Текст книги "The Hidden Man"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

12

THE PROSECUTOR on the Cutler case was Lester Mapp. I didn’t know him, but I’d looked him up on the Internet last night. He’d been a federal prosecutor for six years and then went into private practice with Howser, Gregg, a predominantly African-American law firm that practiced criminal defense. Two years back, he’d been recruited by the newly elected county attorney, a black alderman named Damien Sands. Sands had elevated a number of African Americans to prominent positions in the office. I’d heard some old-timers around the office throw around words like affirmative action, but I didn’t buy it, personally. I had little doubt that a number of minorities had been denied rightful promotion over the years, and besides, in my mind, to the victor went the spoils. You work in an office run by elected politicos, don’t expect fair. You don’t like it, there’s the door.

Besides, I didn’t have much time for the racial thing. I dislike everyone equally.

The judge on our case was the honorable Kathleen Poker. She’d assumed the bench after a career as a prosecutor—find me a criminal court judge who hadn’t—and was generally considered tough but fair. I’d never had a case in front of her but, based on her reputation, she was a relatively good draw.

I sat in the courtroom among the myriad of criminal defense attorneys waiting for the call. It was not, by and large, an impressive bunch. These are not the lawyers you see on television, the thousand-dollar suits and trendy haircuts, the passionate crusaders. These are guys and gals who work for a living. They take their money up front. If they’re good, they only lose about ninety percent of the time. They don’t like their clients and they have trained themselves not to care too much, else they will never again enjoy a decent night’s sleep. And when the money runs out, so do they, or they’d go broke. They do not have the benefit of an armada of young lawyers performing research and investigation. They have the cards stacked overwhelmingly against them and they know it. They know how to cross-examine a witness but have far less experience in directing their own clients on the stand, because most of their clients take Five. They drink their Maalox from the bottle and tell themselves, every day, that they are playing a necessary role in the criminal justice system.

Other than that, it’s a great job.

We got called near the beginning, because our motion was routine. Judge Poker, looking rather austere with gray-brushed hair, peered over her glasses down at me. “Mr. Kolarich, you are aware of the October 29 trial date? Less than a month away?”

“I am, Judge. We’ll be ready.”

She held her look on me a long moment, then looked over at the prosecutor, Lester Mapp.

“No objection,” Mapp said. He was probably thrilled that I’d be playing catch-up. Presumably, he’d expected me to ask for an additional six months.

She smirked at the prosecutor’s feigned graciousness, delivered a little too eagerly. I decided then that I liked her, and I could make her like me, if I were so inclined. “Granted,” she said, and two minutes later, Mapp and I were leaving the courtroom together.

It was my first chance to size him up. He dressed like a guy who’d spent some time in the high-end private sector, dressed in an Italian suit with a stylish yellow silk tie. All in all, he was an impressive-looking chap and, from the way he carried himself, I figured it might be the one thing that he and I would agree on.

He shook my hand and gave me a wide smile. “Great to see ya,” he said, though we’d never met previously. He was way too polished for my liking, but I suspected he would be formidable in court. “You got everything from the PD?”

“He’s sending it over today,” I said.

We stopped at the elevator.

“Ready for trial, are you?” His tone suggested that he didn’t buy it.

I figured I’d help him down the road he was already traveling. “Hey, I told Cutler, he’s crazy if he’s going to trial on this.”

He smiled again, predatory eyes appraising me. I wanted him to think that I was planning on pleading this out. I wanted him complacent, sure of himself. I wanted to be the farthest thing from a threat to him.

“Well, hey, you always got that black guy running from the building,” he said, palming my arm before heading into the elevator.

YOU DON’T INQUIRE, not when you’re a self-absorbed, seven-year-old kid. Something wakes you up, a familiar noise. Then you pinpoint the sound, a window frame sliding up. A moment of terror, filling your chest with dread, until you open your eyes and look at your own window on the second floor and realize it’s not yours. You look through your own open window, through the screen, and you listen, but you don’t inquire. You hear some more noises, rustling. Maybe you could identify that sound, too, but you don’t try; you just hear things happening. Later you will realize it, of course, the sound of someone crawling through a window. The sounds subside, you’re lost in your own world, suffused with drowsiness, and your face eases back into the cool pillow. Maybe you drift off a moment until you hear it again, those same rustling sounds, but then there is urgency to the movements, and that sound—the sound of footsteps running on grass—you have no trouble identifying.

But you’re a kid. You don’t place it in context. It feels wrong, yes, but you don’t confront it. Finally, you get out of bed, tentatively, and move to your window. It’s probably no accident that you waited until the running footsteps have faded before you look. You look down into the window next door, into the bedroom of Audrey Cutler, Sammy’s sister, where the window is open, the curtain is dancing in the light wind.

You return to bed. It feels like you have drifted off to sleep. You lose track of time again, because it doesn’t register at first; it takes you a moment before your head jerks up again, at the sound of Sammy’s mother wailing out, a horrifying shriek.

Later, you will say you didn’t hear anything, that you were asleep. No one expects anything different of you. It’s not like you could help them out, anyway. You didn’t see the man who abducted Audrey. Still, you always wonder: Could you have done something?

I felt my heartbeat kick up a gear as I saw the sign for Leland Park. The old neighborhood looked just that—old. I had to attribute that, in part, to the mere fact of my own maturity, returning to your roots, but Leland Park looked a lot worse for the wear. I had expected change, something different, and found surprise in the absence of change. The houses were the same, aged a couple of decades, well-worn bungalows and the occasional board-up. This wasn’t one of the neighborhoods in the city that was attracting new construction; this was a neighborhood people were leaving.

I turned onto my old street, braking for a young black kid who chased a rubber football into the street. Now that was different. My neighborhood had been all-white; the folks had an unwritten rule about it: You didn’t sell your house to blacks. I’d heard of a lawsuit filed about ten years ago, a claim of racial steering brought against the real estate agents and some of the residents, which apparently had succeeded.

I pulled up to the fourth house from the corner of Graynor and 47th. The house I grew up in was a two-story house with siding, a small porch of rock and a gravel driveway. All of that was still true, but the siding was torn on each side and now there was a porch swing. The half-acre lot looked smaller than I’d remembered it.

I didn’t feel anything. I saw my mother on the front porch, calling me in for dinner; my father drinking a Coors while he fussed over his Chevy on the driveway; my brother Pete running around in circles on our small front yard; Sammy coming to my front door for the walk to school. But it didn’t register in any way. Nothing. My emotions had run daily marathons for months and needed a rest.

Next door was Sammy’s old house. A German shepherd was barking at me from a chain-link fence in the backyard. I looked at the window on the side of the house and pictured Griffin Perlini carrying little Audrey out of the house. Our neighbor down the street, Mrs. Thomas, had seen it happen from her bedroom window, watched them run down Graynor, turning right down 47th. Other than Perlini, Mrs. Thomas was the last to see Audrey Cutler. She hadn’t known what she was watching, of course. She was a middle-aged widow looking down the street, the distance of a football field, at a figure running awkwardly, hunched over, without pumping his arms. She hadn’t realized that the reason he couldn’t use his arms was that he was carrying a two-year-old girl.

I remember the next morning, Mrs. Thomas hugging Sammy’s mother, trembling uncontrollably, apologizing for not having done more. What could she have done?

I wondered if Mrs. Thomas was still alive. It was possible. It was less possible that I was going to prove that Griffin Perlini killed Audrey Cutler.

I drove on, turning on 47th and heading six blocks west, then three blocks south, then two more blocks west. The house was in the middle of the street, a ranch-style with a roof that was openly suffering, old vinyl siding, and a neglected lawn. I’d passed the house several times, more as a curiosity than anything else. I’d never gone in or thought of going in. I’d thought of a few other things, like putting a few bullet holes through the windows, but as a teen I never did anything more than pass by the home of Griffin Perlini and stare.

An elderly woman stepped out onto the porch and took the mail from the slot. I found myself getting out of my car and approaching. I caught the woman’s attention, and she didn’t seem concerned. This wasn’t a nice neighborhood, but I was in courtroom attire and I didn’t pose any visible threat to her.

“Mrs. Perlini?” I asked, taking a wild shot. Griffin Perlini hadn’t lived with his mother at the time of Audrey’s abduction, and I had no idea what had happened to the house afterward.

The woman didn’t respond, but she opened herself up toward me, receptive to my question. Had Griffin Perlini’s mother moved into this home after he left?

“Mrs. Perlini?” I asked again, as I slowly approached the porch.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was weak, befitting her small frame. She was wearing a light sweater and gray pants that perfectly matched her long hair.

Wow. I’d lucked out. This woman was Griffin Perlini’s mother.

“Mrs. Perlini.” I stopped short of the porch. “My name is Jason Kolarich.” I gestured behind me. “I grew up around here.”

“Oh.” Her voice softened, but she didn’t smile. “You knew—did you know—”

“Griffin? No, ma’am. I mean—no. But that is why I’m here.”

Her face moved into a full-scale frown. She kept her composure, watching me and letting silence fill in the blanks.

“I’m a lawyer, Mrs. Perlini. I’m defending Sammy Cutler.”

She nodded, as if somehow she suspected as much. I could have predicted any number of reactions, but she seemed to accept me as if I’d said I was selling something she knew she had to buy but didn’t particularly want to.

She lowered her head, as if she was speaking in confidence. “You knew the Cutlers?”

“I lived next door.”

“I see.” Her gaze drifted off, over my head, beyond me. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her, everything her son became, everything he’d done.

“You’ll want to come in, then.” Mrs. Perlini walked into her house. I took the steps up and opened a flimsy screen door. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was hoping to accomplish. This whole thing had been a lark, and now I was about to have a conversation with Griffin Perlini’s mother.

I sat down on a flimsy couch while I listened to her toil in the kitchen. The clinking sounds told me she was making coffee. I didn’t want coffee, but I wanted anything that would elongate this conversation.

The place was drab but well-kept. The walls were painted lime green and were covered with photographs, in some of which I recognized Griffin, but it was clear that there were several children in the family. A good-sized crucifix was prominently centered.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Perlini was placing a cup of weak-smelling coffee in front of me. She sat in a rocking chair across from where I sat and held her cup of coffee in her lap. She didn’t seem in a hurry to take the lead, but as soon as I cleared my throat and started up, she chimed in.

She asked me, “Do you think what he did was justified?”

I assumed she was referring to what Sammy did, killing her son. “Do you want me to answer that?”

“I suppose not.” She studied her coffee cup but didn’t drink it.

“Do you?” I asked.

“Do I think it was justified?” She thought about that a moment. “I suppose from his perspective—” She struggled with her answer. “Your first instinct is to protect your children.”

“Sure.”

“But when your child’s sickness hurts other people—innocent children—well, it allows you to see more than one perspective.”

I looked again at the gold crucifix on the wall. This woman must have spent a good deal of time conversing with the Almighty. You chalk it up to a sickness, I imagine, like she’d said. It’s not my fault. It’s nothing I did. My son was ill. But do you believe that? Is there a part of you that thinks back, that second-guesses, that wonders if you’d done something differently—

“I have to prove that your son killed Audrey Cutler,” I said. “And I’m wondering if you can help me with that.”

She closed her eyes and whispered something to herself. I had the sense she was praying. For some reason, I felt a rush of anger. I’d had a few go-rounds with the Almighty myself, but it hadn’t helped any. I tried cursing Him for what happened to Talia and Emily, but the conversation always ended with the blame stopping at my doorstep. I surely didn’t blame God for their deaths. But I didn’t find comfort, either, and I found myself back to my childhood bouts with religion and logic. Faith, by definition, is the absence of proof, and as a logician, a lawyer trained in linear thinking, I struggled to make sense of a line of logic that had no end.

My family was dead, and there was nothing upstairs that could explain why. The truth was, I was afraid not to believe, afraid of being left off the guest list when my time came, but if push came to shove, if I really challenged myself with a focused question, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know if I believed or not. Maybe that, itself, was an answer.

“I just want the truth,” I said, interrupting her reflection. “Surely God wouldn’t want you to lie.”

She opened her eyes. I didn’t like what I saw in them. She wasn’t angry so much as concerned. “I wasn’t asking for advice,” she told me. “I was asking for strength.”

I decided to remain quiet. I didn’t want to insult her further and I didn’t want a sermon, either. I just wanted an answer.

“He never told me he kidnapped that poor girl, if that’s what you’re asking, Mr. Kolarich. He told me the opposite, in fact. Now, I may be a lot of things, but I’m not ignorant. I know my son. I know he did things.” She drank from her cup and let the liquid play in her mouth. I suddenly felt very small.

“He was always troubled,” she went on. “Always. He never bothered much with girls, but I just thought he was slow to develop that interest. Growing up, he was so introverted, so tortured, but I never knew him to act on any of the impulses that he obviously had. I never knew. Does that sound odd? A mother didn’t know her son had this horrible sickness.”

She drank from the cup again and nodded to herself. “About a year before—before his first arrest—that was when I first discovered something about his—his preferences.” She shrugged. “I honestly had no idea before that time.”

I knew, vaguely, that her son had a criminal record before Audrey was abducted, which was the reason the police had focused on him so quickly.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“Oh, well, Griffin—he injured his knee very seriously. He tore the—his anterior something-or-other?”

“The anterior cruciate ligament,” I said. It was a common injury in football. A buddy of mine at State tore his ACL and never played ball again.

“That’s it,” she said. “He was off his feet for weeks. It’s not like we had the money for surgery. He was all but immobile. So I stayed here with Griffin, while he was recuperating. One day, I was just trying to clean up. He was so messy, that boy.” She sighed, relishing a momentary memory of her son that did not include his sexual affliction, before she darkened again. “I saw some—some photo—”

“You saw some disturbing photographs,” I gathered.

“That’s right.” She touched her eyes. “I—I talked to him about it. He told me it was just some joke that a friend had sent him.” She looked at me. “Of course I should have known better. I make no excuses, but—a mother wants to believe, doesn’t she?”

“Of course she does.”

“And then, later, there were those few incidents in Summit. And Griffin told me they were misunderstandings, he swore to me he would never touch a child. Can you imagine how much a mother would want to believe that?”

She was referring to Griffin’s first brushes with the law in a town downstate, one ending in a nolle and one in a conviction for indecent exposure.

“And then,” she said softly, “there was little Audrey.”

Her eyes welled up. I imagine, by now, it took a lot to make the tears fall. I realized now why she had made Griffin’s home her own. It was penance. She was punishing herself for the sins of her son by immersing herself in the memory.

“I told him, Mr. Kolarich, I did. I said, ‘Griffin, if you did something to that little girl, you have to tell them.’ But he wouldn’t admit it.”

He wouldn’t admit it. Different than saying he denied it.

“Do I think he did something to that little girl, Audrey? Well, the answer is yes.”

I nodded. “Can you help me at all?”

Fresh tears spilled down her face. I sensed that it was more than mere generalized grief. She was struggling. She had something to tell me.

I was about to burst, but I had to let this play out naturally. I would beg and plead if necessary, but it felt right to let her make the next move.

She took a while, a good cry, wiping her face, blowing her nose, mumbling to herself, before she finally heaved a heavy sigh.

“I guess there’s no sense trying to protect him anymore,” she said.

13

AREA THREE HEADQUARTERS was no more than half a mile from where I grew up, a place where I’d spent a very uncomfortable evening in the summer before my junior year at Bonaventure. I still remembered the taste of sweat on my upper lip, the thick cologne of the police detective who stood over me, the whack from the heel of Coach Fox’s hand across my face. I didn’t remember the name of the cop, but it wasn’t Vic Carruthers.

Carruthers looked to be near retirement, a broad guy with an extra chin and a face that looked like a map of interstate highways. He sat back in his chair and looked crosswise at me, a guy who was reminding him of a case that hadn’t gone so well for him.

“Perlini’s dead,” he repeated back to me. “And Audrey’s brother is the one that killed him.”

“He’s charged with that murder, yes.”

“And her son being dead, that accounts for the mother’s change of heart. She figures there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore.”

“Right.”

“She didn’t”—he came forward, leaned into me, his jaw clenched, a fire to his eyes—“she didn’t feel the need to help out that girl back then.”

“I don’t think she knew,” I said. “And she didn’t want to believe it. She still doesn’t know for sure. But she suspects.”

“She suspects. She suspects.” Carruthers ran a large hand across his face. “I don’t even know where this school is, I don’t think. Fifty-seventh and Hudson?”

I nodded. Hardigan Elementary School had a large hill behind it that supplied a good toboggan slide in the winter, and a hangout for recreational drug users in the warm weather, when I was a kid. The hill crested down sharply into a thick set of trees, in front of which was a large fence that formed the boundary of the schoolyard.

Mrs. Perlini had no way to be sure, she’d told me, but she knew that Griffin had continued to visit the site as an adult. There would be one obvious reason for someone of Griffin’s sexual inclinations to want a bird’s-eye view into an elementary school yard, but Mrs. Perlini could never shake the notion that Griffin had used the cover of the thick trees for another purpose.

“She thinks it’s a burial site,” Carruthers said. “She found muddy shoes and a shovel in his garage one day? That’s it?” His anger was rising, bringing color to his jowls, but I imagined the source was the reminder of this unsolved case, his inability to nail the man who killed a little girl on his watch.

“It was a place he went,” I said. “She thinks it’s where he would have put her. I happen to think she might be on to something.”

“You happen to think. You score a few touchdowns for Bonaventure and that makes you a police detective.”

I didn’t bother to fight. He was doing a pretty good job battling himself. He didn’t speak for a long time, scratching at his face and, it seemed, reliving the investigation. From what I knew, Carruthers had gotten a little rough with Griffin Perlini while they searched for Audrey, but that hadn’t been the problem. The problem was that Griffin Perlini had never said a damn thing to the police, not a word, once they trained on him. No little girl’s body, no incriminating statement.

Carruthers opened a drawer on his cluttered desk and removed a photo. It was Audrey, frozen in time as a child.

“You don’t forget a case like that,” he said. “Not ever. Not a day goes by . . .”

I knew a little something about regret, and I didn’t want to be reminded.

“The girl’s dead and her killer’s dead,” Carruthers said.

“Yeah, but her brother’s not.” I gathered my things and stood up. “Sammy Cutler is entitled to know.” I looked at the photograph of Audrey, clutched in the detective’s hand. “And so are you.”

YOU’RE DUMB TEENAGERS, you and your buddy Sammy, careless with your side business, the one you work between shifts at the grocery store. Careless because you never consider the consequences. You tell yourself, it’s only pot, it’s just you and your buddies getting stoned, it’s not addictive, no one’s getting hurt, and you’re just making a couple of bucks.

You don’t think much about the guy who sells you the stuff, Ice, the twenty-year-old who sells out of his house and who, you later learn, is into a lot more than just marijuana, and who has attracted the attention of the police.

So you drive up to his house like you’re visiting a friend. You keep your stash in the trunk of the car. Turns out, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sammy sees it first—Look, he says, pointing at the window of Ice’s house, through which you see a man in the living room with a badge hanging around his neck.

You stop on the driveway, turn and run, just as the front door bursts open, people shouting after you, just like how it goes on television, Freeze—police, and some instinct causes you and Sammy to separate, Sammy running south, you running north. You’ve spent a year on the football squad by now; you’ve honed your physical skills. You can run like lightning and you do, full force, never looking back, using all the advantages of a boy on foot, cutting through alleys and over backyard fences, maximizing the difficulty of anyone giving chase by car. You don’t stop until you’re far beyond your neighborhood, a good five miles at least.

Sammy. You don’t know. He can’t run like you. You think about it and you hope, you pray. Yes, you’ve abandoned your car across the street from Ice’s house, and you know what’s in the trunk. Still, it’s possible, all of it: It’s possible Sammy got away; it’s possible the cops don’t know it’s your car; it’s possible Ice hasn’t given you and Sammy up—after all, the police weren’t after small-timers like you. They’re after the higher-ups in the chain, right?

The next hours, the late afternoon and early evening, are agonizing. You walk aimlessly, slowly circling back toward your neighborhood. You’re hesitant to make it home that night, wondering if a police car is awaiting you on the driveway. You approach your house tentatively, scanning up and down the street. When you walk through the front door, your sweat-drenched hair stuck to your forehead, your pulse rattling, your mother is sitting at the kitchen table with your brother, Pete.

Sammy’s at the police station, she tells you.

I DROVE BACK from the police station, thinking about Sammy in his cell, thinking about Mrs. Perlini and the denial she lived with, and thinking about the blue Chevy that had kept a pretty safe distance from me since I first drove back to my old neighborhood earlier today. I could only assume that this was the same friend I’d made a couple nights back, leaving that club. I was being followed, no question.

I called Pete on my cell. He wanted to head out tonight and I said I’d think about it. He sounded okay on the phone, but I was still thinking about the other night at the club. I was pretty sure he’d been using drugs, and for all I knew, he’d been back using for quite some time. I’d been in such a funk for the last four months that it had probably escaped my attention.

“We gotta talk, little brother,” I told him.

He laughed. “‘We gotta talk?’ What does that mean?” He was being defensive. From what I knew, Pete had never been more than a casual user, but the slope, as they say, was a slippery one.

I didn’t respond to him because he knew what I meant. I didn’t have any right to tell him what to do, and I had no real desire to do so. Add to that, Pete had done a pretty good job watching over me these last few months, so it felt a little weird preaching to him. Still, I couldn’t just let it go.

“Just—we’ll talk tonight,” I said, after tiring of his moaning.

“Forget about tonight,” he said. “Save your sermon for someone else. And hey—it’s nice to see you’re back to form, telling me how to live my life.”

I drove home with the music down, keeping an eye on the Chevy following me, memorizing the license plate, though I assumed that a trace wouldn’t get me anything. I thought about screwing with the guy, hitting the brakes, maybe letting him pass me, waving hello to him or tailing him, but I didn’t see any advantage in any of that. Better he should think he’s a world-class expert in surveillance, until I could figure out what I needed to do with him.