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Overview
More than twenty years after Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto went head-to-head in the shattering murder trial in Presumed Innocent, the men are pitted against each other once again in a riveting psychological match. Now over sixty years old and the chief judge of an appellate court, Sabich has found his wife, Barbara, dead under mysterious circumstances. Molto accuses him of murder for the second time, setting into motion a trial that is vintage Turow-the courtroom at its most taut and explosive.
PRAISE FOR INNOCENT
"Breathtaking . . . worth the wait."
-Philadelphia Inquirer
"Masterful . . . compelling and enjoyable."
-Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Fresh and fierce, more than a courtroom procedural . . . [a] delectable page-turner."
-Chicago Tribune
"A cunning, intricate thriller . . . meticulously constructed and superbly paced, full of twists and surprises."
-New York Times Book Review
"Turow wins again . . . He remains at his best."
-USA Today
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478948469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grand Central Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/30/2017 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 448 |
| Sales rank: | 235,540 |
| Product dimensions: | 12.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 4.30(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Chicago, IllinoisDate of Birth:
April 12, 1949Place of Birth:
Chicago, IllinoisEducation:
B.A. in English, Amherst College, 1970; M.A., Stanford University, 1974; J.D., Harvard University, 1978Website:
http://www.scottturow.com/Read an Excerpt
Innocent
By Turow, Scott
Grand Central Publishing
Copyright © 2010 Turow, ScottAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780446562423
PROLOGUE
Nat, September 30, 2008
A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.
The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother.
This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends. But it is the moment my mind returns to, the way I always see them.
According to what my father will soon tell me, he has been there, in that room, for nearly twenty-three hours, except for bathroom breaks. Yesterday, he awoke, as he does most weekdays, at half past six and could see the mortal change as soon as he glanced back at my mother, just as his feet had found his slippers. He rocked her shoulder, touched her lips. He pumped the heel of his palm against her sternum a few times, but her skin was cool as clay. Her limbs were already moving in a piece, like a mannequin’s.
He will tell me he sat then, in a chair across from her. He never cried. He thought, he will say. He does not know how long, except that the sun had moved all the way across the room, when he finally stood again and began to tidy obsessively.
He will say he put the three or four books she was always reading back on the shelf. He hung up the clothes she had a habit of piling on the chaise in front of her dressing mirror, then made the bed around her, pulling the sheets tight, folding the spread down evenly, before laying her hands out like a doll’s on the satin binding of the blanket. He threw out two of the flowers that had wilted in the vase on her night table and straightened the papers and magazines on her desk.
He will tell me he called no one, not even the paramedics because he was certain she was dead, and sent only a one-line e-mail to his assistant to say he would not be at work. He did not answer the phone, although it rang several times. Almost an entire day will have passed before he realizes he must contact me.
But how can she be dead? I will ask. She was fine two nights ago when we were together. After a freighted second, I will tell my father, She didn’t kill herself.
No, he will agree at once.
She wasn’t in that kind of mood.
It was her heart, he will say then. It had to be her heart. And her blood pressure. Your grandfather died the same way.
Are you going to call the police?
The police, he will say after a time. Why would I call the police?
Well, Christ, Dad. You’re a judge. Isn’t that what you do when someone dies suddenly? I was crying by now. I didn’t know when I had started.
I was going to phone the funeral home, he will tell me, but I realized you might want to see her before I did that.
Well, shit, well, yes, I want to see her.
As it happens, the funeral home will tell us to call our family doctor, and he in turn will summon the coroner, who will send the police. It will become a long morning, and then a longer afternoon, with dozens of people moving in and out of the house. The coroner will not arrive for nearly six hours. He will be alone with my mom’s body for only a minute before asking my dad’s permission to make an index of all the medications she took. An hour later, I will pass my parents’ bathroom and see a cop standing slack-jawed before the open medicine cabinet, a pen and pad in hand.
Jesus, he will declare.
Bipolar disorder, I will tell him when he finally notices me. She had to take a lot of pills. In time, he will simply sweep the shelves clean and go off with a garbage bag containing all the bottles.
In the meanwhile, every so often another police officer will arrive and ask my father about what happened. He tells the story again and again, always the same way.
What was there to think about all that time? one cop will say.
My dad can have a hard way with his blue eyes, something he probably learned from his own father, a man he despised.
Officer, are you married?
I am, Judge.
Then you know what there was to think about. Life, he will answer. Marriage. Her.
The police will make him go through his account three or four more times—how he sat there and why. His response will never vary. He will answer every question in his usual contained manner, the stolid man of law who looks out on life as an endless sea.
He will tell them how he moved each item.
He will tell them where he spent each hour.
But he will not tell anybody about the girl.
PART ONE
I.
CHAPTER 1
Rusty, March 19, 2007, Eighteen Months Earlier
From the elevated walnut bench a dozen feet above the lawyers’ podium, I bang the gavel and call the last case of the morning for oral argument.
“People versus John Harnason,” I say, “fifteen minutes each side.”
The stately appellate courtroom, with its oxblood pillars rising two stories to a ceiling decorated with rococo gildings, is largely empty of spectators, save for Molly Singh, the Tribune’s courthouse reporter, and several young deputy PAs, drawn by a difficult case and the fact that their boss, the acting prosecuting attorney, Tommy Molto, will be making a rare appearance up here to argue in behalf of the State. A ravaged-looking warhorse, Molto sits with two of his deputies at one of the lustrous walnut tables in front of the bench. On the other side, the defendant, John Harnason, convicted of the fatal poisoning of his roommate and lover, waits to hear his fate debated, while his lawyer, Mel Tooley, advances toward the podium. Along the far wall, several law clerks are seated, including Anna Vostic, my senior clerk, who will leave the job on Friday. At my nodding direction, Anna will ignite the tiny lights atop counsel’s podium, green, yellow, and red, to indicate the same things they do in traffic.
“May it please the Court,” says Mel, the time-ingrained salutation of lawyers to appellate judges. At least seventy pounds overweight these days, Mel still insists on wearing bold pin-striped suits as snug as sausage casings—enough to instill vertigo—and the same lousy rug, which looks as though he skinned a poodle. He begins with an oily grin, as if he and I, and the two judges who flank me on the three-judge panel that will decide the appeal, Marvina Hamlin and George Mason, are all the best of friends. I have never cared for Mel, a bigger snake than usual in the nest of serpents that is the criminal defense bar.
“First,” says Mel, “I can’t start without briefly wishing Chief Judge Sabich a happy birthday on this personal milestone.”
I am sixty years old today, an occasion I have approached with gloom. Mel undoubtedly gleaned this tidibit from the gossip column on page two of today’s Trib, a daily drumbeat of innuendo and leaks. It concludes routinely with birthday greetings to a variety of celebrities and local notables, which this morning included me: “Rusty Sabich, Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals for the Third Appellate District and candidate for the state Supreme Court, 60.” Seeing it in boldface was like taking a bullet.
“I hoped no one had noticed, Mr. Tooley,” I say. Everyone in the courtroom laughs. As I discovered long ago, being a judge somehow makes your every joke, even the lamest, side splitting. I beckon Tooley to proceed.
The work of the appellate court in its simplest terms is to make sure that the person appealing got a fair trial. Our docket reflects justice in the American style, divided evenly between the rich, who are usually contesting expensive civil cases, and the poor, who make up most of the criminal appellants and face significant prison terms. Because the state supreme court reviews very few matters, nine times out of ten the court of appeals holds the final word on a case.
The issue today is well-defined: Did the State offer enough evidence to justify the jury’s murder verdict against Harnason? Appellate courts rarely reverse on this ground; the rule is that the jury’s decision stands unless it is literally irrational. But this was a very close case. Ricardo Millan, Harnason’s roommate and business partner in a travel-packaging enterprise, died at the age of thirty-nine of a mysterious progressive illness that the coroner took for an undiagnosed intestinal infection or parasite. There things might have ended were it not for the doggedness of Ricardo’s mother, who made several trips here from Puerto Rico. She used all her savings to hire a private detective and a toxicologist at the U who persuaded the police to exhume Ricardo’s body. Hair specimens showed lethal levels of arsenic.
Poisoning is murder for the underhanded. No knife, no gun. No Nietzschean moment when you confront the victim and feel the elemental thrill of exerting your will. It involves fraud far more than violence. And it’s hard not to believe that what sunk Harnason before the jury is simply that he looks the part. He appears vaguely familiar, but that must be from seeing his picture in the paper, because I would recall somebody so self-consciously odd. He is wearing a garish copper-colored suit. On the hand with which he is furiously scribbling notes, his nails are so long that they have begun to curl under like some Chinese emperor’s, and an abundance of unmanageable orangey knots covers his scalp. In fact, there is too much reddish hair all over his head. His overgrown eyebrows make him resemble a beaver, and a gingery mustache droops over his mouth. I have always been baffled by folks like this. Is he demanding attention or does he simply think the rest of us are boring?
Aside from his looks, the actual evidence that Harnason murdered Ricardo is spotty. Neighbors reported a recent episode in which a drunken Harnason brandished a kitchen knife on the street, screaming at Ricardo about his visits with a younger man. The State also emphasized that Harnason went to court to prevent exhuming Ricardo’s body, where he maintained that Ricky’s mother was a kook who’d stick Harnason with the bill for another burial. Probably the only piece of substantial proof is that the detectives found microscopic traces of arsenic oxide ant poison in the shed behind the house that Harnason inherited from his mother. The product had not been manufactured for at least a decade, leading the defense to maintain that the infinitesimal granules were merely a degraded leftover from the mother’s time, whereas the real perpetrator could have purchased a more reliably lethal form of arsenic oxide from several vendors on the Internet. Despite the familiarity of arsenic as a classic poison, such deaths are a rarity these days, and thus arsenic is not covered in routine toxicological screenings performed in connection with autopsies, which is why the coroner initially missed the cause of death.
All in all, the evidence is so evenly balanced that as chief judge, I decided to order Harnason freed on bail pending his appeal. That does not happen often after a defendant is convicted, but it seemed unfair for Harnason to start doing time in this razor-thin case before we passed on the matter.
My order accounts, in turn, for the appearance today by Tommy Molto, the acting PA. Molto is a skillful appellate advocate, but as head of his office, he rarely has the time to argue appeals these days. He is handling this case because the prosecutors clearly read the bail ruling as an indication Harnason’s murder conviction might be reversed. Molto’s presence is meant to emphasize how strongly his office stands by its evidence. I give Tommy his wish, as it were, and question him closely once he takes his turn at the podium.
“Mr. Molto,” I say, “correct me, but as I read the record, there is no proof at all how Mr. Harnason would know that arsenic would not be detected by a routine toxicological screening, and thus that he could pass off Mr. Millan’s death as one by natural causes. That isn’t public information, is it, about what’s covered on an autopsy tox screen?”
“It’s not a state secret, Your Honor, but no, it’s not publicized, no.”
“And secret or not, there was no proof that Harnason would know, was there?”
“That is correct, Chief Judge,” says Molto.
One of Tommy’s strengths up here is that he is unfailingly polite and direct, but he cannot keep a familiar shadow of brooding discontent from darkening his face in response to my interrogation. The two of us have a complicated history. Molto was the junior prosecutor in the event twenty-one years ago that still divides my life as neatly as a stripe down the center of a road, when I was tried and then exonerated of the murder of another deputy prosecuting attorney.
“And in fact, Mr. Molto, there wasn’t even clear evidence how Mr. Harnason could have poisoned Mr. Millan, was there? Didn’t several of their friends testify that Mr. Millan cooked all the meals?”
“Yes, but Mr. Harnason usually poured the drinks.”
“But the defense chemist said arsenic oxide is too bitter to be concealed even in something like a martini or a glass of wine, didn’t he? The prosecution didn’t really refute that testimony, did you?”
“There was no rebuttal on that point, that is true, Your Honor. But these men shared most of their meals. That certainly gave Harnason plenty of opportunity to commit the crime the jury convicted him of.”
Around the courthouse these days, people speak regularly of how different Tommy seems, married for the first time late in life and ensconced by luck in a job he plainly longed for. Tommy’s recent good fortune has done little to rescue him from his lifetime standing among the physically unblessed. His face looks timeworn, verging on elderly. The little bit of hair left on his head has gone entirely white, and there are pouches of flesh beneath his eyes like used teabags. Yet there is no denying a subtle improvement. Tommy has lost weight and bought suits that no longer look as if he’d slept in them, and he often sports an expression of peace and, even, cheerfulness. But not now. Not with me. When it comes to me, despite the years, Tommy still regards me as an enduring enemy, and judging by his look as he heads back to his seat, he takes my doubts today as further proof.
As soon as the argument is over, the other two judges and I adjourn without our clerks to a conference room adjoining the courtroom, where we will discuss the morning’s cases and decide their outcome, including which of the three of us will write each opinion for the court. This is an elegant chamber that looks like the dining room in a men’s club, right down to the crystal chandelier. A vast Chippendale table holds enough high-backed leather chairs to seat all eighteen judges of the court on the rare occasion that we sit together—en banc, as it is known—to decide a case.
“Affirm,” says Marvina Hamlin, as if there is no point for discussion, once we get to Harnason. Marvina is your average tough black lady with plenty of reason to be that way. She was ghetto raised, had a son at sixteen, and still worked her way through school, starting as a legal secretary and ending up as a lawyer—and a good one, too. She tried two cases in front of me when I was a trial judge years ago. On the other hand, after sitting with Marvina for a decade, I know she will not change her mind. She has not heard another human being say anything worth considering since her mother told her at a very early age that she had to watch out for herself. “Who else could have done it?” demands Marvina.
“Does your assistant bring you coffee, Marvina?” I ask.
“I fetch for myself, thank you,” she answers.
“You know what I mean. What proof was there that it wasn’t someone at work?”
“The prosecutors don’t have to chase rabbits down every hole,” she answers. “And neither do we.”
She’s right about that, but fortified by this exchange, I tell my colleagues I’m going to vote to reverse. Thus we each turn to George Mason, who will functionally decide the case. A mannerly Virginian, George still retains soft traces of his native accent and is blessed with the white coif central casting would order for a judge. George is my best friend on the court and will succeed me as chief judge if, as widely anticipated, I win both the primary and the general election next year and move up to the state supreme court.
“I think it’s just inside the boundary,” he says.
“George!” I protest. George Mason and I have been at each other’s throats as lawyers since he showed up thirty years ago as the newly minted state defender assigned to the courtroom where I was the lead prosecutor. Early experience is formative in the law like everything else, and George sides with defendants more often than I do. But not today.
“I admit it would have been an NG if it was tried as a bench in front of me,” he says, “but we’re on appeal and I don’t get to substitute my judgment for the jury’s.”
This little tweak is aimed at me. I would never say it aloud, but I sense that Molto’s appearance, and the importance the PA places on the case, has moved the needle just enough with both of my colleagues. Yet the point is I’ve lost. That too is part of the job, accepting the law’s ambiguities. I ask Marvina to draft the opinion for the court. Still a little hot, she exits, leaving George and me to ourselves.
“Tough case,” he says. It’s an axiom of this life that, like a husband and wife who do not go to bed angry, judges of a court of review leave their disagreements in the impressions conference. I shrug in response, but he can tell I remain unsettled. “Why don’t you draft a dissent?” he suggests, meaning my own opinion, explaining why I think the other two got it wrong. “I promise I’ll look at the matter fresh when it’s on paper.”
I rarely dissent, since it’s one of my primary responsibilities as chief judge to promote harmony on the court, but I decide to take him up on his offer, and I head down to my chambers to begin the process with my law clerks. As chief, I occupy a suite the size of a small house. Off a large anteroom occupied by my assistant and my courtroom staff are two compact offices for my law clerks and, on the other side, my own vast work space, thirty-by-thirty and a story and a half high, with wainscoting of ancient varnished oak that lends my inside chambers the dark air of a castle.
When I push open the door to the large room, I find a crowd of forty or so people who immediately shrill out, “Surprise!” I am surprised all right, but principally by how morbid I find the recollection of my birthday. Nonetheless, I pretend to be delighted as I circle the room, greeting persons whose long-standing presence in my life makes them, in my current mood, as bleakly poignant as the messages on tombstones.
Both my son, Nat, now twenty-eight, too lean but hauntingly handsome amid his torrents of jet hair, and Barbara, my wife of thirty-six years, are here, and so are all but two of the other seventeen judges on the court. George Mason has arrived now and manages a hug, a gesture of the times with which neither of us is fully comfortable, as he hands me a box on behalf of all my colleagues.
Also present are a few key administrators on the court staff and several friends who remain practicing lawyers. My former attorney, Sandy Stern, round and robust but bothered by a summer cough, is here with his daughter and law partner, Marta, and so is the man who more than twenty-five years ago made me his chief deputy, former prosecuting attorney Raymond Horgan. Ray evolved from friend to enemy and back again in the space of a single year, when he testified against me at my trial and then, after my acquittal, put in motion the process that made me acting PA. Raymond again is playing a large role in my life as the chair of my supreme court campaign. He strategizes and shakes the money tree at the big firms, leaving the operational details to two she-wolves, thirty-one and thirty-three, whose commitment to my election seems about as deep as a hit man’s.
Most of the guests are or were trial lawyers, an amiable group by nature, and there is great bonhomie and laughter. Nat will graduate from law school in June and, after the bar, begin a clerkship on the state supreme court, where I, too, was once a law clerk. Nat remains himself, uncomfortable in conversation, and Barbara and I, by long habit, drift near from time to time to protect him. My own two law clerks, who do a similar job to the one Nat will be taking, assisting me in researching and writing my opinions for this court, have assumed less distinguished duty today as waiters. Because Barbara is perpetually ill at ease in the world beyond our house, especially in larger social gatherings, Anna Vostic, my senior clerk, serves more or less as hostess, pouring a dribble of champagne into the bottom of the plastic glasses that are soon raised for a lusty singing of “Happy Birthday.” Everyone cheers when it turns out I still am full of enough hot air to extinguish the forest fire of candles on the four-tier carrot cake Anna baked.
The invitation said no presents, but there are a couple of gags—George found a card that reads, “Congratulations, man, you’re 60 and you know what that means.” Inside: “No more khakis!” Below, George has inscribed by hand, “P.S. Now you know why judges wear robes.” In the box he handed over, there is a new death-black gown with braided golden drum major epaulets fixed at the shoulder. The mock finery for the chief inspires broad guffaws when I display it to the assembled guests.
After another ten minutes of mingling, the group begins to disperse.
“News,” Ray Horgan says in a voice delicate enough for a pixie as he edges past on his way out. A grin creases his wide pink face, but partisan talk about my candidacy is forbidden on public property, and as chief judge, I am ever mindful of the burden of being an example. Instead, I agree to come by his office in half an hour.
After everyone else is gone, Nat and Barbara and I and the members of my staff gather up the paper plates and glasses. I thank them all.
“Anna was wonderful,” says Barbara, then adds, in one of those bursts of candor my odd duck of a wife will never understand is not required, “This whole party was her idea.” Barbara is especially fond of my senior law clerk and often expresses dismay that Anna is just a little too old for Nat, who has recently parted with his long-term girlfriend. I join the compliments for Anna’s baking, which is locally famous in the court of appeals. Emboldened by the presence of my family, which can only mark her gesture as innocuous, Anna advances to embrace me while I pat her back in comradely fashion.
“Happy birthday, Judge,” she declares. “You rock!” With that, she’s gone, while I do my best to banish the startling sensation of Anna full against me from my mind, or at least my expression.
I firm up dinner plans with my wife and son. Barbara predictably prefers to eat at home rather than at a restaurant. They depart while the odors of cake and champagne linger sadly in the newly silent room. Sixty years along, I am, as ever, alone to deal with myself.
I have never been what anybody would call a cheerful sort. I’m well aware that I’ve had more than my fair share of good fortune. I love my son. I relish my work. I climbed back to the heights of respectability after tumbling into a valley of shame and scandal. I have a middle-aged marriage that survived a crisis beyond easy imagining and is often peaceful, if never fully connected. But I was raised in a troubled home by a timid and distracted mother and a father who felt no shame about being a son of a bitch. I was not happy as a child, and thus it seemed very much the nature of things that I would never come of age contented.
But even by the standards of somebody whose emotional temperature usually ranges from blah to blue, I’ve been in a bad way awaiting today. The march to mortality occurs every second, but we all suffer certain signposts. Forty hit me like a ton of bricks: the onset of middle age. And with sixty, I know full well that the curtain is rising on the final act. There is no avoiding the signs: Statins to lower my cholesterol. Flomax to downsize my prostate. And four Advil with dinner every night, because a day of sitting, an occupational hazard, does a number on my lower back.
The prospect of decline adds a special dread of the future and, particularly, my campaign for the supreme court, because when I take the oath twenty months from now, I will have gone as far as ambition can propel me. And I know there will still be a nagging whisper from my heart. It’s not enough, the voice will say. Not yet. All this done, all this accomplished. And yet, at the heart of my heart, I will still not have the unnameable piece of happiness that has eluded me for sixty years.
Continues...
Excerpted from Innocent by Turow, Scott Copyright © 2010 by Turow, Scott. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
"Scott Turow's new novel is the dedicated fiction-reader's version of El Dorado: a driving, unputdownable courtroom drama/murder mystery that is also a literary treasure, written in language that sparkles with clarity and resonates with honest character insight. I came away feeling amazed and fulfilled, as we only do when we read novelists at the height of their powers. Put this one on your don't-miss list."
-Stephen King
Interviews
Sarah Weinman, author of "THE CRIMINALIST" column on The Barnes & Noble Review, talks to Scott Turow about his new novel, Innocent.
Scott Turow has spent his entire career at the nexus between law and literature. He has produced eight bestselling novels, many of which hinge upon late-act courtroom dramatics and the moral dilemmas inherent in the criminal justice system, while a partner at the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, working pro bono for much of his case work. (Ultimate Punishment, Turow's 2003 meditation on the death penalty, grew out of his experiences related to the release of a man from Illinois's death row, eventually prompting a moratorium on the practice.)
But Turow will forever be associated with his first and most successful novel, Presumed Innocent -- and not just because of the movie. The book's complex protagonist, Rusty Sabich, and the stunning twist that blows a hole through his trial for the murder of colleague and former paramour Carolyn Polhemus, made Turow largely responsible for the legal thriller subgenre, paving the way for the likes of John Grisham, Lisa Scottoline, and others who created meaty narratives larded with the intricacies of the law. But Presumed Innocent itself seemed the literary equivalent of lightning in a bottle, impossible even for its author to replicate.
Turow long pooh-poohed the idea of a sequel -- until, that is, a persistent image in his mind of a man sitting by the side of a dead woman became clear enough to reveal the couple to be Rusty Sabich and his wife, Barbara. Any objections to revisting the character at the center of his debut faded away over the three years it took Turow to write Innocent, due to be published on May 4 by Grand Central. The new novel casts Rusty -- now sixty, and a senior-ranking judge -- once more as a man on trial for a crime he did not commit, now facing off against an older, not necessarily wiser Tommy Molto in the courtroom.
"I think in retrospect, it was important for me to go back to the beginning," Turow told me in a telephone conversation in early April, speaking while en route to an appearance at the University of Iowa. "I was coming up to sixty myself, looking both backwards and forwards for a variety of personal reasons. I see now what I didn't see then, which is that I wanted to go back to the very start and, as it were, start again."
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It also comes with a spoiler warning: read no further if you don't want to know what happens until you've read the book.
Sarah Weinman: Unlike Presumed Innocent, which is told exclusively from Rusty's first-person point of view, Innocent features four separate perspectives, belonging respectively to Rusty, his now-grown son (and budding law professor) Nat, Tommy Molto, and Rusty's senior law clerk, Anna Vostic. Why did this story need multiple angles?
Scott Turow: If a book is going well, there is always a character who kind of resonates with it. I don't think that when I started writing Innocent I had the idea of writing from Tommy's point of view. But I got up one morning and tried it, because I had an inkling that maybe it would be good to show the investigation of Barbara's death in parallel with what had gone on in Rusty's life a year before. With respect to Nat, I thought he was, in some ways, the most interesting character in the book, because there's a tremendous moral uncertainty about his father. The whole story depends on Nat's willful blindness to certain facts. I'm not sure that could be credible to a reader unless you enter his point of view. I don't think the mechanical considerations were as important to me as the fact of his position being represented. Once I had opened up the perspectives beyond Rusty, I sort of felt obliged to get into Anna's, because I don't think she can be as fully accepted as a character unless you really see how she understands herself.
SW: Anna struck me as an enigma, and I thought she would remain that way throughout the entire book. But all of a sudden, fairly deep into Innocent, she gets her own point of view. On one hand it elicited sympathy, but from a narrative standpoint it was surprising you waited so long to utilize it. Did you consider introducing her perspective earlier, in order to allow the reader to better understand her troubling, important decisions?
ST: The short answer is yes, I did think about that. I would have been happy to go into Nat and Anna's points of view earlier on. The main issue was that there was so much going on in the early parts of the book. I have the same problem every time: when the stories and characters get complicated, it is really hard for me to get moving. I was reluctant to establish additional points of view earlier, because it would have come at the cost of the forward momentum of the novel.
SW: Innocent carries an underlying theme of masochism. There is Rusty staying with Barbara for decades of marriage, commenting that "what has lain between then and now...that time is not fully deserving of being called 'living'." And Tommy saying that "nobody was meaner to him than Tomassino Molto III. He liked to make himself suffer, and he was doing that now." To some degree Nat has a real masochistic streak, too. The irony is that Barbara comes off as the most sadistic character in the book, even though, being dead, she technically doesn't have a voice. How deliberate were you in pursuing this masochistic streak in the book?
ST: The theme of Rusty's masochism began in Presumed Innocent. It was particularly pronounced through the relationship with that child who was tortured by his mother. [Masochism] is clearly part of Rusty's character. And that vision of Tommy is something established particularly in The Laws of Our Fathers, where he is beginning to move out from under his own shadow. At end of that book he begins this pretty impassioned speech about the kind of person he is. Basically he knows he's going to be dumped on, but goes out and does what he has to do anyway.
The comment about Barbara is a very interesting one. I've had some categorical reactions among my early readers. One is "What a complete monster she is!" My Italian translator felt obliged to write me, telling me how much she hates Barbara. The other reaction, and I have to say this is much more in tune with how I see her, is to treat her with a great amount of sympathy. She's struggled to go on for the sake of her son. Then she poisons herself and lays down to die, beside the husband who's failed her in huge ways over 35 years of marriage -- you want to talk about masochism, that's a really masochistic end. But I don't think she's consumed by masochistic self-sacrificing.
SW: How then did you navigate this fine line between masochism, self-sacrifice, and protection of other people? Look at Nat, especially -- his being protected by those around him is in some ways detrimental, but it also allows him to discover who he is.
ST: I have to say I like this book a lot. I suppose it's not surprising to hear an author say that. What I really enjoy about it is the emotional complexity of all of the characters. All of that evolves out of trying to be faithful to the situation of Presumed Innocent -- and saying to myself, what would it be like to be the man who had survived this cataclysmic experience of being tried and then exonerated? And what would it be like to be the child, the only child in a household where there's all this dark stuff going on? It's true that Nat has been protected. And yet he's had big stuff to deal with as a kid. A suicidal mother, a father accused of being a murderer -- and they want to pretend like he's Beaver Cleaver. He has some potent issues to deal with, and an element of emotional instability which is either part of the situation or part of his nature. I take some satisfaction that at the end of the day he's grown up.
SW: But as the book unfolds, Nat seems to end up just like Rusty, caught in a cycle of being doomed. Is Nat then going to be subject to the same mistakes as his father?
ST: I don't know. Obviously it's a ripe situation. If I choose to return to the Sabiches again I'll have to figure it out. It's absolutely all sitting there, there's no question.
SW: About a year after Presumed Innocent came out, you remarked in an interview that if the book had been published even twelve months later, it would have been dated because of advances in forensic technology. You address that issue to some degree in Innocent, as DNA evidence relating to the murder of Carolyn Polhemus gets us right into part II and Rusty's trial. Was this a way to update yourself on current forensic technology, both the upside and the downsides? After all, there is a lot in the news about the CSI effect, and how older and generally accepted techniques are heavily scrutinized because they aren't validated.
ST: Yes, that is all true. My goal in writing Innocent was to write a free-standing novel, one that can be read and enjoyed by people that haven't even seen the movie of Presumed Innocent. But it was just as important to write it in a way that created obvious resonances between the two novels. I enjoy the irony of pointing out to Presumed Innocent readers that this guy would have been slammed had DNA existed at the time of his first trial. And that everything that happens, including the fact that he was running for the Supreme Court, and is free to get in trouble, all depends on that little weird window of time when he was first tried.
Your point's well taken that the science is somewhat ephemeral. I was a federal prosecutor and I put evidence in -- Presumed Innocent featured hair evidence and fiber analysis, and it turns out that that kind of forensic evidence is now regarded as utterly bogus. You live the history of science in the courtroom. And it is kind of ironic that everybody accepts what you call the CSI effect, and feels that now we really know the truth, because it's science. But people ignore that some of what was regarded as rock certain science actually has nothing whatsoever to do with science. There are people who question fingerprints, and maybe with some reason. Time will tell.
SW: All of your books feature the fictional world of Kindle County, and what you do with it is a lot like what Ed McBain did with Isola, his fictional version of New York City, in the 87th Precinct novels. Does an entirely made-up world give you more room to play with? Or, since you keep revisiting the same world again and again, does it constrain you in any way?
ST: The development of Kindle County was quite accidental. I had been a clerk in the Suffolk County DA's office. I was a prosecutor and had become a member of the bar, so I wanted to make sure no one would accuse me of writing what I was actually doing. When I first started writing Presumed Innocent, it was basically set in Boston. I don't keep a diary or note down observations from real life for use in my crime fiction, but still the net result over time was that Boston ended up resembling Chicago; so I decided to keep it the same and use a different name, Kindle County. I didn't even want to specify the city. And then, because I was really excited about writing about Sandy Stern (in The Burden of Proof), all of a sudden I found myself the proprietor of this separate fictional world.
I have to say that operating in a fictional world suits me really well. I think some people feel frustrated. They think I'm being coy, because obviously, as time has gone on, Kindle County resembles Chicago more and more. So people go, "Come on, just call it Chicago, get it over with." That always confuses me. Readers say it's a little harder to suspend disbelief. I say, it's easier to believe in made-up people but not a made-up place? I don't really buy that.
I do enjoy the liberty of having my own city with its own history. Obviously as time goes on, the place itself has become a character in the books. I really enjoy the way its citizens will go from the background to the foreground and back again -- as Tommy Molto has done throughout the books. I enjoy being able to import my own view of American history without getting into the kind of overt commentary on specific situations that might otherwise be involved if it was a real place. By way of an example, the courthouse where Rusty is tried was built in the 1980s with federal crime-fighting money. But because of urban renewal the project is a complete disaster, because no one wants to open a store near where all the biggest busts in the city are as they come for their court call. I like being able to do this kind of thing, offer some commentary on our contemporary situation.
