The Hidden Man (11 page)

Butcher thought about that, his lips pursed. “You’re gonna try to solve an old case like that?”

It wasn’t typically my practice to share my strategy with a witness. But he seemed genuinely sympathetic to Sammy’s plight, and we were forming some kind of weird bond. I didn’t want to freeze him out and kill the soft, warm chemistry.

“I’m going to try, yes. Because it’s all I have, Tom. I mean, all you can say is there was this black guy, which is great, but you can’t even say what he was wearing. So what can I do? The best I can do is a one-man investigation into what happened way back when, and hope I can come up with something.” I shook my head. “Because if I can’t, I’ve got you against about ten witnesses.”

It wasn’t quite ten. I was laying it on a little thick. But I was also finding that, as much as I was snowing this guy, I was speaking the essential truth.

“Listen.” He knifed his hand down on the table. “Look. This is, like, privileged, right?”

Wrong. This guy had no privilege with me. But I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I didn’t rush to disabuse him.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I don’t know any of these people from Adam, right? But if someone said I shot someone, and it turned out there was this brother running away from the scene with a gun—I mean, right? I’d want someone to come forward. Know what I’m saying?”

It was the second time he’d referred to a black guy as a “brother.” He was saying there was something self-evident about a black man running from the scene. I wasn’t going to be president of this guy’s fan club, but I needed him—Sammy needed him—and I wasn’t here to heal a racial divide in our society, at least not this week.

And I’d told him the truth: As of this moment, he was the best I had.

“You have a sister?” I asked.

“I sure as hell do.” His jaw clenched, the reaction I wanted, imagining what he’d do to someone who hurt his sister. I considered laying it on even thicker, but I didn’t think I needed to.

Butcher leaned back again, looked around the place awhile. I took a drink of the coffee, which was terrible. I didn’t do or say anything, because I felt the momentum.

“Leather bomber jacket,” he said. “Green stocking cap? Yeah, now that I’m thinking back, I mean, really focusing on that particular aspect and whatnot—that sounds about right.”

15

Y
OU’RE TREMBLING when you enter the police station with your mother.
Sammy’s at the police station
, was all your mother had said, and you’d played dumb. You had no idea why. You forgot to mention to your mother that you and Sammy had run from the police outside a drug dealer’s house earlier that day.

You see Sammy’s mother, who is inside pacing until she sees you. Your mom and Sammy’s hug. Mrs. Cutler is crying. She says they found drugs in Sammy’s car.
Sammy’s
car, which is technically true because he bought it, the title is in his name, but both mothers know that you drive it, too.

Your mother looks at you, a long, hard glare, but she doesn’t ask the question. So you don’t answer. You don’t know what you’re going to say.

A cop walks out, an athletically built guy in a dress shirt and badge. He takes one look at you and he says your name.
Jason Kolarich?

Your legs go weak. Your mother takes hold of your arm.
I’m Jason’s mother
, she says, defensively.

The cop waves his hand in a dismissive manner.
It’s not like that
, he says.
We just want to talk to him. Sammy wants to talk to him.

It’s okay, Mom
, you hear yourself say. And then you are following this man through a door, and then down a hall. He doesn’t speak to you. You’re not sure you’ll be able to find your voice again.

Class of ’78
, he says to you. You don’t catch his meaning. You don’t say anything.

He stops at a door with frosted glass bearing the number 2. When the door opens, you see Coach Fox standing in the room, his back to you. He turns around and stares at you.

What the fuck are you doing, Kolarich?
he asks you.
Sit the fuck down.

You sit. Coach Fox points to the cop and tells you,
Detective Brady here, he was an outside linebacker when we went to sectionals in ’78
.
He worked his ass off
, he tells you,
went to college afterward and became a cop
.

I didn’t have the talent you have
, the cop says to you.
So why the hell are you gonna squander it? Getting messed up with this kid Cutler?

Sammy. It comes back to Sammy.
He’s my best friend
, you tell the room.
This is my fault, too.

They don’t like it. Coach Fox spits out a curse.
This year was nothing
, he says to you.
We’re winning state next year, Kolarich, if you don’t fuck it up for us.

You hear yourself again, saying the words:
It was me and Sammy together. It was both of us
, you tell them.

Coach Fox goes quiet. He turns away, as if he can pretend he didn’t hear it. The cop, Brady, leans in so he’s close to your face.

That’s not how Sammy tells it
, he says.

I LEFT the coffee shop not particularly pleased with myself but happy to have at least one fairly solid witness for Sammy. Tommy Butcher didn’t have the first damn memory of what the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene had been wearing and I’d handed it to him. I was sure, at this point, between his racial leanings and his sense of rough justice, that Butcher would testify very clearly that the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene was, beyond any doubt, wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and green stocking cap.

You owe me, Koke
. Maybe that truth allowed me so easily to suggest a memory to Butcher. As a prosecutor, I was obsessive about ethics to the point of a rebuke, on more than one occasion, from my division chief. One of my apprehensions upon joining the defense bar was a fear that the standard was diminished on the other side of the aisle—most prosecutors viewed most defense attorneys as corner-cutters, cheaters, sometimes downright liars. I’d been grateful to learn otherwise, under the tutelage of Paul Riley. Paul had been steadfast on the
Almundo
case, when the senator had suggested how certain witnesses might be cooperative.
That’s not how it works, Hector
, Paul had told him.
At least not with me
. And not with me, either.

Maybe it was Talia’s and Emily’s deaths that gave me a more universal perspective, allowing the ends to more liberally justify the means. Either way, I owed Sammy, like he said. But that conversation with Tommy Butcher would stay with me awhile.

I checked my cell phone and found that I had a message. I played it while I drove.

Good. Progress, at least. Maybe I’d be able to conclusively pin Audrey’s murder on Perlini. That just left me with the small task of convincing the judge that it was relevant to the case, even if Sammy was continuing to claim that he didn’t kill Perlini.

I had my usual lunchtime stop to make, and then I’d go visit Mrs. Thomas, my old neighbor.

WHEN THE CURTAIN PARTS, a number of kids are lying on the stage, curled up in the fetal position, feigning sleep. Behind them, a row of children move awkwardly, side by side, across the stage, wearing cardboard across their waists that are supposed to represent clouds. Talia and I, sitting in the third row, perk up, because we know the sun is about to shine.

Emily, with the golden-orange cardboard sun across her chest, slowly rises from a crouch. “Riiiise and shi-innnne,” she says.

I train the camcorder on our daughter as many in the audience coo with delight. Clearly they understand that Emily Kolarich is the most adorable child in the play.

“‘Time to wake up, everyone,’” Talia whispers, a line she worked on with our daughter all of last night.

“Time to wake up, everyone!” Emily calls out.

Talia finds my free hand and locks her fingers with mine.

“She’s so beautiful,” I say to her. “God, Talia, she is so beautiful.”

AFTER LEAVING THE CEMETERY, I drove down to the city’s south side, to the nursing home where Delilah Thomas was spending her elderly years, no more than five miles from our old neighborhood in Leland Park. The all-brick front along a busy Cardaman Avenue made the place look more like a condo complex, which I suppose wasn’t altogether inaccurate. The place was called the St. Joseph’s Center for Assisted Living. Mrs. Thomas, like everyone else on our block, was a card-carrying Catholic.

I had called yesterday to set up the appointment, because I figured these places were pretty rigid in their structure. They were expecting me when I walked into a spacious reception area decorated in light purple.

A black guy in white escorted me to an elevator and hit the button for six. “You were all Lilly could talk about last night, after you called,” he told me.

Mrs. Thomas had been widowed in her fifties—I was young then, and I struggled now to recall her husband’s cause of death. I’d always remembered Mrs. Thomas in her backyard, tending to her garden, always the first to church. She and her husband had never had children. I could only imagine her loneliness now, but then, I guess, it didn’t hurt surrounding herself with seniors.

“How is she?” I asked the guy, whose name tag said Darrell.

“Oh, Lilly?” His face lit up. “She’s a peach. She does real good. Real good. Real spry little thing.”

We got off at six, and I was, indeed, in what was basically a condo complex. The hallway was dimly lit, the walls white with that light-purple color again, a horizontal stripe along the center. A woman, moving slowly down the hall with a walker, stopped and watched Darrell and me. Darrell said something cheerful to her, and she seemed to react favorably but didn’t smile.

Darrell knocked on the door at 607 and called out for Lilly, surprising me with the volume of his voice. We waited awhile before the door opened.

Mrs. Thomas had to be in her late eighties. I recognized her by her eyes and the way she held her head slightly angled. Otherwise, I could have passed her on the street without recognition. It was like a layer of skin had been overlaid on her face. Still, at first glance, she seemed to be holding up well, slightly stooped but thin, and her eyes were vibrant.

She put her hands to her face, and her small mouth opened. “Jason, Jason,” she said softly. “Oh, look at you.”

I took her hands in mine, and then her arms came around me for a hug. I held her delicately as she repeated my name a few more times. She smelled like flowers. The whole place smelled like flowers.

She took my wrist and led me into her small apartment, where a spread of finger sandwiches and desserts lay on a tray on a coffee table. She’d always been a cook. I remember holidays, particularly, when Mrs. Thomas would bring over cakes and cookies of all assortments and it would strike me, within the narrow confines of a child’s observations, that she had no one else to bake for.