Текст книги "The Hidden Man"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

50

SAMMY WAS BROUGHT into the courtroom at a little after nine in the morning. The deputy removed his manacles and he took a seat next to me, wearing his prison jumpsuit. There was no jury, so no need to make him look more respectable in a suit.

Across from me, Lester Mapp was conferring with another attorney, a young woman. He carried that air of authority that accompanied his position. He wore it a little too proudly. I never felt comfortable with it, myself, the self-righteousness. The way I saw it, lots of people do lots of things they shouldn’t, and the ones hauled into court are just the ones who got caught. Unless we could be more consistent in how we enforced the law, the air of superiority didn’t fit.

I checked my watch for the fourth time when Tommy Butcher walked in. I’d told him to wear a suit, but the best he could do was a brown tweed sport coat, red tie, and slacks, which didn’t seem to fit him too comfortably. I nodded to him but didn’t approach, other than to make a calming gesture with my hands.

“All rise.”

Judge Kathleen Poker walked into court with her typical no-nonsense approach and got right down to business, looking over her glasses at the courtroom. “People versus Cutler,” she said. “Show Mr. Mapp present for the People. Show Mr. Kolarich and the defendant present as well. Mr. Mapp?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” Mapp rose and buttoned his impressive suit coat.

“I’ve read your motion. Do you have anything further?”

“We’d ask to call Thomas Butcher, Your Honor.”

“Is Mr. Butcher present—okay, Mr. Butcher. Will you please come forward, sir?”

Witnesses come in all shapes and sizes, well-dressed and not, confident and meek, but you always want someone who seems comfortable, which means they’re being honest. Butcher seemed to do well enough on first glance, walking slowly to the witness stand and swearing the oath given to him by the bailiff. He rolled his neck, showing his discomfort with a buttoned-up collar and tie. That part wasn’t so good. Fidgeting was not on a lawyer’s wish list for his client.

“Permission to treat as adverse,” said Mapp. I didn’t bother to object, because Butcher was a defense witness. Mapp was asking for the right to cross-examine, to ask leading questions.

“Your Honor, for the record, I assume we can stipulate that the offense under indictment—the murder of Griffin Perlini—took place on September 21, 2006.”

“So stipulated,” I said.

“Thank you, Counsel.” Lester Mapp opened a file folder on the lectern between the prosecution and defense tables. “Mr. Butcher, good morning.”

That was about as friendly as the prosecutor was going to get.

“You gave a statement to the police in regard to this crime on September 18 of 2007,” he said. “Two-thousand-seven. Almost an entire year later.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Already, Butcher was getting his back up a bit, adjusting in his seat and setting his jaw. His eyes shot in my direction.

“On the date of this shooting—September 21, 2006—you were not aware of a shooting taking place.”

“No. Not then, no.”

“You heard about it later?”

“Right. I read about it in the paper.”

“The Watch?”

“Yeah. Some article about the case.”

“Do you recall when this was?”

“Not the exact date.”

“Well, okay—but let’s try it like this,” Mapp said. “You came to the police on September 18 of this year. How many days before that date had you read the article?”

When I asked Butcher almost that precise question yesterday, he couldn’t say. I went through the online archives of the Watch and found an article dated September 16 of this year, which was the Sunday edition. The article was a one-paragraph in the Metro Shorts about a firm trial date being set, including in the discussion that a shooting took place outside the Liberty Street Apartment Complex on the evening of September 21, 2006.

“The Sunday previous,” said Butcher. “Something about it in the Metro section.”

“Okay.” Mapp was slightly disappointed. He obviously had done some research in this regard and was aware of that article. “And what made you come forward?”

“Well, it’s like I told the cops. I’d seen this man running from the building with a gun in his pants. So I figured, maybe there was something to it.”

“You remembered the date that well?” asked the prosecutor. “You remembered September 21, 2006, as the date that you saw this alleged man running from the building?”

“Well, not exactly like that. I mean, I had to think about it. But then I checked back and it was a Thursday that it happened, and I asked my brother Jake about it, and we both thought about it and figured that, yeah, it was the right date.”

“All right, let’s come back to that,” Mapp said. I felt a flutter in my stomach. Sometimes lawyers change the topic because they’re not making any inroads, and rather than cry uncle, they just act like they’ll “come back to it.” Other times, however, they’re hoping to trap a witness by jumping from topic to topic, locking them down on one detail and then using that detail against them in another area.

“Tell the Court where you were,” Mapp said. “Before this event, I mean.”

“Downey’s Pub is the name.” Butcher looked at the judge. “Over on West Liberty, right about Liberty and Manning.”

“Manning is the cross street,” Mapp confirmed.

“Yeah.”

“That’s about four city blocks away from the Liberty Apartments, right?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“Okay, and who was present with you at Downey’s Pub?”

“Me and my brother.”

“And why Downey’s Pub?”

“Good place, I guess.”

“You didn’t go there for the décor, I take it.”

Butcher smiled. “Downey’s? No.”

“Or for the nice neighborhood?”

“No, definitely not.”

Not a good answer. I’d talked to Butcher about that.

“Kind of—kind of a rough neighborhood, wouldn’t you say?”

“Kind of rough,” Butcher agreed.

“But no particular reason for Downey’s?”

I could have objected but didn’t.

Butcher opened his hands. “I mean, what do you want?”

“I want to know why you were there. You live, what, about four miles from the place?”

“Yeah, so?”

Lester Mapp shrugged easily. He was handling this pretty well. “There’s a tavern or two between your house and that bar, right?”

The judge smiled. Butcher chuckled. “One or three hundred,” he said. “It’s as good a place as any. Me and my brother, we used to go there a lot before we had wives.”

Several people sprinkled in the gallery, a reporter or two and some court junkies, laughed. Judge Kathleen Poker did not.

“What was the occasion for going out that night?” Mapp asked.

“Now you sound like my wife,” he answered.

More laughter, but the judge turned to Butcher and said, “Please answer the question.”

Butcher nodded at her. “Okay, well, we was out, that’s all. Me and my brother blow off some steam now and then. It had been a long week.”

“Oh, it’s not unusual?” Mapp asked it casually, but it was not a casual question.

“No. We go out a lot.”

“How often? Once a week?”

“Could be.”

“Twice a week?”

“Been known to happen.”

“You didn’t need a special occasion that night,” Mapp said.

“No.”

“And you didn’t have a special occasion.”

“No.”

“So let’s talk about that month last year. September of last year. How many times did you two go out drinking that month?”

“Oh, well, come on—I don’t know. Who knows?”

No—that was not a good answer. You can’t claim to remember a date certain, going back a year, but then act like you have no memory of other dates in that month.

“No idea,” Mapp confirmed.

“No, I mean—I don’t know.”

“Fair enough. What were you drinking that night?”

“Probably whiskey.”

“Probably? You’re not sure?”

“It’s what I usually drink.”

“You don’t have a specific memory.”

“No. Not, like, specific.”

“How many drinks?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I was okay afterward, so not that much.”

“But you don’t recall.”

“No.”

“How long were you there?”

“Oh, probably a normal amount. Maybe couple hours, three hours maybe.”

“You don’t specifically recall?”

“No, but it wasn’t, like, a marathon session.”

Mapp smiled. “Okay. What was the weather like that night?”

Butcher cleared his throat. “Probably—I mean, pretty much normal.”

“Cold? Rainy? Snowing?”

“No, I mean—pretty much normal, I guess. Not rainin’ or nothin’ like that.”

“Okay. Oh, by the way—did you pay with a credit card? Or did your brother?”

Butcher and I had worked on his answer to this question.

“I don’t know for certain, but I doubt it,” he answered. “We usually pay cash.”

“You usually pay cash? Why’s that?”

“Keep it off the credit card bills,” he said. “The wives, you know. No offense, Your Honor,” he added, looking up at the judge.

The judge shook her head but smiled.

“So there’s no record of this transaction?”

“There’s a cash record.”

“Okay, fine.” The prosecutor had made his point, and it seemed like it wasn’t lost on the judge. “A cash record. Okay. Did you eat there that night?”

“No.”

“You just went there for some drinks?”

“Yeah.”

“Alcoholic drinks? You’re not saying you went there for fountain sodas?”

“No.” Butcher chuckled again. “We didn’t drink Pepsi.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Maybe—maybe ten. About ten?”

“Was that early for you guys?”

“I don’t know about early. I mean, the missus doesn’t appreciate it, you stay out real late.”

“You wanted to get home to your wife.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you guys drive together?”

“No.”

“Okay, where’d you park your car?”

“A few blocks away.”

“What direction from Downey’s?”

“Well, west of it, ’cause that’s the direction we were walking.”

“Okay, where specifically?”

“I don’t know, specifically.”

“But to have passed the Liberty Apartments Complex, you’d have to walk four city blocks from Downey’s Pub. So you were parked at least four city blocks away, right? A half mile away.”

Butcher and I had worked on this answer extensively.

“Yeah, see, but that’s on purpose,” said Butcher. “That’s what I do when I’m out. I give myself a walk after drinking. Straightens you out. Sobers you up. So yeah, I parked a way’s away.”

“But you don’t know where, exactly.”

“No.”

“And the point was, you guys were drinking, so you wanted to give yourself a walk.”

“That’s it.”

“Whiskey, I think you said.”

“Probably.”

“Probably. But definitely not soft drinks.”

“No, definitely not.”

Mapp paused, which probably meant a segue. “Now, Mr. Butcher, you have a criminal record, isn’t that true?”

Butcher adjusted his position in the witness chair. “Yeah, it’s true.”

“You were convicted of submitting a false bid application on a public construction contract, isn’t that the case?”

“Yeah.”

“You were a project manager for Emerson Construction Company back in 1982,” he said.

“Yeah, and in a bid application for an annex to a high school, we listed a subcontractor as a minority-owned business that, it turned out, was not minority owned.”

“We listed. You mean, you listed.”

“Well—yeah, I mean, I wasn’t an owner at Emerson. This was before our family owned our own company. But yeah, I was the one who filled the thing out.”

“And you knew, when you listed that subcontractor on your bid application—you knew that the sub was not a minority-owned company.”

“Yeah, I did. It was wrong.”

“And you signed an affidavit swearing to the truth of that statement.”

“Right.”

“So you lied under oath.”

“I admitted to that. I was young and stupid.”

“Were you young and stupid in 1990, too? Isn’t that when you were convicted of obstruction of justice when you lied to an IRS inspector about payroll taxes?”

“Well, I don’t know about young—but I was stupid.”

“You knew that it was a crime to lie to a federal agent, didn’t you?”

“I s’pose I did.”

Mapp nodded. I was getting uneasy. He had something up his sleeve here.

“Before you were to find yourself in another legal—predicament, let’s say—I’d just want to make sure you were clearly testifying to the truth here today.”

“Objection,” I said. “Argumentative.”

“Let’s move on,” the judge said.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Mapp did a slight bow. “Mr. Butcher, you’re sure it was Downey’s Pub you were at that night?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure you were drinking alcohol?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re sure it was September 21, 2006?”

“Yeah. Why?” Butcher asked, a bit meekly. Suddenly, his brown tweed sport coat and buttoned collar seemed a little warm, a little uncomfortable, as Butcher rolled his neck and kept his eyes on the prosecutor.

“Why?” Mapp paused. “Because, Mr. Butcher, I’m just trying to figure out how Downey’s Pub could have served alcohol on September 21, 2006, when Downey’s Pub didn’t have a liquor license on that date. When it wasn’t even open on that date.”

51

OBJECTION.”I got to my feet on shaky legs. Lester Mapp handed me a certified copy of an order handed down by the state’s liquor control commission, which suspended the liquor license of Downey’s Pub effective September 1, 2006, for the period of thirty days.

“Selling alcohol to a minor was the offense,” said Mapp. “A third violation, warranting a one-month suspension. A one-month suspension that ran through the first week of October.”

“Objection,” I repeated. “This wasn’t disclosed to the defense. This wasn’t provided to me and it wasn’t in the prosecution’s written motion.” What I was saying had merit, but it was like complaining that a life preserver hadn’t been properly inflated to federal regulations. I was right, but I was still going to drown.

“I just got it today,” said Mapp. “We’re two weeks out from trial. This is just a hearing.”

The judge shot the prosecutor a look. She didn’t appreciate the grand-standing. She read from the document that Mapp handed her.

Unfair surprise, I wanted to say, but there was no cure for my ill. Mapp was right. I had almost two weeks before trial. And the document said what it said. Tommy Butcher couldn’t have been at Downey’s Pub on the evening of September 21, 2006, the night Griffin Perlini was murdered.

“Counsel,” the judge said, waving the document at me. “I don’t know—you’re right, of course, that Mr. Mapp improperly sprang this on you. But that doesn’t change what I’m reading here. Mr. Butcher.” She turned to him. “Mr. Butcher, this is a serious development for you.”

Butcher had already figured that out. He was white as a sheet. “Your Honor, best of my memory—I mean, maybe he was open anyway?”

“The front door of the establishment was locked on order of the Liquor Control Commission,” Mapp said with confidence. He was clearly enjoying himself. “The state locks the front door with a padlock. They don’t leave a key for the owner. The owner can go in the back door, but he’s not allowed to open the place to the public—”

“I understand, Counsel. You’ve more than made your point.”

I couldn’t believe this was happening. One-half of my two-pronged attack was coming apart before my eyes.

“Mr. Butcher,” the judge said. “I’m going to ask you a few questions, and you have the right to have a lawyer present if you wish.”

Butcher didn’t answer. His mouth parted, like he was a curious child.

“Would you like to consult with an attorney, Mr. Butcher?”

“No—no, Judge.”

“All right, then. Do you have any personal stake in the outcome of this case?”

“Me? No.”

“Do you have any relationship with the defendant, Mr. Cutler?”

“No.”

“Or Mr. Kolarich, the attorney?”

“No, Judge.” Butcher still looked like the guy who hadn’t figured out the joke was on him. Maybe that’s because the joke was on me. And Sammy.

“Fuck,” Sammy mumbled.

“Judge, this can’t be right,” Butcher said. “Maybe—maybe—”

“All right, now.” The judge resumed her position, facing the entire courtroom. “The Court will state for the record that it is inclined to believe that Mr. Butcher has made an inadvertent mistake and not an intentional lie. It would not be my decision ultimately, but I think the record should reflect my viewpoint.” She looked at the prosecutor. “In light of Mr. Mapp’s surprise evidence here, I think it would be imprudent for me to bar Mr. Butcher’s testimony today. Maybe, Mr. Kolarich, you can find some way to resuscitate it. I will hear this motion to bar the testimony again, if necessary, the day of trial. But Mr. Kolarich, do not try my patience here. It seems abundantly clear to me that Mr. Butcher’s testimony is mistaken, at best, and I absolutely will not allow his testimony unless you can give me an extraordinarily satisfactory explanation for why I should. Am I making myself clear?”

I managed to say, “Yes, Your Honor.” In the space of five minutes, Tommy Butcher had been officially scratched off my witness list.

“And Mr. Mapp, this will not be the first time you spring evidence on the defense at a hearing before me. It will be the last time. Am I making that clear?”

“Of course, Your Honor.”

The judge rose and left the bunch. I looked at Tommy Butcher, who was mumbling to himself, his eyes frantically darting about.

The deputy came over to escort Sammy back to detention.

“We still have Archie Novotny,” I told him.

He looked at me with fear in his eyes. “I sure hope so, Koke,” he said.

The deputy took Sammy away. I looked back at Tommy Butcher, his face ashen, sitting motionless in the witness stand.

“Voluntary and twelve.” Lester Mapp, enjoying the upper hand, approached me. “And after today, you thank your lucky stars I haven’t pulled that offer.”

“You’d mentioned voluntary and ten.” I did my best to sound confident, after having my lunch handed to me in court.

“I said think about ten years, and you didn’t get back to me, and now you’ve lost the best thing you had going for you. You’re lucky twelve is still on the table.”

I found myself nodding as Lester Mapp left the courtroom. For the first time, I seriously considered a plea bargain. I was down to one witness, one alternative suspect—Archie Novotny, who would make for a decent suspect but who would deny any involvement. It was all I had.

Twelve years, out in six with good behavior. One year already served awaiting trial, leaving Sammy with five years more. Lester Mapp, albeit in his condescending way, had spoken the truth back in his office when we discussed a plea: This was a gift. Griffin Perlini had become a temporary media celebrity with the discovery of the dead girls, and the county attorney’s office wasn’t all that thrilled about prosecuting the man who avenged his sister’s murder.

When the courtroom had completely emptied out, Tommy Butcher pushed himself out of the witness stand. He looked like he’d just received some really bad news from the doctor.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked him.

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what coulda happened. I mean, I know what I saw. I mean, nothin’ that happened here changes the fact that the guy—the guy you showed me the photograph of—that guy was there that night, right?”

It was true that I could still place Kenny Sanders at the Liberty Apartments on the night of the murder. But Sanders wasn’t going to admit to anything beyond that. I needed Butcher’s testimony to have him be not only there, but fleeing the building with a gun at around ten o’clock. After this court hearing today, it would be a tough sell to get the judge to allow Butcher’s testimony at all, much less to get a jury to believe it. And without Butcher, all I had was Kenny Sanders admitting he was there that night but not admitting anything beyond that. I had nothing at all.

“Christ, it was a year ago,” Butcher told me. “I thought it was Downey’s. It must have been some place else. Lemme think on this and—”

“Forget it, Tom. It’s over.”

I was still numb from disbelief. What colossally shitty luck. The place gets its liquor license pulled?

“Tell me what I gotta do, Mr. Kolarich. Tell me how to fix this. I definitely saw a guy running out of that building. Tell me what I gotta do.”

I closed up my briefcase and shook my head. “Pray,” I said.

Butcher walked out, seemingly in a trance. I waited in the empty courtroom until he was long gone before I removed my cell phone. “Brown tweed jacket, red tie,” I said to Joel Lightner. “Heavyset, balding. Give him about five minutes and he’ll be outside.”

52

LET’S SAY EIGHT. Eight years, out in four, with one already served. That’s three more years inside, Sam.”

I’d caught up with Sammy in the holding cell in the courthouse before his transport back to the detention center. My client sat against the wall of the cell, dejected and bitter.

“They’re at twelve now?” he asked.

“Say I get him to eight.”

“After today?”

“Sammy—say I get him to eight,” I said. “Let’s pretend, okay? Could you do that?”

He played with the idea. It was never an easy thing to accept, obviously, but the whole point was considering the alternative.

“I have Archie Novotny,” I said. “And they have your statements to them, which were pretty close to a confession, and they have your car at the scene, at the time of the murder, and they have eyewitnesses. Maybe—maybe I can shake those witnesses, Sammy. I haven’t even been able to talk to them yet. I will. But nothing I do to them will change the fact that they picked you out of a lineup.”

He didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Could you do eight?” I asked again.

“After what that asshole did to my sister?” Sammy’s head fell back against the cell wall.

“I don’t think Griffin Perlini killed Audrey.” I blurted it out without thinking. I hadn’t necessarily planned on telling Sammy this fact any time soon. It really didn’t change our case at all—in fact, it hurt it. But I thought it might help Sammy accept a prison sentence.

Sammy stared at me for a long time without speaking.

“Remember Mrs. Thomas, our neighbor?” I said. “She didn’t think it was Perlini who ran off with Audrey. She thought Perlini was too small to fit the man she saw running off with Audrey. And that’s not all, Sam. Here’s the real problem: Perlini had a bum knee. He’d torn his ACL and never repaired it. He couldn’t run, Sam. The guy who took Audrey was in an all-out sprint.”

“Then—who?”

“Our friend Smith? I think he’s shilling for the guy. I think his whole reason for being involved is to keep me from figuring out who really killed her and those other girls buried behind the school.”

Sammy pushed himself up and began to pace the cell. I couldn’t fathom the impact of this revelation. He’d spent his entire life on an assumption that, I was now telling him, was a lie.

“I—I killed a guy who didn’t—who—?”

I killed a guy. He’d never said the words to me. So now we were even on the revelations. Sammy did, in fact, murder Griffin Perlini.

“You killed a guy who molested a bunch of young girls,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t kill any of them. I don’t know. But don’t turn him into a Boy Scout.”

Sammy had nothing to say to that.

“Think about eight,” I said, as the deputy approached to tell us it was time to wrap up.

I WENT BACK to the office and fell in my chair. I had a raging headache with no time for self-pity. I had to find the elderly couple who positively identified Sammy as the man running from the Liberty Apartments and pray that I could find some way to tear apart their testimony. I had to do whatever I could to make a stronger case against Archie Novotny, the only thing I had left in Sammy’s defense. And then there was the small chore of solving Audrey Cutler’s murder, finding the killer, and hopefully finding my brother along with them.

My cell phone rang. Dread filled my stomach.

“Kolarich,” Smith said. “I need to know exactly how you intend to win this case after today’s monumental fuck-up.” His delivery, while intended to be threatening, was edged instead by tension. No doubt, he’d heard about the developments this morning.

I didn’t have a good story about how I could win this case. My best bet was a plea bargain, and I thought I could get the prosecutor down to eight years. Lester Mapp was riding high after knocking out Tommy Butcher’s testimony today, but in the end, the reason the county attorney’s office wanted a plea had nothing to do with the strength of its case. It was public relations. Griffin Perlini had just been turned into a monster in the press, a headline story of a gravesite filled with dead girls, and the elected county prosecutor wasn’t going to score a lot of points by coming down hard on the man who killed the killer. They wouldn’t let Sammy walk, but they’d accept a quiet plea bargain that put this thing to rest.

That, I figured, was why Lester Mapp had filed this motion to bar Butcher’s testimony pretrial. He could have waited until just before trial, handed me the evidence that skewered Tommy Butcher’s testimony, and left my case in tatters. But he wanted me to see, up front, that my case wasn’t as good as I’d thought, so I’d accept a plea deal.

“I have another suspect,” I told Smith. “His name is Archie Novotny. His daughter was molested by Griffin Perlini. He feels like Perlini ruined his family. And he wasn’t where he claims to have been on the night of the murder. He has an alibi—a guitar lesson—but I can prove that he wasn’t at his guitar lesson that night. It’s a fabricated alibi, Smith.”

This was news to Smith. He didn’t volunteer his opinion of my story. He just asked me to repeat the story, more than once, and tried to get his arms around the strength of the case.

“I don’t suppose you can get Kenny Sanders to cop to the murder,” I said.

“I tried. He was willing to place himself at the scene, but anything beyond that, there’s no way. We needed Mr. Butcher to put the gun in his hand, running from the building. Without him, Ken Sanders is just a man who happened to be in the building.”

That’s what I figured. “Then we go with Archie Novotny,” I said. “I can win that case.”

“Losing is not an option, Jason. It’s not an option for you or your brother.”

Smith hung up the phone. I found my eyes trailing upward before I closed them.