“Sure. He’s good.” I knew Chilly back from law school. He’d been with the P.D.’s office since graduation. But he was about to leave. I wondered if she knew that.
“He’s good, but he’s about to leave,” she said.
Check.
“And I think… I’d like you to represent him, Mr. Kolarich.”
The P.D.’s office gets a bad rap. Most of them are actually quite good. But they’re overworked, so sometimes clients feel like they’re not getting special treatment.
“I don’t have very much money,” she said. “But if you could be patient-I promise I’d find a way to pay you.”
She was probably in her sixties, so her earning potential wasn’t exactly at its peak.
“Tom is a sweet boy. He’s sick. He came back from Iraq a different person. I tried to keep an eye on him, but I just couldn’t. My husband, you see, suffers from multiple sclerosis, and I couldn’t take care of Tom like I should have. I can’t help but feel like this is all my fault.”
And I couldn’t help but feel like I was being played. Aunt Deidre was laying it on pretty thick. I was waiting for her to collapse so I could catch her in my arms.
“His parents are deceased,” she added. “I’m all he has for family.”
Did he rescue drowning orphans, too? But lucky for her, she caught me in a good mood.
“I’ll meet him,” I said. “After that, no promises.”
3
Don’t ask me why I do the things I do.
But I was bored. And this one sounded interesting.
The Madelyn R. Boyd Center was two blocks south of the criminal courts building. I finished a preliminary hearing I had before Judge Basham on a B-and-E and met Bryan Childress in front of Boyd at eleven sharp. We were both surprised that I was on time.
Childress wore a gray suit and black tie. Cheap stuff. Chilly never cared much for clothes. Back in law school, he never cared much for anything at all except which bar we’d hit that night.
“So, Ronaldo Dayton,” he said to me. “Well done. I heard the jury came back in four hours?”
Three, actually. Rondo was probably still celebrating as we spoke.
Chilly whistled. The state had really wanted that one. It wasn’t that they cared so much about one gangbanger killing another, but Ronaldo Dayton was a chief with the Black Posse, and they wanted him bad.
We went through the doors up to the front desk. “Hey, Chilly,” said one of the guards, a younger guy, meaning my age. Looked familiar.
“Jimmy, you remember Jason Kolarich? From the gym.”
He nodded at me. “Sure. I caught one or two of his elbows.”
Right. Now I placed him. We played hoops together a couple weeks back. “I was trying to teach you the three-second rule,” I said.
He seemed to like that. “You guys going up to the penthouse?”
Childress nodded. I showed my bar card. Jimmy the guard took down my information and handed me a piece of paper with instructions. I knew the drill. I’d been here a couple times when I was a prosecutor and was trying to flip a gangbanger.
Jimmy followed us into the elevator and slipped a key card into a slot, the only way you could punch a button for the penthouse. Nobody was supposed to go up there by accident.
I looked over the instructions on the sheet of paper.
DO NOT:
• Touch the glass partition
• Pass the inmate anything that has not been placed in the visitor’s container at the guard station
• Accept anything the inmate tries to pass to you
• Pass anything through the speaking holes
• Turn off any lights
THE TRANSFER OF CONTRABAND TO AN INMATE IS A VIOLATION OF SECTION 2-16 OF THE CODE OF CORRECTIONS AND IS PUNISHABLE BY UP TO 6 YEARS IN PRISON.
When I looked up from the piece of paper, Chilly was smirking at me. He was almost my height, with reddish-blond hair and a spray of freckles across his rosy cheeks. He looked like a leprechaun on human growth hormone.
“So you met Aunt Deidre,” he said. “She’s a persistent one.”
I folded the instructions and put them in my jacket pocket. The door opened on six. The guards, a man and a woman, sat behind a desk. Above them, in a thick, boxy font, were the words:
DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
PRETRIAL DETENTION SERVICES
SEGREGATION UNIT
The walls were painted a dull orange, with a large clock and a photo of our governor, Edgar Trotter, smiling broadly. Three windows allowed mid-morning sunlight that angled across the tile floor. It had the sedate, antiseptic feel of a medical facility.
Bryan, who was counsel of record, filled out the paperwork. Case name, docket number, relationship to inmate, that kind of thing.
“We had you down for an interview room,” the female guard said to Chilly. “If he’s not counsel of record, it’s no contact.”
“Right. That’s fine.”
They made me sign a form indicating I understood the visitation etiquette and a waiver absolving the state of any liability for any damages resulting from this visit. We emptied all of our pockets and gave up our cell phones and wristwatches.
“Anything you want to transfer to him?” the guard asked.
Chilly looked over at me. “You want to give him your business card?”
I slipped one out of my pocket and into the round plastic container. The guard made sure that was all we wanted and then closed it up.
The male guard stood up. “You gentlemen have any questions?”
We didn’t. The guard handed us visitor badges and walked us down a hall. We passed through a metal detector and another guard picked us up.
“Our guy was an Army Ranger in Iraq,” said Bryan. “First lieutenant. An honorable discharge, nothing indicating any problems, nothing but good stuff on his record. When he gets home, he has a break with reality, as they say. He drops out of college, can’t hold down a job, and finally goes to ground. He’s arrested a couple of times on vagrancy and shoplifting, nothing that really sticks. But as far as anyone can tell, he’s been living on the street for over a year when the murder happens.”
“Combat fucked him up,” I said.
“It would fuck me up.”
Me, too. “So he shoots a woman getting out of her car in Franzen Park,” I said, recalling Bryan’s summary yesterday. “On Gehringer near Mulligan, by that shoe store. And your guy says this was post-traumatic stress? A flashback? He thought the woman was some soldier in Iraq and he opened fire?”
“Basically.”
“And our client told the cops that the victim pulled a gun on him?”
“In the interrogation, he committed to it. He said he told her to put the gun down. He said it over and over again to the detectives. ‘Put it down. Drop the weapon. Put it down.’”
“But you don’t buy it?”
Chilly let out a low moan. “The victim didn’t own a gun, and there’s no evidence she had one. No GSR on the
