David Ellis - The Wrong Man

I clapped my hands together. “Get me good stuff, people.”

Everyone scattered. It was mid-afternoon now, the morning having been spent at the Boyd Center with my client. I took the discovery file on Kathy Rubinkowski and started to read.

At five-thirty, my intercom buzzed.

“Tori Martin?” said our receptionist, Marie.

Shit. I’d forgotten. “Here or on the phone?”

“Here.”

“Send her back.”

Dinner tonight had been my idea. The other night, when we’d visited the scene of Lorenzo Fowler’s murder, my mind had turned to other things, and Lightner was there, anyway, so we had a couple of drinks and scratched on dinner. This was the rain check.

I wasn’t really sure why I was pursuing this. She’d made it clear that she wasn’t interested in anything other than a platonic relationship. It’s not like I was looking to get married or anything, but I guess I wanted something, though if pressed I couldn’t define what.

“Hey. Nice offices.” She couldn’t have meant that, at least not my office. With the well-worn couch and a desk I’d picked up at a garage sale, half-empty bookshelves, and a desk full of disheveled papers, it looked more like a bachelor pad.

She brightened the place up, though. I couldn’t deny the attraction. She put herself together nicely. The long white coat was expensive, and she dressed fashionably, with the caveat that I knew absolutely nothing about women’s fashion. And truth was, Tori Martin would look hot in a cloth sack.

“Sorry, something’s come up,” I said. “I should have called.”

“That’s okay. Should I-we can reschedule.”

“Sit a minute,” I said. I came around the desk and picked up the football in the middle of the room. She lifted her purse off her shoulder and sat on the couch.

“A case just heated up,” I said.

“The one about Lorenzo? That crime scene?”

“Not exactly. Kind of.”

She cocked her head. “Really.” She was interested. Most people, on a superficial level, would be. Cops and robbers. Cool stuff. But she didn’t pursue it. It was one of the things I liked about her. She had a natural reserve, bordering on aloofness, but I preferred it to the nosy type.

Said differently, she reminded me of me.

“I have a case going to trial in three weeks,” I said, “and we’ve just decided to change our theory.”

“What kind of case?”

“A murder trial.”

“Cool.” Her expression lightened. “That’s exciting, right?”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“Can you tell me about it, or do you have some privilege or something?”

“No, I can.” I sighed. “You want a bottle of water? Or something stronger?”

“Water’s fine.”

I had a small refrigerator in the corner of my office, near my desk. “My client’s accused of murdering a woman in Franzen Park last January,” I said. Inside the fridge were three bottles of Sam Adams, a small bottle of Stoli, and one bottle of nature’s finest. I considered taking a small break and opening up a cold one, but one would probably lead to more. I figured I’d let Tori make the call. If she wanted a drink, that meant she wanted dinner, and maybe I could use a few hours to clear my head. “You sure you just want agua?”

She didn’t answer, so I glanced back at her. She looked like she’d just swallowed a bug. I sometimes forgot how this worked. People thought crime and justice were interesting to hear about and read about and watch on television, but when it got close to home, the idea of defending somebody who murdered a fellow human being was not for everybody. There are a lot of people-other lawyers as well as laypersons-who don’t have the stomach for it. I might not, either, had I not first been a prosecutor and grown somewhat inured to death and violence. A lot of prosecutors become true believers and form a deep-seated antipathy for their opposing counsel. Me, I never saw the world that way, maybe because I spent a good part of my youth putting minor dents in the law myself. There are a lot of people from my neighborhood who would say that if I didn’t have some size and the ability to catch a football and run like hell, I’d have wound up serving time in prison instead of sending people there.

On top of that, the murder victim was a woman; she was Caucasian; and she lived on the north side. People aren’t supposed to be murdered up there. People are supposed to die violently on the south and west sides. When it happens to someone in the nice neighborhoods, especially a white woman, it’s usually headline news.

I handed Tori the sweaty bottle of water. She probably wanted to put it against her forehead as much as drink from it. Hell, she probably wanted to head for the exit.

“Cat got your tongue?” I asked, trying to shake her out of her funk.

“He… killed her?”

“He’s accused of killing her,” I said, but this cute little game of allegedly sounded a lot less cute when applied to a real-life case.

Tori looked away. Disgust, I think, or maybe fear. Yep, I thought, she was seriously second-guessing any interest she had in me.

I took one of the chairs in front of my desk, flipped it around, and sank in it. “This is what I do, kid.”

She took a deep breath and looked up at me. How could you do this? she seemed to be thinking. How could you defend someone who killed a defenseless woman?

“Why did he kill her?” she asked.

I shrugged. “You ask me a week ago, I’d say this guy’s an Army Ranger who lost his mind when he got back from Iraq. He suffered post-traumatic stress that triggered a dormant case of schizophrenia. He killed her because he thought he was in wartime. He was out of his mind.”

That seemed to make a difference with Tori. My client was a sick war veteran, not an evil monster.

“I just got this case a few weeks ago,” I said. “It was a straight insanity defense, the shrink was already lined up, no eyewitnesses. It was pretty much a battle of the experts.”

“And?”

“And now I think my client didn’t do it at all.”

She thought about that for a moment. Judging from our conversations to date, I had the sense that she enjoyed the mental calculations of the law, using a different part of her brain. She had to balance that against her obvious revulsion.

The truth was, I had no idea what was running through her mind.

“You think he’s innocent? And you said it’s ‘kind of’ related to that thing you took me to? That crime scene?”

“It might be. I’m not sure, but I think so, yeah.”

Tori kicked off her heels and brought her knees up on the couch. I watched her intently. It was the first time she’d removed an article of clothing in my presence. Sure, it was only a pair of shoes, but baby steps, right? Without dreams we are nothing.

I framed my hands. “What you saw on Arondale-that was Lorenzo Fowler. He was a mobster. That murder was a professional job. The guy used a semiautomatic handgun from long distance. And he sent a message with the kneecap shots. And picked up the shell casings.”

“Does that mean something-the shell casings?”

“It means he knew what he was doing. A pro picks up the shell casings to prevent a match to his gun. That was a hit, no question.”

“Okay. I’m following.”

“So now we have my client, and the murder in Franzen Park. The theory was that he had a flashback to Iraq and shot this woman from a distance of about ten feet. He shot her with a Glock, which is probably the same model used on Lorenzo.”

She watched me carefully. I don’t know if she was listening to the details or if she was reconsidering whether she wanted anything to do with me. But it helped me to articulate this out loud, to bounce it off somebody who wasn’t an invested member of the defense team.