The Wrong Man (18 page)

“Last time I walked it, it was ten feet,” I said, measuring the distance from Joel Lightner to me.

“That’s highly accurate shooting,” Joel said, not for the first time.

“He shot her right between the eyes?” Tori asked. “So she was looking right at him?”

I looked at Tori. “What’s your point?”

She was her typically put-together self in the long white coat with black knee-high boots. “If someone pointed a gun at me, I’d run. Or duck.”

“That’s what you think,” said Joel. “But in fact, humans center their eyes on danger. There are studies on this. People want to predict the danger, so they focus on whatever is the source of danger. If Kathy saw the gun, odds are that she’d fix her eyes directly on it, and she’d turn so she was seeing it head-on.”

Tori listened, then shook her head. “I’d duck. I wouldn’t stare at the gun.”

“That would be your secondary response,” said Joel. “Your initial
response would be to focus on the weapon. Remember, this probably happened in the space of a second or two. Maybe given more time, maybe the outcome would have been different.”

“This is all very fascinating, folks,” I said. “When this over, let’s write an article together. But for now, how about we figure out how to acquit our client of murder?”

Peter Gennaro Ramini watched Jason Kolarich and the others as they reenacted the shooting of Kathy Rubinkowski. He’d had little trouble following them, using the cover of the festive crowd on a Saturday night. He didn’t need to get too close at this point. He knew what they were doing. So he stood at the intersection of Gehringer and Mulligan, half a city block away, leaning against the door of a bank, his hands stuffed in his pockets as always—his signature, at this point.

Kolarich and company seemed to have the details of the shooting basically right, the distance and the angle, the position of the victim’s body. The latter detail would have been easy to gather from the photographs. The accuracy of their distance measurement surprised him initially. Once you got past a space of four feet or so, it was difficult to pin down the distance of a gunshot with any particularity.

But then he remembered the spent shell casing. That must have been how they measured it. There had been no need to be concerned about the shell casing, from his perspective, because it didn’t matter if the casing traced back to the murder weapon; the murder weapon was going to be found, anyway. Besides, if the shell casing wasn’t left behind, it would look like a professional job. It wouldn’t look like an amateur robbery-turned-homicide, which is how he’d wanted it to appear.

But the flip side of that was now obvious to him: It gave a distance. And that distance was meaningful, a pretty long distance for a Glock to be fired with such precision. It gave Kolarich an argument he wouldn’t otherwise have—that the shooting was carried out by someone of superior skill. A pro. A hired gun.

He watched them until he knew all he needed to know. And then he went home.

Tomorrow, there would be a conversation.

The black town car picked up Peter Ramini at precisely nine in the morning, as Ramini exited the drugstore. He got into the backseat and quickly returned his hands to his coat pockets.

Next to him, Donnie ate a bagel lathered with blueberry cream cheese, more than a little of which found resting places on his chin or his ever-expanding stomach. The guy was like a beached whale. But he was the only person Paulie Capparelli trusted, the only person in the world who could lean down and whisper into Paulie’s ear and receive advice back the same way.

“Whaddaya got, Pete?” Donnie grunted.

“I got a problem, that’s what I got.”

“Tell Donnie. Donnie will make it all better.”

Ramini glanced over. Sometimes Donnie forgot that he was the courier, not the decision maker.

“You remember this thing back in January, almost a year ago, with that lady at the law firm.”

Donnie grunted again. That meant yes. “Polish name.”

“Rubinkowski, right.”

“A beautiful piece of work, my friend. They pinched some other guy, and the fucknut actually
confessed
to it.” Donnie had a good chuckle with that. “He says he was insane, right?”

“That’s right, Don. But listen. So we just had this other thing—the one with Zo.”

Donnie grew quiet with the change in topic. Of course he recalled that. Lorenzo Fowler, at one time, had been one of those guys who could whisper in the capo’s ear, only then the capo was Rico Capparelli, not Paulie. Still, even with the transition, Zo had been considered a trusted member of the inner cabinet—trusted, that is, until the problem with the strip club owner. Nobody had told Zo to take a baseball bat to the guy, and then, of all things, he fucking
died
from the injuries.

Lorenzo had been feeling the hot breath of law enforcement on his neck, and it wasn’t hard to see the nerves getting to him. Enough so that Paulie ordered a close watch over Lorenzo.

So when Lorenzo made a phone call to set up a meeting with Jason Kolarich—not one of their Mob lawyers but a total outsider—Paulie knew about it within ten minutes. And he didn’t like it.

“You remember how Zo called that attorney,” said Ramini.

“Yeah. Right. We figured he was gonna cut and run. Use an outside lawyer so we wouldn’t know.”

“Right. So remember this lawyer’s named Jason Kolarich.”

“Right.” Donnie took a mountainous bite of his bagel. “Kolarich. What is that, Russian? Bulgarian?”

Ramini breathed in, breathed out.

“Romanian? No, Hungar—”

“Don, how the fuck should I know? He’s from… Paraguay, okay? He’s from fucking Antarctica. I fucking care.”

“Petey—”

“I’m trying to make a serious point here. I got a problem here, all right?”

“Okay, Petey.” Donnie patted Ramini’s knee. “Listen, I know this already. Lorenzo goes to see the lawyer. We’re afraid he mighta told him things. Lots of things. But then you took care of Lorenzo. So that erases the lawyer from the equation. He’s got nobody to worry about after Lorenzo was in the ground. Problem solved, right?”

“Wrong. Because this guy Kolarich, he’s not some random lawyer. We figured Lorenzo picked just anybody. Like outta the phone book or whatnot.”

“Right.”

“Right, but it turns out Kolarich isn’t just some random guy. Kolarich
is the lawyer who is defending the guy they pinched on the Rubinkowski thing.”

Donnie stopped in mid-bite. His head slowly turned to Ramini, cream-cheese chin and all. “The guy who says he’s crazy?”

“Right. Tom Stoller is his name. But whatever. Point being, Zo wasn’t just talking to some stiff. He was talking to the guy trying to figure out who killed Kathy Rubinkowski.”

Donnie wasn’t sure what to say, which has hardly surprising. When Donnie fell out of the tree, he hit a few stupid branches on the way to the ground. Undying loyalty was in his job description. Smarts, not so much.

“So taking care of Zo doesn’t automatically take the lawyer outta the equation,” Ramini said. “If Zo told this lawyer how the Rubinkowski thing really went down—”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know, Don. But here’s the thing. Sounds like this lawyer isn’t so much going with this insanity thing anymore.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because remember the guy who hired us on Rubinkowski?”

Donnie thought for a moment. This could take a while. “The industrial guy. Moneybags from bumblefuck.”

“Manning. Randall Manning,” said Ramini. “Manning pays me a visit the other day. He says this lawyer Kolarich is sniffing around him. Asking questions that don’t sound so much like he’s pleading insanity anymore. More like he’s trying to solve a puzzle. And sounds like he’s getting pretty fucking warm. Warm like a fucking blowtorch.”

Donnie moaned.

“I just watched this lawyer Kolarich,” Ramini went on. “I just watched him last night, looking over the scene, trying to figure the thing out. The whole time, I’m thinking, he’s looking at this like it’s a pro job.”

“Oh, motherfuck,” Donnie moaned.

“I know all about this Kolarich. I did good intel back when Zo paid him a visit. He used to be a prosecutor, and now he thinks he’s a cowboy. You remember this thing our last governor had with the feds?”

“The governor?” Donnie turned to him. “That was Kolarich?”

“He was right in it, yeah. A fucking crusader, this guy.”

“So this crusader,” said Donnie. “This guy who ain’t afraid of nobody. Does this crusader got a family?”

Donnie might not be a rocket scientist, but he knew a thing or two. It was the right question to ask.

“Not really. Wife and daughter died in a car accident. His dad is upstate on a fraud pinch. But dad and kid are on the outs, anyway. He’s never visited him, far as we know. There’s also a brother, but he’s fucking around in the Cayman Islands.”

“That’s no help.”

“Hey, Mooch, turn right up here,” Ramini hollered to the driver, Donnie’s brother. If it was possible to be less talented than Donnie, his brother was it. “I’m going to the gym.”

“Whaddaya do, like the treadmill and Nautilus and whatnot?” Donnie asked.

“Ah, they got a track. I run, mostly.”

“I’ve been thinking about doing that myself.”

Ramini looked over at his three-hundred-pound friend. “Yeah, you might want to think about that, Don.”

The car pulled up to the gym.

“Talk to Paulie, Don,” said Ramini. “Talk to him today.”

“So nobody? C’mon, Petey, nobody we can tie to this lawyer? No one he cares about?”

Peter Ramini thought for a moment. He thought about watching Kolarich and company reenacting the crime scene. This could get complicated very quickly.

“He’s got a lady friend,” he said.

Tom Stoller stared at his feet, his tongue moving a hundred miles an hour over his lips. I couldn’t see his hands, but I knew the fingers were twitching as well. I knew he was living in his own world right now, thinking about a hundred things that had nothing to do with this court appearance or even this criminal case, quite possibly having to do with military service in Iraq.

And the state, part of the country that sent this guy to do its dirty work thousands of miles overseas, that put him into a dire situation, fucked him up, and abandoned him when he returned, now wanted a judge to strike his insanity defense from the case.

The docket clerk called our case. Tom didn’t even move at the mention of his name.

Today was Tuesday. We were in the final stages of trial prep. All the distractions—other clients, meetings, court appearances, depositions—were over for all of us. It was all hands on deck. Shauna was working on the experts. Bradley was preparing pretrial motions. Joel Lightner was hunting down everything he could find on Gin Rummy and Summerset Farms and Global Harvest. There was something there, I was sure. Kathy Rubinkowski had stumbled onto something.

But in the meantime, since I had no assurance I would be able to find anything in time, I had to also prepare for an insanity defense. Shauna would handle our shrink, Dr. Baraniq, and I’d probably cross their expert. Unless, of course, Judge Nash struck the insanity defense, at which point
he would have no choice but to give me more time to prepare a retooled defense. That, as Shauna had noted, was one of my real motives here—to let the judge bar the insanity defense so he’d give me more time to pursue my strongest case, that Tom was innocent.

Judge Nash peered down at us over his glasses. He was in a foul mood today. He had abused the lawyers in the three cases coming ahead of us on the docket. I didn’t mind his mood or his abuse, but it made him unpredictable—read
more
unpredictable than usual.

“Ms. Kotowski,” he boomed. “It’s your motion.”

Wendy dove into it, arguing the inability of her experts to perform an analysis of Tom Stoller because he refused to talk about the events of the night in question. She cited case law, which I could not distinguish, that gave the judge the authority to bar a defense based on mental state when the defendant refused to cooperate with the government psychiatrists.

She had another argument as well. And it was her best one. “On the one occasion where the defendant even remotely engaged the state’s expert, Dr. Ramsey,” she said, “the defendant indicated that he had no memory of Kathy Rubinkowski’s murder. Your Honor, the law is clear that a defendant seeking excuse by virtue of a mental condition must lay a foundation that this defendant simply cannot lay. He can’t claim a PTSD defense when he doesn’t even remember what happened.”

Tom had said the same thing to me, more of a whisper, when he tackled me in the visitation room. He’d also mentioned it to Bobby Hilton, his war buddy, in my presence.

“So, Mr. Kolarich.” The judge turned to me. I approached the lectern, but he kept talking. “Your client won’t talk to the state’s experts?”

“That’s what they claim, Judge. I’m not in a position—”

“Has your client talked to
your
expert?”

I paused. “My expert plans to testify—”

“Is that a no, Counsel? It sounds like a no.”

“He hasn’t provided detail to Dr. Baraniq,” I conceded.

“Okay, well, does your client
remember
the events of that evening?”

“Judge,” I said, “I’d rather not give the prosecution a preview of my case.”

The judge frowned. “You’ll have to if you want to assert this defense,
Counsel. You don’t get to sit back on the Fifth Amendment while asserting insanity. You know that.”

“Judge, I bear the burden of proof on this issue. The defense. All the state has to do is rebut my case after the—”

“Mr. Kolarich.” He shook his head. “The state is correct. The defendant can’t sustain a defense of post-traumatic stress disorder if he can’t recall the events of the crime. I’ve read the submission of the state’s expert that the defendant said he doesn’t remember what happened. And I haven’t heard any denial from you.”

“Judge—”

“Counsel, you can tell me, your client can tell me, if he’d like to testify—but this is your last chance. Does your client remember what happened on the night in question or doesn’t he?”