The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  I found myself nodding as Lester Mapp left the courtroom. For the first time, I seriously considered a plea bargain. I was down to one witness, one alternative suspect—Archie Novotny, who would make for a decent suspect but who would deny any involvement. It was all I had.

  Twelve years, out in six with good behavior. One year already served awaiting trial, leaving Sammy with five years more. Lester Mapp, albeit in his condescending way, had spoken the truth back in his office when we discussed a plea: This was a gift. Griffin Perlini had become a temporary media celebrity with the discovery of the dead girls, and the county attorney’s office wasn’t all that thrilled about prosecuting the man who avenged his sister’s murder.

  When the courtroom had completely emptied out, Tommy Butcher pushed himself out of the witness stand. He looked like he’d just received some really bad news from the doctor.

  “What the hell just happened?” I asked him.

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what coulda happened. I mean, I know what I saw. I mean, nothin’ that happened here changes the fact that the guy—the guy you showed me the photograph of—that guy was there that night, right?”

  It was true that I could still place Kenny Sanders at the Liberty Apartments on the night of the murder. But Sanders wasn’t going to admit to anything beyond that. I needed Butcher’s testimony to have him be not only there, but fleeing the building with a gun at around ten o’clock. After this court hearing today, it would be a tough sell to get the judge to allow Butcher’s testimony at all, much less to get a jury to believe it. And without Butcher, all I had was Kenny Sanders admitting he was there that night but not admitting anything beyond that. I had nothing at all.

  “Christ, it was a year ago,” Butcher told me. “I thought it was Downey’s. It must have been some place else. Lemme think on this and—”

  “Forget it, Tom. It’s over.”

  I was still numb from disbelief. What colossally shitty luck. The place gets its liquor license pulled?

  “Tell me what I gotta do, Mr. Kolarich. Tell me how to fix this. I definitely saw a guy running out of that building. Tell me what I gotta do.”

  I closed up my briefcase and shook my head. “Pray,” I said.

  Butcher walked out, seemingly in a trance. I waited in the empty courtroom until he was long gone before I removed my cell phone. “Brown tweed jacket, red tie,” I said to Joel Lightner. “Heavyset, balding. Give him about five minutes and he’ll be outside.”

  52

  LET’S SAY EIGHT. Eight years, out in four, with one already served. That’s three more years inside, Sam.”

  I’d caught up with Sammy in the holding cell in the courthouse before his transport back to the detention center. My client sat against the wall of the cell, dejected and bitter.

  “They’re at twelve now?” he asked.

  “Say I get him to eight.”

  “After today?”

  “Sammy—say I get him to eight,” I said. “Let’s pretend, okay? Could you do that?”

  He played with the idea. It was never an easy thing to accept, obviously, but the whole point was considering the alternative.

  “I have Archie Novotny,” I said. “And they have your statements to them, which were pretty close to a confession, and they have your car at the scene, at the time of the murder, and they have eyewitnesses. Maybe—maybe I can shake those witnesses, Sammy. I haven’t even been able to talk to them yet. I will. But nothing I do to them will change the fact that they picked you out of a lineup.”

  He didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Could you do eight?” I asked again.

  “After what that asshole did to my sister?” Sammy’s head fell back against the cell wall.

  “I don’t think Griffin Perlini killed Audrey.” I blurted it out without thinking. I hadn’t necessarily planned on telling Sammy this fact any time soon. It really didn’t change our case at all—in fact, it hurt it. But I thought it might help Sammy accept a prison sentence.

  Sammy stared at me for a long time without speaking.

  “Remember Mrs. Thomas, our neighbor?” I said. “She didn’t think it was Perlini who ran off with Audrey. She thought Perlini was too small to fit the man she saw running off with Audrey. And that’s not all, Sam. Here’s the real problem: Perlini had a bum knee. He’d torn his ACL and never repaired it. He couldn’t run, Sam. The guy who took Audrey was in an all-out sprint.”

  “Then—who?”

  “Our friend Smith? I think he’s shilling for the guy. I think his whole reason for being involved is to keep me from figuring out who really killed her and those other girls buried behind the school.”

  Sammy pushed himself up and began to pace the cell. I couldn’t fathom the impact of this revelation. He’d spent his entire life on an assumption that, I was now telling him, was a lie.

  “I—I killed a guy who didn’t—who—?”

  I killed a guy. He’d never said the words to me. So now we were even on the revelations. Sammy did, in fact, murder Griffin Perlini.

  “You killed a guy who molested a bunch of young girls,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t kill any of them. I don’t know. But don’t turn him into a Boy Scout.”

  Sammy had nothing to say to that.

  “Think about eight,” I said, as the deputy approached to tell us it was time to wrap up.

  I WENT BACK to the office and fell in my chair. I had a raging headache with no time for self-pity. I had to find the elderly couple who positively identified Sammy as the man running from the Liberty Apartments and pray that I could find some way to tear apart their testimony. I had to do whatever I could to make a stronger case against Archie Novotny, the only thing I had left in Sammy’s defense. And then there was the small chore of solving Audrey Cutler’s murder, finding the killer, and hopefully finding my brother along with them.

  My cell phone rang. Dread filled my stomach.

  “Kolarich,” Smith said. “I need to know exactly how you intend to win this case after today’s monumental fuck-up.” His delivery, while intended to be threatening, was edged instead by tension. No doubt, he’d heard about the developments this morning.

  I didn’t have a good story about how I could win this case. My best bet was a plea bargain, and I thought I could get the prosecutor down to eight years. Lester Mapp was riding high after knocking out Tommy Butcher’s testimony today, but in the end, the reason the county attorney’s office wanted a plea had nothing to do with the strength of its case. It was public relations. Griffin Perlini had just been turned into a monster in the press, a headline story of a gravesite filled with dead girls, and the elected county prosecutor wasn’t going to score a lot of points by coming down hard on the man who killed the killer. They wouldn’t let Sammy walk, but they’d accept a quiet plea bargain that put this thing to rest.

  That, I figured, was why Lester Mapp had filed this motion to bar Butcher’s testimony pretrial. He could have waited until just before trial, handed me the evidence that skewered Tommy Butcher’s testimony, and left my case in tatters. But he wanted me to see, up front, that my case wasn’t as good as I’d thought, so I’d accept a plea deal.

  “I have another suspect,” I told Smith. “His name is Archie Novotny. His daughter was molested by Griffin Perlini. He feels like Perlini ruined his family. And he wasn’t where he claims to have been on the night of the murder. He has an alibi—a guitar lesson—but I can prove that he wasn’t at his guitar lesson that night. It’s a fabricated alibi, Smith.”

  This was news to Smith. He didn’t volunteer his opinion of my story. He just asked me to repeat the story, more than once, and tried to get his arms around the strength of the case.

  “I don’t suppose you can get Kenny Sanders to cop to the murder,” I said.

  “I tried. He was willing to place himself at the scene, but anything beyond that, there’s no way. We needed Mr. Butcher to put the gun in his hand, running from the building. Without him, Ken Sa
nders is just a man who happened to be in the building.”

  That’s what I figured. “Then we go with Archie Novotny,” I said. “I can win that case.”

  “Losing is not an option, Jason. It’s not an option for you or your brother.”

  Smith hung up the phone. I found my eyes trailing upward before I closed them.

  53

  CARLO BUTCHER SATpassively in the kitchen, his three children—Marisa, Jake, and Tommy—having joined him and Smith for a late dinner. Nobody was eating. Marisa, though in her mid-fifties, still reminded Smith of a child. She’d done quite well for her mental impairments; she’d kept a home of her own—even if it was next door to Carlo’s—and she’d done a fine job of raising her only daughter, Patricia. Still, Carlo had propped her up her entire life, financially, emotionally, in every way, and she was leaning heavily on him now. But there was only so much Carlo could do. This wasn’t a problem that could be solved with money or influence. Marisa’s daughter, Carlo’s granddaughter, was sick. Marisa spent every visiting hour at the hospital, as did Carlo, helpless, each of them, as Patricia slowly declined.

  Carlo looked terrible. Smith had been around when Carlo’s wife had passed away, but it was nothing compared to watching Carlo suffer along with his daughter and granddaughter. Carlo had waged war his entire life, from the city’s northwest side, as a white kid in a predominantly black public school, through a brief run in the Capparelli family before he started into the construction trade at the lowest level, working as a laborer and later a foreman, finally taking a chance and building from scratch a construction company of his own, Butcher Construction, turning it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

  He’d made compromises at every level, payoffs and side deals for preferential treatment in contracting, political contributions, and off-the-books cash payments, but Smith had always found Carlo well-grounded by his family. He was a man of substantial means at this stage, in his mid-seventies, but he never left this rather modest home, where he’d lived with his wife. He drove a simple car, wore simple clothes, rarely took vacation or time off, except to spend with his daughter and granddaughter. He’d worked hard to save for the time when he was no longer around for Marisa and Patricia, stowing away millions in long-term securities and investing heavily in life insurance.

  Tommy pushed himself away from the table first, leaving the chicken and rice virtually untouched. He walked down the hall to Carlo’s office, where he and Smith would break the news of today’s events to Carlo. Carlo would not take it well. He’d always been hard on Tommy, the oldest of the three kids and not saddled with developmental disability, and Tommy had not always lived up to his father’s standards. There had been the two scrapes with the law, meeting with Carlo’s disapproval more for their stupidity than their illegality.

  But today—today was a disaster. It had been Tommy’s responsibility, visiting the scene of Griffin Perlini’s murder, walking the neighborhood, settling on Downey’s Pub as the anchor of his story. In fairness, Smith thought, how could Tommy have known that Downey’s had had its liquor license pulled during the month of September 2006? But these distinctions would be lost on Carlo, in his distracted, even panicked state. Tommy would endure his father’s wrath.

  “Jake, stay with your sister,” Carlo said. Jake was the outcast in many senses. He hadn’t joined the family business. He’d done quite well in real estate development and often partnered with his family’s construction company, but he’d largely kept his distance. He was different. He was his mother’s child. He hadn’t been involved in any of the seamier tactics necessary to run a construction company relying on public-works contracts, nor had he been involved in the most recent family project, other than vouching for Tommy.

  Smith followed Carlo, moving gingerly, into Carlo’s office. Smith closed the door behind him. Tommy was already seated, his leg crossed, his foot wagging nervously. Smith, as was his usual practice with Carlo, got right to the matter of delivering the bad news. Carlo liked hearing bad news like he wanted to remove a bandage, as quickly as possible.

  “Unbelievable,” Carlo said, shaking his head slowly. It was more unnerving to witness a calm reaction from Carlo than to watch one of his patented eruptions. “This lawyer is good?”

  It was a question he’d asked before, but he was certainly entitled to the comfort of repetition. “That seems to be the case,” Smith said.

  “Seems like he knows what he’s doing,” said Tommy cautiously, still reticent over his screw-up.

  “He believes that his brother will die if he doesn’t deliver?”

  “Yes,” Smith said.

  Carlo poised his hands with a slight tremble, owing to his advancing age, perhaps, but Smith thought otherwise. “I don’t—I don’t know what to do. I don’t.”

  Smith had never heard anything of the kind from Carlo. Carlo hadn’t always made the right call, but decisiveness had never been a problem.

  “What about Jimmy DePrizio’s boy?” Carlo asked.

  “Denny?”

  “Right. Denny got any bright ideas?”

  “Not recently.” Smith shrugged. “I’ll check in with him. He’s supposed to be keeping an eye on Kolarich.”

  Carlo nodded, then sunk into a thought. “What if we kill the brother?” he asked. “Tell the lawyer he’s next, if he doesn’t deliver?”

  Smith inclined his head. “I don’t know, Boss. Jason Kolarich is hard to predict. But I think it wouldn’t help.”

  “You think.” Carlo focused on Smith. “How we doin’ so far, on what you think?”

  Smith didn’t answer. There was no winning this argument. Carlo ran his hands over his bare forehead. He was showing his age, for the first time, his movements more tentative, the tremble in his hands.

  “Maybe—maybe this is comeback,” Carlo said. “For past wrongs.” He dismissed the two men with a wave.

  Smith and Tommy left the office. I don’t know what to do, Carlo had said. But Smith thought otherwise. He thought that Carlo was beginning to warm to a decision that would affect all of them.

  54

  HE WENT to the construction site, then to St. Agnes Hospital to visit someone, then to his father Carlo’s home,” said Joel Lightner.

  I was driving, talking to Joel with my earpiece. I was done making phone calls to the eyewitnesses placing Sammy Cutler at the scene of the crime. I was going to make a personal visit.

  “Why so suspicious of this guy, Jason? Wasn’t he your witness?”

  I probably should have figured on Tommy Butcher earlier on. A guy shows up a year after a murder and remembers something? I guess I wanted his testimony to be true so badly that I let myself believe the unbelievable.

  “Smith knew all kinds of detail about the hearing involving Butcher’s testimony,” I explained. “But the county Web site didn’t provide any details. And the guy Smith put up—Sanders—didn’t know about it at all. So the only way Smith could have known was from Butcher himself. That, and his obvious lie about being at that bar on the night of the murder.”

  “You think he’s the killer?”

  “My gut would be no, though I don’t know what a child killer looks like. But I’m going to find out.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “Powers of persuasion, Mr. Lightner. Keep an eye on Mr. Butcher, would you?”

  “I will. Hey, what’s cooking with Jimmy Stewart?”

  “That’s Jim, my friend. It’s going fine, I think. Just trying to rattle the cage.”

  “Jimmy’s good for that,” said Joel. “I’ll say that much.”

  “ KOLARICH ISN’T TALKING to me.” Denny DePrizio ripped a piece of bread from the loaf and dipped it into a plate of olive oil.

  “Then talk to him,” Smith said. “Make sure his priorities are straight.”

  DePrizio smirked. “He’s got you by the balls, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s funny to you,” Smith said, as he saw a number of men in suits approaching their table. The l
eader of the four-man group was short and wide, with tightly cropped hair.

  DePrizio looked up. The color drained from his face. Smith noticed that the front man, in fact all of the men, were wearing police shields on their belts.

  DePrizio froze for a moment, then recovered, grabbing the bread again and focusing on the plate of olive oil. “Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Jimmy Stewart, king of the rats.”

  “Sorry to interrupt your lunch, Detective,” said Stewart.

  “And what can I do for the men of Internal Affairs on this fine day?”

  “Take a ride with us.”

  DePrizio, in a flash of anger, threw down the chunk of bread. “Now, why would I do that, Lieutenant?”

  Stewart looked over at Smith, debating whether to engage. “Not here,” he said.

  “Here.” DePrizio wiped his hands on his napkin.

  Stewart waited, then nodded. “Okay. You’ll want to help explain how a guy named Peter Kolarich got dropped from a multiple-count narcotics and weapons beef only a few days after his arrest.”

  “Kolarich. Kolarich.” DePrizio was struggling to keep the brave front. “They blur together, Jimmy.”

  “Let me see if I can help you out, Denny. This was the one where your CI had a sudden change of heart.”

  “It happens.” DePrizio’s level of enjoyment was quickly evaporating.

  “Does it usually happen after someone delivers you a briefcase with ten thousand dollars in it? That usually happen, Denny?”

  DePrizio didn’t move. He didn’t speak.

  “How about we have a look in the trunk of your car, Denny? You think we’ll find a briefcase like that? The one we have you on videotape receiving from Jason Kolarich at that coffee shop?”

  DePrizio worked his jaw, trying to find words. “I want my delegate,” he said.

  “No problem, Denny. Not a problem at all,” said Stewart. “But let’s take a ride. We don’t—we don’t need a scene in front of this lunch crowd.”