The Wrong Man

by John Katzenbach

  Nameless was at the bottom of the stairs wagging with mixed enthusiasm. He recognized the running outfit and knew that he was rarely included now. At one time he would instantly have been at her side, circling with enthusiasm, but now he was more than willing to escort her just as far as the door and then settle down and wait, which, she thought, seemed to be how Nameless interpreted his dog responsibilities.

  Hope had paused to rub his head when the phone rang.

  What she wanted, in that second, was to get away from all the troubles that were coursing within her, if only temporarily. She guessed the call would be Sally, maybe saying she was going to be late. She never seemed to call anymore to say she would be early. Hope didn’t want to hear this, and her first instinct was to ignore the ringing.

  The phone rang again.

  She started toward the door, pulling it open, but stopped, turned, and took a dozen quick strides into the kitchen and seized the phone.

  “Hello,” she said briskly. No-nonsense.

  “Hope?”

  And in that second, Hope not only heard Ashley’s voice, but a world of trouble behind it.

  “Hello, Killer,” she said, using a joke nickname that only the two of them knew about. “Something wrong?” She put a liveliness in her voice that belied not only her own situation, but the emptiness that she suddenly felt in her stomach.

  “Oh, Hope,” Ashley said, and Hope could hear the vacant echo of tears in her voice. “I think I have a problem.”

  Sally was listening to the local alternative-rock station on the car radio when the late Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” came on, and for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, she felt compelled to pull to the curb, where she listened to the entirety of the song frozen in her seat, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel with the beat.

  As the music flooded her small sedan, she held her hands up in front of her.

  The veins on the backs were standing out, blue, like the interstates on a travel map. Her fingers were tight, maybe a little arthritic. She rubbed them together, trying to regain some of the suppleness they once held. Sally thought that when she was younger, much about her had been beautiful: her skin, her eyes, the curve of her body. But she had been proudest of her hands, which seemed to her to hold notes within them. She had played the cello growing up and had considered auditioning for Juilliard or Berklee, but at the last moment had decided to pursue a more general education, which had somehow evolved into a husband, a daughter, an affair with another woman, a divorce, a law degree, and her current practice and her current life.

  She no longer played her instrument. She couldn’t make the cello sound as pure and as subtle as she once could, and she preferred not to listen to her mistakes. Sally could not bear to be clumsy.

  As she sat there in the car, the song began to wind down, and Sally caught a glimpse of her eyes in the edge of the rearview mirror and reached up and adjusted it so that she could look at herself. She was just shy of turning fifty, which some thought of as a milestone, but which she inwardly dreaded. She hated the changes in her body, from hot flashes to stiffness in her joints. She hated the wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes. She hated the sag of skin beneath her chin and in her buttocks. Without telling Hope, she had taken a membership at a local health club and pounded away on the treadmills and the elliptical machines as often as she could get away.

  She had taken to reading advertisements for cosmetic surgery and had even considered sneaking off to some fancy health spa, using an ostensible business trip as a cover. She was a little unsure of why she hid these things from her partner, but was smart enough to recognize that that in itself said all she needed to know.

  Sally took a deep breath and turned off the radio.

  For a moment, she thought that her entire youth had been stolen from her. She felt a bitterness on her tongue, as if everything in her life was predictable, established, and absolutely set in stone. Even her relationship, which in some parts of the country would have set people to whispered gossip across backyard fences and would seem exotic and dangerous, in western Massachusetts was about as boringly routine as the inevitable arrival of the seasons. She wasn’t even much of a sexual outlaw.

  Sally gripped the wheel of the car and let out a quick, angry shout. Not quite a scream, more a bellow, as if she were in pain. Then she glanced around rapidly, to make certain that no passing pedestrian had heard her.

  Breathing hard, she put the car in gear.

  What’s next? she asked herself as she pulled back into traffic, aware that once again she was late for dinner. Some disease? She thought to herself that perhaps it would be breast cancer, or osteoporosis or anemia. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be harsher than the uncontrolled anger, frustration, and madness that she felt ricocheting about within her and that she felt helpless to fight.

  “So, the two women were having trouble?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say they were having trouble. But that wouldn’t begin to capture the moment that Michael O’Connell arrived in their lives, and how his mere presence redefined so much that was happening.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “Really? It doesn’t exactly sound like you do.”

  We were seated in a small restaurant, near the front, where she could look through the plate-glass windows out onto the main street of the small college town we lived in. She smiled for an instant and turned back to me.

  “We take a lot for granted, in our nice, safe middle-class lives, don’t we?” she asked. She didn’t wait for my answer, but continued, “Problems sometimes occur not only when we least anticipate them, but at moments when we are least equipped to deal with them.” The edgy decisiveness in her voice seemed out of place on the fine, mostly lazy afternoon.

  “Okay,” I sighed, “so Scott’s life wasn’t exactly perfect, although, on balance, it wasn’t that bad. He had a good job, some prestige, a more than adequate paycheck, which should have compensated at least some for middle-aged loneliness. And Sally and Hope were going through a difficult time, but still, they had resources. Significant resources. And Ashley, despite being well educated and attractive, was in something of a state of flux, as well. That’s more or less the way life is, isn’t it? How does it—”

  She cut me off, lifting one hand like a traffic cop, while the other reached for a glass of iced tea. She drank before replying.

  “You need perspective. Otherwise, the story won’t make sense.”

  Again, I remained silent.

  “Dying,” she said finally, “is such a simple act. But you need to learn that all the moments leading up to it, and all the minutes afterwards, are terribly complicated.”

  11

  The First Response

  Sally was surprised that the front door was wide open.

  Nameless was plopped down by the entrance, not exactly sleeping, not exactly standing guard, but more or less accomplishing both. He picked his head up and thumped his tail at Sally’s arrival, and she reached down and stroked him once behind the ears, which was pretty much the extent of her connection to the dog. She suspected that if Jack the Ripper had walked in, with a dog biscuit in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, Nameless would have locked in on the biscuit.

  She could just hear the final words of a conversation as she set her briefcase down in the small foyer.

  “Yes…yes. Okay, I’ve got it. We’ll call you back later tonight. Don’t worry, everything will be okay…. Yup. Later, then.”

  Sally heard the phone being returned to its cradle, then Hope exhale and add, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  “What was that about?” Sally asked.

  Hope spun about. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “You must have left the door open.”

  Sally eyed the running clothes and added, “Were you heading out? Or just coming back?”

  Hope ignored the questions and Sally’s tone and said, “That was Ashley. She’s really upset. Turns out that she rea
lly has gotten sort of involved with some creep in Boston and she’s starting to get a little scared.”

  Sally hesitated for an instant before asking, “What does sort of involved actually mean?”

  “You should have her explain. But, as best as I understand it, she had a one-night stand with the guy, and now he won’t leave her alone.”

  “Is this the guy who wrote the letter Scott found?”

  “Seems to be. He’s making all sorts of We were made for each other protests, when they don’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy sounds a little out there, but again, you should have Ashley explain it to you. It will seem a lot more, I don’t know, real, maybe, if you hear it from her.”

  “Well, my guess is this is really a mountain being made out of a molehill, but—”

  Hope interrupted, “It didn’t sound that way. I mean, we both know she can be overdramatic, but she sounded genuinely disturbed. I think you should call her back right away. It will probably do her some good to hear from her mother. Reassure her, you know.”

  “Well, has the guy hit her? Or threatened her?”

  “Not exactly. Yes and no. It’s a little hard to say.”

  “What do you mean not exactly?” Sally asked briskly.

  Hope shook her head. “What I mean is that I’m going to kill you is a threat. But We’ll always be together might be the same thing. It’s just hard to tell until you hear the words for yourself.”

  Hope was a little taken aback. Sally was decidedly cool and irritatingly calm about what she was being told. This surprised her.

  “Call Ashley,” she repeated.

  “You’re probably right.” Sally stepped to the telephone.

  Scott tried Ashley on her regular phone, but the line was busy, and for the third time that evening he got the answering machine. He had already tried her cell phone, but that, too, had only produced the sound of her voice breezily requesting the caller to leave a message. He was more than a little bit put off. What, he wondered to himself, is precisely the point of all these modern forms of communication if one simply gets nowhere more efficiently? In the eighteenth century, he thought, when one received a letter carried over distance, it damn well meant something. By being closer, he thought, everyone had gotten much farther away.

  Before his frustration built further, the phone rang. He seized the receiver.

  “Ashley?” he asked rapidly.

  “No, Scott, it’s me, Sally.”

  “Sally. Is something wrong?”

  She hesitated, creating just enough of a dark space in time for his stomach to clench and the world around him to darken.

  “When we last spoke,” Sally said, employing all her lawyer’s sense of equanimity, “you expressed some concern about a letter you found. You may have been justified in your response.”

  Scott paused, wanting to scream at the professional reasonableness in her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Where’s Ashley?”

  “She’s okay. But she might indeed have a problem.”

  Michael O’Connell stopped at a small art-supply store before heading home. His stock of charcoal pencils was down, and he slipped a set into the pocket of his parka. He picked out a medium-sized sketch pad and took it to the counter. A bored young woman who sported an array of facial piercings, and hair streaked with black and red, was sitting behind the cash register, reading a copy of an Anne Rice novel about vampires. She wore a black T-shirt that said FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE on it in large, Gothic-style print. For a brief moment, O’Connell was mad with himself. He should have filled his pockets with many more items, given the lax attention the girl was paying to the comings and goings in the store. He made a mental note to return in a few days as he forked over a couple of worn singles for the pad of paper.

  He knew the clerk would never think to examine the pockets of someone willing to pay for something.

  Misdirection, he thought to himself. He remembered playing football in high school. His favorite plays were always those designed with some element of deception. Make the other team believe one thing when another was actually happening. The screen pass. The double reverse. It was the key to much of his life, and he embraced it at every opportunity. Make people underestimate you. Make them believe one thing was happening when really, something far different was at stake.

  It was, he thought, the game that made it all worthwhile.

  The clerk handed him some change, and he asked, “Who are the West Memphis Three?”

  She looked at him as if the simple act of communicating was somehow physically painful. She sighed, “They’re three kids who were convicted of murder, of killing another kid, but they didn’t do it. They kinda got convicted because of the way they looked, and all the Bible-thumpers down there who didn’t like the way they dressed and talked about Goth stuff and Satan, and now they’re on death row and it’s unfair. HBO did a documentary about them.”

  “They got caught?”

  “It wasn’t right. Just because you’re different doesn’t make you guilty.”

  Michael O’Connell nodded. “Right. It just makes it easier for the cops to look for you. When you’re different, you can’t get away with anything. But if you’re the same, you can do anything you want. Anything.”

  He headed back out into the evening. As he walked down the street, he took a modest inventory of information he’d acquired. There is a small fringe to society, he told himself, where one can travel with relative impunity. Stay away from the chain store with the security guard. Work at the service station where the owner is willing to cut corners and look the other way. Avoid robbing something from a Dairy Mart or 7-Eleven, because those places were robbed all the time and might have an off-duty cop moonlighting with a twelve-gauge hiding behind a two-way mirror. Always do what was unexpected, but only just so, which kept people off balance, but not alert.

  Never rely on others.

  It all came naturally to him, he thought.

  Michael O’Connell trudged up the street to his apartment house, then up the stairs. As usual, the hallway outside his door was filled with the mewlings and meowings of his old neighbor’s cats. As always, she had put bowls of food and water out for the animals. He looked down and several scurried out of his path. They were the smart ones because they recognized a threat, even if they couldn’t quite determine what it was. The others milled about. He knelt down and held out his hand, until one of the least suspicious cats moved close enough for him to scratch it on the head. With a quick and practiced motion, he seized the cat by the scruff of the neck and carried it into his apartment.

  The cat struggled for a moment, trying to twist and scratch, but O’Connell kept it firmly in his grip. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a large ziploc bag. This one would join four others in his freezer. When he reached a half dozen, he would dispose of them in some distant Dumpster. Then start in again. He doubted the old woman’s ability to keep an accurate count of her pets. And, after all, he’d asked her politely once or twice to limit their number. Failing to follow his suggestions, especially when so generously put, was in reality what was killing the cats. He was merely the agent of death.

  Scott listened to his ex-wife and every second grew angrier.

  It wasn’t that his instincts had been ignored, nor that he’d been right all along. It was the orderly tone in her voice that infuriated him. But he decided that arguing with Sally wasn’t going to do any good.

  “So,” she said, “I think, and Ashley does, too, that perhaps the best thing would be for you to go to Boston and maybe bring her home for the weekend, so she can really get a handle on what sort of problem this young man is likely to cause her.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “A little distance usually gives one some perspective,” Sally said.

  “You would know,” Scott dug back. “How’s your perspective?”

  Sally wanted to respond with equal sarcasm, but decided against it.

  “Scott, can you just
go pick Ashley up? I’d go, but…”

  “No, I’ll go. You’ve probably got some court hearing or something that can’t be postponed.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “The drive back will give me a chance to really sound her out, anyway. Then we can come up with a plan or whatever. Or at least some sort of plan that’s a little more comprehensive than merely bringing her home for the weekend. Maybe all that’s called for is for me to go have a talk with this guy.”

  “I think, before we inject ourselves into the problem, we should give Ashley every chance to sort it out herself. Part of growing up, you know.”

  “That’s the sort of totally reasonable and sensible point of view that I truly hate.”

  Sally did not answer. She did not want the conversation to disintegrate any further. And she recognized that Scott had some legitimate claim to being upset. It was the way her mind worked, seeing every word spoken as if it were light reflecting through a prism, with any particular shaft being important. This made her an excellent attorney and upon occasion a difficult person.

  “Maybe I should go tonight,” Scott said.

  “No,” Sally said quickly. “That would have an element of panic in it. Let’s just proceed steadily.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. “Hey,” Scott asked abruptly, “do you have any experience with this sort of thing?”

  What he meant was legal experience, but Sally took it a different way. “No,” she said suddenly. “The only man who ever said he would love me forever was you.”

  There had been a story in the local paper over the past few days that had captured much attention in the valley where I lived. A child, thirteen years old, had been placed in the tenth of a series of foster homes and had died under questionable circumstances. Police and the local district attorney’s office were investigating, as was every ham-fisted news outlet for miles. But the facts of the case seemed murky, so dark and conflicted that the truth might never emerge. The child had died from a single gunshot wound, administered at close range. The foster parents said that the boy had found the father’s handgun and been playing with it when it discharged. Or perhaps he wasn’t playing with it but had committed suicide. Or perhaps the set of brand-new bruises on the child’s arms and torso that the autopsy revealed meant that he’d been beaten or held down while something far more evil had taken place. Or perhaps the gun had been the source of a struggle between child and adult, discharging in an accident. Or, even darker, perhaps it was murder. Murder prompted by rage. Murder prompted by frustration. Murder prompted by desire. Murder prompted by nothing more than the lousy hand that life sometimes deals to those least equipped to bluff their way out of trouble.