Dante's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF

several 911 calls from the couple’s home, along with tapes in which a clearly distraught Lazarus begged for help. When she finally left Westlake six months before, Lazarus had sought an order of protection. Friends and colleagues at the university—where Lazarus had lately obtained work as an administrative assistant—were quick to rally to Lazarus’s side, volunteering accounts of blackened eyes and ill-concealed bruises, while hospital records confirmed at least one instance in which she had sought treatment for broken bones. Though Lazarus herself steadfastly refused to offer any specifics, she did not object when her counsel announced, in a pressroom percolating with reporters and flashing cameras, that Lazarus would be pursuing a Battered Woman’s defense.
    The trouble this presented for O’Malley was clear to anyone with even the dimmest awareness of local politics. A Republican, O’Malley had barely squeaked by her male opponent in the November polling, a feat only possible in Cook County because the candidate put up by the Machine was caught subscribing to an online child-pornography site mere days before the election. To complicate matters further, O’Malley had run on a strong domestic-violence platform, drawing the support of EMILY’s List and other women’s advocacy groups. The Lazarus case put her campaign promises front and center—she’d declared in several speeches that her office would be “taking a hard look at any prosecution in which the defendant was beaten, stalked, or raped by her abuser”—while the brutality of the crime produced the usual loud demands for justice among the law-and-order faction in her base. Whichever side she took, it seemed she couldn’t win.
    O’Malley played it straight down the middle. While other prosecutors might have broadcast their leanings by hiring one of the celebrity psychiatrists who crossed the country testifying in battered women trials, she’d enlisted Bradley Stephens, a less well-known but highly regarded local doctor who’d never seen the inside of a courtroom. O’Malley also instructed him to spare no expense in conducting his psychiatric evaluation of Lazarus, declaring her intention to offer Stephens’s expert opinion into evidence even if it favored a verdict of acquittal. It was a brilliant move, and one that was already creating speculation about a run for higher office down the road.
    It was therefore doubly unfortunate for O’Malley that Stephens was mowed down in a hit-and-run accident only days before he was to issue his report.
    I’d known Brad Stephens, who worked at a rival hospital down the street, and respected his work immensely. So I’d been shocked when Jonathan told me of his death, a few blocks from his Wicker Park home and roughly at the same time I’d been tying one on at Sep’s party.
    I pushed my uneaten lunch around with a fork. “Eat your mashed potatoes,” Josh urged. “Before I do it for you.”
    â€œIs that what these are? I thought I was eating reconstituted soap flakes.”
    â€œI wish I had your problem—not eating when I’m depressed. And I shouldn’t be making light of the situation. Brad was a good man. Do the police know anything more about the accident?”
    I shook my head. “You remember how bad the weather was that night. They think he must have slipped on the ice and been run over by a driver who couldn’t brake in time or didn’t spot him in the whiteout conditions. If you’d seen him recently, you’d know how shaky his footing was getting.”
    Around my age—that is, just shy of fifty—Stephens had suffered from early onset Parkinson’s disease. My thoughts traveled back to the last time we’d met, while sharing a panel at a conference on emerging issues in veterans’ healthcare. Stephens had just graduated to a support cane, and we’d