Free Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

this thing. And we owe Carolyn as much. Let Mac run the office. She's more than capable. She can watch DEA and the coppers urinate all over each other. She can second-guess indictments. You stay on this. I want you to run out every ground ball, and do it in a goddamn orderly fashion. Do it! Act like a fucking professional."
    I look down the street, both ways. I do not see anyone I know. I am thirty-nine years old, I think. I have been a lawyer thirteen years.
    Raymond walks ahead in silence. Finally, he looks back at me, shaking his head. I expect a further complaint about my performance, but instead he says, "Man, those guys were assholes." Raymond, I see, did not enjoy lunch.
    In the County Building, Goldie, the little white-haired elevator operator who sits all day with an empty car, waiting to take Raymond and the county commissioners up and down, tosses his stool inside and folds his paper. I have begun to broach the subject of the missing B file, but I hold off while we are in the elevator. Goldie and Nico were the best of pals. I even saw Goldie break with protocol and hie Nico up and down on one or two occasions: that was the kind of touch Nico adored — the official elevator. His destiny. Nico maintained a noble poker face as Goldie scanned the lobby to be sure the coast was clear.
    Once we are in the office, I trail behind. Various deputies come forward to get a word or two with Raymond, some with problems, a number who simply want the news from the campaign front. On a couple of occasions, I explain that I have been through Carolyn's docket. I do this in a desultory fashion, since I have no desire to confess to further failures, and Raymond loses the thread of what I am telling him as he moves between conversations.
    "There's a file missing," I say again. "She had a case we can't account for."
    This finally catches Raymond's attention. We have come through the side door to his office.
    "What kind of case? Do we know anything about it?"
    "We know it was logged in as a bribe case — a B. Nobody seems to know what happened to it. I asked Mac. I checked my own records."
    Raymond studies me for a second: then his look becomes absent.
    "Where am I supposed to be at two o'clock?" he asks me.
    When I tell him that I have no idea, he shouts for Loretta, his secretary, calling her name until she appears. Raymond, it turns out, is due at a Bar Committee meeting on criminal procedure. He is supposed to outline various reforms in the state sentencing scheme that he has been calling for as part of his campaign. A press release has been issued; reporters and TV crews will be there — and he is already late.
    "Shit," says Raymond. "Shit." He stomps around the office saying "Shit."
    I try again.
    "Anyway, the case is still in the computer system."
    "Did she call Cody?" he asks me.
    "Carolyn?"
    "No. Loretta."
    "I don't know, Raymond."
    He screams again for Loretta. "Call Cody. Did you call him? For Chrissake, call him. Well, get somebody to go down there." Raymond looks at me. "Sot sits on the car phone and you can never get through. Who the hell does he talk to?"
    "I thought maybe you had heard something about this case. Maybe you remember something."
    Raymond is not listening. He has fallen into an easy chair, angled against what the deputies irreverently refer to as Raymond's Wall of Respect, a stretch of plaster solid with plaques and pictures and other mementos of great triumphs or honors: bar associations' awards, courtroom artists' sketches, political cartoons. Raymond has that aging look again, wandering, pensive, a man who has seen things unravel.
    "God, what a fucking disaster this is. Every campaign Larren has told me to ask a deputy to take a leave so that I have somebody running things full-time, and we've always been able to scrape by without it. But this is out of control. There's too goddamn much to do and nobody in charge. Do you know that we haven't taken a poll in two months? Two weeks to the election and we