“Thank you, Professor Southern. Professor Dobias, we’ll hear from you now.”
The law school faculty, nearly a hundred professors, sit in comfortable leather chairs in a roughly semicircular pattern in one of the many glorious spaces at our school, a room like most others bearing the name of a magnanimous benefactor.
I stand at the front of the room, my one opportunity to make my pitch orally. Yes, I’m wearing a suit and tie.
“I’ll be brief,” I say. “I want to talk about why I’m here. Not here, applying to be a full professor, but here, period. I initially thought I’d become a lawyer because my parents were lawyers. My mother, in particular, who some of you remember, inspired a love of the law. Its goals, its ideality, but its flaws and frailties as well. But the truth is, I was just a kid, a college kid who was taking the next step without being sure it was what I wanted.
“As many of you know, my mother died when I was starting college. I took a couple years off and struggled with her suicide. I was even institutionalized for a while. I blamed myself for her death. I blamed my father. I blamed a lot of people and things. I had a good therapist who taught me to look at things differently. I got better and started up college again.
“When I was finishing college, literally taking my last final exams up here at the U of C, my father was murdered in St. Louis, where he then lived. And as crazy as it seemed to me, the police suspectedmein his murder. We were estranged. We didn’t speak. Our relationship had ended badly after my mother’s suicide. All of that was true. But as I explained tothem, that was all in the past, six years in the past. And as I also explained to them, it would have been impossible for me to have committed the crime while I was in Chicago during finals week.”
(Well, almost impossible.)
“But that didn’t stop the police from pursuing me. They searched my home in Chicago, my family’s house. They tore it apart, frankly, left it in shambles. They tried to discover my communications with my therapist as well. They questioned my friends and my classmates. They invaded every aspect of my life. They turned my life upside down, inside out.
“I knew I was innocent, of course. But on just the tiniest of suspicions, the government was able to destroy my life. And when they realized that they had no case against me? When they realized I couldn’t have done it—did they say so publicly? No. They didn’t give out a clean bill of health. They just dropped a bomb on my life and left me to pick up the pieces.
“That’s when IknewI wanted to be a lawyer. When I realized, from experience, the importance of our constitutional protections. We read about them in books, debate them in classrooms, but I saw up close and personal their importance. I’ve devoted myself to that scholarship ever since. I’ve watched as our Fourth Amendment doctrines have become eroded, in my opinion, by the courts. I’ve argued for changes, wholesale changes in how we understand the privacy rights of our citizens. And I will never stop trying. I will never stop challenging and pushing and prodding. I’ll never stop writing about it. I will never stop teaching it. It’s all I’ll ever want to do.”
I didn’t rehearse this speech. I didn’t need to. This is what I think, what I feel. I didn’t, couldn’t tell them the truth about what I did in St. Louis. That’s the only part that bothers me. A lie sprinkled into an otherwise heartfelt statement.
But I’ve chosen to live with that lie. And now, after Lauren, with two lies. The brilliance of the law is that it’s not concerned with one person but with a system applicable to all. It protects the guilty so it can protect the innocent. It protected me, the guilty, from prosecution twice now.
“Professor?” From one of the back rows, a hand raises, a woman I don’t know well, to whom I’ve not said more than brief hellos in the hallway. I want to say her name is Amara Rodriguez, but I’m not a hundred percent, so I play it safe and stick with the title.
“Yes, Professor,” I say.
“You mentioned St. Louis. And you’re probably aware that these events in St. Louis have come to light during the committee’s candidate review process.”
I am, but only because Anshu told me.
“I’m happy to answer any questions about St. Louis,” I say.
“Is it true that only a few weeks ago, in November, the St. Louis police identified a suspect they believe was guilty of your father’s murder? Based on new forensic evidence?”
“Yes, that’s true,” I say.
I’m not privy to the inner workings of the St. Louis police, but I can only imagine that the people in charge have the same pressure to close cases as a tiny little hamlet like Grace Village. Whoever was in charge of the cold case got the new evidence of Lauren’s fingerprints on the bottle and eventually her DNA on the wineglass, too, along with the information that Lauren had briefly returned to the country during that time. The case was closed as solved. All the easier when the suspect is now dead, not subject to prosecution and unable to contest the determination in any way.
“That must feel like cold comfort,” she says, “being exonerated twelve years later.”
Something like that. They were never going to pin St. Louis on me, as long as they couldn’t talk to my shrink, to whom I spilled my guts the next morning. (A moment of weakness I will never forget or repeat.)
Comfort? I wouldn’t use that word. I wouldn’t even say I’m happy about what I did. Or unhappy. Virtually every moral code and penal code would condemn my actions. I analogize it to the law of war, instead. My father and Lauren declared war on my mother and me. They killed her, and I killed them back. Soldiers aren’t prosecuted for killing other soldiers. They’re prosecuted only for killing innocents. Lauren and my father were the furthest things from innocents. I don’t require approval, nor do I accept disapproval, for what I’ve done.
Did I know that the Grace Village P.D. would fingerprint Lauren and take a DNA sample? Sure, they always do that, if for no other reason than exclusion, differentiation from other prints and DNA found at the scene. Did I know that they’d enter this information into FBI databases? Of course—standard protocol. Did I know that this newly submittedinformation would find a match in the databases for the champagne bottle and plastic flute found at my father’s crime scene? I hoped so. I couldn’t besureLauren’s prints or DNA would be on that bottle or those champagne flutes. But a guy can hope.
And did I time this entire thing so that St. Louis would be in a position to declare its investigation solved and closed only weeks before I had to stand here before this committee and answer questions?
Well, let’s just say the timing worked out okay.
“I’m just glad to put it behind me,” I say, looking squarely at Dean Comstock as I do.
105
Simon
The forest preserve outside Burlington, Wisconsin, where Vicky stashed her post-Halloween burner phone to communicate with me, seems as good as any place to meet. I get there early, having the longer drive and not wanting to be late. The habit of timing things perfectly with Vicky, so critical over the summer and fall, is hard to scrub from my DNA.