The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  “If you hate me,” I said, looking upward, “then I hate you back.”

  I drove on, conscious of a black SUV a few cars back. These guys really didn’t have to switch cars every day. The fact that they did so told me that they were trying to maintain a surreptitious cover. They thought I wasn’t aware of them. That, in and of itself, told me something. These guys were serious customers but they weren’t pros, at least not in the cloak-and-dagger business.

  I deviated from my normal destination and had to think a little bit about the proper route to St. John’s. It was the parish Talia and I had chosen, among many on the north side. It was hard to wave your arm in the city without hitting a Catholic church, but we settled pretty quickly on St. J’s, as most people called it. Talia liked it because of the choir. I preferred it because I liked Father Ben, a younger guy with a good sense of humor and a self-deprecating style. Catholicism, twenty-first-century style.

  None of them had the feel of our parish growing up in Leland Park, St. Peter’s. St. Pete’s looked like it had barely survived an aerial bombing in World War II and hadn’t felt the need for an update in the interim. The priest at St. Pete’s preached his homilies like he was Moses descending from the mountain following his one-on-one with the burning bush.

  But Father Ben, he was okay in my book, as okay as I could feel about a man of God today. When I walked into St. J’s, I found him coming up the stairs from the meeting rooms downstairs. I avoided looking to the right, to the sanctuary itself, to the altar where Emily was baptized at three months.

  “Jason, it’s good to see you.” Father Ben was in a white shirt and dark trousers. His flyaway hair wasn’t in its usual order. It always seemed weird to see a priest out of uniform. I let him work me over a minute. I’d expected some gentle chiding for my lack of attendance since the funerals but didn’t receive it. We covered how I was doing, then talked a little football.

  When the small talk subsided, he seemed to struggle with what would come next. I preempted him by saying, “Thanks for your help today, Father.” And for not asking me why, I didn’t add.

  He gave a heavy sigh and surprised me by putting his hand on my shoulder. I raised my hand because I didn’t want to hear whatever he might say. “Please, don’t,” I said, drawing away.

  “Okay, okay. No homilies today. But can I just say one thing?”

  I could hardly deny him.

  “He didn’t leave you, Jason. Don’t leave Him.”

  I nodded slowly, a bitter smile creeping forth. “Or what?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Or what, Father? What’s He going to take from me, He hasn’t already taken?”

  Father Ben deflated. His eyes searched me for something, I wasn’t sure what. I tapped my watch. “I gotta do this,” I said. “Thanks again for your help.”

  I took the stairs down to the meeting room. Jim Stewart, it turned out, didn’t look anything like his namesake, the actor. This guy was short and stout and dour, a military crew cut, a guy who seemed like he didn’t have a lot of friends. In his line of work, he probably didn’t.

  I thought of one of the actor’s best roles, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . I thought I might like a sequel. Maybe Smith Goes to Prison.

  Or Smith Goes to the Morgue.

  “I’ve got a problem,” I told Jim Stewart. “I need your help.”

  38

  THE ITALIAN DELI and coffee shop about two blocks from the criminal courts has been a fixture since long before I was a prosecutor. The proprietors, two Sicilian immigrants now in their sixties, are there every day chatting up the customers and telling stories about how things used to be in the city, before the federal government starting sticking its nose into the cesspool of local government, pinching aldermen, exposing bogus city contracts, generally bringing sunlight into areas of public works where shade used to predominate.

  It’s mostly a hangout for the lawyers who populate the criminal courts, though cops like to hit the place as well—the exorbitant price of the coffee and pastries notwithstanding. Detective Denny DePrizio was at the counter, as expected, at ten-thirty sharp this fine Friday morning.

  We made eye contact as I walked in with the briefcase Smith had given me, still filled with the ten thousand dollars. I’d been followed, as always, by Smith’s men but they kept their usual distance. I doubted they’d check on me unless there was a particular reason to do so, and I wasn’t planning on sticking around for long.

  In any event, if I was right, Smith and DePrizio were working together on this, and Smith already knew about this meeting.

  DePrizio was at the counter, enjoying some coffee with his jacket thrown over the seat next to him. I moved next to him but didn’t acknowledge him. I set the briefcase on the footstep of the counter next to his feet and leaned in, ordering a large coffee, black, to go.

  “That’s the briefcase?” he asked.

  I nodded. “The only thing I have that Smith touched. You think there’ll be any prints on it?”

  “Hard to say,” DePrizio answered. “Not likely but we’ll know in a few days.”

  That was the time frame I figured. There is typically a pretty long line for fingerprint runs.

  “Thanks for keeping this discreet,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m being followed, but you never know. Okay if I call you in a couple of days?”

  “Sure, Kolarich.” He didn’t hide his opinion of my paranoia. It had been my idea, the surreptitious drop-off, but he’d been a sport about it.

  I took my coffee, stuffed a dollar into the coffee cup for tips, and walked away, the briefcase of money at DePrizio’s feet. I didn’t take a deep breath until I was back in my car.

  MARIE BUZZED ME in my office at about eleven. “Mr. Smith calling.”

  I felt a stirring in my chest, as I did every time I heard from him. We hadn’t spoken for a while now, but he’d sent me a few messages in the interim—a friendly conversation with gang-banger inmate Arrelius Jackson, plus his henchmen mugging Pete in an alley outside a bar.

  “Just wanted to check in on you, Jason. How are things? How’s your brother?”

  I forced a smile on my face and counted to ten.

  “Have you been keeping up your end of the deal?” he went on.

  “Memory serves, Smith, I said we didn’t have a deal.”

  “Well, I’ve kept up my end. I have a suspect for you.”

  “The black-guy-fleeing-the-scene?”

  “The very one. You’ll need to see if your witness—his name escapes me—”

  “Tommy Butcher,” I said.

  “Right, Butcher. You’ll need to see if Butcher might be able to identify our suspect as possibly the man he saw fleeing the apartment building that night.”

  “But he wasn’t the man he saw that night.”

  “Well, now, Jason, I’m sure you can be persuasive. This was a man he saw at a quick glance, and cross-racial identification is notoriously suspect.”

  “You mean, to a white guy, all black guys look alike? That’s not very politically correct of you, Smith.”

  But then again, Tommy Butcher wasn’t exactly politically correct, either. Butcher had been sympathetic to my plight, and if I told him that I had a legitimate suspect, he might be willing to “recall” that the person I pointed out to him was, in fact, the guy he saw.

  This conversation I was having violated the letter and spirit of pretty much every ethics provision of the lawyer’s code. But at the moment, I didn’t have much of a choice, and the truth was, if this could help Sammy, I’d be willing to consider it, regardless of the source.

  “Is this suspect—what’s his name?”

  “Ken Sanders.”

  “Okay, this guy Sanders—is he going to be cooperative? How’s this going to work?”

  Smith said, “He’s obviously not going to admit to anything. But he won’t be able to deny that he was in that building. Mr. Sanders has friends in the building he was visiting that night.”

  The buildin
g where Griffin Perlini lived, and died, was a subsidized-housing facility that contained, among others, many recently released cons looking to get back on their feet. It made me think that Ken Sanders might have been visiting some such gentlemen, which further made me suspect that Sanders, himself, had a sheet.

  “That is correct,” Smith confirmed. “In a nutshell, drugs and violence, but no murder. A full background was stuffed into your mailbox at your house in the past hour.”

  He enjoyed letting me know that he knew where I lived. It was a convenient way for him to deliver me something without showing himself or his men.

  “Is this guy affiliated?” I asked.

  “Is he—what?”

  “In a gang, Smith. Is Ken Sanders in a gang?”

  “No.”

  So Smith actually found a guy willing to be fingered by the defense as a suspect in a murder? He must have put a lot of money into Ken Sanders’s hands.

  Smith told me how to get in touch with the aforementioned Mr. Sanders but told me there was another reason for the call. I told him I was all ears.

  “I see on the docket entry for the Cutler matter that there is a contested motion for next Tuesday? A defense motion?”

  The county courts have recently discovered that we are in a new century, and lots of people use something called the Internet. If you have the docket number of a case, you can access the history of the case, with a data entry for every document filed since the case began. When one of the attorneys files a motion, the docket entry will identify the movant—the defense or the prosecution—as well as designating it “contested” or “agreed.” So Smith could see online that the defense filed a contested motion, but he wouldn’t know the content of that motion or its subject matter.

  “I’m moving for expedited DNA testing of the bodies discovered behind that school,” I explained. “Or, in the alternative, a continuance of the trial until DNA testing can be completed.”

  Smith was silent. I wondered, for a moment, if his phone had cut out.

  “I can only assume you’re joking.”

  “You can if you want, Smith. But I wouldn’t.”

  “No way, Jason. That’s completely unacceptable. Wasn’t I clear about the terms of our agreement? There will be no—”

  “Was I not clear that we don’t have an agreement?”

  “You will forget about those bodies and focus on Mr. Cutler’s acquittal. If you don’t, your brother will go away for ten years, Kolarich. And they will not be pleasant years. We will make it our highest priority to ensure that. I assume I don’t need to draw you a picture. You’ve had a preview, yes?”

  Smith’s voice was shaking with anger—but, I thought, fear as well. I was really hitting a nerve here, a pressure point, to throw his words back at him. Why did he care so much about a delay of the trial? It didn’t make sense.

  Forget about those bodies, he’d said. That, after all, had been what prompted Smith to exert pressure on me by framing Pete—it was after they’d dug up the bodies behind the school.

  Was I on the wrong track here? Was Smith hiding his real fear? I’d been operating on the possibility that Smith’s people had killed Griffin Perlini, and they didn’t want me nosing around and discovering that. Was I off base? Maybe Smith wasn’t protecting someone who killed Griffin Perlini.

  Maybe he was protecting someone who had killed those girls buried behind the school.

  Someone who had killed Sammy’s sister, Audrey.

  “You will withdraw that motion or you’ll be sorry,” Smith warned.

  “Drop the case against Pete, Smith. Make it happen. Or I go forward with the motion.”

  “You can’t win this game, Kolarich. Neither can Pete.” The phone line went dead.

  I hung up the phone and pushed myself out of my chair on weak legs, contemplating this new idea. Was Griffin Perlini innocent of Audrey’s murder? Had someone else killed Audrey, along with those other girls—someone who had accumulated enough wealth over the years to be able to finance an operation now to make sure that Griffin Perlini’s murder did not reopen an inquiry into those murders?

  I couldn’t deny the possibility. It would explain Smith’s desperation.

  I went to the files in the corner of my office that Detective Carruthers had given me, files from Audrey’s case back in the day. I’d neglected them, because I thought they didn’t matter anymore. But maybe they mattered more than anything. I found the name I was looking for, looked through the lawyer’s directory until I found a phone number, and made the call.

  “Jason Kolarich for Reggie Lionel,” I said.

  39

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, I found myself in the law firm of Guidry, Rogers, Lionel and Freeman. They were in one of the nice skyscrapers downtown, which seemed odd for a criminal defense firm, but they probably got a good deal on rent with the market being what it is.

  “Reggie Lionel,” I told the young kid manning reception. He was playing with some contraption that allowed you to watch a video and make a phone call and do your taxes all in one. The digital divide wasn’t limited to the wealthy and the poor; it was age-based, too. By the time I’d said hello to this punk, he could have taken my photo, posted it on the Internet, stolen my credit card information, and learned what I had for breakfast.

  “Third office down,” said the kid, who wasn’t inclined to escort me.

  I knocked on the door, which was already open. Reggie Lionel was wearing an orange sweater and staring, through thick glasses, at a document. His eyes rose without his head of snowy hair moving an inch.

  “Jason Kolarich,” I said.

  “Come in,” he bellowed. I took a seat in an uncomfortable chair. Reggie Lionel was an old-timer by now, mid-sixties probably, which meant he’d gone through law school when black people were not exactly welcome. He’d jumped hurdles I’d never seen.

  “Rare day off from court,” he said, flipping the document onto a cluttered desk. Criminal defense attorneys like Reggie Lionel work on volume, which means they spend almost every day in court. He looked me over. “We co-counsel?”

  “No, nothing like that.” He figured I was jumping into some multiple-defendant case where we each represented one of the doers. “I’ve got a name from the past for you. A client from the late seventies, early eighties. Griffin Perlini.”

  His eyes rose up, his lips parted. I wondered if, before the recent news of Perlini’s gravesite of victims had splashed all across the front page, Reggie Lionel would even remember the man he defended from a police inquiry well over twenty years ago. Maybe, maybe not, but the name had clearly been front and center recently, so he nodded with recognition.

  I wondered what he thought about that, learning that his client might have been responsible for such terrible deeds, wondering if maybe his successful defense of Perlini had allowed the predator to kill and molest other young girls. That, in the end, is one of the great unspoken dilemmas facing a criminal defense attorney who represents the lowest of the low—you don’t want to lose, but you wonder if you really want to win.

  But hey, even I can see that everyone needs a lawyer. Guys like Reggie, they have to have a pretty healthy view of the Bill of Rights to plod forth on behalf of the dregs of society.

  “Sex offender,” he said.

  “They liked him for a crime on the south side, Leland Park neighborhood,” I reminded him. “A young girl named Audrey Cutler.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded. “Didn’t stick, though. Didn’t have eyes.”

  True enough. I wondered if he knew that those “eyes,” Mrs. Thomas, had thought that Griffin Perlini was wrong for the murder. That, upon reflection, is what Mrs. Thomas had been saying to me when I visited her at the assisted living center. She didn’t think Griffin Perlini was the person she saw running from the Cutler’s home that night.

  “Didn’t have a little girl, either,” he added.

  No, they didn’t have Audrey, not then, but the discovery of the bodies behind Hardigan Elementary School w
ould change that soon enough.

  “Griffin Perlini is dead,” I said. “I assume you’ve heard.”

  His eyes narrowed. Yes, clearly, he’d read that article as well in the Watch’s coverage, or on television. But dead or not, Griffin Perlini had been his client, and if he thought there was any chance of a case being made against Perlini, even posthumously, he’d clam up.

  “I’ve got the guy they like for his murder,” I said.

  “The girl’s brother. Right. Sam, I think.” Lionel’s mouth ran around that idea, seemingly ending up with approval. These guys hold their noses and do their jobs, but they probably don’t mind when rough justice comes the way of their scumbag clients. I doubted that Reggie Lionel had lit a candle for Griffin Perlini following his murder.

  “I want to prove that Perlini killed that little girl. Audrey Cutler,” I added.

  “Audrey.” He nodded. “Yes. Audrey.” He gave me an ironic smile. “Way it works usually, the defense attorney’s supposed to defend his client, not implicate him.”

  “Yeah, that rings a bell,” I answered, a little too abruptly for someone looking for a favor. “Look, I just want to know if I’m barking up the right tree. I mean, the cops homed in on your guy Perlini in a heartbeat, given his background. And you remember, he had photographs of little girls, including Audrey, all over that coach house.”

  He kept nodding with me, but he wasn’t talking.

  “And you were smart enough to keep a lid on your client.”

  Still nodding, now smiling as well. I thought the details were coming back to him, if they hadn’t already.

  “So the cops focused on him immediately, and he wasn’t talking. I’m envisioning the possibility here, Reggie, that maybe they got the wrong guy.”

  “Been known to happen.”

  Only one of us was enjoying this. But I had to play this his way, because a black man making it through a legal career defending criminals did not get where he was by taking people’s shit. “Look, I’m not asking you to divulge confidences. How about you stop me if I make a relevant point?”