“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Like you said, three million people fit his description. It’s not like I have a picture of him.” I tapped my hand on the desk. “Forget it. You’re probably the wrong guy to ask, anyway. You’re the arresting officer. I can’t ask you to work against your own case. I’ll find some other cop-”
He raised a hand. The mention of
“No,” he said. “It’s my case. If there’s something wrong with it, it’s my problem.”
I got out of my chair. “I appreciate that. If I think of anything, maybe I’ll-I don’t know.”
“Well, hang on here,” he said. “I’m not saying there’s anything to this. But you seem like a pretty straight-up guy here, Mr. Kolarich. If I can help you find this guy, maybe I’ll see what it’s all about. Maybe it affects your brother’s case, maybe not. But I’ll listen.”
Good. I’d reeled him in. It’s always more fun when the person you’re playing thinks he’s playing you.
“Well, there might be one thing,” I said, “but we’d have to be discreet.”
37
TEN YEARS. TEN YEARS.” Sammy Cutler played the idea over in his head. “Out in five, hopefully. Already got one in. So-four more.”
“I can get you better,” I said. “They don’t want the publicity, now that Griffin Perlini’s notorious. It puts the county attorney in an uncomfortable spot, having to prosecute his killer, especially when that guy was avenging his sister’s death.”
Sammy nodded along.
“Allegedly,” I added.
“Well, I ain’t doing four more here.”
“I can get you a better deal. But we’d be dumb to rule it out entirely, Sam.”
He wasn’t inclined to fight me. “What about Archie Novotny?”
“Haven’t checked out his alibi yet for the night of the murder-the guitar lesson. I will. Meantime, we’ve been looking all over him and not finding much of anything.”
“Right.” Sammy fiddled with the smoldering cigarette between his fingers. “Been thinking more ’bout that. I could see it. I could see Archie doing this.”
I couldn’t decide if this was an innocent man talking, or a man trying to see things through the eyes of a jury. I was also beginning to doubt my perception. I was bone tired. I’d managed about four hours last night, but the previous forty-eight hours of sleep deprivation were taking their toll. Sometimes a few hours’ sleep is worse than none.
“Novotny fits your general description,” I said. “Put the green stocking cap on him so you can’t account for the difference in hair color-he’s got about the same build. He could work. I could sell that to a jury, I think. But that’s not the problem, Sam. You know what the problem is?”
He nodded. “My car.”
He was right. Before I ask questions of a client, I like to give him the lay of the land, so he’s clear on what the prosecution knows and what they don’t know. It’s always nice to demonstrate the wiggle room before giving the client the chance to wiggle.
I started with the obvious. “The convenience store down the street-its security camera is posted in the back corner of the store and points toward the register. It also happens to catch a little bit outside the store. Your car is parked right outside the store, just enough so the camera can catch the back end of your car-and the license plate. The vid is clear on it being your license plate, so we’re stuck with that, right?”
He nodded.
“It doesn’t capture who got into the car because that part of the car is out of the camera’s range. So it’s your car, Sammy, but they can’t say who drove it there or who drove it away.”
“Well, yeah, but…”
I was giving him the wiggle room here, but he seemed content to sit still.
“It was me,” said Sammy.
I deflated. “Then we have some ’splainin’ to do. That’s a pretty big coincidence.”
“Not really.”
“Why not really?”
“They got that one store video? From that night? That’s it?”
“Correct.” I didn’t get where this was going. “Just the one.”
Sammy stubbed out his cigarette and blew out the remnants of smoke. He didn’t look well. The sleep deprivation didn’t help, but it was more than that. He had a heavy drinker’s complexion, a smoker’s wrinkles, a natural frown. He’d lived hard.
“About a week before he died,” said Sammy, “I saw him. I saw the fuckin’ guy.”
“You saw Perlini-”
“I was in the grocery store where he worked, at the checkout, and some manager or something starts calling out for ‘Griffin.’ I tell ya, Koke, I heard that name and I-I just froze. We were kids and all, but man, I knew it was him, soon as I laid eyes on him. Soon as I fuckin’ laid eyes on him.” He lit up another cigarette silently before continuing. “So I waited ’til his shift ended and I followed the guy. I followed him to those apartments. I knew where he lived. And I tell ya, I thought about it every night. Every night for a week, I drove over by his place and I thought about Audrey, and what he did to her, and I wondered if I had the stones to do it-to kill that scumbag.”
Sammy’s story would not be found in the
“So that night,” I said, “you drove over there and thought about killing him?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you get out of your car?”
He shook his head, no.
“If you did, Sammy-if you liked to walk while you think, instead of sitting in the car-it might explain why those eyewitnesses saw you. Like, you were standing somewhere around the building, you heard a gunshot, you started running, and that’s when that nice elderly couple saw you. We’d have some kind of explanation-not the greatest one, but-”
“No, not the greatest one. I’d have to explain why I was hanging out, doing my thinking, right by his damn building. No, I was in the car the whole time. Camera can’t say different.”
Sammy had had a long time to think about this. This was his story and, apparently, he was sticking with it.
“Huge coincidence,” I said.
He shrugged. “Life is full of ’em, right?”
Wrong. But we didn’t have much to play with here. They had his damn car on video, parking at 8:34 P.M. and leaving at 9:08 P.M.-which happened to be the precise window of time in which Griffin Perlini was murdered.
My good friend Smith had suggested that we tag-team on an explanation for Sammy that night. I thought Sammy might be willing to go along with something, if we could drum something up, but how do you explain why you drove across town, parked there for only half an hour-the precise half hour in which the murder happened-and left?
But I let it go for now. If Smith and I could come up with a better alibi-and dollars to doughnuts said Smith was working on it-I could always try it out on Sammy.
As I was heading back to my car, my cell phone rang. The caller ID was blocked.
