Creamy White Thighs

PEKIN, Ill.—The biggest judicial scandal in Illinois since before Lincoln left began on a farm-fringed stretch of County Highway Seven south of Pekin, which is south of Peoria, on a brittle night in early January at the cusp of the Millennium. By late spring, the scandal would engage both chambers of the Legislature, two governors, reporters from newspapers and television stations throughout the state and many from around the nation and some from foreign countries. It was a newsy time, with much to compete for their attention: Bill Clinton’s presidency was ending, the Internet revolution was beginning, Al-Qaeda was rising. And it was an election year. Still, millions of people across America would, for awhile, drop what they were doing to look toward the Illinois prairie, fixated on a galling tale of the arrogance of power, a child adoption gone terribly wrong, and a World Wide Web site called “Heather’s House of Discipline.”

That would all come later. On the brittle January night, the players in the scandal still numbered just two: James David Tipple, chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court and one of the top legal minds in Illinois for the previous four decades; and Pekin patrolman Eric Wiss, who was twenty-four.

The scandal ultimately would raise legal and philosophical issues to test even a jurist of Tipple's stature, but the only issue in play on the first cold night was the question of whether Tipple had been driving sixty-three miles per hour when the speed limit was fifty-five. In fact, he had been. From the moment he heard the chirp of the siren and saw the blue lights slide across his windshield, Tipple knew that he was—in the parlance of the thuggish young defendants who used to appear before his bench when he was a circuit court judge in Urbana in the nineteen-eighties—busted. Tipple had often marveled at how the defendants acted like cornered cats, though the law was consistently, maddeningly on their side, and now he pondered the reason: As the young patrolman walked stiffly toward him, flashlight flickering, shoulders hunched against the whining wind, Tipple felt the pinch of instinctive fear felt by every driver who has watched a uniformed police officer's head bobbing in the rear-view mirror. How different the uniform looked here, at night, expelling puffs of steam backlit by passing headlights, than it did in the fluorescent calm of the courtroom. There, the uniform looked bureaucratic; here, predatory. As Tipple's window whirred open, he marveled for a millisecond at how two centuries of American constitutional protection, and four centuries of English common law before that, hadn't dulled the human instinct to fear the uniform.

The officer: brown hair, weak chin, a small and ill-defined mustache. He looked like a teenager, except for that damned uniform.

Tipple thought: I outrank him. Then he said: “What's the problem, officer?”

“Could I see your license and insurance, sir?”

Christ, he even sounded like a teenager.

“I don't think I was speeding.” Tipple’s own words startled him. Lying like a defendant!

“Your license and insurance, sir?”

Like countless drivers before him, Tipple fumbled with his wallet, trying to look casual while pulling out his driver's license, trying to demonstrate how calm and innocent he was. But Tipple’s wallet, unlike any other, contained a shiny medallion fixed on a card that identified him as the ranking judge on the highest court in the fifth-largest state in the nation. The child-officer saw it. “Is that a badge?” he asked. Then: “Are you a police officer?”

“No, that's—I'm a judge. That's my i.d.”

Tipple handed him the i.d.—what else could he do?—then he sat back and pondered the ethical and political implications of it, while the officer pondered the medallion. Tipple knew it would come up in the background check anyway—Tipple, Jms D., w/m, dob 05/18/31, wt 156, ht 5-10, empl. Chief Justice, Ill Suprm Crt—but did it cross some line, handing it to him like that? Tipple hadn't initiated it, of course, but he felt an undeniable wave of comfort once it was initiated. I outrank you, the medallion said. You're the one who should be nervous, junior, speed-limit violation or no speed-limit violation.

The child-officer, reading aloud from the card: “ `James D. Tipple, chief justice, Illinois Supreme Court.' “ Then, smiling: “Oh, yeah. I thought you looked familiar.”

That was a new one. The cloud that had always darkened Tipple's otherwise radiant career was that it didn't come with public recognition of the kind afforded to state legislators, whom Tipple outranked, nor to governors, with whom he was, as he saw it, on equal footing. Each was, after all, perched atop a co-equal branch of government. Yet no one asked for Tipple's autograph the way they did that gubernatorial twit John Bell. No one took his picture as he walked from his car to his office. He could remember every newspaper article written about himself in the past five years and almost recite the headlines, there were that few of them—all written by young, inarticulate, poorly dressed reporters who showed him no fear and little respect, though he magnificently outranked them. When he walked through the halls of the state Capitol in Springfield, legislators were always mistaking him for a certain chemical-industry lobbyist with a similar nose. Chances were slim that Lieutenant Teen-Cop had actually recognized him.

“You mean you know who I am?” Tipple, asked, dryly. Some vain part of him hoped the child-officer wasn't making it up.

“Yes sir, highest judge in the land,” said the officer. “—Well, in the state.” He looked back at the i.d., checking himself, then cleared his throat. “Judge, I'm afraid I clocked you doing sixty-three and this is a fifty-five,” he said. Then, a smile and a child-like attempt at humor: “I guess you know as well as anyone that you can't do that.”

Tipple: Just say yes sir. “Yes, sir.”

Tipple noticed that the officer was switching his weight from one foot to another, like he had to use the bathroom. Now the officer said, hesitantly: “I have to ask, your honor—have you had anything to drink tonight? I noticed you drifting a little back there.”

The question hit Tipple like a snowball. Between the frantic dance of the blue lights and the shock of the icy wind through his window and the glint of the badge, he had honestly, utterly forgotten about the tang of the cold glass of chardonnay at the reception—forgotten so completely that he could, for one balance-beam of a moment, almost will himself to forget a little longer, just a tiny bit longer. But then the moment was gone and the glass of wine glistened brightly in his memory. Now it was the truth or a lie; continued forgetting was out of the question.

Tipple thought: I outrank him.

Then he said: “I had a glass of wine, officer.” Then: “One glass.” Then: “Several hours ago.”

“All right, judge. I'll be right back.”

Tipple watched the officer’s head bob away in the rear view mirror, breathing white. Then he sunk back into the supple leather seat and tried to ponder the situation calmly, as he might ponder a mildly interesting case before him. Obviously, one glass of wine several hours ago wasn't going to put his blood-alcohol level over the top and, strictly speaking, that's all that mattered. No case, Junior. But speaking less strictly, he was a politician, on equal footing with the governor, after all. The mere suggestion of drunken driving for a politician carried with it its own sanctions. The young, inarticulate, poorly dressed reporters in Springfield who so seldom recognized him would recognize him with a vengeance if he was accused, even for one minute at the side of a road in the snow, of DUI.

The reporters: snide, loutish, rumpled. It wasn't their stories that offended Tipple. They didn't write about him often and when they did, it was usually inaccurate but innocuous. It was their professional culture that offended him, based as it was on arrogance and sanctimony—on their unswerving belief that they were always right and anyone in authority was always wrong, despite the fact that the reporters had no particular training or background in anything except stringing words together, whereas the targets of their sanctimony tended to be experts in the fields of law, business, politics, or something. The reporters' breathtaking power was, in Tipple's estimation, unearned. They hadn't achieved it by completing law school or by convincing their fellow citizens to vote for them or by doing anything else to set themselves apart from the wider culture. They had achieved it by getting low-paying jobs at local newspapers and television stations, something any twit with a bachelor's degree could do. One minute they're mediocre college students in a vocational field of study, the next, they're expecting governors and Supreme Court chief justices to hold doors for them. They were nearly as bad as defendants.

Tipple envisioned bold, black words: Chief Justice Busted for Drunk Driving. Then they'd probably misspell his name.

The teen-cop was back. He held out the insurance card and said: “Here you go, your honor. This card is expired. You'll need to take care of that when you get home. Drive safe, now.”

Before Tipple knew what had happened, the officer was bobbing back to his car and Tipple was pulling away from the shoulder, his license and insurance card on the seat next to him. Had he improperly pulled rank on the young man? Certainly not. This was obviously a responsible young officer who had simply determined that there was no infraction here worth spending any more time in the freezing wind. So much for the bold, black words.
Moments later, the blue lights invaded his car again, angrier this time. Tipple looked at his passenger seat, half expecting his license not to be there. Why else would the responsible young officer stop him again, fifty yards down the road, if not to give him back something he had forgotten? But there were the license and the insurance card on the seat, and then the young officer's face was back in Tipple's window.

“What now?” Tipple demanded.

“I'm sorry, judge—that insurance card is expired.”

“You said that already. You said I could take care of it when I get home.”

“My captain says we need to take care of it now, your honor.”

Tipple felt a chill, unrelated to the frozen snow blowing around like sand. Something had changed. The prepubescent officer's demeanor had gone from friendly to . . . obligatory. Like a child who had just been scolded and ordered to march right back there and—and what? Arrest him? For speeding? For a glass of wine? An expired insurance card? The officer said: “Technically, you can't drive without a valid insurance card, judge. That's the way the law's written.”

“I know how the law's written—I helped write it!” snapped Tipple. To hell with decorum, he was being harassed for his stature. He said: “Why are you harassing me?”

“My captain says we need to do this by the book. I'm not trying to hassle you, judge.”

Tipple said, with what he hoped was chilling calmness: “You are harassing me, and I intend to file a complaint.”

“I'm just trying to do my job, your honor. I don't want to hassle anyone—”

That word again!

“Harass!” Tipple barked. “The word is `harass,’ not `hassle’!” Then, before he could stop himself: “ `Harass’ is a legal term! ‘Hassle’ is something you do to your neighbor at the trailer park!”

The officer’s face went still, and then it appeared to redden, and then—yes, Tipple was sure of it—the last shades of congeniality drained right out of it like water from a colander.

The officer said, with icy finality: “Whatever.”

Whatever. Tipple, regretting a major strategic error, began assembling an apology in his mind, but too late. The officer was moving on, his previously amiable voice now stiff with formality as cold as the encircling wind. He said: “Your honor, you were speeding.” Then: “No one is allowed to drive without a valid insurance card.” Then: “And you mentioned that glass of wine.”

Tipple stared blankly, remembering the way the glass glistened. One glass. He was still staring blankly when the two other squad cars pulled up, seemingly out of thin, frigid air, blue lights spinning.

“You wouldn't want anyone to think we were giving you special treatment, would you, sir?” asked the officer. Then: “Please step out of the car, judge.”

Tipple, to no one: “Oh, my.”

He opened his door, then said, weakly: “That pack of jackals in Springfield is going to love this.” The reporters. Oh, the reporters. In Tipple's mind, bold black words: Drunken Judge Claims He Was Hassled. Or Harassed. Whatever.

What happened over the next several hours in the small cement-block police station in downtown Pekin would lay the foundation for what would, by late spring, grow into a galling tale of the arrogance of power, a child adoption gone terribly wrong, and a World Wide Web site called “Heather’s House of Discipline.”

Republican’s Demise Provides Story of the Day

It was six hours after Senator Malkovich died that Garrick Martin, an amateur astronomer and Statehouse correspondent for the Peoria Post, arrived at the silver-domed Capitol Building in downtown Springfield for work, unaware that Senator Stan, as he was called, had filed his last amendment. The news, when it arrived, wouldn't spawn anything like grief in Garrick. The last time Garrick had thought about the old lawmaker was two years earlier, when he (Malkovich) was indicted for mail fraud, won acquittal, then ran for re-election, thus prompting Julian Marcus—Statehouse correspondent for WSPR radio and the only black member of the Springfield press corps—to suggest a fitting campaign slogan: Senator Stan: He Wasn’t Convicted! It sometimes surprised Garrick how little he cared about these people, whose official activities he had recorded almost every week for the previous four years. For all of Senator Stan's political achievements—the spearheading of the new state constitution a generation ago, the landmark insurance reform package he had passed that very year, the roughly two-thousand other bills he had filed over a forty-year career—the primary impact that his life and his death would have on Garrick Martin would be to provide that day's Story of the Day.

Most days had a Story of the Day, a single event that all the reporters in Springfield would write about. Most of the reporters who worked out of the honeycomb of small offices connected to the Statehouse Press Room lobby on floor two-and-a-half of the Capitol spent most of their time writing the same Story of the Day that everyone else on the floor was writing. The next morning, newspaper readers and radio listeners and television viewers in Rockford, Chicago, Bloomington, Decatur, Carbondale and East St. Louis would wake up to different stories in different newspapers and radio and television stations quoting different legislators (those from Rockford, Chicago, Bloomington, Decatur, Carbondale or East St. Louis, depending), talking about the same Story of the Day. The only time one of the reporters wasn't working on the Story of the Day was when he or she was working on Something Big, maybe something In-Depth, maybe even something Investigative, closing his or her office door while doing it, which always sent a ripple of panic through the rest of the press room. Except for those times when someone was working on Something Big—and it was seldom Garrick, whose door mostly remained open—they would all work on the same Story of the Day. The death of a senator was as good a Story of the Day as any.

The white-haired, crew-cut Senator Stan had had sixty-nine pretty good years. Garrick Martin had had thirty-four. His own hair was shaggy on the top and sides—not political-statement shaggy, just shaggy enough to make it clear he needed a haircut and hadn’t gotten around to going. It was beginning to gray, not heavily at the temples (he would have preferred that) but lightly throughout his head, like someone had sprayed a mist of white paint evenly around his shaggy scalp. It was his reminder, every morning in the mirror, of how much further along his body was than his life. The fine mist of white over his hair made no sense, it was obviously a mistake, and he would have complained to someone about it had he known who to complain to. Graying hair was for parents, for married people—or at least people with some prospect of being married—for people whose careers were advancing, for people who ate something other than fast food, for people who had some reason to go home at night and to make their beds in the morning.

Graying hair was for people who could dress themselves and not wonder if they were doing it properly. Walking into the Capitol on this bright spring morning that the old Senator would never see, Garrick wore the uniform of his profession: a threadbare button shirt too tight at the collar to be fully buttoned, despite the notable thinness of his neck; a necktie of indeterminate fabric and color, stained with soy sauce; rumpled khaki trousers; and black gym shoes, which were, Garrick and his colleagues had convinced themselves, an acceptable alternative to dress shoes, as long as you didn't look too closely. Garrick owned one dress jacket, which he wasn't wearing now. It was hanging on the back of his office door in the Capitol, to be used when he went into the Senate chamber, where jackets were required if you were male.

This morning, as on many mornings when the Legislature was in session, the front lawn of the Capitol was being trampled under the feet of a rally: a big shapeless thing, bristling with cardboard signs and baying dogma at the silver Capitol dome high above. Noisy, squirming rallies, the exception out in the real world, were the rule at the Capitol. Sometimes it seemed to Garrick that every morning of his life was spent side-stepping big crowds of people who were opposing animal testing or in favor of legalized marijuana or opposed to the income tax or in favor of the death penalty. They tended to be brazen out-of-towners, bused in from Chicago or the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis, various kinds of True Believers: activists, enthusiasts, right wingers, left wingers, New Age-ers, lobbyists of every stripe, anyone who cared enough about any issue to pick up a sign or shout a slogan or call a press conference. Every reporter knew that no True Believer could be trusted. The belief itself was irrelevant. A pro-life True Believer was as suspect as a pro-choice one, or a pro-gun one, or a pro-tax one, or a pro-business one, or a pro-tree one. Anyone who believed in a cause strongly enough to march for it certainly believed strongly enough to lie for it. A well-placed lie slipped into the mainstream media could advance a True Believer's cause by light-years, while having the opposite effect on the career of the sorry reporter who was duped into printing it. Lies were the kryptonite of the reporters' profession, the thing that could drop them from the sky, and any red-blooded True Believer would lie to a reporter in a wink to advance whatever he or she happened to see as the greater Truth. True Believers were rank amateurs in that sense. Reporters much preferred to deal with professional politicians, who could be reliably counted upon to believe in nothing.

Sometimes, on slow news days, a rally might rise to the level of Story of the Day, if the issue was timely enough and the True Believers were loud and numerous enough, but not usually. By the time the True Believers got organized enough on a given controversy to actually hold a rally, the bloom was generally off the thing and the Capitol culture was racing off after a newer, sexier controversy. News was a beast that reporters, politicians and True Believers created together, a thrashing thing that none of them could quite control once it awakened, but it usually died young. Today's rally—something about education funding, Garrick surmised from the cardboard signs—wouldn't make Story of the Day in any case and certainly not after the news about Senator Stan came out later that morning. A dead senator would trump an education-funding rally every time.

Through the heavy glass doors and inside the belly of the Capitol, Garrick navigated denim-clad tourists congregating in the central rotunda, all in typical tourist stance: heads pulled back, eyes pointed skyward, like flaccid fish dangling from the awnings of some Third World street market. They were gawking at the magnificent underside of the Capitol dome, five stories above. Built in the 1880s, two decades after Abraham Lincoln left Springfield on what turned out to be a one-way train to Washington, it was an impressive sight, all right: marble, glass and floor after floor of circular brass-railed balconies overhead, framing the highest ceiling most had ever seen. At the second-floor brass railing stood a fistful of gray-suited lobbyists, talking softly and looking expensive—one of them driving home the look by holding a thermos-sized plastic gray cellular phone importantly to his head, its long antenna pointing him out to passing females.

Up the marble stairs, the steps worn curved and uneven by more than a hundred years of men's dress shoes and a few decades of women's heels, and then Garrick was approaching the press room on floor two-and-a-half, letting the Mural wash over him.

The Mural: A house-sized painting on the wall above the double wood-and-glass doors to the press room, depicting white and Indian leaders conducting some kind of important business in the middle of a busy Indian camp, daily Indian activity swirling all around them. The Mural was two stories tall, filling the wall over the doors so completely that it was impossible to step into the press room without feeling you were stepping across the grass and dirt of the Indian camp, perhaps interrupting the important business going on there. Garrick didn’t know what the depicted story was and it didn't matter. He liked the Mural, though it had taken him a year to figure out why the thing made him feel so at ease every morning as he passed under it on the uneven marble stairs. The white and Indian leaders depicted on the wall likely were either beginning or concluding a war—wasn't all of white-and-Indian history some variation on the theme of war?—so the warm calm he felt each morning gazing at the scene made no sense, tinted as it was with unseen blood.

What Garrick noticed, though, after about a year: one lone Indian, a woman, sitting in a patch of grass next to a teepee in the lower left corner of the Mural, holding a baby, unconcerned by whatever piece of history was being made in the middle of the painting. She appeared to be talking to the baby, maybe singing to it, both of them cradled in the tall grass, the teepee forming a soft gray wall behind them. They sat in their own little piece of the world. Garrick could almost smell the papery grass baking in the prairie sun when he looked at them. Something Big was going on a few feet away, by the campfire, but all they had to concern themselves with was finding a soft spot in the grass.