The Hidden Man (31 page)

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?”

“Yeah, that’s great.” He was still excited about our little adventure in puzzle-solving. Sooner or later, he’d become less excited when he realized that I was not serving Archie Novotny’s interests. But the truth was the truth, and I’d lock him down with the affidavit, in any event.

I left the Music Emporium with some steam in my stride. I had Archie Novotny. I had motive, opportunity, and an attempt to manufacture an alibi. I tried to imagine the look on the face of Lester Mapp, the prosecutor, when he saw this.

“Sammy,” I said to no one, “we might just win this case.”

41

Y
OU KILLED ME, JASON.

I awoke with a start, my eyes stinging from the sweat, the echo of Talia’s voice lingering between my ears. The dream was always a little different, but always she was dead, visiting me, a vision within a dream, appearing out of nowhere but somehow I knew she was coming, and I knew she was right.

I tossed the pillow, soaked in sweat, to the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling.

“Happy birthday,” I said. Talia was born on October 13, 1972, in a small town outside New York City, where her father was opening a Kmart. It had been his job, moving across the country as new stores opened. Talia lived in ten cities growing up, attended three different high schools, a nomadic life that taught her an adaptive personality but left her longing for permanency as an adult. She’d made me promise, before Emily was born, that we’d stay in one place, that Emily would stay in one school system.

I thought of her parents, Nelson and Ginny, what today would mean for them. I considered calling them, but we hadn’t spoken since the funeral. They hadn’t placed blame per se, but they’d noted to me, coolly enough,
You were supposed to go with them
. I’d already beaten them to the punch.

That’s what you do—you play it out, isolating any single moment that could have altered the chain of events, turning every one of those moments into blame. I should have told Talia, all along, that I was still on trial, that it was unrealistic to expect that I could break away for the weekend at her parents’ place. I should have told her about Ernesto Ramirez, the ex-Latin Lord who could blow open the case against Senator Almundo.

She’d have left earlier in the day. She’d have left during daylight, making that turn along the road before it was dark. Had I not strung her along into the early evening, she’d have left that morning. Talia and Emily would still be alive.

I got out of bed and went to the bathroom, vomiting until there was nothing but dry retching. I got a glass of water downstairs and sat in the family room, dark and chilly, as the morning sun filtered through the blinds.

Time passed. I didn’t spend it in the way one might expect—lighting a candle, looking over photos. In fact, I spent several hours on the couch drifting in and out of sleep filled with vivid dreams of Talia: The first time we slept together in college, cautious and awkward; an ice-cream cone she threw in my face along the lake one summer afternoon; smiling through tears as she told me she was pregnant; the delivery room, Talia’s remarkable cool during eleven hours of labor; my dumbfounded fascination as the nurse put the scissors in my hand to cut the umbilical cord. Each time I popped awake, fresh sweat covering my forehead and my heart racing.

As I stumbled to the bathroom, I passed a clock that told me it was just past two in the afternoon, which reminded me that I had work to do today, that today could not be all about mourning. My cell phone rang and I scrambled around the living room to find it. It was under the couch, though I couldn’t recall how that happened.

“Hello?” I managed, my voice sounding like a poor facsimile of my normal speech.

“Hey.” It was Pete. “Wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Not the best day.”

“No, I know. You wanna—you wanna grab dinner or something? Probably a good day that you could use some company.”

True, but I couldn’t run the risk of being seen with my brother. He had to stay secluded or Smith could sink his teeth into him.

“The day will come and go,” Pete said. “Tomorrow will be better, Jase.” I took a shower in scalding water and threw on a sweater and jeans. Neither Sammy nor Pete could afford the luxury of my wallowing in self-pity. Sammy’s trial started in sixteen days, and while I had a few pieces of a defense, I hadn’t yet decided how to make them fit together.

ACCORDING TO THE FILE Smith had delivered to my house, Ken Sanders had a pretty long sheet of violence and drugs. He’d been in and out of the joint and now worked as a dishwasher at a Greek diner on the west side.

I ordered some coffee at the counter and waited for him to come out. I’d seen a glimpse of him back in the kitchen—what looked like him, at least, compared to a mug shot—and I felt like I knew this guy already. I’d prosecuted this guy, a hundred times over, a guy on a treadmill of crime, having not much of a chance at anything promising once out of prison, so he returns to what he knows best: to criminal activity out of necessity, to drugs out of despair. One of the downsides of prosecution is you get so overwhelmed by these individual tragedies that you wall it off, you focus on the crime and not on the person, leaving you wondering how much sense any of this makes, whether you’re making any meaningful difference at all.

He came out about twenty minutes later and dropped across from me in the booth, reeking of fried foods, his white top wet at the sleeves and stained with various colors.

Kenny Sanders, my black-guy-fleeing-the-scene, looked all of his thirty-eight years and then some, a few scars along his long forehead, blemishes on the cheeks, a scrawny neck that bore a small tattoo resembling some kind of weapon. He had ex-con written all over him—the beaten-down expression, the submissive stoop in his shoulders.

“I’m Jason Kolarich,” I said, though he already knew that. “You were expecting me?”

“Okay,” he said, nodding compliantly but not making eye contact.

“You talked to our friend?”

“Didn’t talk to nobody, boss.”

Right. That would be the story, obviously. “You were at that apartment building on the night of September 21, 2006?”

“Okay.”

“Can you tell me who you were with?” I already had that information, too, courtesy of our mutual friend Smith.

“Jax and Clay,” said Sanders.

“Jackson Moore and Jimmy Clay?”

“Right, okay.” Still nodding.

“And they’ll say you left them about nine-thirty that night?”

“Okay.”

Leaving Sanders with sufficient time to attempt a robbery of, say, a guy who lived two floors up named Griffin Perlini, a mousy little guy who’d be an easy mark, though something might have gone wrong, see, and instead he ended up popping the guy between the eyes. That would be my story to the jury, of course. Kenny Sanders wouldn’t go quite that far, I assumed. Whatever deal he cut with Smith, however much Smith was paying him for this little charade, Kenny Sanders would not flat-out admit to murder—certainly not to one he did not commit. No, the way I figured it, he’d allow himself to be the object of suspicion but nothing more.

“Do you deny you left your friends at nine-thirty that night?”

“Not sayin’, okay.”

Right. “Did you leave your friends on the second floor of that building, head up two flights to Griffin Perlini’s apartment?”

“Not sayin’.”

“Did you attempt to rob him?”

“Not sayin’.”

“And when he struggled, did you shoot him between the eyes?”

“Not sayin’.” He shook his head. “No sir, not sayin’.”

“Did you then run out of the building?”

“Not sayin’.”

“Were you wearing a leather bomber jacket and green stocking cap? Not saying,” I answered for him.

“Not sayin’,” he agreed.

Smith had worked this out with Kenny Sanders just right. There would be provers—Jax and Clay—to put him in that building at the time of the murder, and to have him leave at nine-thirty, which is the approximate window of time that would allow him to go upstairs, kill Perlini in an aborted robbery, and run out of the building.

But Kenny wouldn’t testify to any of that, and he’d take Five on all the hard questions. The jury would hear the invocation of the Fifth Amendment so many times that they’d be repeating it in their sleep. The prosecutor, Lester Mapp, might try to give Kenny immunity to compel his testimony, but Kenny here would just deny everything, and I, the great defense lawyer, would play up the grant of immunity, which typically tells people that someone is guilty of something. If Mapp took the route of immunity, I’d shove it so far up his ass he’d be tasting it for dinner.

Sanders pulled up his sleeve and scratched the dry skin on his arm. This man had been malnourished his entire life, from the baloney-on-white in the local lockups to the inedible garbage that is prison food. This guy started with nothing and would end up that way.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“No.” For the first time, Kenny Sanders eyeballed me. “No, sir.”

He needed this, he was saying. He was being rewarded handsomely for giving himself up as a scapegoat. I could follow my conscience and my preppy-white-boy guilt, but Kenny wanted the payday.

“Please,” he said, eyes averted again, nodding insistently. “Please, sir.”

And in the end, Kenny Sanders wouldn’t go down for this. The prosecution had their sights set on Sammy. No, the only thing stopping me was my ethical constraints, and I’d already checked those at the door.

“Okay.” I slipped him my card. “The prosecution’s going to want to talk to you,” I said. “That will happen soon. You’ll probably be testifying even before trial.”

“Okay, yeah. Good, okay.”

“I—have to take this picture,” I said. He knew I’d need to do this.

I had a digital camera I’d given to Talia two Christmases ago. She was the photographer in the family, but I wasn’t completely useless. I snapped Kenny’s photo and stopped at a drugstore on the way home to get the picture developed with copies. When I had it in my hand, I made the call to Tommy Butcher, my only eyewitness.

“I need you to look at something,” I told him.

42

I
FOUND TOMMY BUTCHER at the work site in Deemer Park where Butcher Construction was erecting a new facility for the city park district. I don’t recall what previously existed, what had been torn down, but the replacement building was a massive structure, big enough to house indoor tennis courts. First time we met, Butcher had explained to me that his company was a few weeks behind schedule with the project. Apparently that was still the case, if working full-boat on a weekend was any indication.

Men on scaffolding were working on the building’s facade, while others moved in and out of the building through an opening that, one day, would house double doors. Tommy Butcher was surveying their work while he spoke on a walkie-talkie. I caught his eye and he looked away casually, then did a double-take to return to me. He waved to me as he tried to get off his radio. “Okay, Russ, write up the change order and we can decide later. You gotta make a record with these fuckin’ guys, understand me? Now, this isn’t coming from the old man. The old man isn’t working this. It’s coming from
me
.” He clipped the radio to his belt and gestured in the direction of the building. “These people are gonna be the death of me,” he said.

“The park district?”

He nodded. “Everything’s our fault with these guys. These guys write up the worst specs you’ve ever seen, but we’re supposed to read everyone’s minds. Every time we talk, we gotta make our record with those people.”