The Hidden Man (36 page)

“Jason, it’s Denny DePrizio. I’ve got some good news for you.”

I didn’t speak.

“You said you’d be willing to waive any right to sue over this thing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then we can get this thing wrapped up tomorrow, like you wanted.”

“Good.” I listened to him as he gave me the details.

“You okay, Kolarich? You sound funny. Different.”

“I’m fine.”

I was anything but fine. But at least I would get Pete’s case dropped. A fresh start for him, if he could make it out of this whole thing in one piece.

49

P
EOPLE VERSUS PETER KOLARICH,
Case Number 08 CR 67782.”

“Good morning, Your Honor, Jason Kolarich for the defendant.”

Judge Bonarides raised his tired eyes to me. “The defendant is not present?”

“He’s not, Your Honor.”

“Well, I suppose under the circumstances,” the judge said. “Counsel?” The judge looked at the prosecutor, a young woman named Elizabeth Morrow.

“Motion State S-O-L, Your Honor,” she said. The prosecution, on its own motion, was asking that the charges against my brother be stricken with leave to reinstate.

Judge Bonarides cast another glance in my direction. He was probably wondering how some fairly significant drug-and-gun charges were being dropped straight out, without a plea deal. Himself a former public defender, he presumably had a narrow view of the prosecution’s willingness to forgive and forget. Their willingness, in this case, stemmed from my signing of a different sort of agreement only minutes earlier—my agreement not to sue the county for false arrest or wrongful prosecution. But that fell outside the purview of a criminal courts judge, and no one would ever know about it.

Or maybe the judge recognized me. He came out of the same west-side area that produced Senator Almundo. There was a good deal of resentment in the west-side Latino community over Hector’s prosecution, with claims of selective prosecution based on race, resentment that became justified after the feds lost the case. As one of Hector’s defenders, I had a few fans in that community.

“The defendant answers ready for trial,” I said, which started the clock on their time to refile the charges. But this was all just a formality. The drugs-and-guns charges were officially dead. And whatever curiosity Judge Bonarides might have, in the end, another case was disappearing from his docket, and he wouldn’t break out a hanky over it.

The judge was on to the next case only moments later. I shook the prosecutor’s hand. “Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. The cop and the CI went south.”

It wasn’t the most gracious acceptance, but I didn’t care. I’d at least closed one chapter of the book. Pete didn’t have a criminal case to worry about. Now he only had the small matter of staying alive.

As I walked out of the courtroom, I caught the eye of Jim Stewart, who was sitting in the corner of the courtroom, dressed in a sweater and a baseball cap over his crew cut. I acknowledged him and he nodded back. I thought I even caught the hint of a smile cross his sober face.

I MET TOMMY BUTCHER at the construction site where I last found him, directing traffic and conversing with people who appeared to be from the park district, the owners of the building he was constructing. He was tired and ornery by the time he made time for me. We found a spot at a table that had been set up inside the half-constructed building for the workers to eat lunch.

“Oh. Right,” he said, after I laid out for him a detailed recitation of his criminal background.

“You forgot to mention it.”

“I forgot, period. What’s the point? I still saw a colored guy running from that building. Nothin’ I did back in the day changes that.”

I sighed.

“Look, I got better things to do, Mr. Kolarich. I don’t need this shit.”

“No—”

“I’m tryin’ to come forward here and tell what I saw. Someone’s gonna turn me into a crook for sayin’ so, maybe I’ll take a pass on the whole thing. Get me?”

“I get you.” I raised a hand. “Look, I need you. My client needs you. I’m just saying, we need to be prepared for this. They’re going to go after you—”

“Everybody and their fuckin’ brother fudged bid apps back then,” he said, his face fully colored in anger. “I put down a subcontractor as minority-owned when they weren’t. So what? Then in ’ninety, yeah, I’m paying some people in cash under the table so Uncle fuckin’ Sam doesn’t bleed me dry. Maybe I don’t volunteer that info when the G comes around. So now, suddenly, I
didn’t
see a brother runnin’ out of that building that night?”

“See, this is precisely why I’m here, Tom. This is precisely how the prosecution’s going to want you to react. You just be forthright with your explanations, admit to whatever you admitted in terms of plea bargains, and act like it’s all behind you. Don’t fight with them. The judge is going to believe you if you keep your cool.”

“Keep my cool,” he said, shaking his head. “This sounds like it’s gonna be a world of fuckin’ fun. I’m startin’ to get real glad I volunteered for this.”

The attitude, Tommy, the attitude. This was going to take some serious work. This was going to take the afternoon. I’d have to beat him up so many times that he became immune to it, that he’d be ready for it when Lester Mapp came after him.

Because, at the end of the day, Tommy Butcher’s identification of Ken Sanders was one of only two things I had going for me in the case against Sammy Cutler. That, and Archie Novotny. I couldn’t deny that Sammy was parked just down the street from Perlini’s apartment, and I couldn’t deny that the window of time that his car was parked perfectly matched the time it would take Sammy to go to Perlini’s apartment, kill him, return to the car, and drive away. I couldn’t even speak to the witnesses who identified Sammy, all of whom were refusing to return my phone calls. And Sammy’s would-be confession—where he blurted out Griffin Perlini’s name before anyone even mentioned why he was being questioned—didn’t help, either.

No, all I had was two alternative suspects. I would give the jury Kenny Sanders, identified by Tommy Butcher as the black-guy-fleeing-the-scene, and I would give them Archie Novotny, who had motive and no alibi for the night of the murder. That was it. That was all I had. And Novotny would deny everything, of course. He would be an adverse witness.

Which made Tommy Butcher’s identification of Kenny Sanders all the more crucial. These were the only witnesses who were on my side. I had to make sure that Tommy Butcher held up under an intense cross-examination by Lester Mapp.

“Let’s take it from the top,” I said.

MY CELL PHONE rang at my office near eight o’clock that evening. When I answered it, I heard Pete’s voice.

“Jason, it’s Pete. I’m doing—okay. The headline of the
Watch
is ‘County Budget Assailed.’ Take care of yourself, man.”

The line went dead. It was a tape recording, not Pete’s live voice. That was smart. They couldn’t risk Pete blurting something out that would tell me where he was, or anything at all that might implicate them.

The cell rang again.

“Jason,” Smith said. “Best of luck at that hearing tomorrow, with Mr. Butcher’s testimony. A critical moment, obviously. Critical for Mr. Cutler. And critical for your brother. Y’know, I think these guys are almost hoping you’ll screw up, so they can get to work on Pete.”

He hung up before I could reply. I checked the county clerk’s Web site to be sure of the time of tomorrow’s hearing, a superstition of mine.

I called Kenny Sanders one more time to check in with him.

“Never did get one,” he told me, referring to a subpoena from the prosecution.

“The prosecution didn’t subpoena you? Or call you?”

“No, sir. Only reason I know ’bout it’s ’cause of you tellin’ me.”

“Okay, well—show up anyway,” I said. I hung up with him. Then I looked back at the county Web site again.

There it was, just below the line for “Contested Motion—Prosecution,” without elaboration that it was the prosecution’s motion to bar testimony. “Hearing—10/18/08, 9:30 A.M.”

I picked up my cell phone again and dialed the number for Joel Lightner. “The name is Tommy Butcher,” I said. “I need his background and more, Joel. Starting as soon as you can.”

50

S
AMMY WAS BROUGHT into the courtroom at a little after nine in the morning. The deputy removed his manacles and he took a seat next to me, wearing his prison jumpsuit. There was no jury, so no need to make him look more respectable in a suit.

Across from me, Lester Mapp was conferring with another attorney, a young woman. He carried that air of authority that accompanied his position. He wore it a little too proudly. I never felt comfortable with it, myself, the self-righteousness. The way I saw it, lots of people do lots of things they shouldn’t, and the ones hauled into court are just the ones who got caught. Unless we could be more consistent in how we enforced the law, the air of superiority didn’t fit.

I checked my watch for the fourth time when Tommy Butcher walked in. I’d told him to wear a suit, but the best he could do was a brown tweed sport coat, red tie, and slacks, which didn’t seem to fit him too comfortably. I nodded to him but didn’t approach, other than to make a calming gesture with my hands.

“All rise.”

Judge Kathleen Poker walked into court with her typical no-nonsense approach and got right down to business, looking over her glasses at the courtroom.
“People versus Cutler,”
she said. “Show Mr. Mapp present for the People. Show Mr. Kolarich and the defendant present as well. Mr. Mapp?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” Mapp rose and buttoned his impressive suit coat.

“I’ve read your motion. Do you have anything further?”

“We’d ask to call Thomas Butcher, Your Honor.”

“Is Mr. Butcher present—okay, Mr. Butcher. Will you please come forward, sir?”

Witnesses come in all shapes and sizes, well-dressed and not, confident and meek, but you always want someone who seems comfortable, which means they’re being honest. Butcher seemed to do well enough on first glance, walking slowly to the witness stand and swearing the oath given to him by the bailiff. He rolled his neck, showing his discomfort with a buttoned-up collar and tie. That part wasn’t so good. Fidgeting was not on a lawyer’s wish list for his client.

“Permission to treat as adverse,” said Mapp. I didn’t bother to object, because Butcher was a defense witness. Mapp was asking for the right to cross-examine, to ask leading questions.

“Your Honor, for the record, I assume we can stipulate that the offense under indictment—the murder of Griffin Perlini—took place on September 21, 2006.”

“So stipulated,” I said.

“Thank you, Counsel.” Lester Mapp opened a file folder on the lectern between the prosecution and defense tables. “Mr. Butcher, good morning.”

That was about as friendly as the prosecutor was going to get.

“You gave a statement to the police in regard to this crime on September 18 of 2007,” he said. “Two-thousand-
seven
. Almost an entire year later.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Already, Butcher was getting his back up a bit, adjusting in his seat and setting his jaw. His eyes shot in my direction.

“On the date of this shooting—September 21, 2006—you were not aware of a shooting taking place.”

“No. Not then, no.”

“You heard about it later?”

“Right. I read about it in the paper.”

“The
Watch
?”

“Yeah. Some article about the case.”

“Do you recall when this was?”

“Not the exact date.”

“Well, okay—but let’s try it like this,” Mapp said. “You came to the police on September 18 of this year. How many days before that date had you read the article?”

When I asked Butcher almost that precise question yesterday, he couldn’t say. I went through the online archives of the
Watch
and found an article dated September 16 of this year, which was the Sunday edition. The article was a one-paragraph in the Metro Shorts about a firm trial date being set, including in the discussion that a shooting took place outside the Liberty Street Apartment Complex on the evening of September 21, 2006.