The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  I crawl back to bed, hoping not to wake Alexa, but she turns over as soon as she hears me. It’s clear that she’s been awake.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “Sure, sure.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve gotten up.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah, it is. You got up at two and again just now, at four-thirty.”

  “So you’re keeping tabs on me?”

  She puts her hand on my chest. “Don’t say it like that. I’m just wondering if you’re in pain.”

  “I’m fine.” I reach over and kiss her. “Go back to sleep.”

  She nestles into me and quickly drifts off. We fit together nicely in sleep. I breathe in the fruity scent of her shampoo and run my fingers over her back as she softly moans.

  I jerk awake in that same cocoon, like I never slept at all save for the dream, birds feasting on the hair on my arms, grasping tiny hairs in their beaks and yanking them off. I squint at the clock. It’s seven o’clock. I sit up in bed. My shoulders are tight. My hands are shaky and itchy. My stomach is considering a revolution. I get out of bed and walk to the bathroom for another pill.

  “Morning.” Alexa walks into the bathroom rubbing her eyes, the back of her hair standing up. She is wearing a gray T-shirt of mine and silk underwear. If I were in the mood, I’d enjoy the view.

  “Morning.” I put away the pills and close the cabinet.

  She sits on the toilet to pee. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m sure.” I splash some water on my face and look into the mirror, but quickly avert my eyes. Not good. Ghoulish and mangy.

  We lie around for a while and then go downstairs to the kitchen to scrounge up breakfast. I pretty much never cook anything that doesn’t require a microwave, but I still have lots of cookware and utensils left over from when Talia was in charge of the cooking. What I lack, however, is ingredients for anything interesting like French toast or pancakes—not that I have the appetite for it, either.

  “You should go back to the doctor and tell him your knee hurts,” Alexa says as she beats eggs in a pan. I do have eggs, and lots of meat, and really good coffee beans.

  “My knee’s fine.”

  “Okay. Whatever.” She’s doing something fancy with the eggs. I don’t want to prolong this conversation and can’t think of anything clever to say, so I walk through the great room—I actually hate that term, but that’s what they called it when I bought the place, not a living room or family room but a “great” room—and press my face against the window overlooking the street. People are walking their dogs or starting out runs. An old couple is slowly walking down the street, the man wearing a beret, the woman with her arm in a sling, casting their eyes upward at the sky, getting in their stroll before the temperatures reach sauna level.

  “Okay, well, then, here,” Alexa says. I turn back. She is fiddling in her purse, which rests on the elongated breakfast bar. She produces a tin of Altoids and places it on the counter. “You left these at my house the other night. Thought you might need them.”

  Need them, she said. Not want them.

  “What are those, mints?” I ask, a different kind of warmth passing through me.

  “Sure. Fine. They’re mints,” she hisses, turning her back to me again, going to work with a little more fury on those eggs. They aren’t going to be scrambled; they’re going to be annihilated.

  Finally, after an awkward silence of I don’t know how long, my chest burning, she spins back in my direction. “Look, I like you, Jason. I really do. But I had a guy I really liked and he burned me really bad because he kept secrets. I don’t need to know your life story, okay? But if there’s something that really affects you, yeah, I’d like to know about it.

  “Sooo . . . it seems to me, just sayin’,” she says, waving her hands with exaggerated caution, “that your knee still hurts you really badly, and for some reason I can’t figure out, you don’t want to admit that to me. So you’re hiding pills in an Altoids container and you’re getting out of bed every few hours at night, too.”

  “So you’re checking up on me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She throws down the large wooden spoon she was using. It actually lands on the corner of the counter and snaps back at her. “I thought they were mints! I almost put one in my mouth! What are they? Vicodin? Something for pain.”

  I look back at the window, at the treetops and the town houses across the street. I place my palm on the window and feel warmth.

  “If something is hurting you that badly,” she says, “then it’s affecting you. And if we have some kind of a relationship, then that means it’s affecting me, too. And if we don’t have a relationship, then that’s fine, too, but then what the hell am I doing cooking you eggs?”

  “Getting out your aggression, it looks like.” That’s me, when shoved into a corner. Start with sarcasm. If that doesn’t work, it can get uglier.

  She leaves the kitchen without another word, heading upstairs. She is quiet up there, but I assume she’s gathering her things to leave. This is what they call the moment of truth. Cue the dramatic organ music.

  “Okay,” she says when she comes back down the stairs, fully dressed, her purse slung over her shoulder. “You’re a nice guy, Jason. Maybe if we’d—”

  “My knee hurts,” I say. “It hurts all the time. It should be better by now. It’s June. It’s been, like, six months. But it’s not. It’s not better.” The words just spill out, as if someone else were saying them. “My doctor doesn’t believe me so he stopped prescribing me OxyContin. So I have to buy these pills illegally.”

  I’m looking out the window when I deliver this monologue. The fact that I ended with the truth seems, for some reason, to make the rest more palatable. There is a gentle but consistent ringing in my ears: Wrong, not right.

  “He won’t give you pain medication?” she asks, her tone gentler now. Her guard still up, but not quite as high.

  “What did I just fucking say?”

  She doesn’t say anything. Neither of us does. Silence. The abrupt lurch of the fan, the air-conditioning kicking on. The smell of sweat on me, steamy and rancid. Then I hear her back at the stove, the wooden spoon on the pan, a cabinet closing, the freezer opening, bacon grease crackling in the pan.

  Me, I don’t move, staring out the window, watching the slow movement of the elderly couple down the street, grateful that I can’t see my reflection.

  27.

  Jason

  Wednesday, June 19

  I wake up alone on Wednesday morning, unless you consider the images possessing me throughout the night. Another shipwreck of a night, flipping all around my bed, retching into the toilet, thinking of serial murders, butcher knives, young women writhing in pain, their blood-soaked bangs stuck to their foreheads and cheeks.

  Thinking of Alexa, too. How we left things yesterday morning after she made me breakfast, which we ate in relative silence, sticking to ridiculously safe topics like the weather and our schedules this week—depositions she’s working, court appearances I have—ignoring the bomb I’d dropped about my “Altoids” problem. Not that I exactly gave her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. More like the partial truth with some lies mixed in. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as fluidly.

  We said good-bye after breakfast; she didn’t even catch a ride with me downtown, walking to the train instead. A quick peck on the cheek, a curt “Bye,” and that was it. Not that I blame her. If I were Alexa, I’d run away from me like I was qualifying for the Summer Olympics.

  So now . . . Wednesday! I wipe the sweat off my forehead, make it to the bathroom, shower and shave and dress in my best monkey costume for court this morning. It’s in one of the regional branches, not the criminal courts, so I decide to go straight from home to court.

  I get there early and meet my client, who is worried beyond belief. I calm her down and gently prepare her before we enter the cattle call of a courtroom. I fill ou
t an appearance and tell the clerk we want a trial, which means we’ll go to the end of the pack. It’s not until after ten o’clock that they call our case.

  It’s an attempted battery case that will be tried to a judge, not a jury. The husband says the wife tried to stab him during an argument over money. It’s a common tactic in a child custody case, one side accusing the other of assault or battery, hoping to use it as leverage to get the kid in the divorce. Everyone in the criminal justice system knows it—the cops, the judges, the prosecutors—but nobody wants to acknowledge it openly. Prosecutors aren’t allowed to drop the charges on a domestic battery, even if they suspect it’s one of these bullshit cases, because it only takes one mistake—that one case out of a thousand where the husband ends up killing the wife, or vice versa—and then everyone traces it back and finds that the county attorney’s office didn’t pursue charges when it had the chance, and someone has to lose his job.

  So these cases go to trial, but the prosecutors don’t exactly put their best feet forward. They do their duty, putting on the allegedly aggrieved spouse, and rest. I have the additional advantage in this instance of representing the wife; most of these cases, it’s the wife accusing the husband, but in this case the roles are reversed. I’ve never been in front of Judge Oliver, but I can see the look on his face while he listens to the husband, a big meat-eating guy, give his version of how his wife lunged at him with a kitchen knife, and I’m pretty sure I can get a “not guilty” even if I don’t cross-examine the husband. But cross him I do, tying him in knots until he’s about to come out of his seat and do some lunging of his own.

  The verdict isn’t a surprise or an accomplishment, but I savor it nonetheless. This, I’ve come to realize, is truly my best medicine, the only thing I know, the only time I’m not thinking about those Altoids in my pocket—the competition. Every time I lose a case, it haunts me. Every time I win, I drink it in. And I keep track. As a prosecutor, I won all but three of my cases, with the proviso that a plea bargain is considered a victory because, regardless of the reduced offense the descendants plead to, they are convicted of something, and a conviction is a win. As a defense lawyer, I lose more than I win, in part for the same reason about plea bargains, and in part because it’s not a fair fight. The prosecution gets to begin the lawsuit whenever they want, whenever they’re sure they have a rock-solid case, and only then does the defense attorney enter the arena. They also have a considerable advantage in resources compared to most defendants, who can’t afford fancy experts or investigators. I remind myself of all of that, but it still punches me in the gut every time a client goes to prison. I hate, hate, hate to lose, even more than I like to win.

  My client, overcome with relief, kisses me on the cheek and takes my arm as we walk out of the courtroom. I pull out my phone, turn it on, and text “NG” to the divorce lawyer who referred me the case. I have two divorce lawyers who routinely kick these cases my way. It’s a decent stream of business to fill the gaps.

  After wishing my client well, I look again at my phone and see that I have two missed calls from an unknown number and a voice mail.

  “It’s James, James Drinker,” the voice mail says. “There was another murder last night. I didn’t kill her, either.”

  28.

  Jason

  Wednesday, June 19

  Back in my office, I push away a half-eaten cheeseburger I had picked up on the way back and go online to the Herald’s website. It isn’t hard to find, though by midday the story is no longer the headline. The victim is Nancy Minnows, age twenty-three, dead from multiple stab wounds. The police call it “premature” to speculate as to whether there is a connection between this stabbing and the others.

  The promised rain begins to fall in sheets outside, turning everything gray. It will douse the temperature a bit and funk up the air. But I like the post-rain smell. It makes me think that even nature is fallible.

  On the roller coaster that is my opinion of James Drinker’s culpability in these murders, I’m currently in a free fall, sure that he is the man who butchered four women. There is plenty of reason to believe otherwise, but this whole thing is starting to give me the heebie-jeebies. I grab my tin of Altoids for some midday happiness. As I chew up the tablet, it’s not lost on me that I may not be in a superior position to be judging the guilt or innocence of anybody.

  Ten minutes later, I have my phone to my ear, pinching the bridge of my nose with my free hand as I listen to the heavy breath of James Drinker on the other end of the connection.

  “Her name is Nancy Minnows,” he says. “And I don’t know her.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know her?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you might know a Nancy but not know her last name, or something like that. Or you might recognize her face but never knew her name.”

  “Well, they showed a picture of her on the news this morning and I didn’t recognize her.”

  “It could be an old picture, something from a college yearbook or something that’s dated. How old is this girl?” I ask, even though I already know the answer from the Internet.

  “I don’t know. She looked . . . young, I guess. Like the . . . like the others,” he adds with some hesitation.

  “Well, if you’re right that someone’s trying to frame you, James, then they’re not doing a very good job of it.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, I guess. But it’s weird, right?”

  Yes, it’s weird. This whole thing is weird. Once again, this guy is giving me the creeps, but having a weird feeling about a guy isn’t a very strong basis for breaking your sworn oath as a lawyer and turning in your client.

  “I was home last night, alone,” he says. “I didn’t talk to anybody that I can remember. I was online for a while. Should I document all that?”

  “Definitely. But James, you were going to get me those phone records,” I remind him. “The ones that prove you were talking to your mother from your home phone on the night of the third woman’s murder? The night that grad student, Holly Frazier, was murdered?”

  “Oh, right. Yeah, I will. It’ll be on my phone bill. When I get my bill this month, I’ll send it to you.”

  So he’s not going out of his way to expedite the process, to ask the phone company for an early peek at his phone records or to set up an online account and do it that way. But this could explain his innocence as much as his guilt. If he really was on the phone with his mother that night, and he really didn’t kill anybody, then he’d have no particular urgency to get me the data.

  “Let’s go to the police,” I suggest. “I know you’re concerned about handing yourself over to them, but you didn’t kill those women, James, and the cops are going to come to you anyway, eventually. Between dating Alicia Corey and being friends with Lauren Gibbs, it’s bound to happen sooner or later, so you look better getting out in front of it. And now you look far less suspicious, because there have been two more stabbings, and you’re telling me you have no connection to these last two women.”

  Silence, but he hasn’t hung up.

  “I said I don’t know of any connection,” he says. “It doesn’t mean there isn’t one. For all I know, one of them sold me clothes or served me coffee or cleaned my teeth or deposited my check at the bank.”

  “That’s not motive for murder,” I say.

  “Maybe I liked them,” he says. “Maybe I coveted them. Maybe I watched them, everywhere they went, obsessed over them, learned their habits, and then followed them home one night and killed them.”

  I don’t say anything. I feel a decided change in temperature.

  “Maybe that’s exactly why I chose them,” he goes on. “Because my encounter with them was so casual and short that nobody would even remember it.”

  I push myself out of my chair, my head dizzy, my heartbeat drumming. I breathe out. The warm rain still attacks my window. The remnants of my burger, the pink chewy flesh, bring a surge to my throat.

 
“I’m not going to the police, Jason,” he says.

  I start to form words but can’t find them. The call disconnects a moment later.

  I call Joel Lightner right away. “The mother,” I say. “James Drinker’s mother. He said she lives in a nursing home. I want you to find her.”

  “What are you going to do with his mother?” Joel asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Find out where she is and then I’ll decide.”

  A pause. He’s scribbling something down, presumably. “Okay, princess, anything else?”

  “One other thing,” I say. “And this one isn’t free of charge. Put this on my tab. Because it’s going to be expensive.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want twenty-four-hour surveillance on James Drinker,” I say.

  29.

  Jason

  Thursday, June 20

  Another night of fitful, interrupted sleep, the sensation of shadows looming large behind me, nightmares of serial killers removing bodily organs with steak knives. I avoid the bathroom mirror entirely and, on the drive to the office, actually look down to ensure that I am wearing pants.

  My stomach is empty and grumpy this morning, a dull ringing in my ears as I sit in my office, rereading everything in the news reports on the four dead women. By eleven, I finish a first draft of a response brief to a Santiago proffer, a case in federal court where prosecutors are trying to link my client with a dozen other gang members in a drug conspiracy so they can use his statements in court without that pesky rule against hearsay. I have trouble focusing for any number of reasons. First, because I’m going to lose this argument; Judge Royster is going to declare this one gigantic conspiracy and throw the hearsay rule out his twentieth-story window. Second, because I can’t get my redheaded client out of my mind. And third, even I can tell, in rare moments of clarity and self-confrontation, that I am not right in the head these days, that I am slipping.