David Ellis - The Wrong Man

Besides, she’d had plenty of time to draft this thing. She knew months ago she was going to argue this. Why not? It’s a free shot on goal. Knock out the defendant’s legal theory and he’s left with nothing. And even if you lose, you tie up defense counsel on the eve of trial, make him scramble to respond to this motion instead of preparing for trial testimony. Wendy knew full well how thinly staffed we were at the law offices of Tasker amp; Kolarich.

“If she wins on this, she goes after Hilton next,” I said. “She argues that there’s no relevance to his testimony because if PTSD is out of the game, it doesn’t matter what kind of shit Tom went through in Iraq. His war experience is irrelevant.”

“And then we’re fucked,” said Bradley.

I tossed my football in the air, putting some English on it. “Not necessarily,” I said.

“Why not necessarily?”

“For one thing, we can revisit fitness.”

“Fitness-for trial? What does that have to do with this?”

“Young Bradley, what is the standard for fitness for trial?”

“Fitness for… The defendant is able to…” He paused. “The defendant has to be able to assist his lawyers in the preparation of his defense.”

“Correct. And what’s his defense, young Bradley, in this case?”

“Well, insanity.”

“And if he won’t talk to me about the case, is that assisting me?”

Young Bradley paused. I winked at Shauna. “Wait for it,” I said.

“Oh,” Bradley said. “Oh, so now the prosecution’s saying the same thing as us.”

“There you go.”

Shauna piped in. “So we join with the prosecution in arguing that Tom won’t talk about the case. We renew our motion that Tom isn’t fit to stand trial, and now we have Wendy Kotowski corroborating our position.”

“We do.” I threw the football too high in the air and almost didn’t reach it coming back down. “This will play right into Nash’s wheelhouse. He loves to see lawyers tie themselves in knots with their own words.”

“And this does what?” Shauna asked. “It just buys us time, right?”

“Right. It buys us time so my brilliant team of lawyers and investigators can discover hidden jewels of information that will reveal the innocence of our client.”

Shauna took a seat and looked at me crosswise. “So that’s why you wanted to keep the insanity notice on the books. Even though you didn’t like it. You didn’t plan on using it. You just wanted to bait the prosecution.”

I waved her off. “Hey, before we break our arms congratulating ourselves, we have one very big variable,” I said. “That obstacle goes by the name of Bertrand Nash.”

Tori stopped by the law office around eight-thirty with some work product for me. I’d deputized her, put her to work on summarizing some of the background evidence into abstracts that I could quickly reference if necessary. She’d wanted to help, and I’d warned her that it was grunt work, the lowest of the low-background summaries of Tom Stoller and the others with whom he’d served in Iraq. I’d probably never use them, but I’d rather have the information and not need it than need it and not have it.

Shauna had taken some work home with her, which was too bad, because I wanted her to meet Tori.

Tori looked glum. Not an uncommon reaction of a woman in my presence, and Tori wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine on a good day.

“This is really sad,” she said. “He had schizophrenia hidden inside him and the post-traumatic stress unleashed it?”

“Yeah, it’s a bitch of a thing, no question.”

“But you’re not going to say that at his trial? That he had a flashback or whatever?”

I shook my head. “I think I have a stronger case on reasonable doubt.”

“That’s too bad,” she said.

I didn’t follow.

“I mean, it’s a compelling story,” she said. “If I were on the jury and heard about war and that tragic thing that happened in Iraq with that little girl, and now he has post-traumatic stress, and on top of that, a mental illness, I’d feel sorry for him. I wouldn’t want to convict him.”

That was a savvy observation, I thought, for a math major. She was right on the money.

“I’m going to try to get that information in front of the jury, anyway,” I said.

“Oh, good. You really should.” Tori strolled the conference room, looking at the exhibits. She stopped on the blow-ups of the crime scene, the dead stare of the victim, the pool of blood, but then quickly turned away.

“You get used to that,” I said.

She looked at me. “To what?”

“The violence. The blood and gore. You have a problem with that, don’t you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Your reaction, the other day. When I told you I was defending someone accused of killing a woman in Franzen Park. You looked like you were about to vomit.”

She stared at me. I had a hunch that she didn’t like being analyzed. I didn’t, either. I was beginning to think we were made for each other.

“Well, I don’t like violence against innocent people,” she said. “I don’t like it when people are minding their own business, trying to make a living and support their family and all the right things, and then someone comes along and senselessly kills them. That turns my stomach, yes. And I wouldn’t want to get used to it.”

Fair enough. A good reason to stick to mathematics. Plus, she would make a room full of male high school algebra students very, very happy. She removed her long white coat to reveal a black turtleneck and jeans. She looked better every time I saw her.

“But if you’re a criminal or something,” she continued. “If you’re doing something bad. If you’re a drug dealer or whatever and someone kills you-honestly, I don’t have much sympathy for that. If you’re in that game, you live with the risks.”

“You play in mud, you get muddy,” I said.

“Exactly.” Tentatively, she looked back at the crime scene blow-ups. “So which one was she?”

“She-you mean the victim? Kathy Rubinkowski?”

“Yes. Which one was she? Was she an innocent victim? Or was she muddy?”

Interesting. Very interesting. It was really helpful to inject some fresh blood into this process, a layperson unschooled in the law but with brains and common sense, plus a nice ass.

It hadn’t occurred to me to think of Kathy Rubinkowski as anything but a victim. If Tom shot her as part of a PTSD episode, the answer was easy, she was a random, innocent victim. But even if it were a Mob hit, I’d been working on the assumption that she had stumbled on something at work, that kind of thing, and she was murdered before she could expose it.

But Tori, unpolluted and viewing this from a fresh perspective, had made a good point. Why was Kathy necessarily an innocent player? She could have been involved in something shady herself. I made a note to mention something to Joel Lightner. He was probably pursuing that angle, anyway, but it never hurt to make the comment.

“Maybe while you’re majoring in math, you could minor in pre-law,” I said.

“Not for me.” She walked across the room to where I was sitting. My heart did a two-step. The faint scent of flowers followed with her. I knew-meaning my brain fully comprehended-that nothing was about to happen. She wasn’t going to sit on my lap or disrobe or any of the images that swam through my head. But I found her approach provocative no less.

It was a humbling feeling. I still didn’t really know how to do this. Even before I met my wife, I was never good at the initiation stage of a relationship. Since her death, I’ve never felt like I had my legs under me when it came to navigating this kind of thing.