John Katzenbach - The Wrong Man

Sally hesitated for an instant before asking, “What does sort of involved actually mean?”

“You should have her explain. But, as best as I understand it, she had a one-night stand with the guy, and now he won’t leave her alone.”

“Is this the guy who wrote the letter Scott found?”

“Seems to be. He’s making all sorts of We were made for each other protests, when they don’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy sounds a little out there, but again, you should have Ashley explain it to you. It will seem a lot more, I don’t know, real, maybe, if you hear it from her.”

“Well, my guess is this is really a mountain being made out of a molehill, but-”

Hope interrupted, “It didn’t sound that way. I mean, we both know she can be overdramatic, but she sounded genuinely disturbed. I think you should call her back right away. It will probably do her some good to hear from her mother. Reassure her, you know.”

“Well, has the guy hit her? Or threatened her?”

“Not exactly. Yes and no. It’s a little hard to say.”

“What do you mean not exactly?” Sally asked briskly.

Hope shook her head. “What I mean is that I’m going to kill you is a threat. But We’ll always be together might be the same thing. It’s just hard to tell until you hear the words for yourself.”

Hope was a little taken aback. Sally was decidedly cool and irritatingly calm about what she was being told. This surprised her.

“Call Ashley,” she repeated.

“You’re probably right.” Sally stepped to the telephone.

Scott tried Ashley on her regular phone, but the line was busy, and for the third time that evening he got the answering machine. He had already tried her cell phone, but that, too, had only produced the sound of her voice breezily requesting the caller to leave a message. He was more than a little bit put off. What, he wondered to himself, is precisely the point of all these modern forms of communication if one simply gets nowhere more efficiently? In the eighteenth century, he thought, when one received a letter carried over distance, it damn well meant something. By being closer, he thought, everyone had gotten much farther away.

Before his frustration built further, the phone rang. He seized the receiver.

“Ashley?” he asked rapidly.

“No, Scott, it’s me, Sally.”

“Sally. Is something wrong?”

She hesitated, creating just enough of a dark space in time for his stomach to clench and the world around him to darken.

“When we last spoke,” Sally said, employing all her lawyer’s sense of equanimity, “you expressed some concern about a letter you found. You may have been justified in your response.”

Scott paused, wanting to scream at the professional reasonableness in her voice. “Why? What’s happened? Where’s Ashley?”

“She’s okay. But she might indeed have a problem.”

Michael O’Connell stopped at a small art-supply store before heading home. His stock of charcoal pencils was down, and he slipped a set into the pocket of his parka. He picked out a medium-sized sketch pad and took it to the counter. A bored young woman who sported an array of facial piercings, and hair streaked with black and red, was sitting behind the cash register, reading a copy of an Anne Rice novel about vampires. She wore a black T-shirt that said FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE on it in large, Gothic-style print. For a brief moment, O’Connell was mad with himself. He should have filled his pockets with many more items, given the lax attention the girl was paying to the comings and goings in the store. He made a mental note to return in a few days as he forked over a couple of worn singles for the pad of paper.

He knew the clerk would never think to examine the pockets of someone willing to pay for something.

Misdirection, he thought to himself. He remembered playing football in high school. His favorite plays were always those designed with some element of deception. Make the other team believe one thing when another was actually happening. The screen pass. The double reverse. It was the key to much of his life, and he embraced it at every opportunity. Make people underestimate you. Make them believe one thing was happening when really, something far different was at stake.

It was, he thought, the game that made it all worthwhile.

The clerk handed him some change, and he asked, “Who are the West Memphis Three?”

She looked at him as if the simple act of communicating was somehow physically painful. She sighed, “They’re three kids who were convicted of murder, of killing another kid, but they didn’t do it. They kinda got convicted because of the way they looked, and all the Bible-thumpers down there who didn’t like the way they dressed and talked about Goth stuff and Satan, and now they’re on death row and it’s unfair. HBO did a documentary about them.”

“They got caught?”

“It wasn’t right. Just because you’re different doesn’t make you guilty.”

Michael O’Connell nodded. “Right. It just makes it easier for the cops to look for you. When you’re different, you can’t get away with anything. But if you’re the same, you can do anything you want. Anything.”

He headed back out into the evening. As he walked down the street, he took a modest inventory of information he’d acquired. There is a small fringe to society, he told himself, where one can travel with relative impunity. Stay away from the chain store with the security guard. Work at the service station where the owner is willing to cut corners and look the other way. Avoid robbing something from a Dairy Mart or 7-Eleven, because those places were robbed all the time and might have an off-duty cop moonlighting with a twelve-gauge hiding behind a two-way mirror. Always do what was unexpected, but only just so, which kept people off balance, but not alert.

Never rely on others.

It all came naturally to him, he thought.

Michael O’Connell trudged up the street to his apartment house, then up the stairs. As usual, the hallway outside his door was filled with the mewlings and meowings of his old neighbor’s cats. As always, she had put bowls of food and water out for the animals. He looked down and several scurried out of his path. They were the smart ones because they recognized a threat, even if they couldn’t quite determine what it was. The others milled about. He knelt down and held out his hand, until one of the least suspicious cats moved close enough for him to scratch it on the head. With a quick and practiced motion, he seized the cat by the scruff of the neck and carried it into his apartment.

The cat struggled for a moment, trying to twist and scratch, but O’Connell kept it firmly in his grip. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a large ziploc bag. This one would join four others in his freezer. When he reached a half dozen, he would dispose of them in some distant Dumpster. Then start in again. He doubted the old woman’s ability to keep an accurate count of her pets. And, after all, he’d asked her politely once or twice to limit their number. Failing to follow his suggestions, especially when so generously put, was in reality what was killing the cats. He was merely the agent of death.

Scott listened to his ex-wife and every second grew angrier.

It wasn’t that his instincts had been ignored, nor that he’d been right all along. It was the orderly tone in her voice that infuriated him. But he decided that arguing with Sally wasn’t going to do any good.

“So,” she said, “I think, and Ashley does, too, that perhaps the best thing would be for you to go to Boston and maybe bring her home for the weekend, so she can really get a handle on what sort of problem this young man is likely to cause her.”