Almost Mortal

by Chris Leibig

  Sam nodded solemnly.

  “Now my son, Steve. He’s a different story. This is what we need to talk about. Obviously, people are gonna gamble, and people are gonna smoke pot. Me, I never gamble. I don’t even drink. I’ve never understood it. But whatever people wanna do, I got no problem with it.”

  Raj held Sam’s eyes but softly, like the pseudo-politician he was. Small talk. Here comes the kicker.

  “Except I do have a problem when people are stupid. God bless him, but my son and his friends, I can’t help it. I love him. But you know, I spoiled him, maybe. But people act dumb. They gotta pay the cost. That’s just how it is. I wish it were some other way. You see the news today?”

  “News? No. Not yet.”

  “Well, check it out. You know the news, they make a big deal out of things that aren’t a big deal, but look it up. This guy, this veteran from the hood, clocked what’s his face, that police chief of yours.”

  Whoa. “I know about that. Jerome Johnson. He’s a former client of my office.”

  “I figured. You handle cases for poor people. That’s great. Everybody needs a lawyer like you. So anyway, I don’t want the police questioning that guy Johnson.”

  Sam looked down at the time on his phone then back up at Raj. Twenty-five minutes since Simmons’s call. Raj had one of those old faces without wrinkles. He picked up his coffee, and they regarded each other while Raj took a long, slow sip.

  “You know how it is, Samson. A guy gets in trouble. The cops put the scare on him. Punching out the chief, what’s that worth these days? Some jail time maybe? But these guns and the pot. Nothing wrong with some pot, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t like guns, but to each his own with the guns as far as I care. But you know the cops, and this guy from the hood who’s dumb enough to punch out a cop, so they’ll be comin’ heavy at this guy. And here’s where my worry comes in.”

  Sam checked the time on his phone again.

  “I’m almost finished, I know, you gotta go. So here it is; they come heavy at this guy. Like, he’s going under the jail unless he tells ’em where he got the drugs and the guns. And he’s scared. And this guy, he’s not all there in the first place, that’s my take on it. You know how it works. So the guy may say some things. All of it could be wrong, doesn’t matter. And my son and his friends, with their parties and women and drugs and what do I know? My son’s a good guy. He doesn’t know one gun from another, but the pot? I just don’t know. What I care about is people being stupid, and I’m very unhappy. But my son’s friends shouldn’t be selling pot to a guy like that. So, whatever Johnson says, yeah, these guys sell pot. And then the next guy says, no, not me, and then somebody says, you know this guy Steve, he’s got money, weed, the card games. And his old man’s a big shot in town that made his money gambling and donates to candidates like he’s some kind of do-gooder. This guy Johnson. He can’t be talking to the cops about drugs. You go down there and help him. You got twenty large today. And Samson, there’s always more where that came from. I’ve referred you what, two-dozen good-paying clients over the years? And don’t get me wrong. I do it ’cause you’re good, not ’cause I want somethin’ back. But still, we got a relationship, right?”

  Sam took a deep breath. “Raj, there’s something you gotta know.” Raj nodded slightly. “If Johnson’s my client, I act in his best interest, no one else’s. Not yours. Not Steve’s. That’s how it has to be.”

  Raj stood to leave. “You’re an interesting guy, Samson. I like that. So you gotta see what’s good for me is good for Johnson in the long run. Those two things are one and the same. You get them to release this guy, and I’ll pay for his stay at the mental unit up at Bennet. I’ll be his friend. If he needs to do some time, he’ll do some time. But I’ll take care of him. Financially. In the long run. And twenty large to you. Don’t forget that part.”

  Raj paused. “I’m sorry about Steve and this silly business with the doctor. You help me, or you don’t, doesn’t matter. Problem solved. Tell that doc to pay when he can. You don’t gotta threaten people to make money in America. You just don’t. I don’t know what that boy’s problem is, I really don’t.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes at Raj.

  Raj laughed. “You’re right, I do know what his problem is. He’s trying to be like me. A dumb move, Samson. A real dumb move.”

  Sam stood, shook Raj’s hand, and turned towards the door.

  “Hey, Samson!” Raj called out. Sam turned back. Raj, with all his huge exuberance, was oblivious to the suburban Starbucks crowd, all of whose heads turned towards his booming voice.

  “Slow down once in a while. The simple things in life are the best.”

  •••

  Sam approached the glass information booth at the police station. Sally, the police department’s civilian receptionist, greeted him with a huge smile. He had represented her nephew on a DUI and gotten him off.

  To Sam’s left, outside, at the other end of the long lobby, he saw the television trucks. Whichever cop tipped off the reporters had screwed up, because without the press’s attention, Simmons, and Raj for that matter, would never have known to call Sam.

  Some people just can’t see the angles.

  “Detectives are about to question my client, Jerome Johnson,” Sam told Sally. “I formally invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. I am recording this conversation, and I need you to inform the detectives of all of this now. It’s eleven thirteen, according to the clock on your wall.”

  Sam pulled out his iPhone and took a photograph of the clock and Sally with her mouth wide open. Without speaking, she picked up a phone. After a hushed conversation, she winked at Sam. “Have a seat, Mr. Young. Someone will be with you shortly.” Her tone was crisp and professional.

  Sam raised his eyebrows at her. “The recorder’s off now.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” she mouthed in barely a whisper.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  Sam took a seat in the lobby and breathed. He noted the time and opened a notebook. Exactly eleven minutes and twenty-two seconds later, Chief Edwin O’Malley himself emerged from the end of the lobby and walked slowly towards Sam. Rumor had it that O’Malley, after his thirty years on the force, was about to retire and run for city council.

  O’Malley took a seat right next to Sam in the row of plastic lobby chairs. He folded one leg over the other and placed his hands over his knee.

  “Mr. Young.” O’Malley spoke with the blue-collar accent he grew up with. His present objective was obvious. . His only hope to get Johnson to confess to owning the guns was to muscle Sam out of the way. O’Malley glanced down the empty hall to the station entrance, where reporters plastered themselves against the glass doors. Sam mimicked O’Malley’s sitting position. O’Malley sported his black eye gracefully, like the unsuperficial tough guy he wanted to be.

  “I’d sure like to know what the hell you think you’re doing,” O’Malley said. “Your man tried to knock my block off this morning, and he’s living in an empty apartment with enough weaponry to take on my SWAT team. We’re gonna question the guy. Period.” Period, a signature O’Malley comment Sam had heard so often during televised press conferences.

  “I’m making sure you don’t screw this up, Chief.” Sam looked straight ahead, as if speaking to an annoying fellow airline traveler. O’Malley flinched and cleared his throat.

  “If Johnson is under arrest,” Sam said, “he invokes his Miranda rights. If he’s not under arrest, I’m driving him home. You’ve seized the weapons.”

  O’Malley, arms folded, rolled his eyes. “You’re not even appointed to his case, Sam. There is no case. This is an investigation, my friend. That’s it. Period.”

  “Listen to me, Edwin. Johnson invoked his rights through me, and if you guys asked him a single question, it’s worth nothing to you. You got a problem with me representing him right now? Take it up with the state bar. But if I don’t see Johnson in the next five minutes, I’m
taking it up with the people down at the end of the hall. And you know what I’m going to say? That Edwin O’Malley should be trying to help this guy, this war hero with mental health problems whose daughter was recently murdered. But instead, O’Malley is trying to prosecute him because his feelings got hurt when the guy punched him out. What you should do is release Johnson to me right now. Give a gracious speech about it. I’ll check him into the psych ward at Bennet for a voluntary thirty-day stay. Once he gets on his meds he’ll plead guilty to hitting you, and you can come to court and ask the judge to give him a suspended sentence. Now which way is going to look better come election time?”

  O’Malley straightened his uniform by tugging at the bottom of his shirt. Sitting this close to O’Malley, Sam realized the rumors were indeed true about O’Malley’s wanting to run.

  But O’Malley ignored the election comment. “The guy’s dangerous, Sam. He knows how to get his hands on firearms. And the feds are gonna want some answers about those guns.”

  “Fuck the feds. This guy needs help, not twenty-five years.”

  O’Malley glanced down the hall at the reporters pressing up against the glass wall, shook his head, and looked back at Sam.

  “I’ll deliver your man to you by the back entrance. And I’ll have a cruiser follow you to Bennet psych. But Sam, if this sucker bolts or hurts anyone, you’re through. You know I could make that happen. You and your fancy car and extra cash. Yeah, we know about that.”

  “You got a deal, Chief. With one caveat.”

  O’Malley raised his eyebrows, as if being challenged by an insolent child.

  “It’s a misdemeanor assault,” Sam said.

  “Man, you’ve got an overly bold-ass attitude. I’m pretty sure it’s gonna get you into some trouble right soon.” He stood and began to turn his back on Sam.

  Sam stood as well, and extended his hand to O’Malley. “That’s what my therapist keeps telling me.”

  O’Malley started chuckling, eventually rolling into a full-throated laugh.

  “One question, Chief. Why’d you call the press down here?”

  O’Malley flinched, but decided not to deny it. “I have my reasons. You don’t know what it’s like in my world.” O’Malley turned towards the elevators, ignoring the muffled calls of the reporters.

  •••

  “Mr. Young? Your results are ready,” the Diagnostia clerk announced cheerfully.

  Sam reached into his briefcase as he approached the counter. “I need these swabs typed, too. Expedited result.” He held out a large plastic bin containing smaller bags, each with a Q-tip from his manuscript swabbing. The clerk frowned sympathetically. She handed Sam a thin, white envelope, the chalice DNA results, and a plastic bag holding the chalice.

  “You know, these results do nothing for you unless you, well, have your own DNA type for making an exclusion. Or, I guess, the type of the, uh, the person you think it might be. Are you sure—”

  Sam slumped and gave her a sad smile. “Let me worry about that.” She nodded and gently accepted the sealed bags.

  In your heart, you already know.

  CHAPTER 13

  JULIANA SAT UP AND placed her hand on Sam’s back. She always touched him—a lot.

  Sam turned towards her. “Let’s talk DNA.” He opened the Diagnostia envelope. “I have a DNA result here from saliva on the rim of a chalice. I haven’t even looked at it. You don’t have to tell me anything more about your investigation. Just look at this result and react. I’ve got the chalice right here.”

  Sam reached into his briefcase and handed Juliana the neatly labeled plastic bag holding the chalice, then the two-page document. Sam recognized the standard DNA typing chart on page one, the loci and their corresponding alleles on the Powerplex 16 graph.

  Juliana’s eyes rested on the paper for long enough to make the point that she was seeing something odd. She then stood and walked across the room, hips weaving her around her dining room table. She knelt, reached underneath a large wooden bureau, and stood with a thick manila file in her hands. Her worry had given way to the strongest emotional current she possessed—a love of the hunt, the game, the puzzle, the race. Juliana walked to the kitchen and poured each of them a full glass of red wine before returning to the couch with the file tucked under her arm. Her eyes darted quickly around each of Sam’s documents for several seconds.

  “How fresh a sample was this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Juliana took a deep breath. “There are a few things I can tell you. One, this is a corrupted sample. Not a full profile.”

  “It was fresh saliva!”

  “So you think. That’s the problem with lacking the chain of custody. You don’t know shit. But either way, not everyone leaves enough saliva on the rim of a cup to get a full profile. He could have just sipped it. Dry mouth, I don’t know. It happens. Evaporation.”

  Sam reached for the results, but Juliana pulled the thin folder away.

  “I’m not done. Incomplete or not, presuming this result is accurate, there’s a pretty good chance this is the profile of the Joni West bra snapper, and, to a far lesser degree of certainty, the profile of her neck squeezer as well. Your mystery man’s saliva profile has ten alleles at four loci, all also possessed by Joni West’s bra snapper. There are no eliminating alleles.”

  Juliana breathed deeply and tossed the sheet next to her on the couch. She picked up her glass of wine.

  Sam frowned. “I thought you said the bra snapper profile was too weak to mean anything but exclusion.”

  “For the court. I’m telling you how it really is. The ten alleles mean a lot to me. To any logical person. Add to that the fact that you, for some reason, wanted the comparison made, and I can deduce you’re in possession of some volatile and dangerous information. You’re putting me in a weird position, my friend. We’ve gotta do something with this. Ten alleles aren’t enough to calculate odds, but I can tell you from experience, a ten-allele match, unlike a one-allele match, means something. Even if the odds that the chalice sipper and the bra snapper are different people are as low as one in ten that means a lot when combined with whatever you’re not telling me. Basically, we both now suspect that you know who the Rosslyn Ripper is, or at least someone who touched West’s bra near the time of her death.”

  She was right. Weak profile or not, it meant something.

  “I don’t know whose profile it is,” Sam said, “and I can’t find out without doing some legal wrangling. Forty-eight hours. Then you can do whatever you want with the chalice. My client wants the guy caught, too. But it’s complicated.”

  Juliana drained her glass. “No shit?”

  •••

  Sam sat alone again in his living room. Eight o’clock at night. The sole light in the room, a lamp on a corner table behind him, barely provided enough light to read. Yet the black script on the white pages seemed to reflect the fuzzy blue light coming in from the street, from the faraway lamps, themselves out of view. He looked at the two stacks of old white boxes on his coffee table. He pulled the lid off one and looked in. Papers. Used books, including a stack of religious textbooks. He went to the next box, which mostly had more of the same and a stack of medical records. Sam flipped through the records. Some of them related to a fact he knew well—he had been delivered early by C-section. At the bottom of the stack was his own birth certificate. He did not recall ever having seen it before. As he did know though, no father was listed. Then he saw something interesting. A manila folder holding a stack of old photos. He flipped through them. Most appeared to be from before his time. He had plenty of pictures of himself with his mother, the normal growing-up shots taped into neat photo albums that every eighties mother made. But he had hardly any photos of his mother as she was before him. Even so, all the old photos fit his constructed memories. Her with a small group of hippie-seeming friends. Her grad school group, the ones he enjoyed eavesdropping on from his room down the hall.

  The men and women in the p
hotos sported that distinctive seventies look—standing by old cars with their arms around each other. Some of the shots were from the American University campus. One photo showed a dancing woman. His mother stood near her, applauding, smiling broadly while watching the dancer along with four or five other happy friends. Some held glasses of wine, some gyrated to music, but all of them seemed full of the excitement of young students who cared about each other. The dancer’s leg kicked high, and daringly, into the center of the group. Sam wondered when his mother had become the serious, often melancholy, lady he knew, or if she had always been that way, with this photo a rare exception. Like when Sam himself would occasionally forget everything he was stressed about and laugh at something for the pure pleasure of it. Rare moments. Usually when drunk.

  Sam held the photo of the dancing woman and the happy friends for a long time, thinking about the remaining boxes and what they may hold. He flipped through more of the photos until he got to some of himself as a boy, and even a few depicting him in high school. He stopped at the last one in the stack. His mother had both arms around him. He wore a dirty soccer uniform. It was senior year of high school after a St. Ambrose game. She looked barely older than he did then, and far younger than he did now—what with all the smoking and drinking from college to the present. He tried to see into her eyes for some kind of idea about what she was thinking. Nothing but happiness for her son. She would die six months later when her flight to Frankfurt crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, just weeks before Sam headed to college. For all Sam knew, it was the last photo of her ever taken.