The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  “Sure. Yeah. We’ll get the whole thing over to you tomorrow, after the judge lets you in.”

  Tomorrow, I would appear before Judge Kathleen Poker and formally substitute into the case for Patrick Oleari. I was looking forward to a closer inspection of the entire file.

  “Hey, not for nothin’.” Oleari nodded at me. “This is a long way from defending politicians in federal court.”

  Apparently, Oleari had followed the Almundo case, too. The federal government doesn’t lose too often, and a lot of people took note. He probably figured I was still at my former, blue-chip law firm. I didn’t have the stomach to correct him and explain myself. Oleari was wondering what in the name of Clarence Darrow I was doing representing Sammy Cutler.

  “We have history, Sammy and me,” I explained. I thanked him and left.

  I had an idea about how I would get Griffin Perlini’s sordid life before the jury. It was a long shot, and I only had four weeks to pull it off, but it was the only chance we had.

  I would need help. I would need a private investigator. A prayer wouldn’t hurt, either, if I still believed in that crap.

  I drove back to my office in silence. I thought about old times, back in the day, Leland Park. I don’t remember life before Sammy. He was my first friend and my best friend. Both of our mothers worked part-time and they switched off baby-sitting chores, so whether it was my house or his, we were together from the time we were infants with one of the moms watching us. I made little distinction between his house and mine. If we couldn’t find a toy or a sock or a pack of Crayolas, the first order of business was not a search of my bedroom but a trip next door. I ate half my meals next door. I shit in half my diapers next door.

  Sammy and I against the world, it felt like, though it was unspoken. People put us together, Fric and Frac, whatever we did, as if we were twins. My first fight, in kindergarten no less, I didn’t even throw the first punch; Sammy did, coming out of nowhere and popping Joe Kinzley in the kisser after he’d pushed me.

  We were never apart, and it felt like we’d never be apart.

  No one would have mistaken Sammy Cutler and Jason Kolarich for Boy Scouts. We were poor, and we took some liberties with the law. Shop-lifting was our favored method, from candy bars and baseball cards to jewelry and clothes at department stores that we would boost with our friendly neighborhood fence, a drop-out named Ice who paid fifty cents on the dollar. We started smoking dope when we were thirteen and then started selling it, too, which supplemented our jobs at the grocery store. Man, were we punks. We had no respect for anything or anyone. We committed petty offenses just for the hell of it, tossing rocks through windows, spray-painting garage doors, keying nice cars that made the mistake of parking in our neighborhood. We were scraping for whatever we could, causing a little unnecessary ruckus for fun, and surviving life at home.

  When I was a freshman at Bonaventure, I was on the road to nowhere. I was able to discern, by that stage of my life, that I had something going for me in the brains department, but I saw no reason to apply myself. College wasn’t a consideration. Maybe I had listened too closely to my father, who didn’t have a favorable opinion of my present or future. It was in gym class, of all places, that my life turned around, a wayward pass thrown in a flag football game that, for some reason, I felt the urge to chase down, ultimately grabbing the ball with one hand outstretched, catching not only the pigskin but the attention of the varsity football coach. It was like something out of a movie. What’s your name, kid? he asked me. I knew who he was. Everyone knew Coach Fox. If you were me, if you were one of the kids who didn’t fit in, who smoked weed off-campus and blew off homework and generally avoided any school-sponsored event, you thought Coach Emory Fox was the Antichrist.

  Payton, I told him. Walter Payton.

  Yeah, okay, Walter Payton. I want you right here, on the practice field, after school.

  I don’t know why I complied. It would have been more in character for a smart guy like me to blow it off. But I showed up, and he put me through the paces. I stood there, with the varsity quarterback, Patrick Gillis, directing me to run patterns and hurling the ball at me while one of the defensive backs tried vainly to shadow me. It felt as natural as breathing, hunting that football through the air, feeling it into my hands, tucking it in and running away from everything.

  Sammy laughed when I told him where I’d been. They want me to come out, I told him. He said he wants me to play on varsity. Sammy searched my face, seemingly waiting for the punch line. You’re gonna play on the fucking football team, Koke?

  I read something in his eyes, disappointment, in some sense a feeling of betrayal, when I told him that yes, I was going out for the football team.

  YOU OWE ME, Koke. Sammy’s words to me a couple of hours ago, words he’d never said back then.

  I rubbed my eyes and sighed. I had four weeks to pay my debt. I had four weeks to prove that Griffin Perlini did, in fact, abduct and murder Sammy’s sister, Audrey.

  This week, for the first time in twenty years, I would go home.

  12

  THE PROSECUTOR on the Cutler case was Lester Mapp. I didn’t know him, but I’d looked him up on the Internet last night. He’d been a federal prosecutor for six years and then went into private practice with Howser, Gregg, a predominantly African-American law firm that practiced criminal defense. Two years back, he’d been recruited by the newly elected county attorney, a black alderman named Damien Sands. Sands had elevated a number of African Americans to prominent positions in the office. I’d heard some old-timers around the office throw around words like affirmative action, but I didn’t buy it, personally. I had little doubt that a number of minorities had been denied rightful promotion over the years, and besides, in my mind, to the victor went the spoils. You work in an office run by elected politicos, don’t expect fair. You don’t like it, there’s the door.

  Besides, I didn’t have much time for the racial thing. I dislike everyone equally.

  The judge on our case was the honorable Kathleen Poker. She’d assumed the bench after a career as a prosecutor—find me a criminal court judge who hadn’t—and was generally considered tough but fair. I’d never had a case in front of her but, based on her reputation, she was a relatively good draw.

  I sat in the courtroom among the myriad of criminal defense attorneys waiting for the call. It was not, by and large, an impressive bunch. These are not the lawyers you see on television, the thousand-dollar suits and trendy haircuts, the passionate crusaders. These are guys and gals who work for a living. They take their money up front. If they’re good, they only lose about ninety percent of the time. They don’t like their clients and they have trained themselves not to care too much, else they will never again enjoy a decent night’s sleep. And when the money runs out, so do they, or they’d go broke. They do not have the benefit of an armada of young lawyers performing research and investigation. They have the cards stacked overwhelmingly against them and they know it. They know how to cross-examine a witness but have far less experience in directing their own clients on the stand, because most of their clients take Five. They drink their Maalox from the bottle and tell themselves, every day, that they are playing a necessary role in the criminal justice system.

  Other than that, it’s a great job.

  We got called near the beginning, because our motion was routine. Judge Poker, looking rather austere with gray-brushed hair, peered over her glasses down at me. “Mr. Kolarich, you are aware of the October 29 trial date? Less than a month away?”

  “I am, Judge. We’ll be ready.”

  She held her look on me a long moment, then looked over at the prosecutor, Lester Mapp.

  “No objection,” Mapp said. He was probably thrilled that I’d be playing catch-up. Presumably, he’d expected me to ask for an additional six months.

  She smirked at the prosecutor’s feigned graciousness, delivered a little too eagerly. I decided then that I liked her, and I could make her like me, i
f I were so inclined. “Granted,” she said, and two minutes later, Mapp and I were leaving the courtroom together.

  It was my first chance to size him up. He dressed like a guy who’d spent some time in the high-end private sector, dressed in an Italian suit with a stylish yellow silk tie. All in all, he was an impressive-looking chap and, from the way he carried himself, I figured it might be the one thing that he and I would agree on.

  He shook my hand and gave me a wide smile. “Great to see ya,” he said, though we’d never met previously. He was way too polished for my liking, but I suspected he would be formidable in court. “You got everything from the PD?”

  “He’s sending it over today,” I said.

  We stopped at the elevator.

  “Ready for trial, are you?” His tone suggested that he didn’t buy it.

  I figured I’d help him down the road he was already traveling. “Hey, I told Cutler, he’s crazy if he’s going to trial on this.”

  He smiled again, predatory eyes appraising me. I wanted him to think that I was planning on pleading this out. I wanted him complacent, sure of himself. I wanted to be the farthest thing from a threat to him.

  “Well, hey, you always got that black guy running from the building,” he said, palming my arm before heading into the elevator.

  YOU DON’T INQUIRE, not when you’re a self-absorbed, seven-year-old kid. Something wakes you up, a familiar noise. Then you pinpoint the sound, a window frame sliding up. A moment of terror, filling your chest with dread, until you open your eyes and look at your own window on the second floor and realize it’s not yours. You look through your own open window, through the screen, and you listen, but you don’t inquire. You hear some more noises, rustling. Maybe you could identify that sound, too, but you don’t try; you just hear things happening. Later you will realize it, of course, the sound of someone crawling through a window. The sounds subside, you’re lost in your own world, suffused with drowsiness, and your face eases back into the cool pillow. Maybe you drift off a moment until you hear it again, those same rustling sounds, but then there is urgency to the movements, and that sound—the sound of footsteps running on grass—you have no trouble identifying.

  But you’re a kid. You don’t place it in context. It feels wrong, yes, but you don’t confront it. Finally, you get out of bed, tentatively, and move to your window. It’s probably no accident that you waited until the running footsteps have faded before you look. You look down into the window next door, into the bedroom of Audrey Cutler, Sammy’s sister, where the window is open, the curtain is dancing in the light wind.

  You return to bed. It feels like you have drifted off to sleep. You lose track of time again, because it doesn’t register at first; it takes you a moment before your head jerks up again, at the sound of Sammy’s mother wailing out, a horrifying shriek.

  Later, you will say you didn’t hear anything, that you were asleep. No one expects anything different of you. It’s not like you could help them out, anyway. You didn’t see the man who abducted Audrey. Still, you always wonder: Could you have done something?

  I felt my heartbeat kick up a gear as I saw the sign for Leland Park. The old neighborhood looked just that—old. I had to attribute that, in part, to the mere fact of my own maturity, returning to your roots, but Leland Park looked a lot worse for the wear. I had expected change, something different, and found surprise in the absence of change. The houses were the same, aged a couple of decades, well-worn bungalows and the occasional board-up. This wasn’t one of the neighborhoods in the city that was attracting new construction; this was a neighborhood people were leaving.

  I turned onto my old street, braking for a young black kid who chased a rubber football into the street. Now that was different. My neighborhood had been all-white; the folks had an unwritten rule about it: You didn’t sell your house to blacks. I’d heard of a lawsuit filed about ten years ago, a claim of racial steering brought against the real estate agents and some of the residents, which apparently had succeeded.

  I pulled up to the fourth house from the corner of Graynor and 47th. The house I grew up in was a two-story house with siding, a small porch of rock and a gravel driveway. All of that was still true, but the siding was torn on each side and now there was a porch swing. The half-acre lot looked smaller than I’d remembered it.

  I didn’t feel anything. I saw my mother on the front porch, calling me in for dinner; my father drinking a Coors while he fussed over his Chevy on the driveway; my brother Pete running around in circles on our small front yard; Sammy coming to my front door for the walk to school. But it didn’t register in any way. Nothing. My emotions had run daily marathons for months and needed a rest.

  Next door was Sammy’s old house. A German shepherd was barking at me from a chain-link fence in the backyard. I looked at the window on the side of the house and pictured Griffin Perlini carrying little Audrey out of the house. Our neighbor down the street, Mrs. Thomas, had seen it happen from her bedroom window, watched them run down Graynor, turning right down 47th. Other than Perlini, Mrs. Thomas was the last to see Audrey Cutler. She hadn’t known what she was watching, of course. She was a middle-aged widow looking down the street, the distance of a football field, at a figure running awkwardly, hunched over, without pumping his arms. She hadn’t realized that the reason he couldn’t use his arms was that he was carrying a two-year-old girl.

  I remember the next morning, Mrs. Thomas hugging Sammy’s mother, trembling uncontrollably, apologizing for not having done more. What could she have done?

  I wondered if Mrs. Thomas was still alive. It was possible. It was less possible that I was going to prove that Griffin Perlini killed Audrey Cutler.

  I drove on, turning on 47th and heading six blocks west, then three blocks south, then two more blocks west. The house was in the middle of the street, a ranch-style with a roof that was openly suffering, old vinyl siding, and a neglected lawn. I’d passed the house several times, more as a curiosity than anything else. I’d never gone in or thought of going in. I’d thought of a few other things, like putting a few bullet holes through the windows, but as a teen I never did anything more than pass by the home of Griffin Perlini and stare.

  An elderly woman stepped out onto the porch and took the mail from the slot. I found myself getting out of my car and approaching. I caught the woman’s attention, and she didn’t seem concerned. This wasn’t a nice neighborhood, but I was in courtroom attire and I didn’t pose any visible threat to her.

  “Mrs. Perlini?” I asked, taking a wild shot. Griffin Perlini hadn’t lived with his mother at the time of Audrey’s abduction, and I had no idea what had happened to the house afterward.

  The woman didn’t respond, but she opened herself up toward me, receptive to my question. Had Griffin Perlini’s mother moved into this home after he left?

  “Mrs. Perlini?” I asked again, as I slowly approached the porch.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was weak, befitting her small frame. She was wearing a light sweater and gray pants that perfectly matched her long hair.

  Wow. I’d lucked out. This woman was Griffin Perlini’s mother.

  “Mrs. Perlini.” I stopped short of the porch. “My name is Jason Kolarich.” I gestured behind me. “I grew up around here.”

  “Oh.” Her voice softened, but she didn’t smile. “You knew—did you know—”

  “Griffin? No, ma’am. I mean—no. But that is why I’m here.”

  Her face moved into a full-scale frown. She kept her composure, watching me and letting silence fill in the blanks.

  “I’m a lawyer, Mrs. Perlini. I’m defending Sammy Cutler.”

  She nodded, as if somehow she suspected as much. I could have predicted any number of reactions, but she seemed to accept me as if I’d said I was selling something she knew she had to buy but didn’t particularly want to.

  She lowered her head, as if she was speaking in confidence. “You knew the Cutlers?”

  “I lived next do
or.”

  “I see.” Her gaze drifted off, over my head, beyond me. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her, everything her son became, everything he’d done.

  “You’ll want to come in, then.” Mrs. Perlini walked into her house. I took the steps up and opened a flimsy screen door. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was hoping to accomplish. This whole thing had been a lark, and now I was about to have a conversation with Griffin Perlini’s mother.

  I sat down on a flimsy couch while I listened to her toil in the kitchen. The clinking sounds told me she was making coffee. I didn’t want coffee, but I wanted anything that would elongate this conversation.

  The place was drab but well-kept. The walls were painted lime green and were covered with photographs, in some of which I recognized Griffin, but it was clear that there were several children in the family. A good-sized crucifix was prominently centered.

  Five minutes later, Mrs. Perlini was placing a cup of weak-smelling coffee in front of me. She sat in a rocking chair across from where I sat and held her cup of coffee in her lap. She didn’t seem in a hurry to take the lead, but as soon as I cleared my throat and started up, she chimed in.

  She asked me, “Do you think what he did was justified?”

  I assumed she was referring to what Sammy did, killing her son. “Do you want me to answer that?”

  “I suppose not.” She studied her coffee cup but didn’t drink it.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Do I think it was justified?” She thought about that a moment. “I suppose from his perspective—” She struggled with her answer. “Your first instinct is to protect your children.”

  “Sure.”

  “But when your child’s sickness hurts other people—innocent children—well, it allows you to see more than one perspective.”