Джеффри Дивер - Transgressions

“Misidentification”? What was that?

He was becoming angry, defiant. Knowing he was God-damned innocent of any wrongdoing, no matter how trivial: traffic violations, parking tickets. He was innocent! So he insisted upon taking a lie-detector test.

Another mistake.

Seventeen hours later an aggressive stranger now retained as Mikal Zallman’s criminal lawyer was urging him, “Go home, Mikal. If you can, sleep. You will need your sleep. Don’t speak with anyone except people you know and trust and assume yourself under surveillance and whatever you do, man — don’t try to contact the missing girl’s mother.”

Please understand I am not the one. Not the madman who has taken your beautiful child. There has been some terrible misunderstanding but I swear I am innocent, Mrs. Bantry, we’ve never met but please allow me to commiserate with you, this nightmare we seem to be sharing.

Driving home to North Tarrytown. Oncoming headlights blinding his eyes. Tears streaming from his eyes. Now the adrenaline rush was subsiding, leaking out like water in a clogged drain, he was beginning to feel a hammering in his head that was the worst headache pain he’d ever felt in his life.

Jesus! What if it was a cerebral hemorrhage...

He would die. His life would be over. It would be judged that his guilt had provoked the hemorrhage. His name would never be cleared.

He’d been so cocky and arrogant coming into police headquarters, confident he’d be released within the hour, and now. A wounded animal limping for shelter. He could not keep up with traffic on route 9, he was so sick. Impatient drivers sounded their horns. A massive SUV pulled up to within inches of Zallman’s rear bumper.

He knew! Ordinarily he was an impatient driver himself. Disgusted with overly cautious drivers on route 9 and now he’d become one of these, barely mobile at twenty miles an hour.

Whoever they were who hated him, who had entangled him in this nightmare, they had struck a first, powerful blow.

Zallman’s bad luck, one of his fellow tenants was in the rear lobby of his building, waiting for the elevator, when Zallman staggered inside. He was unshaven, disheveled, smelling frankly of his body. He saw the other man staring at him, at first startled, recognizing him; then with undisguised repugnance.

But I didn’t! I am not the one.

The police would not have released me if.

Zallman let his fellow tenant take the elevator up, alone.

Zallman lived on the fifth floor of the so-called condominium village. He had never thought of his three sparely furnished rooms as “home” nor did he think of his mother’s Upper East Side brownstone as “home” any longer: it was fair to say that Zallman had no home.

It was near midnight of an unnamed day. He’d lost days of his life. He could not have stated with confidence the month, the year. His head throbbed with pain. Fumbling with the key to his darkened apartment he heard the telephone inside ringing with the manic air of a telephone that has been ringing repeatedly.

Released for the time being. Keep your cellphone with you at all times for you may be contacted by police. Do not REPEAT DO NOT leave the area. A bench warrant will be issued for your arrest in the event that you attempt to leave the area.

“It isn’t that I am innocent, Mother. I know that I am innocent! The shock of it is, people seem to believe that I might not be. A lot of people.”

It was a fact. A lot of people.

He would have to live with that fact, and what it meant of Mikal Zallman’s place in the world, for a long time.

Keep your hands in sight, sir.

That had been the beginning. His wounded brain fixed obsessively upon that moment, at Bear Mountain.

The state troopers. Staring at him. As if.

(Would they have pulled their revolvers and shot him down, if he’d made a sudden ambiguous gesture? It made him sick to think so. It should have made him grateful that it had not happened but in fact it made him sick.)

Yet the troopers had asked him politely enough if they could search his vehicle. He’d hesitated only a moment before consenting. Sure it annoyed him as a private citizen who’d broken no laws and as a (lapsed) member of the ACLU but why not, he knew there was nothing in the minivan to catch the troopers’ eyes. He didn’t even smoke marijuana any longer. He’d never carried a concealed weapon, never even owned a gun. So the troopers looked through the van, and found nothing. No idea what the hell they were looking for but he’d felt a gloating sort of relief that they hadn’t found it. Seeing the way they were staring at the covers of the paperback books in the back seat he’d tossed there weeks ago and had more or less forgotten.

Female nudes, and so what?

“Good thing it isn’t kiddie porn, officers, eh? That stuff is illegal.”

Even as a kid Zallman hadn’t been able to resist wisecracking at inopportune moments.

Now, he had a lawyer. “His” lawyer.

A criminal lawyer whose retainer was fifteen thousand dollars.

They are the enemy.

Neuberger meant the Skatskill detectives, and beyond them the prosecutorial staff of the district, whose surface civility Zallman had been misinterpreting as a tacit sympathy with him, his predicament. It was a fact they’d sweated him, and he’d gone along with it naively, frankly. Telling him he was not under arrest only just assisting in their investigation.

His body had known, though. Increasingly anxious, restless, needing to urinate every twenty minutes. He’d been flooded with adrenaline like a cornered animal.

His blood pressure had risen, he could feel pulses pounding in his ears. Damned stupid to request a polygraph at such a time but — he was an innocent man, wasn’t he?

Should have called a lawyer as soon as they’d begun asking him about the missing child. Once it became clear that this was a serious situation, not a mere misunderstanding or misidentification by an unnamed “eyewitness.” (One of Zallman’s own students? Deliberately lying to hurt him? For Christ’s sake why? ) So at last he’d called an older cousin, a corporation attorney, to whom he had not spoken since his father’s funeral, and explained the situation to him, this ridiculous situation, this nightmare situation, but he had to take it seriously since obviously he was a suspect and so: would Joshua recommend a good criminal attorney who could get to Skatskill immediately, and intercede for him with the police?

His cousin had been so stunned by Zallman’s news he’d barely been able to speak. “Y-You? Mikal? You’re arrested—?”

“No. I am not arrested, Andrew.”

He believes I might be guilty. My own cousin believes I might be a sexual predator.

Still, within ninety minutes, after a flurry of increasingly desperate phone calls, Zallman had retained a Manhattan criminal lawyer named Neuberger who didn’t blithely assure him, as Zallman halfway expected he would, that there was nothing to worry about.

TARRYTOWN RESIDENT QUESTIONED IN ABDUCTION OF 11-YEAR-OLD

SEARCH FOR MARISSA CONTINUES SKATSKILL DAY INSTRUCTOR IN POLICE CUSTODY

6TH GRADER STILL MISSING SKATSKILL DAY INSTRUCTOR QUESTIONED BY POLICE TENTATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF MINIVAN BELIEVED USED IN ABDUCTION

MIKAL ZALLMAN, 31, COMPUTER CONSULTANT QUESTIONED BY POLICE IN CHILD ABDUCTION

ZALLMAN: “I AM INNOCENT” TARRYTOWN RESIDENT QUESTIONED BY POLICE IN CHILD ABDUCTION CASE

Luridly spread across the front pages of the newspapers were photographs of the missing girl, the missing girl’s mother, and “alleged suspect Mikal Zallman.”

It was a local TV news magazine. Neuberger had warned him not to watch TV, just as he should not REPEAT SHOULD NOT answer the telephone if he didn’t have caller I.D., and for sure he should not answer his door unless he knew exactly who was there. Still, Zallman was watching TV fortified by a half dozen double-strength Tylenols that left him just conscious enough to stare at the screen disbelieving what he saw and heard.