The Last Alibi (8 page)

17.

Jason

Saturday, June 15

I wake with a start from a dream—dirt in my mouth, insects on my skin, my hands on the railing, trying to hold on but the gravitational pull is too strong—that quickly vaporizes into a mash of nonsense. I turn to Alexa, who has part of the bedspread pulled up over her. I am shivery, shaky, uneasy. I manage to make out the time on my watch: It’s past two in the morning.

I climb out of bed gingerly and find my pants. I dig into the pockets, but I don’t find them. That’s where they were, I’m sure of it, but they’re not there anymore. I try every pocket, patting them down, turning them inside out, but they aren’t
there
.

I gently pat the nightstand by the bed, almost knocking over the alarm clock, touching a sticky note, then something circular that is probably makeup. No. Not here.

I get down on my hands and knees on the hardwood floor and feel around. I check everywhere, picking up lint along the way, particles of sand from our beach walk, various other minuscule items you find on a floor.

I tiptoe outside the bedroom, close the door, and flip the switch in the nearby kitchen, squinting in the urine-colored light, retracing my steps from the front door. Nothing.

My head is echoing a gong now, my limbs twitching. I ease back into the bedroom and drop to my hands and knees again, repeating the same steps and expecting different results. I reach far under the bed, and my hand finds something small, granular—a mint from the Jurassic era—but otherwise nothing. “Shit,” I say, my hands moving wildly along the floor. “Shit, shit,
shit
.”

I hear a soft moan from the bed. Alexa rolls back over toward me and says, in a sleepy mumble, “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I say quietly as I pull one leg through my pants. “But I need to get going. Somewhere I need to be tomorrow morning. I totally forgot.”

Alexa pushes herself up slowly. In the darkness, as far as my eyes have adjusted to it, she looks like she’s still climbing the ladder to wakefulness, peering at me with sleepy eyes. “You’re . . . leaving?”

“I have to. I’m sorry.”

She rubs her face. “Is it your knee?”

“No, nothing like that.” I sit on the bed next to her. “Let’s do something tomorrow. Okay?”

She pauses. I don’t know if she’s considering it or if she’s still half asleep.

“Call me tomorrow,” she says.

I press my lips to her forehead. “See you tomorrow,” I say. I throw on my clothes and head for the door. I go to the corner and try to hail a cab on Wadsworth, but there’s nothing here this time of night—I’m in a suburb, not the city—so I walk down a few more blocks to what passes for a downtown, a couple of banks and restaurants and a children’s store, and give it another few minutes. Finally, I call information on my phone, and after a couple of tries locate a company that will send a cab my way. I stand on the sidewalk, hopping on the balls of my feet, my thoughts careening wildly to dark subjects. A homeless man has taken up residence within the cocoon of a travel agency doorstep, a dingy SpongeBob SquarePants blanket over him, a skanky black beard obscuring his face. I can’t tell if he’s asleep or watching me, motionless.

A police squad car rolls down the street. I consider skulking into shadows, but they’ve already seen me. I’m committing no crime, but I can’t shake a feeling of something like guilt—but not guilt, not exactly, just a sense that I am wrong, that I am . . . not right. “Waiting for a cab,” I tell them when they slow the patrol car and roll down the window before moving on, after a curt appraisal.

Guilty, but not guilty. Wrong, not right.

I am wrong. I am not right. I am falling.

The cab arrives. I show the driver a hundred-dollar bill and tell him it’s his if we get home in twenty minutes. If there’s no traffic, the highway makes that a possibility. My knees bob up and down inside the sticky taxi, the cheap torn seating and the inane interviews from some entertainment show on the small video screen.

James Drinker is gutting women like fish and hiding behind me, the guy who isn’t supposed to say anything, isn’t allowed to say anything, would be
punished
for saying anything at all to anybody at all. I put my head between my knees and grit my teeth. My tongue is like a piece of damp fur, my breath putrid, my forehead slimy with sweat.

I throw the driver the money and push myself out of the cab. I run up to my door, get in, give the door a push before I bound up the stairs two at a time, all the way to the third story, and rush to the bathroom. I open the cabinet under the sink and find the box for the allergy medicine, a white box with an orange stripe.

I pull out the silver-foiled sheet and pop one of the pills out, chew it up, and fall to my haunches. I wipe sweat from my eyes and fall back against the wall, finally finding a gentle, warm place on my bathroom floor.

Relax,
I tell myself.
Everything’s fine. Just because Drinker is a weirdo doesn’t mean he’s a killer. You don’t have to do anything, and you can’t, anyway. And this other thing you’re dealing with—it’s going to be fine. You need to do something, but you will, you always have; you overcame Talia’s and Emily’s deaths, you overcame poverty and a fucked-up childhood, you can do anything you want, anything at all.

It’ll be fine,
I promise myself as warmth spreads through me.
It’s all going to be fine.

18.

Shauna

Roger Ogren completes his opening statement at two-thirty. His presentation is what Jason predicted it would be: efficient, to the point, not flashy or hyperbolic. He is, according to Jason, a lifer at the office, a guy who interned during law school, started in traffic court when he got his law degree, and has spent nearly a quarter-century handling major felonies. I’ve struggled to guess what the upshot will be on drawing a veteran prosecutor. Has he fallen into bad habits that I can manipulate? Will he be wise to any tactical maneuvers we dream up? The best I can get from Jason, other than thoroughly unhelpful comments like “Roger is Roger,” is that Ogren puts on a straightforward case free of theatrics and imagination but may have the occasional blind spot for a creative defense attorney. (Now if I only knew a creative defense attorney—at least one who isn’t my client.)

Age has robbed Ogren of most of his hair and left it heavily grayed; cancer took away a good thirty pounds. Tall and thin and weathered, experienced and street-smart, careful and humorless—this is my adversary. I try to make it a habit to get along with opposing counsel, but then again, nearly every case I’ve ever tried was in the civil courts, where the dispute is over money, and where few of the attorneys have any illusions about their clients and sometimes are willing to share as much in off-the-record, colorful commentary. Prosecutors, however, are different. Their client is the state, the people, and many of them bring a holier-than-thou approach to their jobs. Defendants are the bad guys, criminals who must be incarcerated, and thus their attorneys, who search for dust to kick up or technicalities on which to seize, are likewise unsavory.

Judge Judith Bialek—“Judge Judy” behind her back—is a former prosecutor and a trial court judge going on eighteen years now. The bad news is she’s inclined toward the prosecution, the good news that Jason always did well in her courtroom when he was prosecuting felonies. I’ve noted a crimp in her expression from time to time when she’s looked over at Jason sitting in a chair that she probably never expected him to occupy.

“Ms. Tasker,” she booms to me, looking over her glasses, “does the defense still wish to reserve its opening statement?”

It’s been a debate between Jason and me all along. I want to deliver the opening statement now, to tell the jury, right now, right this second, before any impressions can cement in their minds, that Jason didn’t kill anybody. I’m a believer that many jurors make up their minds after opening statements, and if I hold back now, Roger Ogren gets out his first impression without me giving mine. Strike that—the defense
is
giving a first impression, but not a favorable one: We have something up our sleeve, something perhaps too clever by half, not a straightforward, just-the-facts presentation like our adversary. Roger Ogren has the facts, the defense has snake oil.

“We will reserve, yes, Judge,” I say, standing at my seat.

Jason, who wanted us to hold back our defense, won our internal debate. He might be right. On these matters, he usually is. But the truth, which I prefer not to confront, is that I went along with his idea because I was afraid of overruling him and then being wrong. That is something they don’t talk about in law school and something that attorneys in civil litigation rarely experience—the all-consuming fear that your mistake will land a client in prison.

The truth is that I’m absolutely terrified of making one of those mistakes.

19.

Jason

“It was the right decision,” I say to Shauna after Judge Bialek calls a recess following Roger Ogren’s opening statement. Over the last two weeks, she has argued fiercely for delivering the defense’s opening statement at the start of the case, as is tradition—so much so that she actually wrote and presented her opening statement to me two nights ago in an effort to change my mind. It was a great opening, well couched and expertly delivered, but she was never going to change my mind about this. There’s no way we’re telling the jury what happened yet. I know this more than Shauna does.

Because I know things my lawyer doesn’t.

Shauna looks at me, poker-faced. The jury hasn’t filtered out yet, and she doesn’t want to betray any reactions, any emotions, in front of them. Plus there is the gallery behind us, a plentiful group of reporters and onlookers, all of whom would be more than happy to send tweets or post online stories about a perceived “disharmony among the defense team” or “surprised reactions” from a lawyer or from me. I’ve been surprised at the media’s interest in this case, which owes primarily to the fact that many people believe that I was the private attorney who played a central role in the scandal that embroiled our last governor, Carlton Snow. I was, and I did. But I’ve never acknowledged it publicly. Shauna wanted me to do so now in a blatant attempt to influence the jury pool, to trumpet the work that I did for the federal government, to display me to the public as a whistle-blower on corruption, a do-gooder who helped stop bad people from doing bad things.
From whistle-blower to accused murderer
was how one of the local papers blazed it in a feature story, even without my saying anything.

“You doing okay? I didn’t think Ogren was that good. You doing okay?” This from Bradley John, the lone associate at our law firm, a young guy with a lot of talent and a terrific work ethic. If I could get him to cut his hair so he didn’t look like the lead singer in some cheesy boy band, he might have a future in this profession.

“Ogren was good,” I say. “He was what he needed to be.”

“There’s water if you want it,” he says, nudging the bottle toward me.

“Okay, thanks, kid.” I stifle a snicker and catch eyes with Shauna. Among the other tasks she has delegated to young Bradley, Shauna presumably has given him the assignment of babysitting me, making sure I never get dry mouth, never come suddenly unglued in the middle of a long day of trial.

When it was bad for me, when I was scraping the bottom this past summer, I would use the dry mouth I was experiencing as an excuse to reach for my tin of Altoids.
My mouth is feeling kind of sticky and dry, better pop a mint!
I even used the excuse when I was alone, as if I were somehow fooling myself with the ruse. You know your life is going off the rails when you tell yourself the lie you’ve created for everyone else, and you believe it.

And the ruse was no casual thing. I did research. I bought a dozen different brands of breath mints, brought them home and opened each container, examining each mint individually to identify the one that bore the closest resemblance to a thirty-milligram tablet of OxyContin.

I ended up going with Altoids, even though they weren’t the best replica, because when I’ve eaten mints in the past, it was usually that brand. Every morning, I replenished my Altoids tin with a half dozen new Oxy pills, enough for one every two hours of a workday and a couple extra in case I went straight from work to dinner. It became my top priority, ensuring a proper supply of OxyContin before I left the house.

Of course, I also needed to have real Altoids, in case someone saw me partaking and asked me for one.
Hey, could I bum one of those off you?
I couldn’t very well drop a tablet of immediate-release oxycodone into their hands, which would have given them a lot more than minty breath. So I always carried around two of the mini-tins, the red peppermint tin for the painkillers and the blue tin of wintergreen mints for curiously strong breath freshening. I lived with the nagging fear of making a mistake and handing a friend or colleague the wrong tin.

More ridiculously still, I went through the same routine at home, sticking a sleeve of the Oxy tablets in a box of allergy medicine, even though I’ve never been allergic to anything in my entire life. But just in case, on the off chance that I might have a female visitor to my house, again I needed a ruse for my painkiller habit. I remember driving to the pharmacy, looking for a box of allergy medicine for my disguise, and not even knowing what to say to the pharmacist, finally settling on hay fever because my mother used to have that problem in the summer.

“I’m doing fine,” I say to Bradley, making sure Shauna hears it, too. I
am
fine. It’s been over four months now, and I feel separation from the drugs. And I sure as hell am not going to come apart in front of my jury, who will scan me throughout the trial for any hint of emotional instability, among other things.

But the harshest truth I’ve ever had to accept is the one I swallowed a few months back: I lost control once, and I can’t ever be one hundred percent sure I won’t lose control again. I’m now an addict, and I’ll be one for the rest of my life.

The judge reenters the room, and everyone rises. The jury filters back into their assigned seats. In response to Judge Bialek, Roger Ogren rises.

“The People call Officer Martin Garvin,” he says.