Reversible Errors (50 page)

Arthur arrived then and immediately asked what was wrong. She was about to answer him frankly but she could see a significant smile drain from his face at the sight of her. Not tonight, she thought. Sh
e w
ould not darken his mood or distract him tonight. Or any other night, for that matter. She had come to the brink of telling him too many times and then retreated. She was keeping her secret. "You look as if something good has happened," she told him. "Good? It may be good. It's majorly confusing. They found Faro." "You're kidding!"

"That's not the half of it. Muriel wrote me a letter." "May I see?" She had her hand out even before Arthur had fully removed the envelope from his pocket. It was on the letterhead of Muriel D. Wynn, Chief Deputy, Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney's Office. The reference line noted People v. Gandolph and the old criminal court case number. Even at this late stage, Muriel was reluctant to acknowledge she was stuck in the alien terrain of federal court.

Dear Mr. Raven:

Over the last two months, this office, in the course of its continuing investigation of this matter, has encountered a variety of information concerning Collins Farwell. As you know, Mr. Farwell has refused to offer testimony on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment. Furthermore, the information received appears to have no immediate relevance to your client. Nevertheless, in the interest of full disclosure, we wish to advise you of the following . . .

Eight bulleted items trailed down the page. Muriel had crafted the letter to be largely opaque, not to Arthur, who'd see through the obscurities, but to the Court of Appeals, to whom she knew the document would soon be displayed. But imbedded in the details of various records concerning Faro Cole, most of which Arthur had shown Gillian earlier in the week, were two matters of note: a summary of statements that Collins Farwell, Erno's nephew, had made in June while being served with a subpoena in Atlanta. And an acknowledgment that two police officers had recently identified photographs of Collins as Faros.

"My Lord!" cried Gillian at that sentence. Her heart was racing.

After a moment, she was struck by her own reactions, the fact she had no pretense of distance any longer. She asked Arthur what he was thinking.

"I'm not sure that whats going on in my head is called thinking," he said. "Pamela and I were just bouncing off the walls. I'll tell you one thing though: I won't be joining Muriel's campaign committee. A lot of this was pretty underhanded." Arthur suspected that Muriel or Larry had shadowed Pamela on her visit to the Department of Registration. And he was angry about the failure to reveal Collins's statements in Atlanta. "I'd already made a motion to give Collins immunity. In her response, Muriel claimed there was no evidence that Collins had anything favorable to say for Rommy."

Yet his chief disappointment seemed to be with Erno, who had told Arthur that Faro was a cheap hustler who had disappeared long ago.

"We'll never touch bottom with the lies Erno told," Arthur said. "It's like quicksand. We just keep sinking."

"I wonder," said Gillian. Erno was where her thoughts had gone, too, and had lingered. "Erno said he was out to protect Collins when he first involved Larry back in 1991. I wonder if he hasn't been protecting him all along."

"By shooting him in the back? Some protective uncle. I think I'd rather have a gift certificate."

Gillian laughed. He was right. But not completely.

"Even there, though, at Ike's, Erno chose not to acknowledge that Faro was his nephew. Have you wondered why?"

"I can guess. Collins walked into Ike's holding a gun. Felon in possession of a firearm is a two-year minimum mandatory."

"So Erno did protect his nephew," said Gillian.

Arthur shifted a shoulder, granting she might have some kind of point.

"I just wonder, Arthur, if at the end of it all, Erno didn't maintain his own consistency with you. Your instinct was that Erno always told you the truth about one thing."

"Which is?"

"That Rommy is innocent."

"Oh," said Arthur. "That."

"So lets assume he had two dominating motives: exculpating Rommy. And protecting Collins."

Arthur picked up Muriels envelope and tapped it against his hand as he pondered. Soon, he was nodding.

"That would explain why Erno never mentioned the tickets before Genevieves dep," Arthur said. "He was protecting Collins, rather than his pension. If the airline found out Collins had been stealing tickets with Luisa and Rommy, even if it was back in the Stone Age, they'd probably bounce him as a travel agent-and sue his ass, too."

"Possible. But I was actually thinking it could be more than that. Rommy was angry with Luisa for shortchanging him. Is it possible Collins was angry with her, too? For jeopardizing their scheme? Or perhaps he'd been shortchanged as well. Remember, we decided Faro was probably at Paradise that night."

Arthur stared at her. The sophisticated dinner clamor of the restaurant rose up around them, low strings, clinking stemware, pleasant chatter.

"You think Collins is the killer?"

"I don't know, Arthur. We're trading ideas. But clearly Erno wanted to free Rommy, without disclosing what Collins had been up to."

Arthur digested it, then said, "Our next move has to be to renew my motion to immunize Collins. Right?"

"You certainly want to hear from him."

"What do you think the chances are that the Court of Appeals will grant a motion to reconsider so we can pursue Collins's testimony?"

"Not outstanding. It looks like an eleventh-hour delay. And they'll want to adhere to their prior conclusions about the case, no less than other human beings."

Arthur nodded, frowning. He had the same opinion.

"You want a friendlier forum, if you can find one, Arthur. Someone who was inclined to believe Erno in the first place, I'd say."

"Harlow?"

"Why not?"

"He has no jurisdiction for one thing. The case is in the Court of Appeals."

But she had ideas about that, too. Like Muriel, Gillians career had been made exclusively in the state courts. Her knowledge of federal law and procedure had been nil when she entered Alderson, but after years of helping other prisoners craft futile petitions for relief in the federal system, she had acquired considerable expertise.

Arthur reached down for his briefcase to make notes. Together, they began to sketch out a motion. Each came up with phrases and Arthur read the sentences back. He moved the candle on the tabletop next to his pad. In the wan light, she watched him, eager, happy with her and with himself. The focus of her concern was as much Arthur as Gandolph, but she shared his excitement in finding some hope for Rommy in the law. The power of the law, whose drab reality was nothing more than words on the page, struck her then, not simply its determining role in the life of other citizens, but in hers. The law had been her career, the site of her triumphs and of her downfall, and now, through Arthur, a source of recovery. Its words, long forcibly unspoken, remained the language of her adult being. Even as Arthur and she gently debated what to write next, she was unsure whether to accept that recognition with exhilaration or misery.

Chapter
35

AUGUST 10, 2001

The God of Fingerprint
s m
idday ON Friday, Larry received a message from Maurice Dicker- man, Chief Fingerprint Examiner and Head of the Kindle County Unified Police Force Crime Lab, requesting that Larry visit his office in McGrath Hall. After studying the slip, Larry rolled it into a ball the size of a pea and tossed it. Once he saw Dickerman, there would be no choice about calling Muriel, which Larry had avoided for the last two days. This morning, she'd left him a voice mail about Arthur's latest filing in the Court of Appeals, in which she'd sounded chipper and cute, clearly happy to have the excuse to track him down. He'd promptly pushed delete.

In the old days, he'd run from her after every encounter, but that was because he wouldn't say to himself that he was a complete case for this woman, that the air smelled cleaner and brisker when she was around, that he needed someone to go with him stride for stride. No
w h
e was hiding because he was unsure about how much of that he wanted to say today.

And while he avoided Muriel, he avoided his wife as well. He had thought this stuff was done in his life-smelling his clothes before he put them in the hamper to ensure Nancy wouldn't catch the scent of another woman's powder or cologne. Ten years ago, he'd been so blown out and defeated when Muriel called it quits that he couldn't fake it with Nancy. One evening after he'd collapsed in a recliner, several beers to the wind, Nancy had stood over the chair.

'Ripped again? Let me guess. One of your chickie-poos dumped you?'

He felt too weak to lie, but she was astonished by the truth.

'Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?'

'You asked.'

'And I should cut you some slack?'

But she did, because she was Nancy and too nice not to. They tacitly agreed that they'd get back to the lawyer with whom they'd been discussing a bloodless division of property when Larry was in a better frame of mind. Six months later, they still meant to do it. Even after two years, Larry figured each of them was just waiting for something better to come along. Nancy, however, held certain trumps. She was never going to leave his boys. And as time went on, his gratitude to her for that and for a character worthy of canonization approached the boundless. There was no longer much point in other women -they did not measure up to Muriel, and, more important, he owed Nancy that much respect, after she'd passed on the opportunity to throw his ass out. Sometimes when Larry considered the prevailing amity between his wife and him, he wondered if this was simply how marriage was supposed to be, calm and respectful. But no. No. There had to be a melody line that grabbed you, not just harmony and chorus.

That conclusion brought him back to Muriel. No good was going to come of this, he thought. That was something his mother liked to say and she'd say it now. If he'd slept two hours total since Wednesday, that was a lot. The inside of his stomach felt as if it had been sandpapered, and in the mirror, his eyes looked like craters. And even he could not see there any clue about what he really wanted. All he kne
w f
or certain as he arrived at Dickerman s door was that his life had gotten beyond him.

An angular New Yorker, Maurice Dickerman was generally referred to by cops and prosecutors and even most of the defense bar simply as the Fingerprint God. Mo was a regular lecturer at universities and law-enforcement conferences around the country, a distinguished researcher who'd authored the leading texts on prints. Given his renown, on any given day he was more likely to be offering expert testimony in Alaska or New Delhi than supervising the Crime Lab, but on a police force where scandal was not infrequent-two separate crime rings of cops had been busted in the last year, one for selling dope, one for robbing jewelers -Mo was a precious asset, a unique source of credibility and distinction. In the mid-1990s, his threat to leave had finally choked the money out of the count)' to buy an automated fingerprint identification system, an innovation other departments of comparable size had possessed years before.

In 1991, when Gus Leonidis, Paul Judson, and Luisa Remardi had been murdered, an unknown fingerprint generally could not be identified without isolating a specific suspect. Unless a perp had left behind all the fingerprints that appeared on his ten-card -the inked impression of each finger taken when a suspect was booked -there was no way to tell which finger a partial came from, and thus no way to match the unknown print against the vast catalog of fingerprints maintained by the Force locally and the FBI nationwide. Computer imaging changed that. AFIS, automated fingerprint identification systems, allowed the machine to compare an impression against the stored pictures of ever)' known print in the county. AFIS had made it possible, for example, for Muriel to determine overnight that none of the prints left at Paradise in July 1991 was Erno's.

The major drawback of AFIS was time. Elven with computers getting faster ever)7 month, each print submission tied up a machine for roughly an hour. In a case like Gandolph's, where seven or eight hundred latents had been lifted at the restaurant, there was no practical way to attempt to identify all of them, given the other demands on the Force. But if Mo developed a print on the gun Faro Cole had brandished at Ike's, it would be only a matter of minutes to match it agains
t t
he county's database, which necessarily included prints from a multiple arrestee like Collins Farwell.

Mo had just returned from two and a half weeks in Paris, teaching fingerprint developments to the gendarmes, an absence that had kept him from responding to Larry's original request to examine Faro's gun. Now, he insisted on showing off the Parisian snapshots stored on his p
. C
. Mo was a hard guy to interrupt. He wasn't called the Fingerprint God only out of reverence. He spoke in complete thoughts and usually insisted on finishing them, and as he clicked his mouse, he told Larry a lot more than he'd ever wanted to know about the sculptures in the Tuileries and the antique district in the sixth arrondissement. In a hard chair on the other side of Mo's desk, Larry awaited the chance to ask if Mo had found anything on the weapon. When he finally put the question, Mo slowly turned from the computer and lumped his tongue into his cheek.