David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“Oh, but I do.” I reminded him of the gun in his nostril.

“Guy’s Tenth Street. C’mon now, man.”

“His full name, J.D.”

He seemed to be thinking about it. It could be, he was weighing some options, too. But I thought he was really trying to come up with the name.

“Mason’s the last name,” he finally answered. “I think Marcus?”

Marcus Mason. Finally, I had the name of Mace.

“Man, why they wanna kill me? I did like they said.”

I shook my head. “They wanted me to test you, to see if you’d break,” I said. “If you did, I was supposed to kill you.”

“Oh, now, listen-”

“ You listen, shithead. I’m not going to waste a bullet on your ass. I’ll tell ’em you held up under questioning. And you-you pretend this never happened.”

“Never happened,” he readily agreed.

“If I were you,” I told him, “I’d sit tight like they said. You run, J.D., they’ll wonder why. And you know I’ll find you.” I let go of his hair. The rain had subsided to a light shower, but too late for John Dixon. His clothes were plastered against his body. He had twin bruises on his cheeks and a bloody ear.

“Businessman can’t run no business no more,” he complained, sitting up, wincing, taking inventory of the damage.

“Yeah, what’s the world coming to?” I stuffed the gun in the back of my pants. “Get out of the business,” I suggested. “Stick to the mail room job.” I nodded to him, started to walk away, then turned back and kicked him hard in the ribs. That was for Pete. J.D. had gotten off light, all things considered. It remained to be seen how Marcus Mason would fare.

ILEFT THE HOUSE Wednesday morning alone. A Chrysler sedan followed me from a comfortable length. After I left, Shauna Tasker, who had spent the night at my place, left out the back door and walked to her car, parked on the street over. She’d known that I might be taking a spin with her car last night, but I told her I hadn’t, after all, without elaborating. She probably knew I’d gone somewhere last night, but she didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.

What did I have to show for last night, other than a cold? At least I had locked down that Smith hadn’t been bluffing-he’d been behind Pete’s arrest. It had gone down like I would have expected. They put a little scare into J.D. and stuffed some money in his pocket, and he made sure that when Pete came to find him to buy some powder, he’d be in the company of Mr. Marcus Mason.

Smith had money, and he had, at least, a small gang of people. Four white guys, J.D. had said. Probably the same four guys who had jumped Pete. Probably the same four guys who, as a team, were keeping tabs on me.

I caught myself nodding off at a stoplight. I hadn’t slept in two days. I’d been relying on anxiety to prop me up. My vision was spotty and my hands were shaky. I asked myself for the umpteenth time whether I could handle what I was doing. But I kept coming back to two things: one, I had no choice, I had to represent Sammy; and two, I still had a generally overconfident opinion of my courtroom skills. A good trial lawyer thinks he can convince a jury that day is actually night, that up is really down. A good defense attorney adds in a general ability to confuse a situation, to smear the canvas, because he only has to get reasonable doubt.

I decided to place a call to Joel Lightner to keep me alert. I was probably the first driver in history to talk on a cell phone to improve his driving. “Our friend ‘Mace’ is Marcus Mason,” I told Joel. “He’s Tenth Street.”

“Huh.” Lightner gave off a disapproving grunt. The Tenth Street Crew was a pretty rough bunch, even by gang standards. They were particularly sensitive about loose tongues.

“Give me a location on this gentleman,” I requested.

Lightner went quiet.

“Hello?” I asked.

“How ’bout I talk to this guy?” Lightner said.

“No, I’m good. Address and record would be fine.” Marcus Mason wouldn’t be hard to find. He probably had a sheet as long as the Magna Carta. “You find anything on that apartment where J.D. is staying?” I asked, in part to change the subject.

“Nothing much,” Joel said. “He paid cash for one month.”

“ He paid?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

Too bad. I guess I couldn’t expect that Smith would write this landlord a personal check. These guys seemed relatively apt at covering their tracks.

“What about Archie Novotny?” I asked.

“We’re watching him. Nothing interesting so far. He works at Home Depot and it looks like he’s doing work on his house. Doing it himself. I don’t know how to connect him to Smith, Jason. Because I don’t know who the hell Smith is.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t see anything in Novotny’s background, at least so far, that suggests mob involvement or anything like that. This guy’s an unemployed union painter who sits home at night and either watches TV or plays his guitar. He owns a small house and an old Chevy, and he doesn’t have much money in the bank.”

“Okay, well, keep at it.” I had trouble picturing it, too. It was hard to see Archie Novotny connected to Smith and company.

When I got to my office, I made my third phone call to the prosecution’s eyewitnesses on the night of Perlini’s murder-the elderly couple who ID’d Sammy running past them on the sidewalk, and Perlini’s neighbor. These people were stiff-arming me, a common problem for defense attorneys. You refuse to talk to a prosecutor, it’s obstruction of justice. You refuse to talk to a defense lawyer, nobody cares.

Don’t worry about the witnesses , Smith had instructed me. But I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. I needed to visit them. I just had to make sure Smith didn’t know I was doing it.

Marie buzzed me and told me that while I was on the phone, I’d received a call from Detective Vic Carruthers, who had investigated Audrey’s murder back in the day. Initially, I’d hoped to prove that Perlini killed Audrey and then find some way to get that evidence before the jury, for no other reason than to make the jury hate the victim. But now I had another suspect-Archie Novotny-whose motive would be based on Perlini’s molestation of Novotny’s daughter. Now, the jury would know what kind of a guy Griffin Perlini was without my having to prove anything about Audrey. Besides, once I pointed the finger at Novotny, based on Perlini’s molestation of his daughter, the prosecution would probably feel compelled to introduce evidence about Audrey to show Sammy’s motive. With any luck, the jury would hear all kinds of ugly things about Griffin Perlini and decide that nobody should go to prison for his murder.

Maybe Carruthers was calling for his file back. I hadn’t had much of a chance to look through it, and now I probably wouldn’t need it at all.

“Detective, it’s Jason Kolarich.”

“Yeah, Jason. Thought I owed you an update.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I wish I had more to tell you. There wasn’t much of anything in the graves. I’d hoped that Perlini left a memento, some souvenir or something, but he didn’t. The girls were buried naked, so I can’t even look back at clothing to match it up with something we know Audrey used to wear-if we could even do that.”

“Bottom line,” I summarized, “we have to wait for DNA testing.”

“Yeah. I’m on these guys to put a move on it, but you know how these things go. It could be months before we have an answer. So your guy Sammy, he’ll have to put off his trial for, I don’t know, maybe another year.”

That was obviously out of the question, but I didn’t care so much anymore. And Sammy had waited twenty-seven years for definitive proof that Perlini had murdered Audrey. He could wait one more.