The Wrong Man (2 page)

A moment later, Gregus put two large foam cups of water in front of Stoller. He drank them each down in single gulps, water escaping the sides and dripping from his dirty beard. He smacked his lips and nodded.

“I’m hot,” he said.

“Okay,” said Danilo. “We can get you a blank—you’re
hot
?”

“I’m hot.”

Must be nerves, Danilo figured. Internal thermometer rising due to anxiety. It happened sometimes. It was hard to imagine this guy wouldn’t have a permanent chill with his lack of clothing and the outside temp in the twenties, but he’d been inside for several hours now.

“Tom, do you know why you’re here?”

Stoller didn’t answer. He’d stopped his mumbling and seemed to be listening.

Danilo opened the evidence box and lifted the bag holding the murder weapon, the Glock 23 semiautomatic pistol.

“That’s my gun,” Stoller said, as Danilo dangled it before him.

Danilo snuck a peek at Gregus. Jesus. That was easy.

“This is your gun, Tom?”

Stoller reached for it. Danilo pulled it back.

“That’s my gun,” Stoller insisted, as if wronged.

“We need to hold on to it, Tom. Okay? Keep your butt in that chair.”

“It’s mine.” Stoller stared down at the table. “It’s mine.”

“Where did you get this gun, Tom?”

Stoller didn’t answer. Like maybe he didn’t hear it. Danilo repeated the question and still got no response.

“Where do you live, Tom?” he asked.

The suspect’s eyes danced, a crooked smile appearing briefly. “Where do I… live?”

“Okay, sleep,” said Danilo. “Where do you sleep?”

“Park.” Stoller chuckled.

“Franzen Park?” The answer seemed obvious enough. Franzen Park was the name of the surrounding neighborhood, a yup-and-comer, where some high-end townhouses were sprouting up amid apartment buildings where students like Kathy Rubinkowski lived. But Stoller clearly spent his nights in the park itself.

Stoller shook his head, but he didn’t seem to be responding.

“West side of the park, Tom.” Danilo tried to sound casual. “A street called Gehringer. You know that street, Tom?”

No answer. A slow buildup didn’t seem to be getting Danilo very far. The detective drummed his fingers and thought for a moment.

“Why’d you run from the cops, Tom?”

The police had found Stoller in Franzen Park, behind the park district’s main building, huddled between two dumpsters, inventorying a purse later identified as belonging to Kathy Rubinkowski. He threw a two-by-four at one of the cops, knocking away his flashlight, and ran for a good three blocks before the uniforms, with the help of an additional patrol car, cut him off.

Stoller stopped his fidgeting. His eyes darted about. Fresh heat, fresh odor came off him. His forehead had broken out in sweat. His hands came off the table, poised in midair. He seemed to be lost in some world other than this one.

Detective Danilo waited him out. But Stoller didn’t seem ready to spill. So Danilo repeated his question about running from the police tonight. He tried some others, too.
What did you do last night, Tom? Where’d you get this purse, Tom?

“Tom.” Danilo slammed his hand down on the table.

Stoller winced at the sound but didn’t turn to Danilo. Like he heard a sound but couldn’t place it. His lips moved quickly, but damned if Danilo could make out a single word.

“Tom!” he repeated, slamming his hand down again.

Detective Gregus retrieved a file folder from the evidence box. Crime scene photos. She pushed them over to Danilo and nodded.

Right. Probably the right time for this.

Danilo slid a photo across the table. Kathy Rubinkowski, lying dead on the street by her car, amid a pool of blood.

The suspect glanced at the photo and looked away, whipping his head around, his eyes squeezed shut.

“You did this, Tom, didn’t you? You killed this woman.”

The table rocked on its legs as Stoller pushed himself away, jumping from the chair.

“Tom, did you shoot this woman?”

Standing away from his chair now, Stoller shook his head violently and tugged at his hair with both hands.

“Tom, if you don’t explain this to me, you’re going to be charged with first-degree murder.”

“No.” He shook his head so hard, so uncontrolled, Danilo thought, he must be hurting himself.

“Tell me how it went down, Tom, or you’ll spend the rest of your life—”

“Put it down!” Stoller barked in a low, controlled baritone. “Drop it! I said
put it down
!”

The detectives looked at each other. Neither of them was holding anything they could put down. What was he—

“Put it down!”

Danilo steeled himself. Security was one concern. But there were no loaded weapons in this room, and they could hit the emergency button under the table, alerting the stationhouse of the need for emergency assistance, if things got out of control.

The camera was another concern, but the suspect would still be within the camera’s sight line, and the volume of his voice was more than sufficient.

Stoller braced himself, feet spread, and continued to shout his command: “Drop the weapon! Drop the weapon right now! Put down your weapon!”

His eyes were closed the whole time. He was essentially shouting at the wall.

Tense silence followed, a few seconds. In a careful voice, Danilo asked, “Did she pull a weapon on you, Tom? Is that how it happened?”

“I told you to put it down!” Stoller’s posture eased. His voice lowered from a stiff command to a plaintive plea. “I told you… I told you to put it down. Why didn’t you…”

Stoller collapsed to the floor. He let out a wretched wail, somewhere between an anguished, girlish squeal and a guttural animal cry.

“Wake up!” he whined. “Please don’t… don’t die… please, God, don’t die…”

Stoller burst into uncontrolled sobs.

Detective Danilo pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a long sigh. Sometimes he hated this job.

Deidre Maley held her breath until she left Courtroom 1741. A proud woman who took care to contain her emotions, she waited until she had a small portion of the corridor to herself before she burst into tears.

She’d felt so helpless. So angry and confused and helpless. Watching her nephew Tommy in that prison jumpsuit, those vacant eyes staring at the floor as the judge matter-of-factly issued rulings that she couldn’t completely comprehend, and that Tommy surely couldn’t follow in his current condition. Their lawyer, a public defender, was a nice man who seemed to care about what he was doing, but he always had so many cases going, he was always so hurried, always promising that there was plenty of time to prepare for the trial, even though it was less than
two months away
.

After a while, Deidre collected herself. Crying about it was never going to solve anything, her mother always said. Her nephew Thomas didn’t have a mother, not anymore. She was all he had now.

She saw a couple of men who looked like reporters—if carrying notepads and handheld tape recorders was any indication—rush into the neighboring courtroom, 1743. Not being in a particular hurry to return to work, she followed them inside.

A trial was obviously in progress, the antiseptic silence and formality coupled with tension. Dread filled her chest. In just a few short weeks, her Tommy would be on trial just the same.

Deidre took her seat and watched. In the center of the room, a lawyer
in a gray suit stood with a pointer in his hand, next to a blow-up photograph that rested on a tripod and was turned toward the jury. From what she could see, it was a photograph of a gas station and a street.

“Now, Ms. Engles,” the lawyer boomed, “are you confident that you had a clear and unobstructed view of the shooting?”

“Yeah.” In the witness stand sat a young, pretty African-American woman, mid-twenties at best.

“This truck.” Turning to the blow-up photograph, the lawyer aimed his pointer at a truck parked at the gas station, parallel to the street and perpendicular to cars that would be pumping gas, except that there were no cars in the photograph. “This truck did not obstruct your view?”

“No. We were on the far end. You could see the street around the truck.”

“For the record, the far west end?” The lawyer used that pointer again. “The furthest-west end of the gas station?”

“Right.”

“The furthest-west row of gas pumps?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were on the west side of that last row of gas pumps?”

“Yeah.”

“And showing you People’s Twenty-four, previously introduced.” The lawyer moved to a second photo, a second tripod. “Does this photograph accurately depict your point of view, sitting in the driver’s seat of your automobile, while your car was parked on the west side of the farthest-west row of gas pumps on the night of the shooting?”

“Yeah, that’s how I saw it.”

“And you can easily see straight ahead to the street, which would be south, without obstruction from that gas truck?”

“Yeah, real easy.”

“And you are certain, Ms. Engles, that the person you saw fire a weapon and kill Malik Everson is sitting in the courtroom today?”

“Yeah, it was Rondo.”

“By ‘Rondo’ you mean Ronaldo Dayton.”

At the defense table, the lawyer nudged an African-American man sitting next to him. That man stood up.

“That’s Rondo right there,” said the witness.

“The record will please reflect that the witness identified the defendant, Ronaldo Dayton.” The prosecutor nodded with satisfaction. “Nothing further,” he said.

Deidre sighed. The prosecution had so many resources. An army of police officers and lab specialists and doctors, fancy blow-ups and diagrams, everything that defendants like her Tommy lacked. It was such an unbelievably lopsided fight. Unless you had money.

Or you got really lucky with a good defense attorney.

“Afternoon, Ms. Engles.” The defense lawyer strode into the center of the courtroom. Her first full look at him, he wasn’t what she’d expect in a lawyer. He looked more like a football player. Tall with broad shoulders. A formidable person. Judging from the expression of the witness, she held the same opinion as Deidre.

“My name’s Jason Kolarich. Can I call you Alicia?”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Can I call you Jason?”

She giggled a bit. So did a couple of jurors.

“Sure, why not?” he said. The lawyer didn’t have any notes with him. He stood just a few feet away from the witness, angled toward the jury. “Alicia, you have a relationship with a guy named Bobby Skinner, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Bobby is the father of your daughter.”

“Yeah.”

“And Bobby, he’s a member of a street gang, right? The African Warlords?”

“Not no more.”

“Well, we might disagree on that, but—we
can
agree, at least, that Bobby used to be a Warlord.”

“Yeah, used to be.”

“And he still has friends there. He still hangs with them, doesn’t he?”

“He’s got some friends, yeah.”

“And my client, Ronaldo Dayton, he runs with the Black Posse. Isn’t that your understanding?”

“Yeah, Rondo’s with the Posse.”

“And the Posse and Warlords, as far as you understand it, they don’t get along so well, do they?”

“No, they don’t get along.”

“It would be just fine with the Warlords if a member of the Posse went down for this shooting, wouldn’t it?”

“Objection,” said the prosecutor.

“Sustained,” said the judge, an attractive woman with long gray hair.

“Your boyfriend, Bobby, told you to make this story up, didn’t he?”

“Objection.”

“The witness can answer.”

“Bobby didn’t tell me that,” the witness protested.

This lawyer, Jason Kolarich, seemed to have already moved on, expecting the denial. He nodded and shifted a step to his right. The jury seemed to be paying close attention to him. He had a commanding presence in the courtroom, a quiet confidence that seemed to draw everyone in.

“You testified that you bought gas at the Mobil station at about a quarter to two in the morning.”

“Yeah. Yeah, see, ’cause I left my friends and I’s low on gas and I didn’t wanna get gas the next morning before work ’cause I wouldn’t a had time.”

Kolarich nodded. “The attendant at the gas station—he didn’t see who shot Malik Everson, did he?”

“Don’t know about that.”

“You’re the only eyewitness.”

“Don’t know about
that
, neither.”

Kolarich smiled amiably enough. “That’s fair. Now, when you first told the police that you witnessed the shooting, you weren’t real clear on where your car was positioned—which row of gas pumps you were using. Correct?”

“I—I don’t think we talked about it.”

“Okay, but you didn’t say, ‘I was on the furthest-west row of gas pumps.’ Nothing like that.”

“Not right away, but they didn’t ask, y’know.”

“Right. I know.” Kolarich looked over at the prosecution. “It was only
after
you were shown the photograph of that gas truck blocking virtually the entire view of the street that you and the cops came up with a story that your car was on the far-west row of gas pumps.”

“Objection.”

“Sustained,” said the judge. “That question is stricken. Mr. Kolarich, we’ve discussed this.”

“We have, Your Honor. But Alicia, I have the chronology right, don’t I? It was only after you saw that photograph of that huge gas truck blocking the street view that you told the police your car was parked at the
only
gas pump from which you could’ve had a view of the street.”

The witness shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think maybe that’s right.”

Kolarich went to the table and lifted a document. “I can have you review the police report chronology if you like.”

“No, I’ll take your word for it,” the witness said.

“Good enough.” Kolarich paused, looked at the ceiling, stuffed his hands in his pockets. “And—you said you were driving a 2006 Pontiac Grand Prix. That was the car you filled up at the gas station.”

“Yeah. I got the receipt from the credit card.”