The Last Alibi (25 page)

That was a possibility, a hope. But it’s one of those things that you can’t predict, dependent on the circumstances, any number of factors; I knew I’d have to wait until the evidence was laid out and the jury reacted to know its impact.

Now it’s been laid out. Now the jury has reacted. And I don’t see anyone experiencing any pangs of sympathy for Jason Kolarich. Quite the opposite. They are seeing a desperately sad woman who, unbeknownst to her, is about to be murdered, and a cold, unfeeling man who broke her heart. And probably took her life, too.

63.

Jason

The judge mulls over an afternoon break, but Roger Ogren says he is close to finishing, and the judge clearly wants this witness to wrap up early tonight.

“Proceed, Mr. Ogren,” she says.

“Agent Jumer, let’s talk about Tuesday, July thirtieth. The day of Ms. Himmel’s murder.”

They do their thing, introducing another summary chart and displaying it on the screen for the jury, but this one isn’t much of a chart.

CALL DETAIL RECORDS FOR CELL PHONE OF ALEXA M. HIMMEL

Tuesday, July 30

“There are two phone calls on here, is that correct, Agent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For the moment, I’d ask you to focus only on calls made to the defendant.”

“Very good. Ms. Himmel only called Mr. Kolarich once that day,” says Agent Jumer. “As you can see, the phone call came at 8:16
P.M.
to Mr. Kolarich’s home phone, his landline. And the same cell tower, covering Ms. Himmel’s house, provided service to that call.”

“This is the first time, on any of these summary charts you’ve shown us, that the length of call is different,” says Ogren. “Instead of one, it says two.”

“That’s correct. As I said, Ms. Himmel’s service provider counts the first second of a new minute as a full minute in its billing. So anything from sixty-one seconds to one hundred twenty seconds would go down as a two in this box.”

“So we know from this chart that the cell phone call could have lasted as long as two full minutes,” says Ogren. “But in no event less than one minute.”

“That’s right.”

Too long for a voice mail
, in other words, or so Ogren will argue to the jury in summation. It’s hard to fill an entire minute of space on a voice mail; it’s unnatural to talk that long. Sure, it’s conceivable that Alexa would have droned on for more than a minute into a recording device; that’s what Shauna will say in closing argument. She was clearly distraught and obsessive, so it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that this call made at 8:16
P.M.
went into my home landline’s voice mail and she prattled on for over sixty seconds. But, Roger Ogren will counter, none of the other myriad calls Alexa made to me over the preceding days took that long—why, the charts prove it!

The punch line being:
Jason was home
at 8:16 on the night of Alexa’s murder. The call didn’t go into Jason’s landline voice mail. Jason was home, and he answered the phone, and he talked to Alexa for anywhere from sixty to a hundred twenty seconds. He didn’t come home after midnight and find Alexa dead, like he claimed. No, no, no. He received a call from Alexa at 8:16
P.M.
, talked her into coming over to his house—a notion the jury would easily believe, given how desperate she was for his attention at that point—and then killed her with a single gunshot from behind so she wouldn’t wreck his career by going to the Board of Attorney Discipline and ratting him out over his oxycodone addiction.

Then he cleaned up the place, wiped his prints off the gun with a Clorox wipe, probably took a shower and changed clothes to get the gunpowder residue off himself. And then he called 911 and tried to pass off a bullshit story to the cops about how his relationship with Alexa was terrific, peachy-keen, and she must have used a house key—a house key nobody can find—to get in, and some guy named Jim, no last name, yeah, he must have killed her. Yeah, go look for a guy named Jim, there’s only half a million people in this city with that name.

Shauna will cross the FBI agent now, but there’s not much she can do. About the only point she can score is that nobody knows if I received Alexa’s call to my house at 8:16
P.M.
or if it went into voice mail; the call detail records just show the call was picked up, not whether it was picked up by a computer or a person. And then she’ll try to convince the jury in closing argument that I wasn’t home, that I didn’t come home until hours later, roughly midnight, like I told Detective Cromartie.

That 8:16
P.M.
phone call will go under my list of regrets, my list of wish-I-could-do-it-overs.

I wish I
hadn’t
been home for that call. And I really wish I hadn’t answered it.

64.

Jason

Tuesday, July 16

Ten minutes to midnight. I’m in my living room, looking out the picture window, a bottle of water and the tin of Altoids beside me. Alexa—my girlfriend, my alibi—is asleep upstairs, but sleep isn’t for me right now. I’m waiting for a call. I’m always waiting for a call.

Nine days. Nine days since we set the Linda trap, when I flirted with Joel’s investigator, posing as a hostess at the Greek restaurant, hoping to gain the attention of the man previously known as James Drinker. Nine days and nothing yet. Joel Lightner’s team has followed Linda, who is continuing her undercover work at the restaurant, dutifully playing the part, showing up at the restaurant every night as hostess, coming home every night to the single-family house where she lives alone. She is everything “James” would want—young, pretty, and with a clear connection to me now. And yet Joel’s team has not had a sniff of him, no suspicious people following her, no cars driving slowly, no casual observer tracking her movements—nothing. Sometimes the North Side Slasher has moved quickly, sometimes he’s taken weeks to make his move. We don’t know when he’ll strike. Or if. Maybe this is all a waste of time; maybe he never even followed me to the Greek restaurant.

It’s been eight days since the night I spent with Shauna, fifteen of the strangest minutes of a strange period for me. She’s out of sight now, having started her trial the day after our interlude, and taking Bradley John with her, leaving our office empty. They probably come back to the firm at night, but I’m not there to see them. I’m not working late these days. I’m not working at all. And I wouldn’t know what to say to Shauna if I saw her, anyway. The last two times we talked didn’t go so well—one where she accused me of being addicted to pills, the other where we ripped each other’s clothes off and then departed about as awkwardly as could be.

And I’m drifting forward, deprived of a decent night’s sleep going on four months now, popping awake more and more frequently, needing those Altoids more and more frequently. I am drugged and edgy, like someone given a sedative but then jolted periodically with electroshock, trying to focus on the real identity of “James Drinker,” searching for anything he did or said that would narrow the field of candidates, always coming back to the same problem: When I’m chewing up these Altoids, I’m not thinking straight. I’m either foggy from the pills or I’m craving them, neither of which lends itself to good focus.

Name a client,
I’ve told myself over these last months.
Name a client who didn’t get my best effort.
And I want to believe that there is no such client. Kerry Alexander got a lesser-included battery conviction, nine months in the pen, when he could have gotten a decade behind bars. I got a not-guilty on the domestic battery case for that woman whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve already forgotten. Billy Braden waltzed out of court altogether after I walked him on a Fourth Amendment argument.
Name a client.
I can’t. I can’t point to a client and say,
If my head had been more in the game, he would’ve gotten this result instead of that one.

But then it comes full circle: I can only remember my conversations with the man who called himself James Drinker as well as I could see through fog: whispers of comments, stray words and phrases, but not the entirety of the conversations, or even full chunks of it. And here’s what gets me: I didn’t realize it at the time; I thought I was doing perfectly fine. So if I’m looking through a cloudy lens, who am I to judge how well I’ve handled
any
case?

That’s why I’ve begun reassigning cases, referring all my cases out to other lawyers in the private sector, part of the cadre of defense lawyers who kick things to one another. I’ve become a lawyer with no clients. For now. For now, I say to myself. Until I clear things up. Until I get this thing with “James Drinker” resolved, at which point I’ll start cutting back on those happy pills and figure something out. No use trying to take on too much all at once, right? Right. Right, right, right.

My knees bounce up as my cell phone rings. Joel Lightner. I say a quiet prayer.

“Yeah, Joel?”

“I think we spotted him tonight,” he says, breathless. “We were perched at Linda’s house and we think we saw him across the street, between two houses. We saw somebody, at least. I tried with the camera, but I didn’t get anything of value. Pretty much missed him. We tried to double back and catch him, Jason, or follow him, like we said—”

Right. Our best result was to spot him and tail him, follow him back to his home, get his address, then take our time with what we wanted to do. That was Plan A. Plan B, however, was just to snatch him.

“—but there’s only so many of us. By the time we got there, he’d vanished.”

“Do you think he spotted you?” I ask, my pulse slowing, post-adrenaline. I was hoping for an A-plus. This isn’t nothing, but it’s more like a C.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know. By the time we doubled back over there, he was gone. Did he see us coming? God, man, we’re pretty good at what we do. I really wouldn’t think he’d see us. But all I can really say is, I don’t know, and I sure as shit hope not. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Well, our plan worked, at least to a point,” I say. “He must have followed me to the Greek restaurant. But if he knows we’re on to him, then we’re toast.”

“But if he didn’t spot us,” says Joel, “that means he’s about to make a move. And we’ll be ready for him.”

65.

Shauna

Wednesday, July 17

I lean back in my chair and put my head against the wall, daring to close my eyes, knowing that I have hours of work ahead of me. The plaintiffs, the city, rested their case today and we start our defense tomorrow. The heart-pounding intensity that accompanies the birth of a trial has subsided. Now it’s a war of attrition. Each side is soldiering on, trying to keep their wits about them, afraid that any particular moment on any particular day could be
the moment
that seizes the jury’s attention, and wanting to make sure that when that happens, it’s favorable to their side. Bradley and I are like each other’s coaches, always propping each other up, giving pep talks, positive energy.

I’m alone. I sent Bradley home an hour ago. And Jason is obviously nowhere to be found. We haven’t so much as laid eyes on each other since . . . since . . . that moment.

I call Joel Lightner, whom I gave an assignment over a week ago now, after that friendly encounter I had with Alexa in Jason’s office, when she denied he was an addict, when she actually tried to claim that he still has pain in his knee, and when she accused me of feigning concern for Jason when, in fact, I was just trying to steal him back from her.

“Joel, what the hell, guy?” I say into his voice mail. “Remember me? You were going to do that thing for me.”

I punch out the phone and do what I’ve done for the past week: Push Jason out of my mind and focus on the family business that is depending on me.

A moment later, my phone buzzes with a text message from Joel:

Sorry sorry busy with Jason tracking bad guy stretched thin tomorrow I promise

I sigh. Jason really got himself in a jam with that weird redheaded guy who might be a serial killer. What, exactly, Joel is doing to help Jason, I don’t know.

And knowing those two cowboys, it’s probably better I don’t ask.

66.

Jason

Wednesday, July 17

“You’re sure about this,” Alexa says to me over the phone.

“I’m sure. I’ll be with Joel, and as soon as I get home, I’ll turn on some pay-per-view movie or something or I’ll make a call from my landline. I’ll be covered.”

This is the first time since we realized “James” was framing me that Alexa and I have spent a night apart. She’s been my alibi, kept me invulnerable from a frame-up. It’s had the added effect, of course, of keeping young women in this city safe from a serial killer.

Tonight, Joel and I have decided, is the night to take a chance on “James Drinker,” to give him an opportunity to attack Linda with us watching closely. So tonight, I’m going to stay home alone.

Or at least pretend to.

“Well, have fun, sailor,” she says to me. I haven’t told her what I’m doing. There’s no point in worrying her.

I head downstairs and make a big point of plopping down in a chair and watching a ball game on television. I never played baseball as a kid. Me and my friends, punks, idiots all of us, made fun of people who played baseball.

The game ends at nine-thirty. I stay in my chair until ten, then get up, stretch, and walk upstairs. I turn on the bathroom light and brush my teeth; then I turn off the light, turn off the light beside my bed, and crawl under the covers.

A half hour later, I slip out and crawl, in the darkness, to the staircase. I take dark stairs to the bottom level and sneak out the back door of my house. There is a small area there for barbecuing and not much more, then a high gate. I unlatch the gate and sneak into the alley, where a car is waiting for me. It’s Joel Lightner.

I duck into the backseat and stay down. Joel navigates the interior alley system, making a couple of turns until we come out two blocks away from my house.

Unless this guy is magical, he didn’t see me leave my house.

“Time to party,” Joel says, gunning the engine as we drive toward Linda’s house.