The Wrong Man (7 page)

Dr. Baraniq laughed at my awkwardness. “You can relax, Mr. Kolarich. Muslims in America learn to have thick skin.”

They’d have to. I remembered when they built that gigantic mosque a couple of miles west of our downtown commercial district. It was billed as the largest mosque in the Midwest. They finished construction in the summer of 2001, only weeks before the September 11 attacks. And to make matters worse, the name of the mosque was Masjid al-Qadir, which bore an unfortunately close resemblance to the name of the terrorist group that attacked us. Back then, when I was a prosecutor and single, I passed the mosque every day on my way to work. There were protests and death threats and daily pickets for months. Finally, the mosque agreed to take down the big sign bearing its name, but they didn’t change the name.

The way it ultimately turned out, the mosque was credited—by those willing to give it any credit—with cleaning up that neighborhood, which had been populated with gangs and drugs and plagued by drive-by shootings. They hold monthly food and clothing distributions and have done a decent job of assimilating.

All of this got me thinking. Dr. Baraniq’s religion could be helpful at trial. If I could somehow sneak in a mention of it during his testimony, it would only bolster his credibility. The last thing a Muslim psychiatrist could be accused of is a bias favoring an American soldier.

He wagged a finger at me. “We need Tom to talk, Mr. Kolarich. He won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to the state’s doctor.” He stared at me.

“You think he’ll talk to
me
?” I asked.

“He’d better.” Dr. Baraniq lifted his coat off the back of his chair. “Or we have no chance of winning this case.”

“The key to this trial is sympathy,” I told the conference room. “Tom Stoller gave everything for his country. It destroyed him. It gave him PTSD, which triggered his schizophrenia. Things went south from there. A tragedy happened. But Tom Stoller is a victim every bit as much as Kathy Rubinkowski.”

“Well, maybe not every bit as much.” This from Joel Lightner, my private detective. His tie was pulled down and his feet were on the table. Joel joins me occasionally for drinks, by which I mean about three times a week. He is a two-time loser at marriage, a rabid skirt-chaser, and a happy drinker.

“What happened to insanity?” Bradley John, our young pup, asked. Unlike Joel, young Bradley was hoping to learn a thing or two.

“Insanity is our legal theory,” I said. “We argue it with everything we have. But it’s a tool. We use it to give the jury his background. To sympathize. So they won’t want to put one of our nation’s brave soldiers in the penitentiary for life. We have to prove insanity by clear and convincing evidence, and I’m not sure I could even get a preponderance. Tom knew right from wrong. He told the victim he was sorry. And he stole her purse, phone, and necklace afterward. So I’m under no illusion that we can make that case. What I do believe is that in the process of attempting to make our case, we put the jury in the frame of mind that they want to acquit.”

“But he was flashing back to Iraq, right?”

Lightner turned his head lazily—read: condescendingly—toward
young Bradley. “You think he apologized to the Al Qaeda guerrillas when he shot them?”

“Maybe he did.” Shauna was smartly dressed today for court. Her blond hair, which she’d grown out some, curled around the curves of her face. And she had the naughty-librarian black horn-rimmed glasses that made Joel squirm. “Seriously,” she said. “Maybe he felt bad about killing people. What’s odd about that? I mean, isn’t that why war screws people up so much?”

I raised my hands. “That’s all fine, people. I agree. We use that. We embrace what he told the police in the interview. But at the end of the day, the jury’s looking at an instruction that says that we have to prove that his mental defect prevented him from appreciating that what he did was a crime. We have to make them disregard the law and walk him because they view him as a victim.”

I paced the room for a while. I would have preferred to have a football in my hand, but I’d misplaced it in my office. “Joel,” I said. “I need fresh interviews on everybody who served with Tom overseas. I need someone to testify about what kinds of things happened over there. And anything specific to Tom. If Tom won’t tell us, maybe they will. Hopefully—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—hopefully he killed some people over there.”

“And I assume the home run would be if he killed a woman in her twenties while she pulled a gun on him after getting out of her car?”

“Yeah, Joel, that’d be super.” It was a reminder of what a stretch this case would be. PTSD flashbacks, according to Dr. Baraniq, were typically spurred by circumstances similar to the traumatic event in your past. It was hard to see how encountering a petite, well-dressed young woman could have flashed Tom Stoller back to Iraq. But it was all we had.

“Bradley,” I went on. “Hit the books. I want every court decision ever published on PTSD. The PD’s office did some research, but I want you to double-check it. I want to know what factors can vitiate the defense, the use of hypotheticals versus actual firsthand accounts, anything. I want examples where the defendant refused to talk about the event but still managed to pull this off. Keep in mind some jurisdictions follow M’Naughten or irresistible impulse, not the modified ALI. Preferably, I want something on point in a jurisdiction following ALI like us. But I’m not greedy.”

“Got it. Got it.” Bradley seemed pumped for this case.

“Shauna,” I said. “Take a look at the forensics and the blood spatter and the medical examiner reports. We don’t have to accept that the shooting happened exactly the way the prosecution claims. If we need to hire that guy—what’s his name, Peters?—then let’s talk and we can do it.”

“And when you’re done, Shauna,” said Joel, “come over to my place. We’ll open a bottle of wine and talk about it.”

Shauna rolled her eyes and nodded at me. “What’s your assignment?”

“Me?” I stretched my arms. “I’m going to get Tom Stoller to talk to me,” I said.

Lorenzo Fowler was a married man, so when he visited Sasha, he had to go to her place. It was more accurately described as
his
place, as he bought the condo and paid the utilities and assessment. It was one of the ritzier places on the blossoming near-west side of the city. Sasha could have had her pick of spots, but she fancied herself an artist and liked the feel of this part of the city.

Fowler parked his car down the street, got out, and pulled up his coat collar. It was dark and cold, and before he trudged forward, he took only a quick look about him for immediate threats.

He didn’t see any.

He didn’t see Peter Ramini, sitting in a different car down the street, his hands stuffed into his coat pockets.

It was nine-forty when he arrived at Sasha’s condo. Anyone trying to predict Lorenzo’s movements would estimate that he would spend about four hours at her place before returning home. He always returned home. He never spent the night at Sasha’s.

Just over four hours later, Lorenzo emerged from the elevator in the building’s lobby. He nodded to the man at the front desk with no trace of embarrassment or guilt. He always felt better after an evening with Sasha. For a Ukrainian gal, she could make a plate of sausage and peppers. And in the bedroom, she performed feats of gymnastic agility that could earn her a gold medal in the Olympics. He was a bit lightheaded after a half-bottle of wine and the food and the sex. It was a welcome break.

The early-morning air was a harsh return to reality. Things had been tough for Lorenzo of late. That strip club owner Lorenzo had disciplined with an aluminum baseball bat had died two days ago. The police had come looking for Lorenzo today at the lumberyard. They’d be back again tomorrow. Paulie would be nervous.

Paulie was always nervous these days. It wasn’t like how it used to be. The feds had always been around, but the surveillance was so good these days that it was impossible to know where you were safe. Nowadays, Paulie wouldn’t communicate with anybody other than a whisper directly into his ear.

So what would Paulie think of the cops wanting to talk to Lorenzo about a dead strip club owner?

Lorenzo shuddered. He thought about his conversation the other day with that lawyer, Kolarich. He seemed like the sort that wouldn’t shy away from helping him. Some lawyers, they heard the Mob was involved, they’d back off. Kolarich seemed like the kind of guy who would get off on it. And the kid had brass; Lorenzo hadn’t met that many people who, knowing that Lorenzo worked for the Capparellis, told him to fuck off. Despite what he’d said, Kolarich would be there for him, he figured, if he needed him.

Trading the identity of Gin Rummy could do it, he felt certain. The feds would jump in and walk him on the strip club owner’s death and probably anything else for which they charged Lorenzo. You take away Gin Rummy, you take away Paulie’s best muscle. You take away one of the few people Paulie still trusted. It was valuable information. Lorenzo would be able to write his own ticket. Someplace warm, that much was for sure. An apartment for Sasha, too, if she’d come. Would she?

And then something felt wrong, and all at once Lorenzo felt exposed. Nothing he could put his finger on, but it wasn’t an accident he’d managed to stay alive for fifty-two years, thirty-four of them with the Capparellis.

He slowed his pace and removed his Beretta from the back of his pants so that he was holding it at his side. The streets were empty. The nearest bars were two blocks away. Other than a couple on the corner who appeared to be engrossed in each other, Lorenzo felt reasonably sure he was alone.

Still, he widened his approach to his parked car, so that he could see
into the backseat before he got too close. Okay, the backseat was empty, good enough. As he kept walking around his car, he saw something on the ground, a single flower and a note. It stopped his movement for just a moment, while he focused on the ground behind his automobile.

In that brief window of time, a bullet threaded his windpipe and sent him staggering backward against the chained-up door of a used bookstore. He tried to hold himself up, tried to raise his gun, but the signals weren’t reaching their intended targets.

A second bullet shattered Lorenzo’s left kneecap. A third did the same to his right.

Lorenzo crumpled into a heap at the door of the used bookstore.

He tried to scream, but no sound came except something warm and sticky through the hole in his throat.

You had your chance,
he told himself, as the lights went out.

I was back at Vic’s, a bar I adopted as my preferred choice when I couldn’t find drinking buddies. You hit your mid-thirties and most of your friends have wives and kids, like I once did, and while five martinis at a fine local establishment on a Monday night might sound appealing, they usually have higher priorities. I did, too, once upon a time.

I took my usual seat, on one end of the wraparound bar, drunker than usual, because I’d forgotten to eat anything for dinner. The place had filtered out by now and it reminded me of that time a few days ago when I’d made the acquaintance of those two idiots bothering that lady.

I thought about Tom Stoller and my three failed attempts, thus far, to get him to open up to me. Shauna was working with our expert, Dr. Baraniq, but whichever way you cut it, we had holes in our defense. I’d reconciled myself to that. In the end, it was like I’d said to my team—if we did our job, they wouldn’t let the technicalities of an insanity argument get in their way. Either the jury would want to acquit him or they wouldn’t.

I was tired. Today was the deadline in the Stoller case for the defense and prosecution to share any remaining discovery—information to be used at trial—and witness lists. No matter how much you planned, it was always a rush at the end to get it done. And with Judge Nash, you didn’t want to omit anything. If it wasn’t turned over in a timely manner, it wouldn’t be admitted at a trial where he presided.

I raised my empty glass for a fifth Stoli. I wasn’t an alcoholic—which, of course, is what every alcoholic says. But I was different (a lot of them say
that, too). I wasn’t trying to hide from anything or blur reality. I was coping with reality pretty decently these days, thank you very little. I still missed my wife and daughter so desperately that it sucked oxygen from my lungs, but I’d learned how to coexist with it.

No, I drank so I could fall asleep at night. I’d lost that ability to let my mind settle into that calm transfer from wakefulness to dreams. Once I’m down, I stay down, but I can’t find that equilibrium to get me there.

The bartender, not the normal guy, shoved a glass of wine in front of me filled with ice cubes and slices of lemon and lime. I stared at it for a long time.

“The fuck is that?” I asked.

“A wine spritzer. From the lady.”

I turned back to the far corner of the bar. The lady from the other night, again with the white coat, was sitting in a booth. Somehow I’d missed her coming in.

She walked over to me. I’d fancied her a bit from afar the other night. “Intrigued” was probably a better word. Up close now, she looked pretty much the same, the petite build and girlish features, but now with the details filled in. A crooked mouth, cautious eyes, nice pale skin with a dusting of freckles high on her cheeks. She smelled pretty damn good, too.

“That cocktail you wanted,” she said.

“Great.”

She still hadn’t taken a seat. She seemed to be debating with herself.

“You want to thank me but you don’t know how,” I said. “You’re a lady who can take care of herself and you don’t appreciate men acting like they’re rescuing the damsel in distress.”

She listened to me with a trace of amusement.

“On the other hand,” I went on, “those two big goombahs were a bit of trouble for you. Maybe you’d underestimated them. So you were relieved when I came out and offered some assistance. You appreciated and resented the gesture at the same time.”

She worked her mouth a bit as she watched me. Waiting for me to go on, but at the moment I was spending some time on that mouth of hers and letting my imagination move to places dark and steamy. I was in what you’d call a dry spell, you see. I made Mohandas Gandhi look like Hugh Hefner.