Текст книги "The Hidden Man"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

38

THE ITALIAN DELI and coffee shop about two blocks from the criminal courts has been a fixture since long before I was a prosecutor. The proprietors, two Sicilian immigrants now in their sixties, are there every day chatting up the customers and telling stories about how things used to be in the city, before the federal government starting sticking its nose into the cesspool of local government, pinching aldermen, exposing bogus city contracts, generally bringing sunlight into areas of public works where shade used to predominate.

It’s mostly a hangout for the lawyers who populate the criminal courts, though cops like to hit the place as well—the exorbitant price of the coffee and pastries notwithstanding. Detective Denny DePrizio was at the counter, as expected, at ten-thirty sharp this fine Friday morning.

We made eye contact as I walked in with the briefcase Smith had given me, still filled with the ten thousand dollars. I’d been followed, as always, by Smith’s men but they kept their usual distance. I doubted they’d check on me unless there was a particular reason to do so, and I wasn’t planning on sticking around for long.

In any event, if I was right, Smith and DePrizio were working together on this, and Smith already knew about this meeting.

DePrizio was at the counter, enjoying some coffee with his jacket thrown over the seat next to him. I moved next to him but didn’t acknowledge him. I set the briefcase on the footstep of the counter next to his feet and leaned in, ordering a large coffee, black, to go.

“That’s the briefcase?” he asked.

I nodded. “The only thing I have that Smith touched. You think there’ll be any prints on it?”

“Hard to say,” DePrizio answered. “Not likely but we’ll know in a few days.”

That was the time frame I figured. There is typically a pretty long line for fingerprint runs.

“Thanks for keeping this discreet,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m being followed, but you never know. Okay if I call you in a couple of days?”

“Sure, Kolarich.” He didn’t hide his opinion of my paranoia. It had been my idea, the surreptitious drop-off, but he’d been a sport about it.

I took my coffee, stuffed a dollar into the coffee cup for tips, and walked away, the briefcase of money at DePrizio’s feet. I didn’t take a deep breath until I was back in my car.

MARIE BUZZED ME in my office at about eleven. “Mr. Smith calling.”

I felt a stirring in my chest, as I did every time I heard from him. We hadn’t spoken for a while now, but he’d sent me a few messages in the interim—a friendly conversation with gang-banger inmate Arrelius Jackson, plus his henchmen mugging Pete in an alley outside a bar.

“Just wanted to check in on you, Jason. How are things? How’s your brother?”

I forced a smile on my face and counted to ten.

“Have you been keeping up your end of the deal?” he went on.

“Memory serves, Smith, I said we didn’t have a deal.”

“Well, I’ve kept up my end. I have a suspect for you.”

“The black-guy-fleeing-the-scene?”

“The very one. You’ll need to see if your witness—his name escapes me—”

“Tommy Butcher,” I said.

“Right, Butcher. You’ll need to see if Butcher might be able to identify our suspect as possibly the man he saw fleeing the apartment building that night.”

“But he wasn’t the man he saw that night.”

“Well, now, Jason, I’m sure you can be persuasive. This was a man he saw at a quick glance, and cross-racial identification is notoriously suspect.”

“You mean, to a white guy, all black guys look alike? That’s not very politically correct of you, Smith.”

But then again, Tommy Butcher wasn’t exactly politically correct, either. Butcher had been sympathetic to my plight, and if I told him that I had a legitimate suspect, he might be willing to “recall” that the person I pointed out to him was, in fact, the guy he saw.

This conversation I was having violated the letter and spirit of pretty much every ethics provision of the lawyer’s code. But at the moment, I didn’t have much of a choice, and the truth was, if this could help Sammy, I’d be willing to consider it, regardless of the source.

“Is this suspect—what’s his name?”

“Ken Sanders.”

“Okay, this guy Sanders—is he going to be cooperative? How’s this going to work?”

Smith said, “He’s obviously not going to admit to anything. But he won’t be able to deny that he was in that building. Mr. Sanders has friends in the building he was visiting that night.”

The building where Griffin Perlini lived, and died, was a subsidized-housing facility that contained, among others, many recently released cons looking to get back on their feet. It made me think that Ken Sanders might have been visiting some such gentlemen, which further made me suspect that Sanders, himself, had a sheet.

“That is correct,” Smith confirmed. “In a nutshell, drugs and violence, but no murder. A full background was stuffed into your mailbox at your house in the past hour.”

He enjoyed letting me know that he knew where I lived. It was a convenient way for him to deliver me something without showing himself or his men.

“Is this guy affiliated?” I asked.

“Is he—what?”

“In a gang, Smith. Is Ken Sanders in a gang?”

“No.”

So Smith actually found a guy willing to be fingered by the defense as a suspect in a murder? He must have put a lot of money into Ken Sanders’s hands.

Smith told me how to get in touch with the aforementioned Mr. Sanders but told me there was another reason for the call. I told him I was all ears.

“I see on the docket entry for the Cutler matter that there is a contested motion for next Tuesday? A defense motion?”

The county courts have recently discovered that we are in a new century, and lots of people use something called the Internet. If you have the docket number of a case, you can access the history of the case, with a data entry for every document filed since the case began. When one of the attorneys files a motion, the docket entry will identify the movant—the defense or the prosecution—as well as designating it “contested” or “agreed.” So Smith could see online that the defense filed a contested motion, but he wouldn’t know the content of that motion or its subject matter.

“I’m moving for expedited DNA testing of the bodies discovered behind that school,” I explained. “Or, in the alternative, a continuance of the trial until DNA testing can be completed.”

Smith was silent. I wondered, for a moment, if his phone had cut out.

“I can only assume you’re joking.”

“You can if you want, Smith. But I wouldn’t.”

“No way, Jason. That’s completely unacceptable. Wasn’t I clear about the terms of our agreement? There will be no—”

“Was I not clear that we don’t have an agreement?”

“You will forget about those bodies and focus on Mr. Cutler’s acquittal. If you don’t, your brother will go away for ten years, Kolarich. And they will not be pleasant years. We will make it our highest priority to ensure that. I assume I don’t need to draw you a picture. You’ve had a preview, yes?”

Smith’s voice was shaking with anger—but, I thought, fear as well. I was really hitting a nerve here, a pressure point, to throw his words back at him. Why did he care so much about a delay of the trial? It didn’t make sense.

Forget about those bodies, he’d said. That, after all, had been what prompted Smith to exert pressure on me by framing Pete—it was after they’d dug up the bodies behind the school.

Was I on the wrong track here? Was Smith hiding his real fear? I’d been operating on the possibility that Smith’s people had killed Griffin Perlini, and they didn’t want me nosing around and discovering that. Was I off base? Maybe Smith wasn’t protecting someone who killed Griffin Perlini.

Maybe he was protecting someone who had killed those girls buried behind the school.

Someone who had killed Sammy’s sister, Audrey.

“You will withdraw that motion or you’ll be sorry,” Smith warned.

“Drop the case against Pete, Smith. Make it happen. Or I go forward with the motion.”

“You can’t win this game, Kolarich. Neither can Pete.” The phone line went dead.

I hung up the phone and pushed myself out of my chair on weak legs, contemplating this new idea. Was Griffin Perlini innocent of Audrey’s murder? Had someone else killed Audrey, along with those other girls—someone who had accumulated enough wealth over the years to be able to finance an operation now to make sure that Griffin Perlini’s murder did not reopen an inquiry into those murders?

I couldn’t deny the possibility. It would explain Smith’s desperation.

I went to the files in the corner of my office that Detective Carruthers had given me, files from Audrey’s case back in the day. I’d neglected them, because I thought they didn’t matter anymore. But maybe they mattered more than anything. I found the name I was looking for, looked through the lawyer’s directory until I found a phone number, and made the call.

“Jason Kolarich for Reggie Lionel,” I said.

39

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, I found myself in the law firm of Guidry, Rogers, Lionel and Freeman. They were in one of the nice skyscrapers downtown, which seemed odd for a criminal defense firm, but they probably got a good deal on rent with the market being what it is.

“Reggie Lionel,” I told the young kid manning reception. He was playing with some contraption that allowed you to watch a video and make a phone call and do your taxes all in one. The digital divide wasn’t limited to the wealthy and the poor; it was age-based, too. By the time I’d said hello to this punk, he could have taken my photo, posted it on the Internet, stolen my credit card information, and learned what I had for breakfast.

“Third office down,” said the kid, who wasn’t inclined to escort me.

I knocked on the door, which was already open. Reggie Lionel was wearing an orange sweater and staring, through thick glasses, at a document. His eyes rose without his head of snowy hair moving an inch.

“Jason Kolarich,” I said.

“Come in,” he bellowed. I took a seat in an uncomfortable chair. Reggie Lionel was an old-timer by now, mid-sixties probably, which meant he’d gone through law school when black people were not exactly welcome. He’d jumped hurdles I’d never seen.

“Rare day off from court,” he said, flipping the document onto a cluttered desk. Criminal defense attorneys like Reggie Lionel work on volume, which means they spend almost every day in court. He looked me over. “We co-counsel?”

“No, nothing like that.” He figured I was jumping into some multiple-defendant case where we each represented one of the doers. “I’ve got a name from the past for you. A client from the late seventies, early eighties. Griffin Perlini.”

His eyes rose up, his lips parted. I wondered if, before the recent news of Perlini’s gravesite of victims had splashed all across the front page, Reggie Lionel would even remember the man he defended from a police inquiry well over twenty years ago. Maybe, maybe not, but the name had clearly been front and center recently, so he nodded with recognition.

I wondered what he thought about that, learning that his client might have been responsible for such terrible deeds, wondering if maybe his successful defense of Perlini had allowed the predator to kill and molest other young girls. That, in the end, is one of the great unspoken dilemmas facing a criminal defense attorney who represents the lowest of the low—you don’t want to lose, but you wonder if you really want to win.

But hey, even I can see that everyone needs a lawyer. Guys like Reggie, they have to have a pretty healthy view of the Bill of Rights to plod forth on behalf of the dregs of society.

“Sex offender,” he said.

“They liked him for a crime on the south side, Leland Park neighborhood,” I reminded him. “A young girl named Audrey Cutler.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “Didn’t stick, though. Didn’t have eyes.”

True enough. I wondered if he knew that those “eyes,” Mrs. Thomas, had thought that Griffin Perlini was wrong for the murder. That, upon reflection, is what Mrs. Thomas had been saying to me when I visited her at the assisted living center. She didn’t think Griffin Perlini was the person she saw running from the Cutler’s home that night.

“Didn’t have a little girl, either,” he added.

No, they didn’t have Audrey, not then, but the discovery of the bodies behind Hardigan Elementary School would change that soon enough.

“Griffin Perlini is dead,” I said. “I assume you’ve heard.”

His eyes narrowed. Yes, clearly, he’d read that article as well in the Watch’s coverage, or on television. But dead or not, Griffin Perlini had been his client, and if he thought there was any chance of a case being made against Perlini, even posthumously, he’d clam up.

“I’ve got the guy they like for his murder,” I said.

“The girl’s brother. Right. Sam, I think.” Lionel’s mouth ran around that idea, seemingly ending up with approval. These guys hold their noses and do their jobs, but they probably don’t mind when rough justice comes the way of their scumbag clients. I doubted that Reggie Lionel had lit a candle for Griffin Perlini following his murder.

“I want to prove that Perlini killed that little girl. Audrey Cutler,” I added.

“Audrey.” He nodded. “Yes. Audrey.” He gave me an ironic smile. “Way it works usually, the defense attorney’s supposed to defend his client, not implicate him.”

“Yeah, that rings a bell,” I answered, a little too abruptly for someone looking for a favor. “Look, I just want to know if I’m barking up the right tree. I mean, the cops homed in on your guy Perlini in a heartbeat, given his background. And you remember, he had photographs of little girls, including Audrey, all over that coach house.”

He kept nodding with me, but he wasn’t talking.

“And you were smart enough to keep a lid on your client.”

Still nodding, now smiling as well. I thought the details were coming back to him, if they hadn’t already.

“So the cops focused on him immediately, and he wasn’t talking. I’m envisioning the possibility here, Reggie, that maybe they got the wrong guy.”

“Been known to happen.”

Only one of us was enjoying this. But I had to play this his way, because a black man making it through a legal career defending criminals did not get where he was by taking people’s shit. “Look, I’m not asking you to divulge confidences. How about you stop me if I make a relevant point?”

He chuckled to himself. He didn’t think much of me, and he didn’t mind displaying that sentiment.

“Audrey Cutler was my neighbor,” I said. “A really sweet little girl. I have some reason to believe that maybe Griffin Perlini didn’t kill her. If he didn’t, I need to find out who did. She deserves some justice, don’t you think?”

“Justice. Justice.” He lost his smile. He had a weathered face that had seen a lot more than I had, and he didn’t betray very much. I sensed that he had a profound sense of justice himself. I just didn’t know what it looked like, and I hoped I never would.

“In the not-so-distant past,” he said, “a prosecutor who went by the name of Jason Kolarich convicted a man named Walter Tucker for first-degree murder.”

I thought about that a moment. “A shopping mall,” I recalled. “A Tenth Street ticket.” Walter Tucker, for his initiation into the Tenth Street Crew, had shot a teenager outside a shopping mall for committing the crime of trying to leave the gang.

“I knew the family,” he said. “Good people.”

I didn’t answer. This wasn’t a game I could win.

“You remember George Ryder handled the defense. He offered involuntary and twenty. But Jason Kolarich turned it down and went to trial with one pair of eyes and a shaky gun.”

And I won. But I knew his thoughts without him saying them: A white boy ID’s a colored kid, of course the jury’s going to convict. I heard it all the time. And I wasn’t sure I disagreed, not all the time, at least. But I didn’t prosecute a case if I wasn’t sure the guy was guilty. It made life simple for me.

“George said you were fair, though. Tough as hell but fair.” He brought a fist to his mouth and let out a nasty cough. It seemed to move him off topic. “Okay, Jason Kolarich, tell me their theory. Those smart cops out there in Area Two with the missing girl, Audrey Cutler.”

I felt like a student now, but okay, I’d play along. “Perlini nabbed Audrey Cutler from her bedroom, a snatch and run. He went to his house or his car, had his fun with her, killed her, and disposed of the body.”

He leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. “Snatch and run. Snatch,” he repeated, “and run.”

His emphasis on that last word finally triggered it in my mind, finally scratched that mental itch. My body went cold. I felt my hand rise up to hood my eyes.

“Ah,” said Lionel. “Did the cops do their homework, Jason Kolarich?”

A moan escaped my throat. No, in fact, they hadn’t.

“But you did, right, Counselor?”

Yes, I did. But then, my homework was over twenty years later, and after Griffin Perlini was dead. So when I’d had the conversation with Griffin Perlini’s mother, Griffin was not facing a first-degree murder charge, when everyone shuts their mouths and prays that the police can’t put one and one together and get two. In fact, when Mrs. Perlini had told me that Griffin had torn the anterior cruciate ligament behind his knee a few years earlier—before Audrey’s abduction—it was nothing more than an introduction to a story.

“Griffin had a torn ACL,” I said. “He couldn’t run.”

“No more than I could do a triple axle off the high dive,” said Reggie Lionel.

40

I WALKED BACK from Reggie Lionel’s office in a trance, every assumption I’d made in the case now turned upside down. I’d had teammates who had torn their ACLs and, while it was not a universal rule, it was typically the case that a full tear of the ACL, unless surgically repaired, left you able to walk but unable to run. Perlini’s mother had told me that they didn’t have the money for surgical repair. The police, when investigating Perlini for Audrey’s abduction, surely didn’t put him through wind sprints. They’d have no reason to know of his inability to run. Reggie Lionel, wisely, had held his client back from revealing this fact to the police, because there was always time to do it, and most likely that time would have been in a courtroom, while he stood trial.

Lionel, back then, had played it smart. Wait out the cops, see if they can put something together, hold back your trump card in case you need it. He just never needed it, because the cops couldn’t pin the rap on his client.

Mrs. Thomas had described the man running as very fast. It was impossible to imagine that Griffin Perlini could have pulled that off.

Griffin Perlini didn’t kill Audrey. The notorious Mr. Smith’s client, I was now sure, did.

Smith wasn’t worried so much about delay as he was about me figuring out this very fact. He hadn’t jumped to attention until the bodies were discovered. That was their concern. That was when they framed Pete to get control over me.

It was not lost on me that this revelation did some violence to my attempt to free Sammy Cutler. I’d hoped to show the jury that Sammy killed the man who killed his sister. If the jury knew that Perlini didn’t kill Audrey, Sammy’s murder looked a lot less justifiable.

But I couldn’t let this go. I might not be able to solve this crime in a short time frame, but I would solve it. I would find Smith and I would find his client. I would find Audrey’s killer.

Smith. I’d taken a gamble and filed the motion for expedited DNA testing—or a delay of Sammy’s trial until testing could be completed—to rattle the tree, to force Smith’s hand, to see if it might prompt him to make a move that would expose himself to me. He would have a counter, I knew, some effort to tighten the noose, but I was getting to the end of the line and I had no good leads on Smith, or his client, with less than three weeks to go until Sammy’s trial.

If I was right that Smith and company were covering up Audrey’s murder, and perhaps multiple child murders, the clock was ticking loudly for Pete and me. Once Sammy’s trial was over, and they had no use for me, they’d come after both of us to cover their tracks. I had seventeen days to solve this thing before there would be a contract out on both of our heads.

What else could I do? I had forced Smith into a corner now by asking the court for DNA testing. I was trying out a plan on Detective Denny DePrizio, though it probably wasn’t going to help Sammy. What else could I do?

Solve Sammy’s case, for starters. I had two leads on alternative suspects now. Smith had given me Ken Sanders, the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene. And I had to follow up on the alibi of another potential suspect, Archie Novotny, who claimed he was at a guitar lesson on the night Griffin Perlini was murdered.

THE MUSIC EMPORIUM, located on 39th and Greenway, was a relic in this day and age, full of rows of albums and CDs in an era where nobody had a turntable anymore and most young people were buying music online. It was a cramped, musty, dark place with music posters for wallpaper, where the only conditions of employment seemed to be wearing your hair past your shoulders and sporting hallucinogenic imagery on your T-shirt.

I actually appreciated the place. We’ve become too impersonal nowadays, buying and reading everything through a computer. I still liked to hold a newspaper in my hand. I still preferred flipping through CDs in a store. I did so while I waited, going through some old Smiths music. This place had a pretty good collection. I bought a used copy of Strangeways, Here We Come because I’d lost mine, and a CD single of “The Queen Is Dead,” which I still thought was their best song.

“Morrissey. Good taste.”

I turned around as the clerk was ringing up my purchase to find the guy who I assumed was Nick Trillo. Archie Novotny had given me his name; this was his guitar teacher who could vouch for him. I hadn’t formed a predictive image of the man in my mind, but in hindsight, he was about what I should have expected. He was skinny to a fault but with a minor paunch, a scatter-patch goatee, gray hair pulled back into a long ponytail.

“You, too,” I said, nodding to his T-shirt, which was the cover art for That What Is Not, by Public Image Ltd., the band Johnny Lydon formed after the Sex Pistols, though I liked PiL’s early stuff a lot better. “You know a better song than ‘Acid Drops’?”

“Nah.” His face lit up. “Nah, man, I don’t.” He hit my arm with the back of his hand. I had won him over. This ponytailed hippie and the yuppie in a serious coat and tie united in their appreciation of an early pioneer of punk rock.

“You needed me for something?”

“Yeah, yeah. Can we find a place to talk?”

“Sure, man, yeah. Here.” I followed him through the store to a door that had a piece of paper on it that read: HEY! IF YOU’RE NOT AN EMPLOYEE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? TURN AROUND AND BUY SOMETHING. It made me like the place even more.

He led me to a room where, presumably, he taught guitar lessons. The walls were lined with some of the finest guitars ever made—a Les Paul, a Stratocaster, a Flying V. Otherwise, there was nothing more than two stools in the middle of the room and a lone guitar, standing upright in a pedestal, that apparently was the one Nick Trillo played when he taught lessons. I made a point of commenting on the classics on the walls to further soften any ice that might have formed. I was a lawyer, after all. People clutch up around me all the time.

“Did Archie tell you I’d be calling?” I asked.

“Yeah, he said something about some dates. He said to give you whatever you wanted.”

That was helpful. This guy Trillo didn’t need to know which side I was on—that is, that I was on the opposite side of Archie Novotny. Maybe he thought I was Archie’s lawyer. If so, I would choose my words carefully, walking a fine line to let him believe that without actually lying.

“September 21, 2006,” I said.

“Whoa.”

“A Thursday night,” I added. “Do you know if he took a lesson that night?”

“Well, yeah, Thursday night’s when he’s always had lessons. But that’s like, over a year ago, man. Far as I know, yeah, he did.”

I didn’t want to be the inquisitor. I had to play this gently. “My only fear here,” I said, “is that someone else might ask the same question, and they won’t take your word for it. They’ll want records. They’ll want proof.” I leaned into him. “I’ll tell you what my real concern is here, Nick.” This is where I hoped our bonding would pay off. “My real concern is that Archie and I give them the wrong answer. I just want the truth. If we say he was here and he wasn’t, then we’ll be in trouble. Or vice versa. If we say he wasn’t here and he was, then, y’know, it looks like we’re lying. I couldn’t care less what the answer is, but it has to be verifiable.”

Nick Trillo seemed troubled by all of this. “Is this, like, something really serious?”

I showed him my hand. “Not as long we tell the truth. We just have to make absolutely sure it’s the truth, either way. Archie figured you might have some records that could verify whether he was here or not.”

I wasn’t being entirely forthright with the gentleman, but in the end, I was just asking for the truth. That, as much as anything, would be what he’d remember. The minor details of what I was saying would get lost.

“Are you, like, one of these criminal lawyers?”

I shrugged. “I do a lot of things. Like divorces, for example.”

“Oh, okay.” He seemed relieved. “So this is like a divorce fight or something?”

I smiled at him. “I don’t think Archie would want me to answer that, Nick.”

Rather slippery of me, admittedly. The guitar instructor thought about it a moment and, my guess, decided that this was a divorce where Archie Novotny’s whereabouts on a particular night were in question. Probably an allegation of adultery. Maybe he hadn’t thought it through, but either way, he was making me for Archie’s advocate and he seemed to want to help.

“So,” I said, “do you guys have any records of attendance?”

He thought about it, blowing out a deep sigh. “Well, y’know, I’ll sometimes jot something down but—I mean, I wouldn’t keep it. No, it’s more like I just remember—well, I’ll tell you what. We could see how much he paid. Yeah, I could do that. Hang on.”

Nick Trillo left the room, leaving me with the guitars on the wall. I should have been a rock star. Other than the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument, couldn’t sing, wasn’t all that attractive, and lacked the gift of lyrical composition, I think I could have.

“Here, okay.” Trillo carried a hefty file box into the room and placed it on the floor, as there was no place else to put it. He sat on the floor and opened it up. “Month of September,” he said. I looked over his shoulder at the files, which were tabbed by months of the year for the year 2006. He grabbed the tab labeled “9/06” and pulled it back to reveal a few dozen sheets of paper. On each one was a photocopy of a check.

“Twenty-five bucks a lesson,” he said. “They usually pay that day.”

“By check?”

“Boss’s rule,” he said. “One of the instructors who used to be here, he wasn’t so honest with the cash thing. Boss says it’s gotta be a check or credit card.”

Good for me.

“September 7,” Trillo said, showing me a photocopy of a check written by Archie Novotny in the amount of twenty-five dollars.

He kept leafing through the pages. “Here. September 14.”

I didn’t care about September 7 or 14. I cared about September 21, 2006.

Trillo ran through the pages. I was playing defense, praying for the absence of a record. I held my breath as he kept leafing, by my estimate a little longer than he should have, proportionately. I watched the dates on the photocopied checks, felt my heart skip a beat as the dates passed September 21, but that assumed that the checks were in perfect chronological order.

“Okay. This is weird.” Trillo held up a photocopied check from Archie Novotny, dated September 28, in the amount of fifty dollars. “He paid for two lessons on the twenty-eighth.”

Which would have included the twenty-first. But my eyes fixed on the memo line of that check, in which the handwritten words “I insist!” were written.

I felt my knees go weak, the adrenaline flow with a vengeance. I thought I understood this, but I wanted to get Trillo on the same page with me. “ ‘I insist,’ ” I said.

“Huh. ‘I insist.’ Yeah.”

“What does that mean? What was he insisting on?”

Trillo thought about it. I decided to help him along.

“So he didn’t write you a check on the twenty-first, and then he wrote you a check for the following week with the words ‘I insist!’ on it.”

“ ‘I insist.’ ‘I—.’ Oh.” Nick Trillo looked up at me, shaking the paper. “I remember this. Yeah. Yeah.” He got up from the floor and pointed at me. “He missed a lesson. He missed a lesson and I told him he didn’t have to pay for it, but he insisted, ’cause he hadn’t called ahead to cancel it. He said, fair was fair.”

I tried to remain calm, though I wanted to wrap my arms around his bony frame. “He missed the lesson on the twenty-first but insisted on paying for it.”

“Yeah.” Trillo nodded with excitement. “Yeah. Must have been the twenty-first. He’d paid for every other one. Yeah, I remember, I told him not to worry but he said, well—”

“He insisted.”

“Right. He insisted.” Trillo looked at the paper and chuckled. “I feel like a detective or something. You want copies of this stuff?”

“If it’s not too much trouble,” I answered. And if it was, I would personally take them to a Kinko’s and make copies myself.

Trillo left for a few moments, returning with fresh copies of each of Archie Novotny’s checks for September—twenty-five dollars for September 7, twenty-five dollars for September 14, and fifty dollars for September 28.

“Good thing we checked,” he said.

Indeed it was—good for me, at least. Not so good for Archie Novotny. Mr. Novotny, it seemed clear, missed his guitar lesson on the night that Griffin Perlini was murdered. Then, if he was even thinking this diabolically, he tried to cover his tracks by paying for it anyway.

“Hey, if it’s not a problem,” I said, “I’ll come back tomorrow with an affidavit—a legal document describing what we discussed. That okay with you?”