The Last Alibi (7 page)

“Jason Kolarich,” she says, clearing her throat and addressing me with mock formality, “I would be very grateful if you’d join me for dinner tonight.”

I shrug my shoulders. “I should warn you that I’m very old-fashioned.”

“Then I’ll let you pay.”

This woman matches me jab for jab. That’s probably going to be a problem for my ego. But she looks so casually elegant in her summer dress, and that edge to her, that sarcasm, that challenge, is much too much to resist.

“I’m powerless to say no,” I answer.

14.

Jason

Wednesday, June 12

I handle a couple of court appearances in the morning, a bond hearing on a cannabis possession—the brother of a law school classmate whom I’m representing as a favor—and a status hearing on an armed robbery, a kid who was whacked out on meth who held up a strip club and got as far as the front door before the gun discharged into his foot.

Afterward, I return to the office and look at the stack of files in the corner that Shauna has given me for the
Arangold
trial. She identified a particular aspect of the trial—a fight over the flooring that was put in the civic auditorium—for me to handle. I need to read some depositions and go over some architectural drawings with the client, but my mind starts to wander on page one. I hate working on this case, and I haven’t even started yet.

I light a match, hold it upright, and run through the words again:

I’ve got tar on my feet and I can’t see.

All the birds look down and laugh at me.

Miss again—this time my index finger getting in on the fun with my thumb, the flesh near the knuckle. The match goes into the Styrofoam cup with the others.

I’m thinking about this meth-head client, whom I got through the public defender program—the PD outsources its overflow; the hourly rate sucks, but it keeps you busy and sharp. This kid has been in and out of rehab twice, done two stints inside, and is undoubtedly looking at a third stay in both. He’ll fail rehab almost assuredly and find himself back under the spell of that drug, and next time he might shoot somebody else instead of his own foot. There are so many clients like that, especially in the drug world, for whom you have the feeling you’re just a temporary stop on a merry-go-round that will end only when they’re dead or sentenced to serious time.

Sometimes this job sucks. It doesn’t help that I feel like shit, out of sorts, my head ringing like the old rotary phone hanging on the wall in my house growing up, plus I have the fucking dry mouth again. I chew an Altoid and chug half a bottle of water.

A half hour later, Joel Lightner waltzes in and I’m feeling better. At my request, Joel had drinks with one of the cops investigating the stabbings of those three women on the north side. He likes to do that anyway. It’s good for business to keep his former colleagues on the police force happy. A private investigator needs lots of favors, and it’s easier to call one in if you’ve bought the cop a steak and a night full of whiskey.

I already have printouts from the Internet, mostly
Herald
articles, on each of the three murders, but I’ve read enough media accounts over the years on things I’ve been involved with—the public corruption case against Senator Almundo, the gubernatorial scandal, my prosecution of six members of the Tenth Street Crew for the torture-murder of a witness—to know that reporters only rarely get the story right, and almost never complete. They pick and choose what is relevant and sensational, no different from writers of fiction.

Alicia Corey, age twenty-six, was a stripper who was last seen leaving her club at about two-thirty in the early morning of Wednesday, May 22. She was found dead the next morning in her apartment, the victim of “six or seven” stab wounds. There was no sign of forced entry; police believe she was accosted outside her apartment and the assailant forced his way in, presumably at knifepoint.

Lauren Gibbs, twenty-eight, was a bank teller who also ran a website design business out of her home on the north side. She was found dead of “multiple” stab wounds at her house on Friday, May 24. None of the articles on Lauren mentioned the number of wounds.

And then Holly Frazier, twenty-seven, a graduate student at St. Margaret’s downtown and a barista at Starbucks, found dead of “at least half a dozen” stab wounds near midnight on Friday, June 7.

I put down the papers I’ve printed out. Hard to discern a pattern when all you have is media reports. The police have not even confirmed that they believe these murders are related. But they haven’t denied it, either.

Joel helps himself to a chair and uses my desk for a footrest. “Turns out one of the main cops working this case is Chris Austin’s nephew.”

I don’t know who Chris Austin is. Probably a cop Joel worked with before he turned to the lucrative career of private investigation.

“Nice kid, the nephew. Vance is his name. Guys must give him shit for that. Anyway, I didn’t get Vance, but I got one of the uniforms assisting on the task force who loved talking about the stuff. He spilled all he could for me and probably a little more. The kid can drink Scotch.”

I roll my hand for him to get to the punch line.

“What’s with your hand?” he asks me. “You smashing it with a hammer?”

“I don’t have a hammer.”

He sniffs the air. “You’re lighting matches in here?”

“Keeps me awake,” I say. “When I get bored.”

Joel shakes his head, like I’m not making any sense, but that it’s not the first time he’s felt that and it’s not worth pursuing. He’d be right about all of that, especially the last part.

“Anyway,” he says, “these three murders are definitely the same offender. All three women—Alicia Corey, Lauren Gibbs, Holly Frazier. Right?”

“Right.”

“He butchered them. Not just clean stabs. It was like he gutted them. Enjoyed it. Real violent. Angry guy, this offender.”

“Anything else connecting them? Any suspects?”

“None he mentioned. But there was one other thing,” he says. “This guy has a signature.”

“A signature beyond gutting them like fish?”

“Yeah. Something else. Don’t know what, though. That’s where the lid came down. I mean, that’s going to be real hush-hush, right?”

I nod. If the offender has some signature to his murders, the cops will usually keep that information out of the press. It makes it easier to distinguish real confessions from bogus ones, the crazies who want to take credit for crimes they didn’t commit.

“He didn’t give any hint? Anything at all about this signature?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. I
wouldn’t
ask. Guy could lose his badge over that.”

True enough. “And what about the three women? Any pattern to them?”

He blinks his eyes no, a quiet shake of the head. “All pretty young. ‘Nice-looking,’ he said, but not bombshells or anything. Well, the one was a stripper at Knockers. He said she was pretty hot. Nice figure, fake boobs.”

That was the one James Drinker said he dated. He got very defensive when I doubted that a stripper would be interested in him.

“Actually, what this uniform said was, she
used
to have fake boobs. Sounds like our offender was pretty vicious with that knife.”

I shudder. Did the freaky redheaded guy who sat in the same chair Lightner is sitting in do those things to those women? Lightner’s eyes catch mine. We’re thinking the same thing.

“You want me to look at your client now,” he says. “James Drinker.”

I nod my head. “At least check out that he’s being straight with me. Name, address, work, that kind of thing. And obviously, you’ll be happy to do this free of charge.”

“Obviously. All of a sudden, I’m a candy striper.” Lightner makes a face, but he knows I need this. I’m his best client, too.

I reach for the file that Marie opened for James Drinker. The informational sheet is always appended to the left side of the open file. I take a look at the sheet, and it looks weird immediately.

“This doesn’t look like his handwriting,” I say. “This looks like a woman’s handwriting.”

I buzz my intercom.
“Yes, Your Highness?”
Marie squawks. She knows I don’t have a client in here, thus the attitude.

“James Drinker,” I say. “The weird redheaded guy? His info sheet looks like a woman’s hand—”

“That’s ’cause I wrote it for him. He said he sprained his hand or something and he couldn’t write it himself. So he dictated the information to me.”

I stifle the easy smart-ass reply—
You take dictation?
—and hang up.

“Okay,” Joel says. “James Drinker. Give me the sheet.”

“James Drinker, 3611 West Townsend. No phone number listed. No phone number?”

“That’s Townsend and Kensington,” Joel says. “Not a nice neighborhood. That’s—I know that building. There’s an apartment building at that intersection.”

Lightner knows every building in this city. It gets annoying.

“He says he’s a mechanic at Higgins Auto Body,” I say. I give him the address, but he probably already knows it.

“Okay. Okay. Basic background?”

“Yeah, is he who he claims to be, criminal background, vitals.”

“Photos? A day in the life?”

“Oh, don’t bother,” I say. “I just want to make sure this guy’s for real. I owe you one.”

“You owe me, like, fifty. Give me a day or two and you’ll know whether he’s for real. And get some sleep, wouldja?” he adds on his way out. “You look like shit.”

15.

Jason

Thursday, June 13

I rise with my client, Billy Braden, as the Honorable Donald T. Goodson enters the courtroom, stumbles on a stair, and tries not to look embarrassed as he takes his seat at the bench.

Billy releases a heavy breath. This is the ruling that will decide his fate. He looks older than his nineteen years, genuinely terrified. I consider mumbling words of encouragement, but there’s no point. We’re going to know soon enough. And it may not be the worst thing for him to have sweated out this whole thing. When I first met him, he was a cocky kid with his hair hanging in his face and one of these rich-kid senses of entitlement, the trust-fund baby who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. But he buzzed his hair before the hearing a couple of weeks ago, at my insistence, and coupled with his nice blue suit and tie, he actually looks like somebody who could make something of himself if he put forth even minimal effort.

“State versus William Braden,”
the clerk calls out, as if there were any other cases up on the call.

Judge Goodson looks out at the attorneys but doesn’t greet us. That’s probably one of the reasons lawyers always give him low marks on the confidential evaluations that the bar associations pass around. If he would just show basic courtesy to the bar, they’d probably give him halfway decent marks, and he could have his own felony courtroom. But some people just can’t get past themselves.

The nausea announces its arrival inside me, weaving through my stomach and drifting upward. I take a shallow breath.

His Honor raises his glass and reads from a prepared text. “This matter comes before the Court on a motion to quash arrest and suppress evidence. The Court has heard testimony from the arresting officer, Detective Nicholas Forrest, and has considered written and oral arguments of counsel. The Court is now prepared to rule.”

Next to me, Billy Braden sucks in his breath and holds it.

“The Court finds that Detective Forrest lacked probable cause to arrest the defendant or to search him for the presence of illegal contraband. Thus, the arrest of William Braden is hereby quashed, and any evidence of the illegal narcotics obtained incident to that arrest is suppressed in any future prosecution of this matter. The Court is filing a written opinion today consistent with this ruling.”

Billy exhales, his posture easing with the flood of relief.

“Mr. Braden,” says the judge. Billy perks back up, back to military posture. “There is not a single person in this courtroom who doesn’t know that you had an eight-ball of crack cocaine on your person when you were arrested. You are free to go, Mr. Braden, because our Constitution is concerned not with individual cases but with the rule of law. It’s a crucial aspect of our system, but it is a technicality no less. You are a very, very lucky young man. I trust that I will not be seeing you back in this courtroom?”

Billy raises his hand as if he’s about to give sworn testimony. “I promise,” he says.

I wouldn’t put money down on that promise. I wouldn’t bet a used napkin. But for now, Billy has a new lease on life. His mother, Karen, gives me a big hug, and his father shakes my hand and covers it with the other. “We can’t thank you enough,” he says. “Really, Jason.”

“My pleasure.”

Billy and I clasp hands, and he does that bump-hug thing against my shoulder. “Hey, man,” he whispers, “I owe you big. Seriously. Fuckin’
seriously
.”

“Glad to help, Billy,” I say.

He looks at me for a long moment, winks at me, smacks my arm, and leaves the courtroom with his parents.

16.

Jason

Friday, June 14

Alexa and I step down from the promenade along the highway and into the small park near the beach. We sit at one of the stone benches and remove our shoes and socks. I angle away from her, slip out an Altoid, and pop it in my mouth as I get to my feet.

“You’re sure this is okay?” she asks me.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” I turn to her. She is in partial shadow, the overhead lighting catching one side of her face, the breeze off the lake playing with those straight bangs on her forehead. A beautiful sight. She even looks great in the dark. Better, actually—there is something about her that seems more at ease in the dark.

“Your knee,” she says. “It’s hard to walk in sand.”

“My knee’s fine.” That’s actually true. I can’t run or anything like that, but there are actually pockets of time now when I don’t even think about it in my daily routine, don’t even recite the words of caution before I stand up or hustle through a crosswalk.

I’m tired of even thinking about it. I want to take in the moment. Dinner at Schaefer’s, a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino—half a glass for me—and now a stroll along the lake.

As we walk down the sand to the shoreline, she takes my hand, ostensibly for support, but then she leaves it in that position as we walk. I’m not the most romantic guy in the world, I admit, but there’s something sweet and intimate about holding hands. Talia and I used to always say that we wanted to grow old together and hold hands walking down the beach. That memory, casually breezing through my brain, freezes me for a beat, but it doesn’t paralyze me like it did once upon a time. You just finally move on. You take steps: initial, gut-wrenching grief, then denial, then a dull ache that colors your world that will never, ever subside—and then one day it does; one day you look up and you realize it’s actually possible to move on.

Our toes sink into the wet sand. The lake is endless, alternately blue, black, even purple. The air is thick and damp. Around us is the gentle harmony of waves crashing ashore and vehicles whisking by at high speeds on the highway twenty yards to the west; there is something special about feeling like there is nowhere else in the world right now that you can hear what I’m hearing.

“This lake is why I moved here,” Alexa says. “For some reason, it makes me feel free.”

I know what she means. I live three blocks from the lake, a couple miles north of here. I always run along the water. My muscles are restless, yearning for the day when I can do it again, even as I’m unsure that day will ever come.

It’s not my only yearning. Our first date last weekend ended at Alexa’s door with a hug. Not even a kiss. She’s an old-fashioned girl.

“Do you miss being married?” she asks me.

That isn’t a question I expected. I spend my days being fast on my feet, ready for any challenge a witness or judge might hurl my way, but these simple personal questions always tie me in knots. But Mom always said, if you aren’t sure what to say, go with the truth.

“I miss Talia,” I say. “I never really cared about a marriage certificate, but she did, and I was fine with it. But yeah, I miss her.”

She looks up at me as we walk but doesn’t respond. That probably wasn’t a crowd-pleaser, but she asked.

“That was very honest of you,” she says.

I laugh. “Brutally so.”

“There’s nothing brutal about it. Would I be better off not asking and not knowing?”

“Maybe.”

“No.” She shakes her head firmly. “A girl needs to know what she’s getting into.”

Interesting choice of words. Am I hooking her in? Am I even trying to? Sometimes I feel like I’m just feeling through the dark, not knowing what I’ll touch and unsure of what I’m even reaching for.

“I had my heart broken once,” she says. “Not marriage, but I would’ve married him if he’d asked.”

“What happened?” There is a pause, longer than necessary. “Brutal honesty,” I add.

“It turned out he was
already
married.”

“Ah. That would be a complication.”

“Yeah . . .” Her voice trails off. She looks out over the lake. “Yeah, it pretty much sucked, I have to say.”

“How long ago did this happen?” I ask.

“A few weeks ago.”

I stop in my tracks. “A few
weeks
—”

She bursts into a laugh. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.” She faces me and puts her hand on my chest. That simple touch flips a switch on inside me:
All systems go!
“It was, like, three years ago,” she says. “He was a jerk. And I don’t miss him, to answer your next question.”

I move my face closer to hers. “That wasn’t my next question.”

“No?” Her mouth moves closer to mine, her head angling to the right. “What,” she whispers, “was your next question?”

I whisper back, “I wish I had something clever to say, but I just want to kiss you.”

“That’s clever enough for me.”

I don’t care how many times you’ve done it, you don’t forget a first kiss: the awkwardness and trepidation, each of you trying to find that fit, that rhythm. When it’s good, it’s like few things in this world. And this one is good. I taste red wine when we pull away.

She leans back and looks at me, her eyes searching me. As a rule, I don’t like being searched. I never know what someone might find.

“Well, gee, Jason Kolarich. This is pret-ty romantic. You sure know how to sweep a girl off her feet.”

I don’t have the foggiest idea how to do that.

“I still don’t have anything clever to say,” I admit.

She rests her hands on my chest. “Then how about you take me home?” she says.

•   •   •

We walk along the beach until we hit Ash Street, the closest principal artery, and walk up the stairs, wipe off our feet, put on our shoes, and hail a cab. Alexa lives outside the city in a small suburb to the south and west, Overton Ridge, so the cab takes a while with the traffic. We talk about all sorts of things: last fall’s presidential election (she has opinions, I think the candidates are all full of shit); music (she can tolerate R.E.M., which is a relief because that could be a deal breaker); her childhood bouncing around from town to town while her father opened new Kmarts (I didn’t even know that was a specialty, opening new stores). But as we pull off the highway and turn left down Wadsworth, the conversation starts to dissipate, replaced with tension. It seems to be a given what’s going to happen next, and I sense it’s meaningful to her, that she isn’t casual about sex.

I don’t want to be, either. I want to care about it. I want somebody, or at least some
thing
, to matter to me again.

She lives in a small brick bungalow, three from the corner. It hardly looks like we’ve left the city; in a way this block, with its low rooflines and tiny plots, resembles the neighborhood in the city where I grew up, Leland Park.

She uses her key and opens the door. I follow her in as if there were never a doubt. She takes me by the hand and leads me past a small room, a combination living room–dining room that is well kept, spotless. Her bedroom is also small—the whole place is—and also immaculate. Hardwood floors, wall closet, a single window with flowery drapes, a queen-size bed with about a hundred pillows and a teddy bear. The teddy bear is interesting.

Silently, she positions me by the bed and then faces me, taking my face in her hands and kissing me differently than the first time, more assertive but still very soft. We remove each other’s clothes methodically, gently. No tearing or ripping. We are taking it slowly, which works for me, savoring the moment, treating it like it’s something unique and special. Finally, she backs up onto the bed, me hovering over her, and we touch each other everywhere, caressing surfaces, until her tongue is more urgent in my mouth, which I take as my cue, and then a switch is flipped and everything is more primitive, more aggressive, more needy, and we find a rhythm and I do better than I expected in terms of holding out, but when it happens I grunt so loudly I surprise myself.

We lie quietly panting, her hands drawing circles on my back, my face nestled in her hair, for a good ten minutes. I hear a car pass by outside. I hear a bunch of people, talking in that cheerful and familiar way, lubricated by alcohol and heading to their next destination, bed or another bar or late-night chow.

“Don’t hurt me,” Alexa whispers.

For a second, I’m sure I heard her wrong. I raise my head. “Did I—hurt you?”

She eases out from under me, my question unanswered, and heads to the bathroom. I ease off the condom, which was basically coming off anyway as my little man retreats into postcoital hibernation, and wrap it in a tissue. I put on my boxers and lie on the bed.

Nice night. As I stare at the ceiling, my mind drifts. To Talia, scrunching up her nose at one of my cornball jokes; to Emily Jane, our daughter, quietly breathing as she sleeps in the fold of my arm; to Shauna, watching over me while pretending she’s not; to a serial killer butchering young women on the north side.

I sit up on the bed and wait for Alexa. I think of calling out to her. It’s been, like, ten or fifteen minutes. But hey, maybe nature called, or it’s some feminine thing that I don’t understand.

It all comes back with a rush, the needle pricks inside my head and the stormy stomach, the bile in my throat, my mouth dry as sand. I steady myself and wait out the first wave.

Finally, Alexa walks back into the room. “Sorry about that,” she says, casual in her tone. She crawls onto the bed and nestles into my arms.

“Are you good?” I ask.

“Oh, I’m great.” She adjusts herself to look at me. “I’m great. That was—I really enjoyed that.”

That would be more believable had she not left the room for so long, but I see no reason to let my imagination run wild. It was great, and if there is sex a second time, it will be even better.

“Will you stay?” she asks.

I tell her I will. I suddenly realize how exhausted I am. We lie in silence, atop the covers, for how long I don’t know, all energy draining from my body, thoughts beginning to mangle themselves together in dreams. As I fade off to twilight, my defenses down, it comes to me as naturally as the sound of my voice, as obvious as day following night: James Drinker killed those women.