Reversible Errors by Scott Turow Page A

could see that his eyes and nose were raw. She asked if he too was related to Gus.
    "The son," he said, with gloomy emphasis. "The Greek son." He found some bitter humor in what he had said. He introduced himself as John Leonidis and offered a clammy hand. When Muriel had responded with her name and job title, John suddenly brightened.
    "Thank God," he said. "That's what my ma is waiting for, to talk to the prosecutor." He slapped at his pockets until he realized he was already holding a pack of Kools. "Can I ask you something?" He took a seat on the stool beside her. "Am I a suspect?"
    "A suspect?"
    "I don't know, there's all kinds of stuff in my head. The only person I can think of who'd want to kill Gus is me."
    "Did you?" Muriel asked, conversationally.
    John Leonidis fixed on the glowing end of his cigarette. His nails had been nibbled to ragged slivers.
    Td never have had the balls," he said. "But you know, all this 'good' stuff. It was P . R . At home, he was a pig. Like he made my mother cut his toenails? Can you imagine? In the summer, he'd sit like a sultan on the back porch in the sun while she did it. I mean, it could make you vomit."
    John gave his head a bitter toss, and then, with little warning, he began to cry. Muriel had been out of sorts with her own father before he died two years ago, and she had an instant appreciation of the tornado of confusion buffeting John. Tom Wynn had been President of the UAW local at the Ford plant outside Fort Hill, and a field rep, a man who spoke brotherhood in the plant and bile at home. Following his death, after too brief an interval, Muriel's mother had married the principal of the school where she taught, but she was happier in love now than Muriel had ever been. Like John, Muriel had been left to labor with the stillborn emotions that accompanied everything unfinished with her father. As John struggled for his composure, pinching the bridge of his nose, Muriel laid her hand over his on the marked Formica of the counter.
    By the time John's mother emerged from the rest room, he had gathered himself. As he had predicted, when he introduced Muriel as "the prosecutor," Athena Leonidis, who only a moment before had been wilted by grief, stiffened to deliver her message.
    "They should be dead, I want them dead," she said, "the filth who did this my Gus. Dead. With my own eyes. I wall not sleep till I see." She dissolved again and fell upon her son, who, over his mother's shoulder, cast Muriel another bleak look.
    But she understood Mrs. Leonidis. Muriel, too, believed in punishment. Her mother, the teacher, was the touchy-feely type, turn the other cheek, but Muriel had always agreed with her father, who defended some of the bare-knuckles maneuvers of life in the union by saying that humans were not going to be good on their own, they needed some encouragement. In an ideal world, you'd give everybody who lived right a medal. Yet there was neither tin nor time enough to do that in this life. Thus, another kind of object lesson was required - so that the good got something for their efforts. Pain had to be wrought upon the body of the bad. Not because there was any special delight in their suffering. But because there was pain in goodness- the pangs of denial, the blistering under the hand of restraint. The good deserved an even trade. Murder required death. It was part of the fundamental reciprocity that was the law.
    The Detective Commander, Harold Greer, appeared. He encouraged Mrs. Leonidis to go home, but it was Muriel he wanted. Greer introduced himself back in Guss small office.
    "I've been waiting for somebody from the P . A .'s Office for two hours. Tommy Molto's nowhere to be found." Molto, the head of Homicide, had recently regained his job in a civil suit, after being fired for supposedly framing a defendant. No one yet knew quite what to make of Tommy. "Larry says you're smart."
    Muriel hitched a shoulder. "Consider the source."
    Sober by nature, Greer nonetheless