Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow Read Free Book Online Page A

brawls. I have such a vivid recollection of one night when I awoke to their disturbance and found that my mother had taken hold of a handful of my father's Brillo-y red hair while she slapped him with a rolled-up newspaper, as if he were a dog. The aftermath of these quarrels would send my mother to bed for days, where she would lie spent, dwelling with the sensational pain of enormous migraine headaches that required her to remain in a darkened room and left me under an injunction to make no sound.
    Lacking that kind of refuge now, I move over to a basket of clean laundry Barbara has brought up and begin matching the socks. For a moment we are silent, left to the burbling of the TV and the nighttime noises of the house. A tiny finger of the river runs behind the homes half a block away, and without the traffic you can hear it licking. The furnace kicks in two floors below. On for the first time today, it will spill up through the ducts a kind of oily effluvium.
    "Nico was trying hard enough to look unhappy," Barbara finally tells me.
    "He wasn't very successful if you saw him up close. He was positively radiant. He thinks he's got a shot at Raymond now."
    "Is that possible?"
    I sort the socks and shrug. "He's gained a lot of ground with this thing."
    Barbara, a witness all these years to Raymond's invincibility, is obviously surprised, but the mathematician in her shows, for I can see that she is quickly factoring the new possibilities. She grabs at her hair, gray-flecked and curly, worn in a fashionable shag, and her pretty face takes on the light of curiosity.
    "What would you do, Rusty, if that happened? If Raymond lost?"
    "Accept it. What else could I do?"
    "I mean for a living."
    Blue with blue. Black with black. It is not easy with only incandescent light. Some years ago I used to talk about leaving the office. That was when I could still imagine myself as a defense lawyer. But I never got around to making that move, and it has been some time since we have spoken at all about my future.
    "I don't know what I'd do," I tell her honestly. "I'm a lawyer. I'd practice law. Teach. I don't know. Delay says he's going to keep me on as chief deputy."
    "Do you believe that?"
    "No." I take my stockings to my drawer. "He was a river of bullshit today. Told me, in a very serious tone, that the only real primary opponent he had been afraid of was me. You know, as if I would talk Raymond into stepping aside and anointing me successor.
    "You should have," Barbara says.
    I look back at her.
    "Really." Her enthusiasm, in a way, is not surprising. Barbara has always felt a spouse's disdain for the boss. And besides, all of this comes, somewhat, at my expense. I'm the one who lacked the nerve to do what everybody else could see was obvious.
    "I am not a politician."
    "Oh, you'd make do," says Barbara. "You'd love to be P.A." As I figured: I am tweaked by wife's superior knowledge of my nature. I decide to sidestep and tell Barbara that this is all academic. Raymond will pull through.
    "Bolcarro will finally endorse him. Or we'll catch the killer" — I nod toward the TV set—"and he'll ride into Election Day with all the media murmuring his name."
    "How's he going to do that?" asks Barbara. "Do they have a suspect?"
    "We have shit."
    "So?"
    "So Dan Lipranzer and Rusty Sabich will work day and night for the next two weeks and catch Raymond a killer. That's the strategy. Carefully devised."
    The remote snaps and the TV shrinks to a star. Behind me, I hear from Barbara a whinny, a snort. It is not a pleasant sound. When I look back, her eyes, fixed upon me, are stilled to a zero point, an absolute in hatred.
    "You are so predictable," she says, low and mean. "You're in charge of this investigation?"
    "Of course."
    " 'Of course'?"
    "Barbara, I'm the chief deputy prosecuting attorney and Raymond's running for his life. Who else would handle the investigation? Raymond would do it himself if he weren't campaigning fourteen hours a day."
    It was