The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  Therein was the irony. It was after I was left with an empty house, and basically fell apart, that I left the law firm that had cost me such precious time with my wife and daughter.

  “I mean, there we was, watching the news, and I see you on there, and I told everyone, I knew that guy, we were—we used to be—”

  Sammy didn’t complete the sentence. We both sensed the awkwardness. Used to be. Used to spend every waking moment together. Used to be so close that we called each other brother.

  “So—how’s Pete?” he asked, changing the subject.

  My brother Pete, five years my junior, lives in the city like me. He’s hit a bump or two along the way, struggled with drugs a little, but he’s a good egg, and I think he’s on a straight course right now. Then again, I’m not exactly one to judge.

  “You know my mom passed,” I said.

  “Yeah, heard that. Heard that.” He gestured at me without looking in my direction. “Jack’s still”—he gestured with his head—“y’know—”

  “Inside, yeah.” He was talking about my father. Sammy and I referred to Jack by his first name behind his back, a minor rebellion. My father’s fourth strike came about three years ago. He should probably be good for parole within the next few years, but I haven’t done the math and don’t plan to do so.

  “You married?” he asked me. He smiled. “Bet you got a hot wife, right?”

  “Had one,” I said. It wasn’t fun to acknowledge it, but in an odd way it felt good to pass on some misfortune of my own to the man who had spent much of his adult life in prison, and who could well be on the way to many more years at the same address. Maybe it leveled the field ever so slightly.

  Sammy stubbed out his cigarette and grew quiet. I thought to ask him why he took so long to contact me—he’d been arrested almost a year ago and he waited until a month out from trial to get in touch with me. But it wasn’t hard to imagine his reluctance. Sammy was always fiercely proud, and it was probably killing him to come to me for help.

  “This is the guy who killed Audrey,” Sammy said. “You know that, right?”

  “I know, Sam.”

  “This asshole deserved to die. Right?”

  “Right,” I agreed. It felt like he was looking for justification, which meant that he was acknowledging that he had killed Griffin Perlini. But I didn’t push the subject. Defense attorneys never do. And I was his attorney first, friend second—if I’d be his attorney at all.

  “So,” Sammy said, “can you help me?”

  It was a question I literally couldn’t answer, which, I suppose, was an answer in itself. I’d been back on my feet for six weeks, and I’d gotten some good results for some clients, but this was a first-degree homicide with all kinds of complications and little time to prepare. The cases I’d handled were mostly bench trials with only a witness or two, and the truth was, I was mostly winging it, hoping to take advantage of less experienced prosecutors and looking for a lucky break here or there with a missing witness or lost documents. I could do that. That was easy. This case would require dedication, consistency, and full work days, and the price of fucking it up would be my old friend Sammy Cutler spending his life in jail.

  So of course I said, “Sure, Sammy,” and shook his hand.

  6

  HALF PAST THREE in the morning. We navigated the bar, my brother and I, a place that opened six months ago, a series of rooms belowground, like a trendy coal mine, everything bathed in artificial blue light, the bass thumping like a migraine through the club, smoke and cologne and alcohol reaching a gag in my throat as beautiful people glided past us, trying their best to look intriguing and glamorous.

  Pete wasn’t as drunk as I was because he actually gave a shit about making an impression. He was looking to meet someone, which put him in company with the other five hundred people crammed into this fire-code violation. Pete was five years younger; he drew the longer straw in the charm and looks department, while I got the athleticism and ambition.

  “Two o’clock,” he said, turning back to me in what passed for a whisper among the pandemonium, which meant it was just short of screaming into my ear.

  I started to correct him when I realized he wasn’t informing me of the hour but directing me through the stampede to a gaggle of young ladies sitting around a small circular high table. I stifled an objection, because I could hardly expect Pete not to be looking. He was young, handsome, and single. Why the hell shouldn’t he be hitting on women?

  And what had remained unspoken these last few months was that, while Pete was on the make and I was anything but, it was actually my idea to kill most of these nights out at the clubs. I still hadn’t grown comfortable spending time in the house where Talia and Emily and I lived together, nor could I bring myself to sell the place.

  So I found myself playing wingman as Pete made his approach. By the time I was close enough to hear what little brother was saying, two gals were already laughing. The kid had a gift for it, something he got from our dad. Then again, these women seemed like their inhibitions had been loosened by alcohol a good three or four hours ago. There were four of them, young and shapely, in revealing outfits, their hair done up. Two were white, one Asian and one African American. They looked like they came out of a sitcom on NBC.

  “Which one of you is Phoebe?” I asked, but none of them could hear me.

  “This is Jason,” Pete said. “My brother.”

  They seemed to think that was cute, at least the Asian one did. They seemed generally interested in Pete’s banter, though their eyes moved about the room, too, scoping the place for other men. Or maybe women. I know if I were a female, I’d be a lesbian.

  “Be right back,” Pete said. “Gotta take a leak.”

  I gave Pete a look. I didn’t typically inquire of my brother’s scatological needs, but Pete had a history here. Before I could say anything to him, things turned even worse: the music changed to that song by Fergie, not the Dutchess of York, but the one who is booty-licious or something like that. And I didn’t think I could feel worse.

  “What do you do?”

  The good thing about intoxication is I can get lost for a while, but the downside is that Talia always finds me again, and this is when it’s the worst, when the defenses are down, the emotions the rawest. I heard, in my head, that little vocalization Emily used to make, once she hit three months, something between a moan and a squeal, capping off at a delightful, high-pitched squeak—

  “What do you do?”

  I directed back to one of the white girls, who was leaning over the table at me. Based on her outfit and posture, it seemed important to her that I take note of her cleavage, so I made a point of not doing so.

  “I’m a fortune-teller,” I answered.

  “You are not.”

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  I caught eyes with a woman up near the bar, a woman in a green dress, the Lady in Green, who broke eye contact in an easy way, as if she hadn’t been looking at me. I suppose I should have been flattered but it made me feel uneasy, for some reason. Or maybe it was the five vodkas I had drunk. I pondered for the twentieth time tonight what I was still doing here, why I had come here to begin with, why I still feared God.

  I also wondered who had hired me to defend Sammy Cutler.

  “—a doctor or a lawyer or something.”

  I watched the Lady in Green’s eyes tour the bar again as she waited for her drink. She had a narrow, sculpted face. Her head angled upward, revealing a vulnerability that belied her confident appearance.

  “I’m a police detective,” I told the lady trying to converse with me. I say trying because she’d had more to drink than I had.

  “A cop.” She said it like a cuss word. Lot of people feel that way about our city’s finest. Sometimes I’m one of them.

  Now I had the attention of the entire tribe of women at the table. What kinds of cases did I handle? Did I ever shoot someone?

  “You don’t seem like a cop. You
seem like a Wall Street banker.” This from the black woman, or I guess I’m supposed to say African American, but she had a British accent so did that make her English American? African British? I thought of asking her but I would need a bullhorn to communicate with her across the table, and no matter how I tried to phrase the question it would probably sound politically incorrect. Why bother? Why bother with any of this?

  “When I was a boy,” I said, “my parents were killed in front of me by an armed robber. I swore, that day, that I would devote my life to fighting crime.”

  Pete returned from the bathroom, wearing an enthusiastic grin, rejoining the conversation with renewed vigor. I doubted that taking a piss could have put him in that good a mood. I trained my stare on him and he knew it, but he avoided my look and the question it raised.

  “Jason’s a lawyer,” Pete chimed in. “One of the best in the city.”

  “That explains how he lies so easily.”

  I laughed, for the only time that night. I looked back at the Lady in Green who, yes, was checking me out again. The logical part of my brain, when it was functioning, told me that at some point in my life I would be interested in women again, but it seemed beyond comprehension thus far.

  I watched Pete work the ladies. The kid had been through some rough patches. He got it a lot worse at home than I did, growing up. My father could look you in the eye and convince you he was heir to the British throne, but in his soul he was not an enlightened man. He was bitter and temperamental and opted, instead of a psychiatrist’s couch, to relieve tension by taking swats at his boys. I went through a pretty good spell of it myself, though I spent more time working up a sweat dodging my father’s punches than actually receiving them. I would juke right, fake left, hit the floor, anything to make him miss, only heightening his drunken rage, but in the end usually exhausting him, until he finally turned his ire on an inanimate object like my bedroom door, sometimes a chair. The wall of my bedroom looked like a Beirut stronghold.

  Looking back, it was probably comical, my father swatting at air, cursing me out, while I danced around him or crawled beneath him. I probably should have hung one of those punching bags in my room. My dad could have gotten in a pretty good workout, maybe even turned pro on the welterweight circuit. But he wouldn’t have enjoyed people hitting back.

  Once I sprouted up in height, and especially once I started making a name for myself on the gridiron, my dad basically left me alone. Something in the acclaim I received on the football field, and throughout the community, gave me immunity within the confines of our house. I figure, my father couldn’t put me down when everybody else was propping me up, so he gave it a rest.

  Either that or he paid attention that one night when I actually swung back. I always wondered if he had even remembered the punch the next day, waking up with a hangover and a shiner under his left eye, which he rightly could have chalked up to another night at the office in his line of work. That was right around the time the abuse stopped, as it happened, but I never really knew if he remembered his kid popping him, and it didn’t seem like polite dinner conversation. One of the many unspoken things that festered among our family.

  There was something ironic in the ability I had to make defensive backs miss in the open field, each of them my drunken father lunging at me and finding air. I have a distinct memory, my junior year of high school, taking a screen pass sixty yards or so for a touchdown, dodging two or three defenders in the process, then standing in the end zone and looking up in the stands at my family. My mother and Pete were there, as always, but that particular time so was my father, though I don’t remember him clapping. What I do remember is wondering, at that moment, looking up into the stadium lights on a cool Friday night, several hundred fans screaming with enthusiasm, what my father was thinking and having no idea. My best guess was that my father resented me at that moment.

  In any event, when I was no longer a convenient target, Pete bore the brunt of our father’s abuse. He was younger but also smaller and more docile. He wasn’t a fighter, and he wouldn’t avoid my father. He took it, every time. I would listen to it, lying awake, my head inches off the pillow, the sickening sound of open-handed slaps and closed-fist punches, Pete’s muted groans. I did nothing to stop it. To this day, I can’t put my finger on why. No matter how much I hated him, no matter how much I disre spected him, and even when I stopped fearing him, he was still my father.

  Pete and I never really discussed it. I broached the topic a time or two, but he always deflected it. As a child myself, I took it as survival instinct, a coping mechanism, but as an adult I can’t imagine what it did to him. I do know he’s had trouble committing to an occupation (three jobs in four years, currently in pharmaceutical sales) and to a woman (three in four months), and he gambles and parties way too much. It doesn’t take Freud to see a connection.

  It pained me to watch him at work here, reminding me as he did of our father. A part of me wanted to shake him, because he had all the charm of our dear daddy but none of the underlying malice. He could put up an impressive front, no question, especially in a setting like this, entertaining a flock of women. And it wasn’t insincere. There was a big heart in there. This guy basically rescued me after everything happened with Talia and Emily. Maybe it helped him, in a way, looking out for me instead of the other way around, over these last few months.

  Now, here he was, back to sneaking cocaine in the bathroom of a nightclub. He’d never been an addict, per se, at least as far as I knew, but how far removed from addiction could he be? I hadn’t been in a position to know, not these last few months.

  I felt a surge of nausea, thanks to the vodka and the mixture of smoke and expensive perfume in the air. I excused myself for the bathroom. I made several wrong turns through the mosh pit of people, then I felt nauseated again and decided to get some fresh air. I didn’t see the point in entertaining these women any longer, assuming they had been amused at any point. I certainly wasn’t entertaining myself.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, and I only lived twenty minutes away, so I decided to hoof it. I like the city in predawn, the world in transition, decelerating from the night’s sins, the first glimmer of orange-red warming the sky after the city has recharged its batteries. Plus the streets are pretty much empty, so I don’t have to talk to anyone.

  I was thinking about Pete, and about Talia and Emily, when I passed the window of an all-night diner populated with drunken revelers and college kids and law students taking a break during all-night cramming sessions. Good times. Don’t grow up, I silently warned them.

  As I stopped at the diner’s window, I felt something subtle change, not so much a sound but the absence of one, a shift in the cacophony of white noise behind me. Nothing I could pinpoint, just a sense that as I had stopped walking, someone behind me had stopped, too.

  I tried to use the window’s reflection, looking at an angle to the street behind me, but it was hard to make out anything more than a solitary figure. I was mildly curious, sure, but mostly I just wanted to make sure nobody was closing the distance. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, and I didn’t feel like canceling all my credit cards and getting a new driver’s license, or breaking my hand on someone’s face.

  I started onward again toward my house, listening intently, trying to soften my own footfalls so I could hear those of someone else, but not looking behind me again. From what I could tell, I was being followed, but whoever it was had no intention of making a move on me. I didn’t know if this was someone looking for an easy mark but ultimately deciding I didn’t fit the bill, or someone who never had any intention of approaching, who was following me for some other reason. If I’d had anything left to fear in this world, I might have let it keep me up at night. As it was, I made sure to lock my door, set the house alarm, and let the whole thing bother me for a good thirty seconds, until exhaustion and intoxication allowed me a couple hours of sleep in a cold, empty bed.

  7

&nbs
p; I WOKE UP at eight o’clock and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom for about half an hour. This constituted tremendous progress, as there was a time when I’d required at least two hours’ examination of the plaster and that one stain on the ceiling from a champagne cork when Talia and I celebrated our third anniversary, before leaving the bed.

  Things to do, I had things to do. I had a client coming and I had to get started on Sammy’s case. This would be the second day in a row that I would take a shower.

  I got to my office at ten. I share space with an old friend, Shauna Tasker. We have a corner space and double up on a secretary/receptionist. We are, technically, two separate law firms, but we help each other out whenever need be.

  Shauna was sitting in our conference room as I passed. We’ve been friends since back in high school. She was a prosecutor for a couple years, like me, but she left the office sooner, moving to a silk-stocking law firm until she got tired of the senior partner putting his hand on her knee.

  I put my hand on her knee a time or two, myself, back in high school, but that was a long time ago. We became pals afterward, and at State—where she went on merit and graduated cum laude, while I went on an athletic scholarship—she became one of my closest friends. She’s petite and shapely, on the surface a real feminina, but she could always drink me under the table, and when you got her going, she could cuss like a truck driver.

  After everything happened with Talia and Emily, and I quit my law firm and spent almost three months holed up in my house, Shauna cajoled me into renting space from her and hanging a shingle of my own. I thought of putting ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK on that sign but settled on LAW OFFICES OF JASON KOLARICH.

  “Hey.” Shauna had her feet up on the long walnut desk, reading over some complicated transaction. Shauna still did trial work but when she’d left her law firm, she took with her a client that shoots her transactional work, too. When you’re a solo practitioner, you become a jack-of-all-trades, and Shauna was a fast learner. “Get any sleep, dear?”