Who Killed Carolyn Polhemus? PRESUMED INNOCENT

By Paul Gray

Writers want to be read; most of them will also confess to dreams of striking it rich. Every so often, reality conspires to reward both desires at once. The latest beneficiary of this bolt-from-the-blue largesse is a Chicagoan named Scott Turow, 38. Since 1978 he has been a lawyer in his hometown, working for eight years in the U.S. Attorney's office and then as a partner in a private firm. He has also, like thousands of others among the gainfully employed, written in his spare time. Eventually he completed his first novel. Unlike most such manuscripts, however, his did not meet with indifference and rejection; in fact, publishers competed eagerly to buy the book. Turow finally accepted $200,000 from a house whose reputation he admired. Next a book club bought in. Then came $1 million for screen rights, with a paperback sale still pending -- and obviously appreciating as the novel climbs best-seller lists.

But Turow's good fortune cannot be written off entirely to luck. Although a beginning novelist, he is a published writer; his One L, an account of his first year at Harvard Law School, received admiring attention when it appeared in 1977. In addition, Turow's legal training and experience as a prosecutor have honed some skills useful to lawyers and storytellers alike: an eye for significant details, an ear for how people talk and what they may actually mean when under pressure. Presumed Innocent has not stumbled into success. It is a clever, carefully prepared plea for popular attention.

The case rests principally on an irresistible plot. Rusty Sabich, 39, is the chief deputy prosecutor of Kindle County, somewhere in the Middle West. Raymond Horgan, his boss and mentor for the past twelve years, faces a re- election battle undermined by a stroke of bad news. A little less than three weeks before the voting, Carolyn Polhemus, a member of Horgan's staff and Rusty's colleague, has been found murdered in gruesome, suggestive circumstances: nude, bound, apparently raped. Horgan's political opponents create a furor, and the local papers and TV stations chime in: if brutal crime can reach even the chief prosecutor's office and go unpunished, it is time for a change. As he has so often in the past, Horgan turns to Rusty, his reliable protege: "Catch me a perpetrator and save my worthless ass."

It is not that easy, of course. The criminal evidence is inconclusive, and may have been planted with the intent to mislead. Within the agencies he must rely on to aid the investigation, Rusty finds some people who are not Horgan's (or his) friends and who seem disinclined to hurry. And Rusty has an emotional tie to this case that he cannot reveal to any of his fellow professionals. Some months earlier, he had risked his career and his marriage of 17 years on a passionate affair with the murder victim. After a month or so, she jilted him and took up with Horgan.

So who killed Carolyn Polhemus? There is a simple answer to that question, of course, and Presumed Innocent eventually provides it. But the novel has aspirations well beyond those of the run-of-the-mill whodunit. Turow uses Carolyn's grotesque death as a means of exposing the trail of municipal corruption that has spread through Kindle County. The issue is not merely ! whether a murderer will be brought to justice but whether public institutions and their guardians are any longer capable of finding the truth.

An extended trial forms the novel's centerpiece and shows off Turow's specialized knowledge to best advantage. The jousting between prosecution and defense, the psychological intricacies of jury selection, the subtle influence a judge can exercise on the outcome of a case, all are convincingly and grippingly portrayed. And the irony behind these elaborate proceedings is that they almost certainly have no bearing on the actuality of Carolyn's death.

Presumed Innocent is strongest when it sticks to the facts, the gritty routine of trying to solve a puzzle by finding the pieces and hoping they fit. Rusty, who is the narrator as well as the central character, has been at his job long enough to sound persuasively disillusioned. He describes working conditions in the prosecutor's offices: "In the summer we labor in jungle humidity, with the old window units rattling over the constant clamor of the telephones. In the winter the radiators spit and clank while the hint of darkness never seems to leave the daylight. Justice in the Middle West."

Unfortunately, Rusty is also given to occasional delusions of Dostoyevsky. "I have seen so much," he begins at one point, brooding over his liaison with the murder victim, and then recites a litany of misery, concluding, "The lights go out, grow dim. And a soul can stand only so much darkness. I reached for Carolyn." As excuses for adultery go, Rusty's sounds more than a little pretentious.

But these flaws stem from an abundance of ambition, from Turow's attempt to wrest every conceivable implication out of the story he has constructed. Given the breakneck pace of Presumed Innocent, the surprises that keep piling up even after what seems an untoppable conclusion, no one is likely to complain.