THE LAST WITNESS
Thomas Greer Wakes Up
A journalist who has been trying to tell a story for two years and has been put in a hospital for it does not, upon waking, ask if he’s alright. He asks if the story got out.
Greer || Recovery || Truth || Justice
Thomas Greer regained full consciousness on the Tuesday after Clara’s birth, fourteen days after the attack. Sara was home by then — home in the apartment that had been swept by federal agents and then by a security company she had hired independently, an apartment that was now free of the devices they had found (three, in three different locations, none of them places she would have thought to look, which told her the level of access that had been used against her). She was home with a five-day-old daughter and a husband who was cooperating with federal investigators and sleeping in the second bedroom, a distance that was understood between them as necessary and provisional and not yet determined to be permanent or temporary. She was home and recovering and managing the extraordinary logistics of a newborn with the same systematic attention she applied to everything, which Clara was apparently fine with because Clara was already demonstrating the specific quality of a person who did not require excessive reassurance if her needs were met competently. Webb called her at two p.m. to tell her Greer was awake. She asked if she could visit that afternoon. He said yes.
Northwestern Memorial’s ICU had given way to a standard room by the time she arrived, which was itself evidence of progress — the hematoma reduced, the neurological function intact, the body’s extraordinary capacity for recovery being demonstrated in the specific visible way of a person who was sitting up in a hospital bed and looking at the door when Sara came through it. He was thinner than his photograph, with the pale, slightly transparent quality of someone who had been unconscious for two weeks, but his eyes were clear and direct and immediately assessing when she entered — the eyes of a journalist, the eyes of someone whose primary instrument was their intelligence and whose intelligence had clearly survived intact. He looked at her. He said: “You’re Sara Cole.” “Yes,” she said. She sat in the chair beside the bed. “Who told you about me?” she said. “Raymond Doss called the hospital yesterday,” he said. “He’s allowed phone calls now, apparently. He said a woman came to see him and found Noah Banks and she was the only reason — his words — that everything happened when it did instead of getting buried.” He looked at her steadily. “He said you promised him you’d get him out.” “Yes,” she said. “The exoneration process is moving,” she said. “It won’t be fast. These things never are. But the evidence is in the federal record now and it’s been turned over to the Innocence Project as well, for parallel proceedings. He’s going to get out.” Greer was quiet for a moment. “The story,” he said. “Is it—” “It’s out,” she said. “The Tribune and the Sun-Times both ran pieces Friday. The federal charges were announced publicly. The names are in the public record.” He closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them. “Two years,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “And fifteen before that,” he said. “For Raymond.” “Yes,” she said. “And Lillian,” he said. “Fifteen years for Lillian Marsh to know who killed her husband and not be able to prove it.” “She’s been interviewed,” Sara said. “Multiple times. Her account is on the record now. It corroborates everything.” He was quiet again. She looked at him in the hospital bed — this man who had spent two years building a case that had very nearly cost him everything, who had hidden a USB drive in a hollowed-out book and left a piece of paper with an inmate in a state prison and been careful enough and brave enough that even from a hospital bed, unconscious, he had left enough pieces that the right person could find them. “Thank you,” she said. “For keeping the records. For leaving them somewhere they could be found.” He looked at her. “You weren’t who I expected to find them,” he said. “I didn’t expect to be the one who found them,” she said. “No,” he said. “Who made the call at three in the morning?” she said. “The call warning me, telling me to look at the 2009 case.” He was quiet for a moment. “Noah Banks,” he said. “He wasn’t in Evanston when you thought he was. He’d been staying with his sister but he came back the night before you found him. He saw your name in the news — the witness to the attack on me — and he recognized it from the altered records, and he called you.” “He didn’t tell me,” she said. “He was scared,” Greer said. “He’s spent fifteen years being scared. It’s a hard habit to break.” “He’s going to testify,” she said. “He’s committed to it.” “Good,” Greer said. He leaned back against the pillow. “I’m going to write the book,” he said. “When I’m out of here.” “I know,” she said. “Are you going to cooperate?” “When the legal process allows it,” she said. “After the trials.” “Fair,” he said. He looked at her again. “The baby,” he said. “Doss said you were pregnant.” “I had her Friday,” Sara said. “The day of the arrests.” He looked at her with something that was surprise and then something else — the specific warm reaction of a person who was moved by something and was not too exhausted to show it. “What’s her name?” “Clara,” Sara said. He nodded. “Good name,” he said. “Strong.” “Yes,” Sara said. “I thought so.” They talked for another twenty minutes about the case, about what came next, about the trials that would be the longest and most complex in Chicago in years. Then she stood to leave. At the door, she turned back. “One more thing,” she said. He looked at her. “Did you know,” she said, “when you were building the case — did you know that my name had been planted in the 2009 records?” “I found it about six months ago,” he said. “I intended to warn you before anything happened. I was close enough to the truth that I thought I had time.” He looked at her with the clear eyes. “I miscalculated,” he said. “Yes,” she said. “But we arrived at the same place anyway,” she said. “Yes,” he said. “We did.” She left the hospital. She drove home. Clara was asleep when she got there, in the small bassinet that occupied the corner of the bedroom that had always been the room of a woman who worked long hours and needed her sleep and was now the room of a woman who worked long hours and had a daughter who was going to need everything she had and more. James was in the kitchen. He looked at her when she came in with the expression she had been watching for over the last week and trying to categorize — the managed and the unmanaged, the performed and the real. Tonight it was the real. Just the real. The face of a man who had done something wrong and knew it and was trying, with the specific difficulty of someone who had not been in the habit of trying very hard at difficult things, to be better. “How was he?” James said. “Greer.” “Intact,” she said. “Sharp. Ready to go back to work.” “That’s — that’s good,” James said. She looked at him. She thought about the evidence. About the payments. About what he knew and when he knew it and what he had chosen to do with the knowing. She thought about Clara asleep in the bassinet. She thought about the long work of determining what was salvageable and what was not, which was going to require time and honesty and the specific courage of two people deciding whether to rebuild or to leave, and which she was not going to resolve tonight. “I’m going to check on Clara,” she said. “Then I’m going to sleep.” “Okay,” he said. “Sara,” he said, as she turned toward the bedroom. She stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not management sorry. Actually sorry. I made choices that were cowardly and selfish and that put you and Clara in danger and I cannot—” he stopped. “I know,” she said. “I know you’re sorry.” She did not say it was okay. It was not okay. Some things were not okay while you were still deciding whether to make them better. “Goodnight, James,” she said. She went to the bedroom. She stood over the bassinet and looked at Clara, who was sleeping with the profound efficiency of a person for whom sleep was still entirely uncomplicated by anything. She put her hand on the baby’s back, feeling the tiny rise and fall of breathing. She thought about everything that had happened in the eleven days between the alley and this room. She thought about what she had built, what she had found, what she had lost, and what was still possible. She thought: I am thirty-four years old. I am an assistant district attorney in the city of Chicago. I have a daughter who is five days old and grey eyes. I have a husband whose account of himself I am still determining. I have a case that is going to take years to resolve in its full legal complexity. And I have a man in a prison sixty miles from here whose freedom I promised, and I am going to deliver on that promise, and then I am going to figure out the rest. She straightened. She got into bed. She listened to the city outside and the baby breathing inside and the specific, ordinary silence of an apartment at night in a city that was still, despite everything, full of people trying to do the right thing. She thought about the alley. She thought about the rain. She thought: Good decision to turn. Worst best decision I ever made. She closed her eyes. In the morning there would be more work. There was always more work. She was not afraid of the work. She never had been. She slept.