David Ellis - The Hidden Man

When the courtroom had completely emptied out, Tommy Butcher pushed himself out of the witness stand. He looked like he’d just received some really bad news from the doctor.

“What the hell just happened?” I asked him.

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what coulda happened. I mean, I know what I saw. I mean, nothin’ that happened here changes the fact that the guy-the guy you showed me the photograph of-that guy was there that night, right?”

It was true that I could still place Kenny Sanders at the Liberty Apartments on the night of the murder. But Sanders wasn’t going to admit to anything beyond that. I needed Butcher’s testimony to have him be not only there , but fleeing the building with a gun at around ten o’clock. After this court hearing today, it would be a tough sell to get the judge to allow Butcher’s testimony at all, much less to get a jury to believe it. And without Butcher, all I had was Kenny Sanders admitting he was there that night but not admitting anything beyond that. I had nothing at all.

“Christ, it was a year ago,” Butcher told me. “I thought it was Downey’s. It must have been some place else. Lemme think on this and-”

“Forget it, Tom. It’s over.”

I was still numb from disbelief. What colossally shitty luck. The place gets its liquor license pulled?

“Tell me what I gotta do, Mr. Kolarich. Tell me how to fix this. I definitely saw a guy running out of that building. Tell me what I gotta do.”

I closed up my briefcase and shook my head. “Pray,” I said.

Butcher walked out, seemingly in a trance. I waited in the empty courtroom until he was long gone before I removed my cell phone. “Brown tweed jacket, red tie,” I said to Joel Lightner. “Heavyset, balding. Give him about five minutes and he’ll be outside.”

LET’S SAY EIGHT. Eight years, out in four, with one already served. That’s three more years inside, Sam.”

I’d caught up with Sammy in the holding cell in the courthouse before his transport back to the detention center. My client sat against the wall of the cell, dejected and bitter.

“They’re at twelve now?” he asked.

“Say I get him to eight.”

“After today?”

“Sammy-say I get him to eight,” I said. “Let’s pretend, okay? Could you do that?”

He played with the idea. It was never an easy thing to accept, obviously, but the whole point was considering the alternative.

“I have Archie Novotny,” I said. “And they have your statements to them, which were pretty close to a confession, and they have your car at the scene, at the time of the murder, and they have eyewitnesses. Maybe-maybe I can shake those witnesses, Sammy. I haven’t even been able to talk to them yet. I will. But nothing I do to them will change the fact that they picked you out of a lineup.”

He didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard me.

“Could you do eight?” I asked again.

“After what that asshole did to my sister?” Sammy’s head fell back against the cell wall.

“I don’t think Griffin Perlini killed Audrey.” I blurted it out without thinking. I hadn’t necessarily planned on telling Sammy this fact any time soon. It really didn’t change our case at all-in fact, it hurt it. But I thought it might help Sammy accept a prison sentence.

Sammy stared at me for a long time without speaking.

“Remember Mrs. Thomas, our neighbor?” I said. “She didn’t think it was Perlini who ran off with Audrey. She thought Perlini was too small to fit the man she saw running off with Audrey. And that’s not all, Sam. Here’s the real problem: Perlini had a bum knee. He’d torn his ACL and never repaired it. He couldn’t run, Sam. The guy who took Audrey was in an all-out sprint.”

“Then-who?”

“Our friend Smith? I think he’s shilling for the guy. I think his whole reason for being involved is to keep me from figuring out who really killed her and those other girls buried behind the school.”

Sammy pushed himself up and began to pace the cell. I couldn’t fathom the impact of this revelation. He’d spent his entire life on an assumption that, I was now telling him, was a lie.

“I-I killed a guy who didn’t-who-?”

I killed a guy . He’d never said the words to me. So now we were even on the revelations. Sammy did, in fact, murder Griffin Perlini.

“You killed a guy who molested a bunch of young girls,” I said. “Maybe he didn’t kill any of them. I don’t know. But don’t turn him into a Boy Scout.”

Sammy had nothing to say to that.

“Think about eight,” I said, as the deputy approached to tell us it was time to wrap up.

I WENT BACK to the office and fell in my chair. I had a raging headache with no time for self-pity. I had to find the elderly couple who positively identified Sammy as the man running from the Liberty Apartments and pray that I could find some way to tear apart their testimony. I had to do whatever I could to make a stronger case against Archie Novotny, the only thing I had left in Sammy’s defense. And then there was the small chore of solving Audrey Cutler’s murder, finding the killer, and hopefully finding my brother along with them.

My cell phone rang. Dread filled my stomach.

“Kolarich,” Smith said. “I need to know exactly how you intend to win this case after today’s monumental fuck-up.” His delivery, while intended to be threatening, was edged instead by tension. No doubt, he’d heard about the developments this morning.

I didn’t have a good story about how I could win this case. My best bet was a plea bargain, and I thought I could get the prosecutor down to eight years. Lester Mapp was riding high after knocking out Tommy Butcher’s testimony today, but in the end, the reason the county attorney’s office wanted a plea had nothing to do with the strength of its case. It was public relations. Griffin Perlini had just been turned into a monster in the press, a headline story of a gravesite filled with dead girls, and the elected county prosecutor wasn’t going to score a lot of points by coming down hard on the man who killed the killer. They wouldn’t let Sammy walk, but they’d accept a quiet plea bargain that put this thing to rest.

That, I figured, was why Lester Mapp had filed this motion to bar Butcher’s testimony pretrial. He could have waited until just before trial, handed me the evidence that skewered Tommy Butcher’s testimony, and left my case in tatters. But he wanted me to see, up front, that my case wasn’t as good as I’d thought, so I’d accept a plea deal.

“I have another suspect,” I told Smith. “His name is Archie Novotny. His daughter was molested by Griffin Perlini. He feels like Perlini ruined his family. And he wasn’t where he claims to have been on the night of the murder. He has an alibi-a guitar lesson-but I can prove that he wasn’t at his guitar lesson that night. It’s a fabricated alibi, Smith.”

This was news to Smith. He didn’t volunteer his opinion of my story. He just asked me to repeat the story, more than once, and tried to get his arms around the strength of the case.

“I don’t suppose you can get Kenny Sanders to cop to the murder,” I said.

“I tried. He was willing to place himself at the scene, but anything beyond that, there’s no way. We needed Mr. Butcher to put the gun in his hand, running from the building. Without him, Ken Sanders is just a man who happened to be in the building.”

That’s what I figured. “Then we go with Archie Novotny,” I said. “I can win that case.”

“Losing is not an option, Jason. It’s not an option for you or your brother.”

Smith hung up the phone. I found my eyes trailing upward before I closed them.