The Hidden Man (43 page)

Carlo pushed Smith away and turned to his daughter, Marisa. “Come here, sweetie,” he said. Marisa looked terrible. She wasn’t sleeping at night, worrying about her daughter, who lay in the bed clinging to life. It was tough enough to cope for someone with all their faculties, but Marisa’s disabilities, her mild retardation, left her wholly unequipped for this.

Carlo cupped his hand around Marisa’s chin. “Marisa, you know how much I love you, don’t you?”

“I know, Daddy.”

Carlo kissed her cheek and held her for a long time. He stroked her hair and whispered into her ear. “Now, Raymond is going to take you home for a little while. I’ll stay and watch Patricia, don’t you worry. Run along now, sweetheart.”

Marisa picked up her bag. She went over to the bed, stroked Patricia’s hair, kissed her forehead, and whispered something to her. Smith took her arm and looked back at Carlo. Carlo nodded and turned to the orderly.

“You can show Mr. Kolarich in,” Carlo said to the orderly.

I STAYED ON HIGH ALERT as I was walked down a corridor filled with customary hospital smells, soft voices and moans, laughter at the nurses’ desk. It was hard to imagine anyone jumping out at me under the circumstances, but I’d just survived someone putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger, so I figured I had used up all my good luck for the day.

“Right here, sir.” The orderly pointed to a room that was designated by the tag PATRICIA BUTCHER. I looked in before I entered. An older man, probably in his seventies, was sitting in a chair by a window. Sun streamed in and hit the floor near his feet.

“Carlo,” I gathered.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, son.”

“All of it good, I hope.” The private bathroom was to my left, Carlo straight forward. “Let my brother go.”

He nodded. “I will. Give me your phone and it will be done.”

I remained motionless at the threshold of the room.

“Well? Aren’t you going to come in?”

I took a deep breath and entered the room, past the bathroom, and saw the patient lying in the bed. Tubes passed from her wrist to a device that looked like an ATM machine on a diet. Her chest lightly rose and fell. The coloring of her skin was closer to yellow than to human flesh.

“This is my granddaughter,” he said. “She can’t hear us.”

I started to walk over to her but froze in place. Her hair was matted against her head. She was breathing with assistance. It felt inappropriate to stare at her, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

“Her name is Patricia,” said Carlo.

I rested my hand on the post at the foot of the bed. So much adrenaline flowed through my body, I almost couldn’t get the words out.

“Her name,” I said, “is Audrey.”

60

T
HANK YOU, RAYMOND.”Carlo handed me back the cell phone. “Your brother is on his way.”

I closed the door to the room and placed a chair against it. I wasn’t expecting an ambush but I wasn’t going to make assumptions.

“Good,” I said. “Now give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“I only
have
one. Because you’re not a killer. And you don’t want to become one. Trust an old man on that.” Carlo, still seated, rested his head against the wall.

“She was the best thing to ever happen to Marisa,” he continued. “The best thing to ever happen to
us
. My only regret is that my wife, Patricia, never knew her. We named her after my wife.”

“That’s very touching, Carlo.”

He shook his head but didn’t look at me. “Marisa, my daughter—do you know about her? She’s as beautiful a creature as God ever put on this earth, I’ll tell you that, Jason. But she’s a little slow. They used to say ‘retarded.’ Now they say ‘developmentally disabled.’ I say ‘slow.’ Just a little slow, is all. A good mother. A loving mother. She just needs some help, is all.

“Well, it’s not easy being in that condition. She wanted to have a life. She wanted boyfriends, you know, everything a young woman wants. And she wanted to have a child of her own. Especially after Marisa’s mother—my Patricia—died. She became so fixated on it. She had to have a child. She
had
to. I guess she thought it was some way to cope with the loss of her mother.”

“Circle of life.”

“That’s just it. Yeah. Circle of life.” He sighed. “But try telling an adoption agency that you’re a single, mentally retarded woman.
Try
telling them that. Jason, do you have any idea what it’s like to see your daughter in so much—” Carlo’s eyes fixed on me. “Well, now I guess you do have some idea, don’t you?”

“Let’s leave me out of this,” I said. “I think you’re getting to the part where you decided to kidnap Audrey for Marisa.”

Carlo inclined his head. “She saw the girl at that picnic. She followed her around, watching her. I wasn’t aware at the time. But she was fixated. She kept talking about Audrey, Audrey, that kind of thing.” He shook his head. “And this man, Frank Cutler, he was no kind of a good man. He was a drunk, is what he was. Half the time, he showed up to the job in the bag. The other half, he didn’t show at all.”

“Hold up,” I said. “You’re justifying this?”

He stared at me, a whisper of a smile across his face. “It’s what you do. You justify. You tell yourself that you can give this girl a better life than she’d have with a loser for a father. Yes, you justify.”

“You made sure he was away from the house the night you took her. You had some of your people keep him out and drunk at a bar.”

“Yes. That’s true. But they didn’t know about this,” Carlo said. “This was all my idea. All my doing.”

“You took her? You were the one who took her from her bed?”

“Yes,” he answered.

I didn’t believe it. But I couldn’t prove otherwise. At this point, there was no way I could prove whether it was Carlo, one of his sons, or even his daughter who pulled Audrey Cutler out of her room. But it was very clear that Carlo, the patriarch, was going to take the fall for everyone else.

“I told the family she was adopted,” he went on. “My daughter? Bless her heart, but how would she know different?”

“And your boys?”

“Your father tells you something, you believe it.”

I looked again at Audrey, hooked up to tubes and machines. “She got her mother’s genes,” I said, recalling similar machines hooked up to Mary Cutler while she was on her deathbed. “Her kidneys are failing.”

“She’s dying. The donor lists won’t cut it. It’s a genetic thing. She needs her brother’s kidney. And she needs it fast.”

But by the time they found her brother, Sammy, he was under arrest for the murder of Griffin Perlini. They couldn’t very well waltz into the Department of Corrections and announce themselves. It would be copping to kidnapping.

Correction: They
could
have done that. But they didn’t want to get caught.

So they needed Sammy to beat the rap—and to do so quickly. Carlo sent his boy Tommy to tell the police that he saw a black man fleeing the murder scene. Keeping it in the family, of course, because this kind of a secret was too sacred.

Then they sent Smith to offer Sammy the best legal representation money could buy. When he insisted on me, they had no choice. And then I started getting creative. I helped find a burial site of young girls, among other things, and Carlo and Smith began to worry that I was going to drag this case out. They knew I’d want DNA testing on those bodies to confirm that one of them was Audrey, and even though that test would obviously come out negative, there would be a delay of the trial. A delay that could cost Audrey—Patricia—her life. That’s when they started lowering the boom on me, using Pete.

Stick to the script
, they told me, after they’d pinched Pete in that drug bust. Sure. Don’t get creative, in other words. Don’t worry about the witnesses against Sammy. Don’t cause a delay. Don’t do much of anything, in fact, while they went to work on the case, offering Tommy’s perjured testimony, finding Kenny Sanders as a fall guy, strong-arming the witnesses against Sammy.

“Out of curiosity,” I said. “How did you expect this to play out? You get Sammy off the charges, and then you just tell him, ‘By the way, your long-lost sister is still alive, and could she please have one of your kidneys?’”

“You say these things as if there were many options. But there were no options.” He looked at me. “What would we have done? I don’t know. Offer him money for his kidney and for his silence, I guess. Would we have killed him afterward? You want me to tell you that wasn’t a possibility? I don’t know.” He shook his head. “None of that mattered until we got him out of jail.”

That stood to reason, which is to say, there was no reason. From his perspective, his only hope, short of confessing, was to get Sammy free and then think of something.

“You need to know, Jason,” Carlo said, wagging an insistent finger at me. “You need to know, this girl has been loved every day of her life. She was given everything, but most of all our—our love,” he managed, choking out the words. “Extreme actions. We took extreme actions, yes. But it was a matter of life and death. I would rip”—he grabbed at his midsection—“I would rip every organ out of my body to save her. So would my boys. We would do anything.”

“Everything but confess to a crime. This could have been all over months ago.”

“Yes. I admit it. I’ll confess now. Call the police. Have an officer come to this room.”

“I’m going to do just that.” I opened my cell phone, searched through the directory, and made the call. “Detective Carruthers,” I said. “Jason Kolarich. You won’t have to keep that photo of Audrey Cutler any more.”

I gave a little taste of the details and signed off.

“You tried to kill me today,” I said to Carlo. I thought it deserved mention.

He nodded. “I knew it was over. I was ready to go to the cops. I just wanted to protect the rest of my family. This was my doing. It should be me who pays. Me. Just me.” Carlo rose from the chair with some effort and approached me. He took my arm as he began to lose composure, his body trembling, tears falling. “I beg you, Jason. I beg you. The brother—he’ll hate me. He’ll hate all of us. He has every right to. But please, son—
please
convince the brother to donate a kidney.”

MY BROTHER ARRIVED at the hospital at almost the same time as the police. He showed up without an escort, having been dropped off at the hospital with instructions to head to the sixth floor. His left hand was bandaged where he’d lost the finger and he looked like absolute hell, but he was relatively intact and the sense of relief was all over his face.

My brother and I weren’t much for hugging over the years, but we had a long embrace and then I checked him over, with one arm over his shoulder. “I’m okay,” he insisted. “Other than the finger, they didn’t lay a glove on me. They pretty much ignored me, actually.”

I patted his chest. “A braver man than I.”

Police officers were streaming in now. Carlo had left Audrey’s room and was being questioned by Carruthers and other cops in an empty room down the hall. The whole thing was turning into a madhouse.

“Let’s get lost,” I suggested. Pete needed to have his hand examined—at least we were in the right place for that. But mostly I wanted to usher Pete away from this scene, from the entire affair, as quickly as I could. And once we broke away, there was another stop I wanted to make, too.

61

H
IS NAME WASN’T SMITH. It was Raymond Hertzberg, an attorney in private practice who specialized in transactional work, an interesting way to describe what he did. His clients were a who’s who of shady characters—some whose names and photographs would be found on flow charts in the FBI offices, and many who didn’t quite rise to the level of mafia but had some connection or another with organized crime.

He was at his office until well after ten o’clock. He stuffed a number of documents into his old suitcase and carried an additional gym bag for the overload. A long trip was in the making, some place sunny with favorable extradition laws.