David Ellis - The Last Alibi

Taylor is no genius and shouldn’t bother applying for sainthood, but he isn’t the worst guy who ever lived, either. He had an assault and battery conviction from three years ago, so he couldn’t get a decent job, and someone came along and said, Stand here all day with a gun and make sure nobody comes in, and we’ll pay you fifty bucks a day, and he took it. He took it because it seemed easy. He took it because fifty bucks a day was $350 a week, almost $18,000 a year, and because it put a roof over his wife and daughter’s heads and food on their table.

Though ten years my junior, Taylor grew up three blocks from where I lived in Leland Park, went to all the same schools, and started down the same route I was traveling. But Taylor didn’t have football to snatch him out of the quicksand like I did. I could have been that kid.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m still on my way to being that kid, if the last fifteen years of my life have just been an anomaly, an accident, I’ve been playing someone I’m not, and sooner than later I’ll surrender to the gravitational pull down to what I really am at heart, the son of a grifter and alcoholic, a directionless loser.

A knock at my door. Joel Lightner walks in.

“Hey.”

Then Shauna walks in.

“Hey.”

This doesn’t feel like a good thing. I smell a lecture. That’s if I’m lucky. If I’m not, it’s an intervention. We love you, Jason. We’re here for you. We want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Shauna closes the door, and I’m thinking, Intervention, not lecture .

“We’re going to talk,” says Shauna, “and you’re going to sit there and listen. When we’re done, you can tell us to go fuck off if that makes you happy. But you are going to listen.”

I swivel away from the computer and face them both. I don’t say anything, don’t accept her guidelines or reject them. Joel is fading back a bit, but is clearly with her on this.

“You know I’ve been concerned about you, and you know I think you have a painkiller addiction. We’ve sort of put that conversation on hold because I’ve been on trial. I don’t feel very good about that-in fact, if you want to know the truth, it tears me up inside-but it is what it is. But I think part of the problem is your girlfriend, Alexa. I think she’s enabling you. I think she’s scary, since I’m being honest. And that’s why I asked Joel to do me a personal favor and perform a background check on her.”

“You. .” I look at her, then at Joel, with whom I recently spent a rather eventful evening, and yet I don’t recall this subject coming up.

“Jason,” he says, unapologetic, “last August, just eleven months ago, Alexa Himmel was the subject of an order of protection in Medina County in Ohio. A husband and wife,” he says, peeking at a piece of paper he’s holding, “Brian and Betsy Stermer sought an OP against her and got it. They said she was stalking Brian and demanding a sexual relationship from Brian and was physically threatening them and their children.”

“Sorry,” I say, “I’m still at the part where the two of you are doing criminal backgrounds on my girlfriend behind my back.”

“Last October, she violated the OP,” he goes on, undaunted. “She showed up on his front doorstep one day and she had a knife. She was arrested and convicted of contempt of court and, as far as I can tell, was damn lucky she didn’t get charged with something a lot worse.”

“If it was as bad as you’re saying,” I reply, “she would have been convicted of something a lot worse.”

“In December, the Stermers went back to court to modify the restraining order, because it kept her one hundred feet from them, and they said she was standing just outside the hundred-foot boundary, on a public sidewalk down the street from their house, for hours at a time. She would wave to them. She had binoculars. Sometimes she would hold up signs. They said it was causing the entire family extreme emotional distress.”

“Sounds like legalese,” I say. “Let me guess. They had a lot of money and fancy lawyers.”

“She was arrested again last February,” Joel says. “She showed up at Dr. Stermer’s radiology office. She burst into his office and exposed herself to him. She was charged with criminal trespass, criminal contempt, stalking, and public indecency.”

I turn my head away, toward the window.

“She entered into a plea bargain. The Stermers agreed to drop the charges if she would leave the state. And she agreed. She left the state. And she moved here.”

“And met you,” says Shauna.

I stand up. “Guys, it was really great of you to stop by. Thanks for the information, and I’ll take it from here.”

“Jason,” says Shauna, “if you’d lower your defenses for one minute, you’d see that this is serious. I take it you didn’t know any of this? I mean, what do you even know about her?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“C’mon, Jase.” Lightner drops his head a notch. “You know it’s a real question.”

“She was looking for you,” Shauna says. “Not you, specifically, but someone like you. When did you meet? May? June? By then, you’d started dropping weight and not sleeping and looking like. . like you look now. Like a drug addict in a nice suit. You were just what she was looking for, Jason, don’t you see that? Someone who was struggling. The next person she could latch on to. But this time, someone who needed her. Someone who wouldn’t reject her.”

“You know what?” I throw up my arms. “I wasn’t struggling, I’m not struggling, I don’t ‘need’ anybody , and by the way, fuck you, Shauna.”

“And you’re protecting her because she makes you feel nice and warm and fuzzy all over about your drug addiction,” Shauna says, gaining steam now. “She’s manipulating the shit out of you, and you don’t even know it. Or worse yet, you do, but you don’t care.”

“Dr. Freud over here.” I gesture toward her. “A lawyer and a shrink.”

Shauna keeps her stare on me. I know that stare. I’ve seen that stare a thousand times. She knows she’s right, regardless of whether she is or not.

“Listen, you don’t know her like I do,” I say. “If she’s a little intense when it comes to me, it’s probably because she doesn’t have any family anymore. Her parents are deceased, and she doesn’t have siblings. So yeah, she finds someone she cares about, she gets intense about it.”

Joel and Shauna look at each other.

“What are you talking about?” Joel says.

“She’s an only child, and her parents passed away.”

“Oh, Jason,” Shauna says.

Joel pinches the bridge of his nose. “She’s not an only child, Jason. She has a brother. And he lives here in town.”

Jason

Sunday, July 21

It’s near eleven in the morning. My eyes are heavy, my vision hazy; I fought the typical demon battles during the night, blood and fangs and cries of terror. Given the weekend, I kept up the broken-sleep pattern into the late morning, with a few doses of those yummy Altoids thrown in to lubricate the machinery.

I hate that I’m sleeping when there’s so much to do, but the truth is that there’s so little I can do. If running around the city would help me catch our killer, I’d do it. If standing on my head would do it, I’d be flipping upside down right now. I’ve racked my brain repeatedly to come up with names of suspects with whom I sat in a room and secured a confession, but if those names are out there somewhere in the netherworld of my brain, I haven’t found them, and pushing myself toward them seems to have the effect of pushing them away, like reaching into the back of a cabinet and contacting the thing you want just enough to move it completely out of your reach. It’s the worst kind of frustrating, this directionless angst.