David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“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.

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 happen 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?