David Ellis - The Hidden Man

I was thinking about Pete, and about Talia and Emily, when I passed the window of an all-night diner populated with drunken revelers and college kids and law students taking a break during all-night cramming sessions. Good times. Don’t grow up , I silently warned them.

As I stopped at the diner’s window, I felt something subtle change, not so much a sound but the absence of one, a shift in the cacophony of white noise behind me. Nothing I could pinpoint, just a sense that as I had stopped walking, someone behind me had stopped, too.

I tried to use the window’s reflection, looking at an angle to the street behind me, but it was hard to make out anything more than a solitary figure. I was mildly curious, sure, but mostly I just wanted to make sure nobody was closing the distance. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, and I didn’t feel like canceling all my credit cards and getting a new driver’s license, or breaking my hand on someone’s face.

I started onward again toward my house, listening intently, trying to soften my own footfalls so I could hear those of someone else, but not looking behind me again. From what I could tell, I was being followed, but whoever it was had no intention of making a move on me. I didn’t know if this was someone looking for an easy mark but ultimately deciding I didn’t fit the bill, or someone who never had any intention of approaching, who was following me for some other reason. If I’d had anything left to fear in this world, I might have let it keep me up at night. As it was, I made sure to lock my door, set the house alarm, and let the whole thing bother me for a good thirty seconds, until exhaustion and intoxication allowed me a couple hours of sleep in a cold, empty bed.

IWOKE UP at eight o’clock and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom for about half an hour. This constituted tremendous progress, as there was a time when I’d required at least two hours’ examination of the plaster and that one stain on the ceiling from a champagne cork when Talia and I celebrated our third anniversary, before leaving the bed.

Things to do, I had things to do. I had a client coming and I had to get started on Sammy’s case. This would be the second day in a row that I would take a shower.

I got to my office at ten. I share space with an old friend, Shauna Tasker. We have a corner space and double up on a secretary/receptionist. We are, technically, two separate law firms, but we help each other out whenever need be.

Shauna was sitting in our conference room as I passed. We’ve been friends since back in high school. She was a prosecutor for a couple years, like me, but she left the office sooner, moving to a silk-stocking law firm until she got tired of the senior partner putting his hand on her knee.

I put my hand on her knee a time or two, myself, back in high school, but that was a long time ago. We became pals afterward, and at State-where she went on merit and graduated cum laude, while I went on an athletic scholarship-she became one of my closest friends. She’s petite and shapely, on the surface a real feminina , but she could always drink me under the table, and when you got her going, she could cuss like a truck driver.

After everything happened with Talia and Emily, and I quit my law firm and spent almost three months holed up in my house, Shauna cajoled me into renting space from her and hanging a shingle of my own. I thought of putting ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK on that sign but settled on LAW OFFICES OF JASON KOLARICH.

“Hey.” Shauna had her feet up on the long walnut desk, reading over some complicated transaction. Shauna still did trial work but when she’d left her law firm, she took with her a client that shoots her transactional work, too. When you’re a solo practitioner, you become a jack-of-all-trades, and Shauna was a fast learner. “Get any sleep, dear?”

I hadn’t exactly been keeping regular hours lately. Many of those nights had been spent out with Pete, who seemed to have boundless energy when it came to bars and women. Occasionally, Shauna would hang out with me, too, which was a different kind of sport because I got to watch a lot of sloppy-drunk idiots make a play for her.

“Smitty and Dom want to grab lunch today,” she told me, not even looking up from her case file. “Wanna come?”

Her request was deliberately casual. She didn’t know, specifically, how I spent my lunches but probably had a good idea. She’d been trying to pull me out of my funk for the past four months. Still, she hadn’t pushed, and she wasn’t pushing now.

“Can’t do it, m’lady,” I told her.

She looked up, training those loving but disapproving blue eyes on me for only a moment before looking back into her file. She hasn’t known how to handle this thing with me. I was a train wreck there for a while, holed up in my house, feeling sorry for myself, and the best she could figure was that it was better for her to be around than not. She probably understands me better than anyone I know, so she knows that I’m a loner at heart.

“Marie said something about a murder case?”

“Trial starts in four weeks.”

“Oh, well-four whole weeks.” That’s what I like about Shauna. She doesn’t get emotional about very many things. Even when that senior partner started sexually harassing her at her old firm, she simply responded with a counteroffer: She’d contact the EEOC, and his wife, if he didn’t give her a generous severance package and let her steal a client or two. “How’d that come about?”

I told her the name of my client.

“Sammy Cutler?” The name wasn’t registering with her, but she knew it should. “Sammy-” Her feet came off the table. “From BonBons?” she asked, meaning Bonaventure High School. “That freaky guy who wore the army jackets and got stoned all the time?”

Her reaction made me feel worse than I already did, only highlighting the divide that grew between Sammy and me after I became a jock. Shauna didn’t even know that Sammy and I had been friends. It was a painful and embarrassing reminder of how much distance I had put between us once I became a member of the high school elite, a varsity athlete in my sophomore year.

“Sammy was my guy growing up,” I said, allowing enough tone in my voice to call for a little respect on this topic. Shauna grew up about two miles away from Sammy and me, which to us was a different neighborhood altogether, a middle-class area that also fed into BonBons. “My next-door neighbor.”

“And he killed someone?”

Sammy hadn’t come out and confessed to me, but I certainly assumed so. “He killed the guy who killed his sister,” I said, which of course forced me to unload the entire story on her. Shauna, like me, would have been seven years old when it happened, and she might have heard something about it-no doubt her parents did-but it wouldn’t have registered in the way it did with me, naturally.

After listening to all of this, she exhaled dramatically. “Well, Mr. Kolarich, that’s one heck of a case ya got there. You need help?”

“I might,” I said. I tapped the door and left before she could engage me in further conversation.

“You notice,” she called after me, “I didn’t ask you if he had any money.”

I have accused Shauna, in my haughtier moments, of placing too high a premium on receiving prompt payment from customers. “You’re a true humanitarian, Tasker.”

“Come to lunch with Dom and Smitty, Jason! I’m serious! Smitty’ll buy.”

I ignored her, though I appreciated the gesture. I had my regular lunch appointment.

“When did Shauna become a humanitarian?” This from Marie, our assistant, without even looking up. Marie is a fair-haired young woman only three years out of college, who reminds us constantly that she has a degree in archaeology and will leave us, without notice, as soon as (a) she finds a job in that vocation, which seems unlikely given that we live in the Midwest and the only things to be found underground are the bodies of mafia informants, or (b) she gets tired of taking our abuse, which in truth she actually enjoys.