Dante's Dilemma (4 page)

“Woo-hoo, you're headed for the big time now,” Josh chortled. “Before you know it, the networks will be signing you on to replace Sanjay Gupta.”

I scowled at him. “It's just the local stations. But I was informed they'll be airing tapes of the entire trial.”

“I thought you loved courtroom work. And it's better than being told to stop because it's cutting into your patient billings.”

“Jonathan floated that threat, too. Just in case I needed help understanding that I don't have a choice.”

We were seated in a secluded spot of the cafeteria, where Josh had brought me after I emerged in a state of shock from Jonathan's office. Jonathan had been playing me when he suggested I was losing my job. I wasn't—at least for the time being. But I'd been ordered to drop everything I was doing to assist Linda O'Malley, the recently elected State's Attorney for Cook County, with a political hot potato.

I'd heard about the case, of course. You'd have to live under a rock in Chicago not to. Some months earlier, Gunther Westlake, a controversial University of Chicago professor, had been discovered dead on the university's South Side campus—and under circumstances that quickly had the wheels of journalism humming.

“I don't blame you for feeling squeamish, though,” Josh said through a mouthful of potato chips. “Just thinking about what happened to the guy makes me want to puke.”

“You and me both,” I said, resisting a powerful urge to cross my legs.

It wasn't just that Westlake's body showed up on the last day of “Scav,” the university's world-famous scavenger hunt, when the campus was overrun with scores of visiting parents and dignitaries. Or that his corpse was found inside one of the colorful exhibits displayed in the school's main quad for scoring by the competition's judges. Or even that Westlake's remains appeared just as one of them—a class of '73 alumna who collapsed and had to be carried away on a stretcher—was looking inside an entry that should have earned its team a whopping fifty points: a giant papier-mâché replica of a woman's vagina.

It was also that Westlake appeared to be missing some anatomy of his own, which had been severed at the root and stuffed down his throat.

“Still, you've got to admit it's an interesting case,” Josh said.

“‘Interesting' is one way of putting it,” I said. “‘Media circus' is another.”

Under the circumstances, Westlake's murder initially struck some as ideologically motivated: the professor's polemics, appearing in his popular blog and on the op-ed pages of several national newspapers, could always be counted on to provoke someone's ire. A member of the university's Sociology Department, he rarely confined himself to subjects of purely academic interest, penning caustic, in-depth pieces on everything from women in the military (he didn't approve) to stay-at-home mothers (he did), usually drawing enthusiastic applause from the Right and stinging scorn from the Left. Only a month before his death, an article Westlake had written for the
National Review
on the underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields (entirely appropriate in his view) had erupted into chaos when female undergrads stormed the Ida B. Plotkin Sciences Hall dressed as Barbie dolls—the
Chicago Maroon
had humorously captioned the story “Breastageddon”—bringing unwelcome attention to the university's record on promoting women and forcing its president to convene a hasty press conference reaffirming “our commitment to gender equity in all tenure decisions.”

The investigation had taken a different turn, however, when the police discovered evidence that Westlake had been killed in his home and that the weapon used to emasculate him was one of the professor's prized Shun hollow-steel chef's knives, then missing (according to his housekeeper) from its section of a wooden block on the kitchen counter. Their antennae were further raised by reports of altercations between Westlake and his estranged wife, Rachel Lazarus. When students returning from a frat party in the middle of the night claimed to have seen a woman fitting Lazarus's description moving a suspicious bundle across campus, the case seemed open and shut. Lazarus was removed to an Area 5 police station and promptly confessed.

Even with all the theatrics, the case might have produced less fanfare had it not been for the public defender assigned to represent Lazarus who, upon researching possible defenses, discovered what appeared to be a long history of domestic abuse. Police logs going back a decade showed several 911 calls from the couple's home, along with tapes in which a clearly distraught Lazarus begged for help. When she finally left Westlake six months before, Lazarus had sought an order of protection. Friends and colleagues at the university—where Lazarus had lately obtained work as an administrative assistant—were quick to rally to Lazarus's side, volunteering accounts of blackened eyes and ill-concealed bruises, while hospital records confirmed at least one instance in which she had sought treatment for broken bones. Though Lazarus herself steadfastly refused to offer any specifics, she did not object when her counsel announced, in a pressroom percolating with reporters and flashing cameras, that Lazarus would be pursuing a Battered Woman's defense.

The trouble this presented for O'Malley was clear to anyone with even the dimmest awareness of local politics. A Republican, O'Malley had barely squeaked by her male opponent in the November polling, a feat only possible in Cook County because the candidate put up by the Machine was caught subscribing to an online child-pornography site mere days before the election. To complicate matters further, O'Malley had run on a strong domestic-violence platform, drawing the support of EMILY's List and other women's advocacy groups. The Lazarus case put her campaign promises front and center—she'd declared in several speeches that her office would be “taking a hard look at any prosecution in which the defendant was beaten, stalked, or raped by her abuser”—while the brutality of the crime produced the usual loud demands for justice among the law-and-order faction in her base. Whichever side she took, it seemed she couldn't win.

O'Malley played it straight down the middle. While other prosecutors might have broadcast their leanings by hiring one of the celebrity psychiatrists who crossed the country testifying in battered women trials, she'd enlisted Bradley Stephens, a less well-known but highly regarded local doctor who'd never seen the inside of a courtroom. O'Malley also instructed him to spare no expense in conducting his psychiatric evaluation of Lazarus, declaring her intention to offer Stephens's expert opinion into evidence even if it favored a verdict of acquittal. It was a brilliant move, and one that was already creating speculation about a run for higher office down the road.

It was therefore doubly unfortunate for O'Malley that Stephens was mowed down in a hit-and-run accident only days before he was to issue his report.

I'd known Brad Stephens, who worked at a rival hospital down the street, and respected his work immensely. So I'd been shocked when Jonathan told me of his death, a few blocks from his Wicker Park home and roughly at the same time I'd been tying one on at Sep's party.

I pushed my uneaten lunch around with a fork. “Eat your mashed potatoes,” Josh urged. “Before I do it for you.”

“Is that what these are? I thought I was eating reconstituted soap flakes.”

“I wish I had your problem—not eating when I'm depressed. And I shouldn't be making light of the situation. Brad was a good man. Do the police know anything more about the accident?”

I shook my head. “You remember how bad the weather was that night. They think he must have slipped on the ice and been run over by a driver who couldn't brake in time or didn't spot him in the whiteout conditions. If you'd seen him recently, you'd know how shaky his footing was getting.”

Around my age—that is, just shy of fifty—Stephens had suffered from early onset Parkinson's disease. My thoughts traveled back to the last time we'd met, while sharing a panel at a conference on emerging issues in veterans' healthcare. Stephens had just graduated to a support cane, and we'd traded jokes about two sticks on a stage.

“So now you're supposed to take over for him?”

I nodded. “Apparently our CEO loved the idea when he was contacted personally by O'Malley. More publicity for the hospital and a chance to show how civic-minded we are—helping local officials out of a tight bind. Jonathan also mentioned a concern that I was becoming too one-sided about the cases I was taking on. He thinks I should be doing more to put lowlifes away.”

“Is that what's got you so down—besides Brad, I mean?”

“Working for the prosecution? Maybe. Not to mention the timing. The trial starts in the middle of January. That's only a month off.”

“But you'll have all of Brad's work to rely on. He wasn't a guy you could fault for lack of thoroughness.”

“That's what Jonathan said when I raised the point. Apparently, there's no interest in having me reinvent the wheel. And under the rules, I'm entitled to simply explain Brad's findings and indicate whether I agree with them. I don't even have to talk to Lazarus unless I want to.”

“Do you have any idea what Brad was going to say? It's amazing his report hasn't leaked before now, with all of the reporters working overtime to get the inside track.”

“O'Malley's doing, again. She's been worried about a defense motion for a change of venue and has been trying to keep the publicity pot from boiling over, though having the case sent elsewhere would certainly solve her public-relations problem. That's the one ray of sunshine in this whole thing. From everything I've read, she's a straight shooter, unlike some of the sharks in that office.”

I was thinking of Tony Di Marco, an Assistant State's Attorney I'd crossed horns with before, and whom I trusted even less than I trusted Jonathan.

“So that's who you'll be working for, Mama Cass herself?” Josh said, making reference to O'Malley's nickname in the gossip columns. He stopped and added ruefully, “As though I should be making cracks about someone's size.” Josh had finally given in to temptation and was now making short work of the food left on my plate.

“Uh-huh. I'm supposed to be over there getting my marching orders at the crack of dawn tomorrow.”

Josh clapped me on the shoulder. “Like I said when we started this discussion. You're in the big leagues now.”

FOUR

It was a fitting coda to the day that when I reached home that evening, I found myself locked out.

I didn't understand what was happening at first.

Still, I ought to have figured out right away why my key wouldn't move when I tried to open the courtyard gate. My first assumption was that I'd pulled out the wrong one. But on removing the key and checking the shape, as well as flipping through all the others on my ring, I knew that wasn't the problem. I reinserted the key into the lock and tried again, but it stubbornly refused to budge. I tried once more, taking care not to exert too much force. The last thing I needed was to snap the head from the shaft. Once again, I couldn't get the thing to move as much as a centimeter in either direction.

I stood there in the cold, unsure of what to do. At half past six, it was already pitch black outside, and the wind was causing the temperature to drop seemingly by the minute. There was an intercom, but I couldn't tell whether any of my neighbors was home. And even if a human being was behind one of the doors, who would risk venturing outside to answer my summons? No one in the complex yet knew my name. The whole purpose of a
gated
community was to keep out strangers and other undesirables. I could call a locksmith, but I was loath to appear both blind
and
incompetent. Besides, I realized with mounting concern, I had nothing on me that would prove my new address.

I was considering whether there was any way I could scale the eight-foot fence when I was saved from further embarrassment by the sound of footsteps approaching.

“Lose your key?” a woman said brightly as she came up beside me.

“No, I have it,” I said. “I just can't get it to move. Did someone change the locks?”

“Not that I know of. But I bet that's not the problem. Here,” she said, pushing a bulky something against my chest. “Hold my groceries for me while I check it out.”

I did as she asked, shifting my cane to my left hand while I took hold of the bag with my right. She leaned in to inspect the lock. “I knew it!” she exclaimed, as though I'd just presented her with a delightful puzzle to solve. “Frozen again.”

“Frozen?” I said.

“Yeah. Just like the locks on car doors. It happens all the time in weather like this.”

I felt like a fool. Granted, it had been a long time since I'd driven a car. In fact, not being responsible for an automobile was one of the few perks of my current situation, and it was almost liberating when I'd finally bitten the bullet and unloaded my Toyota with a dirt-cheap offer on Craigslist. Oil changes, tire rotations, and annual inspections were now a thing of the past, as was hacking away the ice on the windshield on frigid winter mornings. I could also entertain a sense of superiority listening to the drivers I heard swearing and honking their horns in traffic, while I breezed along the sidewalk with my low-maintenance—not to mention very green—cane.

“We'll have to thaw it out,” the woman said.

“How will we do that if we can't get in?”

“Simple. I always carry a can of de-icer in my purse. You should start carrying one too unless you're immune to frostbite.”

I heard something being pushed into the keyhole and squirted, followed by the sound of the lock opening. “Here we go. Walk on through while I hold the gate.”

I followed her in, balancing the cane against the front of the grocery bag. “You're not worried that I might be Jack the Ripper?”