David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“You told him-about the arrest?”

He shrugged. “What, I’m gonna be sick for six months? He’d find out, anyway.”

“No, he wouldn’t, Pete. You don’t have to tell him un-”

Pete gave me a sour smile and finished my sentence. “Unless I’m convicted,” he said.

“You’re not going to be convicted.”

Pete pushed his hair back, sighed, looked up at the ceiling.

“You’re not going to be convicted, Pete.”

Pete nodded, but it was a sarcastic gesture. A cop had arrested him at a crime scene with a mountain of cocaine and a crate full of stolen firearms. His defense was that the whole thing was a coincidence, a misunderstanding. He wasn’t liking his chances at trial.

I had to tell him the story. He had to know how this whole thing came to be. “This is my fault,” I said. “You were set up, like you said. But you were set up because of me.”

I ran through the whole thing for him, told him about Smith, his interest in my defense of Sammy Cutler, his proposed trade-I do what he wants and he fixes everything with Pete’s case. My brother listened with rapt interest, but where I was expecting him to haul off and take a swing at me or something, instead he seemed, of all things, to be somewhat relieved. I had underestimated how much he was beating himself up over this arrest, how embarrassed he was to have to turn to me. In some way, circumstances notwithstanding, my role in this affair exonerated him. This wasn’t a fuck-up entirely of his own making.

He’d always seen himself that way-the lesser of the two Kolarich boys. The one without the physical ability, without the drive. The one who took his father’s abuse, not avoided it. The one who couldn’t hold down a job, who partied too much and even got pinched a couple of times by the law, making it harder still to secure quality employment-a cycle I had seen firsthand as a prosecutor and defender of the lower ranks of society.

“I’ll make this right,” I said. “I’m going to figure out who’s behind all this. Shit.” I finished off my beer and wiggled the empty bottle. “I’ve got three weeks, little brother. Three weeks to figure all this shit out.”

“Saving the world. That’s my brother.” Pete drained his beer and fetched some fresh ones for us. He handed me one and dropped back on the couch. “You know, Jason, they couldn’t have done this to me without some help. Some help from me. Nobody made me go score some blow that night. Maybe you should be pissed at me for making your life more difficult. Maybe Sammy should be pissed at me, too.”

I shook my head.

“Give me some credit, Jason. That’s all I’m saying. For Christ’s sake.”

“Okay, okay. Just shut up already,” I said. I worked on the beer, feeling the gentle buzz of intoxication. “You’re giving me a fucking headache.”

My brother stared at me, then said, “Not the first one I gave you.”

“No, definitely not.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“You still going to the cemetery every day?”

“What, does everyone know about that?” I looked at my brother, who broke into laughter. I did, too. It felt nice, the release of tension.

“Let’s go out,” he said. “I’m sick of being cooped up.”

He didn’t have to twist my arm. We headed out to Lacy’s, another of the trendy places with dim lighting and minimalist dйcor, ear-thumping music, and a healthy bevy of available women. Pete was in his element, and though I realized that this was the setting that typically enabled his drug use, I appreciated the skip in Pete’s stride, the first time he’d seemed up since his arrest. And I was relatively confident that he was clean. I had found some opportunity, each day that Pete had been staying with me, to take an unauthorized inventory of his room, finding no evidence of drug use.

By midnight, the place was crawling with people, a vast majority of whom were in their twenties, making me a senior citizen and Pete, five years my junior, the coveted “older man” but not quite so aged that he looked out of place. Over these last months since Talia’s death, when I’ve joined Pete and/or Shauna for a night out, I’ve played the bystander. These kinds of places, you start together with the person you came with, but if you’re on the make like Pete, pretty soon it becomes a free-for-all. We started at the bar, where I took a double vodka, Pete a Tanqueray and tonic, and scoped out the place. It took all of five minutes before Pete had identified a group of women. He tried to get me to ride along, but he seemed to recognize that I wasn’t going to bite, so he went off on his own while I hung back at the bar and people-watched.

The energy level at these places always brought back football to me, game days, the crowd stirring with excitement, stretching out electrified limbs before the coin toss, teammates slamming shoulder pads and pumping each other up. I’d always chosen solitude; I turned inward, searched for calm and focus, before a game.

The stereo speakers overhead were blaring a woman’s voice, keeping pace with a staccato electronic drumbeat. Wanting you, needing you, longing for you , she sang. Appropriate for the setting, but the lyrics and the alcohol returned me to Talia. Pete had touched on something earlier-I hadn’t visited the cemetery in the last few days. I supposed that this represented some sign of progress. But I didn’t like to think of such things. Progress suggested the future, a step along a longer path, and it was still difficult for me to think beyond the current day. It was hard to imagine a lifetime of these feelings, harder still to imagine that they would dissipate with time. Dissipate , I decided, was the wrong word. Recede made more sense. They’d go into hiding, ready to return on a moment’s prodding.

I loved Talia. I missed her so much it still caused physical pain. I could never have her again, not even a single moment of her hair tickling my face, the smell of her perfume beneath her ear, the scrunched-up face she made when I rehashed a corny joke from my collection. Wanting her, needing her, longing for her. It would recede, yes. The pain would subside. Life would go on, and sometimes it would be good-I knew that. But it would never be as good as it could have been. It would always be just part of a life, not the whole package. It would always be the qualifier that defined me. Good athlete, good lawyer, good guy-but had that tragedy with his wife and daughter, never really got it back together.

Pete was entertaining five women sitting in a booth near a segregated area that I could best describe as a dance floor, because people were bouncing around like kangaroos on morphine. The women, I had to concede, were attractive in that trashy nightclub sense of the word. Pete seemed to be making some progress when he excused himself. He was heading to the bathroom, obviously, and I considered an objection. I wanted to pat him down for drugs, to follow him into the john, to make sure he didn’t make a drug deal while my back was turned. I did none of those things because he was enjoying himself, and he was entitled to do so without me coming down on him.

But after about ten minutes passed and my brother still hadn’t reappeared, I suddenly felt the need to inquire. A gathering storm of concern began to rise within me, and I quickened my pace, heading to the back of the bar and taking the stairs down to the ground level.

“Like a fight or something,” one woman said to another, taking the stairs up from the bathroom.

“Were they bouncers?”

“I don’t know.”

I jogged toward the bathroom. “Pete,” I said when I walked in, looking around at two empty urinals and a stall that was vacant. “Pete!”