Текст книги "The Hidden Man"

Автор книги: David Ellis

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14

I SPENT THE NIGHT IN, staring at the walls of my bedroom, watching the television with the sound low. I was beyond the point of self-torture. I no longer played the CDs that Talia loved, Morrissey and Sarah McLachlan and Tracy Chapman. I no longer obsessed over our wedding album. I no longer so much as set foot in Emily’s room, the nursery, which Talia had done out in pink and green with a Beatrix Potter theme, cute little bunnies prancing among soft pastel colors.

Nor did I drink, at least not for the purpose of drowning my sorrows. Alcohol didn’t work for me that way; it heightened the pain, unleashed emotion. When you’re drowning, you already feel out of control. You don’t need intoxication to feel unstable.

No, the only thing for me was frivolous diversion, the most innocuous sitcom or infomercial I could find on the tube, the easiest beach-read paperbacks I could buy. I couldn’t handle extremes, so I was reaching for the soft middle.

In some ways, it’s better now, but in most ways it’s worse. The death of a loved one is unfathomable initially, this amazingly horrible thing that can’t have really happened, and then you’re immediately assigned to the rather mundane tasks of notifying people, arrangements with the cemetery, planning a funeral. And then everyone you care about is surrounding you, delivering food in Tupperware and lingering about for a required length of time. After a couple of weeks, everything returns to normal, and that’s when you realize that normal has a new meaning. That’s when you realize that this is your life now, that you own a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a nursery done up specially for a daughter you don’t have, sleeping in a bed for two when there’s only one.

I fell asleep watching syndicated reruns, sitting up in bed with my clothes on, probably some time around two in the morning. I had a dream, the contents of which evaporated from my memory when my eyes popped open; the only thing I recalled was the sound that had awakened me—the sound of Emily crying out, as she had so many times in the depth of night, a whimper that slowly grew into a wail.

It was dawn. I was desperately tired but unable to sleep. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom, getting the toilet lid open just in time to vomit. I sat on the floor of the bathroom, taking deep breaths, scolding myself to no avail. I threw up again and then took a shower.

At nine, I got in my car and drove to see Tommy Butcher, the one witness in Sammy’s case who could actually help us. From what I had read in the report he gave to the police, on the night of Griffin Perlini’s murder at the approximate time of the murder, Tommy Butcher was leaving a bar called Downey’s Pub when a black man came running out of Perlini’s apartment building. Being someone who, like most people, prefers to mind his own business, Butcher thought nothing of it and went on with his life.

Butcher gave his statement to the police only three weeks ago, after reading about the case in the newspaper—meaning that by that point, the police had long ago arrested Sammy and fixed their focus on him as the murderer. Once the police decide they have their man, it’s game over for them. I knew that the prosecution would go to great lengths to discount Tommy Butcher’s testimony and, if possible, discredit him personally.

For starters, Butcher’s statement to the police came roughly a year after the murder, which would make someone wonder how he could be so sure about the precise date that he saw the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene. And undoubtedly, Butcher’s memory would be expected to be faulty, after he’d spent a night in a bar. But maybe something had stood out that made him remember the event particularly well. Maybe the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene had said I just killed Griffin Perlini as he sprinted by.

He’d asked to meet at a coffee shop near 87th and Pershing, which was near a job Butcher was working. Tommy Butcher was a principal at Butcher Construction Company, a family-owned construction firm that had offices in the city and in a large downstate town called Maryville, principally known as the home of Marymount Penitentiary. Butcher Construction had built the addition to the prison and did some other work in that area, but mostly the company did public construction jobs here in the city. Fair or not, you think of big city contracts, you think connections. You think corruption.

Butcher looked like a guy with a lifetime in the trade, a wide guy with half a head of hair; a rough, tan complexion; and a meaty hand that engulfed mine when he greeted me. He sized me up and didn’t seem too disappointed, though I couldn’t guess what criteria he was using. Having had some experience with contractors when Talia and I did some renovation work on our home, I generally put the integrity of construction types right up there with politicians and car salesmen.

“Doing the new park district building over at Deemer Park,” he told me, as we waited for coffee. “City’s throwing a shit-fit because we’re two weeks behind schedule.”

I thought he was trying to tell me that he didn’t have much time for me, so I got right to asking him what happened.

“I’m over at Downey’s,” he began. “Having a few drinks. I left about ten, maybe, something like that. I’m walking east, I guess—yeah, east on Liberty and I’m going by this building. It’s got a walk-up, a staircase, up to the front door. Looks like a real fleabag place, so it fits right in with the surroundings, right?”

“Right.”

“Right. So anyway, this black guy comes out of the door real fast, right? And he’s flying down those stairs. His jacket’s flying open kind of, while he’s running and all, and I see this guy has a gun stuffed in his pants. So me, I don’t want no part of this guy, right? So he goes running past me, and I’m not getting in this brother’s way, right? Guy flies right past me and that’s about it.”

I nodded. I was scribbling some notes.

“And so, yeah, I guess it sure seemed like this guy wasn’t running away because he’d done something good. But what am I gonna do? I didn’t do nothing. What am I gonna do, call the cops and say I saw a guy running?”

“Nothing for you to report,” I agreed.

The coffee arrived, and he filled it with cream. “Nothing to report. Right? Am I wrong?”

I’d already answered that question. There’s no crime in running out of a building, and Butcher hadn’t known that someone had been shot.

“So then, okay, I’m reading about this guy who’s been shot at this building, and I’m thinking back, and then I check my calendar and yeah, I was pretty sure that was the night I was at Downey’s, and I call my brother Jake and we think about it and then we’re sure. It was that Thursday, September 21. And I’m thinking, holy Christ, I gotta tell someone.”

It sounded plausible. It would be a lot better if I could come up with a black suspect, and even better if Butcher could ID that suspect. But I didn’t have anyone, not yet, at least.

“Can anyone confirm you were at Downey’s that night?” I asked. “You mentioned your brother.”

“Yeah, Jake, my brother. He could say.”

“Who else?”

He shook his head. “Just me and Jake.”

I asked him for brother Jake’s contact information. He gave me a cell phone number.

“You pay with a credit card?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. Why, someone’s gonna say I wasn’t there?” He didn’t seem happy about the prospect. I figured Tommy Butcher was used to being in charge and didn’t appreciate dissent.

“It won’t be me. I’m on your side.” I thought that last point was worth making. I wanted it to be us against them. I wanted to harden his resolve for the inevitable doubts that would be forthcoming.

“Do you remember what he was wearing, this black guy?” I asked.

“I remember the gun, mostly.” That stood to reason. Most witnesses, when they see a gun, don’t remember much else. They find themselves predominantly concerned with whether that weapon might be pointed at them in the immediate future.

“The man seen leaving Griffin Perlini’s apartment was wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and a green stocking cap,” I said. It was simply a harmless, innocuous observation, not a blatant attempt to coach the witness.

He thought about that for a minute. “Coulda been,” he said. “Coulda been.” His fingers played on the table. Then he nodded at me. “Your guy got a chance to win this case?”

I shrugged.

“I mean,” Butcher continued, “paper said this douche bag got killed, this guy Perlini, right? They said he killed your guy’s sister. So I guess that gives your guy a pretty good reason to do what he did.”

“If he did it,” I answered.

He exhaled out of his nose, a wry smile, like I’d just made a joke. I thought he was suggesting to me that a jury wouldn’t convict a guy avenging his sister’s murder. He was thinking, perhaps, that I had a pretty good case. I needed him to understand otherwise. I needed him to understand his importance to my case.

“Problem is,” I said, “Perlini was never convicted of killing my client’s sister. They couldn’t make a case against him. He walked. So I can’t get up and say that to the jury. I can’t say Sammy was doing this for his sister, because there’s no proof of it.”

My explanation seemed to trouble Tommy Butcher, which was precisely my intention. “I mean, we all know Perlini killed her,” I said. “I just can’t prove it. Not yet, that is.”

Butcher repeated my words. “Not yet.”

“Not yet. I’m trying. But digging up an almost thirty-year-old case—and I’m not a cop, I don’t have an arsenal of investigators or anything. I’m trying, but it’s going to be hard. And I don’t have much time. So you’re the best I have, Tom.”

Butcher thought about that, his lips pursed. “You’re gonna try to solve an old case like that?”

It wasn’t typically my practice to share my strategy with a witness. But he seemed genuinely sympathetic to Sammy’s plight, and we were forming some kind of weird bond. I didn’t want to freeze him out and kill the soft, warm chemistry.

“I’m going to try, yes. Because it’s all I have, Tom. I mean, all you can say is there was this black guy, which is great, but you can’t even say what he was wearing. So what can I do? The best I can do is a one-man investigation into what happened way back when, and hope I can come up with something.” I shook my head. “Because if I can’t, I’ve got you against about ten witnesses.”

It wasn’t quite ten. I was laying it on a little thick. But I was also finding that, as much as I was snowing this guy, I was speaking the essential truth.

“Listen.” He knifed his hand down on the table. “Look. This is, like, privileged, right?”

Wrong. This guy had no privilege with me. But I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I didn’t rush to disabuse him.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I don’t know any of these people from Adam, right? But if someone said I shot someone, and it turned out there was this brother running away from the scene with a gun—I mean, right? I’d want someone to come forward. Know what I’m saying?”

It was the second time he’d referred to a black guy as a “brother.” He was saying there was something self-evident about a black man running from the scene. I wasn’t going to be president of this guy’s fan club, but I needed him—Sammy needed him—and I wasn’t here to heal a racial divide in our society, at least not this week.

And I’d told him the truth: As of this moment, he was the best I had.

“You have a sister?” I asked.

“I sure as hell do.” His jaw clenched, the reaction I wanted, imagining what he’d do to someone who hurt his sister. I considered laying it on even thicker, but I didn’t think I needed to.

Butcher leaned back again, looked around the place awhile. I took a drink of the coffee, which was terrible. I didn’t do or say anything, because I felt the momentum.

“Leather bomber jacket,” he said. “Green stocking cap? Yeah, now that I’m thinking back, I mean, really focusing on that particular aspect and whatnot—that sounds about right.”

15

YOU’RE TREMBLING when you enter the police station with your mother. Sammy’s at the police station, was all your mother had said, and you’d played dumb. You had no idea why. You forgot to mention to your mother that you and Sammy had run from the police outside a drug dealer’s house earlier that day.

You see Sammy’s mother, who is inside pacing until she sees you. Your mom and Sammy’s hug. Mrs. Cutler is crying. She says they found drugs in Sammy’s car. Sammy’s car, which is technically true because he bought it, the title is in his name, but both mothers know that you drive it, too.

Your mother looks at you, a long, hard glare, but she doesn’t ask the question. So you don’t answer. You don’t know what you’re going to say.

A cop walks out, an athletically built guy in a dress shirt and badge. He takes one look at you and he says your name. Jason Kolarich?

Your legs go weak. Your mother takes hold of your arm. I’m Jason’s mother, she says, defensively.

The cop waves his hand in a dismissive manner. It’s not like that, he says. We just want to talk to him. Sammy wants to talk to him.

It’s okay, Mom, you hear yourself say. And then you are following this man through a door, and then down a hall. He doesn’t speak to you. You’re not sure you’ll be able to find your voice again.

Class of ’78, he says to you. You don’t catch his meaning. You don’t say anything.

He stops at a door with frosted glass bearing the number 2. When the door opens, you see Coach Fox standing in the room, his back to you. He turns around and stares at you.

What the fuck are you doing, Kolarich? he asks you. Sit the fuck down.

You sit. Coach Fox points to the cop and tells you, Detective Brady here, he was an outside linebacker when we went to sectionals in ’78. He worked his ass off, he tells you, went to college afterward and became a cop.

I didn’t have the talent you have, the cop says to you. So why the hell are you gonna squander it? Getting messed up with this kid Cutler?

Sammy. It comes back to Sammy. He’s my best friend, you tell the room. This is my fault, too.

They don’t like it. Coach Fox spits out a curse. This year was nothing, he says to you. We’re winning state next year, Kolarich, if you don’t fuck it up for us.

You hear yourself again, saying the words: It was me and Sammy together. It was both of us, you tell them.

Coach Fox goes quiet. He turns away, as if he can pretend he didn’t hear it. The cop, Brady, leans in so he’s close to your face.

That’s not how Sammy tells it, he says.

I LEFT the coffee shop not particularly pleased with myself but happy to have at least one fairly solid witness for Sammy. Tommy Butcher didn’t have the first damn memory of what the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene had been wearing and I’d handed it to him. I was sure, at this point, between his racial leanings and his sense of rough justice, that Butcher would testify very clearly that the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene was, beyond any doubt, wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and green stocking cap.

You owe me, Koke. Maybe that truth allowed me so easily to suggest a memory to Butcher. As a prosecutor, I was obsessive about ethics to the point of a rebuke, on more than one occasion, from my division chief. One of my apprehensions upon joining the defense bar was a fear that the standard was diminished on the other side of the aisle—most prosecutors viewed most defense attorneys as corner-cutters, cheaters, sometimes downright liars. I’d been grateful to learn otherwise, under the tutelage of Paul Riley. Paul had been steadfast on the Almundo case, when the senator had suggested how certain witnesses might be cooperative. That’s not how it works, Hector, Paul had told him. At least not with me. And not with me, either.

Maybe it was Talia’s and Emily’s deaths that gave me a more universal perspective, allowing the ends to more liberally justify the means. Either way, I owed Sammy, like he said. But that conversation with Tommy Butcher would stay with me awhile.

I checked my cell phone and found that I had a message. I played it while I drove.

This is Detective Vic Carruthers. I’m sending over copies of the files like you asked. And I wanted you to know, we’re going to do the dig. And if I find that little girl’s bones on the side of that hill, I’m going to rip Perlini out of his grave and beat the ever lovin’ shit out of him.

Good. Progress, at least. Maybe I’d be able to conclusively pin Audrey’s murder on Perlini. That just left me with the small task of convincing the judge that it was relevant to the case, even if Sammy was continuing to claim that he didn’t kill Perlini.

I had my usual lunchtime stop to make, and then I’d go visit Mrs. Thomas, my old neighbor.

WHEN THE CURTAIN PARTS, a number of kids are lying on the stage, curled up in the fetal position, feigning sleep. Behind them, a row of children move awkwardly, side by side, across the stage, wearing cardboard across their waists that are supposed to represent clouds. Talia and I, sitting in the third row, perk up, because we know the sun is about to shine.

Emily, with the golden-orange cardboard sun across her chest, slowly rises from a crouch. “Riiiise and shi-innnne,” she says.

I train the camcorder on our daughter as many in the audience coo with delight. Clearly they understand that Emily Kolarich is the most adorable child in the play.

“‘Time to wake up, everyone,’” Talia whispers, a line she worked on with our daughter all of last night.

“Time to wake up, everyone!” Emily calls out.

Talia finds my free hand and locks her fingers with mine.

“She’s so beautiful,” I say to her. “God, Talia, she is so beautiful.”

AFTER LEAVING THE CEMETERY, I drove down to the city’s south side, to the nursing home where Delilah Thomas was spending her elderly years, no more than five miles from our old neighborhood in Leland Park. The all-brick front along a busy Cardaman Avenue made the place look more like a condo complex, which I suppose wasn’t altogether inaccurate. The place was called the St. Joseph’s Center for Assisted Living. Mrs. Thomas, like everyone else on our block, was a card-carrying Catholic.

I had called yesterday to set up the appointment, because I figured these places were pretty rigid in their structure. They were expecting me when I walked into a spacious reception area decorated in light purple.

A black guy in white escorted me to an elevator and hit the button for six. “You were all Lilly could talk about last night, after you called,” he told me.

Mrs. Thomas had been widowed in her fifties—I was young then, and I struggled now to recall her husband’s cause of death. I’d always remembered Mrs. Thomas in her backyard, tending to her garden, always the first to church. She and her husband had never had children. I could only imagine her loneliness now, but then, I guess, it didn’t hurt surrounding herself with seniors.

“How is she?” I asked the guy, whose name tag said Darrell.

“Oh, Lilly?” His face lit up. “She’s a peach. She does real good. Real good. Real spry little thing.”

We got off at six, and I was, indeed, in what was basically a condo complex. The hallway was dimly lit, the walls white with that light-purple color again, a horizontal stripe along the center. A woman, moving slowly down the hall with a walker, stopped and watched Darrell and me. Darrell said something cheerful to her, and she seemed to react favorably but didn’t smile.

Darrell knocked on the door at 607 and called out for Lilly, surprising me with the volume of his voice. We waited awhile before the door opened.

Mrs. Thomas had to be in her late eighties. I recognized her by her eyes and the way she held her head slightly angled. Otherwise, I could have passed her on the street without recognition. It was like a layer of skin had been overlaid on her face. Still, at first glance, she seemed to be holding up well, slightly stooped but thin, and her eyes were vibrant.

She put her hands to her face, and her small mouth opened. “Jason, Jason,” she said softly. “Oh, look at you.”

I took her hands in mine, and then her arms came around me for a hug. I held her delicately as she repeated my name a few more times. She smelled like flowers. The whole place smelled like flowers.

She took my wrist and led me into her small apartment, where a spread of finger sandwiches and desserts lay on a tray on a coffee table. She’d always been a cook. I remember holidays, particularly, when Mrs. Thomas would bring over cakes and cookies of all assortments and it would strike me, within the narrow confines of a child’s observations, that she had no one else to bake for.

I felt that weird symphony of happiness and sympathy, poignant childhood memories fusing with the pain of realizing they’re gone, that life marches onward, trampling everything in its path. Mrs. Thomas was at that stage where hope meant something new and different. I startled myself with the recognition that hope had meant something different to me, too, four months ago.

I played defense to her questioning for a good hour, like I used to when I’d come home from school and my mother would interrogate me. It was annoying at the time, though I wonder how it would have felt had she not inquired. You know you’re a good parent when your child takes you for granted.

I bobbed and weaved, though I tried to fill in as much of the blanks as I could to satiate Mrs. Thomas, who kept insisting that I call her “Lilly” but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. She knew my mother had died and she notably did not raise the subject of my father, currently serving time in prison, so we talked much about Pete—I left out the part about him having a couple of drug-related scrapes with the law, or his inability to find a direction to his life—and mostly about me.

There, too, I edited, letting her take joy in my brief turn as a celebrity athlete, and my scholarship to State. She didn’t seem to be aware—or she’d forgotten—that I’d been kicked off the team for fighting with a teammate, after I’d used up all of my goodwill, even in a sport where violence is prized. She knew about law school and asked me about my law practice. She didn’t know the details beyond that, and when she hit the real sore spot, I decided it best to just tell her that “No one’s tied me down yet,” rather than burden her mind with my misfortune, particularly when I was about to raise another tragedy. She beat me to it, asking after Sammy, and however old she may be, her eyes still worked behind those substantial bifocals, and she knew she’d hit on something dark and messy.

She listened carefully, her facial expressions deteriorating further into sadness with each new development I laid on her, a quick intake of air with each twist to the plot. It’s never fun to hear of a murder, even if it was a scumbag child predator like Griffin Perlini. It’s even worse to think of a sweet, if troubled, young boy from the neighborhood pulling the trigger.

“Oh, my.” Her small frame seemed to turn into itself, as if trying to shield her from the memory of what happened to Audrey Cutler. “You know, Jason, every day I pray for forgiveness that I didn’t say something. That I didn’t call out after that man or call your mother or Mary right away.”

“You had no way of knowing.” It was, in fact, much like the conversation I’d had with Tommy Butcher—there’s no crime against running. That was all she’d seen that night that Audrey was abducted.

Mrs. Thomas nibbled at a couple of fingernails, her haunted expression telling me she was reliving the whole thing. “If I could have been more sure,” she said. “I—I just couldn’t be sure. And Lord help me, I couldn’t say something if I wasn’t sure.”

She was talking about the identification. As the only witness to the abduction, Mrs. Thomas had been asked to identify Griffin Perlini in a lineup. And obviously, she’d been unable to do so, or Griffin Perlini might have stood trial. In her mind, then, she’d failed the Cutlers a second time.

“It would have been almost impossible for you to identify him,” I told her. From my trip back to the neighborhood, I’d estimated that Mrs. Thomas was looking at someone running with his back to her, in the middle of the night, from the distance of maybe half a football field.

Detective Carruthers had sent over copies of his files on Audrey’s abduction for my review. I hadn’t had the chance to look through them save for the file on Mrs. Thomas, so I would know what she’d said back then before this visit. In those files was a lineup report indicating that Mrs. Thomas “could not conclusively identify” Griffin Perlini as the man who had taken Audrey.

From my years as both a prosecutor and defense attorney, I knew that cops had a way of taking literary license with their view of events. Could not conclusively identify left an amount of interpretation that could fill an airplane hangar.

“Can you tell me how that happened?” I asked. “The police lineup?”

Mrs. Thomas gathered her sweater, currently around her shoulders, as if to stifle a chill in a room that was anything but drafty.

“I know it’s hard to remember—”

Her eyes shot to mine, surprising me in their swiftness. “Oh, Jason, it’s not hard to remember that. No, no, no.”

She laid it out like I would expect. A couple of suits—a prosecutor and Griffin Perlini’s lawyer—a couple of cops, and Mrs. Thomas, looking through a window into a lineup of, in this case, six male Caucasians holding numbered cards. “I—I told them I didn’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t be sure. He was number two.”

“Griffin Perlini was number two.” I could only imagine how she’d known that. My guess was, Detective Carruthers had scratched his face with two fingers, or maybe crossed his arms and rested a peace sign on his bicep for her to see—something that would escape the notice of Perlini’s defense lawyer. Prosecutors don’t like to think about how witnesses can be coached.

She shook her head, but not in response to me. “He was so—such a small man,” she said.

Perlini was about five-seven and scrawny. So she was right, but I didn’t catch the significance. Or maybe the problem was, I did.

“Too small?” I asked.

My question seemed to snap her out of the memory. She was silent for a long time. I hated the fact that I was taking this sweet elderly woman back to that time, but I hated even more that I’d pulled her away now. Finally, she looked at me. “I don’t fool myself that my memory is strong enough now,” she said. “A man—a figure—running very fast. I honestly have trouble remembering what I saw.”

I nodded. Accurately summoning memories is tricky, far more difficult than most people realize. It’s not that you don’t recall a vision, it’s that the vision is probably not what you actually saw at the time.

“But you remember what you felt,” I said.

She nodded solemnly.

Could not conclusively identify. “What did you tell the police, Mrs. Thomas?”

“Oh, Jason.” She crossed a leg with some difficulty, turning her body slightly away from me, a classic defensive response. “The man was running so fast, and he was—he was—”

She leaned forward slightly. She didn’t want to come out and acknowledge the horrible truth that he was cradling little Audrey in his arms, but I got the point.

“He was running fast and he was hunched over,” I said.

“So you can see why it would be hard for me to know.”

Sure. But I didn’t have an answer yet. “Please tell me what you told the police,” I said.

Mrs. Thomas stared out the window of her apartment, her expression now a forced stoicism. “Please tell Peter that I’d love to see him some time, Jason,” she said. “And please, take some of this food with you. I swear I’ll never eat it all.”