Molto is going along as precisely as an ice-skater, avoiding the actual question of what my dad asked Dana.
"I suppose, Mr. Molto, for a brief period, I was more intent on terminating my marriage. I cooled off after that and reassessed."
"It wasn't the fact that you were at the height of your election campaign for the supreme court that made you hesitate, was it?"
"I certainly wouldn't have filed for divorce before November 4."
"Would have looked bad, wouldn't it?"
"I was much more concerned about the fact that I would have made news by filing then, whereas it would have been immaterial to anybody but my family after the election."
"But you concede, Judge, don't you, that some voters wouldn't be pleased to learn you were ending your marriage?"
"I imagine that's true."
"While they could be expected to be sympathetic if you suddenly found yourself a widower?"
My dad doesn't answer. He just shrugs and tosses up a hand.
"Did you tell your wife, Judge, that you were thinking of ending the marriage?"
"I didn't, no."
"Because-?"
"Because I was undecided. Because my mood changed again after I saw Mr. Mann. And because my wife was volatile. She could become very, very angry. There was no value in discussing it before I had made a final decision."
"You didn't look forward to talking about this with her, then, Judge?"
"Not at all. It would have been extremely unpleasant."
"So we can say, Judge, can't we, that the fact that your wife died when she did seemed to save you from confronting her or the voters?"
My dad makes the same face, part wince, part frown, as if this is all too stupid, trying to seem indifferent to the trap he's wandered into.
"You could say that if you wanted to, Mr. Molto."
"All in all, Judge, it was a very convenient time for Mrs. Sabich to die, wasn't it?"
"Objection," Stern says with vigor.
"Enough now," Judge Yee says quietly. "Time for other subject."
"Very well," Tommy says again, more deliberately than last time, and wanders back to his notes. He is preening just a little. Molto knows he is still knocking it out of the park. "Let's talk some more about your computer."
The night my father learned he was going to be indicted-November 4, 2008, a date I'm not likely to forget, the day his legal career was supposed to have reached its absolute zenith-the Kindle County Unified Police Force searched our house in Nearing. The police took both computers out of the house and, clearly looking for traces of phenelzine, seized all of my dad's clothing plus every implement from the kitchen-every plate, every glass, every open bottle or container in the refrigerator or the cabinets-and all my father's tools. Even after that, they weren't done. During the initial search, they had discovered some concrete patching my dad had done a few months before in the basement-my parents were always fighting seepage-and the cops returned and opened up the walls with jackhammers. Then they came back with another warrant and tore up the backyard, because one of the neighbors said he was sure my father had been out there digging around the time my mom died. He had been, too, planting that rhododendron for her the day the four of us had dinner. Furthermore, the prosecutors were not only jerks about ransacking the house, they also refused to release anything they seized, meaning my father basically had no wardrobe, no personal PC, and not so much as a pot to boil water in the kitchen for months.
The computer in particular was a point of warfare, because my dad, who worked a lot at night, regularly downloaded court documents to the home PC. There were dozens and dozens of draft opinions on there, many of them involving appeals in which the Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office was a party, as well as lots of memorandums reflecting the internal workings of the court of appeals, in which the judges sort of dropped their shorts and shared candid thoughts about lawyers, arguments, and occasionally one another. The appellate judges were gonzo when they realized this had come into the prosecutors' hands.
George Mason, who became acting chief, didn't want the court of appeals to be seen as shielding my dad, but he would have had to go to court to calm his colleagues were it not for a twist I couldn't help finding amusing: There was no judge to settle the dispute. Everybody in the superior court had already declined to hear my dad's case, and even when a judge was appointed, there was going to be nowhere for the loser to appeal since the appellate court itself was one of the parties. Eventually Molto agreed with George that the PAs would image the hard drive, making an exact copy, and then examine the drive under the supervision of George or someone he appointed, so that no internal court documents were viewed. They made the same agreement about the computer that had been in my dad's chambers.
After my dad's personal PC was analyzed, the home computer was turned over to Judge Mason, and both computers, from home and court, remained in George's chambers side by side for the month it took before Judge Yee was appointed. During that period, my father was allowed to get what he needed off the hard drives to finish his pending opinions or keep his calendar, but only when George or his delegate could witness this and make an exact log of every keystroke. My dad went over there once and found his return to the realm he used to rule far too humiliating to repeat under these conditions. After that, the prosecutors agreed that any further copying from the PCs could be done by emissaries approved by Judge Mason and the PAs, who turned out to be me or, at Judge Mason's suggestion, Anna, whom he knew and trusted as my dad's former clerk and a minor tech guru. Once Yee was appointed, he sided with the prosecutors and ordered both computers turned over to them. The computer from my dad's chambers had nothing of value on it-just like my mom's. But my dad's PC was kind of a gold mine for the PAs and they haul it up to court each day in the same pink shrink-wrap in which it's remained ever since their expert, Dr. Gorvetich, came to the court of appeals to retrieve it in December.
"Now the day before your wife died, Judge, you shredded several e-mails on your home PC, didn't you?"
"I did not do that, Mr. Molto."
"All right," says Tommy. He nods as if he had expected the denial, and walks a little bit, with the grim air of a parent about to give a spanking. "Your Internet provider is ClearCast, is that right?"
"Yes."
"Now, just so we're all on the same page, when someone sends you an e-mail, it actually goes to ClearCast's server, and you then pull it down to your home PC through
your e-mail client. Right?"
"I'm not a computer guy, Mr. Molto, but that sounds about right."
"And going back to Professor Gorvetich's testimony, you set up your account at ClearCast so that e-mails were deleted from the ClearCast server after thirty days, correct?"
"Not to be difficult, Mr. Molto, but it was my wife who dealt with that sort of thing. She was a PhD in math and knew a great, great deal more about computers than I did."
"But we can agree, Judge, that unlike your computer at the court of appeals, you actually downloaded e-mails from the ClearCast server to your e-mail client at home."
"If I understand what you're saying, you mean that when I was at work, I'd go to the ClearCast website to see my personal e-mail, but at home, those e-mails came right to the e-mail program on my PC and were stored there."
"Exactly what I'm saying. And after thirty days, that was the only place those e-mails remained, right?"
"I'd have to take your word for it. But it sounds right."
"Now, did you routinely delete the e-mail on your PC at home?"
"No. Sometimes I'd send documents from the court to my personal account, and I could never really tell what I was going to need, so I tended to just let e-mail accumulate."
"And by the way, Judge. You told us before that your wife sometimes used your PC."