout his life some woman appeared at work, in the pews at church, in his high-rise, for whom he developed a fascination and a desire that ran over him like an oncoming train. The interest, inevitably, was never returned, so Dominga's averted eyes whenever Tommy was near her seemed to be more of the same, surely understandable since she was only thirty-one. But one of her friends had noticed Tommy's pining glances and whispered he should ask her out. They were married nine weeks later. Eleven months after that Tomaso was born. Now if Dominga died, the earth would collapse the same way as a dead star, all matter reduced to an atom. For Tommy was different, he always decided, in one fundamental way: He had felt joy. At long last. And at an age when most people, even those who'd enjoyed large helpings, gave up the hope of having more.
"Thirty-five years married or whatever," Tommy said now. "Jesus. A guy could act strange. He's a strange guy anyway."
"That's what they say," answered Brand. Jim did not know Sabich really. To him, the chief judge was a remote personage. Brand did not recall the days when Rusty roamed the halls here in the PA's office with a scowl seemingly aimed principally at himself. Brand was forty-two. Forty-two was a grown-up. Old enough to be president or to run this office. But it was a different grown-up from Tommy's. What was life to Tommy was history to Brand.
"The copper's whiskers are twitching," said Brand.
Cops were always hinky. Every good guy was really a bad guy in drag.
"What does he think happened?" Molto asked. "Any sign of violence?"
"Well, they'll wait for the coroner, but no blood or anything. No bruises."
"So?"
"Well, I don't know, Boss-but twenty-four hours? You could hide a lot of stuff. Something in the bloodstream could dissipate."
"Like what?"
"Shit, Tom, I'm spitballing. But the coppers think they should do something. That's why I'm coming to you."
Whenever Tommy thought back to the Sabich trial twenty-two years ago, what echoed through time was the teeming emotions. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Carolyn Polhemus, who'd been a friend of Tommy's, one of those women he couldn't help longing for, had been found strangled in her apartment. With the crime falling in the midst of a brutal campaign for prosecuting attorney between Ray Horgan, the incumbent, and Tommy's lifelong friend Nico Della Guardia, the murder investigation was charged from the start. Ray assigned it to Rusty, his chief deputy, who never mentioned that he'd had a secret fling with Carolyn that had ended badly months before. Then Rusty dogged the case and conveniently failed to collect a variety of proof-phone records, fingerprint analyses-that pointed straight at him.
Sabich's guilt had seemed so plain when they charged him after Nico won the election. But the case fell apart at trial. Evidence disappeared, and the police pathologist, who'd identified Rusty's blood type in the semen specimen recovered from Carolyn, had forgotten the victim had her tubes tied and couldn't explain on the stand why she'd used a common spermicide as well. Rusty's lawyer, Sandy Stern, lit up each crack in the prosecution facade and attributed every failure-the missing evidence, the possible contamination of the specimen-to Tommy, to a self-conscious effort to frame Sabich. And it worked. Rusty walked, Nico was recalled by the voters, and to add insult to injury, Sabich was appointed acting PA.
Over the years since, Tommy had tried to make an even assessment of the possibility that Rusty was not guilty. As a matter of reason, it could have been true. And that was his public posture. Tommy never talked to anyone about the case without saying, Who knows? The system worked. The judge went free. Move on. Tommy didn't understand how time began or what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa or why the Trappers lost year after year. And he had no idea who killed Carolyn Polhemus.
But his heart did not really follow the path of reason. There it was scorched on the walls the way people blackened their initials with a torch on the interior of a cave: Sabich did it. A year-long investigation eventually proved that Tommy had committed almost none of the breaches he'd been slyly accused of in the courtroom. Not that Tommy hadn't made mistakes. He'd leaked confidential information to Nico during the campaign, but every deputy PA talked out of school. Yet Tommy hadn't hidden evidence or suborned perjury. Tommy was innocent, and because he knew he was innocent, it seemed a matter of equal logic that Sabich was guilty. But he shared the truth only with himself, not even Dominga, who almost never asked him about work.
"I can't go near this," he told Brand. "Too much history."
Brand hitched a shoulder. He was a big guy, walked on at the U, and ended up an all-conference outside linebacker. That was twenty years ago. He had a huge head and not much hair left on it. And he was shaking it slowly.
"You can't get off a case whenever a defendant comes bobbing by on the merrygo-round for a second time. You want me to go through the files and see how many indictments you've signed already on guys who beat their first beef?"