Please Rise

Innocence

They knew what they did. All of them. Except Calhorn.

They knew Calhorn would balk.

But they needed Calhorn.

Outside the bowels of INVA, no one could know that there were tech writers who were ballet dancers, tech writers who were thoroughbreds picking up speed at the last turn.

Calhorn was both.

But he was a lamb in a company of sharks, an ice cream man in a den of snipers.

Calhorn had a bunny, for god’s sake.

They lied to Calhorn, they cloaked their deceit in another layer of deceit and when the ruse caught fire and began to turn to ash they called in another shark, Garling, who had gotten the Sutterborn Five acquitted, and everyone knew the Sutterborn Five were as guilty as a sunset blinding a westbound driver.

Calhorn was naive, but he wasn’t stupid.

Garling was a genius, but he wasn’t infallible.

The Justice Department had a hardon for INVA and the keys to a motel room and every last one of the INVA corporate warriors went from pillars of confidence to gates clanging in the wind on a Kansas Farm.

Someone was gonna crack.

This was white collar crime, but they were gonna pay. They were gonna pay with time, and even if they did that time in a prison with tennis courts and single person showers, it was still prison.

Plagiarism? C’mon, they were guilty, but you didn’t do time for that, that was just stuff that got you kicked out of Princeton.

Garling would fix it, right?

If not for us, then for Calhorn, right?

Calhorn was innocent.

And when the defendants rose, Calhorn wasn’t among them.

He couldn’t take it.

And when they rose, they all knew that Calhorn couldn’t take the thing that they had caused, that they had choreographed.

Calhorn was the best of them, in every respect.

They knew it.

Calhorn was innocent.

Calhorn was gone forever now, and the judge didn’t have to open her mouth for them to know that they were guilty.

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