David Ellis - The Wrong Man

She walked over to me. I’d fancied her a bit from afar the other night. “Intrigued” was probably a better word. Up close now, she looked pretty much the same, the petite build and girlish features, but now with the details filled in. A crooked mouth, cautious eyes, nice pale skin with a dusting of freckles high on her cheeks. She smelled pretty damn good, too.

“That cocktail you wanted,” she said.

“Great.”

She still hadn’t taken a seat. She seemed to be debating with herself.

“You want to thank me but you don’t know how,” I said. “You’re a lady who can take care of herself and you don’t appreciate men acting like they’re rescuing the damsel in distress.”

She listened to me with a trace of amusement.

“On the other hand,” I went on, “those two big goombahs were a bit of trouble for you. Maybe you’d underestimated them. So you were relieved when I came out and offered some assistance. You appreciated and resented the gesture at the same time.”

She worked her mouth a bit as she watched me. Waiting for me to go on, but at the moment I was spending some time on that mouth of hers and letting my imagination move to places dark and steamy. I was in what you’d call a dry spell, you see. I made Mohandas Gandhi look like Hugh Hefner.

“How’m I doing so far?” I asked.

“In your mind?”

“We can start there, sure.”

“You’re doing great,” she said. “You’re charming and insightful and oh-so-confident.”

“Don’t forget I rescued you, too.”

“How could I?”

I gestured to the chair. “Have a drink with me.”

She paused, the mirth disappearing from her eyes. “I did want to thank you.”

“There’ll be plenty of time to do that between sips. I’ll even let you buy, if that’ll make you feel better about it.”

“But you’re making it hard. To thank you.”

“I’m rough around the edges to mask my sensitive, vulnerable side.”

“You’re also married,” she said. She nodded in the direction of my left hand resting on the bar. “No ring tonight, though.”

She was right, you could still see the pale outline on my ring finger. I finally took the ring off a few months ago, but I guess the impression hadn’t yet worn off.

“Then I guess you better be on your way,” I said.

The bartender put down a Stoli next to the wineglass. I turned away from the lady and went to work on the drink. A few minutes passed and she didn’t move.

“It was nice of you to help me the other night,” she finally said.

“Think nothing of it.”

“I’m not used to people trying to help me.”

I didn’t answer. I drained the Stoli and felt the effect immediately.

“You’re not married, are you? I was wrong about that.”

I put down my glass. “I’m not married anymore.”

“You have a pen?”

Did I have a pen? No, I didn’t. But the bartender did, along with another glass of Stoli for me.

She handed me a slip of paper. It had the word “Tori” and a phone number.

“If you want to call me sometime,” she said.

“Good to know,” I said, but Tori was already headed for the door.

The room they let us use at the Boyd Center reminded me of a large playroom for children. There were stations for board games and a sitting area around a television and a desk with chairs. The walls were painted with that same orange color, and the carpeting on the floor was thick, if a little dingy. Not the traditional setting for an attorney-client visit, but budgets were tight, and this was also the room for family visits.

Tom Stoller was in limbo. He needed serious psychological assistance from the state, but he wasn’t getting it, because this was the same “state” that appeared in the caption State v. Thomas Stoller, the same “state” that wanted to put Tom in prison for life, the same “state” that didn’t want to concede that Tom suffered a mental defect at the time of the shooting-or at all, for that matter.

I sat across the room and observed Tom with Shauna. They weren’t discussing the case. They weren’t probing his troubled mind. They were playing checkers. I’d brought Shauna along today because she was good with people, far more adept than I at establishing bonds and adjusting to the nuances of interpersonal relationships.

Sitting across from Shauna, a checkerboard between them, Tom showed the same tremors I’d seen every time I visited. His tongue was peeking in and out of his mouth. His eyes were blinking rapidly. His fingers wiggled constantly. Side effects, Dr. Baraniq had said, of the antipsychotic medication. Tom appeared to be contemplating his next move in the board game, but for all I knew he was in a faraway place, envisioning himself as Sir Lancelot to Shauna’s Guinevere.

You’d think that his mere presence at Boyd was an acknowledgment of Tom’s mental illness, but it wasn’t. The state wasn’t stupid. Boyd housed all kinds of people who presented problems to jailhouses, ranging from patients with communicable diseases, such as HIV, to notorious individuals deserving of segregation, such as gang leaders or police officers, to those with your basic “behavioral” problems.

Tom Stoller fell into the last category. He wasn’t mentally ill. He was a “behavioral” problem. Yeah. Sure. Once they convicted him, he’d go to a penitentiary and receive somewhat decent psychological services. But for now, especially with an insanity defense looming, the state wouldn’t treat him as anything but a problem inmate who could be kept compliant if they drugged him up.

Tom double-jumped two of Shauna’s checkers. “Ooh, I was hoping you wouldn’t do that,” she groaned.

Tom looked up at her and stared, expressionless, in the inappropriate way of a child. Even when Shauna smiled and broke eye contact, as would any adult, he held his stare on her.

Shauna dutifully jumped one of Tom’s checkers. “Take that,” she said.

“I had girlfriends,” Tom said. I almost jumped out of my chair. It was the first time Tom had ever volunteered anything personal.

“I’ll bet you did.” Shauna winked at him. Bless her heart, she likewise recognized the significance of the moment but played the whole thing casually.

Tom stared back down at the checkerboard, and Shauna snuck a peek in my direction. Before too much time had passed, and the moment was entirely lost, she said, “Was there one in particular? Usually there’s one special one.”

“Jenny. Jenny, but she didn’t want to…” Tom dropped his head and started mumbling.

Shauna waited for a moment. “She didn’t want-”

“I can’t think of the name of the movie.” Tom shook his head harshly, like he was removing cobwebs. “In Somalia. She didn’t like it.”

“The mov-”

“It made her sad. She didn’t like… suffering.”

I knew what he meant. It was a graphically violent film about the American Special Forces operation in Mogadishu that went south and got a bunch of our elite soldiers killed.

“Black Hawk Down,” I said, from across the room.

Tom whipped his head around at me. With one violent thrust, he jumped up and backhanded the checkerboard clear across the room. Instinctively, Shauna pushed her chair backward, and I got to my feet. I raised my hand toward the security camera to indicate we didn’t want or need intervention by the Corrections guards.

Tom stood, frozen, his gaze lost somewhere in a memory. He slowly turned and walked over to the corner, where he took a seat and sat silently, stoic except for the familiar tremors. Shauna and I looked at each other, speechless.

“She didn’t want me to fight,” he finally whispered.