Line of Vision

by David Ellis

I go back downstairs to the closet by the front door. I leaf through the coats until I find the leather jacket I had noticed before. It’s in the back part of the closet, by the lighter-weight coats. It’s not a coat he’s wearing this time of the year. I grab the zipper of the jacket and hold it up. From the zipper dangles a copper triangle with the name of the manufacturer, Drifters, enscribed on it. I’ve heard the name, seen the commercials: emaciated, brooding models, hair in their faces. Très chic, Mr. Sprovieri.

  I fish in the outer pockets of the jacket, unable to contain the voyeuristic thrill of going through his things. Stick of gum, a couple of stray mints covered with lint, about thirty-five cents in coins, and a couple pieces of crunched-up paper. I unravel the first piece. It’s a receipt from his ATM, showing in faded green print that he withdrew a hundred dollars from his checking account on September 11. I make out part of his account number, too. This is much better.

  My next trip is to the basement. I unlock the door and take the stairs, my feet loud on the wood. It looks like the basement in the house I grew up in, in a time when most people didn’t furnish them with entertainment centers and exercise equipment. Concrete floor, dusty old couches, workbench with a power saw. To the right of the stairs is a weight set, a few barbells and a bench, an old brown couch with some punctures in the fabric, an electronic dartboard with only two darts stuck in it. To the left is a pool table and an old dusty mirror leaning against the wall.

  I walk along the concrete floor to the back part of the basement. Near the corner, along the wall, is an oak cabinet. Next to it sits a short, wide wooden chest.

  We had an antique chest in the basement of the house I grew up in, kind of like this one. A creaky old thing that my parents filled with childhood souvenirs. I remember when we moved across town when I was in high school, and my mother followed after the movers shouting orders, making sure nothing happened to her precious chest.

  I open the chest with a cloud of dust but no creaking sound. As I look inside, I can’t help but smile. It’s filled with high school yearbooks, a cap and gown from some graduation, some faded notebooks from “chemistry” and “trig II.” And a couple of scrapbooks. Before I leave I will look up his picture in his yearbook, will read the puff pieces his buddies and girlfriends scribbled in the blank pages. Hope we keep in touch. It was great getting to know you. Stay cool. Maybe I’ll add a little note myself. Something like, I saw you.

  53

  “THANKS FOR COMING OUT HERE,” I SAY TO PAUL and Mandy, as we sit in my living room. “Your offices are great, but for a guy in my shoes, they’re rather oppressive.”

  “It’s a nice break for us, too,” Paul assures me. He’s wearing a colorful sweater and dark blue corduroys. My living room has three pieces of white cloth furniture that form a horseshoe around a glass table. Paul and Mandy take the two love seats across from each other; I sit on the couch, Paul to the left, Mandy to my right. As I look from one to the other, I can’t shake the feeling that this is not unlike an interrogation.

  “We might as well get down to it,” Paul says. He’s probably got tennis with the mayor in an hour.

  “Fire away,” I say.

  “Okay. First. Where were you on November eighteenth, in the late evening?”

  “I was at work. The whole night.” I’ve already told Paul this, and we’ve already gone over the botched alibi more than once. But we haven’t gone into painful detail, because it wasn’t so important if I admitted to the killing. Now it’s pretty damn relevant. Paul wants to go over this again to verify we’re on the same page.

  “How late did you stay?” He knows this, too, at least what the sign-out sheet said.

  “About three-twenty in the morning. I was working on a deal, we were hoping to close it the next day.”

  “Can anyone verify you were there?”

  “Well, obviously, I signed out when I left the building.” I think of the security lady, surprised to see me coming into the building from the back elevator, some time after three in the morning. Her explanation of why she was so surprised, I recall now so vividly that it makes my heart skip a beat: I was a little confused, that’s all. You came in the south entrance and walked all the way around to the parking elevator.

  But Roger Ogren has already talked to her, as has Cummings. She said, miraculously, that she didn’t remember me that night. She checks the sign-ins, she assured both of them, and there’s no way someone could have fudged the time sheet to make it look like they had been working all night.

  “You put the time down, along with your name,” Paul says.

  “Yeah. I would have signed out at some time around three-twenty.”

  “And no sign-in.”

  “It’s just like your guys’ building. You only sign in if you arrive after seven. People who’ve been working all day only put down the time they leave.”

  “So the fact there is no sign-in, only a sign-out, means you didn’t enter the building after seven P.M.”

  “Correct.”

  “So unless you pulled one over on the security guard—which she assures us you did not—that means you must’ve been in the building until three-twenty in the morning.”

  “Yes. Well”—and here we have carefully covered the mysterious entry by the McHenry Stern employee at three-ten—“right before I left for the night, I ran down the street to the all-night convenience store for some coffee. They have some flavored stuff that’s much better than the swill in our vending machines.”

  “But you didn’t actually go to the store,” Paul says. Paul sent an investigator down to the store, and he noticed security cameras inside. Cameras that would have recorded me that night, had I gone in. Or not recorded me, had I not.

  “No,” I say. “As I was walking outside, I just decided that enough was enough. If I didn’t get some sleep before the presentation, I’d look like hell warmed over. So I turned around and went back to the building. I went upstairs, packed up, and left for the night.”

  “At three-thirty.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You didn’t sign out when you made the coffee run.”

  “No. If you’re coming right back, they don’t make you.”

  Take that, Roger Ogren. My tracks are covered. Physical evidence that I was working all night, objective proof on a piece of paper. Paul and Mandy, of course, understand this better than I, and we share a quiet moment of celebration, Mandy perhaps a little less enthused than the men.

  Okay. Enough celebrating. We all know there are some holes.

  “I got a call from Nate Hornsby that night, too. A friend of mine. Works in the foundation with me.”

  I thought you still might be at work, he’d said on my office voice mail that night, the message I heard the next morning. I just tried to reach you at home, but you weren’t around.

  “He called because a speaker we’d signed up for a foundation luncheon canceled.”

  “What time was this call?” Paul asks.

  “Oh,” I say, letting my eyes casually drift up to the ceiling, then back down at Paul, “sometime around nine-thirty.”

  That one silences the room. I have just given the approximate time of the murder.

  “Nate will verify this?” Paul asks carefully.

  I scratch my face and sigh. Paul’s face drops a little with my hesitation. Don’t go south on me now, he’s thinking.

  “As I sit here now,” I say, “I don’t quite recall whether we spoke, or whether he left me a message on my voice mail.”

  Paul looks at Mandy, then at the floor. Just for a second, they’re thinking, just for a second you had us thinking maybe you really are innocent. It’s an awkward moment, my attorneys not wanting to know whether my memory is faulty or just convenient. But having a pretty good idea that it’s the latter. Paul reaches to the table for the glass of water I served him.

  Mandy finally chimes in. “The phone records will demonstrate that the call was made. But all they’ll record is the connection, and the length of the p
hone call. The records can’t tell us whether a human or a machine answered.”

  “If your voice mail picked up,” Paul says, setting the glass back on the coaster, “it would take several seconds to play out your greeting, then who knows how long for him to leave a message.”

  “Was it a long message?” Mandy asks, revealing her spin on what happened. I look at her, and she quickly recovers. “I mean, did he say a lot—”

  “I know what you mean,” I say. “No. He had very little to say. The speaker canceled, let’s talk about it tomorrow, that’s about it.”

  “You were busy at the time,” Paul says. “You didn’t have time to talk.”

  “Right.”

  “So if you two did talk person to person, it would have been a short conversation.”

  “A minute or two, tops. From a phone record, it would probably be the same length of time as if he had left a message on the voice mail.”

  Paul actually smiles when I say this. There is no conflict for him in this. “Anyone else who could verify that you were working all night?”

  “My secretary, Debra Glatz, should remember I was working late. In fact, I think I left her a voice mail before I left that night.” I hope Deb will also remember the state of my office when she saw me the next morning, the empty food wrappers, the stale coffee. “I was getting a cold that next day, and I had hardly slept, and Deb told me that I should just go home. I told her I couldn’t, with the meeting and all.”

  Paul’s eyes narrow. “The message you left her is good. The part about you having a cold and not getting any sleep—well, as you can imagine, that could cut both ways.”

  The reason I didn’t sleep, Paul is saying, and the reason I caught a cold, could be that I was busy lurking outside certain houses and murdering certain abusive doctors.

  “What about anyone else at the office?” Paul asks. “Maybe other people stayed late—not nearly as late as you, of course—but maybe they saw you there.”

  “No one I can remember.”

  “I wonder if it would be worthwhile to interview your coworkers.” Paul is looking for help from me here. He doesn’t want to ask around, only to find that no one saw me there that night.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” I say simply. Mandy scribbles something down on her pad. He did it! He’s guilty!!

  Then I remember Frank. “The partner I worked with on the project probably knew I was working late. Frank Tiller. He can’t verify that I was there, but he can say that it was a big project, and it meant a lot to me.”

  Mandy scribbles that down in the notebook. “Are you guys close?” she asks.

  “He’s probably my best friend at the firm.”

  “What about Nate Hornsby?”

  “Also a good friend.”

  “And your secretary?”

  “We had a good relationship.”

  “You would expect all of these people to be cooperative with us?”

  “I would think so.” I haven’t talked to any of them since my arrest. “So we’re happy?”

  Paul leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Alibis are difficult things,” he says to me, and somehow I sense that this is the beginning of a long speech. “You really stick your neck out when you file a notice of alibi. Technically, the state still has the burden of proving you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn’t change, technically. But in reality, when the defense says, ‘He was at work,’ it will become the defense’s burden to prove this to the jury. In other words, you can forget about all the other deficiencies in the state’s proof. You can forget about their inability to place you at the Reinardts’ home. Forget about their weakness on motive. Forget about any other suspects we might suggest. If you tell the jury you were at your office, and they don’t believe you, you will be convicted.”

  I examine my fingernails. “And you’re worried we won’t be able to prove I was at the office.”

  “Yes I am, frankly. And I’ll tell you this. As soon as we file a notice of alibi, Roger Ogren will commit nearly all of his resources to disproving it. More than he already has.”

  My throat suddenly raw, I reach for my glass of water. My hand shakes as I bring it to my lips.

  We sit quietly, each lost in his thoughts about the alibi. Me, thinking about how smart I felt when I left the building that night, after fudging the sign-out sheet. My attorneys, probably thinking that they have met yet another criminal defendant who has outsmarted himself.

  54

  RANDOLPH J. LARAMIE WAS AN ARCHITECT WHO came to this area in the late 1800s. He was credited with raising the community from a farm town to a commercial district. He reportedly built as many as a dozen factories after settling here. Later, he was elected mayor of Mount Rayford, then the largest town in the county.

  The first building Laramie designed in Mount Rayford was a two-story brick school. Mr. Laramie purchased thirty acres of land to support it. By the 1960s, the school had a full-length football field and several baseball diamonds in its boundaries. The diamonds were authentic baseball fields, with wood fences spanning the outfield and sand covering the pitcher’s mound, the baselines, and home plate. Little League played games there all summer long. Baseball had always been my best sport, and I played dozens of games on Laramie fields.

  The greatest memory from my childhood came on one of those fields. For only the second time in the entire season of the nine-year-old Palomino baseball league, I hit a ball over the fence. Only this time it came in the bottom of the seventh inning—the last inning in that league—with a man on, in the championship game.

  I didn’t even realize I had hit a home run until the first-base coach, Mr. Ritter, yelled the news to me as I ran around first base. I looked up and saw the left fielder standing still, looking over the fence. I stared at him in disbelief, until I saw the pitcher, Joey Farley, throw his glove on the ground and walk off the mound.

  I couldn’t suppress the smile as I rounded second and turned toward my teammates, who were jumping up and down with their hands in the air. My dad was off the bleachers and grabbing the chain-link fence, shouting my name. As I reached third, one of the fathers, who was coaching third base, held out his hand for me to slap, shouting, “Atta way, Marty!” as my foot touched third base. My teammates joined me as I ran the final ninety feet to home. I jumped into the air and stomped on home plate with both feet. I felt my legs go out from under me as I was lifted into the air. Mr. Durkin, our other coach, shouted “MVP!” at me. And I tried to rear my head back, to see my dad again.

  Landing on that white rubber pentagon was the single greatest memory from those years. So it only seemed fitting that this same site should memorialize my newest triumph: the burial of Dr. Derrick Reinardt.

  The sand was hard on Thursday, November 18. Cold and very hard. It took me over half an hour to dig the ditch, scooping shovels full of heavy sand and carrying it a few feet away. The last couple of feet became soil, which was easier to lift. In the end, I looked into a four-foot hole right behind home plate.

  With each shovelful, I peered around my quiet surroundings. I was on one end of a very open field, enough to be home to three baseball diamonds. The nearest street was more than a hundred yards away, and despite a still-strong wind, I would hear a car coming before anyone would have a chance to see me. It happened two or three times, in fact, while I was working. I heard the engine coming long before it came into view, and I fell flat to the ground. The cars always drove right along the stretch of road and out of my view. Were the passengers to look over at the fields, at most they’d see a mound of dirt. The nearest light was by the school, a good stone’s throw away.

  Behind the field I was on were trees and bushes, my best friends. If anyone did come around, I’d just pick up the shovel and run through the bushes to my car, parked less than a block away on the street. Not a foolproof plan, but about as good as I could do under the circumstances.

  The hole sufficiently deep, I carried my shovel over to the car. I opened the trunk
quietly. Dr. Reinardt was wrapped in two thick red-and-black flannel blankets. I caught a glimpse of his contorted face but looked away. I lifted the body out of the trunk and carried it over to the bushes by the baseball field. I returned to the car to get the clear plastic paint drop cloths from the car. I’d bought them months ago, with the ambition of repainting my kitchen.

  First I laid out the plastic drop cloth like a picnic blanket. Then I rolled the doctor out of the blanket onto the plastic and removed my coat from the body. Then I rolled him over and over along the plastic, wrapping it around him as I went. I repeated the process with a second drop cloth. Plastic was no substitute for a coffin, but combined with the cold temperatures this time of year, I hoped the stench would be stifled for some time.

  The hole was not quite long enough for Dr. Reinardt’s body, but what did he care about comfort? I forced him down into the hole, pushing on his chest with my foot. His head stuck up awkwardly, his knees lifted up as well. Something made me want to take one long last look at him, but it was too dark. And I still had the mounds of sand to fill in. Besides, Doc, I hate good-byes.

  Yes, I congratulate myself as I cruise along the highway, the choice of Laramie Field was a good one. A random baseball field in a suburb thirty miles outside of the city. There will be little reason to connect me to it. I didn’t go to Laramie Elementary; I went to Washington School in Becker Heights.

  And the likelihood of anyone discovering the body, at least for a while, is slight. Nobody is playing on those fields in March.

  MOUNT RAYFORD NEXT EXIT

  I pick a Wednesday night for this last visit to Dr. Reinardt’s grave. Wednesday, March 2. Less than two weeks until my trial. My attorneys have hit full stride now, poring over witness lists, drafting pretrial motions, and preparing testimony. They filed a motion to dismiss the charges against me because there is no evidence that a murder was committed—because there’s no dead body. The judge ruled against us because of my confession; he added he would not reward a criminal by allowing him to profit from his ability to hide a dead body well.