Look Closer

“Meetings, meetings, and more meetings,” he says. “The perks of being a full professor. Hey, you should apply to be one! It’s not too late!”

“Don’t start.”

Anshu doesn’t know the full story. He knows the dean asked me to hold off and let Reid Southern apply without opposition. He doesn’t know about my second visit with the dean and the not-so-veiled threats. And he never will. That’s the beauty of what the dean did to me—he knows I can’t reveal it without revealing the story behind it.

I’m lucky the story didn’t come out at the time up here in Chicago. It was the locale, I think, that kept it out of the Chicago media. By the time he was murdered, my father hadn’t been a lawyer in Chicago for several years; he was then practicing in downstate Madison County, where asbestos litigation made a lot of lawyers rich and a lot of companies bankrupt, and living across the border in St. Louis. So the murder, investigation, and court fight happened in a different state altogether.

When the police up here searched my house, I was sure everything would spill out to the newspapers. But it didn’t. What spared me, oddly enough, was road construction on my block. The two squad cars and the forensics team truck had to park in the alley behind my house instead of out front. Other than my neighbors the Dearborns, who weren’t in town at the time, nobody could see the cops coming and going into the back entrance of my house. The Grace Park Police assisted on the search, but they didn’t leak to the press. A few of my neighbors probably wondered what the hell was going on, but if they did, nobody said anything to me. I was hardly around, anyway, commuting every day to school.

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.”