The Wrong Man (9 page)

Shauna leafed through the photos of the crime scene. “You’re right. He took her purse, her cell phone, and yanked the chain off her neck without getting any blood on himself. That would have taken some work.”

“I know. So it makes our sell tougher. We convey this image of a soldier in the heat of battle, and then he’s carefully helping himself to her possessions.”

“Maybe soldiers really
do
rob their enemies,” she said. “We need to find somebody who’ll testify to that.”

“Already on my list. Lightner’s working the witnesses right now. Those that aren’t still in Iraq.”

“Whoa. A Mob shooting,” Shauna said.

“Huh?” I looked over at her. She was fondling the mouse to my computer, checking the Internet. Then a light went on and I sat up, popping to attention. “Who was it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Let me pull it up.” Her eyes moved along the computer screen. “Lorenzo Fowler? Hey, wasn’t he—”

“Shit.” I jumped off my couch and read over Shauna’s shoulder. Lorenzo Fowler, age fifty-two, reputed lieutenant in the Capparelli crime family, found dead on the 2700 block of West Arondale. The article was complete with a photograph of poor Lorenzo slumped against a glass door that read T
ATTERED
C
OVER
N
EW
& U
SED
B
OOKS
.

“A bullet through the throat and one through each kneecap,” Shauna moaned. “Ouch.”

I revisited our meeting. Lorenzo was in the soup, or so he thought, for the beating of a strip club owner. He wanted to make a trade with the prosecutors, if it ever came to that—the name of the Capparellis’ assassin of choice.

“Do you have an alibi for last night?” Shauna asked me.

“Wow. Lorenzo Fowler.”

“Seriously, Jason. Did he tell you anything that would be helpful to the police?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll just run over there and give a full interview with the police and breach the attorney-client privilege. While I’m at it, I’ll stop by the state supreme court’s chambers and turn in my law license.”

Shauna turned back to look at me. “I’m your law partner, pal. The privilege holds. Did he give you anything?”

Poor Lorenzo. Sounds like his fear was well-founded.

“He gave me Gin Rummy,” I said. “The name of a Mob hit man. Actually, he didn’t like that term. He preferred ‘assassin.’”

I read through the article again. Gunshots to the throat and kneecaps. The throat was the only one they needed. The shots to the kneecaps would have been gratuitous. It was punitive.

A message, delivered along with the kill.

I met Tori outside Deere Hall, the primary building in the city campus of St. Margaret’s College. She was wearing the same long white coat, a gray wool cap, and a backpack slung over her shoulder. She appeared amid a flood of students through the Gothic arched doorway, caught my eye, and bounded down the stairs. She didn’t smile—I hadn’t yet seen her smile—but it wasn’t an unpleasant expression, either. Guarded, in a word.

Daylight was evaporating, and it was growing cold as we walked down the street. There were still patches of ice mixed with dirty slush on the walk.

“What do you study?” I asked.

She looked at me. “Math.”

“What do you do with a math degree?”

“You teach. At least, I will.”

“What age?”

“Oh, probably young kids,” she said.

“You like kids?”

She didn’t answer. It was a dumb question. Why would she want to teach kids if she didn’t like them?

“You have any kids of your own?” I tried.

“No kids.”

I took a breath. It hit me that there could be a return volley, the same question put back to me. But she didn’t ask. She just looked me over for a moment as we walked.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a lawyer.”

“What kind?”

“I represent criminals. Sorry, people accused of crimes.”

“Is that hard?”

“It can be. The prosecution has a lot more resources at its disposal. It’s usually a lopsided fight.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. You meant does it bother my conscience?”

She turned to me again. “You like to tell people what they’re thinking, I’ve noticed. That’s a very male thing. Very alpha male.”

“Is it? Am I asserting control?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Maybe you should be majoring in psychology, Tori.”

“I was thinking the same thing about you.”

“Experience is the best psychoanalysis,” I said.

“Who said that?”

“I just did. I’m the only one walking next to you.”

“That’s not what I m—”

“I know. You meant who was I quoting?”

She shook her head in bemusement. She had just passed a test. The test was whether she could tolerate my bullshit. For at least a couple minutes, apparently, she could.

It was the time of year when the weather couldn’t make up its mind, and people took advantage of any halfway warm and clear day to get out and enjoy themselves before the gloomy blanket of winter took over. Parents were hustling their children across busy streets. Students were loitering like the aimless souls they were, laughing and smoking and chatting into their cell phones. I felt like an outsider, an observer, in every way. I didn’t have anyone to shop for, and I had little in common with young people, with their egocentric cluelessness about the world.

But I wished I did. I wished for all of that. Even the part about being clueless. Sometimes I wished I didn’t understand people.

“You like being a lawyer?” Tori asked me.

A fair question. Should be an easy answer.

“He pauses,” she noted.

“I like competition,” I said. “I liked prosecuting criminals more than defending them. But defending them is harder. More of a challenge. I like the challenge.”

She thought about that for a moment. “It’s not about helping people?”

“That can be a fringe benefit.”

We stopped at an intersection, waited for the light. She probed me with those big brown eyes. Her dishwater-blond hair was curling out of her cap. Cute, which didn’t really fit her. She was older than most college kids, probably late twenties, which meant there was a story there. Usually that story’s not a happy one.

“Have you ever defended a killer?” she asked.

“I’ve handled some murders, yeah.”

“Were they guilty?”

I nodded. “Most of the people I represent are guilty, Tori.”

The light changed. Everyone else entered the crosswalk. Tori didn’t move. She turned and looked up at me. This would be the moment in a movie where she kissed me. Or told me what a swell guy she thought I was. Or told me to fuck off.

“Who sits at a bar all night drinking alone?” she asked.

“You,” I said.

“I did that once. You did it at least twice, and you and the bartender seemed to know each other pretty well.”

“I don’t sleep well. The vodka helps.”

“You don’t have to go to a bar to drink vodka.”

“But if I drank at home, it would feel pathetic,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me.

“More pathetic,” I clarified.

Her eyes narrowed to a squint. She was studying me, psychoanalyzing me. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing, generally speaking, but for some reason it didn’t bother me with her.

She let out a sigh. “I think you’re an interesting guy,” she said. “I think it would be fun to hang out with you. But I’m not looking for romance. That’s just not happening with me right now.”

“What a coincidence. It hasn’t been happening with me, either.”

She threw me a look. “Is that your macho way of saying you agree to my terms? Because I’d understand if you didn’t.”

“I agree to your terms, Tori. On one condition.”

She raised her eyebrows again. “Let’s hear it.”

“You entertain the possibility down the road—just the possibility—of a hand job.”

For the first time, Tori let out a real, honest laugh.

“Tom,” I said. “Tom, we have to talk about this.”

I’d spent the last ninety minutes with my client, trying in vain to get him to consider the list of witnesses we planned to call at trial. Thus far, I had obtained from him an in-depth recitation of the entire week of meals served by the Department of Corrections, including last night’s disappointing chili—disappointing, in his eyes, because it had onions, but probably disappointing in several other respects, too—and blow-by-blow descriptions of two
Seinfeld
episodes he’d watched.

Tom was wearing nothing but a T-shirt on top in a room that was set in the mid-sixties at best. It reminded me of what our shrink, Dr. Baraniq, had said, that Tom avoided any sensation of heat because it reminded him of the war.

“I don’t care about witnesses,” he said, motioning to my file. “I just want this over.”

Dr. Baraniq had also complained to me yesterday that he’d spent an entire day with Tom without gaining any insight whatsoever. My expert was going to be left with nothing more than a hypothesis of what might have happened.

“It’s going to be over soon, Tom. Whether you look at this witness list or not. Don’t you want it to be over in a way that we win?”

Tom did what he always did, avoiding eye contact and wiggling his fingers and licking his lips with violent tongue thrusts. The skin around
his mouth was chapped so badly that he vaguely resembled Heath Ledger as the Joker.

“I’m not gonna win,” he said.

“We
can
win, Tom. Just—”

“Don’t wanna.”

“You don’t wanna what? You don’t wanna
win
?”

Tom looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Then he started laughing. First time I’d seen that emotion from him. Dr. Baraniq had said inappropriate emotional reactions were a symptom of disorganized schizophrenia.

“Win?
Win?
How’m I supposed to
win
?”

“You win,” I said, “by showing that you were suffering from your illness when you shot that woman.”

Tom shook his head furiously. “That’s not… that’s not… winning. No, no, no.” He got up from his seat and started walking toward the door.

“What
is
winning to you?” I called out. “Tom—”

“There’s no
winning
. I can’t win.” He stood facing the wall, his head shaking more quickly with each passing minute. “I can’t… It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away.”

“Hey,” I said.

Just like that, Tom dropped to the floor and began mumbling to himself. The words were inaudible but delivered with violence, with anguish.

“Tom,” I said.

But he wasn’t listening. He rocked back and forth on the floor, lost within himself.

A guard entered the room and looked at me with a question.

“Go ahead,” I said, and sighed. Tom was gone for now. He was probably gone for good.

I had to find a way to help him. But I couldn’t do it without him helping me first.

When I got back out to the registration desk, they handed me my cell phone. I saw three messages from the cell phone of Joel Lightner. When I got out of the elevator, I dialed him up.

“I found something,” he said to me, breathless. “Get ready to be happy.”

Take the house, they tell you. It doesn’t matter what happened last week. It doesn’t matter what happened to your best friend. Take the house, they tell you, so you do it.

It was a tip, you hear, but last week was a tip, too—a bogus one, a setup. Three Rangers and two Marines blown up within thirty seconds of entering.

That’s what you’re thinking as you’re standing outside the house. It’s just past two in the morning, but you aren’t thinking about how tired you are. You aren’t thinking about how lonely you are. You aren’t thinking about how hot you are, the thickness of the desert air, the burden of the forty pounds of gear you’re wearing. You aren’t thinking about the questions you have about your mission, this whole fucking quandary.

You’re thinking only about that door, and what’s behind it.

You look to your left, to your lieutenant. Lew looks more like a robot than a human in his combat fatigues and night-vision goggles and gear, bracing the M-14 rifle. But he is a human being, and you know his heart is hammering against his chest the same as yours.

The call comes, and you follow Lew through the front door with a rush. There is a back door, too, and simultaneously your team has entered from that direction as well. You call out your orders, but there is nobody in the front room, a parlor room with a couch and two chairs and an overhead light that looks like a cheap lamp upside down and suspended from the ceiling.

The smell of tobacco smoke is fresh. A cigarette still burns on the small table in front of the couch, smoke lingering in the thick air. You look at Lew. He sees the cigarette, too.

Only moments ago, somebody was sitting right here on this couch.

Gunfire erupts from the back of the house. Lew breaks down the hallway to the right. First door is a bathroom. You follow him in. Secure. Nobody here. Lew slaps your chest and points to the tub of the shower. You would have missed it, but not Lew. A nylon strap protruding from the bottom of the shower basin. Lew tells you to hold security on the bathroom. He approaches the bathtub cautiously, shuffle step by shuffle step. He reaches his hand inside the tub and in one motion yanks on the strap and jumps as far away as he can, awaiting an explosion.

No explosion, but a large section of the basin lies askew in the tub. A hidden door to a hidden bunker.

They wait a beat before Lew pulls again on the loose piece, yanking it free and clear of the exposed hole, a near-perfect square. You crane your neck and barely make out the outline of a swinging ladder before gunfire erupts through the hole. Instinctively, as Lew jumps back, as bullets bounce off the tiled walls, you aim the M-14 toward the square hole and open fire.

The initial gunplay dissipates. Lew tosses a grenade down the hole, and you both retreat into the hallway as it detonates. You call for help, and several Rangers come down the hall. You recall the initial gunfire in the rear of the house and, vaguely, the commotion, but your attention has been focused on this bathroom. When you look back into the bathroom, you see that Lew is already halfway into the hole.