Reversible Errors, Page 2

  “Whose handwriting is this?” Arthur asked mildly and pushed Rommy’s written confession under the glass. The guard jumped from his chair and demanded to see each page, front and back, to ensure nothing was concealed. Rommy studied the document for quite some time.

  “What you think about stocks?” he asked then. “You ever own stock? What’s that like anyway?”

  After a considerable interval, Pamela started to explain how the exchanges operated.

  “No, I mean sayin you own stock. How’s that feel and all? Man, I ever get outta here, I wanna buy me some stocks. Then I’m gone get all that stuff on the TV. ‘Up a quarter.’ ‘Down Jones.’ I’m gone know what they-all on about.”

  Pamela continued trying to outline the mechanisms of corporate ownership, and Rommy nodded diligently after every sentence, but was soon visibly astray. Arthur pointed again to the sheet Rommy held.

  “The state says you wrote that.”

  Rommy’s inky eyes briefly fell. “Tha’s what I was thinkin,” he said. “Lookin at it and all, I’d kind of said it was mine.”

  “Well, that paper says you killed these three people.”

  Rommy eventually leafed back to the first page.

  “This here,” he said, “this don’t seem to make no sense to me.”

  “It’s not true?”

  “Man, that was so long ago. When was it this here happened?” Arthur told him and Rommy sat back. “I been in that long? What-all year has it got to anyway?”

  “Did you write this confession for the police?” Arthur asked.

  “Knowed I wrote somethin back there in that precinct. Ain nobody told me it was for court.” There was, of course, a signed Miranda warning in the file, acknowledging that any statement Rommy made could be used against him in just that way. “And I ain heard nothin ’bout gettin the needle,” he said. “Tha’s for damn sure. They was a cop tellin me a lot of stuff I wrote down. But I don’t recollect writin nothin like all of that. I ain kill’t nobody.”

  “And why did you write down what the cop was saying?” Arthur asked.

  “Cause I, like, dirtied myself.” One of the more controversial pieces of proof in the case was that Rommy had literally shit in his pants when the detective in charge of the case, Larry Starczek, had started to question him. At trial, the prosecution had been allowed to introduce Rommy’s soiled briefs as evidence of a consciousness of guilt. That, in turn, became one of the prominent issues in Rommy’s many appeals, which no court had managed to address without a snickering undertone.

  Arthur asked if Larry, the detective, had beaten Rommy, denied him food or drink, or an attorney. Though rarely directly responsive, Rommy seemed to be claiming none of that—only that he’d written an elaborate admission of guilt that was completely untrue.

  “Do you happen to remember where you were on July 3rd, 1991?” Pamela asked. Rommy’s eyes enlarged with hopeless incomprehension, and she explained they were wondering if he was in jail.

  “I ain done no serious time ’fore this here,” answered Rommy, who clearly thought his character was at issue.

  “No,” said Arthur. “Could you have been inside when these murders happened?”

  “Somebody sayin that?” Rommy hunched forward confidentially, awaiting a cue. As the idea settled, he managed a laugh. “That’d be a good one.” It was all news to him, although he claimed in those days he was regularly rousted by the police, providing some faint support for Pamela.

  Rommy really had nothing to offer in his own behalf, yet as they conversed, he denied every element of the state’s case. The officers who’d arrested him said they had found a necklace belonging to the female victim, Luisa Remardi, in Gandolph’s pocket. That, too, he said, was a lie.

  “Them po-lice had that thing already. Ain no way it was on me when I got brought down for this.”

  Eventually, Arthur handed the phone to Pamela for further questions. Rommy provided his own eccentric version of the sad social history revealed by his file. He was born out of wedlock; his mother, who was fourteen, drank throughout the pregnancy. She could not care for the boy and sent him to his paternal grandparents in DuSable, fundamentalists who somehow found punishment the meaningful part of religion. Rommy was not necessarily defiant, but strange. He was diagnosed as retarded, lagged in school. And began misbehaving. He had stolen from a young age. He had gotten into drugs. He had fallen in with other no-accounts. Rudyard was full of Rommys, white and black and brown.

  When they’d been together more than an hour, Arthur rose, promising that Pamela and he would do their best.

  “When you-all come back, you bring your wedding dress, okay?” Rommy said to Pamela. “They’s a priest here, he’ll do a good job.”

  As Rommy also stood, the guard again snapped to his feet, taking hold of the chain that circled Rommy’s waist and ran to both his manacles and leg irons. Through the glass, they could hear Rommy prattling. These was real lawyers. The girl was gone marry him. They was gone get him outta here cause he was innocent. The guard, who appeared to like Rommy, smiled indulgently and nodded when Rommy asked permission to turn back. Gandolph pressed his shackled hands and their pale palms to the glass, saying loudly enough to be heard through the partition, “I ’preciate you-all comin down here and everything you doin for me, I really do.”

  Arthur and Pamela were led out, unspeaking. Back in the free air, Pamela shook her slender shoulders in relief as they walked toward Arthur’s car. Her mind predictably remained on Rommy’s defense.

  “Does he seem like a killer?” she asked. “He’s weird. But is that what a killer is like?”

  She was good, Arthur thought, a good lawyer. When Pamela had approached him to volunteer for the case, he had assumed she was too new to be of much help. He had accepted because of his reluctance to disappoint anyone, although it had not hurt that she was graceful and unattached. Discovering she was talented had only seemed to sharpen his attraction.

  “I’ll tell you one thing I can’t see him as,” said Arthur: “your husband.”

  “Wasn’t that something?” Pamela asked, laughing. She was pretty enough to be untouched at some level. Men, Arthur recognized, were often silly around her.

  They passed a couple of jokes, and still bantering, Pamela said, “I can’t seem to meet anyone decent lately, but this”—she threw a hand in the direction of the highway, far off—“is a pretty long trip to make every Saturday night.”

  She was at the passenger door. The wind frothed her blondish hair, as she laughed lightly again, and Arthur felt his heart knock. Even at thirty-eight, he still believed that somewhere within him was a shadow Arthur, who was taller, leaner, better-looking, a person with a suave voice and a carefree manner who could have parlayed Pamela’s remark about her present dry spell with men into a backhanded invitation to lunch or even a more meaningful social occasion. But brought to that petrifying brink where his fantasies adjoined the actual world, Arthur realized that, as usual, he would not step forward. He feared humiliation, of course, but if he were nonchalant enough she could decline, as she was nearly certain to do, in an equally innocuous fashion. What halted him, instead, was the cold thought that any overture would be, in a word, unfair. Pamela was a subordinate, inevitably anxious about her prospects, and he was a partner. There was no changing the unequal footing or his leverage, no way Arthur Raven could depart from the realm of settled decency where he felt his only comfort with himself. And yet even as he accepted his reasoning, he knew that with women some obstacle of one kind or another always emerged, leaving him confined with the pangs of fruitless longing.

  He used the gizmo in his pocket to unlatch Pamela’s door. While she sank into the sedan, he stood in the bitter dust that had been raised in the parking lot. The death of his hopes, no matter how implausible, was always wrenching. But the prairie wind gusted again, this time clearing the air and carrying the smell of freshly turned earth from the fields outside town, an aroma of spring. Love—the sweet amazing possibility
of it—struck in his chest like a note of perfect music. Love! He was somehow exhilarated by the chance he had lost. Love! And at that moment he wondered for the first time about Rommy Gandolph. What if he was innocent? That too was an inspiration almost as sweet as love. What if Rommy was innocent!

  And then he realized again that Rommy wasn’t. The weight of Arthur’s life fell over him, and the few categories that described him came back to mind. He was a partner. And without love. His father was dead. And Susan was still here. He considered the list, felt again that it added up to far less than he had long hoped for, or, even, was entitled to, then opened the car door to head back to it all.

  2

  JULY 5, 1991

  The Detective

  WHEN LARRY STARCZEK HEARD about the murder of Gus Leonidis, he was in bed with a prosecutor named Muriel Wynn, who had just told him she was getting serious with somebody else.

  “Dan Quayle,” she answered, when he demanded to know who. “He fell for my spelling.”

  Irked, Larry agitated one foot through the clothing on the hotel carpeting in search of his briefs. When his toe brushed his beeper, it was vibrating.

  “Bad stuff,” he said to Muriel after he got off the phone. “Good Gus just bought the farm. They found him and two customers dead of gunshot wounds in his freezer.” He shook out his trousers and told her he had to go. The Commander wanted all hands on deck.

  Tiny and dark, Muriel was sitting up straight on the stiff hotel linen, still without a stitch.

  “Is there a prosecutor assigned yet?” she asked.

  Larry hadn’t a clue, but he knew how it went. If she showed up, they’d assume somebody sent her. That was another great thing about Muriel, Larry thought. She loved the street as much as he did.

  He asked her again who the guy was.

  “I mean I just want to move on,” Muriel answered. “I think this other thing—I think it may go somewhere. I might even get married.”

  “Married!”

  “Hell, Larry, it’s not a disease. You’re married.”

  “Eh,” he answered. Five years ago he had married for the second time, because it made sense. Nancy Marini, a good-hearted nurse, was easy on the eyes, kind, and well disposed toward his boys. But as Nancy had pointed out several times recently, he’d never said goodbye to any of the stuff that had led his first marriage to ruin, the catting around or the fact that his principal adult relationship was with the dead bodies he scraped off the street. Marriage number two was just about past tense, but even with Muriel, Larry preferred to keep his problems to himself. “You’ve always said marriage was a disaster,” he told her.

  “My marriage to Rod was a disaster. But I was nineteen.” At thirtyfour, Muriel had the distinction of having been a widow for more than five years.

  It was the Fourth of July weekend and the Hotel Gresham, in the early afternoon, was strangely silent. The manager here owed Larry for a few situations he’d handled—guests who wouldn’t leave, a pro who was working the lounge. He made sure Larry got a room for a few hours whenever he asked. As Muriel drifted past him for the mirror, he grabbed her from behind and did a brief grind, his lips close to the short black curls by her ear.

  “Is your new beau as much fun as I am?”

  “Larry, this isn’t the National Fuck-Offs where you just got eliminated. We’ve always had a good time.”

  Combat defined their relations. He enjoyed it maybe more than the sex. They had met in law school, seven years ago now, when both had started at night. Muriel became a star and transferred to the day division. Larry had decided to quit even before he won custody of his sons, because he didn’t have the right reasons to be there. He was trying to bolster himself after his divorce, to stay out of the taverns, even to improve the opinions of his parents and brothers who saw police work as somewhat below him. In the end, Muriel and their occasional interludes were probably the best things to emerge from the experience. There were women in his life, too many, where you yearned but it was never really right. You both carried on afterwards about how terrific it had been, but there was a sad calculation to everything that had occurred. That had never been the case with Muriel. With her gapped teeth and pudgy nose, built narrowly enough to wash down a drain, Muriel wouldn’t be on many magazine covers. Yet after marrying twice for looks, Larry sometimes felt like tightening a noose around his own throat when he was with her, just for knowing so little about himself.

  While Muriel finished batting powder over her summer freckles, Larry flipped on the radio. The news stations all had the murders by now, but Greer, the Commander, had clamped down on the details.

  “I’d really love to catch this case,” she said. She was three and a half years on the job as a prosecutor and not even close to assignment to a capital prosecution, even as the second or third chair. But you never got very far telling Muriel to slow down. In the mirror over the dresser, her small dark eyes sought his. “I love history,” she said. “You know. Big events. Things with consequence. When I was a little girl, my mother was always saying that to me: Be a part of history.”

  He nodded. The case would be big.

  “Doin Gus,” Larry said. “Somebody’s gotta sizzle for that, don’t you figure?”

  The compact snapped closed and Muriel agreed with a sad smile.

  “Everybody dug Gus,” she said.

  AUGUSTUS LEONIDIS had owned the restaurant called Paradise for more than thirty years. The North End neighborhood had gone to ruin around him shortly after he opened, when its final bulwark against decline, DuSable Field, the small in-city airport, had been abandoned by the major airlines in the early 1960s because its runways were too short to land jets. Yet Gus, full of brash immigrant optimism, had refused to move. He was a patriot of a lost kind. What area was ‘bad’ if it was in America?

  Despite the surroundings, Gus’s business had prospered, due both to the eastbound exit from U.S. 843 directly across from his front door and his legendary breakfasts, in which the signature item was a baked omelette that arrived at the table the size of a balloon. Paradise was a renowned Kindle County crossroads, where everyone was enthusiastically welcomed by the garrulous proprietor. He’d been called Good Gus for so long that nobody remembered exactly why—whether it was the freebies for unfortunates, his civic activities, or his effusive, upbeat style. Over the years, he was steadily named in the Tribune’s annual poll as one of Kindle County’s favorite citizens.

  Out on the street, when Larry arrived, the cops from the patrol division had done their best to make themselves important, parking their black-and-whites across the avenue with the light bars atop the vehicles spinning. Various vagrants and solid citizens had been attracted. It was July and nobody was wearing much of anything, since the old apartment buildings nearby didn’t have the wiring to support air-conditioning. The poor girls with their poor-girl dos of straightened hair shellacked with fixer were across the way, minding their babies. At the curb, several TV news vans preparing for broadcast had raised their antennas, which looked like enlarged kitchen tools.

  Muriel had driven separately, but she was lurking near the broad windows of the restaurant, waiting for Larry to edge her into the case. Strolling up, Larry pointed to her in vague recognition and said, “Hey.” Even dressed casually, Muriel wore her Minnie Mouse high heels. She always wanted more height and, Larry suspected, also a chance to emphasize a pretty nice derriere. Muriel used what she had. Watching her blue shorts wagging in the wind, he experienced a brief thrill at the recollection of the flesh now concealed to everyone else.

  He flipped his tin at the two uniforms near the door. Inside, on the left, three civilians were seated together on one bench of a booth—a black man in an apron, a wrung-out woman in a beige housedress, and a younger guy with rounded shoulders and an earring big enough to twinkle at Larry from thirty feet. The three seemed to be their own universe, isolated from the whirl of police activity around them. Employees or family, Larry figured, waiting either to be questioned
or to ask questions of their own. He signaled Muriel and she sat down near them on one of the revolving soda fountain stools that grew up like a row of toadstools in front of the counter.

  The crime scene was being processed by dozens of people—at least six techs, in their khaki shirts, were dusting for prints—but the atmosphere was notably subdued. When there was a crowd like this, there could sometimes be a lot of commotion, gallows humor, and plenty of buzz. But today, everyone had been hauled in off holiday leave in the middle of a four-day weekend, meaning they were grumpy or sleepy. Besides, the Commander was here. He was solemn by nature. And the crime was bad.

  The Detective Commander, Harold Greer, had set up in Gus’s tiny office behind the kitchen, and the team of detectives he’d called in was assembling there. Gus, unexpectedly, was tidy. Above the desk was a Byzantine cross, a girlie calendar from a food wholesaler, and pictures of Gus’s family taken, Larry surmised, on a return trip to Greece. The photos, showing a wife, two daughters, and a son, had to be fifteen years old, but that was the time Gus, like most guys in Larry’s experience, wanted to remember, when he was really pulling the sleigh, building a business, raising a family. The wife, smiling and looking pretty fetching in a rumpled bathing suit, was the same poor wretch sitting by the door.

  Greer was on the phone, holding one finger in his ear as he explained the status of things to somebody from the Mayor’s Office, while the detectives around the room watched him. Larry went over to Dan Lipranzer for the lowdown. Lip, who had the slicked-back do of a 1950s-style juvenile delinquent, was, as usual, by himself in a corner. Lipranzer always appeared cold, even in July, drawn in on himself like a molting bird. He’d been the first dick on the scene and had interviewed the night manager, Rafael.

  Paradise closed only twice each year—for Orthodox Christmas and the Fourth of July, the birthdays of God and America, the two things Gus swore by. Every other day, there were lines out the door from 5 a.m. until noon, with a slower trade in the remaining hours comprised of cops and cabbies and many air travelers coming or going from DuSable Field, which had revived when Trans-National Air initiated regional service there a few years ago.