David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“Do you deny you left your friends at nine-thirty that night?”

“Not sayin’, okay.”

Right. “Did you leave your friends on the second floor of that building, head up two flights to Griffin Perlini’s apartment?”

“Not sayin’.”

“Did you attempt to rob him?”

“Not sayin’.”

“And when he struggled, did you shoot him between the eyes?”

“Not sayin’.” He shook his head. “No sir, not sayin’.”

“Did you then run out of the building?”

“Not sayin’.”

“Were you wearing a leather bomber jacket and green stocking cap? Not saying,” I answered for him.

“Not sayin’,” he agreed.

Smith had worked this out with Kenny Sanders just right. There would be provers-Jax and Clay-to put him in that building at the time of the murder, and to have him leave at nine-thirty, which is the approximate window of time that would allow him to go upstairs, kill Perlini in an aborted robbery, and run out of the building.

But Kenny wouldn’t testify to any of that, and he’d take Five on all the hard questions. The jury would hear the invocation of the Fifth Amendment so many times that they’d be repeating it in their sleep. The prosecutor, Lester Mapp, might try to give Kenny immunity to compel his testimony, but Kenny here would just deny everything, and I, the great defense lawyer, would play up the grant of immunity, which typically tells people that someone is guilty of something. If Mapp took the route of immunity, I’d shove it so far up his ass he’d be tasting it for dinner.

Sanders pulled up his sleeve and scratched the dry skin on his arm. This man had been malnourished his entire life, from the baloney-on-white in the local lockups to the inedible garbage that is prison food. This guy started with nothing and would end up that way.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“No.” For the first time, Kenny Sanders eyeballed me. “No, sir.”

He needed this, he was saying. He was being rewarded handsomely for giving himself up as a scapegoat. I could follow my conscience and my preppy-white-boy guilt, but Kenny wanted the payday.

“Please,” he said, eyes averted again, nodding insistently. “Please, sir.”

And in the end, Kenny Sanders wouldn’t go down for this. The prosecution had their sights set on Sammy. No, the only thing stopping me was my ethical constraints, and I’d already checked those at the door.

“Okay.” I slipped him my card. “The prosecution’s going to want to talk to you,” I said. “That will happen soon. You’ll probably be testifying even before trial.”

“Okay, yeah. Good, okay.”

“I-have to take this picture,” I said. He knew I’d need to do this.

I had a digital camera I’d given to Talia two Christmases ago. She was the photographer in the family, but I wasn’t completely useless. I snapped Kenny’s photo and stopped at a drugstore on the way home to get the picture developed with copies. When I had it in my hand, I made the call to Tommy Butcher, my only eyewitness.

“I need you to look at something,” I told him.

IFOUND TOMMY BUTCHER at the work site in Deemer Park where Butcher Construction was erecting a new facility for the city park district. I don’t recall what previously existed, what had been torn down, but the replacement building was a massive structure, big enough to house indoor tennis courts. First time we met, Butcher had explained to me that his company was a few weeks behind schedule with the project. Apparently that was still the case, if working full-boat on a weekend was any indication.

Men on scaffolding were working on the building’s facade, while others moved in and out of the building through an opening that, one day, would house double doors. Tommy Butcher was surveying their work while he spoke on a walkie-talkie. I caught his eye and he looked away casually, then did a double-take to return to me. He waved to me as he tried to get off his radio. “Okay, Russ, write up the change order and we can decide later. You gotta make a record with these fuckin’ guys, understand me? Now, this isn’t coming from the old man. The old man isn’t working this. It’s coming from me .” He clipped the radio to his belt and gestured in the direction of the building. “These people are gonna be the death of me,” he said.

“The park district?”

He nodded. “Everything’s our fault with these guys. These guys write up the worst specs you’ve ever seen, but we’re supposed to read everyone’s minds. Every time we talk, we gotta make our record with those people.”

“Sounds like someone who’s afraid of a lawsuit.”

He looked at me. “Oh, they’ll sue us. That’s a given. It’s just a question of how much we can get back in a counterclaim.”

So much of the business world is like this now. Litigation is just another cost of doing business, no different than payroll and insurance and bribes to city inspectors. “So, Mr. Butcher-”

“Tommy.”

“Tommy, I have a photo for you to look at.”

He drew back. “No fuckin’ foolin’? You found this guy?”

I struggled with that-or pretended to. “I’d rather not, uh, put ideas in your head.”

The message was clear enough. “You found him,” he repeated.

“Can you just take a look?”

Butcher glanced around before he leaned into me. “Mr. Kolarich, I saw this guy a year ago, runnin’ past me. Right? Understand?”

“Tom-”

“Listen, I saw a guy. I told you that. A black guy. That’s the God’s honest. You tell me you did some digging, you found the guy, I say great. You tellin’ me you got your man? Then it’s the guy I saw. You tell me it’s not your man, then it can’t be the guy I saw. Right?”

I deflated. I couldn’t believe I was even having this conversation. The process was being turned on its head. Usually, Kenny Sanders would be a legitimate suspect only if Tommy Butcher saw him that night. Here, Tommy Butcher saw him only if he’s a legitimate suspect. There are some cops, and maybe some prosecutors, who did it this way. I was never one of those guys. I wore that pride like a badge.

“Hey, look,” he continued, raising his hands, “you got a client who did right by his sister, sounds to me like. Guy killed his sister, so he kills that guy. Me, I might do the same thing. But if it’s me on trial, and there was a black guy barreling out of that building with a gun in his belt, I’d want someone to step up and say so. So I’ll say so. Believe me, I got a hell of lot better things to be doin’ than goin’ to court. But I’ll do it, if you found the guy.”

The wind was whipping up, dropping the temperatures to near freezing. I thought of Talia. I thought of Sammy. And Audrey. I thought about justice and fairness and how rules we put forth to guide a criminal justice system don’t always get it right. There was something larger at play here, a higher ethic. If Sammy killed Griffin Perlini, he didn’t deserve to spend his life in prison. And if he didn’t do it, he sure as hell didn’t deserve a single day inside. No rule of law could alter that truth.

“I found the guy,” I said. “But you didn’t hear me say that.” I handed him a copy of the photo of Kenny Sanders.

He took the photo and didn’t even look at it. “Okay, then. I didn’t hear you say that.”

I told him to keep the photo, which was a subtle direction for him to study it, to commit details to memory. I told him the prosecution would fight his testimony hard and probably try to exclude it prior to trial. Then I left him to his construction project, retreating to my car, safe from the wind. I drove off, secure in the knowledge that I now had two legitimate suspects, Kenny Sanders and Archie Novotny. Each of them was a plausible alternative to Sammy Cutler as the killer of Griffin Perlini. I was disavowing everything I was taught about my profession, crossing virtually every moral boundary, mocking every canon of ethics I had once held sacred. I had fabricated evidence, put words into witnesses’ mouths beyond any typical lawyerly cajoling, and I felt absolutely nothing. No regret. No self-doubt. Just the realization that I was now a lawyer in name only, a man hiding behind a title. I would focus on winning and ignore what I had willingly lost.