Look Closer(26)

I kept waiting for some headline. POLICE RAID HOME OF MURDER VICTIM’S SON. GRACE PARK MAN PROBED IN ST. LOUIS MURDER. Something like that. But it never happened. For months, years, I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop and all of this to be exposed. When they tried to talk to Dr. McMorrow about our conversation the morning after my father’s murder, and I had to fight up to the Missouri Court of Appeals to keep that conversation confidential, I was certain this would all become news. But it never did. It did in St. Louis, but never up in Chicago.

I never disclosed it when I applied to be a professor. Why should I? What was there to disclose? I was kinda, sorta a suspect in a murder, but nothing came of it?

Well, I was more than kinda, sorta a suspect. But nothing ever came of it.

I’m not sure what the police expected to find in the search of my home. Did they think that a murderer would be dumb enough to leave a bunch of evidence lying around his house?

It was almost insulting.

“Do you really think, if I was going to kill my father,” I said to them, the cops, back then, when they hauled me down to St. Louis for questioning, “that I would pick the night before my last final exam in college to do it? What, I’d drive all the way from Grace Park down to St. Louis, stab him in the stomach, then drive another six hours back up, basically get no sleep, then take my last final exam at eight in the morning? What kind of sense would that make?”

“It wouldn’t,” said the cop taking the lead on the case, a detective named Rick Gully. “Which is why it’s the perfect alibi.”

It was hard not to smile.

I got an A on that final, by the way.

? ? ?

“Thank you, Maria,” I say, clapping my hands once. “So the majority held that the police can root through your garbage and obtain evidence of a crime against you without first obtaining a warrant. What did Justice Brennan have to say about that? Anyone besides Maria, who has admirably shouldered the burden so far?”

I dislike the Socratic method, calling on students and grilling them mercilessly. I hated the stress in law school, the anticipation, the dread as you sat in the class and the law professor looked up and down the roll call for the student who’d be put under the laser heat that hour.

Make no mistake, once they volunteer, I’ll work them over. They know that. But there are ways to do it that promote critical examination and debate, that hone and sharpen their focus, and ways that do not. Fear, in my mind, does not.

“Brad,” I say, when he raises his hand.

“Justice Brennan disagreed,” he says.

“Yes, Brad, that would be the very definition of a dissent, I believe, but thank you for that reminder. Could I trouble you to elaborate, kind sir?” I bow.

“He said that when people seal up their garbage, they expect it to remain private. We throw things out because we have to throw things out, but we don’t expect that someone will open it up and go through it.”

“But we expect garbage collectors to take it,” I say. “Do we not?”

“We expect them to take our trash and toss it in some landfill,” he says. “Not take it and open it and look through it.”

“But isn’t putting your trash out on the curb the very definition of abandoning your possessory interest in it? Aren’t you saying to the world, I don’t want this stuff anymore?”

“I mean, I guess so.”

“So once you’ve abandoned your property, why do you have the right to expect anything whatsoever from it? Why do you have the right to object to what happens to it?”

There are many answers to that question, many distinctions and subtleties—the lifeblood of the law, what makes it so glorious. The most important part of law school isn’t the ABCs but learning how to think, how to find those distinctions, how to advocate for your position, how to highlight your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. How to fight with passion and reason.

? ? ?

After my early class, I walk down from the law school to the Chicago Title & Trust Building and make it there by ten. Once in the lobby with my Starbucks, I insert the SIM card and power on my green phone. I text:

And how are we this morning?

She replies quickly:

Well, hello, stranger

It’s become her standard start. My response:

Stranger? I don’t think I can be any stranger than I already am.

She replies:

Then how about: hello tall, dark and handsome

That brings a smile to my face. I’m not that tall, my hair is not all that dark, and “handsome” is overstated, but that’s good. I’m even willing to overlook that she didn’t use the Oxford comma. My phone vibrates again:

You’re not strange you’re enigmatic

Nice of her to say so. But no, I’m strange. My phone vibrates again:

I like your darkness. I like being your light.

I breathe out a sigh. At least one thing’s going right in my life.





21

Tuesday, August 30

This is a joyous, thrilling ride, but the end is a cliff. Is this what it feels like to be addicted to a drug, to ingest something because nothing in the present is so important as the feeling that pill or powder gives you, even while you know that the course you’re on will lead to destruction? You do it anyway, because you No, it’s not enough to say that “you do it, anyway”—you not only do it but you want nothing more than to do it, you embrace self-demolition over all else. Does that mean, perhaps, that was the point of it all along, the self-destruction, but you can’t be honest enough with yourself to admit it, so you wrap it up in something superficially and temporarily pleasurable like the high from a pill?