by David Ellis
He chuckled to himself. He didn’t think much of me, and he didn’t mind displaying that sentiment.
“Audrey Cutler was my neighbor,” I said. “A really sweet little girl. I have some reason to believe that maybe Griffin Perlini didn’t kill her. If he didn’t, I need to find out who did. She deserves some justice, don’t you think?”
“Justice. Justice.” He lost his smile. He had a weathered face that had seen a lot more than I had, and he didn’t betray very much. I sensed that he had a profound sense of justice himself. I just didn’t know what it looked like, and I hoped I never would.
“In the not-so-distant past,” he said, “a prosecutor who went by the name of Jason Kolarich convicted a man named Walter Tucker for first-degree murder.”
I thought about that a moment. “A shopping mall,” I recalled. “A Tenth Street ticket.” Walter Tucker, for his initiation into the Tenth Street Crew, had shot a teenager outside a shopping mall for committing the crime of trying to leave the gang.
“I knew the family,” he said. “Good people.”
I didn’t answer. This wasn’t a game I could win.
“You remember George Ryder handled the defense. He offered involuntary and twenty. But Jason Kolarich turned it down and went to trial with one pair of eyes and a shaky gun.”
And I won. But I knew his thoughts without him saying them: A white boy ID’s a colored kid, of course the jury’s going to convict. I heard it all the time. And I wasn’t sure I disagreed, not all the time, at least. But I didn’t prosecute a case if I wasn’t sure the guy was guilty. It made life simple for me.
“George said you were fair, though. Tough as hell but fair.” He brought a fist to his mouth and let out a nasty cough. It seemed to move him off topic. “Okay, Jason Kolarich, tell me their theory. Those smart cops out there in Area Two with the missing girl, Audrey Cutler.”
I felt like a student now, but okay, I’d play along. “Perlini nabbed Audrey Cutler from her bedroom, a snatch and run. He went to his house or his car, had his fun with her, killed her, and disposed of the body.”
He leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. “Snatch and run. Snatch,” he repeated, “and run.”
His emphasis on that last word finally triggered it in my mind, finally scratched that mental itch. My body went cold. I felt my hand rise up to hood my eyes.
“Ah,” said Lionel. “Did the cops do their homework, Jason Kolarich?”
A moan escaped my throat. No, in fact, they hadn’t.
“But you did, right, Counselor?”
Yes, I did. But then, my homework was over twenty years later, and after Griffin Perlini was dead. So when I’d had the conversation with Griffin Perlini’s mother, Griffin was not facing a first-degree murder charge, when everyone shuts their mouths and prays that the police can’t put one and one together and get two. In fact, when Mrs. Perlini had told me that Griffin had torn the anterior cruciate ligament behind his knee a few years earlier—before Audrey’s abduction—it was nothing more than an introduction to a story.
“Griffin had a torn ACL,” I said. “He couldn’t run.”
“No more than I could do a triple axle off the high dive,” said Reggie Lionel.
40
I WALKED BACK from Reggie Lionel’s office in a trance, every assumption I’d made in the case now turned upside down. I’d had teammates who had torn their ACLs and, while it was not a universal rule, it was typically the case that a full tear of the ACL, unless surgically repaired, left you able to walk but unable to run. Perlini’s mother had told me that they didn’t have the money for surgical repair. The police, when investigating Perlini for Audrey’s abduction, surely didn’t put him through wind sprints. They’d have no reason to know of his inability to run. Reggie Lionel, wisely, had held his client back from revealing this fact to the police, because there was always time to do it, and most likely that time would have been in a courtroom, while he stood trial.
Lionel, back then, had played it smart. Wait out the cops, see if they can put something together, hold back your trump card in case you need it. He just never needed it, because the cops couldn’t pin the rap on his client.
Mrs. Thomas had described the man running as very fast. It was impossible to imagine that Griffin Perlini could have pulled that off.
Griffin Perlini didn’t kill Audrey. The notorious Mr. Smith’s client, I was now sure, did.
Smith wasn’t worried so much about delay as he was about me figuring out this very fact. He hadn’t jumped to attention until the bodies were discovered. That was their concern. That was when they framed Pete to get control over me.
It was not lost on me that this revelation did some violence to my attempt to free Sammy Cutler. I’d hoped to show the jury that Sammy killed the man who killed his sister. If the jury knew that Perlini didn’t kill Audrey, Sammy’s murder looked a lot less justifiable.
But I couldn’t let this go. I might not be able to solve this crime in a short time frame, but I would solve it. I would find Smith and I would find his client. I would find Audrey’s killer.
Smith. I’d taken a gamble and filed the motion for expedited DNA testing—or a delay of Sammy’s trial until testing could be completed—to rattle the tree, to force Smith’s hand, to see if it might prompt him to make a move that would expose himself to me. He would have a counter, I knew, some effort to tighten the noose, but I was getting to the end of the line and I had no good leads on Smith, or his client, with less than three weeks to go until Sammy’s trial.
If I was right that Smith and company were covering up Audrey’s murder, and perhaps multiple child murders, the clock was ticking loudly for Pete and me. Once Sammy’s trial was over, and they had no use for me, they’d come after both of us to cover their tracks. I had seventeen days to solve this thing before there would be a contract out on both of our heads.
What else could I do? I had forced Smith into a corner now by asking the court for DNA testing. I was trying out a plan on Detective Denny DePrizio, though it probably wasn’t going to help Sammy. What else could I do?
Solve Sammy’s case, for starters. I had two leads on alternative suspects now. Smith had given me Ken Sanders, the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene. And I had to follow up on the alibi of another potential suspect, Archie Novotny, who claimed he was at a guitar lesson on the night Griffin Perlini was murdered.
THE MUSIC EMPORIUM, located on 39th and Greenway, was a relic in this day and age, full of rows of albums and CDs in an era where nobody had a turntable anymore and most young people were buying music online. It was a cramped, musty, dark place with music posters for wallpaper, where the only conditions of employment seemed to be wearing your hair past your shoulders and sporting hallucinogenic imagery on your T-shirt.
I actually appreciated the place. We’ve become too impersonal nowadays, buying and reading everything through a computer. I still liked to hold a newspaper in my hand. I still preferred flipping through CDs in a store. I did so while I waited, going through some old Smiths music. This place had a pretty good collection. I bought a used copy of Strangeways, Here We Come because I’d lost mine, and a CD single of “The Queen Is Dead,” which I still thought was their best song.
“Morrissey. Good taste.”
I turned around as the clerk was ringing up my purchase to find the guy who I assumed was Nick Trillo. Archie Novotny had given me his name; this was his guitar teacher who could vouch for him. I hadn’t formed a predictive image of the man in my mind, but in hindsight, he was about what I should have expected. He was skinny to a fault but with a minor paunch, a scatter-patch goatee, gray hair pulled back into a long ponytail.
“You, too,” I said, nodding to his T-shirt, which was the cover art for That What Is Not, by Public Image Ltd., the band Johnny Lydon formed after the Sex Pistols, though I liked PiL’s early stuff a lot better. “You know a better song than ‘Acid Drops’?”
“Nah.” His face lit up. “Nah, man, I don’t.”
He hit my arm with the back of his hand. I had won him over. This ponytailed hippie and the yuppie in a serious coat and tie united in their appreciation of an early pioneer of punk rock.
“You needed me for something?”
“Yeah, yeah. Can we find a place to talk?”
“Sure, man, yeah. Here.” I followed him through the store to a door that had a piece of paper on it that read: HEY! IF YOU’RE NOT AN EMPLOYEE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? TURN AROUND AND BUY SOMETHING. It made me like the place even more.
He led me to a room where, presumably, he taught guitar lessons. The walls were lined with some of the finest guitars ever made—a Les Paul, a Stratocaster, a Flying V. Otherwise, there was nothing more than two stools in the middle of the room and a lone guitar, standing upright in a pedestal, that apparently was the one Nick Trillo played when he taught lessons. I made a point of commenting on the classics on the walls to further soften any ice that might have formed. I was a lawyer, after all. People clutch up around me all the time.
“Did Archie tell you I’d be calling?” I asked.
“Yeah, he said something about some dates. He said to give you whatever you wanted.”
That was helpful. This guy Trillo didn’t need to know which side I was on—that is, that I was on the opposite side of Archie Novotny. Maybe he thought I was Archie’s lawyer. If so, I would choose my words carefully, walking a fine line to let him believe that without actually lying.
“September 21, 2006,” I said.
“Whoa.”
“A Thursday night,” I added. “Do you know if he took a lesson that night?”
“Well, yeah, Thursday night’s when he’s always had lessons. But that’s like, over a year ago, man. Far as I know, yeah, he did.”
I didn’t want to be the inquisitor. I had to play this gently. “My only fear here,” I said, “is that someone else might ask the same question, and they won’t take your word for it. They’ll want records. They’ll want proof.” I leaned into him. “I’ll tell you what my real concern is here, Nick.” This is where I hoped our bonding would pay off. “My real concern is that Archie and I give them the wrong answer. I just want the truth. If we say he was here and he wasn’t, then we’ll be in trouble. Or vice versa. If we say he wasn’t here and he was, then, y’know, it looks like we’re lying. I couldn’t care less what the answer is, but it has to be verifiable.”
Nick Trillo seemed troubled by all of this. “Is this, like, something really serious?”
I showed him my hand. “Not as long we tell the truth. We just have to make absolutely sure it’s the truth, either way. Archie figured you might have some records that could verify whether he was here or not.”
I wasn’t being entirely forthright with the gentleman, but in the end, I was just asking for the truth. That, as much as anything, would be what he’d remember. The minor details of what I was saying would get lost.
“Are you, like, one of these criminal lawyers?”
I shrugged. “I do a lot of things. Like divorces, for example.”
“Oh, okay.” He seemed relieved. “So this is like a divorce fight or something?”
I smiled at him. “I don’t think Archie would want me to answer that, Nick.”
Rather slippery of me, admittedly. The guitar instructor thought about it a moment and, my guess, decided that this was a divorce where Archie Novotny’s whereabouts on a particular night were in question. Probably an allegation of adultery. Maybe he hadn’t thought it through, but either way, he was making me for Archie’s advocate and he seemed to want to help.
“So,” I said, “do you guys have any records of attendance?”
He thought about it, blowing out a deep sigh. “Well, y’know, I’ll sometimes jot something down but—I mean, I wouldn’t keep it. No, it’s more like I just remember—well, I’ll tell you what. We could see how much he paid. Yeah, I could do that. Hang on.”
Nick Trillo left the room, leaving me with the guitars on the wall. I should have been a rock star. Other than the fact that I couldn’t play an instrument, couldn’t sing, wasn’t all that attractive, and lacked the gift of lyrical composition, I think I could have.
“Here, okay.” Trillo carried a hefty file box into the room and placed it on the floor, as there was no place else to put it. He sat on the floor and opened it up. “Month of September,” he said. I looked over his shoulder at the files, which were tabbed by months of the year for the year 2006. He grabbed the tab labeled “9/06” and pulled it back to reveal a few dozen sheets of paper. On each one was a photocopy of a check.
“Twenty-five bucks a lesson,” he said. “They usually pay that day.”
“By check?”
“Boss’s rule,” he said. “One of the instructors who used to be here, he wasn’t so honest with the cash thing. Boss says it’s gotta be a check or credit card.”
Good for me.
“September 7,” Trillo said, showing me a photocopy of a check written by Archie Novotny in the amount of twenty-five dollars.
He kept leafing through the pages. “Here. September 14.”
I didn’t care about September 7 or 14. I cared about September 21, 2006.
Trillo ran through the pages. I was playing defense, praying for the absence of a record. I held my breath as he kept leafing, by my estimate a little longer than he should have, proportionately. I watched the dates on the photocopied checks, felt my heart skip a beat as the dates passed September 21, but that assumed that the checks were in perfect chronological order.
“Okay. This is weird.” Trillo held up a photocopied check from Archie Novotny, dated September 28, in the amount of fifty dollars. “He paid for two lessons on the twenty-eighth.”
Which would have included the twenty-first. But my eyes fixed on the memo line of that check, in which the handwritten words “I insist!” were written.
I felt my knees go weak, the adrenaline flow with a vengeance. I thought I understood this, but I wanted to get Trillo on the same page with me. “ ‘I insist,’ ” I said.
“Huh. ‘I insist.’ Yeah.”
“What does that mean? What was he insisting on?”
Trillo thought about it. I decided to help him along.
“So he didn’t write you a check on the twenty-first, and then he wrote you a check for the following week with the words ‘I insist!’ on it.”
“ ‘I insist.’ ‘I—.’ Oh.” Nick Trillo looked up at me, shaking the paper. “I remember this. Yeah. Yeah.” He got up from the floor and pointed at me. “He missed a lesson. He missed a lesson and I told him he didn’t have to pay for it, but he insisted, ’cause he hadn’t called ahead to cancel it. He said, fair was fair.”
I tried to remain calm, though I wanted to wrap my arms around his bony frame. “He missed the lesson on the twenty-first but insisted on paying for it.”
“Yeah.” Trillo nodded with excitement. “Yeah. Must have been the twenty-first. He’d paid for every other one. Yeah, I remember, I told him not to worry but he said, well—”
“He insisted.”
“Right. He insisted.” Trillo looked at the paper and chuckled. “I feel like a detective or something. You want copies of this stuff?”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” I answered. And if it was, I would personally take them to a Kinko’s and make copies myself.
Trillo left for a few moments, returning with fresh copies of each of Archie Novotny’s checks for September—twenty-five dollars for September 7, twenty-five dollars for September 14, and fifty dollars for September 28.
“Good thing we checked,” he said.
Indeed it was—good for me, at least. Not so good for Archie Novotny. Mr. Novotny, it seemed clear, missed his guitar lesson on the night that Griffin Perlini was murdered. Then, if he was even thinking this diabolically, he tried to cover his tracks by paying for it anyway.
“Hey, if it’s not a problem,” I said, “I’ll come back tomorrow with an affidavit—a legal document describing what we discussed
. That okay with you?”
“Yeah, that’s great.” He was still excited about our little adventure in puzzle-solving. Sooner or later, he’d become less excited when he realized that I was not serving Archie Novotny’s interests. But the truth was the truth, and I’d lock him down with the affidavit, in any event.
I left the Music Emporium with some steam in my stride. I had Archie Novotny. I had motive, opportunity, and an attempt to manufacture an alibi. I tried to imagine the look on the face of Lester Mapp, the prosecutor, when he saw this.
“Sammy,” I said to no one, “we might just win this case.”
41
YOU KILLED ME, JASON.
I awoke with a start, my eyes stinging from the sweat, the echo of Talia’s voice lingering between my ears. The dream was always a little different, but always she was dead, visiting me, a vision within a dream, appearing out of nowhere but somehow I knew she was coming, and I knew she was right.
I tossed the pillow, soaked in sweat, to the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“Happy birthday,” I said. Talia was born on October 13, 1972, in a small town outside New York City, where her father was opening a Kmart. It had been his job, moving across the country as new stores opened. Talia lived in ten cities growing up, attended three different high schools, a nomadic life that taught her an adaptive personality but left her longing for permanency as an adult. She’d made me promise, before Emily was born, that we’d stay in one place, that Emily would stay in one school system.
I thought of her parents, Nelson and Ginny, what today would mean for them. I considered calling them, but we hadn’t spoken since the funeral. They hadn’t placed blame per se, but they’d noted to me, coolly enough, You were supposed to go with them. I’d already beaten them to the punch.
That’s what you do—you play it out, isolating any single moment that could have altered the chain of events, turning every one of those moments into blame. I should have told Talia, all along, that I was still on trial, that it was unrealistic to expect that I could break away for the weekend at her parents’ place. I should have told her about Ernesto Ramirez, the ex-Latin Lord who could blow open the case against Senator Almundo.