The Last Alibi (A JASON KOLARICH NOVEL)

by David Ellis

  I hope I’m not nobody to you, Jason.

  The last words he ever said to me, face-to-face.

  I pop out of my chair.

  I hope I’m not nobody to you, Jason.

  You’re nobody to me.

  “What?” Lightner asks me.

  “We’ve been looking in the wrong place,” I say. “He’s not someone I prosecuted.”

  “No? Then who is he?”

  “He’s someone I interrogated.”

  “Interr—You mean while you were on Felony Review?”

  “Exactly.” I start pacing. Every assistant county attorney does a stint on Felony Review, where you’re assigned to a police station to approve warrant applications and arrests and, at least back when I was there, to interrogate suspects. It was a wild ride, those eleven months, working three days on, three days off, if you were lucky, working day and night with the detectives and patrolmen, hearing their stories, high-fiving them when there was a solve, making friendships, feeling like part of their team. “It was a line I used during interviews to intimidate suspects. I pulled it out when I needed it. ‘You’re nothing to me.’ ‘You’re nobody to me.’ Y’know, breaking them down.”

  “Right? But . . .”

  I shake out of my funk. “This guy, ‘James’ or whatever, when he came to my office, he repeated that phrase back to me. He said, ‘I hope I’m not nobody to you.’ It’s probably something I once said to him.” I blow out air. “He’s someone I interrogated.”

  Lightner nods. “And you wouldn’t be an attorney of record for something like that, right?”

  “Right,” I say. “I didn’t prosecute this guy. I never filed an appearance because I never stood in a courtroom opposite him. I just handled him at the police station and then dished him off to people more senior than me.” I pin my hair back off my forehead, a show of exasperation handed down from my mother. “How did I not think of this before?”

  “Because it wouldn’t occur to you,” Joel says. “Because it’s like a revolving door on Felony Review, suspects coming in and out and then you wash your hands of it. You probably spent no more than an hour with most of these guys, give or take. One hour, out of a one- or two-year process for them. You forget about them and you assume they forget about you.”

  He’s being charitable, cutting me some slack. He’s not wrong, either, but still this should have occurred to me sooner. These suspects really were blips on the screen to me, and I to them, but that doesn’t mean that something didn’t stick in one of their craws.

  “You must have gotten a confession,” Linda says. “If you stand out to this guy that much, it means you made him talk.”

  I wag my finger at Linda. “You’re right. And then, it’s not necessarily a one- or two-year process. If I got a confession that stuck, his lawyer would probably tell him to take a plea. A confession could close down that case right away.”

  “And then he’d have one and only one prosecutor to thank for his time in prison,” says Joel. “That prosecutor might stick out to him.”

  “I’ll bet you used deception,” Linda says. “That always pisses them off, like they forget about all the shit they really, truly did and focus on how unfair it was that you tricked them into admitting it.”

  She’s right. That’s exactly how it works. And I was the master. I’ll bet I somehow twisted him up and got him to cop to something he hadn’t planned on admitting. There’s more than one way to do that, and I mastered them all.

  “So we forget about Gang Crimes and felony courtrooms, even the misdemeanors, and we focus on Felony Review,” I say. “That’s the good news. Wanna hear the bad news?”

  Lightner already knows the bad news, I think. He gives a solemn nod.

  “I don’t remember any of those interviews,” I say. “I mean, bits and pieces, some memorable moments, but names? No names. That was, what, eight years ago? And we were seventy-two on, seventy-two off back then.”

  “I remember that,” Joel says. “The prosecutors looked like hell by the third day. We’d let them shower in our bathroom and sleep on a roll-down mattress in one of the interview rooms. I don’t know why they had you stay on for seventy-two hours straight.”

  “You were lucky if it was seventy-two,” I remind him. “If we caught a case that was ongoing, we stayed on it. I was once on for six days straight on a kidnapping.”

  Lightner sighs. “The point being, it’s all a blur to you.”

  “Pretty much, yeah. And that’s just the bad news. Here’s the worse news,” I say. “Records. You think it’s hard to track down cases where I filed an appearance and prosecuted someone? Try finding Felony Review records. Forget computers. Back then? We’d be lucky if my name was scribbled at the top of a sworn statement, which would be clipped to a pressboard and thrown into some box. Who knows if those paper records even exist anymore? For closed cases? The appeals exhausted? I’m not sure they exist at all.”

  That takes the air out of the room. Everyone looks fried. I’m sure I do, too.

  “Still, it’s a start,” Joel says. “We started with the most logical step, remember? We looked at violent ex-cons who were released in the last year. We thought we struck out because you didn’t prosecute any of them. But now we can look at them again, right? Maybe you got a confession from one of them.”

  He’s right. We have a fresh start. We’re in the game, at least.

  “This guy has definitely pissed me off,” Joel says. “I’m not letting this go. I’m seeing it through.”

  “Me, too,” says Linda.

  The others join in, too.

  “We’re going to catch this prick,” Linda says. “Nobody sends pizza to my house I didn’t ask for.”

  69.

  Shauna

  Friday, July 19

  Bradley is doing redirect on one of the architects, talking about exciting things like soil samples, and my mind wanders. The jurors’ minds are wandering, too. This is the ninth day of a trial about technicalities and specifications, and it’s been a long week for them. Judge Getty has made noise about getting us out early today to get a start on the weekend, and the reaction was positively celebratory.

  I’ve instructed Bradley that every witness on our side, other than our clients, can be no more than thirty minutes on direct examination. I don’t want the jury to blame us for wasting their time, for being the stereotypical blowhard lawyers. Our evidence is concise, to the point, like our case.

  Still, I am B-O-R-E-D and, knowing that this is the final witness of the day and I’m basically done, my mental machinery grinds to a halt. And my thoughts drift, as they have so often during this trial, to my law partner.

  Under the table, I activate my cell phone, keeping the volume on silent. If Judge Getty saw me, he would string me up. I send a text message to Joel: WTF?

  “WTF” stands for Pardon me, but I’m slightly miffed and require an explanation.

  And I’m more than slightly miffed. Joel’s late on his assignment for me. He promised me yesterday and didn’t deliver. He comes back with a response right away: JUST FINISHED. YOU HAVE SOME FREE TIME? THIS REQUIRES FACE-TO-FACE.

  “Hmph,” I mumble. That doesn’t sound good. I text him back that I expect to be back at my office by four, and I’ll make myself available anytime afterward. I consider asking for a hint, a little preview, but Joel, however boorish he may be, knows one thing, and that’s when to be discreet. He’s decided that this is one of those times.

  Which is why I’m starting to worry.

  70.

  Jason

  Friday, July 19

  I put the finishing touches on an appeal I’m writing for a guy named Taylor Prince, who was caught up in a large seizure of heroin by a joint county-federal task force sixteen months ago. It was a big headline for law enforcement, the arrest of over twenty people on the city’s southwest side. Taylor wasn’t one of the ringleaders—this guy would have trouble leading his own shadow—but he was part of the muscle in the operation.

&nb
sp; Last December, Taylor was convicted and got fifteen years, stiffer than some of his cohorts who took a plea and got single digits. Taylor opted for a trial, but it was against my advice, because no matter how much judges will deny it, they still fiercely impose the “trial tax” on those defendants who make them put twelve people in a box and clog up two or three days’ worth of court time. So the guys actually selling the dope got between seven and nine years; Taylor, who was little more than a security guard, a guy with a gun standing outside on watch, was guilty of the selling, too—thank you, laws of accountability—but then additionally had a gun charge tacked on. So now I’m asking the appellate court to do something they’ll never do—second-guess the trial judge on a sentence for convictions involving drugs and weapons.

  Taylor is no genius and shouldn’t bother applying for sainthood, but he isn’t the worst guy who ever lived, either. He had an assault and battery conviction from three years ago, so he couldn’t get a decent job, and someone came along and said, Stand here all day with a gun and make sure nobody comes in, and we’ll pay you fifty bucks a day, and he took it. He took it because it seemed easy. He took it because fifty bucks a day was $350 a week, almost $18,000 a year, and because it put a roof over his wife and daughter’s heads and food on their table.

  Though ten years my junior, Taylor grew up three blocks from where I lived in Leland Park, went to all the same schools, and started down the same route I was traveling. But Taylor didn’t have football to snatch him out of the quicksand like I did. I could have been that kid.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m still on my way to being that kid, if the last fifteen years of my life have just been an anomaly, an accident, I’ve been playing someone I’m not, and sooner than later I’ll surrender to the gravitational pull down to what I really am at heart, the son of a grifter and alcoholic, a directionless loser.

  A knock at my door. Joel Lightner walks in.

  “Hey.”

  Then Shauna walks in.

  “Hey.”

  This doesn’t feel like a good thing. I smell a lecture. That’s if I’m lucky. If I’m not, it’s an intervention. We love you, Jason. We’re here for you. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

  Shauna closes the door, and I’m thinking, Intervention, not lecture.

  “We’re going to talk,” says Shauna, “and you’re going to sit there and listen. When we’re done, you can tell us to go fuck off if that makes you happy. But you are going to listen.”

  I swivel away from the computer and face them both. I don’t say anything, don’t accept her guidelines or reject them. Joel is fading back a bit, but is clearly with her on this.

  “You know I’ve been concerned about you, and you know I think you have a painkiller addiction. We’ve sort of put that conversation on hold because I’ve been on trial. I don’t feel very good about that—in fact, if you want to know the truth, it tears me up inside—but it is what it is. But I think part of the problem is your girlfriend, Alexa. I think she’s enabling you. I think she’s scary, since I’m being honest. And that’s why I asked Joel to do me a personal favor and perform a background check on her.”

  “You . . .” I look at her, then at Joel, with whom I recently spent a rather eventful evening, and yet I don’t recall this subject coming up.

  “Jason,” he says, unapologetic, “last August, just eleven months ago, Alexa Himmel was the subject of an order of protection in Medina County in Ohio. A husband and wife,” he says, peeking at a piece of paper he’s holding, “Brian and Betsy Stermer sought an OP against her and got it. They said she was stalking Brian and demanding a sexual relationship from Brian and was physically threatening them and their children.”

  “Sorry,” I say, “I’m still at the part where the two of you are doing criminal backgrounds on my girlfriend behind my back.”

  “Last October, she violated the OP,” he goes on, undaunted. “She showed up on his front doorstep one day and she had a knife. She was arrested and convicted of contempt of court and, as far as I can tell, was damn lucky she didn’t get charged with something a lot worse.”

  “If it was as bad as you’re saying,” I reply, “she would have been convicted of something a lot worse.”

  “In December, the Stermers went back to court to modify the restraining order, because it kept her one hundred feet from them, and they said she was standing just outside the hundred-foot boundary, on a public sidewalk down the street from their house, for hours at a time. She would wave to them. She had binoculars. Sometimes she would hold up signs. They said it was causing the entire family extreme emotional distress.”

  “Sounds like legalese,” I say. “Let me guess. They had a lot of money and fancy lawyers.”

  “She was arrested again last February,” Joel says. “She showed up at Dr. Stermer’s radiology office. She burst into his office and exposed herself to him. She was charged with criminal trespass, criminal contempt, stalking, and public indecency.”

  I turn my head away, toward the window.

  “She entered into a plea bargain. The Stermers agreed to drop the charges if she would leave the state. And she agreed. She left the state. And she moved here.”

  “And met you,” says Shauna.

  I stand up. “Guys, it was really great of you to stop by. Thanks for the information, and I’ll take it from here.”

  “Jason,” says Shauna, “if you’d lower your defenses for one minute, you’d see that this is serious. I take it you didn’t know any of this? I mean, what do you even know about her?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “C’mon, Jase.” Lightner drops his head a notch. “You know it’s a real question.”

  “She was looking for you,” Shauna says. “Not you, specifically, but someone like you. When did you meet? May? June? By then, you’d started dropping weight and not sleeping and looking like . . . like you look now. Like a drug addict in a nice suit. You were just what she was looking for, Jason, don’t you see that? Someone who was struggling. The next person she could latch on to. But this time, someone who needed her. Someone who wouldn’t reject her.”

  “You know what?” I throw up my arms. “I wasn’t struggling, I’m not struggling, I don’t ‘need’ anybody, and by the way, fuck you, Shauna.”

  “And you’re protecting her because she makes you feel nice and warm and fuzzy all over about your drug addiction,” Shauna says, gaining steam now. “She’s manipulating the shit out of you, and you don’t even know it. Or worse yet, you do, but you don’t care.”

  “Dr. Freud over here.” I gesture toward her. “A lawyer and a shrink.”

  Shauna keeps her stare on me. I know that stare. I’ve seen that stare a thousand times. She knows she’s right, regardless of whether she is or not.

  “Listen, you don’t know her like I do,” I say. “If she’s a little intense when it comes to me, it’s probably because she doesn’t have any family anymore. Her parents are deceased, and she doesn’t have siblings. So yeah, she finds someone she cares about, she gets intense about it.”

  Joel and Shauna look at each other.

  “What are you talking about?” Joel says.

  “She’s an only child, and her parents passed away.”

  “Oh, Jason,” Shauna says.

  Joel pinches the bridge of his nose. “She’s not an only child, Jason. She has a brother. And he lives here in town.”

  71.

  Jason

  Sunday, July 21

  It’s near eleven in the morning. My eyes are heavy, my vision hazy; I fought the typical demon battles during the night, blood and fangs and cries of terror. Given the weekend, I kept up the broken-sleep pattern into the late morning, with a few doses of those yummy Altoids thrown in to lubricate the machinery.

  I hate that I’m sleeping when there’s so much to do, but the truth is that there’s so little I can do. If running around the city would help me catch our killer, I’d do it. If standing on my hea
d would do it, I’d be flipping upside down right now. I’ve racked my brain repeatedly to come up with names of suspects with whom I sat in a room and secured a confession, but if those names are out there somewhere in the netherworld of my brain, I haven’t found them, and pushing myself toward them seems to have the effect of pushing them away, like reaching into the back of a cabinet and contacting the thing you want just enough to move it completely out of your reach. It’s the worst kind of frustrating, this directionless angst.

  I know I’m not well, and that a lot of what Shauna said is true. I know it the most when I’m in bed, either drifting to sleep or first awakening, when my guard is down, my justifications and rationalizations not fully engaged. Of course I’m not doing well. Of course I have to change things. But now’s not the time. I can’t spend time on pulling myself away from these pills while I’m trying to catch “James Drinker.”

  Now’s not the time has become very good friends lately with I don’t have a problem. They trade off hours, one of them always on call inside my brain.

  Alexa’s just getting out of the shower, wrapped in a bathrobe that is way too big for her, wiping a circle in the mirror out of the steam and brushing her hair. “Are you okay?” she calls back.

  “I’m fine,” I say. I’m fine. I’m all good. I don’t have a problem. And even if I did, now’s not the time to deal with it.

  I’ve avoided a complicated conversation with Alexa. Haven’t found the right time yet to ask her about the things Joel and Shauna disclosed to me. I’ve never been one for confrontation, which I fully realize is ironic given that the two things I’ve done best in my life—playing wide receiver on the gridiron and playing a lawyer in a courtroom—both involve conflict. But that’s when you flip on a switch, when you’re doing a job, when the people with whom you’re butting heads aren’t your friends and would just as surely knock you on your ass as you’re trying to knock them on theirs.