by David Ellis
I slow my pace to a walk now, letting the light breeze touch my face. I move slowly, savoring this moment, one of the last such ones I may have. The hill is just as steep as it ever was, but with all the running I’ve been doing, it is a much easier climb than it was on November 18, even with my shoes slipping on the grass. It’s funny, my physical condition is the one thing in my life that has improved since I last stood here.
I park myself at the oak tree. I undo the top button of my shirt and pull down on my tie. And I watch the house.
The lights are on upstairs. It’s dark downstairs, with the exception of the patio light, whose light does not reach the spot where I’m standing. The blind is pulled in the bedroom window. There is nothing to see. No silhouettes pass.
After a time, I slide down the oak tree and sit on the damp grass. I pull out a blade of grass and put it in my teeth, just staring up at the sky. Staring up at her, assuming she’s up there. Knowing her, she managed to charm her way into the pearly gates. A flirtatious wink to St. Peter and all sins were forgiven. Come on in, Adrian. We saved you a good seat.
I never confronted her. Never told anyone, not Dad, not Jamie. Things just kept on, from that first time when I was eight. There was never a dramatic break, never a single defining moment in our relationship. It’s probably because I was too young when it happened, didn’t understand exactly what it was that I had seen, just knew that whatever it was, it was bad. I suppose if I looked back, there was a rift between us from that moment on, but if there was, it was subtle. It’s funny, my first feelings of betrayal didn’t involve my father at all. It was just me. She had betrayed me! But I was far too young to be independent from my mother, and she played the role of the nurturing mommy with great skill. So on we went for a good two years, me having some idea that my mom had done something bad, but not confronting her or myself about it; Adrian acting like nothing had happened.
But like with any other boys, it wasn’t more than a couple of years later that I was sneaking into R-rated movies and catching the occasional porno supplied by a friend with an older brother. It was during one of those movies that the light turned on. Those films weren’t exactly plot-intensive, but this one involved a woman who was cheating on her husband. There they were, all legs and thrusts, screwing away in the bedroom, and suddenly the woman was Adrian and the man was the same nameless, faceless man from that day. I knew then what my mommy had done to my daddy.
Still, I let it go. I pretended. It didn’t happen. It was an isolated incident. When I was fifteen, I had my first girlfriend. I felt for the first time what it meant to have any sort of a romantic bond with someone. It was then that the anger began to swell. And I started watching my mother. I picked up on trends. She left, two mornings a week even before I did, to run “errands.” And then I followed her and saw them. He was a real estate agent who worked on the PTA with Adrian. Early mornings were the best times, I guess.
I brush a hair off my face. Still no movement upstairs. I can’t see her. Just the shade, colored yellow from the inside light.
That was my day, I guess, seeing Adrian and that guy. The loss of innocence. Doesn’t everyone have a day like that, that one identifiable moment or shot of dread, where a child realizes for the first time that the world can be bad, where the roof is ripped off the shelter, and he understands that he’ll need a protective coating for the rest of his life? Whether it’s your parents divorcing, your mom getting cancer, the first time someone calls you “nigger,” your dad losing his job. Maybe it’s a testament to my upbringing that this moment didn’t hit me until age eight. But this is the question I have never understood: Why can’t I get past it?
Movement upstairs, I think, a brief silhouette past the shade. I wait for another pass. Just as I’d been waiting for twenty-some years. She was my cure. Rachel, this beautiful, sexy, confident creature, got me past it. I think of the good old days, standing out here, watching her. How very simple it was. The jolt to my heart, that burst of adrenaline I felt, when that curtain slid open on the glass door. That indescribable feeling of being off balance, panicked, excited, alive!
“I won’t betray you.” I will keep my commitment to you. I will prove to you, to my sister Jamie, to Adrian, to myself, that I can do it. No matter what happens. Because if they take everything else away from me, they can’t take that.
I take a deep breath and rip a handful of grass out of the lawn. I notice a flicker out of the corner of my eye. I look back up at the bedroom window. The room is dark now.
There’s something else. Something unresolved. My eyes move back above the house, to the sky. Then they close.
“Help me understand,” I whisper absently.
71
I WALK INTO THE COURTROOM AT TWO MINUTES TO nine. Paul and Mandy turn at the sound of the doors opening. The judge is already seated on the bench. The jury box is empty. I mumble an apology to my lawyers as I take my seat between them.
“Perhaps now that Mr. Kalish has graced us with his presence,” Judge Mack says, “we can begin.”
I make a point of looking at the clock on the side wall and making a wrinkled face, what’s-the-big-deal. The minute hand is two minutes shy of the hour. Then I look at the judge, who is staring down at me.
“Is there something you wanted to say to me, Mr. Kalish?” says Judge Mack.
Yeah, there is. The trial starts at nine. I’m on time. Go fuck yourself.
I look at the floor. “Nope,” I say in a flat voice, hoping to convey utter disinterest.
The jury files in a moment later. Mandy pushes a notepad in front of me. “Forget about last night,” it reads. “Don’t cop an attitude in front of the jury!!”
I turn my head toward her without making eye contact. I move the notepad back in front of her and straighten out a hand for reassurance.
Roger Ogren walks to the lectern and calls Janet Brewer, the cop who spied on me at the Christmas party. I look over at Gretchen Flaherty. She performed well yesterday with Debra. And she, more than anybody, knows it. Today she holds her head a little higher, her back a little straighter. She is on her way up in her career, a promising young trial lawyer looking to use me as a notch, her first big one.
I recognize Janet Brewer as she passes the defense table on the way to the witness stand. I remember her from the foundation Christmas party. The short, gray-haired woman with her hair in a bun. I caught her eyeballing me as I made my way through the crowd aimlessly, waiting for Rachel to be alone. She looked away when I saw her.
Her hair is the same way today, pulled back severely. Her face is taut, her expression formal. She does not look like a pleasant person. Not that I expected us to become tennis partners.
“I was assigned to the Reinardt case,” she tells us. “My assignment was to attend the Christmas party thrown by the Reinardt Family Children’s Foundation. It was our understanding that Mrs. Reinardt was going to be present.”
“And what was your purpose for being at the party?”
“To look for anything suspicious. The case was still in its preliminary stages, and we thought it was possible that Mrs. Reinardt was involved in her husband’s disappearance. And even if she wasn’t, we thought perhaps the person who broke in to the house was someone at the foundation. Someone who might be at the party.”
“Okay. Where was this party?”
“At the Winston Hotel, downtown.”
“What day was it held?”
“Friday, December third. In the evening.”
“What time did you arrive, Officer?”
“About seven o’clock.”
“What did you do?”
“I mingled. I made up some name and said I had just joined the foundation. I just sort of blended in.”
“What time did Mrs. Reinardt arrive?”
“About seven-thirty.”
“And did there come a time that evening that the defendant showed up?”
“Yes. The defendant arrived right at nine-thirty.”
“
Did you have occasion to observe him?”
See, this is why I find Ogren so unappealing. He uses phrases like “have occasion to” and “subsequent,” like this is how lawyers are supposed to talk. Did she have occasion to see me? This is where Paul Riley shows his superiority in the courtroom. He speaks the jury’s language. Did you see the defendant? Ogren is under the mistaken notion that he appears more intelligent and authoritative when he uses lawyer-speak, when really he just sounds overbearing and self-absorbed. The things people miss about themselves.
“Yes,” the detective answers.
“Please describe what you observed.”
Officer Brewer bows her head a moment and clears her throat, then looks up. She’s got this testimony down pat. Probably said it into the mirror a hundred times.
“The defendant spoke with a couple of people for a few minutes. He turned his head often to look toward the door. I looked over at the door. I saw Mrs. Reinardt.”
“She was standing near the door?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“No. She was talking to two people.”
“Go on.”
“The defendant went to the bar and ordered a drink. Then he spoke with another man at the bar. Then that person left, leaving the defendant alone at the bar. He just stared toward the door. Again, I followed his stare to Mrs. Reinardt.
“Then he had another drink, and then another. One person approached him and tried to make conversation. I wasn’t close enough to hear what was said, but the defendant ignored this person for the most part. He never once looked at that person. He kept looking toward the door. Toward Mrs. Reinardt.”
“What happened next?”
“The defendant then started walking around the room, cutting through people. He kept turning and looking toward the door. He walked through a bunch of people, not saying anything to anybody. Then a woman stopped him, and they had a brief conversation. But in the middle of that conversation, the defendant walked away from her, toward the door. I looked over at Mrs. Reinardt, and the two people she was talking to were gone. Now there was only a single woman talking to her.”
“What did you see the defendant do subsequent to his conversation with this woman?”
“He walked up to Mrs. Reinardt. After a moment or two, the other woman left, leaving the defendant and Mrs. Reinardt alone.”
“Describe what happened next.”
“They talked. The defendant stood very close to Mrs. Reinardt. Closer than she wanted, it looked like.”
“Objection,” Mandy says. “There’s no foundation for that remark. The witness has no idea what other people wanted or didn’t want.” Mandy has the same way of objecting as Paul, making a point to the jury at the same time she makes her case to the judge.
“Sustained.”
Brewer doesn’t even wait for another question. “Well, as he leaned in toward her, she sort of leaned back.”
“She leaned away from him?”
“Yes.”
Bullshit.
“Please continue.”
“They talked for about two minutes. The defendant put his hand on her arm as he talked. I believe Mrs. Reinardt started to cry. Then the defendant got even closer to her, and he said one last thing to her. Then he walked out of the party and never returned.”
“He left the party?”
“Yes.”
“What time was that?”
“Nine-fifty-five.”
“But you said he arrived at nine-thirty.”
“Yes, he did. He left the party only twenty-five minutes after arriving. Right after he finally got to talk to Mrs. Reinardt.”
“Thank you, Officer Brewer. No more questions, Your Honor.”
Mandy gets out of her chair slowly and walks halfway between the defense table and the witness stand, her hands clasped behind her back. “Officer Brewer, you don’t have any idea whether Marty Kalish was feeling sick the night of the Christmas party, do you?”
“Sick? He had three glasses of scotch.”
“Which, if you aren’t feeling well, is going to make you feel even worse.”
“I don’t know if he was feeling sick or not.”
“You have no idea.”
“That’s right.”
“So it is entirely possible that Marty showed up at the party, made a go of it, and decided that he just didn’t feel well enough to stay.”
“He didn’t look like he had the flu.”
“Oh, really? Did you take his temperature?”
“Of course not.”
“As a matter of fact, you never got closer than, say, fifteen or twenty feet from Marty, isn’t that right?”
“Something like that.”
“So you were never close enough to Marty to have any clue whether he felt sick.”
“Obviously, I can’t say for certain whether he was sick or not. Most people with the flu don’t throw down three glasses of scotch in the space of twenty minutes.”
“I never said the flu. You did.”
“Well, whatever.”
“So I repeat. Isn’t it possible that Marty went to the party, tried to make a go of it, then decided that he just wasn’t up to it and left?”
The officer seems more amused by this than anything. “That is possible, yes.”
Mandy nods and pauses. “You thought it was unusual that Marty went over to talk to Mrs. Reinardt?”
Brewer makes a face. “Well, he seemed pretty interested in speaking with her. He was looking over at her the whole time he was there.”
“What I’m asking is, what was so unusual about the fact that Marty went over to talk to her? I mean, what was so suspicious about that?”
This is a softball for Officer Brewer, and Mandy is hoping she’ll take a big swing of the bat. Again, there is the Miranda issue for my appeal, should I be convicted. If Brewer says I was acting strangely—which obviously would have gotten back to Cummings—then that makes me all the more of a suspect when Cummings interrogated me the next day. It’s a pretty good weapon we’ve had against the testifying cops in this case, preventing them from exaggerating my actions. Although every time I’ve heard my attorneys flirt with the issue, I’ve felt a shot to the gut. It’s a good tactic, I realize, but also an acknowledgment that my attorneys are preparing for a guilty verdict.
Officer Brewer has done a pretty good job describing my behavior in her direct testimony, limiting herself to what I did, not how I seemed. Mandy is giving her another chance to step off the tightrope.
“The fact that he talked to Mrs. Reinardt?” she says. “I don’t know. By itself, I suppose there was nothing unusual about that. Depending on what he said.”
“You didn’t hear what he said, did you?”
“I didn’t, no. You’d have to ask Mrs. Reinardt.”
Something tells me they did ask Rachel. I’m not looking forward to the answer.
“He wasn’t acting strangely, was he?” says Mandy.
“I would say he seemed pretty interested in talking to Mrs. Reinardt.”
“You considered that strange?”
“No.”
“So he wasn’t acting strangely?”
“I don’t know if that’s strange or not. He was interested in talking to her, is all.”
“In fact,” Mandy says, “you observed many people from the foundation approach Mrs. Reinardt that night.” Mandy realizes she’s not getting anywhere with her plan. Brewer is not going to comment on my demeanor, whether I was suspicious or strange. So Mandy is going to take that and use it to show I wasn’t behaving suspiciously.
“Several people approached her, yes.”
“Here was a woman whose husband had disappeared a few weeks earlier.”
“That’s right.”
“And people were offering her comfort and support.”
“I don’t know what they were offering her.”
“Because you weren’t close enough to hear.”
“That’s right.”
>
“So, Officer Brewer, isn’t it possible that Marty simply showed up at the party to be a friend for Mrs. Reinardt, despite the fact that he was feeling sick?”
“Like I said, I don’t know.”
“So it’s possible.”
“How would I know?”
“You don’t know.”
“That’s right.”
“And it’s possible that Marty waited his turn to talk to her, so he could show her his support, and then he left to go home.”
“That’s possible.”
“Thank you.”
Mandy walks over to our table and takes her seat. Gretchen Flaherty stands and says she has no redirect.
72
VICTOR SILAS LOOKS AT THE FLOOR AS HE WALKS past the defense table. He shifts around in the seat on the witness stand, adjusts the microphone, then his glasses, then his tie. He doesn’t look in my direction.
Vic always seemed kind of stiff, so he’s in typical form today. But there’s an edge to his voice as he speaks, and he is much quieter than usual. He licks his lips and fools with his glasses in between nearly every question.
“I work in the outreach projects,” he says.
Roger Ogren opens a hand. “Can you explain that?”
“The whole reason we have the foundation is to help disadvantaged children. Some of it is just providing money to shelters and orphanages. But we also sponsor outings, athletic leagues, tutoring. The hands-on work.”
