The Wrong Man

by John Katzenbach

  Michael O’Connell was sauntering down the sidewalk opposite her.

  She tracked him with her eyes as he paused outside the building, dug in his pocket for his keys, and then, not even glancing in her direction, stepped up and disappeared inside. She waited and then, a few moments later, saw lights flash on in his apartment.

  Hope feared that he would somehow know that she had been there. That she had disrupted something, left something out of place. She put her car in gear and pulled out of the parking spot. Without looking back, she drove to the corner, then turned and continued down a wide street for several blocks, until she saw another spot where she could pull to the side. She slid the car in and thought to herself, What was it? Three minutes? Four? Five? How many seconds existed between her break-in and his return?

  Her stomach clenched, and the nausea of fear finally overcame her. Hope opened the door to her car and was quietly and privately sick, vomiting into the gutter all of Mrs. Abramowicz’s Earl Grey tea.

  Scott got an early start the following morning, rising in his cheap motel room just before dawn and driving in the dreary gray November half-light to a spot just across from the house where Michael O’Connell had grown up. He shut down the car and sat, waiting, feeling the first hints of winter seep into the compartment. It was a sad street, a step above a trailer park, but not much of one. The houses were all low-slung, and all in need of repair. Paint peeled from eaves, gutters had pulled free from rooflines, broken toys, abandoned cars, and dismantled snowmobiles littered more than one front yard. Screen doors flapped in the wind. More than one window had been patched with a sheet of heavy-duty plastic. It seemed a place abandoned by options. It was a place for six-packs, lottery-ticket and motorcycle dreams, tattoos and Saturday-night drunks. The teenagers probably worried about pregnancy and hockey in equal doses, and the older folks were more likely consumed by whether their small pensions would keep them off food stamps. It was one of the least friendly spots Scott had ever seen.

  As at the school the afternoon before, he knew he was completely out of place.

  Scott watched the morning ebb and flow of children heading to school buses and men and women carrying lunch pails heading to work. When things quieted down, he stepped out of the car. He had a roll of $20 bills in his pocket and figured perhaps more than a few would be spent that morning.

  Turning his back on O’Connell’s home, Scott headed to the nearest house, directly across the street.

  He knocked loudly and ignored a dog’s frantic deep-throated barking. After a few seconds, a woman angrily shouted at the dog to quiet down, and the door opened.

  “Yes?” A woman in her late thirties with a cigarette hanging from her lip, dressed in a pink coat with a grocery-store logo on it, answered the door. She struggled to hold a cup of coffee in one hand while grasping the dog’s collar with the other. “Sorry, he’s pretty friendly, really, but just scares the hell out of folks, jumping all over them. My husband keeps saying I need to train him better, but…” She shrugged.

  “It’s okay,” Scott said, speaking through the screen of the exterior door.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I’m with the Massachusetts State probation department,” Scott lied. “We’re just doing a presentencing check on a first-time offender. A Michael O’Connell. Used to live across the street here. Did you know him?”

  The woman nodded. “A little. Haven’t seen him in a couple of years. What did he do?”

  Scott thought for a moment, then said, “It’s a robbery charge.”

  “Stole something, huh?”

  Yes, Scott thought. “Seems that way.”

  The woman snorted. “And got his damn fool self busted, huh? I always figured him for something a little more clever.”

  “Smart guy, right?”

  “Acted smart. I’m not sure the two are the same.”

  Scott smiled. “Anyway,” he said slowly, “what we’re really interested in is background. I’ve still got to interview his father, but, you know, sometimes the neighbors…” He didn’t need to finish because the woman nodded vigorously.

  “Don’t know too much. We’ve only been here a couple of years. But the old man—well, he’s been here since the Ice Age. And he ain’t particularly popular around here.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He’s on disability. Used to work at one of the shipbuilders over in Portsmouth. Had some kind of accident. Said he hurt his back. Collects a check every month from the company, from the state, and from the Feds, too. But for a guy that says he’s hurt, he seems to get around okay. Moonlights as a roofer, which is kinda odd work for a guy who claims to be crippled. My husband says he gets paid in cash under the table. I always figured it would be some tax guy snooping around here, asking questions.”

  “That doesn’t say why people don’t—”

  “He’s just a mean-ass drunk. And when he gets drunk, he gets abusive. Makes a racket. You can hear him screaming all sorts of language in the middle of the night, except, odd thing is, there ain’t no one there for him to scream at. Sometimes he comes out and shoots off some old gun he keeps in that mess he calls home. There’s kids around, but he don’t care. Took a shot at one of the neighborhood dogs once, too. Not mine, luckily. Anyway, opened fire for no real reason at all, just because he could. Just a bad dude, all around.”

  “And the son?”

  “Like I said, I hardly knew him. But the apple, as they say, don’t fall far from the damn tree. At least, don’t sound like it.”

  “What about the mother?”

  “She died. I never knew her. It was an accident. Or so the story went. Some people think she took her own life. Others want to blame her old man. Police looked pretty hard at the whole thing. It was pretty suspicious. But then, it got dropped. Maybe something in the papers back then, I don’t know. It happened before I got here.”

  The dog barked once more, and Scott stepped back.

  “Thanks very much,” he said. “One thing. Please keep this confidential. It sort of screws up any questions we might ask if people start talking.”

  “Ah, sure.” The woman pushed at the dog with her foot and took a drag from the cigarette. “Hey, can you folks down in Massachusetts put the old man in jail alongside the kid? It sure would make things quieter around here.”

  Scott spent the rest of the morning working his way around the neighborhood, pretending to be a variety of investigators. Only once did he get asked for some identification, and he backed his way out of that conversation quickly. He didn’t learn much. The O’Connell family had predated most of the other folks in the neighborhood, and the impressions they had made limited their contact with their neighbors. Their lack of popularity helped Scott in one regard: folks were willing to talk. But what people said merely reinforced what Scott had already heard or presumed.

  There had been no sign of the elder O’Connell emerging from the house, although Scott told himself that the man might have slipped away when he was talking with one person or another. Still, a small, black Dodge pickup truck hadn’t moved all day. Scott assumed this was the older O’Connell’s vehicle.

  He knew he would have to knock on that door, but he was as yet unsure exactly who to pose as. He decided he would make one more effort, at the local library, to find out about the circumstances surrounding O’Connell’s mother’s death.

  The town’s library, in contrast to the bedraggled buildings on side streets and former farmland, was a two-story, glass-and-brick building, adjacent to a new police department and town offices complex.

  Scott approached the main desk, and a slight, thin woman, maybe a half dozen years older than Ashley, looked up as she was sliding library cards into the backs of books and asked him not unpleasantly, “May I help you?”

  “Yes. Do you keep high school yearbooks on file? And could you direct me to where you would keep local newspapers on microfilm?”

  “Sure. The microfilm room is over there.” She gestured with her hand
toward a side room. “And the collection is pretty clearly marked. Do you need help with the machine?”

  Scott shook his head. “Think I can manage. The yearbooks?”

  “In the reference section. What year were you hunting down?”

  “Lincoln High, class of 1995.”

  The young woman made a small face of surprise, then grinned. “My class. Maybe I can help you?”

  “Did you know a young man named Michael O’Connell?”

  She froze. For a second she didn’t reply.

  Scott watched the young woman’s face race through bad memories.

  “What has he done?” she finally whispered.

  Sally pored over an array of legal texts and law review articles, searching for something, but precisely what, she was unsure. The more she read, the more she assessed, the more she analyzed, the worse she felt. It was one thing, she thought harshly to herself, to be on the intellectual side of crime, where actions were seen in the abstract world of the courtroom, involving arguments and evidence, search and seizure, confessions, forensics—and then the system took over. The criminal justice system was designed to bleed the humanity out of actions. It neutered the reality of a crime, turning it into something theatrical. She was familiar and comfortable with the process. But what she was doing was a step in a far different direction.

  Find a crime.

  Figure out how to assign it to Michael O’Connell.

  Put him in jail. Go on with their lives. It sounded simple. Scott’s enthusiasm had been encouraging, until she had actually sat down and tried to work her way through all the various possibilities.

  The best she had come up with so far were fraud and extortion.

  It would be tricky, she thought to herself, but they could probably take all of O’Connell’s actions up to that point and re-form them so they would look like some sort of scheme to blackmail her and Scott out of cash. She thought she could probably make it appear to a prosecutor that everything O’Connell had done—especially his harassment of Ashley—was an aggressive plot. The only thing they would have to manufacture was some sort of threat unless they paid some sum of money. Scott could claim under oath that when he’d handed over $5,000 to O’Connell in Boston, O’Connell had demanded more, and that he’d stepped up his pursuit when they had been reluctant. They could even explain away their failure to engage the police up to this point, saying that they were scared what he might do.

  The problem—or, Sally thought ruefully, the first problem of what were likely to be many—was what she remembered Scott saying after he’d handed over the $5,000. He thought that O’Connell had been wearing a hidden microphone that had recorded the entirety of their conversation.

  If that were true, suddenly they would be seen as the liars. O’Connell would skate free, they might face charges, and her practice and Scott’s job might be in jeopardy. They would be back at square one, they would be in trouble, and there would be nothing standing between O’Connell, his anger, and Ashley.

  And, she realized, even if they were successful, there was no guarantee that O’Connell wouldn’t get some sort of reduced sentence. A couple of years? How long would it take with him behind bars to allow Ashley to reinvent herself, to get free of his obsession? Three? Five? Ten? Could she ever be 100 percent certain that he wasn’t going to arrive on her doorstep?

  Sally rocked back in her seat.

  Kill him, she thought.

  She gasped out loud. She could not believe what her own voice was saying to her.

  What is it about your life that is so great that it shouldn’t be sacrificed?

  This made some sense to her. She didn’t really love her work, she was filled with doubts about her relationship with Hope. It had been weeks, maybe months, since she’d felt joy about who she was, and what she stood for. Meaning in life? She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. She was a middle-aged, small-town lawyer, growing old, watching the lines of worry take root in the skin of her face every day. She thought the only mark she’d ever made in life was Ashley. Her daughter might have been the result of a lie of love, but there was no denying that she was categorically the best thing that Sally and Scott had managed in their brief time together.

  Her future is worth dying for. Yours isn’t.

  Again Sally was shocked at what her imagination insisted. This is madness. But it was madness that made sense.

  Kill him, she told herself.

  And then she had another, even more bizarre thought.

  Or find a way to make sure he kills you.

  And then pays for it.

  She leaned back and stared at the books and texts surrounding her.

  Someone had to die. Of this she suddenly became completely convinced.

  I had nightmares for the first time since I’d started in on the story.

  They arrived unbidden and kept me spinning in my bed, sweat-drenched in sleep. I awakened once deep in the night, staggered into the bathroom for a drink of water, and stared at myself in the mirror. I slipped from the room, padding down the carpeted hallway and peering in on my children, reassuring myself that their sleep wasn’t as troubled as my own. When I returned, my wife muttered, “Everything okay?” but had dropped off again before I could answer. I dropped my head to the pillow and peered up into the endless edges of darkness.

  The next day, I called her on the phone.

  “I think I need to speak with some of the principals in this little drama now,” I said roughly. “I’ve been putting that off for far too long.”

  “Yes. I’ve been expecting that eventually you would make that demand. I’m just not sure who would be willing to speak with you at this point.”

  “They are willing to have their story told, but not willing to speak with me?” I asked incredulously.

  When she spoke, I could sense some distant turmoil within her; some events in the story were turning more critical. I was getting closer.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “So many things are in balance. A life balances a death. Chance balances against despair. So much is at stake.”

  “I can find them,” I said abruptly. “I don’t have to play this cat-and-mouse game with you. I could hunt down faculty lists. Search legal databases. Go to student websites. Gay-women websites. Psychopath chat rooms. I don’t know. One of them will have enough information so that I’ll be able to assign real names, real places, and truths to what you’ve told me.”

  “You don’t think I have been telling you the truth?”

  “I do. I’m just saying that I know enough so that I could pursue all this on my own.”

  “You could do that, but that would cause me to stop taking your calls. And perhaps you would never know what really happened. You might know some fact, or you might be able to piece together the details, so that you had the flesh of the story. But not the bones. Never the organs beneath the surface, telling you the why. Would you risk that?”

  “No.” I said. “I would not.”

  “I did not think so.”

  “I will play by your rules. But not much longer. I’m reaching the end of my rope.”

  “Yes. I can hear that in your voice.” But it did not sound as if this had the slightest impact on her. And with that, she hung up the phone.

  36

  The Pieces on the Board

  Ashley was still angry, and sulking about being excluded from the most crucial decision she would ever have to make. Catherine was a little less stymied by Hope, Scott, and Sally’s unreasonable exclusions. She spent an hour on the telephone, dialing numbers, speaking in low tones, before collecting Ashley and saying, “There’s something you and I need to do.”

  Ashley was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, staring over at the corner where Nameless’s bowl—now empty—remained. No one had had the heart to move it. She felt knotted, tied to a mast while around her things were happening that she was intimately involved in, but she could no
t see.

  “What?”

  “Well,” Catherine said softly, “I don’t exactly like being on the outside looking in.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I think we should take a few steps. Steps I’m not sure anyone in this family has ever considered before.” Catherine held up her car keys. “Let’s get going,” she said briskly.

  “Where are we headed?”

  “Going to meet a man,” Catherine replied breezily. “A most unsavory character, I suspect.”

  Ashley must have looked slightly surprised, because the older woman smiled. “That is what we need. Someone distasteful.” She turned and, with Ashley in tow, headed out to her car. “We won’t be telling your parents or Hope about this trip,” she said as she pulled out onto the street. Ashley remained quiet as Catherine accelerated the car, checking the rearview mirror repeatedly, to make sure they were not being followed. “We need some help from someone from a different world. With different values. Luckily,” she sighed, “I know a few folks up near my home who knew someone who filled that particular bill.”

  Ashley had several more questions but sat back, assuming she would find out what she needed to know soon enough. She lifted her eyebrows when Catherine steered the car out of the side streets onto a main boulevard, then turned toward the entrance ramp to the interstate, heading back in the direction they had fled from only a few days earlier.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A little spot just about forty-five minutes north of here,” Catherine said breezily. “Perhaps two hundred yards from the line separating the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the great state of Vermont.”

  “And what will we find there?”

  Catherine smiled. “A man, like I said. The sort of man I doubt either of us has ever met before.” Her smile faded, and she spoke a little more harshly. “And perhaps some security.”

  She did not explain this, nor did Ashley ask her to, although the younger woman doubted security was so easily found, even just over the border in Vermont.