by David Ellis
“Anything you tell me about what happened in the past is confidential,” I say. “The only thing I can’t keep confidential is if you tell me you’re going to commit a crime in the future.”
“I’m not going to commit a crime in the future,” he says.
That’s always nice to hear. I wave a hand.
“Okay. So James, what crime do you expect to be accused of committing?”
“Murder,” he says, without hesitation.
I sit higher in my chair. Homicides don’t walk through the door every day. And here I thought this meeting was going to be boring.
“Two women were killed,” he says. “I didn’t kill them.” Drinker crosses a leg. His sport coat opens as he leans back. Quite the fleshy midsection, this one. Pumps iron and then hits Taco Bell. I raise a fist to my mouth and fight another wave of nausea.
He takes a deep breath. “I knew each of them,” he says. “One was a friend of mine. The other one I dated. Two women I knew, two women murdered.”
He’s right to be worried. That isn’t what the police would call a fanciful coincidence.
“Do the murders appear to be related?” I ask.
He nods, but doesn’t answer at first. His eyes are combing my walls, not that there’s much to see—some diplomas and certificates, a couple of photographs. It’s part of his overall appraisal, checking the schools I attended, equating my stature with the quality of my office.
I pick up a nearby Bic pen, the cap chewed mercilessly, and chew it some more. I hate these cheap pens. I have a fancy Visconti fountain pen my brother, Pete, gave me last Christmas, but it uses replaceable ink cartridges, and I don’t want to waste good ink on this guy. The cheap Bic it is.
“Both women were followed home from where they work,” he says. “And they were both stabbed multiple times.”
The cool deliberation with which he describes the murders sends an icy wave across my back. You can defend all sorts of criminals, but some things you hear, you never get used to. On the bright side, I’m waking up.
“Alicia Corey and Lauren Gibbs,” says Drinker. “Alicia, I dated a couple of times. Nothing serious. Just a couple of dinners.”
I write down those names with my shitty pen. I hate this pen. I should light the pen on fire.
“Is there proof of these dinners?” I ask.
“I . . . I paid for the dinners in cash,” he says.
Interesting. Unusual. Doesn’t make him a killer, but most people pay with credit these days. I draw a couple of dollar signs on the pad. Then a smiley face. Then a knife. My mother always said, You have a flair for art, boy, but she was talking to my brother, Pete.
“I have a lot of cash,” Drinker explains. “I’m a mechanic at Higgins Auto Body—over on Delaney?—and sometimes our boss pays us overtime off the books—y’know, in cash.”
Fair enough. A decent explanation to a jury, but not one his employer would want made public—in fact, one he’d probably deny if he thought Uncle Sam might get wind.
“The dinners were on May twelfth and May nineteenth,” he goes on. “She was murdered the following week. May twenty-second, I think. A Wednesday.”
“You said she was leaving work?”
“She was an exotic dancer,” he says. “A stripper. Place called Knockers?”
This guy was dating a stripper? There’s no accounting for taste, and this guy seems pretty well built, but the goofy red hair down near his shoulders? The fast-food gut? The face made for radio?
“You’re surprised,” he says. “You don’t think a stripper would date me.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Tell you what, James.” I lean forward. Again, the vertigo, the feeling I’m tipping to one side. “I’ll make you a deal. Don’t tell me what I think, and I won’t tell you what you think. Deal?”
“Deal.” He nods. “So she left the club at two in the morning and she was murdered at her house when she got home. She was stabbed six or seven times.”
That’s a lot of detail for someone who hasn’t talked to the police, I think to myself. And for someone who didn’t kill her.
“Go on,” I say. “Tell me about the second woman.”
5.
Jason
Tuesday, June 4
“The second woman was Lauren, Lauren Gibbs,” James Drinker says. “She worked at a bank and was trying to build a website design business. Nice woman. Nice woman.” His eyes move away from mine and over to the walls of my office again. “She was killed two days later, May twenty-fourth, I think. A Friday.”
“And when did you last speak with her?”
He heaves his shoulders. “Couple of weeks ago?”
“There would be phone records, e-mails, things like that, connecting you to her?”
“Yeah. Phone. Not e-mail. Not Facebook. But phone, yeah. I mean, our friendship wasn’t a secret.”
I shift in my chair, but I can’t get comfortable. My hand itches, but it’s one of those inside itches that my scratching fingernails can’t find. I chew the cap on the Bic pen until it’s at its breaking point.
“Something wrong?” he asks me.
I take a breath.
“I need a minute,” I say.
I head to the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. I see dark bags under my eyes. Sleep has been a problem for me. I reach into my pocket, remove my small tin of Altoids, and pop a mint into my mouth. I chew it up and cup some water from the sink.
When I leave the bathroom, Shauna is standing outside Bradley’s office and turns to look at me. She reads something in my expression and says, “What?”
“Nothing,” I answer.
Not interested in prolonging that conversation, I make it back into my office, where James Drinker is standing over by the wall of diplomas and photographs.
“You played football at State, didn’t you?” he asks, wagging a finger at a photograph of me catching a football my freshman year.
I ease back into my chair, making noises like an old man getting out of bed. “Once upon a time,” I say. “Let’s get back to this.”
Drinker resumes his spot in the chair across from me. “Okay.”
“Do you have alibis, James? For these murders?”
“I was like Macaulay Culkin,” he says.
I stare at him. He stares at me. I’m supposed to understand.
“Home alone,” he says. “I was home alone. I don’t get out too much.”
Now that I could believe. “Any evidence of your being home alone those nights? Did you make phone calls from a landline? Did you send e-mails or go online or order in Chinese food or order a pay-per-view movie? Anything like that?”
His face goes blank. “I’m not sure. I don’t go online a lot, but maybe. I didn’t order food or anything. I might have ordered a movie on pay-per-view or something.”
I reach for my pen but can’t find it. Must have knocked it off my desk. I bend over to search the carpet, and when I come back up, my body makes me pay: a lightning strike between the ears and a swimming pain in my stomach. I hold my breath and wait it out. Fuck the pen. I’ll just memorize the information.
“Good, okay,” I say. “Think that stuff over. Now, if the police contact—”
“I’m being set up, Mr. Kolarich.”
“It may be premature to jump to that—”
“How would you do that?” he asks. “If it was you? How would you set somebody up for murder?”
I sigh, loudly enough for him to get the picture that I’m not very interested in this conversation.
“Please,” he insists. “I think that’s what’s happening. How would you frame somebody?”
“How would I . . .” I drum my fingers on the desk. “Well, okay. The police will usually look for motive, means, and opportunity.”
Drinker scratches at his face, his mouth open in a small O. “Motive? Why would I wanna kill them?”
From the cops’ view, that would be the easiest
part of the equation. Boy meets girl. Romance, unrequited love, maybe a little jealousy and obsession sprinkled in. If I put this homely guy next to a hot-body stripper who later wound up with a knife in her chest, first thing I’d think was, She rebuffed him, he didn’t take it so well. A second girl, same story, or some variation of that story. There can be plenty of variations, but the basic tale is the same—matters of the heart—and the cops see it every day.
“Opportunity,” Drinker says to himself.
“Sounds like you don’t have much of an alibi. If someone were framing you, they’d pick a time they knew you had none. Meaning, a time when you’re alone. No one to vouch for you.”
Drinker takes a deep breath. That box has been checked, in his case. He was like Macaulay Culkin.
“And means?” he says. “What is that?”
“He’d choose a weapon that you, yourself, had available, too.”
“Like a knife.”
“Sure, like a knife.”
He looks at me with a blank face. “Well, I have a knife,” he says. “Everybody’s got a knife.” He scratches his face again. “Go on. What else?”
“I don’t know what else there is,” I say. “But if someone wanted to frame you, he might want to help the cops out a little. Leave some clues.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know if he did that or not. You mean, like, drop my driver’s license there?”
“That, or even more subtle, I suppose. Maybe scrape some grease off the floor of your auto shop and smear it at the scene. Or if he has access to your house, he could take something from your house—a fiber of carpet, some hair from your comb, something like that—and leave it at the crime scene.”
“Damn.” Drinker looks like he’s lost a little color. “Go on. What else?”
I look up at the ceiling. It’s been a while since I framed somebody for murder, so I’m a little rusty.
“For that matter,” I say, “if he had access to your house, he could plant all sorts of things there. The murder weapon. Something from the crime scene. A drop of the victim’s blood, even.”
Drinker lets out a shiver. “I don’t think anybody can get into my apartment.”
“You should make sure of that, James. Do you have an alarm system?”
He shakes his head no.
“Get one,” I say. “It’s not that expensive. I have one. But however expensive it may be, it’s worth it. If you’re serious in thinking that somebody is setting you up, you don’t want that person getting into your apartment.”
But he can’t be serious about that, can he? He thinks someone’s killing women and trying to put him in the soup?
Silence. He studies me. His mind is wandering, and he’s not thrilled with where it’s going. I can’t tell if this guy is for real. Anything’s possible, I suppose.
“Guess I got some work to do,” he says.
“I charge three hundred an hour, James. Not counting today. So I’m not cheap.”
He looks up at me, not terribly surprised to hear that number. “I think I can afford that,” he says. “I’ve been saving up.”
I don’t comment on the significance of that statement, but he—the innocent man who didn’t kill anybody—catches it himself.
“I mean, saving up for a rainy day of some kind,” he clarifies.
Fair enough. I don’t know if he’s innocent or not, but I do know that if I limited myself to innocent clients, the phone wouldn’t ring very often.
“Well, it sounds like it may be raining soon,” I say.
6.
Shauna
Tuesday, June 4
A late dinner with Jason, just the two of us. My decision and my treat. He looks like he could use a good steak and maybe a stiff drink, but instead he orders some soup and a club soda. Surprising. I’ve never seen him pass on a drink or a steak. Then it suddenly occurs to me I’m not his mother.
“Is this some kind of diet?” I ask, but he just smirks. Heroically stoic again.
“Anyway, I told Drinker to make a list of anyone who might have a grudge against him and come back tomorrow,” Jason says.
“What a weird meeting. Have you ever had someone come to you and say they think they’re being framed?”
He shakes his head. “When I was a prosecutor, I’d hear that defense. But I’ve never used it as a defense attorney. And definitely not a guy telling me he’s being framed before he’s even charged.”
“Maybe he knows he’s going to be charged and he wants to lay the table for you.”
“For me?” Jason grimaces. “He doesn’t have to convince his lawyer.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know that.”
Jason doesn’t respond. He’s obliterating a piece of thick bread, shredding it to dust on his plate. But not eating it, I notice. There is a greenish pall to his skin, like he’s under the weather.
“So tell me,” I say.
“Tell you what?”
“What’s wrong. Are you sick?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m not sick.”
I sometimes forget that Jason’s had a rough time of things, probably because he never lets on about it. Losing your family in a car accident is beyond words, and that was only two years ago. But to make matters worse, he allowed himself a second shot at romance last year, a woman named Tori. Beautiful and elusive, just the way he likes them. I don’t know what happened with them. He never shared. But one day she was just gone. And our Jason took it hard. “Didn’t work out” was all he said, but he’s easy to read if you know him. He was crushed.
Then a month later, he rips his knee apart on the basketball court, and the jock, the guy who runs fifty miles on a slow week, was laid up for months and hobbling on crutches. His doctor said the pain could last up to a year or longer, depending.
“Either your knee still hurts, you’re still pining for Tori, or something else happened while I’ve been on trial.”
The mention of Tori brings a quick jerk of his eyes, but that’s all he gives me. “Tori is history. My knee hardly ever hurts. Comes and goes.”
He removes a tin of mints from his pocket and pops one in his mouth, chews it up. Not sure why his breath is of concern at the moment. I wasn’t planning a make-out session with him after dinner.
“What happened to your hand?” I ask. Each of the fingernails on his right hand has some corner or section blackened, like some kind of gothic manicure. “Have you been playing with fire?”
He seems to find something interesting, or maybe amusing, in that comment. He lets out a long sigh and leans against the back of the cushioned booth.
Our food comes. Caesar salad for me, French onion soup for the kid. I attack the salad, mixing it up, first picking off the anchovies. Jason stares off into space, his large cauldron of onion soup with the thick slab of Gruyère on top untouched.
“What’s with the loss of appetite?” I ask. “Are you pregnant?”
He doesn’t answer, so I don’t push. My salad is delicious. Probably loaded with calories, but yummy. I don’t work out as much as I should and don’t eat as well as I should, but I’m still in shape. Not supermodel thin, but not fat by any stretch. Never have been. But I’m in my mid-thirties now and sometimes I do check myself in the mirror, monitor my butt for signs of sagging and my legs for the first hint of cellulite.
Okay, I check every day. Every single day, after the shower, in front of my full-length mirror. Pure vanity, I guess, or primitive mating behavior. My mother has started asking on a weekly basis about my love life. It’s a short conversation. No, Mom. No, not even a date. Saving myself for Robert Downey, Jr., Mom, but too shy to call him. I left my number on his Facebook page, though. I have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in brushing off attempts by friends and family to set me up with men who would be absolutely perfect for me. It’s not that I don’t want a man who’s absolutely perfect for me. It’s that I’m so certain that the people they want me to meet aren’t that person that I’d rather forgo the stilted, painful dinner conversati
ons and awkward kisses at the door and just wallow in my aloneness. I choose that word deliberately. I’m not lonely. I’m just alone. See the difference?
I’ve become so adept at pretending the lack of romance in my life doesn’t bother me that sometimes I even believe my own bullshit.
I’m halfway through my salad when Jason says, “You look nice.”
I look up from my plate, some dressing on my cheek, a mouthful of lettuce and crouton. “Huh?”
“I just said you look nice. Blue looks nice on you.”
I make a show of scanning the room behind me, like I can’t believe he’s saying this to me, a Who are you and what have you done with Jason? moment.
“I can’t compliment you? You look nice.”
“Um, okay. Thanks?”
I had a go-round with Jason our senior year at Bonaventure High—the prim-and-proper brainiac and the bad-boy athlete, my walk on the wild side—that lasted one night, or more accurately about fifteen minutes, upstairs in Rita Hoffman’s bedroom while a hundred kids got drunk or stoned below us. There we were, on top of the covers, our clothes in a bunch on the floor, “Drive” by R.E.M. blasting below us on the overworked stereo. “Uh, that was nice,” he said to me when it was over, when he was stripping the condom off and I was pulling on my panties. “This song sucks” was all I said. “This whole CD sucks,” he agreed. It was a more intimate moment than the sex. I didn’t speak to him again in high school.
I didn’t, in fact, even realize we were attending the same university until he became a last-minute addition to our off-campus house at State (when they kick you off the football team, apparently they evict you from the jock dorm, too). He drew the short straw (or one of us did) and got me for a roommate. First thing he said to me, even before hello, seeing me for the first time in almost two years: “Did you just hate that song, or do you hate R.E.M.?” I said, “I love R.E.M., but not the newer stuff so much.” He lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yeah, right, exactly!” And then go-round number two, which lasted about three weeks—sex about ten times, give or take—before we realized that we had to choose between being a full-blown couple or abstain and be buds, it was one or the other in the twelve-by-twelve room we shared. We went with abstinence and buds.