The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  Now we’re as close to married as you can be without having sex or living together. He’s the only person who can make me laugh out loud, the one who’s never left my side, even holding my hand in the doctor’s office during that agonizing week that I had the cancer scare (negative, thank you), the one who knows exactly how to navigate my moods when I’m PMS-ing (it’s okay if I acknowledge it, not okay for him to so much as mention it).

  And now: I look nice. Why would he say something like that? Men don’t just say things like that. They pretend they do, but it’s not true. There’s always a reason.

  “Y’know, it’s possible Drinker really didn’t kill anybody,” he says, digging into his soup, a segue about as delicate as lifting the needle off a Metallica record mid-song. “This could end up being a really fun case.”

  Well, he’s sure feeling better.

  I get the waiter’s attention and nod at him. This is going to be an early night.

  7.

  Jason

  Wednesday, June 5

  “Nobody,” James Drinker says when he returns to see me the next day. “I can’t think of anybody who would have a grudge against me. I don’t know why someone would do this to me.”

  He’s wearing a sport coat again today, over a plaid button-down tucked into blue jeans, highlighting his paunch. Still the disheveled mop of red hair, but he’s a bit less apprehensive, less guarded, today.

  “Okay, listen, James,” I say. “We both know that this looks potentially bad for you. The police are going to link these two murders. It shouldn’t be hard for them to learn that you dated Alicia Corey or that you were friends with Lauren Gibbs, and even if they only figure out one of those two facts, they’re going to cross-reference all known acquaintances between the two victims. Frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t knocked on your door yet. You with me so far?”

  He’s listening intently but doesn’t seem particularly worried. Surely he’s already figured this out independently, but usually when clients hear their lawyer say it looks bad, they start to lose composure. We’re the people who are supposed to say, Don’t worry, it’s under control, I’m going to make it all better. When we say, It doesn’t look so good, they usually freak.

  “I understand,” he says.

  “Okay. Now. If you’re really innocent of these crimes and you think you’ve been set up, then I can get to work on this for you. You’ll have to give me a retainer, and I can start spending it down and billing you by the hour, chasing after the person who is setting you up. I have a great private investigator, and I can do some things from here as well. But if I’m wasting my time, James, if I’m looking for someone who doesn’t exist, then I’m wasting your money. Money that you might need for me to defend you in court. If you run out of money—well, I don’t work for free. So what I’m saying is, we have to spend your financial resources in a smart way. I’ll take your case either way. But don’t send me on a wild-goose chase.”

  I sit back in my chair.

  “So is this a good use of my time?” I ask. “Or would we be better—”

  “I didn’t kill those women,” he says. “I didn’t. I really liked Alicia, and Lauren was a friend of mine. I didn’t kill them. I don’t have a criminal record. I’m—I mean, I’m basically a good person. I’m—I mean . . .” He looks away. Some color reaches his goofy face. He’s almost like a cartoon character. “I know I’m . . . I’m unusual, I guess. Some people think I’m weird. I’m this big goofy guy. I mean, I’m a loner, pretty much.” His eyes return to mine. “I don’t matter to people, Mr. Kolarich. I’m nobody to them.”

  A little heavy on the dramatic self-pity for my taste. A lot heavy. “James, I don’t care about any of that,” I say. “I’ll defend you whether you’re big or small. Whether you’re odd or normal.” Cue the music to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Jason Kolarich: Give me your tired, your weak, your big and goofy.

  I smack my lips. Dry mouth again, the bile in the back of my throat, the slam-dancing going on in my stomach. I pull the Altoids tin out of my pocket and pop one in my mouth. I don’t know what the hell to make of this guy.

  “Maybe the cops won’t even come talk to me,” Drinker speculates, a lilt of unwarranted hope in his voice. “Maybe they have other suspects.”

  “They’ll talk to you,” I say. “And when they do, you tell them you want to talk to your lawyer before you answer a single question. You understand that?”

  “Yeah, I got that. But maybe they won’t even talk to me. Seriously, that’s possible, isn’t it?”

  I let out a sigh. “Sure, James. It’s possible.”

  “Let’s do this, Mr. Kolarich. Jason. Let’s do this: Let’s hold tight. Let’s see what happens.”

  Under the circumstances, that’s actually not a terrible idea. If there’s a guy in Drinker’s past, he’ll still be there when Drinker gets pinched.

  But.

  “James,” I say, “if this is really happening like we think, then this guy might not stop. He’s killing women and he might kill again. Someone else close to you. Or whomever. We should think about going to the police.”

  He’s nodding along, but then he points at me. I don’t really like people pointing at me. “But isn’t that exactly what he wants me to do?”

  This is all so odd. But he’s not wrong, I have to concede. What he’s saying is possible.

  “Maybe do it anonymously,” I suggest. “An anonymous call to the tip line. There must be a tip line.”

  “And say what?” Drinker shrugs.

  I see his point. People close to James Drinker are dying—but it wasn’t James Drinker who killed them, I swear. And this isn’t James Drinker calling, either.

  “I didn’t kill anybody, and I’m not going to jail because somebody’s trying to frame me,” he says. “There has to be another way.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose. I’m out of answers.

  “Let’s hope he’s done,” Drinker says. “He might be done.”

  “Okay. Okay, James.” There’s nothing else I can say. I can’t make him go to the police. And I’d be breaking my oath as an attorney if I called them myself. “Keep your eyes and ears open, James. And keep my business card with you at all times, just in case.”

  He promises to do so. He approaches me and reaches over the table. I shake his hand. It is warm and moist.

  He leans into me. “I hope I’m not nobody to you, Jason,” he says.

  He gleefully bounds out the door, not waiting for an answer.

  8.

  Shauna

  Friday, June 7

  Jason and his private investigator, Joel Lightner, are sitting in my office. Lightner has his tie off and his collar open; his week is over. Jason is sitting on the couch in the back of my office, his left leg propped up.

  “Come out with us,” Joel says. “We’ll have a few drinks, and who knows? You might finally decide to sleep with me.” Joel is twice divorced, now a committed bachelor and skirt-chaser. If he has sex half as often as he talks about it, his penis should be in the hall of fame.

  “It’ll be fun,” Jason adds.

  “Having drinks with you? Or sleeping with Joel?” I ask.

  Jason likes that. He’s in a chipper mood, he is, a rosy glow to his cheeks. It’s getting harder and harder to predict his moods. A few nights back at dinner, he looked like he was going to toss his cookies, but then he perked up. This morning, walking in the door, he barely lifted his eyes off his feet, and now he’s wearing a stupid smirk. And I can’t get over the hair, curling out around his ears, bangs hanging across his face. Since college, it was always the high and tight. Who is this person calling himself Jason?

  “Come out with us, Shauna,” Joel says again. “You haven’t for a long time.”

  That’s true; it was the trial. I sacrifice my otherwise diverse and stimulating social life whenever I get close to a trial date. That diverse and stimulating social life consists of dinner at a steak joint with Jason and Joel, who get drunk and insult each
other, then heading to a bar where Jason and Joel get drunker and insult each other more and sometimes flirt with women.

  I have become one of those women who hang out with men. I didn’t used to be. I had a pack of girlfriends, mostly from law school but some from college, whom I ran around with for years. What changed? Marriage. Kids. For them, not me. Nights out at the bars or poetry slams or concerts became quick happy hours before they had to get home, and even the full-scale nights out weren’t what they used to be, my friends yawning at eight-thirty, children-tired, or meeting up with their husbands later that night. And then I just got tired of the whole thing, these evenings out with women who were married with kids, who either talk about their kids endlessly (day care / soccer / Music Garden / Chinese lessons / Dora the Explorer) or, worse yet—much worse yet—catch themselves doing that and then realize it has the effect of leaving you out, and then they awkwardly stop, the needle screeching off the album mid-chorus, and there is an unstated (God, I hope it’s unstated) pact not to make Shauna feel worse than she probably already does, and someone forces out a painful segue—“So, Shauna, are you working on any interesting cases?”—and then you have two choices: (1) acknowledge it and say, “It’s okay, it doesn’t make me feel barren and unfulfilled and desperately lonely to hear you talk about your kids and husbands, now what was that you were saying about arts-and-crafts camp?” or (2) let them pity you and tell them about the interesting cases you’re working on.

  And then you get the sense that it would be easier if you weren’t there, and then you realize that they’ve had the same thought, that they sometimes get together without you, some vague reference to lunch at Alexander’s, and they glance at you and say, with a trace of apology, forced casualness, “It was just a last-minute thing after lacrosse practice.” And so you decide it would be easier to hang out with women just like you, also single, also childless, but then you realize they aren’t your best friends, but—but—maybe they can become your best friends, but then you realize that you’re thirty-five and you don’t feel like inventing new best buds at that age, and you find yourself probing them, examining them, wondering, what is it about them, why can’t they find someone, thinking that maybe you can find something in them, some flaw that you have, too, and that if you can just discover that one thing, just that one thing, then suddenly eligible, successful, decent, and handsome men with large penises, who absolutely adore musicals and pinot noir and cunnilingus, will come crawling out of the woodwork competing for your hand in marriage.

  And then it turns out it’s easier to hang out with Jason and Joel while they get drunk and insult each other.

  “The reason she won’t come out with us has nothing to do with her dislike for you,” Jason tells Joel. “She has a trial coming up. How far away?”

  “Less than a month,” I say, feeling a shot of dread. “And you’re going to start on it next week, right?” Trials are a bitch. They can be fun, but the workup sucks. Jason has a lot more trial experience than I do, and he’s a different personality. He reads a file the day before and goes in there and, damn him, kicks the crap out of witnesses. I don’t even enter the courthouse unless I’ve dissected every single angle of every single question.

  My client, Arangold Construction, got into a construction job with the city’s civic auditorium that didn’t end up so well. The project was delayed, there were problems at the site, ultimately the city replaced Arangold, and the new contractor ran up the bill under the guise of time restraints. So now the city is suing Arangold for twenty million dollars. It’s a bet-the-company case. Arangold loses this case and gets hit with a verdict anywhere near the number the city wants, the company goes under. Twenty-two employees lose their jobs.

  “Yeah, sure. And I can stay tonight if you need some help,” Jason says. “It’s not a problem.”

  I look over the overwhelming stacks of paper on the floor in the corner. “Start fresh on Monday,” I say. “I can divide out a chunk of the case, a discrete part, and hand it off to you.”

  “Sure.”

  Marie, our receptionist, pokes her head in the door.

  “There she is!” says Joel. He’d sleep with her, too. He’d sleep with a hermit crab.

  She points to Jason. “Court reporter here to see you,” she says. “Her name’s Alexa?”

  9.

  Jason

  Friday, June 7

  That court reporter from the suppression hearing is standing in my office when I walk in. I remember her. Of course I do. Today she is not dressed for court; she is wearing a blue blouse with frilly sleeves and blue jeans that fit her very snugly, thank you very little.

  “Personal delivery?” I ask.

  “Personal delivery.”

  When it happens with me, it always happens instantly. It doesn’t sneak up on me. It doesn’t bud and slowly blossom within me. It zaps me like I stuck a paper clip in a socket. When I first met my wife, Talia, back at State, and she suggested that we could study together for the econ final, that moment I first locked eyes with her, I couldn’t breathe.

  This isn’t that. I’ll never have that again, what Talia and I shared. But there is something there, lingering between Alexa Himmel and me, something primitive and daring that I can’t quite place. Lust, if you had to assign it a word, but that feels incomplete. It’s more like a connection, something between us that just seems to fit together. I get you, Jason. I’m like you.

  Those penetrating icy-blue eyes, catching and hanging on to mine for just a beat beyond the required eye contact for a professional conversation, tell me I’m not alone. When we first met, I was coming off a tough cross-examination, I was in courtroom mode, I had clients with me—it was more like a bus nearly plastered me, but I narrowly avoided it and moved on with my life, just an after-rush of adrenaline to show for it. But this time it’s just the two of us, and I’m pancaked on the road.

  “You seemed like you were in a hurry to get this,” she says, though I’m sure I didn’t.

  “I was,” I answer, though I wasn’t.

  “Okay,” she says, like the meeting is about to adjourn. She’s taken the first step, after all, a fairly overt one. She came all the way over to my office in person to drop off something that she could have e-mailed. She’s not going to take the next step. This is up to me.

  She hikes her bag over her shoulder. “Have a great weekend,” she says.

  “Hang on a second,” I say, like I’ve just come up with a great idea. I wish I had a line to go along with it. Now I owe you one—how about dinner? At least let me buy you a drink. A big tough Hungarian lad I am, but I get tongue-tied around the ladies.

  “I’m trying to think of a smooth way to ask you on a date,” I say. “Got any ideas?”

  10.

  Jason

  Saturday, June 8

  At a quarter to three in the morning, still staring up at the ceiling in my town house, I finally surrender and pull my laptop over and open it. It’s always on. I’m supposed to properly turn it off to allow for upgrades or updates or up-somethings, but I never do.

  I check out a couple of fitness sites, a marathoner’s site being my favorite, even though it will be a long time before I run another marathon. Still, I have to acknowledge, even with the occasional flare-up, my knee is getting better.

  This is the worst time, the still of night, shadows jumping across the window, the gentle creaks and groans of the town house’s foundation. I’m not so good when I’m left to my own thoughts. A night like this, normally, I’d lace it up and go for a run, no matter the time. I like the city best when I’m alone inside it, when I don’t have to share it, when the streets are naked and peaceful.

  There is something wrong with me, but that something is nothing. There is nothing inside me. I watch one foot move in front of the other every day. I hear my voice arguing to a judge or jurors or reassuring a client. But it’s all nothing, isn’t it? The clients will go to prison, and even if I walk them, even if I find some way to win, they’l
l be back, and sooner or later they’ll find a prison cell like metal drawn to a magnet. Everyone’s chasing after something, everyone wants something from somebody else, but not me.

  There is a tiny earthquake in my stomach. My lips, my mouth, my throat, are dried up, sticky and itchy. I drink from a bottle of water but it doesn’t help. I pop an Altoid and chew it up, then slug some more water. Then I jump to the site for our online newspaper, the Herald, to hear about the latest stupid thing that Mayor Champion has done, when I’m greeted with this breaking-news headline:

  BREAKING: THIRD WOMAN STABBED ON NORTH SIDE

  I pop up in bed and click the link. The stabbing just happened. They don’t know the victim or too many details. Police responded to a call in the 4200 block of North Riverwood Avenue, a woman bleeding out from a stab wound.

  I don’t have James Drinker’s contact information with me at home, on a Friday night that is technically Saturday morning. I may have brought home my notes from our two meetings. I don’t remember. These days I—Well, I don’t remember, anyway.

  Twenty minutes later, I’m drifting again, the slow downhill nod toward sleep. Tomorrow, I think, tomorrow I’ll call James, a warmth spreading over me, while James Drinker sticks a knife into a woman, pulls it out, and winks at me.

  11.

  Shauna

  Saturday, June 8

  I dial Jason’s cell at a quarter past eight. It’s early. He might be sleeping. Before the knee problem, he’d have already completed a twelve-mile run or something crazy, whatever that competitive itch he has that he always needs to scratch.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey.” I cradle my cell in my shoulder as I scoop butter with a knife. Granola and toast for this working girl. Long day ahead at the office, prepping for the Arangold trial. Jason better not fuck me on this trial. Rory Arangold’s already been asking about Jason. He’s going to be there, right? He’s going to cross-examine their expert?