The Hidden Man (6 page)

He stood as his client entered from a side door.

“Hello, Carlo,” Smith said.

Carlo dropped his large frame in a plush leather high-back and fixed on Smith. “Tell me about the lawyer,” he said.

“His name is Jason Kolarich. He grew up with Sammy Cutler. Next-door neighbors. Near Forty-seventh and Graynor, Leland Park—well, you know the neighborhood. Mother was a housewife. Father was a grifter. Mostly small-time stuff, card games, and petty rips. He’s doing eight inside now for a mortgage-fraud scam he ran.”

“Where?” Carlo asked. “Where’s he inside?”

Smith thought for a moment. “Marymount.”

Carlo was silent. Smith figured Carlo was thinking about how he could reach someone inside Marymount Penitentiary. Surely, there was a way.

“I don’t know how much Kolarich cares about his dad,” he told Carlo.

Carlo gave Smith a hard glare. He didn’t appreciate the suggestion in Smith’s comment.

“Continue,” Carlo said.

Smith nodded dutifully. “He has a younger brother named Pete. Had some scrapes himself but nothing major. Looks like maybe the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with Pete. He lives here in the city. He likes to engage in the occasional recreational drug.”

Carlo seemed to take note of that.

Smith knew the notes by heart. “Jason Kolarich was a football player, a real good one. A wide receiver. He played ball at State on scholarship for two years. Then he was kicked off the team when he got into a fight with one of his teammates. Put the guy in the hospital.”

“The hospital.” Carlo chuckled, allowed a tight smile. “A fighter.”

“Stayed in school, though,” Smith went on. “Put himself through the last two years, then went to law school. He was a prosecutor for a few years. A pretty good one, from what they say. He was doing felony cases at the criminal courthouse until he went into the private sector. He worked at a law firm called Shaker, Riley and Flemming, which is a very well-established firm in the city. He defended that state senator who was charged with extortion. He won that case.”

“He beat the feds?”

“He beat the feds.”

Carlo seemed impressed. “What about his family? Wife? Kids?”

Smith shook his head. “Kolarich’s wife, Talia, and their baby daughter, Emily, were killed in a car accident four months ago. Their car went off the embankment on a county road heading downstate.”

“Jesus.” Carlo winced. Even Carlo, Smith knew, would be sympathetic. “That’s gotta fuck a guy up pretty bad.”

“Of course,” Smith agreed. “Every day, at lunch, he drives to the cemetery and sits by their graves. He just sits there for an hour, then gets up and goes back to work.”

“Yeah, well—yeah.” Carlo got out of his chair and paced the large room. A guy like Carlo wasn’t comfortable with these kinds of emotions, and predictably, they evolved into anger. “Well, Jesus Christ, what are we getting with this guy? A violent guy who just lost his wife and daughter?”

Smith wasn’t sure of the answer. “He was a rising star at a blue-chip law firm before this all happened. After his wife and daughter died, he dropped off the map, left the law firm, and didn’t reemerge for three months. When he did, he opened up a one-man shop, sharing office space with an old high school friend and handling small-time cases. From what I’ve been able to tell, Kolarich is only halfway back. He works sporadically. Some days, he never leaves his house. Much of the time, he stays out at bars all night but doesn’t make a play for anyone; he just gets drunk and then goes home.” Smith took a minute. “This guy Kolarich will not be reliable, Carlo, but he’s the guy Cutler wanted. He wouldn’t take our people. He wanted Kolarich. And we’re going to do all the heavy lifting, anyway. All he’ll really have to do is show up in court. Hopefully, even he can handle that.”

Carlo was silent for a long while. He walked over to the single picture window in the office and stared, motionless. Finally, he turned his head in Smith’s direction. “And he still has that brother, right?”

“Right.”

“And they’re close? I mean, he gives a flying fuck about this brother? Pete, you said.”

“He seems to, yes.”

Carlo turned back toward the window. He breathed out deeply and cast a hand over his face. “Good,” he said.

9

T
HEY WEREN’T THE FIRST,
the state trooper tells you, as if that were any consolation, as you stand together near the police barricade, artificial light illuminating the otherwise dark county road past four in the morning. It was a sharp turn, a blind curve on a county road along the bluffs, accompanied by a warning sign that, for some reason, Talia must have missed. Her Bronco had busted through the guardrail and toppled over a hundred feet into the river.

You’d done the drive with Talia dozens of times, part of the route downstate to her parents’ place. But you, not Talia, had always been the driver.

She was visiting her folks?
the trooper asks you. You don’t recall answering, but you must have said yes. What you surely didn’t answer was whether your wife was going for a visit, or whether she was leaving you for good.

I was supposed to go
, you tell the trooper, defending your position, though it isn’t under attack. And it’s the truth. You’ve been planning this weekend trip, but you were tied up, as always, with an emergency at work. You were following a last-ditch lead on the case with Senator Almundo, as the prosecution was preparing its rebuttal case and you were working on one last witness, a final nail in the coffin on a case that you were beginning to realize you actually might win.

I’m doing this for us
, you kept telling yourself, working well into the morning hours consistently on the
Almundo
defense.
We win this case, we pull this rabbit out of a hat, and I’m in. I’m set. We’ll be on easy street. Emily will have everything she ever wanted. Talia will have everything she deserves.
Yet you can’t deny that you are also doing this for yourself, the ego boost, the utter high of the high-profile trial, navigating through reporters on a daily basis and seeing your name in the
Watch
.

When the call came, you’d been waiting by the phone in your office for your informant, the guy who might be able to give you the final lead, the home run in your case. Ernesto Ramirez, a high-ranking ex-member of a street gang—the Latin Lords—to which your client, Senator Almundo, had been connected, was going to deliver the message to you that day. The government’s theory was that Senator Almundo had led an extortion ring that terrorized the city’s west side, resulting, among other things, in the death of a local businessman, who was unwilling to pay the obligatory protection money. You’d found Ernesto Ramirez on your own, some extracurricular due diligence on your part, and hit a potential gold mine: Ernesto was going to offer you proof that the storekeeper hadn’t been murdered by the Columbus Street Cannibals but, rather, by a rival street gang, the Latin Lords. The revelation would shatter the underlying premise of the government’s case.

Day had turned into night, which had forced you to cancel with Talia, who decided to take Emily and go anyway. By ten o’clock that evening, you were in a real mood, wondering whether you had missed a weekend with your family over a red herring. When your office phone rang, it hadn’t even occurred to you that Ernesto always called on your cell, not at the office.

I drove back from the cemetery with the windows down, breathing in the earthy, foul smell of the autumn air, the deadening leaves and mold, the crisp air whispering across me in a crosscurrent, wondering why I still made this daily trip to Talia’s and Emily’s graves but unable to stop. It was my one hour a day, my break, but it only made reality all the more gut-wrenching.

I closed my eyes as I pulled up to a traffic light outside the cemetery, trying to squeeze the sights and sounds from my mind, knowing that I could push them away but not wanting to.

Looks like they died on impact
, the state trooper tells you. You accept the statement without question, wanting to believe it was a painless death, knowing that an infant child in a car seat probably would have survived the impact but unable to fathom the possibility, the probability, that neither of them had died on impact, that both of them had drowned.

“You’re in a special place now,” I said aloud, cursing a God that would have let this happen but needing now, more than ever, to believe in His heaven. “You’re in a special place and it doesn’t matter what happened.” A horn honked behind me and I opened my eyes, a considerable distance having opened between my car and the one in front of me, the light green. I gripped the wheel with white knuckles and took deep breaths, my heart rattling against my chest, my arms trembling.

You were supposed to live. You were supposed to have a childhood full of happiness and then become an artist or a doctor or a—you were supposed to fall in love with someone and have children of your own and be compassionate and warm and loving and happy and I—I wasn’t—I wasn’t there when you needed me. I wasn’t there ever. Not ever.

I slammed on the brakes and stopped just short of the SUV idling at a light in front of me, two children in the backseat turning their heads. I wiped thick, greasy sweat from my forehead and struggled to breathe. This happened, from time to time, when I let it get the better of me. I would calm in a few minutes, and it would wash away to my default mode.

That’s what happens to those of us who get to live. We fight through, grit it out, and move on to something better. It’s the dead who have to settle for what they had.

10

I
MADE IT to the detention center by two o’clock, having calmed down from my lunch appointment. I had to get my act together for Sammy’s sake. And I was pretty sure I could do it. If there is one thing I took from my father, it was that ability to compartmentalize. He was a bitter, insecure asshole who could charm a rattlesnake when he turned it on. My version came in a different flavor—I was about as charming
as
a rattlesnake—but I could focus when the need arose.

I wondered, briefly, how Sammy would feel about his lawyer being
pretty sure
he could handle his case, but by then a guard was showing me back to the glass conference rooms. You get to know these guards, who are usually your typical robotic public servants, and it always pays to get on their good side. That’s always been my instinct, being nice to the staff, because they can make your life easier, though I wasn’t really sure what good it was having a prison guard on my side. Either way, for some reason entirely unknown to me, prison guards are not big fans of defense lawyers. And most of them, I’ve seen more humor in a hungry alligator. This guy pushed the door open like he didn’t want anything to do with me and pointed at the table where I was to sit.

“This is great, thanks,” I said to the guard. “I’ll start with a shrimp cocktail, and maybe I can see a wine list?”

The guard didn’t see the humor. “You being smart?”

“That was my first mistake. I’ll talk slower next time.” I opened the small file that Smith had given me on Sammy’s case. Sammy and I hadn’t discussed the details of the case yesterday. It was enough for us, yesterday, to simply reconnect after a long separation.

The case file was relatively small, but sufficient to tell me that the state had a pretty decent case against Sammy.

Griffin Perlini had answered his door on the evening of September 21 at about nine o’clock, whereupon he was greeted with a bullet from a .38 special through the forehead. A neighbor saw a man in a brown bomber jacket and green stocking cap running down the hallway. A married couple, strolling the sidewalk outside, positively ID’d Cutler as the man they saw passing them at a sprint, coming from the apartment building where Perlini lived. And a security camera from a convenience store down the street caught Sammy’s eight-year-old Chevy parked outside.

I’d reviewed a copy of that tape, typically grainy footage with a real-time clock running in the corner of the screen. The camera was positioned in the store’s back corner, providing an overview of the entire shop, including the front register, and continuing to a small area outside the store. At the time of 8:34 P.M., a beat-up Chevy sedan pulled up next to the convenience store, parking mostly out of the camera’s sightline but, alas, the rear end of the car was in full view—including the rear license plate, which confirmed it was
Sammy’s
beat-up Chevy. The car remained there until 9:08 P.M., at which time it drove away, out of the camera’s view. The time frame matched up perfectly with someone who drove to Perlini’s apartment, got in and killed him, and left. The only silver lining was that the camera could not, at any point in time, show the front of the car, or who got in or out—but Jesus, it wasn’t exactly a quantum leap here.

Once the police visited his house to inquire, Sammy didn’t exactly acquit himself well. He was asking for a lawyer before he had the door open. Then he changed his mind, at the police station, and unleashed a tirade against Griffin Perlini before they even mentioned why they were questioning him. He never outright confessed but that’s like saying Custer never outright surrendered.

I reviewed the list I had made:

The case against Sammy looked pretty solid. Eyes at the scene, his car on camera at the scene, and a statement tantamount to a confession. But what was missing from all of this was what, in my opinion, was the most obvious element of the defense.

Sammy had pleaded a straight not-guilty. What he should have pleaded was a diminished-capacity defense, probably temporary insanity. He should admit he killed Griffin Perlini and tell the jury why—because Griffin Perlini was a child sex offender who had preyed on Sammy’s sister, Audrey. No jury would convict Sammy on those facts. Hadn’t his public defender explained that to him?