Free Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow Page A

have no idea where we are, with who." He folds his hand against his mouth and shakes his head. It is not anxiety he shows so much as distress. Raymond Horgan, Kindle County Prosecuting Attorney, has lost his ability to cope.
    A moment passes between us, completely silent. I am not inclined, however, after the pasting I took out on the street, to be reverential. After thirteen years in government, I know how to be a bureaucrat and I want to be sure my butt is covered with Raymond on the subject of the missing file.
    "Anyway," I say yet again, "I don't know what significance to attach to it. I don't know if it's misfiled or something's sinister."
    Raymond stares. "Are you talking about that file again?"
    I do not get a chance to answer. Loretta announces a phone call and Raymond takes it. Alejandro Stern, the defense lawyer who is the chairman of the Bar Committee, is on the line. Raymond begs apologies, says he's been wrapped up in discussions of that bizarre episode between DEA and the local police, and is on the way. When he puts the phone down he screams again for Cody.
    "I'm right here," Cody announces. He has come in the side door.
    "Great." Raymond starts in one direction, then the other. "Where the hell is my coat?"
    Cody already has it.
    I wish Raymond luck.
    Cody opens the door. Raymond goes through it and comes right back.
    "Loretta! Where's my speech?"
    Cody, it turns out, has that, too. Nonetheless, Raymond continues to his desk. He opens a drawer and hands me a folder on his way out again.
    It is the B file.
    "We'll talk," he promises me and, with Cody hard behind him, goes running down the hall.
     
6
     
    "Somehow, the boy, Wendell, became important," I said to Robinson. "To us, I mean. To me, at least. It's hard to explain. But somehow he was part of this thing with Carolyn."
    He was an unusual child, big for his age, and he had the ambling clumsiness of some big children, a thick, almost oafish appearance. He was not so much slow as dulled. I asked one of the psychiatrists for an explanation, as if one is needed, and he said of this five-year-old, 'He's depressed.'
    Wendell McGaffen, during the pendency of his mother's case, had been moved from the County Shelter to a foster home. He saw his father every day, but never his mother. After the usual disputes in court, Carolyn and I were given permission to speak with him. Actually, at first we did not talk to him at all. We sat in on sessions he had with the psychiatrists, who introduced us to Wendell. Wendell would play with the toys and figures that the shrink had around the room, and the shrink would ask Wendell whether he had any thoughts on different topics, which, almost inevitably, Wendell did not. The shrink, named Mattingly, said that Wendell had not in his weeks there asked once about his mother. And as a result they had not raised the subject.
    Wendell liked Carolyn right from the start. He brought her the dolls. He made remarks to her. He directed her attention to birds, trucks, objects passing outside the window. On our third or fourth visit Carolyn told Wendell that she wanted to talk to him about his mother. The shrink appeared alarmed, but Wendell gripped his doll with both hands and asked, 'What about?'
    So it progressed, twenty, thirty minutes a day. The shrink was openly impressed and eventually asked Carolyn's permission to remain during their interviews, and over a period of weeks the story was told, in snatches and mumbled remarks, disordered offhand answers to questions Carolyn had asked, often days before. Wendell showed no real emotion other than his hesitation. Usually he would stand in front of Carolyn, with both his hands gripped hard around the midsection of a doll, at which he stared unflinchingly. Carolyn would repeat what he had told her and ask him more. Wendell would nod or shake his head or not answer at all. Now and then there were his explanations. 'It hurt.' 'I criet.' 'She set I shouldn't be quiet.'
    'She wanted you to be