David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“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.