The Hidden Man (16 page)

The money, he meant. “What’s the collar?”

“Dime bag.”

I nodded. “Not your first?”

He shook his head, no.

“I’ll take your case,” I said. “No cash. Just one favor.”

He cocked his head. I pointed to Pete. “My guy here gets through processing clean. Not a hair out of place. Okay?”

This guy took my card and read it. “Kola-rich. Kolarich.” He wagged the card in his hand. “Hey, boss, can’t nobody make
that
kinda guarantee.”

“You can,” I said. “If you say so, they’ll listen. Right?”

He acknowledged as much and seemed to appreciate the respect. This whole batch of prisoners would be together for the rest of today, from this cell to transport to the basement of the courthouse to bond court. It was the courthouse basement that troubled me the most—that was where the county guards were known, on occasion, to look the other way—and I could only hope that, with this guy’s say-so, Pete would be okay.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Cameron,” he said.

“We got a deal, Cameron?”

He stared at me a long time, then at Pete, who seemed to shrink in the glare. “Yeah, lawyer-man, okay,” he said. “White boy stays clean and I got me a law-yer.”

I took some information from him—family members, job, the kinds of things I’d need to know to try to secure him bond later today—and shook his hand. When he returned to the bench, muttering something to his buddies, I was alone with Pete again. I repeated my earlier admonitions—mouth closed, eyes down—and struggled to pull myself away from that cell, secure in the knowledge, at least, that he’d be okay until I could spring him later today.

If
I could spring him.

20

I
DROVE HOME on empty roads as the sun came up. I took a shower and threw on a suit, hoping bond court for Pete would be today, a single thought repeating itself as I did so: This was wrong. Though I’d been posturing for the cop at the station, I’d spoken the essential truth. I couldn’t believe Pete would be involved in this. But the longer I played it out, the more my mental defenses dissolved. Once you started with the proposition that Pete was using cocaine recreationally, the rest became a familiar tale. Recreational usage becomes addiction. An addict can’t hold down reliable work, while at the same time more and more of his money, discretionary or otherwise, goes into that sweet nectar that increasingly becomes his sole focus. Suddenly he is out of money and looking for any way to come up with funds for the next score. Next thing he knows, his supplier decides that Pete might be useful for his purposes, that maybe he could introduce him to a new group of clients.

I’d handled hundreds of drug cases as a prosecutor, big and small, and I knew all of this well. During my stint on felony review—assigned to a police station to interrogate suspects and approve charges—I’d seen guys arrested for possession with intent who looked more like the addicts who bought the stuff than the guys who sold it to them.

And I had to acknowledge, as I had last night with Shauna, that from being swamped by the
Almundo
trial, to being a new father, to falling into a funk after losing Talia and Emily, I hadn’t been keeping a watchful eye on my little brother. This could have been building up for the better part of a year, and the whole thing eluded me.

I went to the office at nine. I needed to make some calls to some old friends at the county attorney’s office, hoping to call in some favors for Pete, which would be a minor challenge on a Saturday. I also needed to do some Internet transactions to have money liquid in case I needed to bond him out. He’d get bond of some kind or another for a nonvio lent, though guns weren’t far from violence and the judges treated them seriously.

When I walked into my office, the front page of our city newspaper, the
Watch
, was sitting on my chair. GRAVE SITE FOUND ON SOUTH SIDE, said the headline, including an old photograph of Griffin Perlini and a sky-view photograph of the hill behind Hardigan Elementary School, complete with law enforcement swarming the area and a crane lifting dirt. “At least four” children found buried, said one smaller story. MOLESTER MURDERED LAST YEAR; VICTIM’S BROTHER ACCUSED, read another, with side-by-side photographs of Audrey and Sammy Cutler.

This, of course, was a residual benefit I’d always hoped for. I wanted to prove Perlini killed Audrey to help my case, but I also wanted Perlini’s name to become infamous in the minds of potential jurors. I wanted a county full of potential jurors who knew, full well, that Griffin Perlini was a child molester and a murderer.

I imagined the look on the face of Lester Mapp, the smug prosecutor, as he read this very public account of Griffin Perlini’s misdeeds. This was not a good development for him.

But it was hard to focus on Sammy’s case, concerned as I was for my brother. There was nothing I could do for Pete yet. I didn’t know anything about the case. Pete had told me that he was with two people when the police came down on them, and he thought one of them got away. The other guy wasn’t with Pete in the holding cell, which made me wonder.

And what had the cop, DePrizio, said?
I’m on in four hours
.

I went to bond court early to try to hook up with the prosecutors. The courtroom was fairly empty and the judge wasn’t present, so I cornered a young assistant county attorney named Warren and made my pitch for a low bond. He listened patiently to my spiel, which included a few dropped names, and told me he couldn’t go below a hundred. I wasn’t surprised. Too much rock, and guns, to boot. That meant I had to come up with ten thousand. I’d transferred enough money in my checking account to cover that and more.

By the time the judge was ready to assume the bench, the courtroom was full of family members hoping that their loved ones would get I-bonds—allowing them to leave of their own recognizance, meaning no cash down—or at least something low that they could afford. The judge assumed the bench without fanfare, without a call to order by the bailiff. The Honorable Alexander Lotus—Lex Lotus—was a former prosecutor who’d come to office in the last election. He was about my age but graying, a solemn man who looked displeased at his assignment to bond court.

He started with the outstanding warrants for people who had missed court appearances. With each of the roughly twenty men who came before him, he listened to both sides and casually said, usually without looking up from his papers, “Warrant to stand,” after which the people were scooped—taken back into custody.

I settled in when Judge Lotus then turned to the misdemeanors, because that meant Pete’s case—felony charges—would be last. That was the standard protocol for these judges, starting with the small stuff before handling the felonies.

Every person, upon arrest, is entitled to a
Gerstein
hearing, where the judge determines that probable cause exists to detain. In theory, this determination might consist of a searching review of the records, maybe even the calling of witnesses, but in bond court in a big city, the judge usually had the words “Probable cause to detain” out of his mouth before the defendant reached the bench.

After the
Gerstein
finding, the judge would turn to the question of bond, which could take a bit longer unless the prosecutor and defense attorney had agreed on the amount. The judge can choose an I-bond, which lets the defendant walk and only pay the bond if he fails to appear later, or a D-bond, which requires a deposit of ten percent of the money before release.

“Probable cause to detain, circumstances?” The judge would then listen to the attorneys discuss bond before announcing, “Ten-thousand-D, or “One-thousand-I,” never deviating much from formula. If any one case took more than five minutes, the judge wasn’t doing his job.

Prisoners were shuffled in through a side door and lined up in the area that, in other courtrooms, would be reserved for the jury. Sometimes there were benches or chairs, but not in this courtroom. Prisoners stood, manacled, looking through Plexiglas at the profile of the judge, hearing what went on in the courtroom through a speaker, until their case was called.

A fresh batch of prisoners shuffled in, and I saw Pete. My heart sank at the sight. He clearly hadn’t slept, which was a smart move, but I saw nothing to indicate he’d been treated roughly. His shirt and pants were badly wrinkled and his hair was oily and flat. His eyes searched the courtroom until they found mine, and I nodded to him. He blinked twice, then nodded back.

The words finally came from the clerk: “Kolarich, Peter.”

“Jason Kolarich for the defendant,” I said from the front row, before I’d even approached, hoping the name might register with the judge. Our time as prosecutors had overlapped, though we’d never met.

“Prob—” The judge’s eyes lifted off the papers before him. He straightened his posture. “Counsel,” he said to me. A lightbulb had gone on.

“Good afternoon, Your Honor.”

He nodded to me, then glanced in Pete’s direction. “This is a relation, I take it?”

“This is my brother, Your Honor.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, Mr. Kolarich, I think at this stage I would find probable cause to detain.”

“I understand that, Your Honor.” There was absolutely no possibility of my convincing him otherwise, so I showed him some courtesy back, hoping for another return from him for the bigger question.

“Circumstances, Mr. Warren,” the judge said quietly to the prosecutor.

“Officer complainant,” Warren answered, meaning that a cop—DePrizio—was an eyewitness to the crime, as opposed to a layperson. “One point seven kilos of uncut rock cocaine and over thirty handguns. The defendant has two priors for—”

“I see his history, Counsel,” the judge said, waving a hand. Another courtesy, sparing Pete from having his criminal history—two possession busts—being stated publicly.

“People request one-hundred-thousand-D, Judge.”

The judge ran a hand over his mouth. “Mr. Kolarich, sir?”

“Judge, I would request an I-bond. Judge, my brother isn’t going anywhere. He’s gainfully employed, and he’s not going to run from this. If he does, he should be more worried about me than you.”

The judge thought about it a moment, then said, “Three-hundred-thousand-I.”

I breathed out. He was releasing Pete on his own recognizance, making the usual judicial trade-off—stiffening the amount but not requiring anything up front. If Pete skipped a court appearance, he’d be on the hook for three hundred thousand dollars.

“I’ll see you back at processing,” I told Pete. He nodded but didn’t answer as he was led back to the holding area.

I waited around because I had to cover another bond hearing, for Cameron Bates, the guy who watched Pete’s back for the last twenty-four hours. The judge gave him ten-thousand-D, meaning he had to cough up only a thousand dollars for release, which I intended to pay to get him out. The judge, seeing me step up again for a guy who was obviously held along with Pete, probably figured what I’d done and gave me yet another courtesy, kicking down Cameron’s bond by about half.

About two hours later, I walked out of the same police station where Pete had been jailed, with my younger brother quietly by my side. He was continuing to heed my admonition about keeping his mouth shut, even staying silent in the parking lot, as if the police had wired up the overhead lights to listen to confessions.

When the car doors slammed shut, before I could even turn the key in the ignition, Pete turned to me.

“Jason,” he said, “I think I was set up.”

21

C
AN’T MAKE IT
, your brother tells you.
Got an algebra test Monday
.

An algebra test. It doesn’t sell with you. Your brother’s made every home football game, all six your freshman year at State and the four, so far, your sophomore year.

Everything okay
? you ask, but you know you won’t get an answer. And you know, with a sinking feeling, what the answer is.

I just have a damn test, don’t make it a big frickin’ deal
, he snaps.

You don’t push it. You don’t know—you can’t know—what it’s like for him now, since you’ve left the house. You haven’t bothered to ask because you know he wouldn’t say anything anyway. Pete has always kept his distance that way.

The conversation echoes in your head through Friday and Saturday, even during the game, looking up into the packed stands that seem empty without him there.

The game, a mid-afternoon start, goes well. You don’t score but you have nine catches for over a hundred yards by the third quarter. Your finest moment comes next, not even a pass, a running play, a sweep right. You cut back on an angle and make a beeline for the middle linebacker, who is shuffling to his left. You feel the momentum build with your speed. You want it; you can taste it. He sees you, but it’s too late. You plow into him, the top of your helmet connecting just under his face mask, your shoulders pads barreling into his chest. You knock him off his feet, driving his body backward. You land on him with a force, but you’re not done, you keep driving your feet even as he’s on the ground beneath you, your helmet forcing up his face mask, almost taking his helmet off his head. He pushes you off and you slam your fist into his face mask as the whistle blows but you keep throwing punches at him until someone grabs you and lifts you off.

What the hell are you doing, Kolarich?
your teammate shouts at you, as the referee picks up his yellow flag and points at you.

Fifteen yards, personal foul, another fifteen for unsportsmanlike conduct, and you’re out of the game. On the sidelines, the coach is furious, but you don’t even hear him. You walk past him, past your teammates, and off the field.

You throw off your pads in the locker room and don’t even shower. You find your car in the parking lot by the dorm, your piece-of-shit Ford, and you drive the ninety miles home. You’re surprised by your calm, the icy deliberation. When you get home, the house seems empty. Both cars are gone.
Pete!
you call out. He comes out of his room, surprised to see you, still with the black paint under your eyes, in your sweats.