The Hidden Man

by David Ellis

  I looked again at the gold crucifix on the wall. This woman must have spent a good deal of time conversing with the Almighty. You chalk it up to a sickness, I imagine, like she’d said. It’s not my fault. It’s nothing I did. My son was ill. But do you believe that? Is there a part of you that thinks back, that second-guesses, that wonders if you’d done something differently—

  “I have to prove that your son killed Audrey Cutler,” I said. “And I’m wondering if you can help me with that.”

  She closed her eyes and whispered something to herself. I had the sense she was praying. For some reason, I felt a rush of anger. I’d had a few go-rounds with the Almighty myself, but it hadn’t helped any. I tried cursing Him for what happened to Talia and Emily, but the conversation always ended with the blame stopping at my doorstep. I surely didn’t blame God for their deaths. But I didn’t find comfort, either, and I found myself back to my childhood bouts with religion and logic. Faith, by definition, is the absence of proof, and as a logician, a lawyer trained in linear thinking, I struggled to make sense of a line of logic that had no end.

  My family was dead, and there was nothing upstairs that could explain why. The truth was, I was afraid not to believe, afraid of being left off the guest list when my time came, but if push came to shove, if I really challenged myself with a focused question, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know if I believed or not. Maybe that, itself, was an answer.

  “I just want the truth,” I said, interrupting her reflection. “Surely God wouldn’t want you to lie.”

  She opened her eyes. I didn’t like what I saw in them. She wasn’t angry so much as concerned. “I wasn’t asking for advice,” she told me. “I was asking for strength.”

  I decided to remain quiet. I didn’t want to insult her further and I didn’t want a sermon, either. I just wanted an answer.

  “He never told me he kidnapped that poor girl, if that’s what you’re asking, Mr. Kolarich. He told me the opposite, in fact. Now, I may be a lot of things, but I’m not ignorant. I know my son. I know he did things.” She drank from her cup and let the liquid play in her mouth. I suddenly felt very small.

  “He was always troubled,” she went on. “Always. He never bothered much with girls, but I just thought he was slow to develop that interest. Growing up, he was so introverted, so tortured, but I never knew him to act on any of the impulses that he obviously had. I never knew. Does that sound odd? A mother didn’t know her son had this horrible sickness.”

  She drank from the cup again and nodded to herself. “About a year before—before his first arrest—that was when I first discovered something about his—his preferences.” She shrugged. “I honestly had no idea before that time.”

  I knew, vaguely, that her son had a criminal record before Audrey was abducted, which was the reason the police had focused on him so quickly.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “Oh, well, Griffin—he injured his knee very seriously. He tore the—his anterior something-or-other?”

  “The anterior cruciate ligament,” I said. It was a common injury in football. A buddy of mine at State tore his ACL and never played ball again.

  “That’s it,” she said. “He was off his feet for weeks. It’s not like we had the money for surgery. He was all but immobile. So I stayed here with Griffin, while he was recuperating. One day, I was just trying to clean up. He was so messy, that boy.” She sighed, relishing a momentary memory of her son that did not include his sexual affliction, before she darkened again. “I saw some—some photo—”

  “You saw some disturbing photographs,” I gathered.

  “That’s right.” She touched her eyes. “I—I talked to him about it. He told me it was just some joke that a friend had sent him.” She looked at me. “Of course I should have known better. I make no excuses, but—a mother wants to believe, doesn’t she?”

  “Of course she does.”

  “And then, later, there were those few incidents in Summit. And Griffin told me they were misunderstandings, he swore to me he would never touch a child. Can you imagine how much a mother would want to believe that?”

  She was referring to Griffin’s first brushes with the law in a town downstate, one ending in a nolle and one in a conviction for indecent exposure.

  “And then,” she said softly, “there was little Audrey.”

  Her eyes welled up. I imagine, by now, it took a lot to make the tears fall. I realized now why she had made Griffin’s home her own. It was penance. She was punishing herself for the sins of her son by immersing herself in the memory.

  “I told him, Mr. Kolarich, I did. I said, ‘Griffin, if you did something to that little girl, you have to tell them.’ But he wouldn’t admit it.”

  He wouldn’t admit it. Different than saying he denied it.

  “Do I think he did something to that little girl, Audrey? Well, the answer is yes.”

  I nodded. “Can you help me at all?”

  Fresh tears spilled down her face. I sensed that it was more than mere generalized grief. She was struggling. She had something to tell me.

  I was about to burst, but I had to let this play out naturally. I would beg and plead if necessary, but it felt right to let her make the next move.

  She took a while, a good cry, wiping her face, blowing her nose, mumbling to herself, before she finally heaved a heavy sigh.

  “I guess there’s no sense trying to protect him anymore,” she said.

  13

  AREA THREE HEADQUARTERS was no more than half a mile from where I grew up, a place where I’d spent a very uncomfortable evening in the summer before my junior year at Bonaventure. I still remembered the taste of sweat on my upper lip, the thick cologne of the police detective who stood over me, the whack from the heel of Coach Fox’s hand across my face. I didn’t remember the name of the cop, but it wasn’t Vic Carruthers.

  Carruthers looked to be near retirement, a broad guy with an extra chin and a face that looked like a map of interstate highways. He sat back in his chair and looked crosswise at me, a guy who was reminding him of a case that hadn’t gone so well for him.

  “Perlini’s dead,” he repeated back to me. “And Audrey’s brother is the one that killed him.”

  “He’s charged with that murder, yes.”

  “And her son being dead, that accounts for the mother’s change of heart. She figures there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “She didn’t”—he came forward, leaned into me, his jaw clenched, a fire to his eyes—“she didn’t feel the need to help out that girl back then.”

  “I don’t think she knew,” I said. “And she didn’t want to believe it. She still doesn’t know for sure. But she suspects.”

  “She suspects. She suspects.” Carruthers ran a large hand across his face. “I don’t even know where this school is, I don’t think. Fifty-seventh and Hudson?”

  I nodded. Hardigan Elementary School had a large hill behind it that supplied a good toboggan slide in the winter, and a hangout for recreational drug users in the warm weather, when I was a kid. The hill crested down sharply into a thick set of trees, in front of which was a large fence that formed the boundary of the schoolyard.

  Mrs. Perlini had no way to be sure, she’d told me, but she knew that Griffin had continued to visit the site as an adult. There would be one obvious reason for someone of Griffin’s sexual inclinations to want a bird’s-eye view into an elementary school yard, but Mrs. Perlini could never shake the notion that Griffin had used the cover of the thick trees for another purpose.

  “She thinks it’s a burial site,” Carruthers said. “She found muddy shoes and a shovel in his garage one day? That’s it?” His anger was rising, bringing color to his jowls, but I imagined the source was the reminder of this unsolved case, his inability to nail the man who killed a little girl on his watch.

  “It was a place he went,” I said. “She thinks it’s where he would have put her. I h
appen to think she might be on to something.”

  “You happen to think. You score a few touchdowns for Bonaventure and that makes you a police detective.”

  I didn’t bother to fight. He was doing a pretty good job battling himself. He didn’t speak for a long time, scratching at his face and, it seemed, reliving the investigation. From what I knew, Carruthers had gotten a little rough with Griffin Perlini while they searched for Audrey, but that hadn’t been the problem. The problem was that Griffin Perlini had never said a damn thing to the police, not a word, once they trained on him. No little girl’s body, no incriminating statement.

  Carruthers opened a drawer on his cluttered desk and removed a photo. It was Audrey, frozen in time as a child.

  “You don’t forget a case like that,” he said. “Not ever. Not a day goes by . . .”

  I knew a little something about regret, and I didn’t want to be reminded.

  “The girl’s dead and her killer’s dead,” Carruthers said.

  “Yeah, but her brother’s not.” I gathered my things and stood up. “Sammy Cutler is entitled to know.” I looked at the photograph of Audrey, clutched in the detective’s hand. “And so are you.”

  YOU’RE DUMB TEENAGERS, you and your buddy Sammy, careless with your side business, the one you work between shifts at the grocery store. Careless because you never consider the consequences. You tell yourself, it’s only pot, it’s just you and your buddies getting stoned, it’s not addictive, no one’s getting hurt, and you’re just making a couple of bucks.

  You don’t think much about the guy who sells you the stuff, Ice, the twenty-year-old who sells out of his house and who, you later learn, is into a lot more than just marijuana, and who has attracted the attention of the police.

  So you drive up to his house like you’re visiting a friend. You keep your stash in the trunk of the car. Turns out, you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sammy sees it first—Look, he says, pointing at the window of Ice’s house, through which you see a man in the living room with a badge hanging around his neck.

  You stop on the driveway, turn and run, just as the front door bursts open, people shouting after you, just like how it goes on television, Freeze—police, and some instinct causes you and Sammy to separate, Sammy running south, you running north. You’ve spent a year on the football squad by now; you’ve honed your physical skills. You can run like lightning and you do, full force, never looking back, using all the advantages of a boy on foot, cutting through alleys and over backyard fences, maximizing the difficulty of anyone giving chase by car. You don’t stop until you’re far beyond your neighborhood, a good five miles at least.

  Sammy. You don’t know. He can’t run like you. You think about it and you hope, you pray. Yes, you’ve abandoned your car across the street from Ice’s house, and you know what’s in the trunk. Still, it’s possible, all of it: It’s possible Sammy got away; it’s possible the cops don’t know it’s your car; it’s possible Ice hasn’t given you and Sammy up—after all, the police weren’t after small-timers like you. They’re after the higher-ups in the chain, right?

  The next hours, the late afternoon and early evening, are agonizing. You walk aimlessly, slowly circling back toward your neighborhood. You’re hesitant to make it home that night, wondering if a police car is awaiting you on the driveway. You approach your house tentatively, scanning up and down the street. When you walk through the front door, your sweat-drenched hair stuck to your forehead, your pulse rattling, your mother is sitting at the kitchen table with your brother, Pete.

  Sammy’s at the police station, she tells you.

  I DROVE BACK from the police station, thinking about Sammy in his cell, thinking about Mrs. Perlini and the denial she lived with, and thinking about the blue Chevy that had kept a pretty safe distance from me since I first drove back to my old neighborhood earlier today. I could only assume that this was the same friend I’d made a couple nights back, leaving that club. I was being followed, no question.

  I called Pete on my cell. He wanted to head out tonight and I said I’d think about it. He sounded okay on the phone, but I was still thinking about the other night at the club. I was pretty sure he’d been using drugs, and for all I knew, he’d been back using for quite some time. I’d been in such a funk for the last four months that it had probably escaped my attention.

  “We gotta talk, little brother,” I told him.

  He laughed. “‘We gotta talk?’ What does that mean?” He was being defensive. From what I knew, Pete had never been more than a casual user, but the slope, as they say, was a slippery one.

  I didn’t respond to him because he knew what I meant. I didn’t have any right to tell him what to do, and I had no real desire to do so. Add to that, Pete had done a pretty good job watching over me these last few months, so it felt a little weird preaching to him. Still, I couldn’t just let it go.

  “Just—we’ll talk tonight,” I said, after tiring of his moaning.

  “Forget about tonight,” he said. “Save your sermon for someone else. And hey—it’s nice to see you’re back to form, telling me how to live my life.”

  I drove home with the music down, keeping an eye on the Chevy following me, memorizing the license plate, though I assumed that a trace wouldn’t get me anything. I thought about screwing with the guy, hitting the brakes, maybe letting him pass me, waving hello to him or tailing him, but I didn’t see any advantage in any of that. Better he should think he’s a world-class expert in surveillance, until I could figure out what I needed to do with him.

  14

  I SPENT THE NIGHT IN, staring at the walls of my bedroom, watching the television with the sound low. I was beyond the point of self-torture. I no longer played the CDs that Talia loved, Morrissey and Sarah McLachlan and Tracy Chapman. I no longer obsessed over our wedding album. I no longer so much as set foot in Emily’s room, the nursery, which Talia had done out in pink and green with a Beatrix Potter theme, cute little bunnies prancing among soft pastel colors.

  Nor did I drink, at least not for the purpose of drowning my sorrows. Alcohol didn’t work for me that way; it heightened the pain, unleashed emotion. When you’re drowning, you already feel out of control. You don’t need intoxication to feel unstable.

  No, the only thing for me was frivolous diversion, the most innocuous sitcom or infomercial I could find on the tube, the easiest beach-read paperbacks I could buy. I couldn’t handle extremes, so I was reaching for the soft middle.

  In some ways, it’s better now, but in most ways it’s worse. The death of a loved one is unfathomable initially, this amazingly horrible thing that can’t have really happened, and then you’re immediately assigned to the rather mundane tasks of notifying people, arrangements with the cemetery, planning a funeral. And then everyone you care about is surrounding you, delivering food in Tupperware and lingering about for a required length of time. After a couple of weeks, everything returns to normal, and that’s when you realize that normal has a new meaning. That’s when you realize that this is your life now, that you own a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a nursery done up specially for a daughter you don’t have, sleeping in a bed for two when there’s only one.

  I fell asleep watching syndicated reruns, sitting up in bed with my clothes on, probably some time around two in the morning. I had a dream, the contents of which evaporated from my memory when my eyes popped open; the only thing I recalled was the sound that had awakened me—the sound of Emily crying out, as she had so many times in the depth of night, a whimper that slowly grew into a wail.

  It was dawn. I was desperately tired but unable to sleep. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom, getting the toilet lid open just in time to vomit. I sat on the floor of the bathroom, taking deep breaths, scolding myself to no avail. I threw up again and then took a shower.

  At nine, I got in my car and drove to see Tommy Butcher, the one witness in Sammy’s case who could actually help us. From what I had read in the report he gave to
the police, on the night of Griffin Perlini’s murder at the approximate time of the murder, Tommy Butcher was leaving a bar called Downey’s Pub when a black man came running out of Perlini’s apartment building. Being someone who, like most people, prefers to mind his own business, Butcher thought nothing of it and went on with his life.

  Butcher gave his statement to the police only three weeks ago, after reading about the case in the newspaper—meaning that by that point, the police had long ago arrested Sammy and fixed their focus on him as the murderer. Once the police decide they have their man, it’s game over for them. I knew that the prosecution would go to great lengths to discount Tommy Butcher’s testimony and, if possible, discredit him personally.

  For starters, Butcher’s statement to the police came roughly a year after the murder, which would make someone wonder how he could be so sure about the precise date that he saw the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene. And undoubtedly, Butcher’s memory would be expected to be faulty, after he’d spent a night in a bar. But maybe something had stood out that made him remember the event particularly well. Maybe the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene had said I just killed Griffin Perlini as he sprinted by.

  He’d asked to meet at a coffee shop near 87th and Pershing, which was near a job Butcher was working. Tommy Butcher was a principal at Butcher Construction Company, a family-owned construction firm that had offices in the city and in a large downstate town called Maryville, principally known as the home of Marymount Penitentiary. Butcher Construction had built the addition to the prison and did some other work in that area, but mostly the company did public construction jobs here in the city. Fair or not, you think of big city contracts, you think connections. You think corruption.

  Butcher looked like a guy with a lifetime in the trade, a wide guy with half a head of hair; a rough, tan complexion; and a meaty hand that engulfed mine when he greeted me. He sized me up and didn’t seem too disappointed, though I couldn’t guess what criteria he was using. Having had some experience with contractors when Talia and I did some renovation work on our home, I generally put the integrity of construction types right up there with politicians and car salesmen.