The Hidden Man (9 page)

The woman didn’t respond, but she opened herself up toward me, receptive to my question. Had Griffin Perlini’s mother moved into this home after he left?

“Mrs. Perlini?” I asked again, as I slowly approached the porch.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was weak, befitting her small frame. She was wearing a light sweater and gray pants that perfectly matched her long hair.

Wow. I’d lucked out. This woman was Griffin Perlini’s mother.

“Mrs. Perlini.” I stopped short of the porch. “My name is Jason Kolarich.” I gestured behind me. “I grew up around here.”

“Oh.” Her voice softened, but she didn’t smile. “You knew—did you know—”

“Griffin? No, ma’am. I mean—no. But that
is
why I’m here.”

Her face moved into a full-scale frown. She kept her composure, watching me and letting silence fill in the blanks.

“I’m a lawyer, Mrs. Perlini. I’m defending Sammy Cutler.”

She nodded, as if somehow she suspected as much. I could have predicted any number of reactions, but she seemed to accept me as if I’d said I was selling something she knew she had to buy but didn’t particularly want to.

She lowered her head, as if she was speaking in confidence. “You knew the Cutlers?”

“I lived next door.”

“I see.” Her gaze drifted off, over my head, beyond me. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her, everything her son became, everything he’d done.

“You’ll want to come in, then.” Mrs. Perlini walked into her house. I took the steps up and opened a flimsy screen door. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was hoping to accomplish. This whole thing had been a lark, and now I was about to have a conversation with Griffin Perlini’s mother.

I sat down on a flimsy couch while I listened to her toil in the kitchen. The clinking sounds told me she was making coffee. I didn’t want coffee, but I wanted anything that would elongate this conversation.

The place was drab but well-kept. The walls were painted lime green and were covered with photographs, in some of which I recognized Griffin, but it was clear that there were several children in the family. A good-sized crucifix was prominently centered.

Five minutes later, Mrs. Perlini was placing a cup of weak-smelling coffee in front of me. She sat in a rocking chair across from where I sat and held her cup of coffee in her lap. She didn’t seem in a hurry to take the lead, but as soon as I cleared my throat and started up, she chimed in.

She asked me, “Do you think what he did was justified?”

I assumed she was referring to what Sammy did, killing her son. “Do you want me to answer that?”

“I suppose not.” She studied her coffee cup but didn’t drink it.

“Do
you
?” I asked.

“Do I think it was justified?” She thought about that a moment. “I suppose from his perspective—” She struggled with her answer. “Your first instinct is to protect your children.”

“Sure.”

“But when your child’s sickness hurts other people—innocent children—well, it allows you to see more than one perspective.”

I looked again at the gold crucifix on the wall. This woman must have spent a good deal of time conversing with the Almighty. You chalk it up to a sickness, I imagine, like she’d said.
It’s not my fault. It’s nothing I did. My son was ill
. But do you believe that? Is there a part of you that thinks back, that second-guesses, that wonders if you’d done something differently—

“I have to prove that your son killed Audrey Cutler,” I said. “And I’m wondering if you can help me with that.”

She closed her eyes and whispered something to herself. I had the sense she was praying. For some reason, I felt a rush of anger. I’d had a few go-rounds with the Almighty myself, but it hadn’t helped any. I tried cursing Him for what happened to Talia and Emily, but the conversation always ended with the blame stopping at my doorstep. I surely didn’t blame God for their deaths. But I didn’t find comfort, either, and I found myself back to my childhood bouts with religion and logic. Faith, by definition, is the absence of proof, and as a logician, a lawyer trained in linear thinking, I struggled to make sense of a line of logic that had no end.

My family was dead, and there was nothing upstairs that could explain why. The truth was, I was afraid
not
to believe, afraid of being left off the guest list when my time came, but if push came to shove, if I really challenged myself with a focused question, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know if I believed or not. Maybe that, itself, was an answer.

“I just want the truth,” I said, interrupting her reflection. “Surely God wouldn’t want you to lie.”

She opened her eyes. I didn’t like what I saw in them. She wasn’t angry so much as concerned. “I wasn’t asking for advice,” she told me. “I was asking for strength.”

I decided to remain quiet. I didn’t want to insult her further and I didn’t want a sermon, either. I just wanted an answer.

“He never told me he kidnapped that poor girl, if that’s what you’re asking, Mr. Kolarich. He told me the opposite, in fact. Now, I may be a lot of things, but I’m not ignorant. I know my son. I know he did things.” She drank from her cup and let the liquid play in her mouth. I suddenly felt very small.

“He was always troubled,” she went on. “Always. He never bothered much with girls, but I just thought he was slow to develop that interest. Growing up, he was so introverted, so tortured, but I never knew him to act on any of the impulses that he obviously had. I never knew. Does that sound odd? A mother didn’t know her son had this horrible sickness.”

She drank from the cup again and nodded to herself. “About a year before—before his first arrest—that was when I first discovered something about his—his preferences.” She shrugged. “I honestly had no idea before that time.”

I knew, vaguely, that her son had a criminal record before Audrey was abducted, which was the reason the police had focused on him so quickly.

“What happened?” I asked her.

“Oh, well, Griffin—he injured his knee very seriously. He tore the—his anterior something-or-other?”

“The anterior cruciate ligament,” I said. It was a common injury in football. A buddy of mine at State tore his ACL and never played ball again.

“That’s it,” she said. “He was off his feet for weeks. It’s not like we had the money for surgery. He was all but immobile. So I stayed here with Griffin, while he was recuperating. One day, I was just trying to clean up. He was so messy, that boy.” She sighed, relishing a momentary memory of her son that did not include his sexual affliction, before she darkened again. “I saw some—some photo—”

“You saw some disturbing photographs,” I gathered.

“That’s right.” She touched her eyes. “I—I talked to him about it. He told me it was just some joke that a friend had sent him.” She looked at me. “Of course I should have known better. I make no excuses, but—a mother wants to believe, doesn’t she?”

“Of course she does.”

“And then, later, there were those few incidents in Summit. And Griffin told me they were misunderstandings, he swore to me he would
never
touch a child. Can you imagine how much a mother would want to believe that?”

She was referring to Griffin’s first brushes with the law in a town downstate, one ending in a
nolle
and one in a conviction for indecent exposure.

“And then,” she said softly, “there was little Audrey.”

Her eyes welled up. I imagine, by now, it took a lot to make the tears fall. I realized now why she had made Griffin’s home her own. It was penance. She was punishing herself for the sins of her son by immersing herself in the memory.

“I told him, Mr. Kolarich, I did. I said, ‘Griffin, if you did something to that little girl, you have to tell them.’ But he wouldn’t admit it.”

He wouldn’t admit it
. Different than saying he denied it.

“Do I think he did something to that little girl, Audrey? Well, the answer is yes.”

I nodded. “Can you help me at all?”

Fresh tears spilled down her face. I sensed that it was more than mere generalized grief. She was struggling. She had something to tell me.

I was about to burst, but I had to let this play out naturally. I would beg and plead if necessary, but it felt right to let her make the next move.

She took a while, a good cry, wiping her face, blowing her nose, mumbling to herself, before she finally heaved a heavy sigh.

“I guess there’s no sense trying to protect him anymore,” she said.

13

A
REA THREE HEADQUARTERS was no more than half a mile from where I grew up, a place where I’d spent a very uncomfortable evening in the summer before my junior year at Bonaventure. I still remembered the taste of sweat on my upper lip, the thick cologne of the police detective who stood over me, the whack from the heel of Coach Fox’s hand across my face. I didn’t remember the name of the cop, but it wasn’t Vic Carruthers.

Carruthers looked to be near retirement, a broad guy with an extra chin and a face that looked like a map of interstate highways. He sat back in his chair and looked crosswise at me, a guy who was reminding him of a case that hadn’t gone so well for him.

“Perlini’s dead,” he repeated back to me. “And Audrey’s brother is the one that killed him.”

“He’s charged with that murder, yes.”

“And her son being dead, that accounts for the mother’s change of heart. She figures there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore.”

“Right.”

“She didn’t”—he came forward, leaned into me, his jaw clenched, a fire to his eyes—“she didn’t feel the need to help out that girl back then.”

“I don’t think she knew,” I said. “And she didn’t want to believe it. She still doesn’t know for sure. But she suspects.”

“She suspects. She suspects.” Carruthers ran a large hand across his face. “I don’t even know where this school is, I don’t think. Fifty-seventh and Hudson?”

I nodded. Hardigan Elementary School had a large hill behind it that supplied a good toboggan slide in the winter, and a hangout for recreational drug users in the warm weather, when I was a kid. The hill crested down sharply into a thick set of trees, in front of which was a large fence that formed the boundary of the schoolyard.

Mrs. Perlini had no way to be sure, she’d told me, but she knew that Griffin had continued to visit the site as an adult. There would be one obvious reason for someone of Griffin’s sexual inclinations to want a bird’s-eye view into an elementary school yard, but Mrs. Perlini could never shake the notion that Griffin had used the cover of the thick trees for another purpose.

“She thinks it’s a burial site,” Carruthers said. “She found muddy shoes and a shovel in his garage one day? That’s it?” His anger was rising, bringing color to his jowls, but I imagined the source was the reminder of this unsolved case, his inability to nail the man who killed a little girl on his watch.

“It was a place he went,” I said. “She thinks it’s where he would have put her. I happen to think she might be on to something.”

“
You
happen to think. You score a few touchdowns for Bonaventure and that makes you a police detective.”

I didn’t bother to fight. He was doing a pretty good job battling himself. He didn’t speak for a long time, scratching at his face and, it seemed, reliving the investigation. From what I knew, Carruthers had gotten a little rough with Griffin Perlini while they searched for Audrey, but that hadn’t been the problem. The problem was that Griffin Perlini had never said a damn thing to the police, not a word, once they trained on him. No little girl’s body, no incriminating statement.

Carruthers opened a drawer on his cluttered desk and removed a photo. It was Audrey, frozen in time as a child.

“You don’t forget a case like that,” he said. “Not ever. Not a day goes by . . .”

I knew a little something about regret, and I didn’t want to be reminded.

“The girl’s dead and her killer’s dead,” Carruthers said.

“Yeah, but her brother’s not.” I gathered my things and stood up. “Sammy Cutler is entitled to know.” I looked at the photograph of Audrey, clutched in the detective’s hand. “And so are you.”

YOU’RE DUMB TEENAGERS, you and your buddy Sammy, careless with your side business, the one you work between shifts at the grocery store. Careless because you never consider the consequences. You tell yourself, it’s only pot, it’s just you and your buddies getting stoned, it’s not addictive, no one’s getting hurt, and you’re just making a couple of bucks.

You don’t think much about the guy who sells you the stuff, Ice, the twenty-year-old who sells out of his house and who, you later learn, is into a lot more than just marijuana, and who has attracted the attention of the police.

So you drive up to his house like you’re visiting a friend. You keep your stash in the trunk of the car. Turns out, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sammy sees it first—
Look
, he says, pointing at the window of Ice’s house, through which you see a man in the living room with a badge hanging around his neck.