Bloody River Blues

Crimmins snapped, angry because there was a 5 percent chance the line was not secure.
    “I found him.”
    “How?”
    “I called some favors in.”
    Called in favors? Nonsense. Nobody owes a leech any favors. “Who is it?”
    “A man with this movie company that’s up in Maddox.”
    “Movie company? I never heard about a movie company.”
    “They’re shooting some gangster film up there.”His voice was bright with an irony that Crimmins didn’t wish to acknowledge.
    “Well? Tell me about him.”
    The man said, “They know he saw who was in the car. Both Maddox police and the FBI. So far, he’s been too scared to testify.”
    “What did he see?” Crimmins asked slowly.
    “They’re sure he saw the driver,” the lawyer said, then added, “There’s something else I should tell you. I heard from somebody in the Justice Department that Peterson’s going after him. He’s going to jump on this guy with both feet. He’s going to jump on him until he burns you.”
    A sigh. “What’s his name?”
    “John Pellam.”
    “Where’s he staying?”
    The lawyer hesitated—pehaps at Crimmins’s sudden interest in details. Then he said, “He’s got a trailer. You know, a camper. He parks it different places but mostly he’s staying at the old trailer camp by the river in Maddox. Near the cement plant.”
    “I thought that was closed.”
    “Maybe for the movie people they opened it.”
    “It’s deserted around there, isn’t it?”
    Now the hesitation grew into a long silence. The lawyer managed to ask, “Why do you want to know that? Tell me, Peter.”
    Crimmins said, “I don’t need anything more from you for the time being.”
    “LINE IT UP for me, Nels,” said Ronald L. Peterson, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri.
    He sat in a large office, done up in functional sixties design. The furniture was expensive. The desk was solid teak, but you could not tell that by looking at its top, which was covered with a thousand pieces of paper. On the bookshelves, filling three walls, were dark, wilted volumes. Moore’s Federal Practice Digest. Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Case reporters, law reviews, ABA Journal s.
    Young Nelson, sandy-haired, solid, a purebred preppy, opened a file stuffed full of scraps of yellow foolscap and began pulling out sheets and organizing them.
    Peterson, forty-four, was wearing a Brooks Brothers navy suit, about one-fifth as old as he, a white shirt, a yellow tie with black dots on it (a summer model technically, but this was his good-luck tie, having been around his neck when he put seven Cosa Nostra leaders into prison, and so he wore it when—as now—he felt he needed luck). Peterson was a solid man, with thick hands and a smooth face. Balding. A roll of belly and midriff that showed taut and pinkish under the thin white shirts he always wore. He was the sort of man whose face revealed exactly the boy he had been at thirteen. And in other ways, too, he was much the same then as now: confident, vindictive, smart, determined, prissy. And manic.
    Ronald Peterson’s approach to this job, as well as his approach to the practice of law, was characterized by an almost charming simplicity. He was the chief U.S. lawyer in a major judicial district for the same reason he had worked in the Justice Department forthe past nine years: because he thought that people who did bad things ought to go to jail.
    Years ago, in law school, troubled about what kind of practice to go into, Peterson had heard one of his Harvard Law professors say that the best lawyers make the worst judges. Meaning that the practice of law provides its own morality—lawyers do not need to make terrifying judgments about right and wrong; they just apply the rules. This observation was an epiphany for him, and that summer he took a job as an intern in the same U.S. Attorney’s office that he now headed. He had been applying the simple rules ever since. He went about this task with the devotion of a fundamentalist Shi’ite—with whom he shared a sense of righteousness and an ecstatic appreciation of the abstract.
    The man who was the focus of Peterson’s present jihad was Peter Crimmins. This campaign actually had less to do with the infamous 60 Minutes program skewering his office than one might think. No, what Peterson resented so much about Crimmins was what the prosecutor had identified as a serious problem in America—a legitimate businessman’s