The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  “Doing the new park district building over at Deemer Park,” he told me, as we waited for coffee. “City’s throwing a shit-fit because we’re two weeks behind schedule.”

  I thought he was trying to tell me that he didn’t have much time for me, so I got right to asking him what happened.

  “I’m over at Downey’s,” he began. “Having a few drinks. I left about ten, maybe, something like that. I’m walking east, I guess—yeah, east on Liberty and I’m going by this building. It’s got a walk-up, a staircase, up to the front door. Looks like a real fleabag place, so it fits right in with the surroundings, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right. So anyway, this black guy comes out of the door real fast, right? And he’s flying down those stairs. His jacket’s flying open kind of, while he’s running and all, and I see this guy has a gun stuffed in his pants. So me, I don’t want no part of this guy, right? So he goes running past me, and I’m not getting in this brother’s way, right? Guy flies right past me and that’s about it.”

  I nodded. I was scribbling some notes.

  “And so, yeah, I guess it sure seemed like this guy wasn’t running away because he’d done something good. But what am I gonna do? I didn’t do nothing. What am I gonna do, call the cops and say I saw a guy running?”

  “Nothing for you to report,” I agreed.

  The coffee arrived, and he filled it with cream. “Nothing to report. Right? Am I wrong?”

  I’d already answered that question. There’s no crime in running out of a building, and Butcher hadn’t known that someone had been shot.

  “So then, okay, I’m reading about this guy who’s been shot at this building, and I’m thinking back, and then I check my calendar and yeah, I was pretty sure that was the night I was at Downey’s, and I call my brother Jake and we think about it and then we’re sure. It was that Thursday, September 21. And I’m thinking, holy Christ, I gotta tell someone.”

  It sounded plausible. It would be a lot better if I could come up with a black suspect, and even better if Butcher could ID that suspect. But I didn’t have anyone, not yet, at least.

  “Can anyone confirm you were at Downey’s that night?” I asked. “You mentioned your brother.”

  “Yeah, Jake, my brother. He could say.”

  “Who else?”

  He shook his head. “Just me and Jake.”

  I asked him for brother Jake’s contact information. He gave me a cell phone number.

  “You pay with a credit card?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. Why, someone’s gonna say I wasn’t there?” He didn’t seem happy about the prospect. I figured Tommy Butcher was used to being in charge and didn’t appreciate dissent.

  “It won’t be me. I’m on your side.” I thought that last point was worth making. I wanted it to be us against them. I wanted to harden his resolve for the inevitable doubts that would be forthcoming.

  “Do you remember what he was wearing, this black guy?” I asked.

  “I remember the gun, mostly.” That stood to reason. Most witnesses, when they see a gun, don’t remember much else. They find themselves predominantly concerned with whether that weapon might be pointed at them in the immediate future.

  “The man seen leaving Griffin Perlini’s apartment was wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and a green stocking cap,” I said. It was simply a harmless, innocuous observation, not a blatant attempt to coach the witness.

  He thought about that for a minute. “Coulda been,” he said. “Coulda been.” His fingers played on the table. Then he nodded at me. “Your guy got a chance to win this case?”

  I shrugged.

  “I mean,” Butcher continued, “paper said this douche bag got killed, this guy Perlini, right? They said he killed your guy’s sister. So I guess that gives your guy a pretty good reason to do what he did.”

  “If he did it,” I answered.

  He exhaled out of his nose, a wry smile, like I’d just made a joke. I thought he was suggesting to me that a jury wouldn’t convict a guy avenging his sister’s murder. He was thinking, perhaps, that I had a pretty good case. I needed him to understand otherwise. I needed him to understand his importance to my case.

  “Problem is,” I said, “Perlini was never convicted of killing my client’s sister. They couldn’t make a case against him. He walked. So I can’t get up and say that to the jury. I can’t say Sammy was doing this for his sister, because there’s no proof of it.”

  My explanation seemed to trouble Tommy Butcher, which was precisely my intention. “I mean, we all know Perlini killed her,” I said. “I just can’t prove it. Not yet, that is.”

  Butcher repeated my words. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet. I’m trying. But digging up an almost thirty-year-old case—and I’m not a cop, I don’t have an arsenal of investigators or anything. I’m trying, but it’s going to be hard. And I don’t have much time. So you’re the best I have, Tom.”

  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

  YOU’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.

  This is Detective Vic Carruthers. I’m sending over copies of the files like you asked. And I wanted you to know, we’re going to do the dig. And if I find that little girl’s bones on the side of that hill, I’m going to rip Perlini out of his grave and beat the ever lovin’ shit out of him.

  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.

  I felt that weird symphony of happiness and sympathy, poignant childhood memories fusing with the pain of realizing t
hey’re gone, that life marches onward, trampling everything in its path. Mrs. Thomas was at that stage where hope meant something new and different. I startled myself with the recognition that hope had meant something different to me, too, four months ago.

  I played defense to her questioning for a good hour, like I used to when I’d come home from school and my mother would interrogate me. It was annoying at the time, though I wonder how it would have felt had she not inquired. You know you’re a good parent when your child takes you for granted.

  I bobbed and weaved, though I tried to fill in as much of the blanks as I could to satiate Mrs. Thomas, who kept insisting that I call her “Lilly” but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. She knew my mother had died and she notably did not raise the subject of my father, currently serving time in prison, so we talked much about Pete—I left out the part about him having a couple of drug-related scrapes with the law, or his inability to find a direction to his life—and mostly about me.

  There, too, I edited, letting her take joy in my brief turn as a celebrity athlete, and my scholarship to State. She didn’t seem to be aware—or she’d forgotten—that I’d been kicked off the team for fighting with a teammate, after I’d used up all of my goodwill, even in a sport where violence is prized. She knew about law school and asked me about my law practice. She didn’t know the details beyond that, and when she hit the real sore spot, I decided it best to just tell her that “No one’s tied me down yet,” rather than burden her mind with my misfortune, particularly when I was about to raise another tragedy. She beat me to it, asking after Sammy, and however old she may be, her eyes still worked behind those substantial bifocals, and she knew she’d hit on something dark and messy.